Annette King, on home turf

A day on home turf with personable Cabinet Minister Annette King lets JAN CORBETT in on her recipe for coping with a hectic schedule controlling the big-spending health portfolio

She is in charge of allocating a $7.2 billion budget in a way that determines who gets medical treatment and who does not, but this Saturday morning, begun in a suburban Wellington cafe, Annette King is facing more pressing tasks.

First, she must be at the St Georges Church fair in the affluent beachside suburb of Seatoun in time to have the pick of the marmalades and chutneys. Next, she has to cross socio-economic boundaries for the Newtown School gala in time to run in the spoon-and-potato race, leaving enough time to browse through the plant stand for something suitable for the new house.

Lastly, she wants to stop at the grocer for a bunch of lilies and irises because she cannot possibly go through a weekend without flowers.

But too long spent over our flat white coffees, exchanging views on the television advertisements we love and loathe, diet and exercise (even the Minister of Health finds walking to add years to your life soooo boring), chatting to her friend Judy, who owns the cafe, and discussing immigration policy with a constituent who stops by the table, means that by the time she arrives at the fairs in her new, bright red (of course) Volkswagen Beetle, the jam and chutney have gone.

"This is going to be very bad," she says, "I might be forced to make some." And after giving out the King family secret for frying lamb chops (stand them on their fatty sides, cook slowly, then lie flat to brown) it is easy to believe that she might.

But the only preserving Annette King is doing concerns public health. By the end of this month she will have sealed the legislation that dismantles the Health Funding Authority and replaced it with 22 partially elected district health boards which will have the job of implementing Government health strategy.

The aim is to eradicate regional variations in the availability of drugs and services by restoring democracy to the health system, even though the legislation allows the ministry, and King as minister, to flex enough muscle to prevent a ghastly spectacle if democracy turns bad.

Although the Medical Association is sceptical about the need for more reforms and questions their cost, chairwoman Dr Pippa MacKay is impressed by King's "openness and willingness to meet us and be frank."

Medical Council chairman Dr Tony Baird who, although reluctant to talk about the minister to whom his organisation reports, agrees with that assessment, adding that King not only understands the issues within health "but is prepared to lead on them, and I find that encouraging in a minister."

This week she has spoken out about the need to stem staff shortages among medical professionals and is pushing for trans-Tasman food labelling regulations to be extended.

But on the more vexed question of whether health can stand more restructuring, King points out that the reforms are almost complete. But few people may realise that, because the minister has not been actively selling the changes.

She says she doesn't need to, because replacing secretive, businesslike hospitals with an open, democratic, non-profit, public health system is what people want.

"The Nats thought there would be as much outcry about the changes to health as there was about the Employment Relations Bill," King says.

"They had something like 17,000 submissions on the ERB.

"They put on their website a pro-forma submission against the health bill. They got not one response, not one made it to the select committee.

"The select committee had 150 submissions in total and most of those were in favour of change."

Everything was indeed progressing smoothly until National seized on the Treaty of Waitangi clause, which has since been redrafted.

"We failed to communicate clearly that it did not mean preferential treatment for Maori," King says.

But this is the weekend, the time King puts her portfolio responsibilities aside, shuns the ministerial limousine in favour of the Beetle and concentrates on being the MP for Rongotai.

She relates easily with the varied social factions in what is an economically disparate electorate, taking in the Labour strongholds of Newtown, Strathmore, Island Bay, Miramar and the Chatham Islands, and the National-leaning suburbs of Seatoun, Hataitai and Roseneath.

But with King as their MP, those suburbs no longer lean automatically to National. She not only won every booth at the last election, but increased the party vote as well. At 12,928, she enjoys one of Labour's largest majorities, a reward for all those weekends showing up at what the rest of us might consider a tedious round of local events, but which she calls the best part of the job.

She also has five Chatham Islands lobsters in the freezer, a reward for the effort she puts in for all 780 people who live there.

Perched on a tiny chair at the primer-size table in the Newtown School Hall, drinking her polystyrene cup of tea, eating her paper plate of sandwiches, and taking note of a tip for apple crumble (sprinkle custard powder over the fruit before topping with crumble), she looks nothing like a sixth-ranked cabinet minister. She could be what she once was - the school dental nurse, albeit a voluptuous one. For at 53, this blond with piercing green eyes still knows how to show a respectable hint of cleavage under her casual blazer.

Her radar is so locked on fun that when, as Minister of Racing, the TAB asked her to dress up in racing silks and ride a horse up to the steps of Parliament as part of their 50th-birthday celebrations, they didn't have to ask twice.

Her husband, Ray Lind, a Wellington City Council executive, says that "Annie" is such a social animal and draws so much energy from other people that she will collapse on the leather couch some evenings, declare herself exhausted ... and ask for suggestions on who they can invite around.

If doctors had known about hyperactivity in children when she was born in 1947, King has no doubt she would have been diagnosed with it. "Cannot sit still, fidgets," she laughs, describing herself as a child.

She was the middle daughter of three in a Labour-voting family from Murchison, a Labour-voting town. Her father, after a brief stint in the coalmines, spent the rest of his working life with the Post Office.

That put considerable strain on the father-daughter relationship when Annette King won Horowhenua for Labour in 1984 and was quickly seduced by the New Right.

"My father absolutely detested and despised Rogernomics," King says. "He hated the sale of Telecom. We were a Post Office family and I was in the Government that sold the Post Office.

