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Steve Braunias, formerly of the Listener and currently of the Sunday Star-Times, had lunch with Jeanette this week. His write-up of the encounter is typically humourous and quirky. He writes:

The lighting was low. The room was intimate. Denied a doughnut, I settled for love; at 60, Fitzsimons remains something of a poppet, with her girlish manners and mischievous face; warm, kind, bright, she was the kind of mum you’d like to take your girlfriend home to meet…

She hopes the Greens will be trusted by voters to provide the crucial support to a third Labour government. Fitzsimons, the kingmaker. How sudden and unlikely that seems… She has emerged as Helen Clark’s new best friend. The twain met early in the campaign, Clark and Fitzsimons smiling together to present a unified front, despite their well-documented animosities.

The tactic may be working. Last week, a TVNZ poll gave the party 6%, and TV3’s poll registered 7%. A snap poll conducted by this newspaper after the unveiling of National’s tax cuts had the Greens back down to 5%, but you can smell the fear. The prospect of a Labour-Greens government has brought about a measured response from United First leader Peter Dunne. It was, he said, “a recipe for lunacy and disaster”…

Of Clark’s Labour government, Fitzsimons said: “I think there’s a feeling that Labour has lost some of its spark. It’s run basically two good governments; its first term, it did some amazing things which we all celebrated, but their second term, they did less … We think we could add a spice to their third term, and give them a reason for being.”

You could speculate that a Labour-Greens government would make Clark and Fitzsimons the two most powerful women in New Zealand. But what else might they have in common? Fitzsimons came up with one desperate example: “We discovered a couple of weeks ago that we had one experience in common that we hadn’t realised. We were talking about trains, and we both remembered catching the old Limited overnight express, second class, Auckland to Wellington, as university students going to the university arts festival, which happened every May holidays.”

We can only imagine what a powerful bond that would create. I asked her how she would characterise her working relationship with the prime minister, and she said, “I think it’s professional. I think it’s cordial. I think there’s basic elements of understanding where each other is coming from, and a trust that we won’t break our word. We don’t spend long hours together late at night drinking coffee. And of course everybody has lots of different moods. The PM is human like everybody else.”

Helen Clark and Jeanette Fitzsimons: the two most powerful women in New Zealand? That has a nice ring to it

N.B.: There’s one mistake in Braunias’ piece. He calls Richard Green a Green MP. He’s actually the Green Party’s candidate for the New Lynn electorate, and number 26 on our party list.

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