Helen Clark
Helen Clark was prime minister of New Zealand for nine years, from 1999 to 2008, the second woman to hold the office and the first to win it at an election, a political scientist from a Waikato sheep farm who led the Labour party through three victories and governed in coalition under the proportional system with a discipline the country had not seen since Muldoon, kept New Zealand out of the Iraq war in 2003, settled the foreshore and seabed dispute with the Maori in a way that cost her a Maori party, and went on to run the United Nations Development Programme for eight years and to lose the race for secretary-general in 2016 to a man. She was born in Hamilton in 1950, read politics at Auckland and lectured in it, and was elected for Mount Albert in 1981 as one of the party's left, opposed to the Lange government's market reforms of the 1980s that she watched from the back benches and the ministries of housing and health. She took the leadership in 1993 after the party's second defeat, survived a caucus coup in 1996, and won in November 1999 with the Alliance as a partner. The government reversed some of the reforms, restored income-related rents and a state bank, brought back the railways, raised the top tax rate, paid for interest-free student loans and Working for Families, and legalised civil unions and prostitution. The economy grew every year and unemployment fell to the lowest in the OECD. She refused Bush the troops for Iraq, sent engineers afterwards, and said that if Gore had won there would have been no war. She apologised for that. The Court of Appeal's ruling of 2003 that Maori could claim customary title to the foreshore produced her law vesting it in the crown, a hikoi of fifteen thousand to parliament, and the Maori Party. She lost in November 2008 to John Key after the electorate tired of a fourth term, resigned the leadership that night, and in April 2009 became administrator of the UNDP, the third-ranking post in the UN. There she cut the bureaucracy and was accused of running it like a government. She came fourth in the straw polls of 2016 for secretary-general, was elected to the boards and commissions of her retirement, and remains the most trusted public figure in New Zealand polls.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
