Dame Judy McGregor

Not mincing words

Dame Judy has never been one to mince words. She’s a woman who tells it like it is which is what she does throughout her chat with the In Profile team during a visit ‘home’. 

Although she hasn’t lived here since her mid 1960s run-in with Girls’ High (she’s now based in Auckland) she retains a deep affection for her birthplace. Whanau members live here and, ironically, a niece teaches at Girls’ High.

She recently visited the school and says it’s very different from her time there with highly achieving students, strong leadership and committed staff.

“Things have changed for the better, In my day I don’t think the school did justice to some Maori pupils or independent thinkers.”

“Professor emeritus Ngahuia te Awekotuku and I often joke about being suspended from Girls’ High because she was too, about a year after me.”

Dame Judy admits she found her secondary school years tough going. 

“I struggled through the third and fourth forms.

“When I wrote to the paper I made the mistake of signing my name. The principal read my letter out in assembly. My parents were embarrassed, Suspension wasn’t a badge of honour in those days. 

“What made it worse for me was my brother [David] was a goodie two shoes.  He was head prefect at Boys’ High.”

Rotorua roots

The McGregor family’s Rotorua roots run deep.

Dame Judy’s grandmother, Rose McGregor, ran the Pendennis Guest House in Whakaue Street. She also had a bakery in Tauranga.

“Gran’s Cornish-style cooking was legendary, especially her pasties; she had very regular customers. 

“She used to say any baking made with lashings of good New Zealand butter and sugar must be good for you. I’m not sure how that diet would be viewed today.”

Judy’s father Rob McGregor had car dealerships, her mother, Frances, worked as a medical secretary for a local GP practice.  

Her mother she says was a woman with a strong sense of social justice. It’s obvious her daughter inherited it.  

Lynmore, yachting

The McGregors lived in Lynmore then in its early stages of development.  She takes us on a retrospective tour.

“We lived in Lewis Road, Gran was just up the road, it was very rural.

“We used to play in the quarry while they were dynamiting the rocks out of it, run around in the Redwoods, sledge in the hills behind Blackmore’s farm.

“Lynmore was a great place to grow up. Rotorua was a fabulous place in that era and still is.”

The family was sporty - swimming and yachting.

“ We’d swim virtually year-round at Hannahs or Holdens Bay or the Blue Lake [Tikitapu].

“We started off with P class yachts, moved on to Flying Ants, Moths then Finns.

“The Moths were deeply hopeless for lake sailing.

“Whatever class we sailed in we’d be beaten by Fay Crichton. She was a brilliant yachtie.”

Sailing wasn’t always a harmonious pursuit for the McGregor clan. 

“Dad would help with the rigging but he was hopeless. Inevitably the mast would fall out and we’d capsize. When my brother and I capsized and blamed each other he sailed off and left me in the water for a patrol boat to pick up.  The lake was very shallow then with nice thermal eddies to wallow in.” 

St Faith’s , teachers college

Sundays began at St Faith’s

“My mother helped with the catering.  She was in a group that for some reason had defected from St Luke’s. There were lots of cups of tea and scones in the old hall.

“My brother was an altar boy when Manu Bennett [later Bishop Bennett] was the vicar. That was before the window of Christ walking on the water was there.

“I’m aware of the many happy times at St Faith’s; cooking kai and church services in te reo, the beautiful singing in that fantastic setting. There was always serenity by the lake.”      

The serenity ended when Dame Judy moved to Hamilton to become the youngest student to be admitted to its teachers’ college. She was still 16.

“That was when there were only two vocations for girls; nursing or teaching. 

“My parents would have done anything to get me out of Rotorua. Hamilton seemed like a safe sanctuary to them. I had a lot of great friends from Rotorua at teachers’ college.

“I went into a flat where everyone was blonde. We all hated PE because the thinking was you could only teach PE if you wore hideous black rompers. 

