This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Over the course of the year, NZME editor-at-large Shayne Currie sat down for lunch with a variety of prominent New Zealanders. Today we take a look at some of the highlights from these meetings.
Brian Tamaki radiates a certain charm. Across the lunch table, wearing his trademark black polo-neck top with his wraparound sunglasses on the table, he makes it clear that the idea of talking to the Herald is not his own.
“I first of all said no, but my wife is very ... "
As Hannah sits alongside him, I’m expecting him to say something along the lines of “persuasive”, but he switches tack.
“... but immediately, I can see that you’re different.”
A charm offensive.
Over the course of the next hour-and-a-half, we have a perfectly amicable conversation. He lightly prods me a couple of times to emphasise a joke or a point, he laughs reasonably frequently, and both he and Hannah open up on a number of personal details about themselves and their political campaign.
Then, just a few hours later, Brian Tamaki is at his regular Monday night ‘Apostles Academy’ pulpit, speaking to a different audience, having a crack at media, promising to disrupt the general election, and praising the Vision NZ candidate, Karl Mokaraka, who that very afternoon clambered on to a fence to interrupt a Christopher Luxon press conference, in what turned out to be one of the memes of the campaign.
A charmer then? Or a chameleon?
Paul Henry devoted a chapter to the Herald in one of his books a decade ago. It was not complimentary. Not about the newspaper, nor a couple of writers, nor the editor at the time, who happened to be me.
He wrote that a phrase often used by one of his former radio colleagues, Pam Corkery, came to mind when he thought of Shayne Currie: “I wouldn’t give him the steam off my piss.”
Which, I have to say, was so wonderfully shocking and funny that it has stayed with me for a long time.
The backdrop to the comment was Henry’s regular insistence that the Herald was a “shabby little tabloid”. And the context to that was his feelings about his treatment at the hands of the Herald through various incidents, in particular some of his on-air utterances over the years.
A decade on, we’re at a lunch – what turns out to be a very long, convivial lunch – and, before we get too far into a second bottle of red, I say I have one thing to raise with him.
Over lunch in August, Henry talked TV, battles with the Herald and how he and John Key once almost died.
By his own estimate, Sir Ashley Bloomfield has posed for a selfie thousands of times. He’s still readily recognised – and stopped – in the street.
“The comment I would like to make,” he says, with such a striking tone and familiarity that I instantly picture him at the Beehive Theatrette podium, “is of the many thousands of people who have come up to me – and it’s an everyday thing – only one has been slightly unpleasant.”
What on earth happened, I ask him over lunch.
“The comment was, ‘Are you Ashley Bloomfield? Well, I hope you have a terrible day because you’re a terrible man.’
The relief of vacating the role as health boss was virtually instant, he says. Sleep patterns have returned. His wife Libby says he looks five years younger.
She and the couple’s three young adult children now have their husband and father back. Bloomfield says he has brain space back.
“You can never switch off,” he says of the role, for which he fronted most of the 1pm Covid press conferences, usually alongside Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. His face launched a thousand social media memes, adorned tea towels and, yes, features in many New Zealanders’ mobile phone camera rolls.
In August, a year after he finished the role, Bloomfield opened up on what he thinks we got right and wrong with Covid, Mike Hosking and media, leadership, and family.
Her hand has fended off rugby players around the globe, lifted two gold medals, and – devastatingly – held a knife as she contemplated suicide when she was only 11 years old. I reach out to shake it, but she sweeps my arm aside.
“Can we have a hug, bro?”
Ruby Tui is as unconventional and authentic as ever.
Five months on from that glorious Rugby World Cup final at Eden Park – the gold medal, the singalong, an all-night party – she bounds into lunch in her black, short-sleeved adidas top, Black Ferns shorts and white cap as if she’s ready for another 80 minutes.
She’s back training and has a new rugby contract under her belt. On the day we meet, she hasn’t quite signed, but it’s imminent. It has been, clearly, a careful negotiation process – Ruby Tui is now a wanted woman, with dozens of media and speaking requests, sponsorship commitments and a travel schedule that’s more akin to that of an Air New Zealand flight attendant.
Three weeks ago, she was commentating on matches at the World Sevens Series in Hong Kong, before moving on to Singapore the following week. This week, it’s a mini-break in Tahiti. In a couple of weeks, a speaking engagement at a conference in Nashville.
Welcome to the “crazy life” of Ruby Tui – at the age of 31, still young and fit, but with an old soul and a deep sense of purpose which emerges as we talk over lunch at Boda restaurant, on the top floor of Movenpick Hotel in Auckland city.
In April, just five months after the Rugby World Cup victory, that famous singalong and a best-selling book, Tui talked over lunch about living life with purpose, her future plans - and children.
