1 So let me get this straight. It's the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night and your ship has sunk. You've taken your harpoon, you've impaled it into an outcrop, and you're clinging on for dear life, and then when the sun comes up, you realise you've been shipwrecked on the back of a dead whale. Now, if you believe that, you're gonna love my campaign. Sausages, sausages, sausages! That's Jackson Barry. He's a great example of a Kiwi politician. I've always said you have to be a bit mad to be a politician in New Zealand. You don't. But it helps. (CHEERFUL MUSIC) What do you think of the sausages? New Zealand has a past filled with people who thought, 'She'll be right,' when more often than not, it wasn't. Join me as we celebrate these true stories of the history that history tried to forget. (CURIOUS PIANO MUSIC) Copyright Able 2017 Over the years, New Zealand governments have served up a mixed grill of social reforms. Yes, in this episode we're celebrating the sizzle in the sausage of politics. And to tell these true tales of some extraordinary New Zealand politicians, I'm using some ordinary New Zealanders. And amongst this raw talent, you will note our most famous butcher in the role of our second most famous butcher. So join us as we ham it up in an episode called... And then there was the time I rode on a whale. (GASPING) Yes. Poet Thomas Bracken, who penned our national anthem, once wrote the lines, 'Who was it told us wondrous tales? Who rode upon the backs of whales? Why, Captain Jackson Barry.' And there he is. Gold miner, bushranger, sailor, teller of tall tales, cut-price butcher and candidate in the 1866 race for the mayoralty of Cromwell. What's encouraging about Jackson Barry is he is a guy you'd be crazy to believe as he sells the public the outlandish stories of his life. Now then, who would you like it signed to? Rebecca, please. Rebecca. Certainly. Sometimes, though, his stories are all the more outrageous because Barry is a shameless plagiarist, and the stories of his life occasionally happen to be the stories of other people's lives. To be fair, Jackson Barry even plagiarised himself. His first book was so successful, he reissued it twice more under different titles. Wrote a little note there just personally for you, Josephine. Aw, appreciate it. Thank you. Despite this, he's still the favoured candidate in the Cromwell mayoral race of 1866, helped by the fact that he does... a very cheap sausage. Democracy ` it's all about giving people what they want. Take, for example, what happened in the 1928 general election campaign. Nowadays, foreign debt is frowned upon, but people are ecstatic when Sir Joseph Ward promises that, if elected, he'll borrow �70 million to fund public works. The problem is that his speech notes only said 7 million. Ward's eyesight failed him, and he misread the figure. But in politics, a promise is a promise, and his party wins. Luckily for him, no one would lend us the money. I suspect his magnificent moustache could have run for prime minister on its own and won. 'Get to the point,' wails the honourable member. 'Get to the point.' Words that echo around his sorry bedchamber, night after night I'll be bound. Get to the point! I shall get to the point. I shall get to the point, and the point shall be got to. The point, ladies and gentlemen, is Picton. This pontificating politician is Arthur Beauchamp. He is Katherine Mansfield's grandfather, but where she has a talent for short stories, Arthur most certainly does not. It's nearly 7 in the morning. Beauchamp started speaking at half past 8 last night. The topic? Whether Picton should remain the provincial capital of Marlborough. His opponents want it moved to Blenheim. Gentlemen, I once had an Irish setter. What a magnificent hound he was. His opponents call his speech, 'a vomiting forth of nonsense, ribaldry and Billingsgate.' But finally, after 10� hours, it looks as if he's about to wrap things up. That concludes my preliminary remarks. (GROANING) Let me now turn to the particular subject under discussion. I believe it was Descartes who said, 'The measure... Nope. He's just getting warmed up. But, Tim,... Oh! ...there you are. Look, you know a bit about assaulting the ears of the populace for prolonged periods. What do you make of Beauchamp's 10� hours? Well, of course, now he wouldn't get away with it, would he? We've got standing orders. So you're only allowed to speak for 10 minutes unless 75% of the councillors suspend standing orders. But that doesn't happen very often. No. The measure of a loyal citizen... You yourself, of course, you know, notorious for long speeches. LAUGHING: Well, outside` I mean that as a compliment. