Sandra Lee - bad news and proud of it

AUDREY YOUNG talks to an introspective Sandra Lee, away from the frontline to nurse a lurgy and think about the future.

Sandra Lee sits back in bed in her ministerial house in Wellington, where she is confined with a severe bout of flu, and takes an unmistakable drag on a cigarette.

There is little point getting her to confirm down the telephone that she's enjoying a smoke. Chances are she would switch into stern Minister of Conservation mode and demand that such private information not be written, and chances are she would have sounded frightening enough to get her way.

Best not to upset Parliament's clean-green queen by letting her know she can be mentally pictured amid damp tissues and grubby ashtrays. She does admit that she is in bed, though.

But Sandra Lee has been subjected this year to much more personal revelations than that she has a fondness for fags. For example, her love affair with Te Puni Kokiri adviser Anaru Vercoe, and the altercation between her old friend and former Auckland City councillor Suzanne Corbett and Vercoe at her ministerial house, to which the police were called.

But what with the flu and the flak she has taken this week for vetoing the Macraes mine expansion in Reefton's Victoria Conservation Park, who could blame her for turning to a favourite vice?

She can afford just one day in bed before struggling back to the front line - lurgy in tow.

The mining decision is one she wears with absolute comfort. Lee is an avowed conservationist.

She makes no apology for staying a member of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, along with 65,000 other New Zealanders - "it's hardly the Khmer Rouge".

She does not see it as grounds for Macraes' lawyers to lodge an application for a judicial review.

"That would be silly. Ministers don't give up their rights as citizens because they become MPs. Ministers belong to Federated Farmers and all manner of organisations."

Being Conservation Minister is like being Minister of Bad News, she sometimes thinks. She is in charge of the country's possums, 1080 poison drops, stoats, ferrets, wild horses, and thousands of public toilets that people want to gripe about.

On the flip side are her proud achievements, and top of her list was last year's decision to stop Timberlands logging 130,000ha of West Coast native forest.

The job is an absolute privilege, she says without the slightest sense of rubbing salt into the West Coast wound.

Lee has covered a lot of ground in her 19 years of elected representation. She has chaired the Waiheke County Council, served on Auckland City Council, was elected an MP in 1993 in Auckland Central, was forced to become Alliance leader when Jim Anderton stepped down after the death of his daughter, and was leader of the Mana Motuhake party until she was ditched in June.

She is now a list MP, deputy leader of the Alliance, and Minister of Local Government, as well as being an Associate Minister of Maori Affairs.

It is time to think about standing down, she agrees, but that's not uncommon.

"This time in any parliamentary term I think about standing down. I don't think it's good for any politicians to think they're on those green seats forever.

"But I haven't made a decision. I normally make my call in the final year, and I will."

She is amused at a friend's suggestion that her politics of early days on Waiheke were those of an uncompromising, principled Marxist.

"A principled Marxist? I don't know. Every fascist I ever heard of has described themselves as a principled Marxist."

Marxist, socialist, unionist, Maori nationalist, environmentalist, whatever it is, and it is probably a bit of them all, Sandra Lee is a peculiar mix.

Her wild hair matches an occasionally formidable temper (her parents nicknamed her Stormy as a child, although she would say she has grown into a passionate woman rather than a volatile one).

But she is better known for using her hushed and fragile tones to control the attention of her audience.

She is steely and emotional.

She can be self-possessed and vulnerable, a militant advocate and a natural victim.

She is coquettish and passive-aggressive. She is a doting grandmother and a femme fatale - a pioneer of the women-growing-old-disgracefully movement.

Alliance colleagues suggest that whatever the demands of her personal life, she has the heart and discipline of a child of the union movement.

Her father was an English-born watersider, her mother a West Coast Maori. She was born not long after the 1951 waterfront strike and named Sandra Rose Te Hakamatua Barber. She turned 49 this month.

Raised in Wellington and educated at the liberal Onslow College, she married a young seaman and had her first of two girls at age 17. The daughters, aged 32 and 24, each have a son and daughter, the joys of Lee's life.

"I said to a friend a few years ago: 'What is this unique bond that exists automatically between grandparents and our grandchildren?', and she quipped back, 'Mutual enmity'."

She has a good grandmotherly cackle at that one.

L EE has not been far from trouble since becoming a minister - her visit to Waikaremoana, her friendship with Tame Iti and finance for the so-called road to nowhere, ructions in Local Government New Zealand, her dumping as Mana Motuhake leader, and her relationship with Vercoe.

She won't talk about her private life, except to confirm that he is her partner.

It was known that she had taken up with a younger adviser posted to her office from Te Puni Kokiri, that he had left his ill wife for the minister, and that his wife was the sister of political party aspirant Derek Fox.

It turned from unsavoury gossip to news in June, when it was learned that senior Mana Motuhake members had approached Lee earlier concerned that the relationship was distracting her from the leadership, then helped to oust her.

She emerged from the experience stronger than before.

The uncharitable utterings of her successor, Willie Jackson, and revelations about her private life turned her immediately from potential villain to martyr.

Prime Minister Helen Clark is a Lee ally and, in fact, has shown more loyalty to her than to some of her own MPs.

She weighed in behind when Lee was rolled. She is impressed by Lee's grasp of detail on complex issues such as local government rating and resource management. She says: "I've got a lot of time for Sandra. I think she is a person of very considerable integrity."

The confidence in Lee may be based on her efforts to get Labour and the Alliance to the altar.

Lee was the Alliance person Clark first approached with detente in mind after the bitterly fought 1998 Taranaki-King Country election - when Clark and Anderton could barely make eye contact.

"She readily agreed and went away to do something about it," says Clark.

"That's where it started. She played a very important role in getting this Government together."

Not long after, Clark was addressing the Alliance conference.

Clark is not alone in observing that Lee seems "liberated" since losing the leadership.

Alliance colleagues also observe a more relaxed and fun friend.

Lee agrees: "It does relieve me of some pressure, to be perfectly honest," she says with a natural sigh, accompanied by a sound like a cigarette being stubbed out.