Summer reissue: On July 24 New Zealand woke to news that cabinet minister Kiri Allan had resigned and would face charges for careless driving and resisting arrest after crashing her car the previous night. The incident was a culmination of a period of extreme distress for a politician who overcame immense personal challenge to achieve meteoric success as a parliamentarian, writes Toby Manhire.

First published on July 24, 2023.

Kiri Allan this morning resigned her portfolios and returned to her East Coast home, where she will consider her political future. She spent much of last night in police custody, after crashing a ministerial car into a parked vehicle on Evans Bay Parade, the road that curls around the bays beneath Hataitai in Wellington. Allan has been charged with careless driving and refusing to accompany a police officer. 

Bonus episode: Kiri Allan resigns

Toby Manhire recounts the career of Kiri Allan following her resignation from cabinet earlier today.

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Chris Hipkins said Allan was in “extreme emotional distress” at the time of the incident. She had recently been through an upsetting breakup with her fiancée and faced mounting pressure at work. The prime minister was nonetheless clear that the actions of his justice minister were “indefensible”, her remaining in post “untenable”. Whether she is able to resume a political career that has proved eventful, often inspirational and for the most part glittering will in part depend on as yet unknown details about her response to police shortly after 9pm last night.

‘Nothing about that place feels ordinary or normal’

In the months before the 2017 election, I approached a couple of senior Labour figures to ask who would be an engaging, interesting first-time candidate from the party to approach for our new diary series. Both came back immediately. Kiritapu Allan. It was good advice. This young Māori lawyer was bright, funny, mischievous, and very clearly going places. 

“I have put my hand up to be Labour’s candidate in the East Coast because life is really hard for many people these days,” she wrote in her first post. “I think regions like ours need someone that understands the hustle and bustle of central government and that will be committed to making gains for our towns.” In her second, she described her first live TV appearance. “Let’s be honest, I wanted to throw up.”

Allan gave the incumbent MP, Anne Tolley, a run for her money, but finished second, arriving in parliament on the list. In her maiden speech she described her upbringing. “I am one of 10 children, from a mixed family that transcends race, class and geography.” She said: “Growing up, central government politics were not part of our daily discourse. But standing up for what was right and honourable was of fundamental importance.” 

Last year, Allan spoke about her own experience of conversion therapy and how, as a teenager, she had “desperately tried to pray the gay away”.

After dropping out of school at 16, Allan’s first job was at a KFC in west Auckland. She would later decide to study law. As she gravitated towards politics, former finance minister Michael Cullen was a mentor. 

The 2017 campaign was “life-changing”, said Allan at a candidate diary reunion event alongside National’s Erica Stanford and the Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick in November last year. “I loved it. I loved campaigning because I loved our people. It was epic.” Allan made an immediate impression in parliament and was soon appointed junior whip. At the time she felt anything but a fish to water, however.

“I think some people come in and feel automatically relatively comfortable,” she said in November, gesturing towards Swarbrick. “We feel out of place. We don’t fit the mould. We’re not from that place. It doesn’t sound like us. There is nothing about that place that is familiar, even five years on, even as a minister and you’ve got all these public servants helping, nothing about that place feels ordinary or normal.”

She sought strength from the “wairua side of it”, she said. “Spiritually, I’ve got to ground my feet in this job. Every single day, you chuck your boots on, and you feel it is an absolute privilege. And it is a heartbreaking privilege. I don’t think that you can separate the two out … This job really pushes you to your limit. Spiritually, physically, mentally. It’s a very uncomfortable environment.”

‘I confronted mortality, face up’

Allan won the East Coast electorate in 2020, and was promoted into cabinet by Jacinda Ardern, as minister for conservation and emergency management. Within months, she had an emergency to manage, in the form of the March 2021 tsunami threat, with her response across an edgy few hours winning her many new admirers. 

At the same time, she recounted at the candidates’ diary event, she had been undergoing hospital tests – “I had basically not stopped menstruating for quite some time” – and a few weeks later received a devastating diagnosis: stage three cervical cancer. While her lead doctor insisted that she would make it, “I was seeing a psychologist for the entire time, and preparing to die.”