As he sat in the Whanganui motel room, on the eve of the biggest rugby match of his fledgling career, 21-year-old David Kirk’s mind was racked with doubt.
It was 1982 and his South Island team had been written off in the media as “good old boys”, classed as no-hopers against an All Black-studded North Island side in the annual inter-island encounter.
“That’s the only time I ever felt I couldn’t cope,” says Kirk.
“I remember just getting so out of my depth. I don’t know if I can cope with this, the pace is going to be too hard, they’re too big. What happens if I make all these mistakes?”
He called his parents – in those days on a crackling landline – just to hear some reassuring voices.
The following day, Kirk and the South Island team beat the northerners 22-12.
“It was the most anxious I’ve ever been in a rugby game, and I’ve always looked back on this – I’ve held it up as a standard.”
A little over a year later – Kirk having now graduated from Otago University medical school – a patient died of a suspected heart attack at Greenlane Hospital, where Kirk was working as a young doctor.
It was left to Kirk to contact the patient’s wife with the devastating news at 2am.
“And of course, they’re disbelieving – ‘How can this be? I saw them this afternoon, they were great’.
“Having to have that conversation, it makes you realise that with sport and other things in business, you can keep them in perspective.”
Those two anecdotes have perhaps helped lay something of a psychological foundation for one of New Zealand’s most successful sporting and business careers over the next 41 years – a legacy that so far includes lifting the very first Rugby World Cup, securing a famous $750 million business deal, working as chief policy adviser for the Prime Minister, launching his own businesses, chairing a swag of others, and studying at Oxford.
Over lunch in August, the former All Black talked business, sport, politics and family - and a recipe for how NZ can fill its cup again.
He revolutionised how we watch sport, earned a knighthood for his services to broadcasting and business, and became an outspoken columnist as New Zealand’s Covid response became increasingly muddled. Right now, over lunch, Sir Ian Taylor is singing a children’s poem.
“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout…” he recites at our waterfront-facing table at Giraffe restaurant on Auckland’s Viaduct. “… down came the rain and washed the spider out.”
He sang the ditty at a Television New Zealand audition in the early 1970s to earn himself a role of presenter on Play School – and, with that, a place in the hearts of a new generation of New Zealanders.
From TV star in the 70s to outspoken columnist. Over lunch in July, discussions about wealth taxes, Covid, and a future for New Zealand, allowed an insight into the life and mind of one of New Zealand’s top business leaders.
“Hey listen, darling!” Helen Emett pleads with husband Josh, as they go back and forth debating with increasing hilarity about which year they met.
“We get this wrong a lot. I always have to do this with him … I love it,” she grins.
We move between 2006, 2007 and 2008, before Helen steps in firmly to lay down some facts. The couple settle on 2007 as the year they first met and January 2008 for their first date.
“Write that shit down!” Josh says, laughing.
Josh, who turned 50 this year, is labelled a “celebrity chef” in many quarters but his culinary credentials and skills have been deeply embedded for more than three decades, well before television and social media catapulted him into stardom.
Waikato-born and raised, he grafted hard early on in kitchens in New Zealand and Australia, before spending 11 years in Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred restaurants, in London, New York and Los Angeles. Ramsay brought him back Down Under, to Melbourne, in 2010, before he came home to own and operate some of New Zealand’s best-loved restaurants.
His warm, personable behaviour, deep-thinking approach and undeniable good looks break the mould of the irascible, pan-flinging, abusive chef of lore, traits often exhibited by Ramsay.
Over lunch in July, Josh and Helen talk about food, love, Gordon Ramsay, MasterChef, and their own dining habits.
Then-broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson describes him as “one of the best Tories”. John Key considered him a future Prime Minister. He’s a trained lawyer who’s held powerful roles in politics, banking and media.
But as Simon Power steps down as TVNZ chief executive his immediate priority is a family holiday, four historic US Presidents and some more time on the surfboard.
Power, his wife Lisa and their two boys will travel to the United States for a family holiday – California, Washington DC and New York are all on the itinerary.
He will then stay in America to carry out research for a PhD – focusing on four US Presidents and their paths as Governors or through the Senate. “I’ll be in a room with boxes for a couple of weeks. Everyone thinks it’s slightly odd … but I’m really looking forward to it!”
Beyond that, he has few plans, apart from ensuring he spends some decent time on his surfboard at Whangamatā, as New Zealand eases out of winter.
Over lunch in July, Power opened up on the canned merger with RNZ, why he quit after a little over a year into the job, what’s next and why a renowned political and news junkie has been watching Love Island.
Blood is much thicker than radio talkback lines. Chlöe Swarbrick’s father – a key figure who instilled in her the power of argument and debate – is, she says, right-leaning but these political ideologies take a backseat if his daughter is in the firing line.
