I once heard the story of a very well-known figure in New Zealand public life who had crashed and burned in a spectacular, crazy blaze, and they approached a publisher with the notion of writing a tell-all memoir. The publisher declined. They did not think it would sell. They also not did not think that the timing was right, that it was too soon. “The problem,” the famous person was told, “is that you don’t have a redemption arc yet.” What a thing to be told about your own life! What are you gonna do, write a note to self on a Post-It note, Must get redeemed? But the exact same problem confronts the new memoir by former Labour minister Kiri Allan.
The angle or point of her book Go Hard or Go Home is that she crashed and burned. We really only remember her for a single incident. Her opening chapter dives right in to the night she pranged her car in Oriental Bay, Wellington, on July 23, 2023, failed a breath test, was arrested, and ended her political career when she resigned from parliament the next morning. She writes, “The charge was a minor driving offence but the crime felt akin to murder and was portrayed as such in the public domain.” It’s portrayed as such in her own book, too, with the drama of the opening chapter, and another recreation of it later in the memoir. “I tried to kill myself,” she writes, and then comes up with the first but certainly not the last everything-including-the-kitchen sink sentences in her memoir: “With the tears tumbling down my face, the rain falling and adrenaline pumping through my veins, with me wanting to end it all, I took a corner badly and crashed into a parked ute.” I love the way she packs it all in and ends the sentence with an apposite thud. She appreciates the seriousness of the situation, and the tabloid farce she has created: “The Minister of Justice was being arrested.” She goes into what happened, and what happened immediately afterwards, in almost forensic detail. But something is missing. There is an absence. She frankly and openly admits fault, but there is no redemption arc in sight because she is still kicking up a fuss about her arrest, still moaning about it, still playing the victim card—always crashing in the same car.
And so she comes across the same way she always came across in her brief, vivid political career, as a bumptious fuck-off-if-you-don’t-like-it flake. It’s kind of admirable. Allan adheres to a you-do-you-Boo ethic, is committed to honesty and telling it like she sees it. As for flakiness, she really had no choice than to follow a lifelong path as an eccentric and an outsider. Her childhood was institutionally crazy: “My parents were church elders, part of a Pentecostal church during the height of the 1980s’ wave of the Holy Spirit. Praying in tongues, prayer over demonic powers and stamping out Satan were all part of my daily vernacular. I learnt all the books of the Bible in order, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, by the age of five.” That way lies madness, but also a restless, active intelligence.
She eventually left the church, and left school early. Here’s another of her great sentences, charging around the page: “My efforts at trying to be a Māori had failed and I was now 16 and working at KFC in Mount Maunganui with dreams of getting a job at the mill. Drinking with my cousins and mates after touch, the Waikato drinkers at one end of the table and the Lion Red drinkers at the other end of the table – that was my main interaction with Māori at that point in my life.” This passage, a little bit later, is even better: “I’d graduated from KFC to Rebel Sport, to postie, to hammer hand on a building site. I was living the dream: playing rugby, touch, league, working enough to buy beers, gas and phone credit to get me to the next week and making out with a few girls here and there.” Dame Fiona Kidman worked on Allan’s memoir, and I can imagine the novelist’s delight when Allan writes with such verve and good humour.
I’m likely imagining it and just trying to colonise some land in her story but I think I remember Allan when she worked at that funky little bar on Ponsonby Rd, Grand Central. It was loud and chatty, an intellectual notch above the mindless bourgeois yap at SPQR and Prego further down the road; Allan tells the amazing story of a regular patron at Grand Central who made good his promise of helping her get a place in law school. Huzzah to Professor Mark Henaghan, Dean of University of Otago’s Faculty of Law. He changed her life, put her on the road that led to Parliament.
Allan ended up studying at Victoria University. She interned in the Prime Minister’s office during the Helen Clark administration. She worked in criminal law for a small while but her social conscience directed her elsewhere. “I started to look for another area of law that would enable me to advocate for those who needed a voice.” She joined Kāhui Legal and performed Treaty work. Again, she lets rip an on-your-marks-get-set-go sentence that summarises a life lived in haste: “I would go on to work at that firm for five years, marry Natalie, one of the lawyers who worked there, and together we would go on to set up the Bay of Plenty office of Kāhui Legal when we were finally ready to return home and start a family.” But it might have served the book better to sometimes slow down, to stop and smell the roses or whatever, or just look at who else was around; there is very little sense of Allan observing anyone else other than herself. There is nothing of her romantic life after her marriage ends and there is nothing about why the marriage ended. Ain’t none of our business, I suppose, but it is a memoir, so where are the, you know, memories?
She also elides her years in Parliament. There isn’t a scrap of gossip in her book. No one in government gets a serve, not even that hapless whipping post, David Cunliffe, unpleasantly ganged up on by Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson in their memoirs of the same place at the same time. Allan prefers to write about her workload. But there is only so much you want to read about the Provincial Growth Fund, and her political philosophy is not exactly intellectually stimulating: “Our country needs a clear formalised direction with our communities at the centre,” etc. She pads out the book by reprinting a few thousand words of a boring campaign diary she wrote for The Spinoff. Her promotion to Cabinet in Labour’s second term finally sees Allan write something interesting about workplace tensions, and takes us behind closed doors: “I had heard rumblings that Jacinda had been making enquiries about me to some of my senior colleagues. I would later find out that almost all of the Māori and Pacific Island ministers from the previous term would oppose my ascendance to cabinet, except for Willie Jackson.”