She said: “That’s an interesting experience to go through as a young mother, as somebody who just recently started a parliamentary career, had been a minister for six months, not even that. Being confronted with this real prospect: OK, everything you thought was going to happen, isn’t.”

Just before Christmas 2021, Allan revealed she’d been given the all-clear. “I am so grateful to every single person that has supported our family through this journey, and the incredible medical staff that have saved my life to date,” she wrote on social media. “This disease caught me out and I was not prepared for what would follow. We have the medicine, the science and the expertise to detect this form of cancer far earlier than I did. Please, to all my sisters out there, take time to have your cervical smears, your mammograms, and all other health checks; to all my brothers out there, let the doctors have a look and take a prod – it may just one day save your life – and your family wants you, needs you, to stay healthy for them.”

Allan resumed ministerial duties the following years, and in June 2022 was made minister of justice. She continued to grow in reputation, and there was conjecture around a possible run for the Labour leadership after Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation in January – though Allan was quick to stress that was not something she’d considered. 

‘She is in a much better space’

Allan issued an apology in early April over remarks made a few days earlier during a farewell at RNZ for her then fiancée, Māni Dunlop. While she had been appearing in her personal capacity during remarks that included criticisms of the treatment of Māori staff at a public broadcaster that should “look at its culture”, Allan said she accepted that as a minister of the crown it left her open to perceptions of interference.

A few weeks later, 1News revealed that Meng Foon, then race relations commissioner, had made cash donations to Allan’s 2020 campaign to the tune of $1,500, while a company of which he was a director had provided office space to her campaign worth more than $9,000. There was nothing illegal about the donation, though some insisted she should have freshly declared it as a conflict of interest after taking the justice portfolio, given that minister appoints the commissioner. 

In a series of reports from the end of June, Stuff published allegations from former staffers who had worked in Allan’s office, including accusations of “screaming and shouting” at staff. Allan rejected the claims, while Hipkins, who was in China when the story broke, expressing his confidence in “an incredibly competent and talented person who’s clearly had a bit of a rough run lately”. 

Allan was on mental health leave following a personal relationship breakup when Hipkins returned to New Zealand. She urged journalists and the public not to “conflate” her mental health issues with issues around her interactions with staff. 

A further source of pressure came from a small but increasingly aggressive group of people enraged by the government response to Covid. Though she had learned to brush off online abuse, Allan said last November, “the thing that does get me a little bit is when I’m with my children and I’m threatened. Even by myself I don’t mind, I can manage that. It’s when I’m with my kids. And that’s upped the temperature over the past year, to the extent people are following you, I would have to park in public places and literally wait and have 111 on my phone, those types of things.”

She gave an example: “I was at a Bunnings, got the kids with the bloody sausages and tomato sauce over their hands, we’re running through trying to get nails or whatever we were doing, and just literally being cornered in by two people who were very aggrieved around mandates, locking us in – myself, my partner and our two kids, in a row in Bunnings … I don’t like that that has become the state of New Zealand.”

Ten days ago, the prime minister announced that Allan would return to work and resume full ministerial responsibilities – which included the newly assigned associate ministership for finance, awarded after Michael Wood resigned from cabinet – from July 17. “Kiri has had a rough time lately, both personally and at work,” he said. “I’m pleased she is in a much better space after taking some time off and getting some professional support. Mental wellbeing should never be a source of shame or embarrassment.” At the same time, Allan offered an apology “to anyone who has found my behaviour towards them unacceptable”.

Allan was assured and, on the face of it at least, in good health during an appearance on Wednesday last week alongside Hipkins to lay out out a new ram-raid-specific offence – the smoothest in a bumpy week of government law and order announcements.

‘She has not won that battle’

On Saturday, Allan was in Whakatāne. She posted to her Instagram account congratulations to participants in the Fifa Women’s World Cup, with a picture of her daughter’s football team, which she coaches, playing a game. 

