Dan Banik and Helen Clark discuss the fragmented global development agenda, the role and relevance of the United Nations system, whether we are now better prepared for the next pandemic, and how politicians apply research while shaping everyday policies.
Our guest on this very special (100th) episode is someone I greatly admire and needs very little introduction. Helen Clark has engaged widely in policy development and advocacy across the international, economic, social and cultural spheres. She was Prime Minister of New Zealand for nine years and has also served as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Since 2019, she has chaired the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and in 2020, she was appointed co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, established by the World Health Organization. In addition to serving on numerous advisory boards and commissions, Helen is a strong and highly influential voice on gender equality and women’s leadership, sustainable development, climate action, peace and justice, and global health. Twitter: @HelenClarkNZ
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Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod
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I am super excited to welcome you to our 100th episode. Over the last three years, I have had the pleasure of not just chatting with friends, mentors, and colleagues, but also have these conversations recorded and made available to a global audience that currently is spread across 160 countries. I’ve been fortunate to feature some absolutely fabulous guests. While some of these are world-famous and regulars on the global media and podcast circuits, others typically never do podcasts, but chose nonetheless to come on our show. I am particularly pleased that we have provided a platform for outstanding scholarship, featuring not just established scholars but have also highlighted the important work of early career academics. But this show, as you know, is not just about scholars. We’ve featured politicians, activists, UN and World Bank staff, aid officials, think tanks, journalists, entrepreneurs, influencers, and comedians. What started as a Covid project has 99 episodes later turned out to be a very important part of my life. Indeed, I derive great pleasure from doing the show and am in many ways addicted to In Pursuit of Development. And while I have continued to expand my horizons through these conversations, I hope you too have enjoyed the journey so far.
Banik It's wonderful to see you Helen, and I'm thrilled and really honoured that you are the guest of my 100th episode. Welcome.
Clark Congratulations on reaching 100, it's a milestone.
Banik Thank you. It does feel like ages ago that I started the show, it was actually around the same time that you started work on the independent panel that we'll return to. Helen, you've been a global thought leader, you're a global personality, you've had all of these hugely important positions in New Zealand as Prime Minister, but also as administrator of the United Nations Development Program. How do you understand the concept of development, what is development for you these days?
Clark Well, for me it's not just about modern highways and train systems and so on. I really buy into the Amartya Sen definition of development which in essence is the mission, is human freedom and the process of achieving that is expanding human capabilities. You zero right in on human development, the critical importance of education, the critical importance of health without our health we are nothing. I also add housing, which I think is rather under emphasised in development, a child, a person of any age in insanitary, draughty cold, damp housing cannot thrive. I think of the basic investments that has to be made to enable people to have that platform to expand their capabilities. Now what has of course changed enormously is absolutely having to bring the sustainability element into this because we did make a lot of progress in reducing extreme poverty, nowhere near there, but a lot of progress, we did make a lot of progress on expanding life expectancy and getting children into school. But as we near these planetary tipping points over the boundaries that nature establishes, we run the risk of very much going backwards. A UNDP report a decade or more ago talked about this and there's so much talk now about how can we sustain the gains we've made if we keep exceeding the boundaries which nature has given us. I think another overlooked concept for a long time was that of resilience, resilience to disasters of all kinds. In New Zealand, we're used to being resilient around seismic events we are increasingly being challenged even with the resilience, we have the bi major climatic events, we're all challenged by the pandemic. So, we need development, and I don't just mean developing countries, I mean all of us, we are challenged to look at if we are actually able to sustain our gains with what is going on around us. I think putting that framing of inclusive human development, sustainable development, resilient development around what we do is so critical.
Banik We have, at least in the global development agenda, we've moved from the Millennium Development Goals to the SDG's, the Sustainable Development Goals and we have what, around seven years to reach them things are not looking good. There is a new IPCC report that was just released yesterday, really warning us that we're not really going to make much of a difference, there's political inaction. I wondered whether you think some of the concepts that we still deal with in global development, such as sustainable development, do you think they're still relevant or do we need to supplement these constantly with new ideas? I mean, you were talking about resilience that's a part of the sustainable development concept as I understand it and yet I notice, Helen, that people seem to be dissatisfied with the SDGs. It seems to me that we are having in the global development agenda parallel discussions, climate change discussions, SDG discussions, financing discussions, global health discussions the global development agenda is very fragmented. Is that also how you see it?
