Marilyn Waring, the former National MP, the esteemed academic, feminist and thinker about women’s place in the world and former goat farmer, is a surprise. This is hardly surprising. Because she has always been a surprise. Except, you imagine, to herself. She famously, of course, took on bully boy Robert Muldoon. And won.
She brought down Muldoon’s National government that she was part of. She objected to the Nats’ stance over the nuclear-free NZ issue and in 1984 told the party she would vote independently on that issue, disarmament issues and rape. The party had a majority of just one seat.
Muldoon got pissed and slurringly announced a snap election. She had goaded him into it. He had hauled her into his office to be ranted at and she took her secret weapon: an apple. In her autobiography The Political Years, she wrote about the apple. “If I’m trying to have a serious conversation with somebody and they eat an apple, it’s loud. Then I feel like they’re not paying attention. So, I took an apple. And it was loud and crunchy. And it was very nice.” That is very nice.
Clever, not alarming
And, so – surprisingly? – is she. She can be as crisp as her apple. She can be as lyrical as a poem. Which might be a bit surprising. She is a serious and influential thinker. She has a very big brain. People with very big brains can be intimidating. She isn’t. She wears her cleverness, which she must be well aware of, lightly. She doesn’t talk down to people. She talks up to people by which I mean she converses in a collaborative way. After talking to her, you feel just a bit smarter than you were before talking to her. That is a rare talent. I felt a bit brainy for about 10 minutes after talking to her.
There are two very serious and important matters to discuss. There is the matter of the people’s select committee on pay equity, instigated by her. And goats. She had responded to an email request for an interview which may have mentioned the goats: “I love sharing stories about goats.”
I gave her a choice. Shall we do pay equity or goats first? “Oh, we should do pay equity first, probably.” Her committee has been set up to challenge the Equal Pay Amendment Act, rushed through the House under urgency. The act, say its critics, will erode women’s rights in the workforce.
Waring has been working for women’s rights in the workforce for her entire career. Her latest secret weapon is the contact list in her phone. She got on the blower to former women MPs –Lianne Dalziel, Sue Bradford, Steve Chadwick, Nanaia Mahuta and a number of others – and just like that she had her 10-woman committee. She is very persuasive.
“Ha, ha. I didn’t need to persuade women.” She had been listening to the parliamentary debate, something she seldom does these days, and she got mad as hell. She prefers “distressed – like a lot of people”.
“For me it’s kind of a symbol of a nation’s values, or particularly a reflection of a government’s values, when the people who care for the most vulnerable in your community, whether that’s the beginning of life, the end of life or those who need help and assistance through their life, are paid the least. And it’s the government paying them the least because the government is overwhelmingly the employer here. And I think it’s a disgraceful reflection of their values and of a nation’s values.”
She wrote in a media column in June: “In the absence of evidence for the debate, we endured the lazy, specious, headline-grabbing and truly ignorant remarks about the comparators used in pay equity settlement.” She pointed to the often-quoted “comparison between social workers and air traffic controllers”. A bachelor of social work, she pointed out, takes four years to achieve. An air traffic controller can be trained and qualified in not much more than a year. “Understanding what a social work qualification means, I would happily employ a social worker as an air traffic controller but never contemplate the reverse,” she wrote.
How can she be certain – and she is – that her people’s select committee will prove effective when it holds no powers? “Because I’ve got 1638 submissions and they tell me all the things that are outrageous … I still believe in the capacity of New Zealand women to be able to take that on board when they go to the ballot.”
She adds the role of the people’s select committee is to gather evidence, which will be archived “to highlight a gross blight on democratic processes, draw out a significant range of submitters, provide voice, give hope, as well as change votes in provincial marginals ‒ there are a lot of them”.
Submissions to her committee were live-streamed last month. The group’s report is due before the end of the year.
Small-town girl
Waring is the elder of two children (accountant brother Gavin lives in Australia) who grew up in the tiny Waikato village of Taupiri, where her father had the butcher’s shop passed on by her grandfather, who established it. She didn’t live on a farm but did spend a lot of time on nearby farms.
“I consider myself a country person, not an urban one. You know, people say, ‘Oh you’ve done this and you’ve done that’, and I say, ‘But I’ve actually never left Taupiri. That’s what I carry in my heart and that’s what taught me so many important things in my life. I’m still on the Taupiri Community Charitable Trust. It’s home.” She left in 1984, the same year she left Parliament after nine years.
She had an idyllic country childhood. “We just roamed in hordes of kids around the village. It was just wonderful. It was like the whole village was one big hide-and-seek playground. If it was getting near dinner time, you’d ring the telephone exchange and say, ‘Where are the kids at the moment?’”
There was the school swimming pool and blackberrying and mushrooming and eeling. There was tennis and rugby and the mountain to climb and explore. “I think now of the things that we used to do that kids can’t or don’t do anymore.”
