Finlay Macdonald reviews a new biography of Helen Kelly
Helen Kelly was born in 1964, putting her right at the tip of the baby boomer tail. Generational labels are tiresome, particularly the way they’re now deployed in the proxy class warfare of housing affordability. But at least it helps locate her in time: a child who grew up and came of age in the old welfare state and who entered adulthood and the workforce in the ideological laboratory of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Old enough to remember, young enough to adapt, she would provide the thread of continuity and conviction that a brutalised union movement could hold on to in an era of employment contracts and workplace casualisation.
Roughly around the same time Kelly was absorbing the radical politics and union activism that defined life in her parents’ old villa in Wellington’s Mt Victoria, a young John Key was setting out on a very different path from his childhood home in a Christchurch state house. A few years older (he was born in 1961), Key would nonetheless enjoy and endure the same old New Zealand that all late-stage boomers remember – largely egalitarian, socially conservative, chafing under Muldoon’s authoritarian yoke, a free university education. He just had his eye on a different prize.
In Rebecca Macfie’s terrific retelling of an all-too-brief life, the paths of Kelly and Key first cross in 2010. He has made his millions and is now prime minister, she has paid her dues and is now president of the Council of Trade Unions. There is trouble in Middle Earth over director Peter Jackson’s rejection of an actors’ union demand for a collective agreement. The local film industry is supposedly in jeopardy, the production might move to Eastern Europe, national pride is on the line, angry hobbits are marching with pitchforks and torches and Key’s cargo cult government is watching the skies for Lear jets bearing golden gods from Hollywood. It is a thoroughly dispiriting spectacle, a classic mash-up of cultural cringe and craven politics, and a low point for Kelly.
Kelly agreed to a TV interview with celebrity pretend journalist Paul Holmes, only to be shouted down
Macfie expertly sets out the manoeuvring and manipulation that eventually saw the country rewrite employment law to suit the film industry, but there’s a moment that stands out even in the context of the generally lamentable media coverage at the time. Always up for a debate, Kelly agreed to a TV interview with celebrity pretend journalist Paul Holmes, only to be shouted down by the apoplectic host: "The impression people have, Helen, is that you are well out of your depth. When Jackson calls you 'clueless' and tells you to go home, this is a New Zealand-produced genius, the like of which we’ll never see again...What do you know about show business? What do you know about the film industry?" On top of the hate mail she’d been receiving, and the wider defeat for the union movement, it was bruising and humiliating. More than that, it was a reminder that taking on the establishment in New Zealand will put you at odds with squares and lackeys just as much as with power and wealth.
Some 30 years earlier the young Helen had caught a glimpse of what was coming when 22-year-old Tania Harris led the 50,000-strong “Kiwis Care” march down Auckland’s Queen St. Helen’s father, veteran union organiser Pat Kelly, had just helped pull off a big victory for striking Kinleith mill workers and Muldoon was ramping up his familiar anti-labour rhetoric. Macfie has no need to dwell on the ironies of Harris exhorting the nation to “pull together, not apart” as cries of “commos”, “pommies” and “stirrers” rang out from the crowd. The 16-year-old Helen recorded in her diary, “Talk about bad news for the unions.”
At that age Helen couldn’t know she would one day be good news for the unions, and it’s trite to suggest DNA is destiny. But it’s hard to imagine a better training for the intellectual and emotional demands of keeping the people’s flag flying than growing up in the Shannon Street house of Pat and Cath Kelly. Her father was a union child too, born and raised near the Liverpool docks, depression-poor and schooled by the blitz in the truth about fascism. When he came to New Zealand in 1954, he wrote home, “I’ve found Shangri-La”. Her mother Cath came from the other end of the social spectrum, youngest child of the well-off Eichelbaum family of Wellington, who turned left instead of right and whose independent mind and spirit seem very much to have lived on in her daughter.
It's this side of Kelly that Macfie does such a good job revealing. Her socialism and union loyalties are, given her upbringing, not so surprising. But it’s the portrayal of her playfulness, guts and maverick soul that stick with the reader. “She was always smiling, always sparkling,” a high school friend remembered. “People were very drawn to that.” As a negotiator, it seems, that sparkle could be the glint of a blade. When she turned up in Wairoa during the Affco lockout in 2015 her style made a real impression on the local union rep: “We’re pretty hearty here in Wairoa,” he recalled. “I mean, we call a shovel a fucking shovel. After that meeting all I wanted to do was be like her.”
This same sense of full-hearted engagement also animates this blow-by-blow account of the various campaigns Kelly fought, which is as much a testament to the author as her subject. Union politics is not without its inherent drama, but the strikes, lockouts, marches, defeats and victories that make the news are only part of it. The eternal battle of labour and capital is also a story of incremental progress hammered out over long hours in nondescript rooms, point by point, clause by clause, two steps up, one step back. Macfie wears her research lightly, and her ability to distill it all into a tight narrative while still conveying a sense of the prosaic reality of a unionist’s day job is a biographical masterclass. In Macfie’s hands, the struggle is real.
That is not to say there isn’t a steady undercurrent of moral outrage beneath the surface. Macfie is particularly strong, as you might expect, on Kelly’s involvement in the Pike River scandal, the subject of her previous book. But she finds the essence of her subject’s furious commitment to human dignity in every sordid workplace “health and safety” failure, be it the young security guard killed on his first shift or the forestry workers who never made it home for dinner. “Her ambition was Herculean: she wanted to change the way working people were treated, and she wanted to wrap the arms of the union movement around those who were powerless and isolated.”
She would likely have been fast-tracked into cabinet in Jacinda Ardern’s first government
But Kelly’s fate was to inherit leadership of the union movement in a post-apocalyptic economic landscape where poverty and unemployment were hardwired into the system. The union movement itself had been rendered, if not completely powerless and isolated, then certainly diminished and peripheral. Unlike the movies she was accused of so unpatriotically putting at risk, the script was never going to end on a convenient uplifting note. As Macfie writes, “there was no totemic endpoint, no towering legacy.” Nor was there any shame in that.
What might have happened, then, had cancer not taken Helen Kelly in 2016 at the age of 52? Her cousin and colleague Bill Rosenberg thought she would have become Prime Minister. Macfie says she would likely have become MP for Rongotai in 2017 and been fast-tracked into Cabinet in Jacinda Ardern’s first government. Who knows? How her still-evolving radicalism would have sat with modern Labour’s apparent fear of its own shadow is an intriguing question – although there’s probably a clue in her refusal to accept being made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, despite her hunch it would have been a good look for the union movement “in our sycophantic little country”.
No, it’s a safe bet Helen Kelly would have remained the best kind of rebel, the one with a cause. Whatever she might have gone on to do, New Zealand would have been better for it. As for public honours, this book does that job very nicely.
Helen Kelly: Her life by Rebecca Macfie (Awa Press, $50) is available in bookstores nationwide. The author appears at the Auckland Writers Festival on Saturday May 15.
