Published in The Post, 30 November 2024

New Zealand’s 37th prime minister officially summonsed former ministers, MPs, staffers and friends to Parliament’s Grand Hall for a celebration on Thursday, marking the 25th anniversary of the fifth Labour government.

Of course, I accepted – it’s hard to say no to Helen Clark.

Other invitees clearly felt the same way. There were about 80 of us there for dinner on Thursday night, in a room used as a billiards hall when Helen started life as an MP way back in 1981.

We cast the lines of memory across the improbable distance of a quarter of a century.

I thought back to election night, 1999. I was on duty as one of Helen’s three press secretaries, alongside Mike Munro and David Lewis.

The Labour Party faithful were gathered in large numbers at the Avondale Racecourse, watching TV as the election results came in and the tide went out on Jenny Shipley’s government.

Helen, now prime minister-elect at the head of a Labour-Alliance coalition, arrived very late in the evening, wanting to be absolutely sure of the result first.

Helen Clark and Peter Davis celebrating, election night, 1999, Avondale Racecourse

Inside a crush of people she made her way slowly up the stairs – the racecourse lifts having proved unreliable – to receive the acclaim of the crowd. I tucked into her slipstream – and stayed there for most of her first term as PM.

I’d grown up in a household in which politics was often discussed and here I was working for a prime minister. It’s taken me a full 25 years to gain a full appreciation of the job that had come my way.

Also in Helen Clark’s slipstream were the 49 MPs of the Labour caucus – now members of a government at last, after nine wearying and occasionally fractious years in opposition to National.

As several of the speakers at Thursday night’s function reminded us, the fifth Labour Government, in power until 2008, reformed and built stuff. A lot of it has lasted: KiwiSaver, the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Kiwibank.

Two of the prime architects of these initiatives, Sir Michael Cullen and Jim Anderton – the Alliance leader – have since died. We remembered them, along with the other ‘99ers no longer with us: Parekura Horomia, Janet Mackey, Jonathan Hunt, Helen Duncan, Dave Hereora, Georgina Beyer, Larry Sutherland, Joe Hawke, Taito Phillip Field.

I have very vivid memories of this time, though few are attached to grand policy reforms or the cut and thrust of politics.

As prime minister Helen Clark travelled a lot, domestically and internationally. Press secretaries went on the road with her.

At the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, we looked out at the Brandenburg Gate, still pockmarked with bullet holes from the Second World War. When it came time to leave – Helen was in the German capital, briefly, for a gathering of social democratic, ‘third way’ leaders – the hotel’s staff gathered outside the main entrance to wave us farewell.

Four new Labour ministers in 1987 – Bill Jeffries, David Butcher, Helen Clark, Michael Cullen

In May 2001 Helen led a delegation of army veterans to Crete, to mark the 60^th anniversary of the battle that had pitted Freyberg’s New Zealand troops against German paratroopers. I saw a normally loquacious TVNZ reporter rendered mute at the sight of the gravestones at the Souda Bay Allied war cemetery, their inscribed silver ferns illuminated in the late afternoon sunlight. There were a lot of them.

Various events were held on and around May 20, the anniversary of the German attack. At one of these I heard the veterans before I saw them. As they marched towards the main square in the village of Galatas, where the fighting had been so vicious and costly in May 1941, their medals jangled and their feet scraped upon the cobblestones.

Politics can be serious but it can be absurd too. Back in Wellington, ensconced in our ninth-floor office, the three press secretaries found time to laugh.

The laughter was a tonic for the long hours, absences from home and the general intensity of life working inside a prime minister’s office. Helen helped to keep it topped up with pithy observations on the latest shortcomings of some journalists – and, occasionally, some of her colleagues too.

We worked with Alec McLean, Helen’s indefatigable senior private secretary. Every scrap of paper destined for Helen’s desk had to pass his first.

On one occasion he strides briskly into the office – Alec’s stride was always brisk – and waved a photocopied newspaper article at me. It featured a piece of smart-arsery from me that a Press Gallery journalist had noted down and later used to add a bit of ‘colour’ to their column in a provincial paper.

“Did you say this, Mark?”

“Yes, Alec, I did.”

“I don’t think Helen really needs to see this, do you?”

“I agree, Alec. Thank you.”

He returned to his station outside the prime minister’s office.

Former PM Clark takes a photo of Former PM Hipkins during his speech at the anniversary event

We all got told off now and then by Helen. Sometimes this was in person, when we might be subjected to The Look.

On other occasions the prime minister might add her handwritten comments to a draft news release we’d submitted to her, making it clear – via assorted underlinings and exclamation marks – we needed to do a bit better.

We listened to speeches on Thursday night. Nanaia Mahuta, Annette King, Martin Gallagher, David Parker all spoke eloquently, recalling the Clark government’s achievements, and remembering those absent colleagues.

Gallagher, who’d been an MP in the marginal seat of Hamilton West, made the point that while not all MPs could be “in the kitchen” – the inner sanctum of Cabinet – their contribution to the life of a government was still an essential one.

There was a vanishingly rare turn at the podium from Heather Simpson, Helen’s formidably brilliant chief of staff all through the 1999-2008 government.

Heather kept it brief and forthright, Southland-style, and thanked the staff for their contribution between 1999 and 2008– the press secretaries, the administrative teams, the planners and the keepers of ministerial diaries. The people we’d served, the former ministers and MPs, were commanded by Heather to raise a glass to us. They obeyed.

Then the 37th prime minister, fittingly, had the last word.

“In 1999 it was time for a change, but it was a hell of a slog to get there.”

She slogged and she got there. For another few hours, in familiar surroundings, it was enjoyable to be back in the slipstream of Helen Elizabeth Clark almost exactly 25 years after that late night in Avondale.

Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Chris Hipkins gather with members of the Fifth Labour Government for a 25th. anniversary dinner of its accession to power, in the Grand Hall at Parliament.

Between 1996 and 2002 Mark Watts worked at Parliament, as a press secretary to Helen Clark. (Reproduced with the kind permission of The Post)

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