She didn’t know the word feminist but by the time she was 11 she had started to notice that women weren’t afforded the same opportunities as men. She didn’t talk to her mother about these things but she did talk to her maternal grandmother, who remembered a certain day. Her grandmother must have been only about four and it wasn’t a Sunday so she couldn’t understand why her mother was dressed in her best clothes and why she herself had to change into her good clothes. “Then the gig was taken out and they drove to the polling booth to cast the first vote, in 1893. My great-grandmother wanted my grandmother to be there and to remember. So when you’ve got a little handed-down story like that, yeah, it just opens a window to something.”
She says feminism today means what it has always meant. She quotes Rebecca West, the writer and journalist who is often described like this: socialist, suffragist, agitator and difficult woman – “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
In 1976, the NZ Truth ran a front-page story which started: “Marilyn Waring, National Member of Parliament for Raglan, is a lesbian”. Her family didn’t know she was gay, so that was charming of the paper, wasn’t it? They never mentioned the matter. Weirdly, Muldoon supported her. “He stepped in to protect me. He said something like: ‘You don’t say anything. The party doesn’t say anything. And the story will go away.’” It mostly did. He had offered a sort of kindness.
And then he didn’t. While she was eating her apple, he drank whisky. He huffed and he puffed. He called her a “perverted little liar”. A lesser mortal might have been tempted to throw that apple at his head. “I think what I responded to him was, ‘If you say that outside this room, I’ll sue the shit out of you.’”
She was still in her 20s. Does she know where her bravery, her principles came from? “I don’t think of it like that and it was not easy. But basically, when I turned around there was seldom anyone else there. And someone had to do what was needed, even if it doesn’t change the immediate outcome. So I took a deep breath …”
She wasn’t frightened of Muldoon. She had the support of her Waikato electorate. “And that was my cloak.”
Here’s a question: What the hell was she doing in the National Party in the first place?
There is a simple answer. In 1974, Venn Young, then a National Party backbencher, “introduced his homosexual law reform bill. Norman Kirk [then Labour leader and prime minister] said there was no way he would countenance it, and that that behaviour was unnatural and a whole lot of other things that were on the front page of The Dominion newspaper. I got up from my seat in the Victoria University library and I walked into town and joined the National Party.”
Also, Labour at the time had a clause that said its candidates had to vote in accordance with the majority of the caucus. She has never encountered a line she wanted to toe.
I say I think she’s now a leftie. How did she vote in the last general election? “I’m not going to tell you that!”
I think she’s a leftie now. “Well, I don’t think you can say what I am. That’s the thing about the presumptions that people have.”
She doesn’t know what her public profile is and she doesn’t care. “When you’re a public figure everybody thinks they know you and know who you are. And they’re always imposing this personality on you. And if I really wanted the public profile I’d be all over social media, and I don’t do any of it. So I think that tells you that, actually, until I got mightily provoked, I was minding my own business and getting on with having a life.”
The simple life
She is 72. She has two final PhD students’ theses to see through, then she will retire from her job as professor of public policy at Auckland University of Technology. She lives alone and has moved to a retirement village in the Bay of Islands. She gardens. She loves fishing. She fishes with people who don’t talk. It’s peaceful, she says. She knits, she plays the ukulele – that might be a bit surprising.
She was supposed to become a professional singer, a soprano. She had always played the guitar, then got arthritis in her left thumb. “That meant I couldn’t span, and I thought, ‘Oh, well, it’s gone.’ Then I heard Hey, Soul Sister [by US rock band Train] on the radio and I looked down at my left hand and it was forming the chords. And the people next door had ukuleles so I rushed next door and said, ‘Could I just borrow one of your ukuleles?’ I came rushing back in while Hey, Soul Sister was still playing and I thought, ‘Shit, I can do this.’”
God help everyone when she does retire, I say. She’ll cause more trouble. “Oh, no, no. I don’t think so. I got two new knees lately and that’s slowed me down a lot.
“I was coming through the airport in Wellington recently and of course I set everything off. So I’m standing in that, you know, round contraption, with my hands in the air and [RNZ’s] Guyon Espiner came through and said to me: ‘God, are you still a security risk?’”
She doesn’t have any animals now. “I’ve never been one for pets. Although some of my friends would suggest that every goat on the farm was a pet.” Hooray, we’ve arrived at the goats! We share a great love of goats, although I have, alas, never kept a goat. At peak goat, she had about 200 angora goats.
She left the Waikato “so that I wasn’t constantly pestered to solve everybody’s problems”. She took up goat farming north of Auckland because, after the toxic gas of Parliament she “knew I needed to heal”. Goats provided solace. “They really give you unconditional love. And they’re wicked and funny.” And they really do eat the washing off the line.
She is a country girl, still. There was also solace to be found in such things as “the cherry blossoms and the bulbs coming up and the little lambs in the paddock”.
Oh, she has done this and she’s done that. The most wonderful thing she’s done? She’s spent a lifetime, and a career, being a difficult woman. I do enjoy a difficult woman.