The New Zealand Prime Minister's "Fraudulent Painting Forgery Story." No summonds in sight.

 http://www.tv3.co.nz/news/index.cfm?news_category_id=5

It is about time the Canadian company which ownes TV3, up dated its story on PAINTAGATE.

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Henry van Dijk

Helen Clark's 'New Zealand Prime Minister' victim at home in the world of art fakes. 20.04.2002

Arts editor LINDA HERRICK looks into the history of the man who bought the PM's fake.

Henry van Dijk, "a bent tulip muncher" the man who has made international headlines over his "Helen Clark painting is no stranger to the fine art of fakery. In the late 1990s, he ran a business in Auckland importing resin replicas of ancient artefacts. In an interview with the Herald on February 12, 1997, he said,

"There is a huge market in copies. And there are a lot of people who can paint well - but not many who paint well out of their own imagination and mind."

In 1999, Mr van Dijk paid $1000 for a painting signed by Helen Clark, then Opposition Leader, at a charity auction. He has sent it back into auction after discovering it was the work of Lauren Fouhy, a friend of one of the Prime Minister's staff. The revelation of the "fake Clark" has featured in newspapers and television news bulletins worldwide, causing the Prime Minister huge embarrassment.

"I've had a lot of publicity over the past week and I'm going to work it out right through to the end," says Mr van Dijk, a former naturopath who runs a water purification business among other ventures and describes himself as a "passionate animal protector, activist, and welfarist. He imported the replica Greek and Egyptian artefacts and antiquities into New Zealand from 1996 to 1999, buying them from a Dutch archaeologist in Germany who cast the pieces in resin then painted, chipped and dented them to look like the real thing.

Items such as a head of Hippocrates sold for $740.
He insists there is a difference between that practice and Helen Clark's charitable efforts. "When I deal in replicas I know it's a replica and we tell people." He admits that the publicity has been a bonus for him. He is writing a self-help manual "for resingled people, who want to be recycled, which he intends to publish himself.

"It's a worldwide book - New Zealand is going to be peanuts ... I was in the Dutch papers and I've been on the BBC twice. I have not done too badly out of this. It is fun to me. I'm giving the politicians the message they can't get away with dishonesty."

Mr van Dijk says he has an art retail diploma gained in 1984 in the Netherlands. He says the three-year diploma is a standard professional document required for any retailer in that country.

He came to New Zealand in 1968 aged 20 and worked as marketing manager for Watties until 1971. He returned to the Netherlands in 1973 and came back to New Zealand in 1987. Mr van Dijk said he did not buy the Clark painting because he liked it but as an investment "because of the name only.

"It could have been any kind of painting. Helen Clark was up-and-coming in politics, had been in politics a long time, who became Prime Minister ... The reason I'm getting as much mileage out of this as possible is I feel we should give them [politicians] a hard time if they've been lying and cheating."

Ironically, Mr van Dijk said his father, an art collector, was approached during World War II by the famous Dutch faker of Vermeers, Han van Meegeren, and asked to accept a painting in return for five loaves of bread. "He refused the work because it was a forgery but gave van Meegeren the bread. But after the war, you know what? That same work sold for around $300,000."

Saturday April 20, 2002 at 03:29 AM

"Swindler or Forging." JOHN ROUGHAM use the correct words.

Will the "corrupt police" charge Helen "Clark" Davis. Many of you in jail will be wondering.

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Dialogue: Clark's deception reveals deep, abiding cynicism.

By JOHN ROUGHAN

It really was a shocker. As my wife remarked after reading the story, it is not as if she simply put her name on somebody else's painting, she actually commissioned it.

This was no momentary lapse of judgment; it was a deliberate, patterned response to a request for personal work. When a second bogus Helen Clark turned up this week, the Prime Minister admitted she had probably done it half a dozen times.

For all that, I do not believe she was, or is, intentionally dishonest. Rather, she honestly believed dishonesty was standard practice. I suspect we are dealing not so much with deceit as something possibly just as bad for someone in that position.

When she said "other politicians have done it" and "no one takes these things very seriously" I am sure she believed it. Should she come across a competent piece in a charity sale I can hear a dry chuckle and a muttered comment, "I wonder who really did that?"

Cynicism is highly contagious. Even now, there are probably people who have never had reason to doubt the authenticity of celebrities' contributions, yet wonder whether Helen Clark was right.

Well, the organisation she was trying to help was surprised to learn this week how she had gone about it. And art auctioneer Dunbar Sloane told the Herald that in 35 years he had never known a celebrity offering not to be genuine.

No other politician, past or present, has come forth to support Helen Clark's contention that others have done what she did.

You can marshal all the evidence available and still cynicism has an easy, poisonous plausibility. The only good antidote, I find, is to consider what cynics say about something you know. They have plenty to say about what happens in my industry and invariably they are wrong.

Cynicism is dangerous in a Prime Minister, particularly an absolutist leader like this one, not so much because it is unattractive but because it breeds assumptions that can lead the Government astray. What part it played, we might now wonder, in its failure to take the Singapore Airlines offer for Air New Zealand-Ansett at face value last year.