"Even now, if you want to get Dad going, just mention Rogernomics ... he still gets mad. Although he was never critical of me, he had to put up with a lot of criticism. He belonged to the Superannuitants Association. In the end he and Mum wouldn't go to meetings because they would be blamed for things the fourth Labour Government did."

King now says that insufficient attention was paid to the social impact of converting to a free-market economy. Although observers find it difficult to know exactly where she now sits on the philosophical spectrum, she distances herself from any New Right infatuation.

"I suppose hindsight is a great thing," King says, "but when I got into Parliament in 1984 I really fitted Muldoon's stereotype - I wouldn't have known a deficit if I fell over one.

"My knowledge of the economy, like most New Zealanders', was incomplete. I had a strong social conscience and wanted to be involved in doing things that improved people's lives. But the big changes that Government made were in economic terms. Many things happened in a very short time that a lot of us didn't really comprehend.

"We did some good things as well. Not everything we did was wrong."

After David Lange resigned as Prime Minister and ministerial posts were suddenly vacant, King was thrust in as Minister of Employment. Her daughter was unemployed, a fact she kept quiet.

New leader Geoffrey Palmer saw in King a politician with an enormous amount of empathy and common sense and, he says, "There is no substitute for common sense in politics."

Yet politics was never an early ambition for King, even though at school "I was only girl in debating team and I was one of the gasbags of my class." She is considered an adept sparring partner in the House.

She had joined the Labour Party in 1972, but it was as a dental nurse that she had her first taste of political action at Parliament when - wearing her veil, white smock and white stockings with seams up the back - she joined marchers demanding a pay rise from the third Labour Government.

Later she contributed to making submissions on legislation for area health boards, similar to the legislation she is now introducing.

Dental nursing, like politics, was something she wandered into after high school in Murchison.

"The horizon for me was to be a teacher, a nurse or a dental nurse. I was accepted for dental nursing. We had the dental nurses boarding with my grandmother, who lived next door to us. I used to dress up in the gear. And in those days I used to smoke her Du Maurier cigarettes. I would put the uniform on, smoke one of her cigarettes, drill holes in old stones and fill them up with whatever I could find. She never seemed to notice."

Thanks to the encouragement of her first husband, Doug King, she combined dental nursing with raising their daughter, Amanda, and studying for a bachelor of arts degree in political studies and history. Sending Amanda to daily childcare was considered a bold decision in Hamilton in the 1970s and raised her mother-in-law's eyebrows.

By 1980 the marriage was over and King moved to Wellington to begin a postgraduate diploma in dentistry, becoming a tutor. Four years later she was swept into Parliament in the Labour landslide along with a record number of women MPs.

Although ousted by Horowhenua in the Labour rout of 1990, she returned to take Miramar in 1993 and was placed sixth on Labour's list for the first MMP election in 1996.

When Helen Clark was looking for a senior woman colleague to take over as health spokesman after Lianne Dalziel became ill, King was the obvious choice.

"I think [Clark] felt, having been a woman health minister, that women had a closer touch to it. I sort of fitted the bill. It was a big learning curve because health had become incredibly complex under the National Party reforms, with an acronym for everything and a lot of complexity around each.

"I was glad I'd been spokesman for two years. It would be almost impossible to become a Minister of Health unless you had done some understudy of it."

Apart from introducing district health boards, Labour's public health policy is focused on reducing the demand for acute hospital beds by improving our overall health.

King is promising improved immunisation rates, early detection of diabetes, a reduction of cardiovascular disease, a cut in smoking and improved dental health.

"We have appalling rates of immunisation," she says. "Only 45 per cent of Maori children and 55 per cent of Pacific Island children are immunised. Back in Tonga or Samoa almost 100 per cent of their kids are. We export measles from New Zealand to the Islands.

"You have to do it in a way that is appropriate for the community. In the Islands they go to the churches and the sports events. If we want to lift immunisation rates you need more people doing it and you need to be prepared to go to where the hard-to-reach children are. We could crack this quickly."

She supports Pharmac's tight rein on the drug budget and, having a father with angina and a mother with rheumatism, knows how vulnerable the sick are to promises of instant cures and therefore opposes drugs being advertised directly to the consumer. She has that policy under review.

Although Dr MacKay, of the Medical Association, wishes that doctors heard more vocal support from the minister, King cannot be coaxed into privately bagging the medical profession, even over a glass of chardonnay at home in Roseneath, from where she eagerly points out Jonah Lomu's sprawling mansion across the harbour.

Although her habit of blaming the last Government for everything is passing its use-by date, King attributes the latest epidemic of medical disasters - from Dr Bottrill in Gisborne to Dr Parry in Whangarei - to a health system that put profit and competition ahead of quality and cooperation.

The biggest scandal, King says, is that the Medical Council did not have the power to withdraw Dr Morgan Fahey's practising certificate as soon as he pleaded guilty to sexual crimes against patients.

She hopes to change the law before Christmas, allowing the Medical Disciplinary Tribunal to act quickly against errant doctors, and she is working on law that would set standards and competency assurance among all health and disability care providers.

And, of course, there is the house to finish. "We're still living among dust and dirt."

After 20 years as a single woman, she married Lind at Easter, a year after they met. Showing off her kitchen, she says she feels like the woman in the advertisement who phones the babysitter to see if her appliances are all right. Running her hand along the bench, she laughs, saying it was a natural for a dental nurse to choose stainless steel. But she promises she hasn't taken to rubbing it down with methylated spirits - yet.

* Disclosure: Jan Corbett accepted a Chatham Islands lobster from Annette King, but after more than one glass of chardonnay forgot her instructions for cooking it.