Michele Hewitson Interview: Metiria Turei

Metiria Turei's past roles include dressing up as a giant vagina. 'That was fun,' she says of her time in street theatre. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Nobody (except Sue Bradford, perhaps) seems to have a bad word to say about Metiria Turei, the co-leader of the Greens. She seems very nice, in that friendly Greenie way, but she must be a tough cookie because she won the co-leadership battle with Bradford in 2009.

She's been co-leader since then, and was supposed to represent that new face of the Greens. She might be expected, in an election year, to have upped her profile.

If she has, I haven't much noticed and neither, it seems, have the political commentators, given what's written, or not written, about her. But she is supposed to be a "colourful" character.

The Greens' media chap suggested I might like to interview her: the Greens were about to have their conference (held over Queen's Birthday weekend) and one of their candidates had suggested this idea to me some time ago and I'd blithely said that I was keen.

And why not? If you look at her CV, she looks interesting enough, in that way that is often referred to as colourful - which means wacky, by MPs' standards.

She got the huff this week with the Speaker - for ejecting Clare Curran from the debating chamber for wearing a Highlanders' rugby jersey - and walked out. This seemed a silly thing to make a stand over.

"Oh I just get so pissed off. He treats women ministers differently than he treats male ministers." And, as she pointed out gleefully later when I pointed out that she could do with a higher profile, "There you go. It was a good thing to do because it got me some media!"

Nothing very colourful seems to have happened at the Greens' conference except that she made a speech in which she said the prospect of the party going into coalition with National, or entering into a confidence and supply agreement with them was "highly unlikely".

This sort of shift - highly unlikely as it is that the Nats will need them - is a Very Big Deal for the Greens. And we now know that those nice Greens have been, gasp, fighting about this issue for some time. We know this because Sue Bradford wrote a blog saying so, and that the Greens had shifted towards the Right.

At least I know this. Turei says she hasn't read the blog - you'd have thought she'd have been curious, but apparently not - but that she has heard that Bradford is "very grumpy".

As she might be. They have known each other for 20 years and both came to politics through the unemployed rights movement. And then she did for her. "Yeah! Well, you know, that's the whole point of being in a competition ... Somebody was going to win and somebody was going to lose." She is not that nice. "I didn't feel any guilt or any shame."

She said, sarcastically, about the in-fighting, "That's right. We're not at all a political organisation that has hard political discussions, like every other political organisations." But when I asked how vicious this in-fighting got, she said, "I wasn't part of that."

How could she not be? "I wasn't. We had a lot of discussions about it. I wasn't part of the in-fighting that she saw." How could she not be? "Because I wasn't."

I still haven't got a clue what her new, improved, Green co-leader image is supposed to be. And I'm not sure that she does either. She says there was a lot of talk about this at the time and it was all "bullshit", based on her age and Bradford's age. I thought she was supposed to be the more moderate, less scary face of the Greens and, apparently, the one who doesn't do in-fighting.

Well, if she says so. She can certainly hold her own in a row, and she can happily start one. We had quite a heated set-to over her saying I'd said Bradford putting the knife in would be seen as a case of sour grapes. I hadn't said any such thing, I said. "No, you're wrong," she said, as though if she said I was wrong, that was the end of it.

The in-fighting which may or may not have happened was about this highly unlikely possibility of going with National. It is so highly unlikely, why didn't she advocate just ruling it out? "It's a fair question.

Because there are people in the party who want that possibility and there are people in the party who want that option closed completely." And she stands where? "Where am I? A pox on both their houses [National and Labour] is where I am."

Right, so, as she says: Highly unlikely. Which still doesn't explain why she doesn't rule it out. "The whole point of being there is to make sure that they can both be stopped doing the stuff that causes people harm and they will both do things that cause people harm if they don't have a moderating force and we are the only ones who can be a genuine moderating force, in my opinion."

She may be a genuine moderating force these days. She used to dress up as a giant vagina. I wish I didn't have to write that and I really wish I hadn't asked why.

