Margaret Wilson

Margaret Anne Wilson (born 20 May 1947) is a New Zealand lawyer, academic and former Labour Party politician. She served as Attorney-General from 1999 to 2005 and Speaker of the House of Representatives from 2005 to 2008, during the Fifth Labour Government. Early life and career Born in Gisborne, Wilson was raised in Morrinsville where her parents Bill and Patricia (Paddy) ran a small store. She was the eldest of four children. As a seven-year-old, she spent several months living in Auckland with her great-aunt and great-uncle after her father had a nervous breakdown. Wilson's family were Catholic and Labour-voting; Bill's father's cousin was the Labor Party Premier of New South Wales, Bob Heffron. Wilson returned to Auckland to receive secondary education at St Dominic's College, and completed her final year as the only female student at Morrinsville College. She had a leg amputated due to cancer at the age of 16, which cut short her plans to be a physical education teacher. Instead, she studied law and graduated LLB(Honours) from the University of Auckland in 1970. Briefly, she worked as a law clerk and solicitor in Auckland from 1970 to 1972 (in 1971 she was secretary of the legal employees' union), before a master's in jurisprudence on workers' participation in management in New Zealand was completed in 1974. In her memoir, Wilson reports that only seven in her undergraduate class of 200 were women; her female classmates included future Chief Justice of New Zealand Sian Elias and future judge of the Hong Kong Court of First Instance Clare-Marie Beeson. Future members of Parliament David Lange and Jim McLay were also in the cohort. Wilson began lecturing in the University of Auckland law faculty in 1972 and continued in lecturing roles until 1990 (latterly in a part-time capacity as she became more politically active). Wilson campaigned for Eddie Isbey, the Labour Party candidate in Grey Lynn, in 1969 and 1972. In 1975, she spent a year studying for a doctorate at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Ontario, which she did not complete. Before her overseas studies, Wilson had begun to campaign for women's rights; she returned to these aims in 1976 and joined the Labour Party as a means to those ends. She stood unsuccessfully for the Auckland City Council on a Labour Party ticket in both 1977 and 1980. In her memoir, Wilson reflected that future Prime Minister and her then-University of Auckland colleague Helen Clark encouraged her candidacy.