Alicia McKay has a remarkable story to tell. Photo / Supplied
Alicia McKay has had every opportunity to fail – and she’s missed them all.
From foster care to teenage pregnancy, the high school dropout has an honours degree, a successful international consultancy business, has authored three books and birthed as many daughters. None of whom plans not to follow in her footsteps.
That is, the footsteps that Alicia followed her mother in.
“I’m from a long tradition of teen parenting in my family. Teen parenthood that goes back three or four generations,” McKay says.
Repeating that cycle at 16, McKay was well aware of what could lie ahead for her first child, Bailey.
“You inevitably get estrangement. So, there are really tense relationships at every level between me and my mother, my mother and her mother, her mother and her mother.”
McKay’s father was 17 when she was born and she says she has never had a “consistent or meaningful relationship” with him. She was raised initially by her mum.
“I had a really difficult relationship with my mother growing up. Partly because she was 18 when she had me and a single mum, and she was grappling with some demons of her own. Partly because I was a f***ing nightmare, I think.”
McKay has refreshingly unfiltered self-awareness.
“I’m extremely intelligent, which is really difficult to deal with in a child, and I found that out with my third child,” McKay says.
“My mother didn’t really have the emotional coping skills to manage a person like me. I have a lot more empathy for her since I’ve raised my third child.”
She may have followed the same ill-advised path of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother before her – but McKay relishes cutting her own track. She always has.
With crystal-clear hindsight, the point where McKay’s life fell apart was probably where her remarkable future fell into place.
“I started getting into trouble fairly early.”
The high school years came early for McKay. Her intellect had been identified at the end of Year 7 – and she was enrolled in high school a year early.
“Because my birthday’s already at the end of the year, it meant that I went to high school when I was 12 - just turned 12.”
Her education was accelerating inside and outside the classroom.
“Hanging out with kids who were a year or two above me at school, which meant that I was hanging out with 14 and 15-year-olds. Smoking cigarettes and bunking school and I was just doing all the things you do, but very quickly.”
Trouble at school then followed her home.
“My mother and I were in constant tension. I’d started jumping out my window at night to go and hang out with the local troublemakers. She came in one morning to tell me she was sending me away.”
Alicia was 13 and knew just how to hit her mother where it hurt.
“I walked out the door, and I ended up going to my grandmother’s, who my mother was estranged from.”
Her new home didn’t last long – maybe six months. She recalls legal action from her mother and then a negotiated return that never came to be.
“The day before I was supposed to go home, I ended up in hospital. When I called [Mum], I said, ‘I can’t come home tomorrow - I’m in hospital’. She said, ‘Well, that’s so f***ing selfish and typical. Don’t come home then’.
“I never went home.”
McKay stayed with her Nana for less than a year before that relationship soured, too.
“She kicked me out. Partly for being a little brat, and partly because she also didn’t have any of the skills needed to raise a grandchild. And by that point, Child Youth and Family [CYFS] were involved.”
Her next “home” would need to be approved by the state.
“I went to live with a boyfriend’s mother. Her boyfriend sexually assaulted me and I got kicked out of her house,” says McKay matter-of-factly.
After a short stint on the streets, McKay was placed into foster care at the age of 14.
“A police officer came to pick me up from wherever I was staying, and off I went to Ashburton,” recalls McKay.
Until this point, McKay had grown up in Christchurch and Selwyn.
“I got placed with a couple who were living in a state house in Ashburton. [They] had very low literacy and life skills of their own and couldn’t have children. And somehow had been approved as a foster family,” McKay says.
“Looking back on it now, I cannot see how [they were approved] because we had the power cut off every third month.”
McKay says she was supposed to be a temporary placement before a 28-day family group conference was held. She stayed with the couple for almost two years.
“They didn’t know how to cook. So, we ate like hash browns with satay sauce on them or McDonald’s on payday. And we had kids coming and going as temporary placements.”
McKay says the couple were no match for her. By this time, she was a highly intelligent teenager with rapidly increasing life experience and extraordinary resilience.
“I ran rings around them.”
She stayed there until a few months before her 16th birthday.
“And then when I moved out, I said ‘I’m leaving school. I’ve got a flat, I’ve got a car, I’ve got a job’. And they said, ‘Oh, I don’t think we can get that through CYFS’.”
McKay says the couple devised a plan that could be mutually beneficial.
“They said, ‘Why don’t you just move out and then we’ll split the money that CYFS is paying?’”
McKay agreed and once a week she received half of the state-funded allowance.
“That actually went on for a number of months until CYFS figured out that I wasn’t living at the house anymore. By then I was six months’ pregnant with Bailey.”
She says she was released from her guardianship, and never heard from CYFS again.
“I never had a follow-up phone call or like, where is she now? I was 16 years old. I had no legal guardians. I had a baby. You think they might have checked up, but it’s not really how it worked back then.”
