Michael Cullen (politician)

The Honourable Sir Michael Cullen KNZM
Official portrait of Cullen, 2008
16th Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand
In office 15 August 2002 – 19 November 2008
Prime Minister	Helen Clark
Preceded by	Jim Anderton
Succeeded by	Bill English
40th Minister of Finance
In office 10 December 1999 – 19 November 2008
Prime Minister	Helen Clark
Preceded by	Bill Birch
Succeeded by	Bill English
26th Minister of Revenue
In office 10 December 1999 – 17 October 2005
Prime Minister	Helen Clark
Preceded by	Bill Birch
Succeeded by	Peter Dunne
4th Treasurer of New Zealand
In office 10 December 1999 – 15 August 2002
Prime Minister	Helen Clark
Preceded by	Bill English
Succeeded by	Position Abolished
13th Deputy Leader of the Labour Party
In office 11 June 1996 – 11 November 2008
Leader	Helen Clark
Preceded by	David Caygill
Succeeded by	Annette King
18th Minister for Social Welfare
In office 24 August 1987 – 2 November 1990
Prime Minister	David Lange Geoffrey Palmer Mike Moore
Preceded by	Ann Hercus
Succeeded by	Jenny Shipley
Member of the New Zealand Parliament for Labour party list
In office 27 November 1999 – 30 April 2009
Succeeded by	Damien O'Connor[n 1]
Member of the New Zealand Parliament for St Kilda Dunedin South (1996–1999)
In office 28 November 1981 – 27 November 1999
Preceded by	Bill Fraser
Succeeded by	David Benson-Pope
Personal details
Born	(1945-02-05)5 February 1945 London, England
Died	19 August 2021(2021-08-19) (aged 76) Whakatāne, New Zealand
Political party	Labour
Spouses	Rowena Joy Knight ​ ​ (m. 1967; div. 1989)​ Anne Collins ​ (m. 1989)​
Profession	Historian
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Canterbury (BA & MA) University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Thesis	Social statistics in Britain 1830–1852 (1971)
Academic work
Discipline	History
Institutions	University of Otago

Sir Michael John Cullen KNZM (5 February 1945 – 19 August 2021) was a New Zealand politician. He was a Member of the New Zealand House of Representatives from 1981 to 2009, the Deputy Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party from 1996 to 2008 and a senior minister in the Fifth Labour Government from 1999 to 2008, serving as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and Attorney-General.

Cullen was first elected in 1981 as the Member of Parliament for St Kilda after a ten-year career as a history lecturer at the University of Otago. He was a junior minister in the second term of the Fourth Labour Government, where his appointments as Minister of Social Welfare and Associate Minister of Finance were intended by Prime Minister David Lange to temper the government's economic reforms known as Rogernomics. When Helen Clark became Labour's leader in opposition from 1993, Cullen became the Labour Party's finance spokesperson. Later, he became Clark's deputy leader and served as her deputy prime minister from 2002 to 2008.

In his post-parliamentary career, Cullen was involved in public governance as the chair of New Zealand Post and the Earthquake Commission. He co-led a review of the intelligence and security sector with Dame Patsy Reddy for the Fifth National Government and chaired the Sixth Labour Government's Tax Working Group. In 2020, Cullen retired from public life after revealing he had been diagnosed with stage 4 small-cell lung cancer,^[1] which had also spread to his liver. He died of cancer the following year.

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