The following evening, she crashed her car in Hataitai. Shortly before its 7am bulletin on Monday, RNZ broke the news that Allan had been involved in a car crash and taken into police custody. Less than half an hour later, in a statement issued by the prime minister’s office, she said had resigned all her portfolios. “I’m heading home and will be taking time to consider my future in politics,” she said.

“Over recent weeks I’ve faced a number of personal difficulties. I took time off to address those, and believed I was OK to juggle those challenges with the pressure of being a minister. My actions yesterday show I wasn’t OK, and I’ve let myself and my colleagues down. I accept that my position as a minister is untenable. I’m very sorry for my actions, the harm they could have caused and the embarrassment it has placed on the government and my colleagues.”

A couple of hours later, a bleary-eyed Chris Hipkins spoke to the media. He acknowledged there were political implications, but, “My initial concerns last night were for her immediate safety and wellbeing. It appears that some of her personal struggles came to a head,” he said. “I spoke to her on the phone this morning, it would be fair to say it was a difficult conversation,” said Hipkins. “She’s clearly not in a good space so it was not a long conversation.”

He said: “I’m very sad for Kiri. Kiri is an incredibly talented person who clearly has been battling some demons, and has not won that battle.”

Bonus episode: Kiri Allan resigns

Toby Manhire recounts the career of Kiri Allan following her resignation from cabinet earlier today.

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Summer reissue: In an exclusive two-part series, Max Rashbrooke assesses the Labour government’s record on key measures. Today: hardship and poverty, and the difficulty of measuring both.

First published on June 12, 2023. Read part two here.

Iosua, a 41-year-old Wellingtonian, lives in a boarding house because no better accommodation is on offer. After the rent is paid, he has $130 a week for food, clothing and other costs. Paul, a 50-year-old with multiple health conditions, applauds the government’s recent benefit increases and the less punitive attitude among agencies. These men both experience hardship, to varying degrees, and together they start to shape an answer to a pressing question: how much has been done, in truth, to alleviate poverty in this country, ever since that day in October 2017 when Labour came to power promising to transform the lives of the disadvantaged?

From the outset, Labour has looked at this issue through the lens of child poverty, in part for tactical reasons: people are less likely to blame children for their situation. The Child Poverty Reduction Act, passed in 2018, made the government accountable for the first time for reducing hardship, on three main measures. 

1. How many children are in families with less than half the current typical (median) income; this is a level where, budgeting research shows, it becomes hard for families to afford the basics. For a sole parent with one child, the poverty line in 2021 was $600 a week; for a couple with two kids, $965.
2. Whether families have more than half the income a typical household had in 2018. This tests whether living standards are rising over time – and takes housing costs into account.
3. How many families report being unable to afford basic things like going to the doctor, buying fresh food, and providing their children with decent clothes and shoes. (This is called material hardship.)

All three measures have fallen under Labour (that is, since 2017-18), by between 29,000 and 77,000 children. “This isn’t [yet] the structural change we need to see,” says Paul Barber, a Salvation Army policy analyst, “but we are going in the right direction, at least.” The payoff is clear in the government’s measures of child wellbeing, most of which have improved. Just 13% of children say food runs out “sometimes or often”, compared with 20% in 2019, and rates of avoidable hospitalisations have decreased. (Some measures, such as mental distress and truancy, have worsened, owing in part to the pandemic.) 

The National Party sees the hardship data differently, claiming Labour should be held responsible for the 2017-18 figures, when poverty was higher than usual. But that data actually covers the period from July 2016 to July 2018: most of it was gathered when National was in government, and virtually all of it reflects National’s policies. It is, in fact, the party’s last gift to the nation, as far as poverty is concerned.

National also claims Labour has just continued a prior trend of decreasing deprivation. And John Key’s record here was better than some on the left would admit: material hardship, for instance, was falling from 2011 onwards. But income poverty – the gap between poor families and contemporary middle-class households – wasn’t. And, crucially, Labour has continued to drive poverty down, or at least hold it steady, through a pandemic. When National was faced with its own pandemic equivalent, the global financial crisis, it allowed poverty to rise, before bringing it down some years later. 

