Word: keys
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...John Key can thank many things for his rise to New Zealand's top job - not least the receptionist skills of his sister. Liz Cave was the face of a large Christchurch clothing company in late 1998 when the then president of the governing National Party, John Slater, came visiting on business. Knowing him a little, she summoned the courage to say, "Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?" Not at all, replied Slater. "I have a brother who lives overseas," Cave told him. "He's planning to come back and he may be interested in going...
...Key rang Slater a few days later from London, where he was head of foreign exchange for investment bank Merrill Lynch. It would be a few years before Key could extricate himself from the world of finance, and he entered Parliament in 2002; he became the party's leader four years later. And on Nov. 8, the political career launched by that call culminated in a resounding election victory for Key and National, ending nine years of Labour rule under Helen Clark. On the night, hundreds of supporters gathered outside Key's mansion in the affluent Auckland suburb of Parnell...
...Like many on the left, Clark isn't much reassured by the fact that Key himself once relied on welfare. Seven years old when his alcoholic father, George, died of a heart attack, young John and his two elder sisters were raised in a state-provided house in Christchurch by their Austrian-immigrant mother, Ruth, who made ends meet by working long hours as a cleaner. "We always ate and we were always happy," says Key's sister Sue Lazar, "but there wasn't a lot of money for clothes or anything like that...
...While Key may have started out on Struggle Street, he quickly showed a knack for finding avenues to greener pastures. One afternoon during his mid-teens, he announced to his family that he was taking up golf. "No one we knew played the game," says Cave, "certainly no one in our neighborhood. But he said businessmen played golf and he needed to learn it now so he would be ready...
...Key campaigned from the center, but many of those now trying to get his ear would like the party, now resplendent in the robes of power, to adopt what Slater calls "its natural position in terms of philosophy." Many self-made men never lose their empathy for the underprivileged; others figure that if they could haul themselves out of poverty, others should be able to do it too. While he pledged on election night that his government would serve the interests of all New Zealanders, Key also noted that the people had voted for a "more prosperous, more ambitious" country...