McKay left at the end of Year 12 with her qualifications from that year – though she hadn’t done as well as she’d have liked.
“I think it was only a week before I found out I was pregnant with Bailey that I was looking at going back to school [for Year 13],” McKay says.
Instead, the now 17-year-old began her own enterprise.
“I was running a cleaning business - that I’d set up. I advertised in the paper.
“I ran all kinds of hustles before that. I used to import things and sell them on TradeMe. I always had one or two jobs.”
She says she was “absolutely creaming it” according to her friends, earning $30-$40 per hour- while nursing her infant daughter.
“My friend came over with her University of Canterbury prospectus. And I was reading that and I thought, this all sounds quite good. I wouldn’t mind doing this.”
The problem was – by not completing Year 13, she hadn’t gained University Entrance. However, she had managed to complete some study while pregnant – thanks to the help of her former economics teacher, Scott Haines.
Despite having already left school, McKay had persuaded Haines to allow her to attend an early morning class he was running.
“He used to do a thing for his [Year 13] economics and accounting students. He got them discretionary entrance into a 101 paper at Lincoln University to give them a taste of university and get them prepared.”
McKay would attend the 7am class a couple of times per week.
“And I sat that exam, well, I stood to do that exam on an ironing board, 38 weeks’ pregnant. I got the ‘top student’ in that paper that year.”
With that successful exam paper under one arm and 4-month-old Bailey on her hip, McKay marched into the University of Canterbury to plead her case for enrolment – without UE.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m really smart!’”
Whatever she said, it worked. The 17-year-old mother of one with a part-time cleaning business in Ashburton was going to be a university student.
When McKay was younger, she’d read John Grisham books. She acknowledges now it was strange – but she also believes it had an influence on her choice of course.
“I started doing a law degree. I got into the second year, which, you know, 800 kids go into the first year and then only 180 get through to the second year.”
McKay got through the first semester of the second year. She was travelling from Ashburton to Christchurch daily for lectures. Her partner was working late shifts at the meat works. The window for study was tight, she couldn’t leave Ashburton until her partner had woken from his night shift to look after their daughter – and had to be home in time for him to get to work. It was taking a toll.
“I was having a lot of difficulty at home. My daughter was 18 months old, and her dad and I weren’t getting on very well.”
McKay, now 19, took the rest of the year off from studying before returning the following year. However, her dreams of pursuing a law degree were dashed.
“I had a lot of grief about not being able to do my law degree because of a couple of admin f*** ups, because I wanted it. But that’s fine.”
“I finished my degree when I was 21 and by then I was pregnant with Charlie. I started my honours degree extramurally through Massey University the following year.”
Charlie, McKay’s second child, was born a few weeks into her honours year.
“I was a single mum that year. So, it was me, Bailey (4-year-old) and Charlie was a baby, doing my thesis, sitting at home.”
McKay graduated with a double major Arts degree in political science and media and communications.
“I came out of it with first-class honours and then went into a postgrad job as a policy analyst at the Ashburton District Council. I reconciled with Bailey’s dad and went on to marry him and have a third child with him [Harriet].”
The shift to working life was difficult for McKay. The stability that her role at Ashburton District Council offered also came with confines that were as unfamiliar to her as her now regular wage.
“I was very frustrated at the, you know, get to work at 8.30am, leave at 5pm, not a minute before, not a minute after.
“They wanted me there every day. They wanted to tell me what to do. It didn’t matter that I did everything in half the time as everybody else, they still wanted me there all day and it didn’t really work for me. Why can’t I go home?” McKay says.
McKay was now 22 – but had lived a life well beyond those tender years. A life where she had largely set her own rules.
“I’d spent years juggling the kids and studying my thesis and whatever else and being able to do that in my own terms. I chafed pretty quickly against a traditional working environment.”
Her new career was also interfering with a home life that was finally stable.
“I had a boss who told me to leave my family at the door when I came to work, which felt like something you could say if you had a stay-at-home wife - but maybe it wasn’t something that was entirely useful for a young mum of two.”
The “young mum of two” stuck it out for long enough to become a young mum of three.
“I was 26. I was married. We owned a home. She was on purpose and she really has the attitude to match it. In fact, sometimes she tells her siblings, ‘I was the only one they wanted’, which isn’t true - but she is the only one that was planned.”
The square peg stayed at the round hole for around four years, living a “kind of idyllic family life in Ashburton”.
A change of employment couldn’t stop the growing restlessness.
“I tried to work at a law firm. I lasted eight weeks working for Duncan Cotterell, and then I thought, well, this is ghastly. This is all Koru Lounge and credit cards and w**kery and making partners richer, so I don’t like this very much.”
McKay was looking for answers at home as well.
“I’m like, okay well, are we done? Have we f***ing clocked it? Like, is this all we’re gonna do now? Are we just gonna wait here ‘til we die?” McKay recalls.
