Air New Zealand’s Kiri Hannifin: ‘I live in my own skin - it’s pretty much all I’ve got’

Kiri Hannifin has defended indigenous Mayan communities in Guatemala, been a staunch advocate for Women’s Refuge and been a part of left leaning political machinery in this country and Britain. She was the face of Australian-owned supermarket giant Countdown and now has a growing executive role at Air NZ, one of the country’s biggest businesses. She explains how her deeply held core values fit into profit-driven corporates - and her surprising reason for studying law.

Kiri Hannifin grew up in Christchurch where her Irish Catholic father had pictures on the wall of Michael Joseph Savage and the Pope. And her mother was an atheist.

‘’It was an incredibly hilarious political family – we were always debating issues.’’

That political and social awareness was sharpened when her father, Sam lost his job when she was in her mid-teens.

‘’Our world fell apart really quickly,’’ says Hannifin.

‘’We had never known financial insecurity. As a 15-year-old I had the sense that this was something quite worrying.’’

Her father had been selling for a glass manufacturer and for a while was a barman at the Lancaster Tavern working with her mother Denise before they went on to found a successful glass business themselves.

Kiri, at Catholic Cathedral College in central Christchurch at the time the family’s world went ‘’topsy turvy”, got a job at a local supermarket and learned the value of work.

‘’It was hard graft and I’ve never actually stopped working since then. I remember having a sense of financial responsibility from an early age.’’

She studied politics and law at Canterbury University and from a big family with an activist father she had an interest in community work while there.

‘’I was quite involved with doing community law and started volunteering at Women’s Refuge and got quite involved in different issues that I’ve never quite let go of.

“These things formed quite a big part of my life,’’ she says.

Did she choose a law degree to allow her to change the world through legislation?

‘’Nothing so virtuous,’’ says Hannifin, who is willing to have a laugh at herself.

She was a fan of LA Law (the Suits-style legal drama of the 1980s), and it wasn’t the big cases the powerful downtown firm took on that tipped the balance into pursuing a legal career.

‘’I think it was the clothes.’’

She also wanted a professional qualification at the end of her studies and she graduated in 1998 and her first job in New Zealand was at Te Puni Kōkiri.

‘’That was where I learned about the Treaty, it’s very legal and my sort of idea of how you could get justice or a better outcome from the colonisation of New Zealand that felt very purposeful. I really enjoyed that.’’

After working for four years in Wellington, she travelled to central America where she worked in Guatemala with the Mayan Indian community.

‘’They were very reliant on coffee as their main crop, and they were selling mostly to Nescafe, there was no food and the babies were drinking coffee. It was all terrible.’’

She then spent about four years in London, working with local authorities including Lambeth, Southwark and Hammersmith and Fulham councils. Roles included providing political advice to elected councillors, working with health authorities and helping implement European Union equality laws within local government.

There was lots of travel, including a trip through Africa with boyfriend Gareth (the couple met at an election party in 1999) and she tells a good story of how he was briefly ‘’kidnapped’' by a female mountain gorilla intent on grabbing a hat off his dreadlocked hair.

She momentarily thought she might be stranded alone in the Congo but four minutes later Gareth was deposited back, as white as a sheet.

But after time away, home beckoned and she came back in 2005.

‘’You’re so happy being away - you think New Zealand is so remote. And then all of a sudden you have to come home. It’s visceral,’’ says Hannifin.

‘’You’re so proud that this is your country. You can’t believe your luck that this could be our place.’’

For two years she worked as a political advisor within Prime Minister Helen Clark’s government, with roles including issue management, strategic political and communications advice, liaising with other political parties and policy development.

‘’It felt very purposeful. I enjoyed seeing how things worked, the mechanics of government and how decisions were made and really got to understand what motivates people.’’

She had the first of two children as the Labour government was ending its second term.

After a break, she then became a senior policy advisor and spokesperson for Women’s Refuge.

‘’You see the best of humanity in the very worst of humanity, often in the same day.

“I loved it for lots of reasons like giving a voice to people without one. There were very good people doing God’s work.’’

She was there for seven years.

Her next big role – and one where she became well-known in the media – was as Countdown’s manager of corporate affairs and sustainability. That grew to include health and safety and it was her first experience within a very big commercial business.

‘’It was quite a shift from domestic violence to groceries and I probably came in pretty hot with all my ideas of what was right and wrong,’’ she says.

‘’But it’s amazing how you can channel your values to pretty much anything that you do.’’

She worked on encouraging Countdown to do more in communities and improve the welfare of more than 20,000 staff who worked there. The company climbed up the corporate reputation index which was like ‘’winning a gold medal,” given the public attitude to supermarkets.

‘’No one really likes supermarkets too much. They just charge you for groceries.’’

Kiri Hannifin was a Countdown spokeswoman when the pandemic hit and when the supermarket had to deal with two stabbing incidents. Photo / Supplied

As a natural communicator she became prominent in the media when Covid-19 hit. She was the human face of the supermarket chain, clearly explaining new rules for shopping and urging customers to treat low-paid and nervous staff with respect.

