Table of Contents
Summarised by Centrist
Journalist Graham Adams argues Helen Clark is enjoying a polished modern revival as the arts world and sympathetic media are helping to “burnish her halo,” while skating past the most politically explosive decision of her premiership.
“Just don’t mention the foreshore and seabed,” he writes.
Adams writes that Clark’s 2000 arts funding boost was a “canny investment” that appears to have secured “the undying devotion of the luvvies”, and says the result is a version of Clark scrubbed clean of the harder edges of her record.
The Auckland Theatre Company’s new play and Tova O’Brien’s admiring TVNZ interview are treated as proof that the “Cult of Helen” is back in full force.
He points out that the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 is often treated by the left as a “misstep” or “debacle”, even though it was one of the defining events of Clark’s time in office, triggering a mass hīkoi, helping spark the creation of the Māori Party, and exposing a blunt side of Clark that today’s admirers prefer to forget. At the time, she dismissed protesters as “the same old faces” and “the haters and wreckers”.
Yet, Clark’s most controversial act is now defended by parts of the centre-right more vigorously than by the left that once claimed her.
Adams says conservative groups increasingly see the 2004 law as the clearest and most durable answer to coastal claims after John Key’s National government replaced it with the Marine and Coastal Area Act in 2011.
He quotes Muriel Newman arguing: “The only fool-proof way to protect the coastline for all New Zealanders is to return it to Crown ownership by repealing the Marine and Coastal Area Act and restoring the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act.”
Don Brash, once a fierce opponent of Clark’s law, now says: “If we had a choice we’d go back to the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004 where the Crown owns the foreshore and seabed on behalf of all New Zealanders.”
