Always looking at the benefits

Judith Collins says she has learned to be diplomatic within the National Party ranks. Picture / Kenny Rodger

The first thing you have to say to Judith Collins, National's new spokeswoman for welfare, is "Congratulations." The second is: "Is that appropriate?" Because although Collins says "thank you", and "Yes, it is. Certainly',' she can hardly be seen to be jumping for joy. She has gained the portfolio at the expense of her "buddy in parliament" Katherine Rich.

So while Collins is "happy to have it, of course", she is all too aware that this is "complicated. Yes, but we don't own portfolios and people change portfolios all the time".

Still, she most certainly did not have a glass of champers to celebrate, and "I didn't get all excited because I thought, well, 'obviously there are issues around it and it won't be something that's just like easy as anything. Because there's obviously other things going on'."

You could say that. The issues around Rich's sacking have meant that the issues meant to be in the news - the content of Don Brash's Orewa II speech - have been largely overshadowed.

Not that you would know this talking to Collins. She is so relentlessly, infuriatingly positive that within about ten minutes of sitting down with her I am rolling my eyes. This simply encourages her.

I'm asking her about the mood in the National Party. These must be, I say, strange times. There has been what Miss Positivity calls "a bit of a break in the ranks, not very much. A teeny weeny bit". There has been the perception that if you are a woman MP in National and you disagree with leader Don, then it's bye bye baby.

Oh, never mind all of that. For Collins, "it's always fun times, never a dull moment. I'm not focusing too much on the little hiccups". Her clouds all have lovely silver linings, because, she says, her beatific smile firmly in place, "the great thing is looking for the positive. And the positive side is that this, ha, little issue has actually kept the Labour Party, the PM and her state of the nation speech, off the front page of every major daily."

Yes, but you guys were on the front pages for the wrong reasons, weren't you? "Oh, yes," she says blithely, "but looking at the positive ... she wasn't even there."

People accuse her of being overly optimistic, she says. I can't think why. "When I go to Parliament, if people ask me how I am, I never say 'fine' because fine means nothing much. So I always say 'magnificent, fantastic, I'm having a fantastic day'."

She's going on about Orewa II being "definitely a success" and when I ask at what level, she says "oh, in the polls". And the NBR poll, which had National as having lost a couple of points? "What NBR poll?" she says. "I just ignore anything negative and move on."

To her great amusement, my eyeballs are by now stuck firmly in the top of their sockets. What an annoying person you must be to see first thing in the morning, I say. She takes this as a great compliment: "I think I am."

She likes a good scrap; enjoys being described as "pugnacious". She is the youngest in a family of four very rowdy siblings and their even rowdier parents. Her mother was almost completely deaf and was the loudest of the lot.

The family farmed in Walton, which is between Morrinsville and Matamata - I had to ask and she said "what a thing to ask. Walton's mountain, of course". She describes herself "working class, cow cockie's daughter"; they were a Labour family. Collins, as a stroppy young thing, says she made her mother join the Labour Party: "One of my silly moves." She has rectified this since: she is now a stroppy older thing and her siblings are now members of the Nats. I feel they would have little choice in the matter but she maintains she is not really very bossy and is the "most mild of my sisters". I'm not sure I could cope with being in a room with the lot of them.

After the last election in which National did abysmally, I spent a day with Collins in her electorate in which she did very well. She was outspoken about the party, and scathing about the campaign. She says she used to get her knuckles rapped a bit "but I've moved past that now".

What she is scathing about now is being accused of being a mouthpiece of Brash. "As if." But she says she does try "to be slightly more diplomatic within the party now". She has learned, or so she says, "that just because I have a view maybe it's not necessary for the entire world to share that view - just at the moment".

She thinks that "sometimes I can be a bit tough in the House and a bit tough in select committees. I try to balance that with a bit of understanding that the people I'm dealing with are actually human, and they have feelings too."

This is a sarcastic rejoinder to the accusations that she is a hard-right, beneficiary basher. She'd prefer to be thought of as a compassionate politician in the tradition of Mickey Savage. That, I tell her, is going to be a hard one to sell. "Not at all," she says. So we could run a headline saying: Collins Returns To Labour Roots? "Well, yeah. It's just the Labour Party has lost the faith. Ha ha."

For all her self-professed liking for a good stoush, she is - already, in her first term - too good a politician to get into one with a journalist. It wasn't for lack of trying on my part.

When I say that coverage of Orewa II became about another woman MP getting the chop for disagreeing with the leader she goes into a spiel about how Labour had to demote John Tamihere and Lianne Dalziel. I say that all her lot have to do to get the chop is have a minor disagreement with the leader - oh, and be a sheila. She says, mildly, "look, when you're leader you've got to take the tough decisions". Labour might have more women MPs but, she says, "most are very quiet, at least ours do things". That's right, I say, they do things: open their mouths and get the chop. "Oh rubbish," she says, but she's still smiling - if a little tigerishly.

I ask, just to wind her up a bit, if she has plans to roll Brash.

That has her rolling her eyes. "Certainly not," she says. What, never? She sighs a bit at this and says "leaders come and leaders go; spokesmen come and spokesmen go. And, I mean, I'm very happy with his leadership".

She has told me off a bit, in a teasing sort of way, for calling her "stroppy". This is, she says, "really a sexist term. Have you ever used "stroppy" with a man?"

Now, at the end of the interview, she says, "Don't be too brutal, Michele".

I tell her that's sexist: she wouldn't have said that to a male reporter.

"Oh I would," she says. "I would have said it like this" - she puts on a coy little face and flutters her eye lashes.

She coos: "They underestimate me."

I doubt this very much. Good as she is at looking cute, she is so much better at looking stroppy.