Nikki Kaye at the Currach Irish Pub on Great Barrier Island in January 2022. Photo / Audrey Young
Nikki Kaye at the Currach Irish Pub on Great Barrier Island in January 2022. Photo / Audrey Young
Opinion by Audrey Young
Audrey Young is the NZ Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018. She was political editor from 2003 to 2021.
She was talking about the people who had continued to check in on her after her sudden departure frompolitics and having served 53 days as its deputy leader to Todd Muller.
It was easy to see why she felt loved. She was energetic, passionate, clever and full of fun. She came from a close family and had a loyal set of friends. Her political mentors, including Sir John Key, were helping her adjust to a new life and hoping to harness that seemingly infinite well of energy on boards inside and outside New Zealand.
She would work with anyone who shared her particular goal at the time as she did with former Green MP Kevin Hague on social issues and Labour’s Chris Hipkins on education issues.
She won the former Labour stronghold of Auckland Central because of her hard work and because she was probably the most acceptable Tory they had ever been presented with.
She was a fantastically flawed politician. She threw herself into whatever she was doing, sometimes to the point of obsession. As Key put it, she was among the most intense people he had met.
Nothing was simple to her. She would over-prepare and possibly over-think issues as a minister and she often answered a question by beginning: “Four things…”
She believed in belief. When she supported Vic Crone in becoming mayor of Auckland in 2016, she bet me a carton of wine that Crone would win. Not long later, she stood aside as a minister after discovering she had breast cancer. She was still on leave at the time of the local government elections when a package arrived in the office – half a dozen of the best wines from part of her electorate, Waiheke Island, and Jenny’s Tamarind Chutney.
She returned to politics with even more zest for life and doing the things she enjoyed with the people she loved most.
She had barely been in the Education portfolio when the 2017 election result cut short her ministerial career.
She and Simon Bridges had been identified early as the standout MPs of their generation – one a devoutly urban liberal and the other a hardcore provincial conservative. It was because of Nick Smith’s resignation from Cabinet in March 2012 that Bridges got a head-start over her in being appointed a minister. But they both entered Cabinet at the same time, at the start of 2013.
They each understood their importance to the two wings of the party and had respect for the other, but not steadfast loyalty. In Opposition, she was one of the ringleaders in the leadership coup against Bridges in the 2020 election year, knowing she would be deputy to Muller.
Nikki Kaye and Simon Bridges were the outstanding MPs of their generation, seen here at Parliament in February 2016. Photo / Audrey Young
When Muller got off to a shaky start, and Kaye seemed more sure-footed, questions were asked about why she hadn’t put herself up for the leadership. She was inspirational but Nikki was not leadership material. She did not have the temperament and while she was embraced by the party, she was probably way too liberal to ever lead it.
She and Muller did give us some priceless moments particularly the first caucus run in which Muller was being put through the wringer over why he had no Māori on his front bench. That was when Nikki piped up with those immortal and erroneous words: Paul Goldsmith is Ngāti Porou.
She was the only politician I tried to talk out of retiring (I probably would have tried with Bridges, too, if I’d had advance warning). She made the decision not long after the shattering experience of Muller’s resignation, and amid the carnage she and her conspirators had created.
But she was resolute, as she was with so much, and with her decision to stay out of politics. She left behind a private member’s bill on teaching a second language in primary schools for which she had gained the support of Labour, the Greens and Act. It is to National’s eternal shame that it did not do more with the bill.
Nikki Kaye on her piece of land on Great Barrier Island where she built a modular house. Photo / Audrey Young
After a year, I thought she had been given enough time to lie low and suggested a novel assignment. It would allow me to visit her spiritual home, Great Barrier Island, for the first time with her as a guide, and to let readers catch up with what she had been doing outside politics. Surprisingly, she agreed.
It was one of the most fun assignments ever, not least because of her chance encounter with Lorde. Lorde ended up sitting next to us at the pub in Tryphena and Nikki re-introduced herself to Lorde, having previously met her in a lift in Sydney with Taylor Swift, as you do. She showed me all over the island including the piece of bush she had bought and her plans to build a modular house on it.
Nikki was nervous though. She knew she had no control over what was going to be written. We had barely got out of the airport before she asked what I was going to write. She need not have worried, then or now. She was loved and admired, flaws and all.