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yes, 26 hours. Uh, I don't think we'll be lasting that long with this interview, but it was the longest television interview in the world. Yeah, well, all right. Well, all this money we seem to be spending on all this IT stuff, how do we know it's not just a fad like the hula hoop? And a couple of guys ` I think they're from Denmark or something ` broke it, and we thought, 'Oh no! All that work for nothing.' But they didn't televise it, so they got disqualified, so still hold the Guinness Record for it. What is the key, do you think, to` to` to going on and on relentlessly? To me, it still comes down to practice. Now, Mum went to Holland, so I spent a year in Holland. When I finally got back to New Zealand, I was put in a special class for foreign kids, and we were given speech training. But they had no speech therapist, so they brought this 82-year-old opera singer out of retirement, and she'd be saying, (PLUMMY ACCENT) 'Timothy, I want you to project yourself. I want you to throw your voice across the room.' She was really melodramatic. But she taught me the art of oratory, and I got elected as the milk monitor. I got elected as the bus monitor. I got elected as a prefect in high school. I got elected to the student executive at university, and it was because of her. You gotta` You gotta practise. Do you have any, um, heroes, orators, you know, that you look and think, 'That is a great speaker'? To be honest, even though we're on different sides of the fence, Muldoon ` Robert Muldoon. Because he understood television. He was the first television orator, in a way. And he would just turn to the camera and say, 'Look, you guys, we've got to face this issue man to man.' And we're all looking across wondering who the hell he was talking to, you know. Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I could listen to you all day. Aw, thanks, Radar. Now, hang on a minute. I thought this programme was meant to be about crazy politicians, so what am I doing here? Ah! (GROANING) Oh! look at that. Fortunately for the crowd, at the 11th hour, Beauchamp collapses from exhaustion. And in case you were wondering, Beauchamp wins the day, and the Blenheim men go home defeated for now. What a showman! Jackson Barry was a showman as well, travelling the country and regaling people with his yarns. And if you didn't believe his whale tales, he would show you the skeleton of the whale to prove it. This one right here, actually, now hanging in the Otego Museum. Somehow he managed to fit all 17m of whale in a wagon and toured the country with it, and then at shows he would open the jaws, put seats inside, where the band could play or gentlemen could eat their dinner. What a show! And that's how I survived my time with the cannibals. (GASPING) Jackson Barry once performed a farewell lecture in Australia that was so popular he then toured it for two years. (APPLAUSE) And they never get sick of me leaving. Little wonder he's winning the hearts and minds of the people of Cromwell. (CHEERING, APPLAUSE) Yes, yes! Vote for me for mayor. Mayor! Mayor! That's me. (TRIUMPHANT MUSIC) Yes! 1 ...was a very good sausage, marvellous. Jackson Barry is one of our most fascinating politicians. He's loved by the people of Cromwell for his tall tales of shipwrecks, gold rushes and cannibalism and for his cut-price meat. Seriously. Meat packs, meat packs. Get your meat packs now. Meat packs, meat packs, meat packs. You see, the residents of Cromwell are being fleeced by the town's butchers. That is until one hot summer's day when newcomer Jackson Barry kills a couple of cows and sells the meat cheaply, meaning the other butchers' meat goes rancid in the sun, and they have to dump it in the river. And it is for just this reason that he's the favoured candidate to win the mayoralty. One thanks, Jackson. After all, it's a good campaigner who can turn any situation to his advantage. And one of the best examples of this happened in 1840. When carpenter Samuel Parnell refuses to work more than an eight-hour day, he does so when there's a severe shortage of carpenters, and with the threat of any worker who works longer hours being thrown into the harbour,... (SCREAMING, SPLASH) ...there's little option but to accept his terms, and the eight-hour working day is born. New Zealand basks in the glory of being one of the first countries in the world to introduce sensible working hours. Well, sort of. Because glory's rays don't always filter down to everyone. More than 60 years after Parnell's victory, domestic servants are still working every hour they're not asleep. There you go. (CLOCK CHIMES) In 1906, a parliamentary bill was introduced to allow these women a single half day a week off, but it was defeated at the first reading. Sorry, ladies. Roused, Wellington's servant women form a union demanding a working week not exceeding 68 hours. Let's see. 68 hours ` that is 10 hours a day, only eight on Sundays. That's considered such a major reduction in their working week that their mistresses, including Mrs Hislop, the wife of Wellington's mayor, get a little antsy and pressure their influential husbands to put a stop to this nonsense. A half a day off once a month perhaps, but only if the man of the house doesn't mind a cold supper. Yeuch. Do they get their 68-hour week? Well, in 1907, the servants' union are late filing their annual