From all accounts Brian Neeson was
a much-admired and thoroughly competent National member of parliament. He represented
a number of West Auckland electorates. In 1993 he successfully contested the
Waitakere seat and in 1996 was elected MP for Waipareira and then in 1999 the Waitakere
seat once again. In the 2002 elections he sought the National Party nomination
for the new seat of Helensville, which had absorbed most of the Waitakere electorate.
However he was controversially
defeated for selection by a new kid on the block, John Key.
National Party president at the
time Michelle Boag, in an effort to rejuvenate the political wing, had cast her
eyes worldwide to find a potential prime minister and settled on a high-flying
New Zealander who had been appointed on to the Foreign Exchange Committee of
the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
It was a stroke of genius that
Key had been enticed back to his homeland, but Neeson considered his own non-selection
a betrayal and quit National and stood as an Independent. He came in third.
I’ve always found it somewhat
amusing that John Key represents Helensville which would have been a more
appropriately-named seat for his three-term rival Ms Clark.
Perhaps buoyed by Ms Boag’s
success Labour strategists also went looking for a future leader and their
search revealed a man who best fitted their ideals. David Shearer wasn’t a
millionaire money trader, but more of a compassionate man and to some extent his
rise and rise in politics was not too dissimilar to John Key’s.
He had stood as a list-only
candidate for Labour in 1999 and in 2002 he unsuccessfully contested the Whangarei
electorate. He went back overseas to work for the United Nations and returned
in 2009 and was given Helen Clark’s safe Mt Albert seat. There was no betrayal
involved; Ms Clark simply moved on to the list.
Mr Shearer was widely tipped to
be a future New Zealand Prime Minister.
He certainly had the pedigree. The
son of a Presbyterian elder, all in all he spent twenty years working for the
United Nations, managing the provision of aid to countries including Somalia,
Rwanda, Liberia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iraq. In 1992 The New Zealand Herald named him New
Zealander of the Year and the following year he was awarded an MBE in the
British New Year’s Honours list.
When the three David’s vied to
lead the Labour Party and then eventually all of us into the promised land, he
was undoubtedly the standout candidate. So much so that David Parker left the
contest early, leaving David Cunliffe to unsuccessfully fight it out with Mr
Shearer.
David Cunliffe was regular
attender at Licensing Trust conferences in his various ministerial roles and I
remember him telling me once that he loved the Wairarapa and was a regular visitor
to Castlepoint where he went fishing. The son of an Anglican minister he is a
seasoned politician and would probably have stood the rigours of leadership
more stoically than David Shearer.
Shearer on the other hand
appeared to be the politician we had always dreamed of; a gentle, decent man
with no hidden agendas.
I’m not sure what hardships he
would have had to endure during his career with the United Nations, but they will
have been nothing compared to heading a dysfunctional caucus with varying political
factions, a number of whom will have been undermining him since his first day
in office.
Leadership can only occur when
those you lead recognise unequivocally that you are the best person for the
job. Helen Clark had no worries on that score and neither has John Key.
And we the public weren’t as sympathetic
as we might have been either. We laughed when Shearer stumbled over sentences, we
were totally unsupportive when the polls showed a disturbing downward spiral and we applauded
the media when they constantly replayed his phonetic failings.
We want decent people to be politicians,
but then we decline to treat them decently.
David Cunliffe will fight for the
leadership against Grant Robertson with a wild-card thrown in by Shane Jones. It’s
here the pedigree gets blurred. Brought up in middle-class Dunedin, Robertson
and his family faced poverty and hardship after his father was jailed for two
years for embezzling $120,000 from his employer. If he were to succeed and eventually
become our first gay Prime Minister, along with our same sex marriages we will
probably be regarded as the most liberal country in the world.
By then Brian Neeson will have
faded from memory and David Cunliffe might well have gone fishing.
0 comments :
Post a Comment