Central to Labour’s strategy has been the welfare system, partly because it can be tweaked with relative ease and partly because beneficiaries are especially poor. The Families Package, passed in 2018, has given households an extra $1.1bn a year in Working for Families and other payments. The unemployment benefit, known as Jobseeker Support, has risen from $215 to $340 a week. The Accommodation Supplement has been boosted, the Best Start payment for newborns introduced, and the rate of the unemployment benefit linked to the average wage (so that the two increase in step). In total the government has injected an extra $16.5 billion into the welfare system. Even after accounting for inflation and higher rents, the average beneficiary’s income has risen 43% since 2018, and around 350,000 households are on average $113 a week better off.

To understand the scale of the task Labour has tackled, it helps to consider what welfare payments are worth compared to the average wage. As the graph shows, benefits were not only cut brutally in 1991 by National’s Ruth Richardson but were allowed to fall further and further behind wages under Helen Clark and John Key. Since 2018, they have headed back up towards their past peak. Only partway, of course, and some beneficiaries remain $100 or $200 a week below the poverty line.

Outside the welfare system, Labour has tried to ensure work pays. (As half of poor children live in households whose main income is from paid work, a job is not, by itself, a sure route out of hardship.) Since 2017, the minimum wage has risen rapidly, from $16.50 to $22.70. But other changes have been slow to arrive: none of the government’s much-touted Fair Pay Agreements, for instance, have been signed yet. Nonetheless, overall hardship has fallen: since Labour came to power, some 115,000 people have been lifted out of poverty.

Not that everything is rosy, of course. Material hardship rates, for instance, remain far higher for Māori and Pacific children (23% and 28%, respectively) compared to European and Asian children (10% and 6%). People with disabilities also face elevated rates of poverty.

And Labour faces a stiff challenge trying to maintain progress.  In the first chart, the dots represent its targets for child poverty in 2024 and 2028. They are demanding: income poverty, for instance, would have to fall by two-thirds in a decade – from 16.5%, a worse-than-average record in the developed world, to just 5%, among the very best performers. Why, then, does it not feel as if New Zealand is embarked on an epochal combat against the scourge of poverty?

An anecdote is telling here. According to government sources, Jacinda Ardern was known to go away and read papers on subjects like the indexation of benefits – an important but strikingly dull topic – and return them covered in red ink. Which is to say: the former prime minister was a policy wonk, and her child poverty agenda deeply technocratic. The measures employed – for instance, how many children are in families living on less than 50% of equivalised median disposable household income, after housing costs – may be beloved by experts, but are, in their raw form, unintelligible to voters. 

A government so often accused of being “all spin” turns out, ironically, to have implemented a deeply serious agenda that it is largely unable to explain to the public. And rather than wage war on exploitation – by tackling outrageous rents, for instance, or requiring all employers to pay significantly better wages – Ardern’s government has relied on more bureaucratic means, things that can be changed at the flick of a switch, like benefits and winter energy payments. There has been no real rallying cry, no sense that the state’s full resources are being mobilised to fight the evil of poverty, no crusade that would resonate deeply with the public. 

There is another sense in which the apparent reduction in poverty seems implausible. How, some will ask, can it be reconciled with the stories of record foodbank use and of families still sleeping in cars; how is it consistent with our sense that, at the bottom, life is as bad as ever, or even worse?

Leo Tolstoy would have known how to resolve the paradox. In the famous first line of his novel Anna Karenina, he wrote that although all happy families are alike, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So it is with poverty: each person’s experience of it is subtly different. And although it is impossible to fully capture this complexity, it is still useful to understand that there are, at a minimum, two kinds of poverty.

The families whom Labour have lifted out of hardship are, for the most part, what might be called the ordinarily poor: households that, although largely holding things together, were desperately short of cash and struggling to pay their bills. Numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands, they have, thanks to Labour’s wage and benefit increases, often been lifted from just below the poverty line to just above it.