Two stabbing attacks in Countdown supermarkets in 2021 at either end of the country were another test for the business, and for Hannifin.

Her tearful appearance on TV following the Dunedin attack remains a powerful watch and it won support from viewers but not from everyone in the business.

“I know that after Dunedin where I was very sad, not all of my colleagues thought that was an approach that we should have taken because it potentially showed culpability whereas I didn’t see it like that.’’

She said she felt some guilt.

‘’Not out of a sense of I caused it, but out of a sense that it was on my watch people who I was looking after.’’

She was part of the leadership team at Countdown, an $8 billion business and she is now on the nine-member executive group at Air New Zealand, among the country’s most high-profile businesses.

Hannifin constantly wrestles with how much to give of herself in public.

‘’At Countdown I was who I am, I wear my heart on my sleeve and have a very strong sense of what’s right and wrong and fairness and justice.”

Part of rising to executive jobs meant judging how to be herself but being pragmatic enough to do tough jobs. That’s still evolving.

‘’And that takes a lot of time to work out how to still be yourself and do what’s required. I always wrestle with, ‘am I too much or is this enough?’ - or maybe I’m too open or maybe this isn’t professional or they’ll think I’m too soft,” she says.

‘’I don’t know if you ever lose self-doubt. Maybe I’ll wake up and feel like I’m enough.

“Even in the most difficult circumstances, when you don’t really know what to do you stand back and think, ‘well, this is what I believe in’ and it does help navigate situations.”

Hannifin says she is not always that virtuous and makes ‘’lots and lots of mistakes.’’

Sometimes her own values aren’t necessarily what needs to be heard.

‘’(But) I feel much more comfortable if I live in my own skin - it’s pretty much all I’ve got.’’

Taking off to Air NZ

Hannifin had met Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran several times while she was at Countdown.

He built a formidable reputation in the grocery business for Woolworths in Australia and later in general retail heading Walmart’s 4000-plus store operation in the United States, before returning home to lead the airline.

The two clicked talking about supermarkets.

‘’That’s how I met him and got his advice on grocery retailing. He was very generous with his time.’’

As the airline emerged from the crisis phase of the pandemic, it accelerated its sustainability push.

Air New Zealand – like the rest of the airline sector - knows it’s not only the right thing to do as the planet heats up, it makes long-term financial sense as polluters face growing financial penalties.

The elevation of a dedicated sustainability job to the executive was a perfect fit for Hannifin.

She’d dreamed of working at the airline that she says has the mana to effect change in the country, beyond its core business.

‘’I thought maybe there’s an opportunity there to keep working to shape our country in a very small way. When it was sustainability, that felt like a perfect fit.’’

She’s been in the role since early last year. The scale of the challenge for aviation to meet climate goals is enormous.

Air New Zealand has selected a battery plane partner for trial flights but just a trickle of sustainable aviation fuel (Saf) is being produced to help reduce aviation’s 2% to 3% contribution to global emissions. In New Zealand the percentage contribution of domestic aviation is higher - about 6%.

Hannifin says flying is essential for New Zealand’s future and the country could be a leader in Saf production.

‘’I want my children and my grandchildren to grow up in a country that has looked after its environment because it really is our single biggest asset.’’

The path towards sustainable flying is bumpy with an Air New Zealand development partner Universal Hydrogen, failing in the United States earlier this month and Shell halting construction of a biofuel plant in the Netherlands earlier this month.

But the bad news is balanced by signs the price of some Saf may be coming down from up to five times the cost of traditional fuel.

She says governments need to give unambiguous signals to encourage energy companies to commit resources to making alternative fuels. Mandates are being brought in around the world, she’d like to see them here but says they’re not well understood.

Cost of living crisis-hit passengers face higher prices through pricier alternative fuel and carbon offset schemes so airlines have to be conscious of this.

‘’We’re not going to go out and spend millions and millions of dollars on different types of fuel.’’

Right now there’s scarce supply and high demand. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) says Saf production will triple this year to 1.9 billion litres but that will account for just 0.53% of aviation’s fuel needs.

“It’s chicken and egg. The price will come down with scale but the only way we’re going to get scale is with policy.’’

Air New Zealand faces a tough second half to the financial year. Due to changes as part of a cost review throughout the business Hannifin is taking over responsibility for corporate affairs.

That puts Hannifin, with the airline’s communications department, at the heart of shaping the airline’s image in the news.

‘’We’ve got a very strong brand. And how we show up and how we behave and how we treat our customers and stakeholders is the very core of our business.’’

She wants to know how the airline is perceived around the country.

‘’I’m very interested in how we show up and whether the community sees us as more than just an airline. Do they see us as a core part of the fabric of where they live or maybe they don’t want to?’’

The airline flies 15 million passengers a year around the country and the world, with the overwhelming majority having a good experience. Some of those who don’t can vent on social media and Hannifin says the negative stories hurt.

‘’When something is raised with us, we fix it. So when we let one (problem) through or it hasn’t come to us first, we feel it because we don’t want to let people down.’’

Grant Bradley has been working at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.