return. And their registration is cancelled. They reapply, but they're turned down because, the registrar said, 'Domestic servants are not workers, because they're kept for comfort and convenience,' which makes domestic servants the only private workers prevented by law from forming a union. I'm afraid, ladies, you won't see a reduction in your working hours until 1935, when the 40-hour week is made universal. (CORK POPS) Hooray! WOMEN: Boo! Whakamutua atu te hoko waipiro ki nga hoia Pakeha. I imagine those women would have been right behind this guy. This is Wi Pere. He's currently arguing that if New Zealand wants a strong local defence force, we should stop buying beer for the army and use the money saved to arm women instead. ...nga tane o tenei motu i a ratou wahine. Unfortunately, no one listens. If they had, domestic servants might have got their 68-hour week. Wi Pere is used to people not listening. He's the only Maori on the legislative council. The other members don't like him speaking te reo. And then when it's translated, they like what he has to say even less. So much so that during one of his speeches they arranged to quietly leave, until there's no quorum, and Pere is forced by the Speaker to stop. Mr Pere. And if you think that's bad, here's how he was portrayed in newspapers of the time. Tom, what do you make of this? There is Wi Pere, depicted almost as a savage. Well, as an artist, it's not a bad drawing. There's a lot of vigour and energy in the drawing. But he looked nothing like that. He was a very sophisticated, elegant, handsome... Yeah. So it's a complete fiction, that drawing. Although it's sexist and racist, the draftsmanship is not bad for the time. What have you discovered about politicians over...? Well, it's the '60s. What's that? 40? Over 40 years of cartooning? What I've learnt about New Zealand politicians is that they, by and large, are decent people. They really do` They're like me. They think they're making a difference, but they're fascinating because they make tremendous cock-ups. If they didn't make cock-ups, you'd be having no show. When it comes to caricaturing politicians, you know, it must be` it must be a lot of power in the pen to pull these people down to a` I guess a place that you think they should be. Oh, my job is to wound, humiliate and hurt, and you pick on the most unpleasant or unfortunate feature they've got. These days we've got PR people running around behind politicians going, 'You're wonderful. You are superb. New Zealand doesn't deserve you. 'Double your salary. Triple it, triple it. You are worth more than this country can pay.' So the PR industry is going around telling politicians and leading businessmen they're absolutely fabulous. Someone has to walk behind saying, 'You're just another human being.' And the great thing is every day a politician will come out and say something that you can look at and go, 'Oh God, material.' I know. When other people sigh and roll their eyes and are despairing, I'm going, 'Yes!' So in many ways, I guess if you are a politician, the only time you can be certain that a newspaper won't mock you is if you actually own it, which is a fact that James MacAndrew was only too aware of in 1850 when he sets up his own newspaper to win himself the position of Otago Superintendent. But almost immediately MacAndrew misuses public funds. He's convicted of fraud and sent to jail. Well, not quite. You see, MacAndrew is still superintendent and therefore in charge of prisons. He simply declares his own house a jail. In one move he solves in problem, and in a roundabout way, invents home detention. And that is the kind of originality we like in a politician. It's a lot more pleasant in Cromwell for Jackson Barry, who has just been voted in as mayor. (CHEERING) The sausages are on me! (CHEERING) CROWD: # For he's a jolly good fellow. # For he's a jolly good fellow. For he's a... But despite being loved by the locals, his fellow councillors are about to rebel. # And so say all of us. # And so say all of us. # For he's a jolly good fellow. # And so say all of us. # (CROWD CHEER) 1 ...and then there was the time I swum with the whale in Kaikoura. Jackson Barry ` gold miner, bushranger, sailor, teller of tall tales and cut-price butcher ` has just been voted in as the Mayor of Cromwell. The townspeople are very happy. The sausages are on me! (CHEERING) Several butchers and his fellow councillors are not. Good morning, fellow councillors. Be upstanding for His Worship the Mayor. The councillors are upset that Barry runs the council as he sees fit, with scant regard for protocol. While he was away on business in Dunedin, they'd had a special meeting at which they'd passed a motion of no confidence in him. As you can imagine, when he discovers this, he is not happy. But a motion of no confidence was nothing compared to what happened a few years later to the Mayor of Onehunga. When women won the right to vote in 1893, Elizabeth Yates is the first woman to cast her vote in Onehunga. The very next day, she becomes the first