On the road with the QUEEN OF HEARTS
It’s two weeks until election day 2017. Steve Braunias has been travelling on the campaign trail with Labour leader Jacinda Ardern as she rides a wave of popular support. Next week, he joins Bill English.
T he royal carriage sped through the land for three long days. There was a storm. Lightning struck a house in the Manukau Heads, and rainwater poured through the smoking roof. The morning sky in Hamilton was black as coal. Inside the carriage, the woman talked on the phone and read documents given to her by the royal press flunky. The driver had the sombre face of an undertaker. He had jet- black hair and very big hands that guided the silver BMW soundlessly around corners.
The woman looked out of the window. When she was filmed sitting in the back of the parliamentary services limousine for a TV commercial, she looked out of the window with a dreamy, soulful expression; it made her look like a saint, come to house the poor and bathe their feet. Her gaze appeared to be all- seeing. Now, in the wet Waikato, her green eyes took in nothing.
She was thinking ahead. She was travelling to Rotorua for the night, then flying to Christchurch. It was the middle of the week. It had started on Monday morning with a royal visit to the Pink Batts factory in Penrose. She couldn’t have sworn she had been there on Monday, the days of the North Island tour folded into one another and time lost meaning, but she remembered almost everything else.
Three days after the factory visit, she was suddenly asked, “What is a Pink Batt made out of ?”
“Fibre and recycled glass,” she said. “What kind of glass?” “Off- cuts of window glass.” “What temperature is the molten glass when heated?” “1200 degrees.” Close: the correct answer is 1300. She had met Tolu Makakona, team leader at Pink Batts, and remembered later that he’d worked there for 34 years. They spoke at the factory while the loud, heavy crash of the chopping blade came down 28 times a minute to guillotine each Pink Batt. The ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate followed the woman, their minds pulped 28 times a minute.
Afterwards, they gathered around her, and the beatific leader of the Labour Party made a fine speech about the need to provide warm homes. “Insulation,” she said, “will improve the health of New Zealanders!” But no one listened. When she finished, all the questions were about the exact capacity and dimensions of a $ 11.7 billion hole that National Finance Minister Steven Joyce claimed he had discovered in Labour’s costings.
She said there was no hole. The fourth estate asked if there was a possibility of a hole. She denied the existence of anything resembling a hole. The fourth estate speculated that in a certain light there might be a hole. She said she wanted to talk about insulation, not a hole. The press demanded: “Is there a hole?”
Three days later, when she asked if it had been damaging to have to defend Joyce’s unverified but repeated sightings of a hole, she said, “It’s so hard to know what people take from that. Someone can make a claim, and even though they know it’s misleading, and even though it’s shown to be false, the claim hangs out there, and you wonder what people are left with . . . It’s very frustrating.”
The royal carriage left Penrose that day and headed for the old television studios in Shortland St in downtown Auckland. Her entourage chose it to set the mood: they wanted a suitable venue to rehearse for that evening’s live TV debate on Newshub. She was thrown strange and random questions for two hours in an attempt to expect the unexpected from debate moderator Patrick Gower. The session lasted for more than t wo hours. When she turned up that night at the Manukau Events Centre, she felt prepared, ready, calm; before and after the first debate, held the week before on TVNZ 1, she was in a state of something resembling shock of the Colmar- Brunton poll result, released that afternoon, which showed Labour in the lead over National for the first time in 12 years. “I was still trying to process it,” she said, “at 4am.”
There was a full moon and the planes departing the airport flew low over Manukau. Inside the events centre, a man hired as a warm- up act roamed the stage in black sandshoes and no socks. Mary English sat in the audience. Patrick Gower stood in the shadows. When his name was called out for the show to begin, he took a deep breath, blew it out and marched towards the light. It was a very long evening and at the end of the debate a panel of men and women who are interested in politics sat on bar stools with their backs to the audience and were filmed sharing their views. They had a lot of views and they are almost certainly sharing them now and forever.
