The politician and mum opens up about love, family and a topic close to her heart.
In the late ’90s, when political science student Erica Poppelbaum sat cold-calling people in her market research job, she had to listen to the guy next to her do the same joke, in the same part, in every interview for four hours.
There was eye-rolling, yet also the beginning of a crush, and respect for the fact that he never had a single person on the phone say no to him. His joke worked every time.
The guy, Kane Stanford, wasn’t someone new. He had been on Erica’s radar as “the weird kid who everybody loved” when the pair attended Rangitoto College on Auckland’s North Shore together.
Their names on the fifth form speech trophy, a year apart, summed them up well.
“While I pontificated over the relevance of the United Nations, he talked comedically about bus drivers,” says National Party senior minister Erica, 46, who holds the education and immigration portfolios.
“And she was the captain of the debating club who played the bassoon, and did the boring speeches and other geeky endeavours,” retorts Kane, 47, laughing.
“I was in seventh form, she was in sixth form, and we were both student reps. We first interacted while working on the ball committee. I thought she was fiery and forthright.
“Once we started uni, I got her the part-time job at the market research company. It was part of my plan to flirt with her.”
But then he played coy. Kane quips she hunted him down.
“I called him six nights in a row before he asked me out,” recalls Erica. “Six nights! He didn’t get any of the hints.
“Our first date was a walk on Long Bay Beach. I was so excited and I wore this beautiful long skirt. But when I got out of the car, he goes, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise this was formal’.”
Introducing Kane to her parents Karen and Lex also had, well, hairy beginnings. At the time, Kane sported dreadlocks and half an orange beard.
“Just half!” he tells. “We were going to a themed party, which was ‘Dress as Your Drink’. So because I was drinking vodka and orange, and I had a big orange beard, I shaved half of it and wrote ‘VODKA’ on that part of my face.”
Smiles Erica, “So that’s how I introduced him to my parents. He looked a bit dishevelled. And my mum was like, ‘What on earth have you brought home?’
“But very quickly, everybody fell in love with him. Kane’s the most lovely, kind man, and I simply couldn’t do this job without him holding the fort at home.”
The couple, who married at the Long Bay Marine Reserve in 2006, are parents to daughter Holly, 17, and son Alex, 13.
When Erica decided to run for politics in 2017, taking over as East Coast Bays MP Murray McCully’s successor, she had been the children’s main carer.
“My son had only just turned 5 and in my world, he was still a baby,” she says. “After I had put my name in the ring and been selected, I remember waking up in the night and having a panic attack, thinking, ‘I’m going to be away from home three to four days every week and Kane’s going to be in charge. He does not cook, he does not clean.’
“At that stage, he was the breadwinner, I suppose. I always worked, but I was the one who did the school drop-offs, made the lunches and took them to after-school activities.
“The realisation hit, ‘I have to hand all this over to him.’ And now he’s so much better at it than me! He has stepped up so massively. I’m very lucky. But it was hard letting go. The most difficult thing has been stepping away from that parenting decision-making role. Yet I’m not there, so I can’t intervene.”
Until recently, Erica used to clean the whole house every Sunday to help alleviate some of the “mum guilt” before she left for Wellington again.
“That only lasted for a year!” she says. “I only get to see the family on a Saturday, usually and then Sunday is reading. So when we are together, then it’s phones away to try to have quality time – unless Holly and I are watching stupid TikTok videos together.
“Or we play board games – we’re all very competitive,” she shares. “And we like watching The 1% Club quiz show on TV together. I feel really boring! This job is all-encompassing, as it should be.
“I haven’t watched my son play a game of hockey in five years because he plays weeknights. I try to ring him every night, and he rings me on the way to school. Thankfully, I always get to Holly’s netball game on a Saturday.”
Erica is frank about the trade-off that comes with the hallowed halls of power. There’s an air of pragmatism to the conversation as she reveals that nothing could have prepared her for being a Government minister.
“You can’t master the balance of home and political life,” she says.
“It’s impossible in my role to master any kind of balance. If you think about exercise, eating well, taking time out for yourself and spending time with your family in an 80-hour-a-week job, those things do not mix.
“It is what it is because it’s a huge privilege to do this role, and I could be out of it in a year’s time. And [National deputy leader] Nicola Willis and I are very close, so it’s nice having her to vent to.”
While Erica chats comfortably about her life, it’s clear that policy work is where her passions lie. When the conversation veers there, the down-to-earth politician truly lights up.
Excited about being tasked with investigating how social media could be restricted for under-16-year-olds in New Zealand, she will explore options for legislation and implementation.
“I will be leading the policy work, and getting it right and effective will be really important,” explains Erica. “We’ve got to educate kids too about the dangers of social media, which we will put in the digital safety component of the relationship and sexuality guidelines in the health curriculum.
“This one is really personal to me. I have seen the damage it does to kids, and I feel very strongly we need to protect them from that. All mums feel the same – we all want them off the devices, off social media. Parents have often said to me, ‘If every child was off it, then it would be fine and I wouldn’t have to play the bad cop’.”
Erica believes banning students’ use of phones in schools was one of the best things this government has implemented. The passionate politico – also the lead minister for the Government’s response to the Royal Commission on Abuse in State Care – is proudest of the work she has done in the education portfolio.
Specifically, the “seismic shift” of now teaching Kiwi kids to read using a phonics-based approach.
“This country has a literacy crisis, but now that we’ve mandated structured literacy, it will change the course of Kiwi kids’ lives,” she says.
As the eldest of three siblings, Erica grew up in Ōkura (north of Auckland), the daughter of a Dutch immigrant father – a pilot – and a mum who worked in the family business, exporting and growing green grapes in their 10,000 square-foot glasshouse. She recalls them being “extraordinarily hard-working” parents, who, now in their seventies, were always community-minded.
“They were on the PTA fundraising for the schools and building a local kindy,” tells Erica. “I have a huge sense of gratitude towards both of them.
“My passion for community service started with how I was brought up, tagging along with them to working bees and planting trees or weeding. That’s why it’s always been important for me to model that for my children. Kane and I work very hard to instil those same values in them.”
Both teens have inherited their parents’ talents for being excellent speech writers and natural orators from an early age. Holly, in Year 13, also has a “huge science brain”, says her proud mum, and she plans to study chemical engineering at Canterbury University next year.
While Kane, a general manager at a spirits company, holds down the fort at home, he likes to quietly moonlight as Erica’s jokes writer too.
It stems from the days the couple worked together producing local reality TV shows like Piha Rescue.
“As the producer, she was my boss and I was joke contributor,” tells Kane. “She’d give me her script and say, ‘I need a joke or a pun here’ and I’d be firing lines at her. She’d go, ‘No! Rubbish! Even worse! Oh, boom – that could work!’”
Erica points out that after she became an MP, she’d still ring Kane to get a joke or killer line for a speech.
“He tells me his proudest moment is when Erica Stanford gets quoted in the paper, but it’s actually him!”
Steffanie Holmes has published more than 40 books in the past decade.