Labour finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds during her questioning of Finance Minister Nicola Willis in Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Barbara Edmonds is poised to draw on her undoubted forensic skills as a former top-notch tax lawyer to expose any “smoke and mirror” tricks in National’s first Budget.
Next Thursday will be the first full-scale public test Edmonds has faced since she was appointed Labour’s shadow finance minister three months ago.
A self-confessed pragmatist with a practised eye for detail, she is relishing the opportunity to pick apart Nicola Willis’ debut Budget as Finance Minister.
To Edmonds, Willis is a “consummate politician”.
“I have respect for Nicola. We are both women in politics in financial roles. She’s got a hard job. But I make it really clear, we see the world through very different lenses.
“And that just comes down to our life experiences.”
Edmonds says her own passion is ignited when she has to fight for something - issues like making benefit changes “bring fire to my belly, having a really clear purpose, being intentional and using it in a way to portray a message”.
The pair are both 43. There are other similarities – but also differences.
Edmonds, a mother of eight, is the child of immigrant Samoan parents. A former head girl at Carmel College, she was a tax lawyer at Inland Revenue with secondments to two Revenue Ministers under National before entering politics as a Labour MP.
Willis, a mother of four, is the daughter of a prominent Wellington lawyer and a former parliamentary journalist. A political adviser to Sir John Key, and before that Sir Bill English, she spent time at Fonterra before beginning her own political career as a National list MP.
Both have excelled in their careers.
Both also have stay-at-home husbands, which enables them to pursue their political careers safe in the knowledge their families are intact.
In Parliament, Edmonds has adopted a methodical style as she marks Willis.
Careful to lay the groundwork before going into political overdrive, she has yet – and may never - develop Willis’ verve, chutzpah and sheer political gall. Willis is a future Prime Minister in the making, Edmonds concedes.
“She’s highly experienced through the debating world and in the chamber,” says Edmonds. “So, for me it’s genuinely just being comfortable with my style of how I’m approaching this.
“And my style is very boring, but it’s very considered and going on the information you have at hand.”
Her job is to puncture the Finance Minister’s credibility.
This week Edmonds used a pre-Budget positioning speech to assert her opponent may not be able to deliver tax relief without increasing debt or worsening inflation. As for spending increases, she questions whether they are “really a meaningful budget increase or just what was set aside by the previous Labour Government bundled together to make it look big, plus a little bit more that doesn’t even meet inflation?”
These are issues commentators and economists will also be pondering.
For Willis, Thursday is a big day months in the making.
The Beehive publicity machine has been in overdrive: dual interviews with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon - National’s political yin and yang - along with pre-Budget announcements and speeches. And Willis never tires of teasing journalists: ”just x sleeps” until all will be revealed.
For Edmonds, the Budget is also a speed test. Opposition politicians do not get much advance warning and have to mount their parliamentary demolition job – almost on the fly. She says it helps to know what to look for. She says Labour will have a really good team on hand with the groundwork done well in advance.
“You have to have a plan of where to look.”
Talking points include: whether there are income threshold changes for personal taxes or actual tax cuts; the debt track and path to surplus; the impact on overall revenue of reinstating interest deductibility for landlords; and how infrastructure investment is treated and any new revenue measures. These will all have to be weighed in quick smart time.
Edmonds is no political neophyte.
She had already chalked up strong credentials working for three Revenue Ministers as an IRD secondee before she successfully stood for Labour in the Mana seat in 2020.
“It really is a privilege working in a minister’s office,” says Edmonds. “You really get to see - at least from a public sector side - some inner workings of how things get negotiated.”
Her first two roles with Revenue Ministers were under the National Government in 2016.
Edmonds enjoyed working in Michael Woodhouse’s office – “it was a great team atmosphere”. He was from a family of nine children and understood the personal pressures Edmonds faced as a mother of eight.
With Judith Collins, she learnt a lot about excellence. “She set really high standards of her officials and the type of advice you’d get.
“A lot of that is because she had a really strong political staff … but it was a high-expectations office.”
Labour’s Stuart Nash reached out on the change of government and she shifted away from the public service to becoming the new Revenue Minister’s political adviser. It was an opportunity to “see behind the other curtain”.
This included preparing Nash for interviews with Newstalk ZB (“he’d say something on Mike Hosking and we might have to spend Wednesday basically tidying that up because he’s so much of an open book”).
What she learned from Nash’s office is that when Cabinet Ministers have to make trade-offs and really hard decisions, “you’re not going to make everybody happy”.
The hardest role she had was driving detail for Nash (who also held the police portfolio) on the Labour Government’s gun reforms after the March 2019 mosque attack.
“The timeframe in which the Prime Minister wanted to do them was basically ‘we wanted to do it as soon as possible’,” she says.
“Those were long hours, very long hours, and I didn’t see my family much during that time. But that was the sacrifice that they understood that we had to make as a family for me to basically do a good job for the wider good.
“We had to negotiate with New Zealand First, a lot as well - making sure that your coalition partner was comfortable, basically briefing them just as much as we had to brief our own Labour colleagues and other leadership.
“I do have a lot of time for them [New Zealand First] because of the relationship we had built throughout the coalition. "
Edmonds is the first woman to hold the senior finance role in Labour. But she is arguably also the best qualified of recent Labour finance chiefs.
Edmonds gained her grounding in Inland Revenue’s tax policy unit under the mentorship of former Deputy Inland Revenue Commissioner Robin Oliver, who later encouraged her to enter politics instead of pursuing her aim at the time of heading a government department.
Edmonds then moved to a legal position at IRD where her role was to ensure that the tax laws were being applied consistently. “So, we provided determinations, standard practice statements – it was a very legal, clear interpretation of the tax laws that have been made,” she says.
Edmonds also got to manage the team for a period, which she says was almost the perfect training ground for going into a minister’s office. It taught her to delegate tasks, how to read things quickly, provide a view and then push them on to the next part of the decision-making process.
Earlier, as a new graduate, she had liaised with the Law Society, partners of all the big firms and the Treasury to form a view on the taxation dispute rules. She still has strong connections in these areas.
In the 2020-2022 Parliament, she served as the chairwoman of Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee, later serving in short order as Minister of Revenue, Economic Development, Internal Affairs, and Pacific Peoples, as well as Associate Minister of Finance, Cyclone Recovery and Housing before Labour’s defeat.
“I loved my ministerial office. Ten months. Nine portfolios. I was sort of jumping about,” she says. “We did the best we could in the time that we were given. It was difficult in the sense that because I came at the end of the term of government, I was pretty much just inside looking after other people’s policies that had been approved.”
Going through her first Budget was an experience, “having been involved with budgets for over 10 years, and then all of a sudden basically bidding for my own policies”.
Edmonds has been through a steep learning curve as shadow finance minister.
Once the Budget is done and dusted, she will be focusing on Labour’s fiscal vision in preparation for the 2026 election.
“Obviously, I’ve got a good foundation for it. Probably a lot more than other people would have,” she emphasises. “In many ways, I’m really enjoying actually the ability to have time to think about policy development.”
It is obvious she would like to see more indirect taxation – capital gains and/or wealth taxes are under discussion but the options have to be worked up through Labour’s Policy Council.
Her challenge is to stay grounded in her community.
“I’m still a mum. So you stay on the side of the rugby sideline, young 5-year-olds come up and give you a kiss and a hug and want to take a selfie with you.
“I believe once you become disconnected with the different communities you’re serving, that’s when you lose touch. And that’s actually probably when the time you need to move on.”
New Zealander with colourful history finds himself in third continent's courts.