Clark It's terribly fragmented and even if we looked at what people see as the environmental side of it, we get a lot of publicity about what's happening pursuant to the Climate Change Convention and the Paris Agreement. But the Framework Convention on Climate Change was just one of three great conventions that came out of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the other two being the Convention on Biodiversity and the Convention to Combat Desertification, absolutely critical. We are walking, the experts tell us, towards a world where a million species, more species will become extinct now, as humanity we've done a shocking job of making many species extinct already. But if we don't mend our ways, don't attend to habitat, to protection of wildlife protection of the unique rivers, the oceans, the whatever, we really are doomed. Human beings need functioning ecosystems in order to thrive, but we've put our own development before the ecosystems, rather than taking an integrated approach. How to get back to breathing some life into the Sustainable Development Goals which clearly are struggling, those core human development targets aren't going to be met and a lot of others aren't either. Some of the SDG targets and goals simply weren't measurable anyway, which was always a problem. There is the SDG summit in New York at the high level this September, and one just hopes that the best minds somewhere are applying themselves as to how to breathe life into what is the right agenda, but it is probably unnecessarily complicated if you like.
Banik It seems to me, Helen, that there are countries and groups of countries that are pulling in different directions, so you have some of the countries in the global north talking much more about consumption, economic growth or rejuvenating economic growth following the pandemic, creating jobs, taking care of the welfare states. This is also some of the discussions you’ve been having in New Zealand. Then you have emerging countries, the big countries like China and India talking about how they are trying to undertake this green transition, but they still need a lot of the fossil fuel energy and thereby they're thinking about addressing the climate targets in the long term. Then you have some of the poorest countries in the world that are simply struggling, there's no financing and a lot of fragile states are experiencing a host of problems. In this kind of a fragmented world where you have all of these countries pursuing different agendas, the role of the United Nations seems to be extremely crucial, that's the closest we have towards some sort of a global institution that has convening power and legitimacy. You mentioned the SDG summit in September, what is it that you hope the UN can do? I'm just thinking, given that you've been an insider, a senior leader of the UN, how do you now see the UN from the outside? Do you think it is fit for purpose to deliver on some of these extremely ambitious global development agendas? Or is it, as some people say, it's the member countries that have made the UN as weak perhaps as it is sometimes considered to be?
Clark I always say that there's many UN's that if we simplify that down to two, there's the Member States meeting in the General Assembly with the Security Council which is clearly an important organ which is underperforming and has for years. But then there's the UN organisations and I was privileged to lead one of them for eight years, the UN Development Program. What I think in the run up to the Summit in September, the Member States should be doing is reaching out to the UN development system and saying we need your fresh thinking and ideas about how we can turn this around and what better place really to start than with the human development report which comes out of a quasi-autonomous office within the UNDP and generally has thought provoking things to say, scanning the horizon, looking ahead, what are the trends, what needs to be done. So I hope that the preparation for September isn't just a Member State negotiation on a document, it really needs to be proceeded by consultations, which involve the major agencies, both within the UN system and beyond, and which involve civil society because times are bleak and we're heading for outcomes in 2030 which are not impressive. If we can't turn that round it does discredit the international agenda setting and that would be a bad thing because if we don't agree on international agendas, what do we actually rally round? I think it is a bit of a watershed in 2023. Let's recall that when there was the Millennium Development Goal Review Summit in 2010 there was also a panic about the state that the MDGs were in, and that prompted the UNDP, which at that time was a thought leader in in this area and led the UN development system to say, can we have MDG acceleration. There was a lot of good work to be done with countries who were willing partners to say, OK, take an MDG that you're really worried about and targets that you're really worried about and by bringing all the stakeholders together, let's see whether we can turn this around. I remember an example from Ghana, we're really worried about maternal mortality, we're not making the progress. When the deep dive went into that government, the UN team, the agencies, civil society, some very practical things came out, which was that the poor didn't get access to the health insurance scheme, that needed to be paid for, that the poorest woman didn't have transport to facility, that to be paid for, that the highest rate of mortality was among the very young mothers, the adolescent mothers, who dropped out of school early and were having children before their bodies were really ready for it. So, there's three areas of focus, fix the transport access, make the insurance scheme possible for women to get the services they need and keep girls in school. You will reduce maternal mortality if you do these things and of course support for the sexual and reproductive health agenda helps a lot as well. So, there are practical things you do if you're really focused, and I think we need that laser like focus again on the SDGS.
