Sunday interview: Michael Cullen

Michael Cullen - the sad, funny man, the grumpy wit. File picture / Mark Michell

Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen has just had a week from hell. Battered, melancholy, and holding flowers from his staff, he reveals why sadness dogs his political career and how he uses humour to deal with the cut and thrust of life in the Beehive.

It is Thursday night and Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen is clutching a large bunch of brightly coloured gerberas given to him by his staff, preparing to leave the Beehive for his standard 7.05pm flight home.

"Mustn't forget the flowers," he says, and you can see he is touched and that his cheeks are flushed as he throws his overcoat on and rushes out the door.

The gerberas, and the office drinks next door, were a gesture from his staff - worried, perhaps, about their boss and a little shaken themselves by what, in anyone's books, has been a harrowing week.

Cullen's acerbic wit is famously wielded on the battlefield of the House. He is known as one of the funniest speakers since David Lange.

But just days after his future as a politician was publicly questioned, and in a less than stunning year, the country's second in command is visibly tired and uncharacteristically raw.

A sadness hangs over him. But then, maybe that's not all that surprising.

"If a really good comedian isn't depressed," veteran American stand-up Bob Saget once said, "then something's wrong". And Cullen has spun some marvellous one-liners in his time.

"We won, you lost, eat that" - the come-back to National after challenges in 2000 to Labour's industrial law reforms; "Winston Peters is the blowfly of New Zealand politics" - Cullen on the propensity for Mr Peters to wallow in political refuse; and "At least with Mr Hide there is no Dr Jekyll; what you see is unfortunately what you get all the time."

Yes, it was a tough week, he tells me. Cullen announced one of the biggest shake-ups in tertiary education, put the final touches on the Budget, met three international dignitaries and deflected criticism of New Zealand's race relations by the United Nations.

"But then there were the joys of the interpretation of Helen's comments in the Listener."

Asked by the Listener if Cullen would be expected to deliver all the Budgets before the 2008 election, Prime Minister Helen Clark answered: "I don't know." It looked like Dr Cullen, already 61 years old, might quit before the next election.

Clark quickly said she had been misunderstood and all she intended was not to prejudge Cullen's own decision.

But the damage was done. And the question remains whether that was intentional.

Does this mean, I suggest, that Clark really wants Cullen to go or that she has somehow lost her grip? This is not a Prime Minister prone to opening herself up to misinterpretation, right?

Cullen, who may or may not have been hurt by that, looks battered, but remains loyal. "What Helen is doing, and I'm absolutely confident of it, was that she was essentially saying it was a matter for me to make that decision. Did I want to carry on or didn't I? She's always been very careful about what she says."

So will he stay? The intention is to stick around for the 2008 election, he says. But in Parliamentary speak that's as vague as it comes.

What would have to happen to make him chuck it in?

"Well, that's simply a question of at what point you think that it's time for somebody else to take over the job and you've done the best you can."

Cullen is a dream deputy. Intellectual, practical, the Minister of Nearly Everything, he is trucked out to solve all manner of problems from wayward ministers to the trickiest portfolios. He recently became Attorney-General, on top of everything else, when a scandal erupted around David Parker. He is Parliament's strongest performer in the House, and runs the country in Clark's absence. And yet he doesn't want her job. Or does he? "No," he instantly replies.

He did once though, I suggest. "Well which was the once you were thinking? I was not being proposed as a leader in 1996 or whenever it was, that was Mike Moore being proposed not me.

"I know [Listener columnist] Jane Clifton keeps repeating that but she is very unreliable in Labour Party politics. Like she kept, the other day, saying I left the House during question time because I was angry. Well, I'm afraid the reality is simpler than that.

"Two or three times during question time this year I had to go out for a pee. It's nothing to do with anger at all. It's just that it's very embarrassing to have an accident in the middle of question time especially when you're sitting on the front benches.

"Bobbing up and down all the time you'd never get away with it."

And there is Cullen in a nutshell. The sad, funny man, the grumpy wit.

I ask how he would prefer to be perceived, because the witty orator he is known as in Wellington is often lost on the rest of New Zealand. They see him as a stern man, who borders on irascible.

Does he like being funny?

"Oh yes, I suppose so, but I've always had that since I was about 10. It sort of goes with being me, I suppose. That's fine, but [I'm] also somebody who genuinely cares about the ordinary person and is trying to be Minister of Finance in their interest. Trying to generate both economic growth and a fairer society which gives people a fair go.

