She's the boss: Christine Rankin

Christine Rankin still has a fondness for flashy earrings, the bigger the better. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Christine Rankin says, "I think a lot of people have thought for a long time that I'm really tough and I don't feel anything. Well, I do. But I have my ways of managing that".

I'm sure a lot of people do think just that. A lot of people think a lot of things about her. She is one of those people who doesn't need any introduction, does she? But it is quite extraordinary that she is one of them, when you think about it. Everyone knows what she looks like because she came to be an odd sort of celebrity (well, she is. She was on Dancing with the Stars) when she was, of all things, a public servant.

She has not been a public servant since 2001. She lost her job as head of Work and Income, and in the aftermath came what she calls "my trial" when she took a $1.25 million grievance claim against State Services Commissioner Michael Wintringham, alleging political interference in the decision not to reappoint her. She lost the case and said at the time, to a journalist, à la Greta Garbo, "I want to be left alone."

She doesn't now want to be left alone. Her name has been in the headlines again this week as one of the instigators of the three-minute silence against child abuse.

Well, that is what she was supposed to be in the headlines for. Then she said that people might like to stop their cars, wherever they were, and get out and be silent. A couple of twits did that on the harbour bridge, displeasing Transit New Zealand. Then she went on the telly and said the things she likes to say about child abuse and on her way out there was an exchange with TVNZ security guard Louis Rawnsley, who has since been sacked.

She is the chief executive of a trust called For the Sake of Our Children, which she does part-time, and she runs a business with her son. But what is she now? A sort of social worker? "No. I believe I am a leader."

What she used to get called was a cult leader, which is not perhaps complimentary. "Yeah, yeah, absolutely," she scoffs. "They said I had a cult leadership style and that's because New Zealanders don't understand leadership and I think that's just amazing. To love and inspire and motivate your people and know them and be out with them and care what they think and feel and what they're struggling with and fix it for them. I can't see how that's a cult."

I am sitting here, listening to this and thinking, "well, it's hard to see there's too much difference in what a leader might say and a cult leader might say". Although I don't actually say it; I thought she might have heard it. She looks at me and says "you're looking at me very cynically".

She doesn't seem to mind this very much, the looking or the description. She's had all the looks before, and heard far worse descriptions. I'm not one of those people who will end up thinking she doesn't feel anything, but I do think she's tough.

Controversy does rather seem to dog her. I wondered if she'd given any thought to this, and why it might be, and she says, "I don't know if it's that I do say things other people don't say. I do things differently. I absolutely accept that. But in the New Zealand way of doing things that would mean if I was going to not be controversial or not be myself I would do what everybody else does, which is fit in and be quiet.

"Because you're not allowed to be different in New Zealand. It's a risky thing to do."

What I was getting at, really, was that her latest controversies, the car stopping suggestion; the sacking of the doorman, have rather taken the focus off the campaign. Did she get the car thing wrong?

"I got it right. Yeah, I'm really happy with that." But she ended up getting a lot of flak for it. "Oh, well, you get flak for all kinds of things when you stand up for what you believe in."

AS for Rawnsley's sacking, "I'm not talking about him. You can talk about him all you like but I'm not." But there is an irony here, I suggest, in that the former head of Winz, whose job it was to get people jobs, is now involved in an incident in which a man has lost his job.

"As I say, it's nothing to do with me. Talk to TVNZ. You can ask the questions but I'm not going to talk about it."

I do ask quite a few more and she doesn't answer them, and I ask another one, just to be annoying, right at the end and she laughs and says, "you just keep trying, don't you?"

Well, it is my job. She has an odd attitude to the media and thinks they have to be kept in their place, which may be partly because she had journalists on her doorstep during her trial. Mostly I think it's because she is very, very bossy. And she is, she says, very bossy.

She bossily told me she wouldn't tell me whether she was going to stand for mayor.

"I'm not telling you what I'm going to stand for." So she is. "No, no, I didn't say that at all." She will tell me she is most certainly not going to join up with Steve Crow's campaign, as was suggested in a Sunday paper recently.

"That's the most appalling thing. I would never have anything to do with somebody who was associated with porn."

But he was at the silence? "That was an absolutely open thing and anyone can be there. I would never have a view about who should and shouldn't be there. Every single New Zealander has a right to be heard and good on him."

What funny things she says. She would, no doubt, say she says things that are different, so maybe that's it. A lot of people thought that a silence as a way of drawing attention to child abuse was an odd, not to say contradictory, way of going about it. But she says it's just picking holes, and that people could have sung, or made a lot of noise, or done whatever they wanted. She doesn't see any contradiction, but then, she wouldn't.

She was hit when she was a child, badly, by her father, but she says, "looking back, I wouldn't swap any of it. I'm truly grateful for all these experiences because they truly do make you the person you are and that sounds awfully twee, but it's true".

It might sound twee; it also sounds like a very odd thing for a campaigner against child abuse to say.

Perhaps it's some Buddhist thing. She's a practitioner of Japanese Buddhism, which is about self-growth and knowledge and becoming a better person.

Something like that. I'm not quite sure why she feels the need to be a better person when she doesn't care what anyone else thinks of her. Most people, if you told them they might be perceived as racist, would be upset. She just says, "it's not my concern".

Well, it is, if, as she keeps saying, Maori feature heavily in child abuse statistics, they're the people she must be trying to reach. So the perception can't be helpful.

"Those statistics are there and we as a nation, we're too afraid to say that because we're going to be labelled as racist."

She is not trying to be evasive. She will tell me, straight up, that she is no longer married to husband number three. Three!

"When I meet them I marry them but I don't do that any more."

I wasn't going to mention the earrings. We all know she wears them, the bigger the better. But she was taking them on and off so I asked if they were hurting.

"I always take them on and off. I have a reaction to the metal because I wear rubbish, as you can see."

What a peculiar thing to do. "Why do you think that's peculiar?" Because she's allergic but persists in wearing them. "I love them. Why shouldn't I wear them?" Because she's allergic to them. "I'm not allergic to them all the time, though."

And it is this little conversation, about earrings, that about sums up an hour in the odd life of Christine Rankin, who sees nothing peculiar in wearing something that gives her a rash.