“We had one set between us. One of the blondes would turn up and sign in for the rest of us.”     

Scurrilous student newspaper

Dame Judy’s teachers’ college credits carried her on to university; she graduated with a BA. 

“Waikato University was still quite new. Really, it was just a cowshed with some eclectic academics.   

“There was a lot of coffee drinking and student protests.”

Along with the late Michael King and others, she was one of the founders of the student newspaper, Nexus.   

“Through the gloom of a Hamilton winter we’d walk the copy [content] and pictures  from the university to the typesetters and printers in  Frankton. A lot of places that were closer wouldn’t touch it.

“They saw it as a scurrilous student newspaper. It was certainly the most sued.  Our drawers were full of writs. We had no money so in the end people just gave up on us. 

“We did a fantastic satire on the Waikato Times.  The mayor, Mike Minogue, banned its distribution on Hamilton’s streets.”

That satire didn’t do Dame Judy any great harm. During Varsity holidays she began a cadetship at the newspaper she’d helped lampoon.

“I got the job because I had written about Scientology and its impact on young people.

“A Hamilton family had been disrupted by it.”

Commercial photography

From the Waikato Times she moved to Auckland and became a commercial photographer.

“I’d fallen for a photographer. He plucked me from under the hooves of a police horse during the anti-Vietnam war protest when the American vice president Spiro Agnew came to New Zealand. 

“He was a commercial photographer specialising in yachting and boating and I was his apprentice.

“I’m going to get back into it [photography] one day, but now everyone’s taking magnificent pictures on their cell phones.”

Dame Judy enrolled at Auckland University and began an MA in history, studying under Professor Keith Sinclair.

“He was a great teacher but my thesis couldn’t compete with photography and I didn’t complete [it].”

Hard news beat, scoops

She became the Auckland correspondent for the Wellington-based Dominion newspaper. The deal was that she covered what Press Association didn’t.

A slew of scoops followed.

“I extensively covered the Royal Commission into Contraception, Abortion and Sterilisation and became very interested in Bert Potter and his [Centrepoint] commune.     

There were two exclusive hours with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher while she was having her hair done.

Then came the doozie of them all, the 1975 Whina Cooper-led Maori land march.

Judy McGregor being Judy McGregor she didn’t cover it from the sidelines, she marched in the thick of it from Te Hapua to the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

“It was a monumental time. I do recall becoming very sick of boil-up by the time we reached the harbour bridge.

“Walking over the bridge was amazing. It moved underneath our feet, that felt very symbolic.”     

Springbok tour, marriage  

Covering protests became her speciality.

At the time of the 1981 Springbok tour she was news editor at the tabloid, left-leaning  Sunday News.
With a posse of  reporters and a photographer she headed for the first, subsequently aborted, game in Hamilton.

“We saw a hole in the fence. I said ‘go for it’, we did and two of the team were arrested in the melee.

“The general manager had given gave me money for expenses. I blew most of it bailing them out.”

Journalism today disappoints her – especially its lack of balance.

“The trouble with the polarising nature of social media is there aren’t two perspectives, it’s instant and that is often unthoughtful. That’s my greatest sadness about the information era we are in.” 

She met fellow journalist John Harvey during the  1981 tour.  “. . . The love of my life and best friend.”

“He was covering it for the Manawatu Evening Standard. Like the Sunday News it was against the tour.

“We met at a press conference with the police commissioner Bob Walton. It was a piss-arsing around PR exercise; media from around the world were there.”

McGregor and Harvey married and became editors of their respective publications, separated by a good stretch of the North Island.

“To be together we had to fly backwards and forwards between Auckland and Palmerston North, it was pretty trying.”

Wellington, Auckland, Palmerston North

The commuting distance shortened when she was appointed to head Independent Newspapers Wellington-based Inprint division.  

 “As well as the nation’s cheque books we published best sellers like Footrot Flats, Alison Holst’s kitchen diaries, the racing publications Turf Digest and Best Bets.”

