Kieran McAnulty, Wairarapa MP, at the Anzac Memorial Bridge south of Eketahuna this week. Photo / Audrey Young
The guts of it is that Kieran McAnulty is not a simple man.
He talks as though he has just walked off the set of a John Clarke sketch.
His spiritual home is Eketahuna.
His opening remarks to the Speaker in his maiden speech back in 2017 were “Gidday.”
He is the sort of bloke who is funny before he has even opened his mouth.
And yet he has been trusted with the serious business of trying not to lose an election for Labour, having been the minister asked to reset the Three Waters policy.
Apart from Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Finance Minister Grant Robertson, Kieran McAnulty is perhaps Labour’s most important politician at the moment.
“Here’s the guts of it,” he memorably said as he opened the Three Waters press conference in the first week of a long parliamentary recess, before expounding on the water-management entities and the co-governance issue.
He appears to have taken the heat out of the issue, although it is not clear yet whether it is because of what he said or because people like him.
Either way, the straight-talking newish minister and former TAB bookmaker is turning out to be a valuable weapon for Labour as it fights for a third term in Government.
So what gives him his character?
While he was not raised on a farm, he is rural to the core, not unhelpful for the Minister for Rural Communities. His father, Mike, was raised on a farm in south Eketahuna and his mother, Marie, was raised on a farm in north Eketahuna. Their parents came from Eketahuna, as did their grandparents.
McAnulty grew up in Carterton and spent most of his life in Masterton “but I’ve always said Eketahuna is home because that’s where the family is from.”
The reforms of the 1980s made it too difficult for his father to take over the family farm but he stayed close to the agriculture sector by becoming a dairy shed inspector and a TB tester, a job he had for 46 years.
“I’m quite proud of him actually,” says McAnulty, “because it is pretty rare for anyone to work in the same job for 46 years these days.
“But going into a cocky’s dairy shed and pointing out where the flaws are and telling them to change it … you’d start to piss a few people off over it but he didn’t. Everyone’s always got nice things to say about him … It says a bit about him.”
McAnulty said he spent every school holiday herd-testing with his father, who is also a former manager of the Wairarapa-Bush rugby team.
Kieran comes from a big family but is an only child and remains close to his parents. They were with him this week at the Anzac Memorial Bridge at Kaipaoro, south of Eketahuna, on Anzac Day for a memorial service, with about 100 others.
The bridge was built in 1922 and is a memorial to six locals who were killed in the First World War and three in the Second World War, including Private Margret Olive McAnulty, a first cousin to Kieran’s grandfather, Barry McAnulty.
She had been an Army nurse in Egypt and was killed in a truck accident in 1943, aged 27, along with three others returning from a concert.
Kieran’s parents and some cousins performed the ceremonial tribute when Margret’s name was called by the Tararua Mayor, Tracey Collis.
He laid a wreath as the local Member of Parliament along with the National Party candidate, Mike Butterick, and after the last post is played, it was down the road to the Mt Bruce wildlife sanctuary, Pukaha, for afternoon tea and an interview.
McAnulty says he was always more interested in politics than his friends at Chanel College, to the extent he declined an invitation to a Solway College ball because it clashed with election night.
“I gave myself an uppercut.”
And he attributes his interest in politics to his grandparents rather than his parents.
McAnulty’s mother was a Monaghan and her father was a big fan of Muldoon. Her cousin John is a former chairman of Fonterra.
McAnulty’s grandfather, Barry McAnulty, and his great-grandfather, were staunchly Labour and managed the campaigns of the Labour candidates who opposed Keith Holyoake, the local MP and Prime Minister of New Zealand.
He says they were so staunch it almost put him off.
But after finishing school, where he was head boy, he headed off to Otago University to study politics.
He says he was never a scholar although the record shows he left with an MA in politics after a 117-page thesis titled: The role of positioning in political party performance in the 2008 New Zealand General Election.
It’s an assessment of how various positions - adversarial, dismissive or accommodative - that big and small parties took on policies and on working with each other affected their fortunes favourably or adversely.
Why Otago?
“Because I wanted to get on the piss,” he says bluntly. “Marc Ellis was high profile at the time and he had some great stories about Otago.”
McAnulty is affable and a hard case. His party trick at school was doing an impression of a bugle, specialising in Coronation St. Things happen to him.
After varsity, he went on his OE with the aim of ending up in Ireland and playing rugby. First, he was doing a Contiki bus tour through Europe and he got talking to a bloke in a queue in Venice who turned out to be the president of a rugby club in County Cork.
McAnulty ended up there with a car, a house, a spot as half-back on the local rugby team, and a job managing a bookie’s office.
“The captain of the rugby team, his old man owned half a dozen bookies outlets in Ireland, not like over here. They are all privately owned over there.”
He also met his first wife there, Suzanne.
When he returned to Masterton, he got a job as a case manager Work and Income helping others to find work.
“One of my clients came in with a job advertisement for a bookmaker at the TAB and could I help him apply, which I did to the best of my ability, and I also applied – and I got it.”
He spent seven years at the TAB and then became economic development manager at the Masterton District Council before being elected as a list MP in 2017 at the age of 32. He won the seat in 2020 with a majority of 6545.
In his maiden speech, he talked about the farm workers across his electorate “who slug their guts out” and see the dream of farm ownership slip away. He also talked about the cleaners in Masterton Hospital and small business owners in Dannevirke. He had worked hard to get to Parliament but no harder than them.
“Our start in life truly is a lottery … I wonder why, for some, there seems to be an incapacity to comprehend the concept that not every child is born equal and no amount of hard work will give them the gains that they deserve.”
McAnulty was singled out early by the Labour leadership as one to watch. He became junior whip as soon as he was elected and was identified privately as a future minister, possibly agriculture after Damien O’Connor retired.
In June last year, he was made Associate Minister of Local Government, Minister of Emergency Management and Minister of Racing, which he is passionate about. He had a five per cent share in a horse called Chuck A Luck and it had done quite well but the syndicate that owned it wanted to sell it.
He hopes to get back into horse ownership after his second marriage in January to fiancee Gia Garrick.
“Once I get the wedding out of the way, I will be reinvesting in a horse - 100 per cent.”
He said he was excited about getting married but was keeping it low profile because of the threats he has faced – since 2021 he has received threats from anti-vaccination activists and has had to stop advertising his mobile electorate clinic.
The long three-week recess comes to an end next week when Parliament resumes on Tuesday and McAnulty expects to be back in the firing line over Three Waters.
His changes had a mixed reception. There was general support for increasing the number of water management entities from four to 10 in order to give councils a voice at the table.
There was less acceptance of his decision to keep the 50:50 composition of regional committees and National and Act were infuriated when he said it was part of recognising Maori special interests in water under the Treaty of Waitangi which was unique to New Zealand.
He and Hipkins are adamant that the 50:50 committee is not the governance entity – it appoints the panel that appoints the governance board - and that it should not be called co-governance.
“We are not proposing 50:50 in the Resource Management Act reforms and we are not proposing 50:50 emergency management reforms that are coming through. It is only in this instance because it deals with water.
“They are making it sound like I was proposing that we have 50:50 seats in Parliament. It was based on ‘Where will this lead?’ ‘This is the thin end of the wedge.’
“I don’t believe what I said was all that drastic. I stand by everything I’ve said.”
That appears to be long and short of it, or as McAnulty might say, the guts of it.
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