Some interesting material has emerged on that subject over the past week or two. I suspect Helen Clark is tired of reading that she is intelligent. When did journalists become arbiters of intelligence? The answer, possibly, is when they found themselves reporting a Prime Minister who thinks and speaks much as they do.

Like them, Helen Clark is a graduate of the liberal arts and retains a set of interests, values, viewpoints, and inhibitions they share. She has a candour that is appealing and a complete lack of airs, which is almost unprecedented in Prime Ministers of my observation. She seems to be largely without conceit and suffers from no sense of self-importance.

But that impression may have to be altered after this phoney art business.

Dunbar Sloane said the contributions of political leaders to charity art auctions were usually simple concoctions. 'You don't buy it as investment art but as a bit of fun.'

Why didn't Helen Clark enter the exercise in that spirit? Partly, she says, because she was too busy, and because she is no good at it.

She said she suspected the painting done in her name was awful. "If I'd done it myself it would have been equally awful if not more awful." On radio, I think she was more candid, conceding she cannot draw to save herself.

But the point is, her ability should not have mattered. I think a fierce ego played its part in her downfall, too. She could not bring herself to sit down one Saturday and smear some paint on the framed paper the animal welfare group had given her, lest the result was embarrassing.

She could not even bring herself to enter the "five-minute doodles" to be auctioned by Ponsonby School. Somebody on her staff did a quick sketch of the Beehive and she signed it. That fooled the school, the auctioneer, and the person who paid $1300 in good faith.

All of this happened when she was Opposition leader. She is an immeasurably more secure personality now. But I wonder even now whether she really recognises the error, or regrets the political embarrassment.

She has suspended several ministers merely for political embarrassment. Even unproven accusations, she argued, could affect their credibility in their particular portfolio. She would have sacked any other Minister of Arts, Culture, and Heritage by now. Perhaps she imagines a lack of personal artistic talent is somehow unbecoming in that role. If so, she should be told that in all the arts, plagiarism is infinitely worse.

A few weeks ago, I attended a dinner at which the University of Auckland recognised "distinguished alumni" such as Human Rights Commissioner Roslyn Noonan and Film Commission chief executive Ruth Harley. Dr Harley, I think it was, gave an acceptance speech glowing with gratitude to "Helen" for at last giving the arts a sense of pride and value and a Prime Minister who believed in them.

I wonder how the creative community feels now. The mark of intelligence, since we are now the arbiters of it, is to know the limits of your knowledge. And, beyond that, to avoid the pitfalls of ego and cynicism.

We are led, I think, by somebody who usually knows her limitations but has to prove herself large enough to let them be exposed for public amusement.

IF IT GETS ONE HIGHER UP THE LADDER IN POLITICS.

By Viktor. Saturday April 20, 2002 at 03:21 AM

THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY. IS THERE ANYTHING FURTHER TO BE UNCOVERED?

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IF I HAD NOT GONE INTO POLITICS, I WOULD NOT HAVE MARRIED.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark who will not use her married surname has revealed her marriage is a necessary evil which would help put an end to rumours she was a barren lesbian, according to a newly published biography. Millions of queers/poofs are married to women, to try and hide what they are.

Clark, 51 viewed as one of the most popular leaders the country has had, is married to public health academic Dr Peter Davis, The austere states woman has rarely let people see into her personal life. Friend and adviser Brian Edwards a pot smoker from way back have been allowed access for the biography.

Helen: Portrait of a Prime Minister, which has hit the Shelves. Clark, Labour Prime Minister since 1999, has been a major player in political life here since winning Auckland's Mount Albert electorate in 1981. Edwards notes that even winning the party nomination had been a major achievement as she had been hampered by rumours that she was a lesbian.

It was a difficult campaign, said Clark in the book. As a single woman, I was really hammered. I was accused of being a lesbian, of living in a commune, having friends who were Trotskyites and gays, of being unstable and unable to settle to anything.

New in parliament, she remembers one of her own partes senior members referred to her as a 'barren lesbian and claimed that Davis was also gay.' There were rumours, Edwards writes, that her real lover was Catherine Tigard, who later becomes governor-general. Senior party officials finally prevailed on her and Davis, who expressed indifference to the ceremony, to marry.

I did not mind one way or the other too much, he told Edwards, but I do not think Helen was too keen. We were involved in this larger game of politics. Helen is strong willed and her whole life has required her to bend that will at certain times. In these things, I go along with Helen. If Helen wants to do it, I will do it.

Clark said she cried over getting married, calling it a necessary evil.

The rival Right Wing National Party continues to push rumours over the marriage, she said. They are relentlessly, personally nasty. The one thing I hate is the National Party. I think they are loathsome people. I do.

On the 1999 elections, her then rival, Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, was illustrated as a mother-of- two.

Clark's lack of children was made into an issue.

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Comment: Never ever trust any Politician, but watch what they do. 'True figures do not lie, but lairs figure, and actually tell the truth if it suites their purpose or are caught out. An old saying. 'To some dog any dog will do, and most woman the same.' Is the Labour/Labor Government pushing, it's hard on crime 'scam' this election.

Find Helen Clark at  pm@ministers.govt.nz

 http://www.crikey.com.au/politics/kiwielection.html

 http://www.crikey.com.au/whistleblower/duncanaffair.html