This encompassed the period she was working towards her law degree, completing three papers each year.

Retuning to Auckland she became editor of the Auckland Star, then in its dying stages.

“Management wanted to turn it into a tabloid.  I said ‘I’ve edited a tabloid. it won’t work’. I was sacked and joined John in Palmerston North.

“I was lying under the duvet crying for the first couple of weeks until a friend in our street asked if I could teach news media and communications at Massey University.

Academic, business, political worlds

“I was involved with a group doing a lot of work around increasing Maori and Pacific Island students in the media industry. I’d been outspoken about the lack of them in newsrooms.”

She taught and helped with a course specifically for Maori and Pacific students which was established to run first from Rotorua motels then Waiariki Polytechnic.

At Massey University sexual harassment of students came under her microscope.

“That was long before the #MeToo movement.” 

The workaholic Judy McGregor was asked to chair the Palmerston North Enterprise Board - and accepted.

“Annette King [Labour MP for Horowhenua] had just been ousted from parliament in the 1990 election. I thought she’d make a damn good CEO. She did.

“When she stood again in 1993 in the Miramar electorate I ran her campaign, doing communications and media.
“I was particularly proud of coming up with her bumper sticker ‘Vote for A King’. Annette won – just.

“That’s how I got my PhD, using the campaign as the basis. John now uses the bound thesis to prop up his computer.”

Going undercover

Learning that the Human Rights Commission was to appoint an Equal Empolyyment Opportunities Commissioner (EEOC) she applied and was accepted.

Gender pay gaps had long been her bete noir. As EEOC the “dire” pay aged care workers received caught her crusading attention. It appalled her.

“They were predominantly from diverse ethnicities reluctant to withdraw their labour.”

Between 2010 and 2014 she travelled the country gathering evidence to base a report on it.

Out of the blue came an invitation the latent investigative journalist in her leapt at.

“I met a woman who ran an agency providing workers to aged care facilities. She said ‘I can get you in, here’s the uniform’.

“I spent three weeks undercover as a buddy carer. The work was emotionally and physically draining, but the experience was invaluable.

“I was photographed in uniform and kept a personal diary. The very strong aged care employers’ lobby couldn’t dispute what the carers endured for little pay and long hours.

“In my final report I said the work was slave labour and described the workers as ‘heroic, the invisible glue of the New Zealand health and community services’.”

Dame Judy’s report led to the historic Bartlett court case that was the foundation for the 2017 legislation which upped carers’ wages. She frets they are again dropping behind and some are on the minimum wage.

“We need all political parties to commit to an immediate increase as their pay equity claim proceeds.”

Health board chair 

The following year she was again involved in health – this time in the public sector.

“David Clark [Minister of Health] asked me to chair the Waitemata DHB. I said I didn’t have any experience in the health sector. 

“I was going to say no but when he said three out of four of the region’s DHBs were chaired by men I said yes.  I’d been campaigning all those years to get more women on boards.”

 The board’s area was vast.

“From Kaipara to the harbour bridge with 90 different physical sites including two major hospitals and the Mason Clinic devoted to forensic psychiatry.”

She was at the helm when the pandemic struck. 

“We were working many hours a week.  It was an exhausting, arduous, very difficult time but with a fantastic CEO and very sharp, good clinicians, committed nursing and caring staff we got through it as New Zealand did with far fewer casualties than many countries.”

Dame Judy chaired the board until last year’s switch from DHBs to the stand-alone Te Whatu Ora.

She’s confident it will work effectively but rues the loss of elected local representatives which she says is a “democratic deficit.”

The honours she’s received for a working lifetime of achieving results aren’t taken lightly.

“I must say I felt embarrassed when they were announced but I feel they sort of celebrate all the careers I’ve had and recognise the work of many other people too.

“They don’t mean I can stop fighting for the things that matter.”