Gosche steps down from Cabinet to help ailing wife

By AUDREY YOUNG

Mark Gosche has decided to step down from the Cabinet after the health of his wife, Carol, deteriorated two weeks ago.

He will remain the MP for Maungakiekie.

Mr Gosche has been on three months' leave from his portfolios of Housing, Corrections, Pacific Island Affairs and Racing to devote more time to Mrs Gosche, who suffered a brain haemorrhage last year.

He had been planning to return to work full-time but Mrs Gosche, who is also a chronic asthmatic, suffered a bout of pneumonia - not for the first time since her collapse a year ago.

That convinced Mr Gosche he wasn't ready to return.

"Up until a couple of weeks ago I was ready to come back but the latest bout of pneumonia just tipped the balance," Mr Gosche said yesterday.

"It was so severe, and the stress levels go back up again, you then realise that this is not a short-term issue.

"You've got to be 100 per cent for that Cabinet job.

"It is important to the Government that they have got everybody firing on all cylinders."

It was not an easy decision, he said.

"But in the end family are so important you have to sometimes step back from your role in public life and say I can still do the work as an MP but the workload and the responsibility in Cabinet require more than I am able to give at the moment."

Mrs Gosche is now in a long-stay private hospital not far from her family home in Pakuranga.

Two of the couple's three children are living at home with Mr Gosche, as well as their first grandchild who was born just two weeks before Mrs Gosche collapsed in Wellington.

Mr Gosche would not speculate on whether he might be able to return to the Cabinet.

"I haven't given any thought to what the long-term future is, largely because I don't know the prognosis for Carol.

"She is doing reasonably well at her physio and speech language therapy but she is still not able to talk. She still requires 24-hour care and basically people around her all the time to do essentially everything for her."

The Prime Minister, Helen Clark, said she would "shortly be giving consideration to filling the Cabinet vacancy", which was sufficiently ambiguous to suggest she may not fill it.

Mr Gosche's portfolios are being minded by four other ministers.

Mr Gosche was elected to Parliament in 1996. He was the first MP of Pacific Island decent to become a minister.

And there may be expectations by Labour's hefty Pacific Island vote that another Pacific Islander, Phillip Field or Winnie Laban, be promoted in some way.

But Helen Clark is expected to come under some pressure by ambitious backbenchers to fill the vacancy.