A joke published recently in a local magazine: What`s the difference between Ruth Richardson and a Rottweiler? Answer: Lip gloss.
Richardson, New Zealand`s minister of finance and the country`s second most-powerful politician, knows how cruel perceptions of women in politics can be-especially if the women like to wield power and are singularly determined. But if she is going to be branded the Rottweiler of New Zealand politics, this intensely analytical 41-year-old mother of two is determined not to be pushed around, either.
Richardson, who is heading a controversial reform of her nation`s economic policies, says women are better-suited to making hard decisions.
”I do believe it`s easier for women to be more firm and crusading in politics, because for us to prevail in the first place we have to be very determined and have our heads screwed on,” she says. ”I don`t want to succeed in politics more than anything else in my life, so I`m not going to be deflected in my course by the tantalizing prospect of keeping my head down simply to maintain power. To make it at all, women have to break molds, so that tends to make us good reformers.”
Unfortunately for this former feminist activist and lawyer, it is not a particularly good time to be this country`s fiscal leader. New Zealand is in the midst of a recession and is burdened by high overseas debt. A British-style parliamentary democracy that once was ranked as having one of the world`s best standards of living, New Zealand`s financial and social deprivation now are real issues in what used to be a quiet backwater of egalitarianism.
Richardson`s answer lies in cutting public spending to match its income, and that means cutting back significantly on the socialist-inspired benefits that gave New Zealanders cradle-to-grave protection.
Very much a product of conservative, rural New Zealand, a farmer`s daughter who believes in self-reliance and individual responsibility, Richardson is having to be the architect for the dismantling of one of the world`s first welfare states.
In the process, she has become the embodiment of the New Right in a country grown weary of five years of radical reforms. A strong believer in free-market economic policies and a low-tax economy, Richardson has introduced charges on health, education and welfare in many areas in a country that for two generations has taken for granted an elaborate system of free services and a host of pension and welfare benefits. Many of the old protections and subsidies have been swept away from industry and farming.
Unfortunately, there is a high political cost in representing the hard face of change in a once-prosperous country having to face up to high unemployment and record business failures. Polls show that fewer than 20 percent of the voters now support the conservative National Party government of Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Richardson, who were elected in November, 1990, in a landslide.
It`s likely the pair are going to pay for their zeal when the country goes to the polls in 1993. But if some of her male colleagues in the government already are showing signs of losing their nerve in the face of public opposition to cutbacks, it`s also clear why Richardson so often is lampooned as a fighting dog. Backing down is not on her agenda.
”I`m not enjoying power during good economic times so I simply don`t have the luxury of making soft choices,” she maintains, chopping the air with her hand to emphasis the point. ”But that`s why I have this job. I`ve always been driven philosophically in terms of individual responsibility. Welfare has to be targeted and I`m not going to be deflected from what has been done by special pleading.
”I`ve inherited an extremely rough path from my predecessors, but blame is not going to generate one more dollar for the country`s economy. We are the generation who has to pay the bill and I`m quite prepared to face up to that challenge.”
The challenges have been personal as well as professional. In the traditional image of the politican`s spouse, Richardson`s husband, Andrew Wright, has given up his career in the interest of hers. Until June of 1991 he taught law part-time at nearby Lincoln University, but he has given that up to care full-time for the couple`s two children, Lucy, 7, and Oliver, 5, and run their 48-acre deer farm in the northern part of the country`s South Island.
It`s Richardson who has to bring all her work home, though that`s when she`s lucky enough to get away from the capital city of Wellington at all. During busy weeks she gets back to the farm for only a couple of nights or a weekend. She`s aware of the strain on her family.
”There`s a tremendous amount of pressure, but my family knows I`m not one to walk away from a challenge. I appreciate that it`s enormously demanding on them, so I`ve had to strike some sort of balance,” she admits. ”Last night I was up till 12:30 a.m. working through policy with the prime minister, but I have wonderful personal support from my office staff, who act as something of a proxy family. I also have a husband who is out of the box in terms of understanding.”
Whenever she can get away from Wellington, Richardson tries to become just another rural mother and the local Member of Parliament for a her farming region.