Under this government, some people genuinely feel better off. Paul Clutterbuck, the 50-year-old Wellingtonian living with multiple rare health conditions, says that until the recent benefit increases, his disposable income had “stagnated terribly” over several decades on what is now called the Supported Living Payment. “I have definitely been better off over the last three years [compared to] my previous 30 years on the Invalids Benefit,” he says. “Obviously there’s a long way to go, and it’s nothing like the income of working people, but I’m grateful for the improvement since Labour came into office.” Clutterbuck has also detected “a huge culture shift at Work and Income, moving away from beneficiary bashing and towards an environment of trusting the client to do the right thing. It’s obviously not perfect either, but it’s a huge leap forward.”

For some people in extreme poverty, though, nothing much has changed in recent years. Stephen Turnock, the director of Wellington social agency DCM, says the number of people his organisation works with, around 1,000 a year, has stayed static under Labour: “We are back to pretty much where we were [pre-Covid].” Sitting in his office on Lukes Lane in central Wellington, Turnock describes the agency’s whānau as “incredibly alienated” people battling multiple issues, often including physical and mental health problems, homelessness and addiction, and possessing “limited capacity to support themselves out of poverty”. 

Right at the bottom of the ladder, these people, numbering perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 across the country, “are all overlooked or lost in the rest of that much bigger picture”, Turnock says. Many do not have young children, so have gained nothing from the focus on child poverty. Briefly, during the pandemic, they were all housed, but – famously – not in permanent or suitable accommodation, and the urgency of action dissipated post-pandemic, the Covid lessons left unlearned. 

Iosua Clarke is one of those struggling to gain a foothold. Released from prison last year, he has spent 12 months in emergency accommodation, most recently the Halswell Lodge boarding house in central Wellington. Work and Income (WINZ) has been “pretty good”, he says, providing a $350 “steps to freedom” payment and food grants. WINZ and DCM have both tried to help locate more suitable housing. “But it’s hard finding accommodation, especially for [ex] inmates and fullas in the struggle. No-one will really take us – just the Lodge and places like that.” 

Staying at Halswell costs something like $300 a week, split between Clarke and WINZ, leaving just $130 a week for food and everything else. “And everything’s expensive here in Wellington – so expensive, eh? Far, you got to be rich.” Clarke is also fighting long-term alcoholism; DCM helps but there is not, he says, much state support. And he feels life has got harder recently. “I can see it in people’s faces. Ever since Covid happened, things have changed … The homelessness is getting worse, with all the drugs coming through now, not just P, different types of drugs.” For the last year, he has been trying to secure better housing and a building apprenticeship, but nothing feels certain. “I’m not happy. I’m definitely not happy. I try to do things to make myself feel better, but … I just feel lost, sort of thing. Not ‘lost’ lost, but, ‘Where do I go now?’ lost.” 

What would it take to fix these kinds of situations – and indeed the social problems that have, Turnock argues, been building up for decades? Above all, he says, government agencies need to co-ordinate their policies (a recurring request that somehow never gets answered) and, in collaboration with NGOs, revamp the services targeted to the poorest. Currently, alcohol addictions may bar whānau from accessing mental health services, or vice versa. Or there may not be a health clinic in their area that will let them in the door. This is a community that needs dedicated, flexible, whānau-friendly health services.

And – no surprises here – it needs more homes. DCM is a provider under the government’s Housing First scheme, which finds people accommodation and then wraps services around them. But of the homes DCM has used to house nearly 300 people, the vast majority have been rented – often temporarily – from the private sector; only 12 were provided by Kāinga Ora. “Everyone is in the same sandpit … just moving things around,” Turnock says ruefully.  

Several large social housing developments will shortly open in Wellington, easing the pressure somewhat. But, in an awful irony, the organisation’s housing woes are not limited to those it serves. “Our own staff are struggling,” Turnock says. “We are talking about housing [our service users], yet our own staff can’t afford the rent.”