The woman was relaxed. Bill English was relaxed. In the commercial breaks, they wandered around the front rows, and had relaxed conversations with strangers. Throughout the debate, the woman turned to face English, tried to engage him in conversation, called him by his name; but English avoided looking at her. He stared down at his shoes. He glanced to the side at the warm- up man’s shoes, and took an intense interest in the bare ankles. But there was only so much about feet to hold his attention and at other times he simply closed his eyes. It seemed eminently possible he had been given instructions that to make eye contact with the woman would prove fatal, would strike him like a lightning bolt and leave him in a pile of ashes on the floor.
Afterwards, Gower sat in his dressing room with his dad, a cousin, a mate from university, and colleagues from Newshub, and drank deep from a crate of Steinlager. Moderating a live televised debate between the t wo leaders had been a mountain to climb and now he was taking the first wearying steps of his descent. He had taken off his tie and his jacket, and was talking loudly. He checked his phone. The woman had sent him a text from the back seat of the BMW. She wrote, “You did a good job.”
She got home and examined some of the debate. She didn’t much enjoy watching herself and found fault in this answer and that answer. “But I think the main thing about a debate is to give people a sense of who you are.” But there was something opaque about her — “ethereal”, as Audrey Young wrote in the Herald, “vague” as Bill English said in a context of her policies, although it also worked as a character assessment. What was really going on with this beaming, drippy queen of hearts, who cared for the people, and chanted: “Kindness”? There was no mystery to her, she said. “My friends all say I’m an over- sharer.” In any case, she didn’t do self- reflection. After viewing the debate, she drifted off into a contented sleep about midnight, and got up again at 5am.
DAY TWO began with a round of interviews in the morning, in downtown Auckland, and she grabbed a small quiche to go at Elk Eatery in Graham St before heading south to the ploughed brown fields of Pukekohe. The earth was heating up in the spring sunshine. There were roadside sales of daffodils for $ 2 a bunch, and 0800DOGTUCKER was advertising good prices for that all- year favourite — unwanted or injured livestock.
The BMW parked on a steep driveway. A house was under construction. The point of the visit was to talk about Labour’s commitment to incentivising trade apprenticeships. The house was on a hill. It had views of Rangitoto Island and the Coromandel ranges. Closer to hand, it had views of a healthy crop of potato plants.
The woman met building apprentice Megan Young- Cath, 18, and asked her, “What was your pathway?” She replied, “I like making things and that.” The woman said brightly, “I was the only girl in my metalwork class. So yeah. Anyway!”
She also spoke with Joseph Galloway, 24, who was actually starting his first day as a building apprentice. He signed forms on the bonnet of a car. His own pathway was kind of crooked. He had a steady job manufacturing paint for roofing tiles. It paid well, $ 1000 a week after tax.
“But I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Same thing every day. Then they gave me a chemist, and I had to look after him. It was too much work for one man. So I thought, ‘ Well, I may as well be happy.’ I took a drop of $ 6 per hour to do this. All the boys at work couldn’t understand. I didn’t even tell the missus; I just did it.”
He had short red hair, and wore a singlet. He was a man with a plan. He’d been saving to buy a house for seven years. It was all with Kiwi Saver. The idea was to buy the cheapest land he could, maybe up north in Ahipara, and if it had trees on it, then he’d mill for timber to lay down a floor and build the house himself.
He represented the possibility of keeping alive the Kiwi dream of owning your own home. But later that day, the woman toured Te Puea marae in Mangere, and sat down to a meal of roast vegetables and chicken in the kitchen with four homeless families who had been offered sanctuary at the marae.
Dolly Paul, 65, was across the road at the kohanga reo with her mokopuna, Sandii- Lane, aged 3. The little girl played shops with potted herbs. Dolly was small and wore a black beanie pulled over her eyebrows. She recalled the morning last year when it first became known that Te Puea was helping homeless families.
“I was in my dressing gown,” she said, “and I went down to get the mail. Well, I tell you. A big truck pulls