I never quite realised the irrelevance of my home country in world affairs until I told at least a dozen people how excited I was that Helen Clark was speaking at Merton College, and precisely none of them knew who she was. The closest anyone got was someone who asked if she was an Australian politician campaigning for gay rights, which considering she passed a Civil Union bill allowing legal recognition of same sex partnerships in 2004 isn’t that far off the mark. Apparently being Prime Minister of the international powerhouse of New Zealand for 9 years, however admirable, doesn’t quite make you a 21st Century Napoleon, Lenin or Churchill. She now heads the United Nations Development Program, making her the third most powerful person at the United Nations.
A strange misconception I find overseas is that New Zealand is a peaceful and harmonious society that is not plagued by many of the social ills suffered by other countries what many don’t know is that behind the veneer, New Zealand society has as many dark and ugly issues as any other nation, except that unlike in Britain, discussing major social or political issues is often seen as taboo. Most distressingly, this includes has one of the worst rates of domestic violence and child abuse in the developed world. As the first woman Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark has been critical in making women’s and children’s rights and welfare one of the most important aims of the UNDP, and she talked about her work in New Zealand when as PM, she led a campaign aiming at raising awareness of these issues in New Zealand society and leading a major culture change. In this she noticed that “a key way to change awareness was to involve men who had been previous perpetrators to stand up and admit they were wrong in an attempt to break the silence around domestic violence and stop the vicious cycle where abuse is passed from generation to generation.”
The keys with the developing world are causing a profound culture change in societies that often have deeply ingrained prejudices against the limitations of women; she notes that, rather than looked down on, “the power of women is often suppressed because it is feared as a key motor for social change” that risks upsetting traditional hierarchies of power.
Dispossessed youth, she notes, are one of the most dangerous elements in any society; whether it is Maori or Pacifica youth in New Zealand who feel profoundly alienated by a system they believe works against them who turn to gang violence or unemployed youth in Mali or Nigeria who turn to political extremism. “It is extremely important to involve community leaders at all levels, and make the political process of a country able to incorporate those who previously felt excluded.”
One of the most important and pressing countries in international affairs has been the international communities efforts to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and I put the question to her of what the international community has done right, and what it has done wrong.
To this question she replies that the problem with Afghanistan is that, from the British Empire to the Soviet Invasion to the American occupation, it has constantly had foreign solutions to its unique problems imposed upon it at gunpoint. “What Afghanistan needs is solutions created by the Afghan people to its own challenges; we’ve seen those foreign solutions fail over and over again.” One of the major problems for international development she notes is the fragility of democratic institutions after a history of political and social instability. “Every country wants to have a Gorbachev enter, fundamentally change the system and then depart peacefully but very few actually get one; even the most well intentioned reformers end up having to be pried out of office with a very large crowbar.”
I finished by asking her what she felt was her proudest achievement, which turned out to be the important if colourless fact that “for 9 years, I presided over one of the lowest periods of unemployment in New Zealand’s history; people had jobs.” it’s far from a glamorous answer, but the most fondly remembered national leaders are often more important for what doesn’t happen in their countries than what does.
There is something eerie about meeting someone you spent your youth thinking was one of the most important people in the world. Christopher Hitchens has a thoughtful passage in his memoir where he remarks that one of the most enlightening parts of the Oxford experience is to meet such imposing figures face to face and realise how human they are after all. There is something strange about Helen Clark; she is incredibly lively and energetic, and beams with charisma; yet her answers are often rather wooden and rehearsed, as if she still retains the politicians innate distrust of the political interview; she once called a New Zealand journalist a “sanctimonious little creep” after what she considered a series of ambush interviews on a current affairs show. I ask her if she’s glad she left politics. ““Oh I’m still a politician; once you get into politics, you can never really leave”