[pf] a view of New Zealand in a British newpaper: The New Statesman

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Cover story - The New Statesman Profile - New Zealand, a woman's land
 
Cover story
Jackie Ashley Monday 2nd April 2001  

Men turned it into an extreme free market society; now, women are trying to
clear up the mess. New Zealand, a woman's land profiled by Jackie Ashley

Imagine, if you can, Prime Minister Antonia Blair jousting with the leader
of the opposition, Wendy Hague, in the House of Commons, before returning
to Downing Street to consult her cabinet secretary, Ruth Butler, about a
matter that is being referred to the lord chief justice, Lucy Woolf. They
decide to consult the attorney general, Geraldine Williams, while
requesting a meeting with Patricia Bonfield (the head of the country's
biggest company), Katy Livingstone (the mayor of the country's biggest
city), as well as Margaret Wright (the leader of the Green Party). 

It sounds like a 1970s feminist utopia, a separatist vision of a parallel
world in which men, or at least powerful men, had been abolished. It is
certainly a fantasy; it could never happen here. Or could it? For there is
a country where virtually every top job is now held down by a woman: New
Zealand. The Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe may be the country's
best-known export, but the women are its news-makers and power-holders.
Helen Clark is the prime minister; Jenny Shipley, a former prime minister,
is the leader of the opposition; Sian Elias is the chief justice; Margaret
Wilson is the attorney general; Marie Shroff is the cabinet secretary;
Christine Fletcher is the mayor of Auckland, the largest city in New
Zealand; Jeanette Fitzsimons is the leader of the Green Party; and Theresa
Gattung is the chief executive of Telecom, the biggest company in New
Zealand. Truly a woman's land.

On 4 April, one more influential woman completes the Kiwi sweep: Dame
Silvia Cartwright (portrait opposite), a trailblazer for feminism in her
country, will be sworn in as the new governor general - in effect, the
Queen's representative in New Zealand. Dame Silvia was in London last week
for meetings with the Queen, who remains New Zealand's head of state
despite the country's growing republican movement. Dame Silvia's view is
that a republic is not a burning issue for now, and she claims that there
is still a good deal of warmth in New Zealand towards the Queen. So Dame
Silvia will carry out constitutional duties on the Queen's behalf: to
appoint the prime minister and cabinet, to summon and dissolve parliament,
and to receive visiting heads of state.

Dame Silvia's appointment is non-political - her duties are largely
ceremonial. Yet it is an important job, and she agrees that her appointment
has been met with more surprise here in Britain than back home in New
Zealand: "It is well accepted in New Zealand [that women get top jobs]; it
may not be accepted with total enthusiasm in every quarter - but then,
that's true of any major appointment - yet certainly I didn't get any sense
of astonishment." 

Dame Silvia is 57, immaculately dressed in black, and has a regal air about
her. She is only the second woman to have taken on the post of governor
general, a job usually filled by male brigadiers, viscounts and army
generals. She describes herself as a feminist and was a successful lawyer
before taking up her present job. She was the first woman to be made high
court judge in New Zealand, and the first female chief judge of the
district court.

Dame Silvia talks as though she hadn't set out to be a pioneer, simply
taking jobs that came along, realising somewhere along the way that she had
become a role model. Accompanying Dame Silvia on her visit to Britain is
New Zealand's cabinet secretary, Marie Shroff. The pair of them are utterly
at home with their place in society, and both are clearly slightly bemused
that "governance by women" is causing such surprise in London. 

In one sense, New Zealand has always been ahead of the times. It was the
first country to give women the vote, back in 1893, long before the hardest
and most violent of the suffragette struggles in Britain. It doesn't have
full equality, but is so far ahead of the UK as to be out of sight. Today,
30 per cent of seats in parliament are held by women, a figure achieved
only recently, since the electoral system was changed to a form of
proportional representation. Dame Silvia believes that changing the voting
system to PR played a big part in increasing women's representation, and
also brought about changes for the minority Maori community: "There is now
the same proportion of Maori MPs as there are Maoris in the general
population, but women still haven't quite made it." Does she think there
will ever be truly equal representation for men and women? "I hope so," she
replies, "but it won't be in my lifetime."

Still, the picture is far better in New Zealand than in Britain, where the
number of women MPs is predicted to fall considerably after the next
election, regardless of the result, because there have been no all-women
shortlists this time around. Dame Silvia diplomatically refuses to
speculate as to why Britain's 120 women MPs have not been judged a great
success in this parliament. "It is a very large majority the government has
here, and it must be very difficult to make a name for oneself," she muses
politely. 