"That was fun!" That was also, thank goodness, many years ago, when she was in an anarcho-feminist (no, I wasn't going to go there) street theatre group (which could be a definition of colourful, I suppose) called the Random Trollops. What sort of statement is made by dressing up as a giant vagina, exactly? "It's just another body part. It's kind of a fun one as well. Don't you think?"

What I thought was ugh, and, not wanting to get trapped in the equivalent of a performance of the Vagina Monologues, I moved things along very quickly, I can tell you. Although not quickly enough to prevent her assuring me that she wasn't always the vagina. "Sometimes I was the tongue."

She now, you may be relieved to hear, limits her creative side to playing the bass ukulele in a ukulele band called Martha. She is very enthusiastic about this and says they have "jams" where anyone can come along and sing or play rattles and "it's a really interesting community thing". At least it's good, wholesome fun - "people used to sing around the piano, they don't any more" - and doesn't involve dressing up as genitalia.

She certainly looks pretty ordinary, almost conservative, (comparatively speaking) these days. And she does not appear to possess, thank goodness, a wacky or even particularly colourful character.

She has a round smiley face and a sweet voice and talks in such a rush that it's difficult to dissect her sentences, which is probably not a great thing in a politician. She asked the photographer not to take pictures while she was talking because her mouth, she demonstrated, goes all sort of rubbery and turned down when she speaks.

It does a bit, and it also makes her look a lot tougher, in photographs, than she does when she's not talking. I'd never had noticed if she hadn't pointed it out and of course once I had noticed, it was impossible to stop noticing.

I rather liked her for pointing out her rubbery mouth. She says she doesn't know what her public image is, but she knows how she looks in pictures. Was she serious about not being photographed talking? She dropped it as soon as I said that, goodness, she was bossy, although she admits she can be.

As to how colourful she is, she does use some unusual language. She occasionally has, for example, what she calls"brain farts", a term you are unlikely to hear many politicians use. She phoned me back to ask a favour which was: could I please not repeat something she'd once said about her mum? This was a family joke, and affectionately meant, but she'd badly hurt her mother's feelings. So, okay.

But my question had been: why would she say such a thing? That was the brain farts, apparently. She also once said of her father (who died in 1995 at the age of 48) that he was a "very black" farm labourer. Why would she say that he was "very black"? Because he was, she said.

What a funny mix of ambition and Greeniness she is. She is not, by the way, one of those lifestyle Greens; she is a political Green.

This means that she is only Green, at home, the way most people are now. She uses (or rather her husband does, because he does all the housework) biodegradable detergent and that's about it.

She has been a corporate lawyer, with Simpson Grierson; she belonged to NORML and McGillicuddy Serious before the Greens. She "loved" smoking dope but gave it up at 21 because the bloke she was then with became "a shit" when he was stoned and she decided the only way to deal with him was for her to stop smoking. She says she hasn't smoked since.

She is married to Warwick Stanton, who comes from a "white, Presbyterian" old Remuera family. She has a child from a previous relationship; he has two. When he took her home to meet the folks, she was in her anarcho-femo stage. What must they have thought? She says they were all lovely and very welcoming.

She was grinning as she said this. Why was she? Because, she said, she was remembering that "apparently his mother said once that if she had tried to imagine the perfect woman for Warwick, she would never, ever, in her wildest dreams have imagined me! But she couldn't imagine anyone more perfect now ..."

She is capable of sounding very grown-up (she's 41) and earnest, especially when she is delivering one of her little lectures about power - the analysis of which is something she is very interested in but which I'll spare all of us. And then she writes "hi ya" and "awesome" in an email, and signs a text to a journalist she's never met with an x. Is she given to signing text messages to journalists she's never met with an x? (I can't imagine any other politician doing this.) Oh, she said, "just because I'm lazy."

She can't be bothered writing her full name and signing a message, "M" is a bit stark. She said, at one point - I'm fairly certain of this - "dude! Dude!" So it was like having coffee with a teenager one minute and a senior politician the next. This is a bit bewildering. I'm not sure if it makes her wacky.