KEY POINTS:
Leadership is easy to spot. It is naturally interested in everyone and everything, intelligent but modest about it. Look around a university campus any year and chances are you will see a few national figures of the future.
Note the name Kate Sutton. Four years ago she was
president of the Auckland University Students' Association. Now, aged just 27, she is the women's vice-president of the Labour Party with a seat on its New Zealand council.
Her election, with others in the party organisation and its list selections this year, is seen as a rejuvenation of the party as deliberate as the feminist infusion of Labour in the late 1970s.
Sutton ran against an incumbent of Helen Clark's age, "a lovely woman", she says, "who had served the party well. But it was a time in my life when I decided to give it a go. It didn't divide the party but did bring a lot of energy to it".
She is not going to Parliament this time - she is carrying Labour's banner in wealthy Epsom - but she will when she is ready.
She is of the generation that has grown up with Rogernomics, come of age under Labour, took out student loans, does not expect a job for life. They plot their careers for change.
For the moment she is working in the corporate world, high in an Auckland downtown tower with a stunning view of the waterfront. It is not where she expected to be when she graduated in politics in 2004 and looked for "a policy job that wasn't in Wellington".
Born and raised in Glendowie, she is still in no hurry to go south. "I just love Auckland. This city is magic. There's so much about it I love, only an Aucklander would understand that."
She found her first job with a not-for-profit organisation in South Auckland. The City of Manukau Educational Trust did "a variety of projects, a youth transition service which helps school leavers into further study or employment. Also a project working to get funding and resources for early education for centres serving Pacific Island children".
By then, student politics had given her a taste for elections and she had topped the poll for the Tamaki community board, whose bailiwick extends to Otahuhu.
The combined work was an eye-opener for a Glendowie girl. "South Auckland really showed me what life was about. I was meeting people who had never been over the harbour bridge."
She recalls it with such relish I wonder why she left.
"I'd been at the trust three years and I was thinking, you know, typical Generation Y, what's next?
"I didn't want to work for the Government because I knew I wanted to be quite involved in this election and being a vice-president of the Labour Party limits what you can do. You are flying your flag, your colours are out there.
"But also in the private sector that can be difficult for employers who know what your politics are and that you potentially are going to be quite involved in the election.
"I'd worked with Landco on their Stonefields development because it's just outside Tamaki Community Board's area and it happened they were looking for someone who could help them understand councils a little bit better."
So here she is in Landco's 28th floor suite, hired for her command of public policy issues, Auckland growth problems, local government and potential public-private partnerships.
Besides Stonefields, the company is doing a development at Long Bay on North Shore and Ngunguru in Northland where she is negotiating a land swap with the Department of Conservation.
"Developers can be seen as bad guys," she says, "but there are some developers out there who are working for the good of communities."
It is her job to help convince communities of this.
"But I have to believe it. It is not a spin job - I couldn't do that."
And if the company should happen to do something she believes not to be for the public good?
"So far that hasn't happened and I've made it very clear that if it does, I don't want to be part of it."
We are talking a day or two after Labour has promised to abolish the parental means test on student allowances, a move she describes as "fantastic", almost up there with the suspension of interest on student loans at the last election.
"I'd spent 2004 campaigning against the loan scheme and in 2005 the Labour Government made loans interest-free (during years of study). That was magical really, quite fantastic. If I hadn't believed before that people could come together and achieve something, I certainly believed it from that point on."
The universal allowance announcement, though, poses a difficulty because she has also been elected to the Auckland University Council and university vice-chancellors have called for the money to be better spent on educational improvements.
"Of course I have a perspective from advocating for students, and being in the party. But now from a council perspective we have to look at how we get more funding from the Government and from private research and development."
If forced to make a choice she supports the universal allowance. "I believe it's about those who are in need and them having access to university first. It's about saying education is a public good."
I'm guessing she didn't qualify for student allowance?
"No, my parents earned too much money. But I lived away from home from age 17. Both my parents were very supportive but this is the situation, right: I'm very independent. I worked in a paint shop. For me the principle is, if students are the only group in society that has to borrow to live, how is that fair and equitable?"
It is hard to say what changes her generation will make.
"The people coming through, like Phil (Twyford), like Jacinda (Ardern, 20 on the list), Conor Roberts in Rodney, have a different perspective on the world.
"We've worked in the private sector. We are children of Rogernomics so we know the good and bad parts of that. We are different in upbringing to Helen Clark and Phil Goff and it will be interesting to see how that plays out."
But the motivation sounds the same.
"It's a matter of getting up in the morning with that fire that says every New Zealander should have the privileges I've had. I will go into Parliament for that and fight for that. That's what it's about for me."