So just what is the magic ingredient that has led New Zealand's women to
the top? After all, this is generally considered a macho society, known
above all for its sportsmen, its rugby, its rugged farmers. And it is not,
like the Scandinavian countries that also have strong female political
representation, a naturally left-leaning, social-democratic nation. Indeed,
until the mid-1990s, it was looked to not for its female successes, but as
a radical political experiment - the most extreme of the
government-slashing, privatising regimes of the time, out-Thatchering
Thatcher. (The experiment failed in the end.) 

I ask Dame Silvia if class is at the root of it all. Could it be that women
have advanced further in New Zealand because the class system is much less
obtrusive than it is in Britain - because of the openness of a society that
is younger in attitude? 

Could it be, even, after a century and more, the practical, why-not,
pioneer's attitude to life? Dame Silvia doesn't have one, clear answer.
Perhaps there isn't one. Yet she insists that the prominence of women at
the top is not simply tokenism: "The prime minister and the leader of the
opposition and all of them are there because they are very talented women."
They didn't get their jobs, she believes, because a certain image was
wanted, "but because they are very talented politicians or businesswomen or
whatever."

And yet, I persist, it cannot merely be that New Zealand has very talented
women while other countries don't - it must have taken an extra push to
have got to this level of representation. Dame Silvia puts it down to a
number of mentors: some women, some men, who encouraged women to go for the
jobs in the first place. Then it just grew "exponentially". This sounds
highly plausible: networks breed networks, people in power spot and recruit
others who are similar to them - the revolution takes place over coffees
and job interviews, replacing the male bars and clubs of a generation ago. 

Women in New Zealand are finding success not only in visible positions.
"We're not just talking about a little layer on the surface," says Dame
Silvia, "but it's right through the system." On the other hand, she doesn't
really think that New Zealand is any different to other societies.
"Chauvinism is still there, but it's no longer overt . . . much
discrimination at the unintended level still remains, and I believe that is
the most subtle and difficult to overcome."

So how much difference has it made, having a raft of women at the helm of
the country? Not that much, according to Dame Silvia: "It's very hard for
me to assess whether it has changed the culture. I do know that women do
things differently from men, but in the end they have the same job to do
whether they're male or female, and I haven't perceived a huge change." She
believes that it has been a quite natural evolution, that there has been
"nothing extreme about what's happened".

This low-key assessment of the change is backed up by academic research on
the New Zealand House of Representatives by Dr Sandra Grey from the
Australian National University. Her study "Does Size Matter? Critical Mass
and Women MPs in the New Zealand House of Representatives" found that when
women achieved 15 per cent representation, there was some feminisation of
New Zealand's political agenda. Yet when it increased to 30 per cent, in
1996, there was little further change. A combination of "party allegiance,
a male backlash and social conservatism" prevented any significant
alteration of the political culture or policy outcomes.

In fact, equal pay remains a distant goal for many women workers in New
Zealand, and the country has not been forging ahead on traditional "women's
issues" such as maternity pay: in this respect, the system lags behind what
we have in Britain. Neither Dame Silvia nor the prime minister, Helen
Clark, has children, so is it the case that women find combining a family
with a career as difficult in New Zealand as anywhere else? Dame Silvia
made a positive choice: "When I might have had children, it was a time when
it was a choice between that and taking a partnership in a legal firm - if
I'd delayed joining the partnership for five years, I might have missed my
opportunity." She admits that it remains much more complicated for women
with families. 

So, at first sight, there is a disappointing final act to the female drama
of New Zealand: the powerful women have not feminised their society, or
even provided the economic and social bulwarks we might have expected. 

But it is not the final act, nor anything like it. The arrival of women on
top was caused by mentors, individual choices and networks, not by a
dramatic storming of barricades by the sisterhood. And wider social changes
may take root and last only if New Zealand's female leaders are seen as
absolutely ordinary, mainstream politicians, rather than radical challengers. 

The right-wing free-market experiment of a decade ago was very much a boys'
thing - bold, radical and loud. Perhaps, after all, it is not so surprising
that the women are clearing up and sorting things out in a quieter, calmer
manner. Not every female leader, thank God, has to be a Thatcher.


© The Author © New Statesman Ltd. 2000. All rights reserved. Please contact
the publisher. 
The New Statesman is registered as a newspaper in the UK and the USA.

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· One of several comments, on GV-NZ:

  The extreme free market was led in NZ by the Labour Party of whom Helen
Clarke was a cabinet minister as were a number of other women.
  It was followed by National and the likes of Jenny Shipley.
  It is currently espoused by flakes like Muriel Newman and Deborah
Coddington.
  The problem was caused by people of both sexes and will be resolved by
people of both sexes.
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· Another:

I protest! What about Ruth Richardson!!!!!
She was right up there with the best of them.

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· Ruth Richardson's Black Budget of 1991 was one of the several
contributors that pushed me over the edge into depression for some years.  D.

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sent to Pos Fut list by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
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