A CV few can dream of – apart from the Sauron ring in a blue rosette.
It feels instructive that the press statement issued by Judith Collins’ office yesterday, announcing her retirement from politics after 24 years in parliament, took an age to wind its way, via a lengthy enumeration of accomplishments and lofty ministerial warrants, to a mention, 14 paragraphs down and almost in passing, of the fact that she’d been leader of the National Party.
Collins, who will depart mid-year to take up the position of Law Commission president, has a CV most politicians can only dream of. She’s held 18 ministerial portfolios – three of them twice over. In the current government she occupies roles of immense responsibility, including defence, the public service and the intelligence agencies. As attorney general, she is respected across the house and the legal profession.
Over some dozen years of opposition she’s proved tireless, tenacious – a nightmare for the ministers she stared down across the chamber. Talk to those who’ve worked for her and the response is mostly the same: a great boss, demanding, encouraging and fair, engendering long-lasting loyalty. Public servants remark on the pace at which, as a minister, she would absorb copious amounts of information. I’ve come across a number of people who found her appointment as minister for space or minister for digital government baffling, but swiftly found their scepticism – whether they agreed with her decisions or not – evaporate. Barbara Edmonds, today the opposition spokesperson but once employed in Collins’ office when she was minister of revenue, praised “one of the best bosses I’ve had”.
“A force of nature,” Christopher Luxon called her yesterday, and nobody could argue with that. A formidable brain, a work ethic of preternatural proportions. The trouble, and there was trouble, seemed only to flare when a taste for the leadership entered the mix, and the brightness started to burn like a lilo on the surface of the sun.
What Collins has never lacked is character. Her first political impulses might have been towards the left of the spectrum, but she got over that soon enough. A more enduring lesson of her childhood, perhaps, something her father taught her on the Waikato farm where she grew up: never run from a bull in a paddock.
She eschewed the vogue for incrementalist politics, in pursuit of the fabled median voter. In 2015, when The Spinoff asked Collins what she made of Jeremy Corbyn, the leftwing UK Labour leader, she said she profoundly disagreed with his views, but “at least he stands for something … It’s only by galvanising the base, by giving people a reason to care, that those more centrist will give [a] party a chance.”
The sobriquets were many: she was Crusher Collins. She was New Zealand’s Iron Lady. And, less admiringly, “Tipline”, a nickname acquired following the laying bare of her links to the attack blogger Whaleoil, documented in the Nicky Hager book Dirty Politics, which drew on a cache of hacked messages. If the episode confirmed impressions of a machiavellian operator, one message revealed her to be Machiavellian with a capital M. “If you can’t be loved,” she’d advised, “then best to be feared,” which is more or less a direct quote from The Prince.
She was sacked as a minister by John Key – and, painfully, stripped of her “honourable” title – over messages released during the scandal that implied she had played a role in attacks on Serious Fraud Office director Adam Feeley. She would later be exonerated by a formal inquiry. Her simmering anger at that episode – “the worst of times” – made for one of the few potent passages in Pull No Punches, a memoir which for the most part pulled its punches. She would later say of those “dirty politics” days: “I think it was pretty clear, the whole culture at that time was one that was not conducive to doing the best that we could and I think it is important that we move on.”
After numerous attempts to take the National reins failed, the 2020 tailspin that saw Todd Muller stand down after just 53 days left a shattered caucus deciding they had no alternative but to adopt the “nuclear option”. She says she felt a sense of responsibility.
It was, she has since reflected, a “hospital pass from hell” – she’s right about that, but she had, after all, spent inordinate amounts of time manoeuvring around the field, insisting she be thrown that ball. To be fair, asking a politician not to covet the leadership is a bit like asking an astronaut not to dream of space, but for Collins it caused havoc. She had at last won that office, realised that ambition, but it had by then taken on a toxic alchemy, the brighter future as Sauron’s One Ring in a blue rosette, shimmering with allure and self-destruction. And so “16 months of sheer hell”, as she’s since called it, were watched by the country through squinted eyes. An embrace of divisive, Orewa-esque rhetoric, policy issued on the hoof, weird broadsides against media and bizarre attacks on public figures that rendered the opposition, in my view, unserious.
Janet Wilson, who became press secretary to Muller and agreed to stick around for Collins, found Collins to be paranoid and Muldoonesque. The election campaign – spanning strange adventures on Ponsonby Road and even stranger scenes of prayer – was so punishing that Wilson found consolation in reading dystopian war poetry. Collins was right that she had been dealt an unwinnable hand – this was, after all, peak team-of-five-million, Ardernophoric, Covid-free New Zealand – but it remains an indelible truth that she led National to a defeat that saw 23 seats lost and the first and foreseeably only majority MMP government.
Towards the end of 2021 and returned to opposition, Collins’ attempt to torpedo a resurgent Simon Bridges backfired. Instead of rounding on the former leader, the National caucus delivered a no-confidence vote in Collins. Her time as leader was over.
Many of us predicted that the man who came after her, Christopher Luxon – whose attributes crucially included not being bloodied by or seething over the party’s civil wars – would consign her to political Siberia. Instead, he showed a strength of leadership too easily overlooked and placed her 10th in his first shadow cabinet. She picked up where she’d left off in portfolio work, and, as far as I know, stayed well away from the One Blue Ring. Yesterday, she departed on her own terms, albeit in a move that has generated its own measure of controversy.
But in her own way Collins is now going the way of Bridges, and after a polarising career that has seen her variously regarded as abrasive and compassionate, but underestimated only by the foolish, let us kneel awkwardly in an empty church and pray she enjoys some of the post-spotlight serenity in which he bathes, albeit with more sports car and less yak and beard.