Jackson emerges from the book with credit, and she also says nice things about Chris Finlayson and Nikki Kaye. Michael Wood is misspelled as Michael Woods. Ardern comes and goes, with nary a moment of reflection or assessment. Maybe Allan was too busy to notice. Again, there’s a sense of moving fast, of volatility. “I knew I had come into politics for a good time, not a long time. I was there to hustle hard, make change, get out.” Certainly we all know that she got out, but how much did she achieve? On her role as associate minister of the arts: “One of my good friends started telling me how screwed Creative New Zealand funding was and that the arts sector needed a major overhaul.” Nothing has changed. On her role as conservation minister: “In my opinion, there are two types of conservationists: those who want to lock up the conservation estate and throw away the key, and those who want to rejuvenate biodiversity to bring back the native birds – in order to eat them. I’m of the second ilk.” What?
One journalist gets a serve. Allan utters the two words that strike fear in every corridor of parliament: Andrea Vance. It was Vance who broke the story (or “unsubstantiated claim”, as Allan prefers) of workplace bullying. Allan derides the allegations as not just a nonsense but also a racist nonsense. The claims, she writes, were “based on the testimony of those who could not stand to be told their work did not meet my expectations. Imagine being a senior public servant and being told your work was unacceptable by a young, Māori, female minister. How dare I? Despite the allegations Vance made, she could find no one to go on record alleging I had bullied them.” Well, define “bullying”, but that final sentence is inconsistent with the earlier sentences in her paragraph. At the very least, she sounds…difficult to work for, a bit…challenging. As she writes elsewhere, “I had no time for ineptitude or incompetence…I detest people I consider useless.” Oh fuck off. She was briefly regarded as a future Labour leader. “In every poll, I was sitting at second. It didn’t make sense to me.” Me neither.
The book’s most affecting and powerful section deals with the stress, the pressures, and her own fragile mental health that eventually culminated in the crash on Oriental Bay heard around New Zealand. With courage and candour, she takes you behind not just closed doors but behind the veneer she tried to maintain as a functioning government minister. After the Vance story broke, she lost it. “I had just concluded the estimates select committee hearing, which I managed with my usual directness. I was over policy but the opposition had decided to turn the hearing into one about the allegations of bullying. The chair of the committee ruled that the line of questioning was out of scope but I allowed the questioning as it had to be addressed somewhere. I had four media stand-ups on the bullying allegations that day, plus the select committee hearing. When I got back to my office, I went into an extreme panic attack and then a full-blown breakdown. Colleagues came to assist and just sat with me while I was breaking but it was a no-brainer I was pretty screwed at this point.”
Yep. She writes of cutting her arms, bouts of self-loathing (“how shit I was, how fuckin’ useless I was, how I was nothing but a failure, how I fucked everything and everyone up”), going on meds, a five-hour phone call with a mental health professional to help her come down off the ledge. She was wanting to make an appointment with death. She acknowledges she was fortunate that things ended with an appointment in Oriental Bay. The prang, the cops, the headlines—she was able to walk away from the thing that was killing her, politics.
It was only a minor driving offence. But Allan drags the pages back to the scene of the crime and argues at length that the police denied her the right to call a lawyer. “The police and I had discussions and I immediately requested to speak to a lawyer. The police undertook a roadside breath-alcohol screening test, which I failed, and again I requested to speak to a lawyer. In fact, all I would say at that point is that I wanted to speak to a lawyer….I knew I was entitled to speak to a lawyer as soon as I requested one. However, the police said I could speak to one at the station and, after I reminded them it was a legal right to request a lawyer, they arrested me for failure to accompany them under the Land Transport Act….They read me my rights, including that I had the right to a lawyer. As soon as they read me my rights, I requested a lawyer again. This right was again declined…The arrest was quite physical – three police officers slammed me on the bonnet of the police car. My friend was so distraught by that stage that she had started weeping; this was after reinforcing my requests, confirming my right to speak to a lawyer without delay.”
We got it the first time. She wanted to speak to a lawyer. Still, it’s the business of a memoir to relitigate a trauma, and the pages of the crime of the century at Oriental Bay take us there in a long, exhilarating passage, the cops cuffing the Minister of Justice on the bonnet of a cop car beneath the glare of the streetlights in the rain with the black water of Wellington harbour licking the seawall and, in the distance, the dark forests of Tinakori Hill, looming above the dark fortress of the Beehive.
Allan got out alive. She writes of recovery at a yoga retreat in Thailand. “Now I work with marae up and down the country to assess and address their climate-adaptation needs. There are 770 operational marae across the country and 80 per cent of them are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Some will have to be relocated, others lifted onto piles or stockbanks –and all of these actions cost immeasurable amounts of money.” So maybe the book does have a redemption arc. Allan can direct her considerable energies and talents to achieve something real. You get a sense of her charisma in her book, of someone special, complicated, self-regarding, passionate, smart, at heart a GC with more life experience than most politicians, whose only real failure in her years in that dark fortress was to have a good time.
Go Hard or Go Home by Kiri Allan (Penguin, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide.
