At age 35, Alliance cabinet minister Laila Harre is a totally political animal who, as PETER CALDER discovers, has an instinct for survival that goes back to her childhood.
The courier knocking at the door of Laila Harre's Te Atatu home is bearing two cases of wine. The label is unfamiliar. "Looks expensive," I suggest, my pen poised above my notebook.
"Don't you dare!" says the cabinet minister, but the admonishing tone is rather undermined by her smile.
"Is this," I wonder aloud, " the origin of the expression 'chardonnay socialist'?" The box announces that the contents are pinot noir. Has the 21st century brought us the pinot socialist?
"Pinot socialist," says Harre, rolling the phrase around on her tongue and wondering how it will taste when it's poured into the columns of a newspaper.
"I'm not a pinot socialist; I just married a pinot socialist," she says. And, to be fair, it is her husband, Barry Gribben, a public health researcher, who emerges from his home office to inspect the delivery.
It's busy, that front door. A few minutes later, it bursts open under the combined weight of the couple's 11-year-old son, Sam, and a mate, home from school and shattering the afternoon air with a rousingly bellowed "Wassup!"
Harre enjoys the moment, but is quick to turn to the task in hand: with the assurance of a political veteran she is devoting all her energy to steering the talk away from herself and towards what she proudly calls her ideology.
"I'm an entirely political animal," she says, by way of explaining why she's uncomfortable with questions about herself. Fresh in her mind is the women's magazine which wanted to know what contraception she used and whether she was devastated by the breakup of her parents' marriage when she was 10.
Now 35, the Alliance MP is the cabinet's most junior minister and one of its most visible. The clash with her party leader, Jim Anderton, over whether she - an Associate Minister of Labour - should address striking Herald journalists brought her a brief level of public attention which she would have rather done without. But it is in her principal portfolios - Youth Affairs and Women's Affairs - that she has been making the most public noise and achieving, she hopes, a level of influence out of proportion to her rank in the cabinet.
"Women's and Youth Affairs are small-policy departments," she explains, "and your importance [in the process of Government] is generally connected to how much money you control. But what I've tried to do is have a role in a whole range of policy areas, which I think was the original intention of both those ministries."
Harre is happy to be characterised as part of the Government's left. But - as her quick and comprehensive backdown in the clash with Anderton showed ("I'm in a team here and this is the leader of the team," she said, gesturing to her boss) - she knows the importance of not alienating those you need to work with.
That instinct for survival goes a long way back. As a fifth-former at Auckland Girls Grammar School in 1981, she wanted to join a weekday protest against the Springbok tour but was "too chicken to wag." So she got a note from her mother and went with the school's blessing.
She smiles at the memory and speculates that the headmistress of the day, Charmaine Pountney, would probably have considered the experience "good for my education." But she agrees that the incident is illustrative of her personal style.
"I've always played by the rules," she says. "I think you can advocate your principles, participate politically and be very clear about where you stand without necessarily being [destructive]."
Harre says her parents played a role in her creation as an "entirely political animal" but more by a process of osmosis than indoctrination. The third of four children, she remembers lively debates at the dinner table and being "constantly validated for thinking about stuff."
"Neither of my parents was party political but both were extremely non-judgmental and open people," she says.
L AILA Harre spent her early years in Fiji, where her father, a social anthropologist, was studying the urbanisation of a traditionally agricultural society and she suspects that it is a result of that that she arrived at secondary school in New Zealand more colour-blind than her peers.
When she observed classmates making racist comments "I just couldn't understand it. Because I hadn't been acculturated that way it gave me a huge shock to think that some people saw others as inferior because of their race.
"I grew up in an ethnic minority, but I had absolutely no perception of that and I'm grateful to my parents for that."
Her lineage is, by her own description, unconventional. Her mother's father was "a Jew who rejected his faith and took an independent course from his family early on and my father's father was an atheist and a freethinker who thought the greatest invention of the 20th century was the mass-produced condom."
She was shaped, too, by her mother, Charmian, an actress who died a year ago from breast cancer, although she "never went down the artistic path."
"Mum and I had a difference of view on that one. I auditioned for a Shakespeare once but I found the audition awful - competitive and nasty - and I walked away and said to Mum, 'I'm not going back into acting because it's too competitive.'
"She often threw that one back at me. She thought it was rather ironic that I had rejected acting because it was too competitive and ended up in politics."
Even now, she endures, rather than enjoys, the cut and thrust of political life.
"I don't see competition as something that's valuable in its own right. I am prepared to do it and obviously every three years you enter a major competition for popularity but I don't get any great joy from the inherently competitive nature of our parliamentary system."
She trained as a lawyer and developed her knowledge of industrial law litigating cases for some of the larger trade unions but she says she did not nurse political ambitions from an early age.
"My political life has been a series of things that happen when you're making other plans. I've always acted according to what I thought was a principled position at the time rather than as the result of a deliberate strategy."
Nor does she have a long-term political plan. "One of my biggest weaknesses is my failure to plan," she says, adding with a chuckle, "I think the state should do that."
"You keep doing what you're doing until you stop being effective. I certainly hope that I would know when I'd stopped being of any value to anyone and go away and stop irritating them."
Given the Alliance's dismal poll ratings - between 3 and 4 per cent, down from an election-night 7.7 - and the controversy swirling round the head of the party's deputy leader, Sandra Lee, it's tempting to wonder whether cabinet's bright young thing sees herself as leadership material. But she parries the question with the deftness of a seasoned campaigner.
"I think," she says, unblinking, "that I am in a political leadership now. The role that any of us individually play within that leadership doesn't enter into it."
In a recent column by Herald political commentator Colin James, an unnamed Labour politician explained Labour's support for the Alliance's pet project, the People's Bank, by saying that "if it keeps Laila quiet for a year, it's worth it."
Harre says the comment seems "awfully odd" but admits it could be a compliment to someone who makes a lot of noise.
"When you look at the issues we want to promote we're going to have to make a lot of noise. It's a long time since there's been a credible advocacy for redistribution of income and free health and education and we're not going to achieve the sort of public support that is necessary behind those big ideas by being quiet about them.
"You might get criticised for being ideological because that word is considered an insult in this country. But if ideology is about having an analysis of power and wanting to use democracy to empower people who don't have power within the market then I don't trust people who aren't ideological."
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from New Zealand
Man jailed for 10 years for 'merciless' beatings of teen partner
'You should have a big sign around your neck saying dangerous', judge tells abuser.