Banik I was in New York and in Washington in January of this year, interacting with the World Bank and a host of UN agencies. One of the impressions that I got from these meetings, Helen, is that the Bank is not necessarily talking with UN agencies in New York. The UN agencies themselves, they are worried about money or the lack of it coming to their organisations, and there is competition also among many of these agencies. There is this feeling among some that we should have, maybe a core group of UN agencies and some of the smaller ones need to perhaps be organised differently. There's been so much talk about UN reform, strengthening the role of the national coordinator, the Resident Coordinator's Office, where is it do you see that the UN should be tightening up? Is there scope and willingness to reform going forward? Because a lot of agencies including the UNDP, they're struggling to get financing.
Clark Yes, I think all the core development agencies are struggling for money and that’s partly because, a) we are in hard times post pandemic, the pandemic wrecked the finances not only of low- and middle-income countries, but of high-income countries as well, all of which have taken on far more debt generally than they're comfortable with. Then you have the war in Ukraine, which is bleeding a number of the traditional donors dry, not only with the military support that they're giving to Ukraine but also the humanitarian need and the humanitarian need when you had what 6 million people go over the borders and probably roughly as many again dislocated within Ukraine. And that came on top of Yemen, Somalia, the crisis and the hell, the long list of conflict affected, and fragile countries say nothing of Afghanistan, Myanmar. So, the money that has been there from the traditional doners, traditional development partners has been overwhelmingly skewed into sheer humanitarian relief and we all understand the need to sustain life, but if that's being done at the same time as countries are cutting their development budget, it becomes very, very, very hard. I think with the UN agencies, if we had a blank sheet of paper, of course we could design fewer agencies with a merging of what we now understand to be mandates. But Member States have always been a lot better at setting things up than closing them down.
Banik That's true.
Clark Every agency whose neck will be put on a chopping block will have champions, either those in the capital that they're located in or those who have a national heading them or whatever there'll be a wide range of reasons. I think the smarter thing to do might be to revisit mandate. I think that there is mandate creep and I think there's also agencies which could probably be more normative and less operational. Because once agencies go operational, then they're all competing in the field for small project funding and the issue is the extent to which an agency like UN Women, which is clearly important, should simply be normative and policy focused rather than in the small projects field. That’s the lens I would take to it now. I don't think the reforms to the Resident Coordinator system have been particularly effective, they're really struggling to fund it now is my information, and that doesn't surprise me because the traditional funders will be saying, well, excuse me, but what is the value? What is the development benefit of this? And it's very hard to show any.
Banik This is something that I've discussed with Achim Steiner on the show and he says that if only donors understood the value for money that UNDP provides and we agreed on some form of metric to measure what UNDP is doing, then it would be easier to sell the idea that the UNDP should get more money. I was recently in many of these African countries that I study and talking to some of the UN organisations and what they were saying is that they really need core funding, not a trust fund not tied to certain projects, just core funding that would basically allow them to do what they need to do with national authorities. But let's move the conversation Helen towards something that was created in July 2020 by the WHO, the independent panel that you co-chaired together with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, you came up with this wonderful report called “Transforming or Tinkering Inaction Lays the Groundwork for Another Pandemic”. When you were here in Oslo last year presenting some of the findings of that report, I remember one of the key things that we discussed was the role of governance in this whole story, both at the national and also at the global level, so could you please walk us through what you found in this independent panel’s work and how prepared are we to face a new one that may be around the corner?
Clark Well, no better prepared, really, except if we note that this pandemic is so recent and in fact not declared over that we might just in our short-term memories retain some of the learning from it and there's certainly a lot of learning which was fully documented in the independent panel's report. This report was called for by the World Health Assembly in May 2020, it wanted a comprehensive and independent review of the international experience of coordinating the response to the pandemic. I think when they called for that report in May 2020 and wanted it by the middle of the next year, they thought the pandemic would be done and dusted well and in 2021 it was gathering steam. We can all remember those terrible shocking scenes from India when the Delta variant hit India and the tragedies of people and ambulances outside of the hospitals with the oxygen running out. So, we were presenting and preparing a report as the pandemic was picking up speed and going to a scale. While the recorded number of deaths still goes what somewhere in the six to seven million figure, I’m more inclined to follow the Economist Intelligence Unit, which looks at excess mortality and that takes it to well over 20 million. This is a huge, huge event, the President of the UN General Assembly described it to me, he sees it as the first major crisis of the Anthropocene era, that's the significance of it. So, there we were preparing a report when the pandemic was still raging around us, and we pointed to numerous things that were wrong. Firstly, with respect to the powers of the WHO, which really doesn't have much power, the international health regulations, in our opinion, disempowered the WHO rather than empowered it. We were very struck by what Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian PM, and WHO DG said to us that if she had had to operate as Director General during the SARS outbreak under the current International Health Regulations, she couldn't have done the job she did. What does that tell us? That we went backwards with the international legal framework, so we were very clear that WHO under the IHR International Health Regulations has to be empowered to get on the site of an outbreak immediately. We all know that didn't happen, it has to be empowered to publish what it knows, not have to beg a country to release the information as it did with this in previous pandemics. It has to be empowered.
