Michael Cullen (politician)

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, which had also spread to his liver. He died of cancer the following year.