Kiritapu Allan l

Diving into new roles

Irreverent, fun, and determined. Kiritapu Allan, the relatively new conservation minister, sits across from me in her office in the Beehive. It has a good view, looking out to the old Parliament Buildings, which now house Victoria University of Wellington law school – handy, as she often refers to law school as an important part of her life.

Allan is not a household name. She has been in Parliament since 2017, coming in as a list MP and, in common with many other Labour MPS, won a seat during the Labour landslide election last year. Allan is now, as well as being a minister, also Mpfor the East Coast.

Yesterday, she was suddenly in the news again, in one of her other roles, as minister for emergency management, responsible for the response to the tsunami threat.

Allan was married to Natalie Coates, a lawyer, but is now separated, and has a 3-year-old daughter, Hiwaiterangi. She spends her time between Wellington and Gisborne.

She is an engaging mixture of seriousness, warmth and irreverence. A Cabinet minister at 37 and holding one of the portfolios that is traditionally difficult for a Labour minister: conservation. The ‘‘Minister for DOC’’ can be loved or loathed depending on which side of the environmental divide one sits.

But Allan wants to get rid of that stereotype. Her vision is that economic activity and conservation can and should be able to co-exist, rather than being at loggerheads.

‘‘Conservation is something that I really wanted, because it is, you know, it’s onethird of our country’s land mass. It’s something that I think so many of us . . . how we identify, for many New Zealanders is in relationship to our environment.

‘‘But I think, too, that conservation has a bit of a funny old rep that a lot of people feel like you either are a conservationist or you’re not. And if you’re not, then you don’t really have a stake in the conversation. My view is kind of completely opposite. I think that we all have a really important stakehold in the largest natural asset that we have.’’

But before all that we start off talking about cricket. Allan grew up mostly in the small North island town of Paengaroa, near Te Puke, in the Bay of Plenty. She was the only girl playing in a boys’ team, and went through school continuing to play. A keen follower of just about any sport, she is quite happy for us to take photos of her in the middle of amore recent pursuit: diving.

While friendly and with an earthy and somewhat infectious laugh – her staff were joking before our interview that you can hear the minister before you can see her – there is clearly a harder edge and a sense of mission that drives Allan.

To understand her, a look at her upbringing is instructive. She was the ninth of 10 children, raised in the home of evangelical, Christian missionary parents.

Her parents, David and Gail, met on board amissionary ship called the Anastasis, a Youth With A Mission ship that sailed the Pacific Islands spreading the gospel. The style of church in her family was, she says, definitely of a ‘‘throw your hands up in the air and pray’’ flavour.

Allan’s siblings range from age 23 to 60. She was adopted by mother Gail, the older sister of Allan’s biological mother. Her adoptive mother worked variously as a caretaker and cook and her father was at Affco’s meatworks, until he was laid off in the 1980s.

‘‘Things like food on the table weren’t a big issue. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a really secure upbringing,’’ Allan says of her childhood. It was also around this time, she says, that she realised some people had more than others.

‘‘ ... I knew I was living a very privileged life in comparison to some of the people that I love the most, some of my siblings, who were, I’m thinking of one sibling in particular, a transient life, where the next meal [was], or the roof overhead.’’

She’s on a roll now and talking in a stream of consciousness. ‘‘You know, I’ve spoken about this on record, but I had, you know, a number of my brothers, and my father, my biological father, and my folks, and my intimate family have been in and out of the criminal justice process for my entire lifetime.

‘‘Were my family members inherently bad, evil, born to cause harm, or was it something else at play? Because when I looked at these people . . . they were incredibly smart, intelligent, physically capable, incredibly competentmen and women who made often quite a series of really poor decisions.

‘‘So what caused that? So those are just those constant driving questions, forever.’’

We talk about how she reconciled her upbringing with the growing realisation of being lesbian. She says that, even while she was living it, she tried not to think about it. Nor did she get the opportunity to come out in amanner of her own choosing. When she was 16 her parents found out and she was ejected from the household for a time. ‘‘Basically, somebody took it upon themselves to call my parents and let them know.

‘‘Everyone had sort of metmy ‘friends’, my ‘special friends’. It was just, nobody talked about it, really talked about it. It was fine, everybody accepted whoever was in my life, I never really had troubles apart from that initial phase with mum and Dad.

‘‘And theywere awesome – a year or so later, but they had to do a lot of unpacking of their own. And they then became pretty cool support for other folks.’’

Allan is refreshingly open and thoughtful about her own struggle. She goes to Ratana Church and still has a faith, but clearly quite a different one from the one in which she was brought up. Christian witness, yes, and sense of mission, yes. But pointless piety, no.

But she says it probably took her about a decade to work out how her sexuality sat alongside her faith.

She is a great storyteller and her story of how she ultimately ended up in Parliament is a cracker. In the 2000s, a chance encounter in the Auckland bar in which she was working changed Allan’s path in life. Before that ‘‘university was not really on my radar’’.

’’And this guy would come into the bar once amonth, and have these very flamboyant discussions. Sometimes he’d bring in his friends that had studied at these very fancy universities like Harvard and Stanford. When you work in a bar, everyone’s got a bit of a yarn, but you take it all with a bit of a grain of salt.

‘‘This guy then started sending books to my bar from his work and enrolment picks to study law at Otago University.’’

That man turned out to be Mark Henaghan, now a law professor at Auckland University, who has also been dean of the law faculty at Otago University. ‘‘And he had been bringing in Andrew Geddis, who had just finished his Harvard training at that time.’’

Henaghan encouraged her to take law, which she did, at Victoria University of Wellington. That study helped set her on a path to politics. She joined the Labour Party, interning in Helen Clark’s office and working around a number of Young Labour types and staffers: Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, Nanaia Mahuta, who had just become a very young MP, and Michael Wood – all now Allan’s Cabinet colleagues.

‘‘Were my family members inherently bad . . . orwas it something else at play?’’