"You know, I'm a lucky person. I'm the first member of my family to get a formal educational qualification. I've had the chance to go on scholarship to one of the country's most elite private schools, Christ's College in Christchurch, there was scholarship to university, scholarship overseas to university" - he laughs, like the story is slightly embarrassing but gee he loves to tell it. "Then back to a society which was still living in the dream of absolutely full employment.

"And enormous luck compared with my maternal grandparents who, in their childhood, were in conditions of serious poverty and struggled their way out to working-class respectability."

Cullen's parents didn't have it so easy either. The family immigrated to New Zealand when Cullen was about 10. Dad had been a spectacle frame maker in England and Mum was a shorthand typist.

"But when we arrived we found nobody made spectacle frames in New Zealand, which NZ House had kindly not told us, and [his father] had no aptitude for business so he then got a job assembling fluorescent lights."

His parents pushed him academically, but Cullen pushed himself too, becoming a history professor at Otago University before becoming an MP while still in his 30s.

His master's thesis was on poverty in the 19th-century English society his grandparents grew up in.

"Unlike some," he says. "I don't turn my back on the past, and I don't assume, because I'm academically capable and had certain skills in public speaking, and other skills which suited me to go into this career and succeed, I don't see that that makes me a better person or somehow massively deserving and that other people shouldn't get much because somehow they haven't got those talents.

"Well, talents are only a matter of luck, to a certain extent. I get very annoyed with people who talk as though the fact they've got talents is something that's their virtue that they themselves created ... "

His father, tellingly, was an accomplished amateur comedian and did stand-up comedy around the traps. Was that something Cullen considered getting in to?

He laughs and then shudders into the back of his chair. "No! Goodness me. I mean, the remarkable thing about coming to this job is that I'm basically a shy person. I find it quite difficult when I'm going into a room full of strangers and doing the flesh-pressing bit. That's the bit of the job that I'm not very good at."

And that can quite often be the case with someone who taps into humour, isn't it? "Yes, that's right."

Does he think it can be a bit of a defence mechanism?

"It is a defence mechanism. Yes. For most of my childhood I was very small for my age. I only sort of blossomed to my height when I was 17 or 18 and didn't blossom in the outwards direction." And he catches a glance at his not so substantial mid-section - "When I was first a minister I was a lot skinnier than I am now."

The other day Cullen was a guest on National Radio's afternoon show where guests get to tell the presenter about their favourite song of all time.

His was I've got Plenty of Nothin' from Porgy and Bess. And while that might sound like a tricky dicky choice for a finance minister accused by his opponents of being a scrooge, Cullen's reasons were somewhat more quixotic.

Music, he said, was as much about emotions as it was about music. And most of the music he liked had a combination of happiness and sadness to it.

Happiness, Cullen says, is as profound an emotion as sadness, but harder to sustain.

"Politics is a hard job that can bring its own sadness. Like most politicians, I haven't had the kind of time with my children that I would have liked," he says.

"The marriage break-up [he remarried in 1989] of course made that much more intense and so I'm not as close to them as I would like to be, and there is something sort of ineffably sad about that.

"That's a common experience for politicians because it's such a time-consuming, all-consuming job."

Has it been worth it?

"I don't know, it's hard to say. If you'd known this was going to happen and you had your life over again, would you do it again?" he trails off.

Well, would he? "I probably would. Yes, I probably would. Some things I would do differently."

Is he more sad than happy or more happy than sad?

"Aaah, I think I'm more happy than sad these days. I've been through phases of sadness. I had a very bad period after the '87 election when I became minister and things went wrong. [He was social welfare minister]. And I found moving from Dunedin [where he'd been an electorate MP for 18 years] a profoundly disturbing experience because I loved the city so much. But then it was an easy choice between my wife and Dunedin."

And at that point his press secretary interrupts to remind Dr Cullen he has a plane to catch to get home to his wife, Anne Collins, in less than 40 minutes.

The minister, who often plays golf on his own, says Anne is his best friend.

He made a promise, years ago, that he would return to Napier every Thursday night and it's one he is not prepared to break.

"I've reached the point in my career where I don't believe in sacrificing my personal life and my marriage for the sake of the job. If it ever got to that point, then that's certainly [when] I'd say somebody else can do this."

And with that, he grabs his gerberas, throws on his overcoat and heads out the door.