Banik And have the money, right?
Clark Well, the money too is another issue, but all of these are things which simply need better procedures that Member States accept that if WHO say we need visas for the staff to go to Wuhan they've got to be produced, if WHO says we now know enough to tell the world X, the government can't stop that, they shouldn't be able to stop it. WHO must be able to act on precautionary principle you have a respiratory virus on the move. This is dangerous and it has to be in power to declare the public health emergency of international concern without being kneecapped. I rather politicised the emergency committee, so these are all practical things that could be done with the IHR, the IHR are being reviewed but will Member States take the steps that need to be taken. What really concerns me is that after Chernobyl, which was a nuclear disaster at scale, Member States during the Cold War came together and agreed two new nuclear safety treaties within five months. Here we are, three years after the declaration of the pandemic, three years and six weeks after, after the declaration of the Public Health Emergency of international concern and we have these processes running on the IHR review and the possible new legal instrument not due to culminate till May 2024, four years and Chernobyl which affected a smaller number of people and didn't kill 20 million at five months to get something done. So, the international community really has not stepped up to its responsibility to ensure that there's the proper legal framework for dealing with this and that just one of many sets of issues.
Banik I think those are really important points you raised. I actually had Gro Harlem Brundtland on the show, I've been chatting with her over the last few years and on the show, she said exactly what you just said that, had she been in charge now, she would not have felt that she was empowered to criticise anybody, but SARS was different, she actually told the Chinese government you need to pull up your socks, share information, do certain things. So, one set of issues then Helen has to do with the architecture of how these systems and organisations like the WHO are empowered and financed, how member countries are willing to listen to some of the advice coming from these organisations. There's also this other element that I know a lot of my colleagues, particularly on the African continent, were really upset with and that was just the selfishness of the West, this vaccine nationalism. This idea that when push comes to shove, we think about ourselves and all this talk about solidarity disappears, and solidarity perhaps comes when we end up having a vaccine that we don't really want for ourselves and then that's the one we'd like to distribute to others. I'm not sure how we're going to tackle this idea, the selfishness that we as humans, as countries have inbuilt in us that prevents us, even in such a visible crisis as the pandemic, to share what we have and to have some sort of an equitable distribution of resources and vaccine. Any thoughts you have on that?
Clark Yes, I have a lot of thoughts on this. If I were an African leader or citizen, I wouldn't trust anyone saying, oh, it'll be different next time, I wouldn't trust it because what we saw was everyone rushed to save their own skin and that left the poorest countries out of the queue. Gordon Brown, I think used a phrase that you're trying to finance a global public good with a charity whip around. If you had an ideal world, you would have said OK, there's X amount of vaccines available that is going to go first around the world to every health worker, to every older person and to every health vulnerable person. We know that people carrying a burden of non-communicable diseases were particularly vulnerable, the asthmatics, people with cardiac issues, kidney, diabetes issues and so on. That would have been a rational rollout, but that didn't happen, basically in the West we got as much vaccine as we needed, we ordered 3 to 4 times as much as what we needed, and we gave it to everyone while you know some countries frankly still haven't cleared 10%. Well, I wouldn't have any faith that it would be different on any kind of model like that again. Where I've been focusing attention and a group of us have had now two comments in The Lancet on this is to say that we need an equitable end to end ecosystem, which starts with research and development now one positive thing the WHO has done is designate organisations in South Africa as an MRNA hub. It doesn't have to be restricted to MRNA, it could be other existing technologies, and this hub has something like 14 to 16 spokes in research. What you need is those institutions to be capacitated to immediately when a new disease appears on the block, to pivot with the technologies that we have. MRNA wasn't new, this has been developed for a long time, but the people who had the technology were able to pivot fast to get those vaccines out. So that capacity is needed through the through the global South through this kind of hub and spoke arrangements. It needs to be connected in the flow through to manufacturing and Africa, for example, has an Africa