A Dressing Down [05/08/2001] PRODUCER: SARAH HALL REPORTER: RICHARD LANGSTON KAREN INTRO: She lost. She didn't get one cent of the $1.2 million she wanted. But maybe Christine Rankin did have a victory of sorts. Not in the employment court, but in the court of public opinion. Remember how it was before she brought her case for unfair dismissal? She was seen as a hard-nosed head of a government department, profligate and pushy. Supposed to be serving the poor and needy, instead she was flying her staff in private jets to corporate get-togethers. Today she's just as likely to be thought of as a woman who stood up for her rights, a woman victimised for her style rather than her substance. As she prepared to take on the government head-to-head, 20/20's Richard Langston was at her side. He's been with Rankin and her family for the past few weeks, getting to know the woman behind the public image. RICHARD (V/O): This was not the way a civil servant serving the poor was meant to dress. Mini-skirts and earrings that unleashed unimagined forces in very high places, and places where they would normally remain private; men’s minds. MARK PREBBLE: Every time she moved I found that I was having to see an embarrassingly large amount of breast exposed. I didn't like it. CHRISTINE RANKIN: I thought it was sexist. I thought it was disgusting. This is it Richard, very boring isn't it, very ordinary. RICHARD: Probably never have a wardrobe of clothes attracted so much attention. CHRISTINE RANKIN: No it’s amazing isn’t it. They’re just... I like colour I suppose. I’m always amazed at how people react to them. I suppose it’s mostly because they’re very bright. RICHARD: Well you'd have to say, there’s fewer clothes than I thought there'd be, but they're still not the clothes you'd think a civil servant would go to work in. CHRISTINE RANKIN: No maybe not. Just my style. RICHARD (V/O): Christine Rankin and her style. It’s been a problem. So is the fact we even know who she is. As a civil servant she's meant to be grey and faceless. (I/V): The government's made it very plain they don't like your clothes. CHRISTINE RANKIN: No. RICHARD: What do you think of the government’s style of dress? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Oh well I don't... Well it's very different from mine. RICHARD: Is there any reason why you chose miniskirts? CHRISTINE RANKIN: No not really. It just seemed to develop as part of my style. I feel comfortable, I feel I look good in them, so I wear them. RICHARD: You’re aware you've got very good legs, many people have told you so. CHRISTINE RANKIN: So they tell me. Yeah. RICHARD: Did you ever get to a stage where you thought, well I’ve had enough of this, people concentrating on my legs, my earrings. Maybe I'll rejig myself a bit? CHRISTINE RANKIN: No, no I didn't. I am sick of people concentrating on it. But I guess I ask for it. I mean, there they are, and that's me and you have to accept I suppose, that there is some of that, but they're not the important things. Those things don't matter at all. RICHARD (V/O): Christine Rankin was one of 37 chief executives in the public service. You probably can't name any of the others. So who or what made her a runaway public obsession? Was it her mistakes, her style? Or her arch critics, the Labour Party? CHRISTINE RANKIN: They painted a picture of me as, well they demonised me really. I do believe that. RICHARD (V/O): Demonised, idolised, or trivialised. Christine Rankin says the politicians went too far and she sued them, claiming they'd humiliated her for, among other things, the way she dressed. (I/V): You’ve become an icon. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Well it's not a very positive thing. The experience overall has been truly ghastly. (Off Cam) You like all the sparkly ones, just like Nana. RICHARD (V/O): She's forty-seven and a grandmother. This is 3 year old Molly, and the way she tells it, she prefers the quiet life. CHRISTINE RANKIN: I loved my job. I wanted to do my job. I didn’t ever want to be a public figure. No-one would invite that into their lives. I really feel for my husband and my children and what they’ve endured, and I have tried to protect them from it. RICHARD (V/O): This is a family that's been living under enormous pressure. The controversy even followed them into the one place they thought they’d be able to hide from it, the home. And the man Christine Rankin’s been married to for seven years, Alan Hogg, has really felt the strain. ALAN HOGG: It's been very difficult, a feeling of invasion almost. Our relationship has been affected by it. We've lost some of our spontaneity and the humour and the fun that we used to have in our life. Much of that has been dented by this. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Oh God, look the picture painted was just so bad. I used to be spat at and hissed at. The hissing was something that people really seemed to enjoy doing. I was spat at in an airport, only once, but it has a huge impact. It really does. Look I got death threats, I was sent a bullet. ALAN HOGG: I love her dearly and to see what’s happened to her in a job that she is totally passionate about and committed to, has been a dramatic thing for me. CHRISTINE RANKIN: I limited where I went. I went to places that I felt safe. I was always conscious of what I was wearing and what I had on. ALAN HOGG: We went to the waterfront to join in with the rest of Wellingtonians for the millennium celebrations, and basically once the crowd started to realise who Christine was, and a lot of that crowd was students at the time and obviously alcohol played a large part, they become very, very aggressive. I think I said to Christine, "Hang onto my jersey and don’t let go", and used some of my army training and proceeded rather quickly through the crowd. RICHARD: That must have been frightening. ALAN HOGG: It was, very frightening, and you could see and sense the crowd starting to seethe and get themselves whipped up into a bit of a lather. RICHARD (V/O): Christine Rankin's son, Matthew arrived home in the middle of the furore surrounding his mother. MATTHEW RANKIN: My brother and myself have always had a very close relationship with mum. I found in many respects I couldn’t really talk to her very well because she was so consumed by everything that was happening. ALAN HOGG: I just cannot think of any Chief Executive who's ever, to my knowledge, been treated the way that Christine has. It is just appalling. And yet I’ve known a number of very incompetent people at various levels of government, who’ve never been treated the way Christine's been treated. MATTHEW: Growing up I always remember mum's commitment to work and to the family as well, and how she always strove to achieve. And also the fact that, and this is part of the message I think that is so important for Kiwis, which is that I remember her talking to us about her promotions and being so afraid, nevertheless having the courage to go and actually do that job, and then always succeeding, just a history of success. And so to see her being treated in such an unfair way which is just completely in my view very untrue, it's just shocking and to see the destruction on her personally. RICHARD (V/O): But there has been a lighter side. Hundreds of people have written to her, many of them men. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I get lots of letters and lots of telephone calls, contact on the street. People do all kinds of things. RICHARD: What sort of things do they say? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Lots of requests for dates. Actually there are a couple of people who’ve proposed to me which is very interesting. I got sent the other day a beautiful package from a man who said he would like to marry me and he sent me a big pile of jewellery and a painting that he'd done and a very lovely letter. And I thought that that was gorgeous. And there was another man in Westport who lives in the camping ground, who also proposed to me, so I’ve had a few. Some of them are not very pleasant can I tell you. Some of them are weird, but a lot of... RICHARD: How weird? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Very weird. RICHARD: That’s as much as you want to say? CHRISTINE RANKIN: That’s as much as I think I should say. RICHARD: How do you see yourself? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I have always felt that I'm very ordinary. You've got to remember where I started. RICHARD: Ordinary? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Everyone tells me that that’s not the case and my friends get cross with me when I say those things, but the person inside is ordinary. RICHARD (V/O): And certainly the beginnings were ordinary. She was born in Greymouth, the daughter of a coalminer, the youngest of four children. CHRISTINE RANKIN: The most real memory for me is every day having a knot in my stomach because I never knew what was going to happen next. It wasn’t a very good life, it was a fairly violent situation that I was brought up in. It was pretty bad. Very bad. RICHARD: You were punched? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Hugely. Often for nothing at all. And I guess that’s why, you never knew what was going to happen, you didn’t have to do anything in particular. It was just there. RICHARD: Were there injuries? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Yes. RICHARD: Can you talk about that? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I had my shoulder dislocated on several occasions. All the things that go with beatings. My father was a big man, he was a huge man. RICHARD: How do you feel about your father now? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I love him. He died a few years ago but I don’t think that, I don't think that affects the way that you feel. I have some anger and I never dealt with it when he was alive in terms of him. I had a wonderful mother, an absolutely wonderful mother who saved my life on many occasions. RICHARD: Saved your life? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Oh yes. She always tried to control what was happening, sometimes not very successfully, but she was a wonderful, strong woman and she had a big impact on my life. I wouldn’t swap any of it. I think that it’s made me the person I am, and it’s made me passionate about creating an environment in the place I work, that can give other people the opportunities that I’ve had. And I would never have had that fire to do that, if all those things hadn't happened to me. RICHARD: A lot of your attributes have been turned against you haven't they, this girl, this coalminers daughter, why is she head of this organisation? