Helen Clark
Helen Clark is a committed socialist and is the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. She currently holds the position of Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme – the third highest position in the United Nations. She is, in addition, the Chair of the United Nations Development Group.
She was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008 and the leader of the NZ Labour Party from 1998 to 2008.
As a teenager, Clark became politically active, protesting against the Vietnam War and campaigning against foreign military bases in New Zealand. She also protested against nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
In 1970, Clark joined the Maoist dominated pressure group Halt All Racist Tours, which was against sporting contacts with South Africa. In the early 1970s, she was on the HART Executive Board and close to Maoist/Stalinists Michael Law and Trevor Richards.
While joining the Center-Left Labour Party, Clark has remained on the far left since her university days.
In 1987, National Party M.P., Michael Cox, while in Parliament, had this to say of Clark, who was then a possible Minister of Defence: “The M.P. for Mt. Albert has said in the House that she would rather have Russian Ships in the Pacific than American ones” and “she has made frequent trips to Russia, has a card for Aeroflot.”
In 2003, ACT Party M.P. Ken Shirley made the following observation of Clark, who at this point was the Prime Minister: “Prime Minister Helen Clark’s clear inability to confront her ghosts will cost New Zealand dearly. It was she who led the Labour Party’s anti-U.S. cabal in the 1980s, and it was this group that was determined to add the unnecessary Clause 11 to the 1987 legislation aimed at destroying the ANZUS Alliance.” (ANZUS stands for the now defunct Australia, New Zealand, United States military alliance.)
Clark moved a petition in Parliament on September 24, 1985, calling for withdrawal from all military alliances.
On June 3, 1986, the Press reported that Clark claimed “peace supporters are not communists.”
In 1989, Clark, along with fellow Labour M.P. Russell Marshall, met with the Auckland branch of the pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party front, the New Zealand Council for World Peace, which was also an affiliate of the Soviet controlled World Peace Council.
On July 9, 1987, Clark tabled a petition in parliament from A.P. Quinn “and 311 others,” requesting the government appeal for a nuclear test ban. Clark moved that the petition “…be referred to the government for the most favourable consideration.” A.P. Quinn is Arthur P. Quinn, of the Waiwhetu Peace Group. Quinn was a member of the pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party.
In 1986, Clark expressed concern that her long-distance phone calls were being monitored by U.S. sources: “They have the surveillance equipment to pick up long distance conversations and I believe mine would be of interest to them.”
In 1986, Clark visited Nicaragua along with Labour Party President Margaret Wilson. On her return to New Zealand, she urged the Labour Party to back aid for the revolutionary Marxist Sandinista government.
In 1986, Professor Jose Maria Sison was the Chief Political Consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the coalition of groups which had, at that time, been waging an armed struggle for 35 years. Joma Sison was one of the founders of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army, in the late 1960s. He was captured during the Marcos martial law dictatorship and spent nine years as a political prisoner, without charge or trial, enduring torture. He was released after People Power 1 overthrew President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. That same year he made a speaking tour of several countries, including New Zealand. Clark was among those who attended his Wellington meeting.
It was revealed in 1986, that when Filipino intelligence officers raided an underground safe house in Manila on the night of March 24, 1988, they not only captured leading hard liners of the Communist Party of the Philippines New Peoples’ Army, but also 97 computer disks. A copy of a three-page document from one of those discs is headed: “Workshop 1: Party to Party Relations, June 13, 1986.” It deals with overseas work and those who are in consultation with the International Department of the Communist Party of the Philippines. On page three, line eight, Helen Clark is listed as the “individual link” for New Zealand.
In early 1987, Clark visited the Philippines as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Select Committee.
A former New Zealand government courted China and France in an attempt to curb American and Australian influence in the Pacific, according to a leaked diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks in November of 2010.
New Zealand is also said to have formulated its anti-nuclear legislation, which caused a deep rift with Washington, because of a desire to trim its defense budget as well as for publicly stated ideological reasons.
The claims are made in a 2004 cable released by the WikiLeaks website under the heading: “What we could not say in the mission programme plan,” the Dominion Post newspaper reported.
The cable said New Zealand’s Labour Party government led by Helen Clark flirted with China and France in the early 2000s “to curtail U.S. and Australian influence in the region,” it said.
During a visit by the Chinese Vice-Minister for Trade, “New Zealand Trade Minister Jim Sutton publicly claimed that China was New Zealand’s most important and valued trading partner, a claim that left Australian officials here scratching their heads in wonder.”
It was a previous Labour government — led by David Lange — that introduced the anti-nuclear legislation in the 1980s, a move that led to a decades-long rift in intelligence and military co-operation between Wellington and Washington.
The cable said U.S. officials had been told by people who were senior New Zealand government officials at the time that Wellington knew the policy would lead to New Zealand being pushed out of the regional ANZUS alliance with the United States and Australia.
Exclusion from ANZUS would thereby lessen “the country’s defence spending requirements at a time of fiscal and economic crisis,” the cable said.
In a report in the People’s Daily, Chinese President Jiang Zemin referred to Clark as an “old friend.” He hoped to “establish bilateral long-term and stable overall cooperative relations with a healthy development geared to the 21st century,” and “broad prospects for bilateral economic cooperation.” Clark had strongly supported China’s entry into the WTO.
Clark eventually initiated a free-trade deal with China, making New Zealand the first Western nation to do so.
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