pharmaceutical strategy, but it hasn't for a range of reasons got a lot of traction on it, partly because they lack a common regulatory system. So, you could be for example producing a whole lot of vaccines in Kenya, but you couldn't sell them in Somalia or Ghana. So, there are a number of things that need to be done. But if you could get the R&D capacitated, standing capacity for that manufacturing capacitated and not just on a standby basis because there's a need for manufacturing around the region week in week out year-round in any case. Then you come to the issue of how will the products that they produce in response to the pandemic be financed and that's where I think the concept that both the independent panel which I Co-chaired and the G20 High Level panel on sustainable financing for pandemics. We said you needed surge financing up to 100 billion for that first three months response and that surge financing could be allocated to making sure that the goods can actually be paid for and got out there in the developing country markets and that needs to be financed by some kind of advanced market commitment, pre commitment. Ideally the pandemic fund, which has been established in the World Bank with the basis for that it hasn't of course got enough capital as it is but if it could go to a sustainable financing model on a basis of everyone pays according to their means, and then it's allocated according to need you could on that basis also have pre commitments and be able to leverage response. So, all these things are possible with political will and leadership and some of us will continue to bang on about this because we can do better than we have.
Banik Well, you have been talking to several media outlets, you've been in many high-level seminars and discussions. I read actually recently in one of these reports that you said that even though publicly funded signs had contributed to the success of these COVID-19 vaccines, they weren't treated as global common goods and rather nationalism and profiteering around vaccines resulted in a catastrophic moral and public health failure which denied equitable access to all. Where does profits come in here Helen, there is a dilemma, you want to incentivize companies to innovate, but some of this innovation is done by funds from the public and then the profits perhaps end up unfairly in some quarters. Is that one of the reasons why you think a mechanism such as Covax did not work as well as it was intentioned to?
Clark Covax can't work, and we don't need a 2.0 model of Covax and the action for COVID tools accelerator of which it was part. Look, I'm really a sceptic about the pharmaceutical company claims that they have this massive spending on R&D which they have to recoup. We all know that a lot of the core science behind the products which have helped us fight COVID have come from the public purse, and largely from the taxpayers of the of the West. But it was done without conditions, and so the companies have ended up with this vast profiteering of what was to a very significant degree, publicly funded inputs and smart governments going forward would say, well, actually we want this area of science, we're going to support this, but we also are going to keep a stake in the IP for it and try to take a global common good approach. It's also true that pharmaceutical companies tend to spend a lot more on branding and marketing than they ever do on research and development. The whole thing has been immoral, frankly, and that's why the group of us continue to say that we need to look to at how regions can be empowered to take their own destiny into their own hands with R&D manufacturing, distribution and allocation and delivery and there will be a need for some surge financing for that in the event of an epidemic. But the cost of the surge financing is but a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the cost of having to go through a global pandemic which what last estimates were 25 trillion out of the global economy. No wonder countries are feeling poor.
Banik So we've talked a bit about how there is considerable scientific evidence and knowledge out there, and yet it is not always possible to implement these things. I wanted us to discuss a bit what it was like for you to be a politician. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, oh, by the way, I saw that New Zealand is a very happy country apparently, this world Happiness Report says that you're 10th and we are 7th at the moment.
Clark We are almost as happy as Norway.
Banik You're almost as happy as us. How was it for you to be a Member of Parliament, the Prime Minister, leader of the opposition? How did you actually try and succeed or not succeed in trying to convey the science, the evidence on whatever issue, whether it is health, social protection and then sell this to the public? I'm asking you this because I feel that in many ways, in terms of climate, in terms of health, in terms of pandemics, we often have the information and we talk about the lack of political will, the lack of political commitment. I'm trying to understand what it is politicians need to do differently, Helen, to translate this research into policy.