Housing is, of course, another flashpoint for Labour. The debacle of Rotorua’s motels aside, what matters most for the poorest New Zealanders, long-term, is the supply of social housing: dwellings available at less than market rates. Superficially, this story also looks bad for the government: the social housing waitlist has spiralled upwards from 8,000 in March 2018 to 24,000 today.

Ministry of Housing and Urban Development data shows, however, that nearly 12,000 places were added to the social housing stock between July 2017 and March 2023. Of these, just over 4,000 are Kāinga Ora net new builds (7,900 built, minus 3,300 demolished and 300-odd sold), and 1,900 built by NGOs like Dwell Housing Trust. A little more than half the 12,000 “places” are new homes (once demolitions are factored in). The remainder have been bought or leased from the private sector, or “redirected” from other parts of government. (Transitional and Housing First places have also been greatly increased.)

This approach has its defenders, though. Repurposing private homes has been a quick way to prioritise housing for the very poorest, even if it adds nothing to the overall stock. And whether one takes the 6,000 or the 12,000 figure, the contrast with National’s record is a favourable one. Exact figures from that period are surprisingly hard to come by, but a 2018 stocktake found the number of state houses fell from 69,717 in 2011 to 62,917 in 2017, a drop of nearly 7,000. In many cases the homes were transferred to NGOs, with no change in rent, rather than sold to private landlords. But Labour claims that, across both the state and NGO portfolios, there were 1,500 fewer social houses in 2017 than in 2008. Leading National figures like Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop have admitted their party did not do enough last time round. And as the current housing minister, Megan Woods, likes to point out, if National had added places at the same rate in its nine years as Labour has in its six, the housing crisis would be greatly diminished.

The social housing waitlist is also biased by something that affects many such statistics: the extent to which they reflect not greater need but greater access. Across the welfare system, the consensus among experts is that help is now much easier to get. Under National there was, for instance, a lengthy social-housing triaging process, in which people hoping to go on the register had to phone the Ministry of Social Development and undergo a “screening” assessment before being allowed to make an application. As those hurdles are removed, the apparent increase in the waitlist partly reflects greater ease of access. Labour has also invested in services like Community Connectors, paying NGOs to help struggling families better understand the support available. 

Just how much this affects the figures, no one can say. One government staffer, interviewed for this article, said they had spent years trying to ascertain how much lower the waitlist would be if National’s processes had been retained, but to no avail. In any case, the scale of the recorded increases surely dwarfs such effects. The number of special needs grants, for instance, has risen from 182,187 in the December 2017 quarter to 382,707 in December 2019 and 396,909 late last year. No one outside government, and perhaps no one inside it either, believes that can be explained solely by increased ease of access.

All of these issues are, of course, exacerbated by the current cost-of-living crisis. The government’s response has been to lift benefits and minimum wages in line with inflation. But the poorest New Zealanders have long experienced a higher rate of inflation than others, as prices rise fastest in the basic goods that consume much of their budget. 

Growing social stress is evident in media reports of pensioners sitting in the dark to save energy, of households poleaxed by rising grocery prices, of widespread truancy among poor families. In early May, a survey of foodbanks found they were twice as busy as they had been pre-pandemic. The combined weight of covid and the cost of living has badly strained people who were barely coping in the first place. 

But because there are, at a minimum, two poverties, that picture is entirely compatible with a world in which benefit and minimum-wage increases have also lifted tens of thousands of people out of deprivation. So where does that leave the whole poverty debate? For analysts like Paul Barber, this is a decisive year. “Many [previous] initiatives have stopped, or need to be renewed,” he says. “The benefit increases of past years [for instance] have been paid out. My big question is, ‘What next?’ We are really going to need to move if we are going to meet the goals we have set as a nation.” For some groups, genuine progress has been made – but not to an extent that it couldn’t be unwound. “It all feels fragile, and not bedded in yet.”

Wealth inequality – did Labour make it worse? Read part two here.