female mayor in the entire British empire. It's a cause for great celebration, but it does fuel the flames of chauvinistic discontent. The town clerk promptly resigns along with four councillors and the entire Onehunga fire brigade. Although some people say that was just because they wanted some fancy new uniforms. (ANGRY SHOUTING) Despite being congratulated by Queen Victoria, jeering crowds disrupt her meetings, and at least once, she's forced to manhandle protesters out of the room. Within a year, though, she sorts out the borough debt, upgrades roads, footpaths and sanitation and lobbies the government to reopen to local cemetery. Even her enemies cannot deny she is effective. (TRIUMPHANT MUSIC) But then at the next election she is defeated by a man whose only qualification is that he is not a woman. It was to be a full 63 years before mayoral chains in New Zealand were once again draped over the bosom of a victorious female. That time, though, the fire brigade remained intact, but they continued to play a key role in the sexual politics of this nation, because we didn't get our first female firefighters until 1981, which, Annie, seems frankly unbelievable. LAUGHING: Yes, that's right. They just didn't have firewomen in those days. I was called Fireman Barry for years, actually. I think the word now is firefighter but we were called firemen, and, uh, I and Elizabeth England were the first in Australia, and I think the commonwealth. Why is that? Just that it was such a male bastion? Well, they just didn't want women. I mean, they couldn't have women with menstrual cycles on fire stations. Fire stations would become hotbeds of sin. (LAUGHS) Women would be fainting at motor accidents. So basically when the 1975, um, Equal Opportunities Act came out, the fire service didn't act on it. All the other services did ` the air force, navy, army. The all had women in the ranks, but, no, the fire service deemed they were above that. How hard was it? Cos it took years, you know. Well, I didn't know what I was in for, and, honestly, I didn't know that I'd become headline news for a while, and probably if I had know what I was in for, I'd` I don't know whether I would have done it. But it did take years. When you finally got into the service, how did the men who were there react? 50/50. 50% hated the thought of a woman doing the job, uh, and 50% were excellent. So it was a bit of a worry to start with because there were talk of the wives picketing the stations. Picketing the station because they thought that maybe you might have led their men astray? The hotbeds of sin! (LAUGHS) It doesn't say much for the support of other women does it, you know? Men go to sleep at night on a fire station, where you can do what you after 9 o'clock, and you get up and go to fire calls. They would got to bed in a pair of jocks. Well, I couldn't really do that, could I? Because, you know, I would certainly get the women picketing the stations. So I went to bed every` You'd probably get quite a large increase in the number of men who wanted to be firefighters. (LAUGHS) I went to bed fully dressed for my whole 17 years of firefighting, in a men's pair of denim trousers and a T-shirt. And you certainly didn't wear anything nylon when you flew down the pole. No. No. Best thing about being a firefighter? Um, it's exciting, there's no work to catch up on when you get back from holiday and every day is different. You know what? I had never considered that. Yeah. It is really the ultimate. You finish work for the day and that's it, and you'd` you'd` There's no homework. No. There's not. (PENCIL SCRATCHES PAPER) Back in Cromwell, the town's newly elected mayor is currently fighting a few fires of his own. As you'll recall, Jackson Barry has just seen the motion of no confidence in him. Things are about to get awkward. Incensed, Barry storms across the room, locks the door, pockets the key and demands... Who moved that motion? The rebellious councillors wither under his steely glare until... Jackson Barry expresses his displeasure and renders the mutinous member unconscious, which causes another turncoat to vacate the room by the only means possible, which means he misses Barry's moment of procedural triumph. Who seconded that motion? Well, if no one seconded that motion, it's a invalid motion, and we'll move on to general business, and,... ah, Mrs Brown's cat is on the agenda. Someone has been stealing the cat food! Jackson Barry would go on to live to the ripe old age of 88. He was one of the country's most colourful characters and certainly one of our most prolific liars. Why don't we have more politicians like that these days? Apart from the assault laws. They say if you love law and you love sausages, you should never watch either one being made. Jackson Barry loved both, and he made them exactly as he pleased. Ladies and gentlemen, what about a round of applause for our wonderful Jackson Barry, Sir Peter Leitch? (CHEERING) Fantastic, fantastic. High five, buddy. Yes! Yay for you! Yay for you! High five, yes! Yes, high five.