The first change came when she launched her own business and left traditional employment behind.
“There’s no freedom and there’s no money.”
The second change came when the family of five made the decision to move to Wellington, where McKay could make the most of her talents. But a young policy analyst from Ashburton was going to have to knock on a lot of doors before they opened in the capital.
But they did open through perseverance, and McKay worked out why.
“All the things that I had found to be a handicap in the working environment, that uncertainty about who to be and what to wear and how to speak - that was an asset when it came to building client relationships. The way that you make money in business is you be as ‘you’ as possible.
“That’s where you land contracts - through the development of genuine connection and relationships with other people. And I’m really good at doing that.”
As McKay’s career soared,her relationship at home declined.
“My marriage fell apart, but that’s fine. We’re still best mates and there’s nobody I’d rather be raising our kids with.”
As I speak with McKay, she is sitting in a departure lounge about to board a flight to Australia. Her trip will take her to numerous conferences where she will speak with great authority about how to spend public money. She has written three books and spoken to thousands of people. Later this year she will be a guest speaker in the United States – in front of 6000 local government CEOs. Her ideas are currency.
“It’s one of those stories that looks like overnight success because I was so young, but also it was just years of me having coffees that went nowhere and going for jobs that people laughed at me for and being the only woman in the room or the youngest person in the room. Or just shouting into a void in general.”
Just don’t tell Alicia McKay she’s proof that hard work pays off.
“I’m an anomaly. An exception, and I’m very aware of that.
“One reason I was very cautious for a long time of saying anything about my background publicly - aside from just coming to terms with it myself, was that there is a tendency for these kinds of stories to be weaponised, particularly with a right-wing lens. You know, ‘see, it just goes to show that if you’ve got the right attitude, anything’s possible’.
“And that’s just completely untrue.”
She’s right. The reason McKay’s story is so compelling is because it is so unlikely. Her teenage journey has been undertaken by many – but very few have arrived at the same destination as McKay.
“The reason that less than 1% of care-experienced children even make it into tertiary education in New Zealand, and the reason that we are disproportionately more likely to wind up in the justice system or benefit dependent - or with mental health issues or drug dependencies, is not because we’re uniquely weak or that everybody other than me is uniquely weak. It’s because that’s what the system is designed to produce, and that is what those life experiences in a very reasonable way will do to people’s lives.
Again, McKay’s self-awareness is to the fore.
“It doesn’t mean that I’m any better than anybody else - it means that I won the lottery on intelligence. And that I had a few lucky breaks and a couple of people who really believed in me - but it’s the exception, it’s not the rule. You can’t bootstrap your way out of foster care and f**kery.”
One of those believers was her economics teacher, Mr Haines.
“I have so much to thank him for.”
And recently she had an opportunity to do just that. McKay was invited to speak at the Secondary Principals Association of New Zealand conference. Haines is the vice-president.
“I got to tell the room what he’d done for me in the context of giving a broader keynote around strategic thinking and perspective,” McKay says.
“It was a very lovely moment to stand on stage and tell 250 principals what Scott Haines had done for me 20 years ago.”
It was also the moment when Haines learnt the full story.
“He had no idea, really. Like, he knew I was pregnant, and he knew I was a foster kid, I think. He didn’t know that it was thanks to that paper that I’d gotten into university. I don’t really think he understood what he’d done for my life at all.”
At 36, McKay has lived a lot – but she has a lot more in front of her.
A memoir is in the works - as is her first foray into fiction. New projects are what Mckay thrives on.
“I’ve been proving myself my entire life, and now that is my fuel. I need to be proving myself in order to motivate.”
She says she’s trying to find healthier motivation like “joy, enthusiasm and creativity” to avoid cyclical burnout.
McKay is also planning to use her voice more on social issues that she has genuine life experience in. Like New Zealand’s class divide. She says she straddles two worlds but feels little belonging to either.
“When I am using it for good in my life, I feel really positive about it. I often get to be a translator or a facilitator that can bridge two different worlds. I can speak to the CEO and the foster kid, I can speak to the minister and the homeless guy, and that can be an extraordinarily useful skill.
“But on dark days it’s just very f***ing lonely.”
Learning is a constant for McKay – who still reads two books per week. Curiosity is something her three daughters have picked up. McKay says her middle child Charlie also has “wildly good emotional intelligence”.
Her eldest daughter Bailey is not so much following in her mother’s footsteps as she is walking the trail blazed by McKay. She is studying at university, a new mother-to-daughter tradition.
As for the “teen mum cycle”, the wheels have come off.
“She’s now 19, she’s 20 in October and we’re looking good, mate.”
Mike Thorpe is a senior journalist for the Herald, based in Christchurch. He has been a broadcast journalist across television and radio for 20 years and joined the Herald in August 2024.
'I don’t care if it’s Martha Stewart or the bloody Pope. I’m not taking [Made in NZ] off.'