”I`ll do things like fly down to my daughter`s school prize-giving and sit there like a beaming mother, but it`s not easy and I know it takes a toll. In spite of all this I`ve maintained some semblance of a private life, though.”
Although she grew up amid the paddocks and small towns of New Zealand`s rural heartland and was educated at a Catholic boarding school, she says she developed a liking for politics as a teenager.
”There has always been a strong tradition of political activism in my family, we were always keen to debate the issues over the breakfast table. Going into politics seemed a pretty natural thing to get involved with,” says the lawyer who entered Parliament more than a decade ago.
After law school she worked as at the Justice Department and for a farmers` association. Active in the National Party, Richardson won her first seat in Parliament in 1980, becoming the party`s finance spokesperson a year before the party won the general election in 1990.
Richardson doesn`t think it`s unusual for a woman from her background to rise to the head of the country`s treasury.
With a great-grandfather who was a member of New Zealand`s early parliament, from 1909 to 1919, Richardson recalls that at an early age she was interested in ideas about how to run the country and improve the political system. She says she never felt she was in a political vacuum just because she grew up in the country.
”I`ve always felt that rural New Zealand is so often misjudged as conservative, when in fact the people can be very progressive. Farming families always have been great seedbeds for free-market thinkers and people who place a great deal of emphasis on individual responsibility.”
Richardson, who comes across as earnest and forthright in the Margaret Thatcher mold, is unhappy with all the references to her being a free-market ideologue.
”People talk of what I`m doing as being extreme, but the real extremism, as far as I`m concerned, was the decades of high national debt, high taxation and dependency on the welfare state. What finally puts the skids under a decent welfare system is economics that no longer can fund it. Fiscal responsibility and social responsibility have to be married.”
It`s statements like these coupled with such unpopular moves as taxing state pensions that have done a lot to foster her image, as articulated in public-opinion polls, of being rigid and uncaring. In many ways that is not helped by her often brisk, humorless delivery. She`s not at ease in the spotlight, and she has a tendency to retreat into the semantics of economic jargon.
A woman who her close circle of staffers say is particularly warm and caring behind closed doors, Richardson attributes a lot of the vitriol aimed at her and close colleague Jenny Shipley, the Social Welfare Minister, to the unfair amount of personal scrutiny faced by any woman in political power.
”When you are part of the public domain it`s a fact of life that women are more noticed than men. But if you find that hard to handle, then you are not the person for politics,” she admits.
On the surface, she has displayed a remarkable degree of public steadfastness over some controversial issues. The new policy of taxing pension benefits for retired people has become particularly touchy. There have been mass demonstrations by pensioners, fierce interest-group lobbying and in one instance, Richardson was splattered with paint by a protester.
The easygoing informality that once characterized New Zealand politics has given way to almost unprecedented levels of anger and frustration. Richardson and other top government figures now are shadowed in public by armed undercover police, when once they could wander unescorted wherever they wanted.
Wherever she goes in public, it`s likely that groups of angry, middle-class people protesting funding cuts. But Richardson is adament that the time has come to pay the bills. Pointing to the rapid aging of the population in the developed world, she says it`s an issue that is going to have to be faced by every major country sooner.
”It`s a preoccupation I know with a lot of economies. There has been a lot of intergenerational transfer that has incurred deficits and simply sent the bill to the next generation. Now suddenly this generation is saying `Wait a minute, we are going to be left with paying for a double dose here. Not only are we going to be left with having to fund our own income requirements, but also yours and all the accumulated deficits down the line!”
With free market economic reforms and right-wing economics sweeping through many countries, Richardson sees an opportunity for women in politics. ”I think in the past politics has tended to shut women out because it has been based on power structures that have been privileged and insular-the
`old boys` club` mentality. I think these days the relationship of people to the political process is about how empowered the individual feels.
”I also think modern society is better informed and more conscious of its own rights, and women are very much in tune with that. We don`t tend to be corporate types and we don`t tend to patronize, because we have been patronized for too long. I think women are more comfortable with
decisionmaking that involves devolution of power because it`s more natural to us.”