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I know that I've been painted as a ditzy blonde, you know she’s not really very good and she’s not very smart, because I don’t have a degree. I think I’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what I’m capable of but I’ve been made to feel ashamed of where I’ve come from. RICHARD (V/O): She nearly died from the blood disorder Lupus when she was 17. A year later she was married but it didn’t last. She was left raising two little boys. She wanted to work but couldn’t so she applied for a benefit from Social Welfare. CHRISTINE RANKIN: It was a profound experience. The fear of going into that place and having to ask for help and the way I was treated, look it’s not something anyone would forget. RICHARD (V/O): Twenty years later she was the boss of the department that had so disgusted her. After starting as a temporary clerk in 1978 it was to become her career, her life, for the next 23 years. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And I always had a view that we should do it a different way. From the very first day as I watched other people go about their job, I thought "There's a better way of doing this." RICHARD: Ten years ago what did staff used to wear? CHRISTINE RANKIN: There was everything you could think of. Boob tubes, anything and everything went. Jandals? There was a rule about jandals. I think that was about the only rule we ever had, but that was going just a little bit too far. I don’t think you can have credibility if you look really scruffy, I just don't think...and that’s the way we used to look. So did I. I wore my jeans and my little kung fu shoes when I first went to work too. RICHARD (V/O): But she is about more than look. As General Manager of Income Support in the mid-90s, she was praised in a government-commissioned book for leading from the front, for her charisma and drive. Her methods were anything but classic public service. She spent a lot of time talking to frontline staff. Her style was to motivate personally, ideas she'd taken from corporate America. (I/V): I suppose your critics would say you’re more private enterprise than private enterprise? CHRISTINE RANKIN: What's wrong with that? What is wrong with that? Don’t you think that New Zealanders want from their public service, a very efficient service, and a service that gets results, and that's what they've got. RICHARD (V/O): But her corporate-style was controversial, as was the policy she had to administer. More emphasis on getting the unemployed into work, less on benefit entitlements. The then Labour opposition didn’t like it, and in 1999, her second year as Chief Executive, she says they started to take her apart. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And I used to be very proud of the fact that in my late twenties I taught myself not to cry. And that's really been broken down in this last couple of years. RICHARD: So you survived your childhood beatings. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Yep. But you know in the last couple of years I’ve had that knot back in my stomach almost every day, because I never knew what was going to happen next, and I never knew where the next attack was going to come from. RICHARD (V/O): In the next part we look at the attacks she would describe as sexist and disgusting. PART TWO Karen Intro: When chief executives in the public service fall out with their politicians, the decent thing is to go quietly. Christine Rankin was never going to do that. She took the unprecedented step of taking the government to court, and the case would give a rare glimpse into the workings of power. Not how things should be, but how they are, how it can all become very personal. Here's Richard Langston again. RICHARD (V/O): June 1999, 140 civil servants fly out of Wellington, the trip that would turn Christine Rankin from unknown to one of the most reviled people in the country. Her department chartered two planes to go to a conference. The flights cost $120,000 more than if they’d gone on the regular commercial service. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Of course it was a mistake. RICHARD: I think the public objection to it was though, here are public servants behaving as though they’re in the private sector? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I absolutely agree with that and look I take responsibility for it. It wasn’t big in the scheme of things but because we were in a very unusual election year, it became bigger than the biggest thing. It got out of control and I think it was easy for those politicians to make me a monster. RICHARD (V/O): WINZ and Christine Rankin were picked to pieces. Videos made by the department featuring Christine Rankin emerged and politicians of the left saw them as more evidence of the department's indulgences. GRANT GILLION: The $100,000 spent last year in New Plymouth on a mock wedding where Christine Rankin was a celebrant, and the silver-suited style, Michael Jackson type extravaganza. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Apparently I swung off a rope and did a Michael Jackson. Anyone that knows me, knows I’m not co-ordinated enough to do any such thing. I didn’t. Of course I didn't. RICHARD: There was no silver suit? CHRISTINE RANKIN: No. I wore a grey suit on that particular day - not one of my favourite colours can I say. RICHARD (V/O): But the impression being created in the public mind, was a government department run almost as a personality cult. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Look I feel passionate about my organisation. Yes my leadership style is a personal one, they know me, they know what I’m about, they know what I think. That’s what leaders do, isn’t it? I don’t see that that's anything to do with a cult, in fact I think that's a revolting way of describing it. It's not the way I see it, at all. RICHARD (V/O): But if things had been bad for Christine Rankin they were about to get a lot worse. In late 1999 she went to parliament to meet her new political masters, the politicians who’d been rubbishing her for months. Unknown to her, within days of taking office, Labour ministers sought legal advice on how to sack her. But publicly the talk was of peace. STEVE MAHAREY: I think we’ve got a fresh start. That’s they way I would describe today. We’ve got a start now where we can build that confidence again. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Well apparently the Prime Minister was very cross that he made the statement, because he told me at one stage that she had given him an instruction that he was to publicly humiliate me for four months after that. And he actually put a date on it. He said I have to do it until around about April. I've got to take every opportunity, because the public are wondering what on earth I’m doing, they think I’m a wimp. RICHARD (V/O): There was another meeting with her minister Steve Maharey, in which he raised the issue of her dress. And she says he also told her how Labour had used her in the '99 election campaign. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Mr Maharey told me that he, pointing at the vein in his arm, that I had provided them with fantastic fodder leading up to the election, that they had mainlined, he had mainlined into my vein, and that it was irresistible. STEVE MAHAREY: No I am not even denying I used the word mainlining, I am saying I don’t recall that discussion. CHRISTINE RANKIN: I had to go home and look in the mirror and get rid of my glasses, which were Hugo Boss glasses. STEVE MAHAREY: But I don’t think I am in a position to be telling Ms Rankin what to wear, from a personal point of view. CHRISTINE RANKIN: He told me that he wore Hugo Boss, and it was alright for him but it wasn’t alright for me as the head of a welfare organisation. STEVE MAHAREY: Certainly as her minister who is facing these issues with the public perception of the organisation, I have to raise them. CHRISTINE RANKIN: He wanted to be able to go out with me and show that he had changed me. STEVE MAHAREY: No you are depicting a kind of Svengali type relationship here. RICHARD (V/O): But the meeting that would really disturb her was with the top official in the Prime Minister's office, Mark Prebble. CHRISTINE RANKIN: He told me what ministers were thinking at the time, and that's that I’d become a sexual icon in the public service, that I distracted men everywhere. MARK PREBBLE: Nobody in her position could afford to become considered, thought of as a sex symbol. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And that I should buy my clothes at Katie’s, and that's no disrespect from me to Katie’s, but he told me to buy them at Katie's or some equivalent place. MARK PREBBLE: I said I did not claim to be a fashion adviser, I had no notion of where Christine might purchase her clothes, but that purchase from a chain store is always the safer option. CHRISTINE RANKIN: That I had charisma, and that I was bigger than my minister, and that that wasn’t okay and that minister’s didn’t like that. MARK PREBBLE: Yes, I certainly was saying that a true public servant does not become swept away, excited. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And he said public servants were not there to have vision and that the last person that had vision was Bill Sutch, and he was tried for treason. MARK PREBBLE: The problem was not just one of flamboyance, there was a question of decency. I was outraged by having someone sit in front of me displaying as much as she was displaying and I found it offensive. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And I remember going and sitting back in my boardroom on my own because I'd gone to his office for that meeting, and I felt embarrassed and ashamed and horrified that anyone would need to say that to me. RICHARD (V/O): Christine Rankin says she found it no easier when that conversation was recounted in court. CHRISTINE RANKIN: And I remember the day that Mark Prebble gave his evidence and I had a huge physical reaction. I got chest pains and I thought, I said to Alan "Something is happening to me", because I really thought that something awful was going to happen. And it wasn’t. It was stress, but I have never, I mean to hear someone say that you’re indecent is a pretty big thing to live with, knowing that the nation is listening to that. ALAN HOGG: He's different isn’t he? There’s no way anything I’ve ever seen Christine wear that was indecent or ...I can’t recall now the words that he actually used, but Christine is a very stylish woman, a beautiful woman. No I was horrified by what he said. Appalling stuff really. And I think there are many, many men, and I’m a very ordinary one amongst them, that would share the same view as I have. RICHARD: Did you ever consider changing your style? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Yep I thought about it, but I really believe this that is me and this is what I’m about. RICHARD: But if you loved the job so much, was it worth some concession? CHRISTINE RANKIN: I still say this is me, and my life has been one of enormous development. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what I’ve done. Look at the results that I’ve achieved. RICHARD (V/O): But it was her mistakes that made the headlines, and they were used against her in the court case; the charter flight, two confidential payouts to staff, and the bungling of the student loans scheme. It was soon after that, she was told her contract wouldn’t be renewed. CHRISTINE RANKIN: It was a horrible shock because I didn’t really think it would happen. I thought at the end of the day, by the time my contract was ready for renewing, we would have got through a lot of those things and the results would speak for themselves. RICHARD: It's a fixed term you're on. Why didn't you just accept, ‘it's over, they don't want me anymore.’ CHRISTINE RANKIN: Because that was not the way the picture was ever painted for me. Always we were told that it was just a matter of course, you'd have to do something monumental for your contract not to be renewed and obviously they thought that I had. (GIVING SPEECH): And you have to ask yourself what is important to the future of this nation. The number of people finding a future for themselves and moving from being a burden on the state, or the length of my skirts and earrings. RICHARD (V/O): In her last weeks in the job, Christine Rankin took every opportunity to get out the message she says the government wouldn’t give her any credit for. CHRISTINE RANKIN (At meeting): Our performance overall is impressive. We have performed at the highest level and we've exceeded our targets. Thank you. RICHARD (V/O): That was her last word to the government before she sued them for $1.2 million, claiming she was a victim of politics. Not even the government disputed her results in service delivery, of getting people into work. Officials argued she failed because she didn’t understand the importance of the political element of her job. Her former boss Michael Wintringham. MICHAEL WINTRINGHAM: The position demanded a level of sophistication that Mrs Rankin struggled from the outset to achieve. STEVE MAHAREY: Mrs Rankin had a tendency to personalise criticisms and did not seem to recognise that there were bigger and more important issues. MICHAEL WINTRINGHAM: This department has become something of a laughing stock in the public service. MARK PREBBLE: This person has failed in the job. This person has not managed to maintain an appropriate relationship with ministers, this person has not projected the appropriate image of a public servant chief executive and hasn't managed to carry forward the department, has presided over a succession of problems and has not managed to create the solutions required. RICHARD (V/O): After eight punishing days in court the Rankin saga had been laid bare. CHRISTINE RANKIN: There have been many times this week and last week where I wished I’d never done it. RICHARD: Seriously, it’s been that bad? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Yep but there are other moments when I think about it, that I know that I didn’t have any choice, and that no matter what, it was right because for me the issues are still enormous. RICHARD: It's been so personal, this case, personal details, personal conversations that have been about uncomfortable subjects. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Very uncomfortable. Why would you do it to yourself? RICHARD: Have you had times where you’ve thought, maybe I've got this wrong? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Yeah of course, of course. Anybody would have. Yes I have. RICHARD: What conclusions did you come to? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Well I think hindsight is a wonderful thing and there are things that I would do differently of course, if I had the opportunity again. But fundamentally in terms of leading my people, I love them and I’ve been involved with them and I wouldn’t change that for anything. RICHARD (V/O): The family waited for the judge's decision, knowing there was far more than reputation at stake. (I/V): What's riding on this? ALAN HOGG: A lot. A lot. RICHARD: Could it ruin you? ALAN HOGG: There's the potential to ruin us, yes. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Well there's a huge personal cost financially, that's one thing. And there is the potential for us to lose our home. And that’s one part of it. I exposed so much of myself that hadn’t been exposed in terms of that court case, and while I anticipated some of it, I didn't ever understand how bad it would be, day after day after day. RICHARD: The day after she left for a brief holiday in Australia the judge delivered his ruling. He had sympathy for the harrowing experience she'd endured but legally she had no case, and he awarded her nothing. CHRISTINE RANKIN: Legally it wasn't possible to find in my favour. I absolutely accept that. That doesn't mean that any of those things are not real and that they didn't happen. They most certainly did and they're just as unacceptable now as they were before this decision. RICHARD: The judge said Christine Rankin should never have brought her case to court and few of us would take on the power of the state. But this defiant woman from the other side of the tracks, who openly wore her differences, is unrepentant. (I/V): What do you hope people will remember from this case? CHRISTINE RANKIN: Oh help, look I hope they don't remember earrings and short skirts because that's not what it's about. It's about an apolitical public service, it's about being judged on results and having things balanced up, and it's about permission to be different and I think we've got a long way to go in terms of that, and there is all kinds of differents out there and they're extremely talented people, and if we are going to be judged on being different, that's terrible.