If negotiating your wife’s release from Somali gunmen can help you survive New Zealand’s political jungle then David Shearer could have plenty of staying power.
Labour Party leader David (54) and his wife Anuschka Meyer put their lives on the line while working as humanitarians in war-torn Somalia in 1992. At one stage Anuschka had an AK-47 aimed at her head for two hours by a rebel demanding money and medical supplies, before David could talk the gunman into releasing her.
“I had to calm him down and try to understand what he really wanted,” David says. “I was definitely worried, but I wasn’t panicking. You’ve got to bring calmness to the situation. “We had to offer him some money and supplies to leave. You can’t take a hard-line stance with somebody with a gun.”
It’s experiences like this that have only helped to strengthen the couple’s relationship. Their peaceful home in Pt Chevalier, Auckland, is worlds apart from the drama they faced every day during their years working for Save the Children and the United Nations.
Now married for 25 years, the couple met when David became homeowner Anuschka’s flatmate in Auckland in the 1980s. “I started cutting the lawns and you know… it just went on from there,” David laughs. When after two years, Anuschka (now 58) decided to travel through Asia on her own, David didn’t want her to slip through his fingers and flew to Bangkok on a whim to propose.
“I thought I didn’t want to lose this woman. We decided to get married then and there,” says David. “We went to the Thai equivalent of a registry office.” They’re relaxed about sharing insights into their relationship with the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, but their children, Anastasia (13) and Vetya (15), are off limits because they want to protect them from publicity.
“Letting it go in the good times means in the bad times you can’t really say ‘keep my kids out of this,’” David explains. “But we don’t mind the odd family shot if they come along to functions,” adds Anuschka. “They’re both at the age where they don’t want to be different,” David explains.
The teenagers go to different secondary schools. Anastasia has just started at Western Springs and their son is still at Northcote College where he started when the family lived on the North Shore until six months ago.
There has been a whirlwind of changes for the family over the past three years. They’ve moved countries, changed jobs and built their dream home, plus there’s been a new addition to the family, their schnoodle dog Tino.
David was elected MP for Mt Albert in 2009 and in just over two years he rose to leader of the Labour Party. The couple are proud of their work overseas and feel particularly good they helped to feed 30,000 starving Somali children. “They wouldn’t be alive if it hadn’t been for us being there and that’s a nice feeling,” David explains.
They were named New Zealanders of the Year by the New Zealand Herald in 1992 for running one of the biggest aid camps in Somalia during the civil war. Looking back, they can’t believe the danger they faced. One of their friends who worked for another aid organisation was killed and on another occasion in Somalia Anuschka returned from lunch to find a man pointing a gun at her secretary’s head.
“You’d think you’d be very nervous about that, but calm takes over, so I just told him to put the gun away and we could start negotiating,” she recalls. The non-religious couple didn’t fit the stereotype of aid workers overseas. There was a saying at the time that humanitarian workers fell into three categories – mercenaries, misfits and missionaries, but the couple say they weren’t any of them.
“I’ve always had a strong feeling of service and doing something that made a difference,” David explains. “There’s a sense of justice you want to uphold,” adds Anuschka, who now works as a lawyer.
These days David is negotiating how short he needs to shave his hair if he wins the Leukaemia and Blood Cancer’s Shave for a Cure charity competition, where the public decides which celebrity has to shave their head. David’s father Bob died of prostate cancer in 1993 when he was 67, so raising awareness of the disease is naturally a cause he believes in.
Bringing support back to the Labour Party is another cause close to his heart. Despite growing up with National-voting parents, his own values suit Labour’s philosophy. After all they’ve been through together, he has a trusted adviser in Anuschka, who also has an interest in politics. “We have similar values,” says Anuschka. “We’re probably quite different. David is much more outgoing and extroverted.
“We have the same sense of humour,” says David. “I think that’s important – being able to laugh at the same things. After all the years in all these different places, you experience a bit of life and you trust each other.” “We’ve done a lot together,” Anuschka says, “and having been a couple, we’ve been able to talk through those things and understood what it was all about, and that’s certainly helped us with our work.”
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