Helen appreciation thread

After a while he asked where we came from. New Zealand I answered, explaining that we were Asian based expats.
You must be enormously proud of your Prime Minister said Kevin.

I explained that proud was not really the right word…well yes it was a word I’d use, as below but perhaps supportive and grateful were more appropriate.

Supportive because I generally agreed with both her philosophical and policy. And grateful because of the enormous strides the industry I’d been involved in had been able to take over the past decade as a direct result of her active personal input in furthering the industry. Last month there were, in one week, 13 New Zealand albums in the NZ Top 40. That would have been unthinkable if we’d had a continuation of National’s arts policies of the 1990s.

Kevin seemed an unlikely fan though...he was a very conservative aging businessman, the sort of person you’d assume would support the right. So I queried his opinion.

His opinion of Ms. Clark, he said, was based on how she was perceived outside her home country. Kevin explained that New Zealand’s mighty, and much improved in recent years, reputation, at least in the Asia-Pacific region, rested in no small part upon the way she was perceived. As honest, decent, clean and principled. And, importantly, independent.

It’s hard to overstate how positively New Zealand is viewed beyond it’s shores and it, too, is hard to overstate the role Helen Clark has in that perception. It wasn’t always so. Before 2000 we were seen as pretty much a US satellite state. Clean though…

As a non resident New Zealander I feel a little, no that’s silly, more than that, quite a bit, saddened by the end of the Clark era. She’s someone who, and I think my opinion is echoed by most New Zealanders I meet offshore, that does give me some pride. Taxi drivers around Asia ask where I’m from...they either respond to my answer with “Kia Ora!” or a thumbs up “Helen Clark!”.

She has substantial international mana and I’m pretty sure John Key, who from a distance looks like a personality free zone (an opinion emphasized by his pathetic leap onto Obama both before the election and in his victory speech…does he have his own personality or simply borrow?), will be lucky to achieve same level of respect beyond the nation’s shores. And of course that respect translates back to New Zealand’s standing.