Private lives
It’s only when you see what MPs do, day in day out, that you realise how hard it must be on their families. Children are brought up hardly seeing one of their parents, and spouses spend much of their time flying solo. This obvious downside of being a parent/politician always makes me wonder why Helen Clark’s opponents - most recently, Peter Dunne - seek to make political hay out of her childlessness. She said in an interview recently that she decided not to have children because she knew, if she did, she wouldn’t be able to achieve politically what she wanted to achieve.. I would have thought this a more responsible position than some of the other politicians in Parliament, who have families to appear normal, only to thoroughly neglect them once they get close to power.
The Herald on Sunday has an interesting piece today on the toll that being an MP can have on one’s personal life. Sue B is one of the MPs interviewed. The story reads:
When Sue Bradford became a Green MP five years ago it would have been easy to think she was giving up a hard life at the wrong end of a police baton for a cushy life in Parliament’s halls. Before then, standing up for her political beliefs meant getting arrested, risking life and limb on the front line in protests, being abused by police and the public, and feeding her family on an income bordering on negligible.
Despite having a master’s degree and a post-graduate diploma, the most she had earned was $32,000. Now she earns $113,300 plus expenses and is respected as one of Parliament’s most hard-working MPs.
But all this has come at a private cost for the 52-year-old mother of five. Recently she stood before Parliament’s mostly male MPs and spoke publicly for the first time of being raped three times, the first time when she was just 16. “Almost without meaning to I ended up talking about my own experiences,” she explains. “I got so wild with the Government for not understanding what they were doing. They were doing a really good law, but they weren’t going far enough. They weren’t listening to the submitters, to the victims of rape.”
The experience was bruising. It didn’t go down well in the House, she says. but the public response was overwhelmingly supportive.
But it’s the toll on her family life which is the most unrelenting.
Bradford’s youngest son was just 8 when she became an MP. Now he is a teenager. Her partner of 25 years, Bill, has had to give up much of his own activism to mind the children and their close relationship has had to survive weeks where the only contact is by phone.
When Sue is home, they take the phone off the hook.
Despite all, Bill says life is never so bad that he has asked her to give up her job: “But I get really down about it sometimes. Not the job, but about the fact that we never seem to get together.
“I wouldn’t like to think that the rest of my life is going to be spent when we’re apart all the time.”
Things will get particularly bad for MPs’ families these next two months in the run-up to the election. Mum and Dad, who are seldom round anyway, will be there even less.
