There’s a lot to be learnt about political power in New Zealand from Kiri Allan’s new book and her media appearances. However, not all of it is what the former politician would like us to see.
The most revealing scene in Kiri Allan’s new memoir, Go Hard or Go Home, isn’t the car crash. It happens in a hospital, where Allan, then a Cabinet minister, was receiving treatment for cervical cancer. As she recounts in the book, and as Danyl McLauchlan reports in his excellent Listener profile earlier this month, an outgoing chief executive of one of her own departments made a special visit and spent at least half an hour discussing the government board positions he hoped to occupy after leaving his post.
“Imagine being plugged up to chemotherapy,” Allan writes, “and a very senior public servant making a special trip to the hospital to lobby you for board positions.” Her conclusion: “It says something about where power and patronage actually sit in Wellington… and who feels entitled to it.”
If it happened as Allan describes it, it is pretty shabby. It is also a remarkable glimpse into the less formal workings of Wellington: the networks and expectations that run alongside the official machinery of government. And then she declines to name him. The book tells readers something is rotten in the way appointments and influence work here, and then declines to say where.
The revolving door from minister to consultant
The government appointments story also looks more interesting alongside Allan’s own life after Parliament. She now runs a consultancy firm which has clients she lists as “including iwi entities, Māori collectives, central and local government and private business”. Her website describes the firm as a “professional hustler for clients and entities who do good things for great people”.
Much of that work is in climate adaptation, emergency management, natural hazards and related areas. These are not random subjects: Allan was herself Minister for Emergency Management and Conservation.
Allan’s post-political work is presented as consultancy rather than lobbying. Yet the activities she has publicly described include strategy, helping organisations understand legislative and regulatory processes, using networks and assisting clients to get projects across the line with decision-makers. Doesn’t this sound like “lobbying”?
None of this suggests wrongdoing. The point is that New Zealand has no lobbying register and no stand-down period for departing ministers, so there’s no way for anyone to tell.
That question became especially relevant this week when Allan wrote an opinion piece for the New Zealand Herald on Thursday about the National Iwi Chairs Forum hui in Queenstown. The piece was a mixture of reportage and opinion, titled “Party leaders met NZ’s most influential iwi figures: Te Pāti Māori tanked and Luxon didn’t show”.
The Herald told readers that Allan was a former Labour minister who “now runs the KLA consultancy firm”. What it did not disclose was Allan’s advisory relationship with the National Iwi Chairs Forum itself. The Forum lists Allan as lead adviser to its Disaster Recovery ILG, and Allan has publicly described facilitating climate-adaptation work associated with the Forum. But if you write a political column about an organisation’s meeting, shouldn’t readers know that you also work in an advisory capacity with that organisation? It simply gives readers useful information.
The Herald piece also required an awkward clarification after Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere posted on Facebook that the piece told “outright lies”, especially because he wasn’t at the conference. Allan had reported that Tamihere was there, and the following: “In my view, Te Pāti Māori tanked. You could feel the room – packed with people waiting for a clear vision for te ao Māori – pull back. Instead they got, what sounded to me like, a defensive account of the party’s internal troubles from president John Tamihere, including a claim that no one but him had built an organisation serving Māori the way Waipareira Trust had.”
The above section was later amended to refer to co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi instead. But there’s still no acknowledgment that Allan was reporting on an organisation she works for. This should be a basic requirement when an ex-minister, political insider and consultant wants to be a media commentator.
Going hard on the public service
Allan’s biggest intervention during the promotional tour has been her attack on the public service — one that potentially aligns with the interests of the sectors she now advises.
Allan writes in her book that she came to agree with the Act Party that the state service “was overpaid, bloated and slow”. This was first reported on by McLauchlan in his Listener piece. He writes that Allan “came to loathe the Wellington bureaucracy: the officials who left her unbriefed, the ‘yes, Minister’ that meant nothing” — and the highly paid senior people who, in her view, dodged the hard issues.
Then on Friday on RNZ she doubled down on all this in an interview with Guyon Espiner: “What I found with senior bureaucrats is that they’re often more political than politicians. They know they’re going to out-survive politicians. And they just sometimes need to bide their time, say ‘Yes minister, absolutely minister.’”
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons was furious with the former Labour minister. In a Facebook post she accused Allan of taking a “cheap shot” at the public servants who had worked for her, calling the comments “unjustified, gross and unbecoming”. Fitzsimons says: “She knows that the people and agencies she is criticising can’t answer back.”
She also argued the remarks feed “a far-right narrative that leads to privatisation of important public services”. Of course, Allan was pushing an agenda of devolution of roles and funding to communities, iwi and private entities – sectors that overlap with the client base she describes on her own website – with stories about her time as Minister for Conservation.
Allan’s narrative is that she became aware that the centre gatekeeps resources that should flow to communities: getting millions of dollars of Jobs for Nature money out to community groups was a “ridiculous process” that took a couple of years, and settling cultural rights over whale bones took four. She told Espiner: “I do think we need to have a good think about how tax dollars get put back into communities, having our communities steward those resources ... is something I’m a big advocate for.”
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