Clark Well, firstly, they've got to want it translated. Unfortunately, we have coming through our political systems, people who just want to be there for the joyride, as long as it interests them. So, we need politicians with purpose and politicians prepared to say, I need to see the evidence. Across our political spectrum we have different beliefs although in the societies, the sort of social market societies, if I could call it that way, the differences between the mainstream parties aren't as great as they often like to pretend. There's often a core belief that you have to have a basic social welfare system that you have to have publicly funded education that the health system’s got to be publicly funded that this is a huge public component to funding your infrastructure, your public transport whatever. So, there's a sort of body of belief that we buy into and yes, you'll get you know, on the extremes, people who want to question all of that, but that's not generally where the public is. I think that two of the crises we're talking about now, both the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis have really challenged political leaders because publics are now extremely grumpy, they're being subject to restrictions for a number of years, frankly, without the restrictions during the pandemic, a lot more people would have died. With the restrictions we had to play for time until we had vaccines and could start to give more protection and the vaccine doesn't only work anyway, people should be wearing masks for the long term. I recall first going to Japan in 1975 everyone wore masks in the streets and on the trains, I thought, what do they know that we don't know? I now know what they knew that they were living in a very densely populated society, and you didn't want to pick up the cold or the flu or whatever from the person next to you on the on the train. In the West, we need to readjust our thinking that if we want to keep ourselves well and protect our elderly and vulnerable, we need to start changing the ways that we behave but that has been challenging. I saw in the New Zealand experience, Jacinda Ardern and her government did so well the first year of the pandemic and then people started getting grumpy, very grumpy, and I suspect that's the same story in many, many countries. Then with the climate crisis, people kind of get it that the climate is not what it was but ask them to do something about it, and that's a different proposition. I remember when I was Prime Minister because we ratified the Kyoto Protocol, we endeavoured to set targets for carbon zero and we set out the range of things that you'd have to do but when people were surveyed and asked should the government be doing something about climate change? Most people said yes, the government should be doing something and then when you got to the question, would you be prepared to pay more for a litre of petrol? Ohh no. There's a sort of disconnect between what people know, which is that there needs to be action that they're not prepared to change so this really requires a lot of patient effort from political leaders to lead people to where to where we need to go, and a lot of political will and it isn't easy. In New Zealand all efforts of this kind of run up against a groundswell and the rural community not everyone, of course as elsewhere, we have enlightened the farmers who want to do the right thing, but a lot question any action that's asked of them, so it isn't easy. One does wonder looking at the overall trends, the fact that we've never really got on top of the pandemic, the fact that we're trailing so badly on meeting the targets set by the Paris Agreement, is humanity capable of standing up to and dealing with these existential challenges? Or do we have generations of citizens and leaders who just want to look the other way and say, oh, well, someone else can bear the cost of that later on, it is a concern, so we need voices speaking out for action. I always recall Nick Stern, Lord Stern who did the report for the British Government on climate action, and he made the point you either pay now or you pay a lot more later. If we let global warming continue on the trend it currently is, the adaptation bill will be enormous and we won't be able to stop substantial dislocation of people, loss of life and depletion of key resources. So that’s serious but translating it into terms that can be persuasive politically is the issue.
Banik So one of the things that I noticed in Norway and in many other parts of the global North is this disagreement on intergenerational equity that we have to do something for future generations, which is at the heart of the sustainable development concept. It's this idea that I've worked hard, and I've paid my taxes, it's my turn to enjoy life, who are you to tell me to eat less red meat or not fly as much. I think some of these issues are things that we are still grappling with and when politicians come up with this or they try to operationalize the evidence and talk about uncomfortable issues there is often that severe backlash, which I think the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern experienced, and she recently quit. I think you've also been experiencing something like that. What can you say about how easy or how difficult it is for female leaders to address these huge issues?
Banik Well, I think Jacinda Ardern was subjected to an avalanche of misogyny. There were critics for whom she could never do anything right. When I was in politics, I was attacked as a childless woman who wouldn't know what it was like to bring up a family. Jacinda was attacked for being a young woman who had a child and therefore couldn't possibly have time for the job so they will take you one way or the other. I think what also changed a lot from my time in politics as I left New Zealand politics in early 2009, left the Prime Minister's job and in November-December 2008. What's changed is the reach of social media, it was in its infancy when I left and now, of course how many zillion users does Facebook have, Twitter, the other platforms. While in many ways, social media can be a force for good, connecting people and ideas, we also know it can be a force for harm with the trolling, the abuse, the gathering together of people of malign intent to spread disinformation, misinformation to rally people into violent protests of some kind or another. So those are pressures that politicians have today, and my understanding is that the academics are doing the research on how this affects women in leadership, it is quite disproportionate the level of hate and viciousness that they face.
Banik Helen, it was such a pleasure to have you on my show. Thank you so much for this huge honour.
Clark Thank you, Dan. Pleasure to do it and to be on the 100th episode.