22. Comparing Pathways to Power: Women and Political Leadership in New Zealand

There has always been a public fascination with women political leaders, primarily because there have been so few of them; they are indeed exceptional. Because political leadership has primarily been a male domain, arguably one of the last bastions of almost exclusive male power, watching a woman perform this role seems to attract significant interest. Most recently, the focus has been on two aspiring women leaders: Hillary Clinton, whose bid for the Democrat nomination was reported daily in newspapers around the world and, more tragically, the thwarted and fatal campaign by Benazir Bhutto to re-enter the Pakistani government.

In addition to Hillary Clinton, there appears to have been a rush of women political leaders elected to positions of power of late. We can think of Nancy Pelosi (US), Angela Merkel (Germany), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Cristina Fernández (Argentina) and the thwarted French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal. Over a decade ago, Benazir Bhutto featured alongside Corazin Aquino (Philippines), Mary Robinson (Ireland), Kim Campbell (Canada) and Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway). Before that it was Margaret Thatcher (Britain), Golda Meir (Israel) and Indira Gandhi (India). While at any one time the number of women prime ministers or presidents may not be high, there has been an increase in the number of countries featuring women political leaders (Reynolds 1999).

There is a small body of work in the form of political (auto)biography that has focused on women political leaders and their entry into executive government. These biographies, and the edited volumes that profile particular women leaders, highlight the difficulties associated with being a woman with political ambition (Genovese 1993; Thatcher 1995; Klenke 1996; Edwards 2001; Clinton 2003). While many such women are portrayed by the media to have experienced a ‘meteoric’ rise, the reality is that access to the inner leadership group is obtained only with sustained commitment to building a political career.

For any politician, male or female, an enormous investment of time and energy is normally required to build a political career to the point where they have the capacity to influence directly the government’s policy agenda, that is, to become part of the leadership group or the executive. Political leadership depends on at least: selection to a safe seat to ensure incumbency over time; professional development through strategic service within party executives and caucuses; practiced performances in parliamentary committees and the debating chamber; party in government; intra-party political or factional machinations; and, possibly, the (in)visibility of one’s own ‘feminist’ positioning. Thus, a mix of factors, individual, structural and politico-cultural, constrain and/or expand the opportunities for women politicians to enter the executive of government where there is arguably considerable potential to act for women.

Australia and New Zealand rarely feature in broader cross-national comparisons of women’s parliamentary presence (for exceptions see Sawer and Grey 2005; Sawer, Tremblay and Trimble 2006) and New Zealand is more obviously absent than Australia in those that do encompass more than North America and Europe (Commonwealth Secretariat 1999; Outshoorn and Kantola 2007; Haussman and Sauer 2007). Yet both countries have histories of being leaders in areas of women’s rights. New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote in 1893, while Australia was the first to give women the right to vote and stand for Parliament in 1902. Australia was a pioneer in the establishing dedicated women’s policy machinery while New Zealand’s women’s policy machinery has become institutionalised despite the election of neo-liberal/conservative governments throughout the 1990s.

New Zealand and Australia are politically and culturally similar but there are some differences in how women’s political representation has progressed. Most obviously, New Zealand has had two women prime ministers consecutively since 1997. In that year, Jenny Shipley took over the leadership of the governing conservative National Party to become New Zealand’s first woman prime minister. In 1999, New Zealand experienced an election campaign where the two major parties were both led by women and most media reported that the ‘gender factor’ had been neutralised in New Zealand politics as a consequence (Curtin 1997). Helen Clark won the 1999 election and has gone on to become New Zealand’s longest serving Labour leader. By contrast, Australia is yet to elect a woman prime minister. In March 2005, an Australian women’s magazine published an article headed with the question ‘Will Australia ever have a female Prime Minister?’ and there was much pessimism in the feature’s response (Loane 2005). Two years later, in October 2007, Australia elected a new Labor government and made history in that it included Julia Gillard as Deputy Prime Minister (who served almost immediately as Acting Prime Minister).

In this chapter I focus on two aspects of the women and political leadership ‘question’. First, I explore some of the idiosyncrasies of the New Zealand political system that might account for women’s success compared to their Australian counterparts in accessing political leadership positions. Second, I examine what women have ‘done’ as a result of their attaining executive leadership positions. There is a burgeoning literature on women and leadership that suggests women have the potential to ‘do’ leadership differently (Sinclair 1998; Wajcman 1999) but very little of this discusses women’s political leadership (for an exception see Rosenthal 1998). There is however, a scholarly interest amongst feminist political scientists in the substantive representation of women, that is, how women politicians act for women, or on behalf of ‘women’s interests’.

Some would argue that we should not expect women leaders to necessarily act on behalf of women, as if they were a sectional interest.^[1] Certainly there have been a number of women leaders who no doubt support this position. But the election of Helen Clark did raise the expectations of many women’s groups in New Zealand and shifts in the gender gap in voting behaviour suggest a substantial proportion of women in New Zealand wanted Helen Clark as leader (Aimer 1997; Curtin 2002). So in the second part of this chapter I explore, albeit briefly, whether we can expect to see women leaders acting for women. In doing so, I draw from literature on both representation and leadership in order to reveal the extent to which women political leaders might use their power to make politics and policy more ‘women-friendly’.