Former MP Dr Marilyn Waring is an economist, an academic and an author. Having entered Parliament at the tender age of 23, Dame Marilyn famously crossed the floor on several issues, including the Nuclear Free Bill. Marilyn has also been a Professor of Public Policy and a goat farmer. While at 72, she is now retired, she is kept busy chairing the People’s Select Committee on the controversial Pay Equity Bill.
I grew up down the road from Ngāruawahia in a village called Taupiri. It was a small community under the mountain where everybody knew each other. I learned early on that there were two ways of being and two ways of knowing. Nobody was saying “bicultural means this”, it was just part of everyday life. I really drew on that in my academic career.
Mum and Dad’s educations were interrupted by World War II.
Dad was the local butcher and on both sides of our family, nobody had been to university. He bought Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedias and the University Society Reading Course as he wanted to give me and my brother every opportunity they hadn’t had. I’m also grateful my parents and grandparents read to me. I still love reading.
I was at primary school in Taupiri.
When our teacher, Trevor Williams, took the Form One and Twos to the Bay of Islands to teach us our nation’s history. We put on concerts and published magazines on the old Gestetner [the original office copy machine] to sell door to door. We had bottle drives and collected tea coupons until we’d raised enough money. We were billeted with Paihia Primary families – most kids had barely travelled – and we visited Kororāreka, Waitangi, the Mission Stations at Paihia and Waimate North, and Puketi Forest. I’ve never forgotten that week and it’s probably why I retired up this way.
After two years at Ngāruawahia High School.
I was sent to Waikato Diocesan School, which was a major culture shock. I’d never seen flash cars and I could count the number of Māori students on the fingers of one hand. In my interview to get in, I told the headmistress I wanted to be a physical education instructor. She said she didn’t think that was my destination and to think of something else. So I said I wanted to be a diplomat, which is hilarious, as diplomacy is not central to my character.
I graduated with an honours degree in political science.
From Victoria in 1973, then I went to London to study voice. I liked the idea of being a perpetual student and once home, I intended to start a music degree. Then my former politics professor Alan Robinson told me about a job in National’s Opposition Research Unit and suggested I apply.
I was allocated the portfolios for Housing, Fishing, and Women.
I also attended Women’s Electoral Lobby meetings and that year they wrote to the General Directors of the political parties to say they wanted more female candidates. Their replies said that women just don’t stand. So with 1975 being International Women’s Year, I did a little feminist activism and told George Gair I was looking to stand because National hadn’t
had a woman in caucus from 1972 to 1975.
George was an extraordinary MP, whose research was wonderfully thorough, and he took me seriously.
It also helped that I came from the Raglan electorate, a safe National seat where Doug Carter was about to retire, so I put myself forward for pre-selection. My father, who was way ahead of his time and embodied the slogan “Girls Can Do Anything”, took the form to his butcher shop to get the required number of signatures.
Out of 140 voting delegates, fewer than 30 were women.
Selection night was held in the Ngāruawahia High School hall. I had nothing to wear, so my mother suggested a dress I’d worn to a wedding a few years earlier. Because so few women had been elected as candidates, there wasn’t really a dress code, so I wore my bridesmaid dress.
The place was packed to the rafters.
If the fire service had come, we’d have been in trouble – and some women in the front row were giving me the thumbs up and big grins. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eliminated early, then it came to the final ballot. When my name was called, the crowd roared. I was tempted to say, ‘I think there’s been a mistake’, when Jim Bolger ran to the stage to embrace me because I’d just solved National’s caucus problem by putting a woman in a safe seat.
I was 22 – the same age as most MPs’ grandchildren.
A lot of the time, I felt I was on a different planet to them. Doug Carter said to me, ‘You’re younger than all the rest of them, which means you’re going to have to live with what you do longer than them. So whatever you do, make sure you can sleep straight in your bed at night.’
In 1981, I made the decision to leave Parliament in 1984.
So I had three years to think about what to do next. I wanted to be rural and away from the Waikato so I wouldn’t be asked to solve people’s problems all the time. I considered everything from tree crops to commercial flowers for my recovery period. I eventually settled on goats as they are entertaining, intelligent and they give unconditional love. Which is how I became a goat farmer while I wrote Counting for Nothing.
You might call what I had PTSD,
Although the vehicles for abuse were different in my day, but I was roundly abused, even in my own caucus. I still remember which men came to my defence. My first PA had worked for Sir Keith Holyoake and when I looked through my archives, I realised she shredded the foulest mail that was addressed to me. She sent it straight to the bin. I’m not sure I would’ve survived in a social media Parliament.
From about 1977, I’d been thinking about how GDP didn’t recognise women’s underpaid or unpaid work.
For a long time, I obsessed about it, then I wrote Counting For Nothing. That book changed my life. The National Film Board of Canada made a documentary about it and I spent the next 30 years being an international development consultant and an academic, giving lectures all over the world. I also completed my PhD at the University of Waikato.
I met a Jamaican feminist at the UN.
She’d visited New Zealand and was constantly jibing me about not having visited her country, so when I was finishing a fellowship at Harvard, I went home via Jamaica. I also wanted to look at an aid development scheme supplied by an engineering company in O¯torohanga, which was in my constituency, but my visit coincided with Bob Marley’s official state funeral. As you’d imagine, everything stopped. There was no pointin making phone calls, and meetings in Kingston weren’t happening. Then the Australian High Commissioner called and asked if I’d got the message from Ottawa, and what time did I want to be collected. Which is how I found out I was going to Bob Marley’s state funeral. It was a full Ethiopian Coptic funeral with bells and smells, the whole regalia. I was New Zealand’s representative seated in the third row.
The Pay Equity Bill.
Seeks to remove the rights of 180,000 New Zealand women and it’s aimed at the lowest paid most essential workers. I hardly ever watch Parliament but when the Bill was being debated, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was appalling on so many levels: the urgency, the retrospective nature of it and the complete lack of evidence. The effect on women was savage. I was in mourning when someone asked what could we do. I was swimming – I think best when I’m walking or swimming, talking to myself – and I decided we needed to find a vehicle to collect the evidence that should’ve been before Parliament during the debate.
This became the People’s Select Committee with Sue Bradford, Nanaia Mahuta, and Lianne Dalziel stepping up.
Major specialists volunteered to help, making it one of the best-resourced and intellectually capable Select Committees ever. We’ve received 1600 submissions, we have hearings until November, and will deliver our report in January.
Many of my friends say I’ll never retire, but I love it.
Even through COVID, I never watched Netflix or YouTube. I’d never had a smart TV and fiction wasn’t much on my agenda, as I was always reading theses, with the exception of the Booker short list. These days, I read novels all the time. I watch series, I play the ukulele. I never thought I’d be a lady who lunched, but I’m doing that. I’m back to knitting. My mum and grandmother taught m,e and I knitted all through secondary school and at Parliament, because women like to be engaged in simultaneous activities. I make candles. I have a garden to play in. I enjoy cooking and reading cookbooks for pleasure. Retirement is very busy, but now it’ll have to wait while we investigate the Pay Equity mess.”
