By AUDREY YOUNG
They are highly educated policy freaks who have drawn their factionalised Labour parties to power after years in the wilderness.
But Tony Blair and Britain's New Labour have proved to be a role model for Helen Clark and New Zealand Labour.
Issues Mr Blair pushes have a ring of familiarity about them. He, too, pledged to clean up the public service; he set up a special unit to address issues of the disadvantaged; he, too, has embarked on constitutional changes; he has also boosted the arts and culture. And he, like Helen Clark, is very big on promoting national pride.
But it is the leadership style of the man she will meet on Thursday that particularly impresses her.
"What I've picked up from him is that people are looking for leadership. He has been prepared to get out and take a lead," she told the Herald.
He is aged 46, an Oxford-educated lawyer, a Christian father of three - with another due next month - and the first Labour Prime Minister of Britain in 18 years.
She is 50, a former academic with impressive international networks among social democrat leaders, the first Labour Prime Minister in nine years, who has displayed an early bent for iron-hand leadership.
"You could see why it was going to work for him," she said. "He is good-looking. He has a good media presence. And he is an experienced politician."
While her style is a surprising shift from her moderate Opposition technique, it is instructive to hear her admiring the qualities of Mr Blair, whom she compares favourably to Margaret Thatcher and Sir Robert Muldoon.
"What I think the British responded to in Thatcher was that she was a leader. She did get out and say 'follow me' and it worked for quite a long time.
"Muldoon did pretty much the same here. In both cases they are flawed models but Tony Blair is a leader. He will get out and make a punt."
The Blair Government has not been short of admirers from all shades of the spectrum in New Zealand. National and Act both claimed their crackdown on social welfare benefits that Labour opposed so much here was the very model of Mr Blair's own policies, although subsequently diluted after a backbench revolt.
Act leader Richard Prebble said he admired Mr Blair's "courage" in blunting union power in the British Labour Party. He had a low-tax, light-regulation approach to government and a similar view to Act on welfare - "a desire to push people towards jobs rather than dependency."
Commentator and Herald columnist Colin James said Mr Blair had been more "experimental" in social policy.
He believed that Labour in New Zealand was generally to the right of its British counterpart in economics, but if both stayed in office for a further five years there would probably be a convergence between the two.
Helen Clark believed they were there already.
"The history of New Zealand Labour in modern times was of a lurch to the right.
"Our job of reconstruction is to bring it off the giddy edges of that and back into a respectable social democratic position.
"The modern history of British Labour was the lurch to the loony left with Tony Benn and the worst-ever result around that position.
"The [Labour leaders] Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair had the long painful task of bringing them back to a respectable social democratic position.
"So we've ended up in pretty much the same political positioning but with a history of the last 20 years being very, very different."
Helen Clark, who arrives in London tomorrow, will travel on to Turkey for the 85th Gallipoli commemorations, and will then visit Singapore.
She suggested that education might be the next policy target in her sights. If she follows the Blair example, that would dovetail neatly into her bid to raise national pride and identity.
"One of Blair's big things is education, education, education. He has identified that as the key intervention the modern state has to make and identifies very much with trying to transform Britain from being an old economy to a new economy, I think quite successfully."
Mr Blair had worked successfully on the theme of pride in being British, she said.
"Britain went through a few years where it was seen as being the sick man of Europe.
"Countries can lose confidence in themselves and in many ways New Zealand lost confidence in itself. It's building the confidence in New Zealanders to say, 'Yeah, we can do it. We are as good as anyone else."
Blair leadership inspires Clark
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.