She remembers being at the centre of vitriol after attending a protest soon after being elected to Parliament.
“My dad, who listens to Newstalk ZB – or used to listen to ZB – called me, freaking out: ‘they’re going at you on talkback radio’.
“I was like, ‘I think this is it forever now, dad, as long as I’m doing this gig. I’m a Green, I’m young, I’m a woman, I’m gay. I’ve got all the things – whichever part of the platter of stuff you want’.”
I return to her throwaway comment a few minutes later. Why does her dad no longer listen to ZB?
She laughs: “He finds it really hard to hear me being slagged off all the time.”
She quickly points out that she’s never turned down an invitation to appear with Mike Hosking on ZB’s Breakfast show. “He did hang up on me during the debate on the cannabis referendum. He told me something along the lines of he was right, I was wrong, and they were going to win. Anyway, it is what it is, he’s in control – that’s his prerogative.”
The loyalty of Swarbrick’s father Paul - who works in the finance industry - extends both ways, and beyond.
Before we sit down for lunch at Auckland city eatery Ima – “I’ve had a lot of good times here” – Swarbrick warned she would be reluctant to go into too many details of her family life.
The Auckland Central MP sat down for lunch in June to discuss life, family, Sir Ian Taylor and wealth taxes, the ‘time-warp’ of Parliament – and why she’s not in politics forever.
Wayne Brown walks into lunch at one of Auckland’s upmarket hotels in a short-sleeved, blue and beige checkered shirt. He looks relaxed, holding the hand of his wife Toni. The pair could easily be mistaken for being on an overseas holiday or a cruise ship.
“I call her Princess and she calls me Brownie,” says Auckland’s mayor of almost six months.
It’s a weekday, and “Brownie” – “my kids all call me that, and my grandkids” – still has several meetings ahead. He jokes that he needs to be slightly sober for the lunch but seriously drunk for an afternoon meeting with councillor Maurice Williamson.
Brown is in an upbeat mood and he will pepper lunch with this - shall we say - unique style of humour. As the world well knows, he is not a traditional politician. Few escape a skewering over the following two hours, as he paints a picture of himself as a no-nonsense, qualified engineer and board gun, voted in as mayor to get Auckland back on track. Mr Fix-it.
“Well, it’s lovely to be here,” says Brown, surveying his kingdom from the table at the Park Hyatt’s Onemata restaurant, with its waterside views of the Viaduct and Auckland’s cityscape. “Right in the heart as to why I want to be mayor.”
Over lunch in March, Brown discussed avoiding ‘national f***-ups’, banjo-band groupies - and the love of his life.
David Lomas was in a central Auckland cafe when an older woman – a stranger – sat down alongside him and revealed a deep personal secret. She’d had a baby 60-odd years ago, she confided, as a 15- or 16-year-old, and given the child up for adoption.
“She said, ‘I’ve never spoken to anyone in my life about this’,” says Lomas, researcher, cajoler, connector and star of the eponymous show David Lomas Investigates.
“She just sat down and started telling me her story.
“It gets you because you just don’t realise how many people are carrying a hurt all the time.”
Lomas has been variously described in media as a “human locator beacon”, a “good fairy ... sprinkling fairy dust”, and a “priest” – people willingly telling him their deepest secrets.
“Not quite in the little [confessional] room,” he once laughed.
We’re meeting for lunch today at Beau, a restaurant on Ponsonby Rd in Auckland. I arrive early and nab an outdoor table. I spot Lomas approaching right on time, 200 metres down the road.
He walks methodically and carefully, almost like the way he talks on his show – “Hello. My. Name. Is. David. Lomas.” He takes his time to observe a car that’s suddenly stopped on a side street, almost impeding his path. An old-school journalist – constantly curious.
He doesn’t much like being on the other side of the recorder. “I look forward to interviews as much as a colonoscopy!”
Over lunch in December, Lomas talked about his own back story, the remarkable success of his show and surviving a fatal helicopter crash with Paul Holmes.
State Highway 12 rolls through hillsides and farmland in Northland – hair-raisingly narrow with sharp turns and pockmarked with filled-in and newly forming cavities. It’s about as far from London’s Covent Garden or New York’s Met as you’ll find, and about the only place where The Voice now performs.
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa says she only sings in the car these days. That patchy detour road between Auckland and the Bay of Islands is now her stage. That – and when it’s clear of slips and open – State Highway 1 over the Brynderwyn Hills.
“You’ve got to keep yourself going. It’s a nasty road. It’s the lorry drivers, lots of the logging trucks shouldn’t be on the road – or only on certain days.
“I’ve had a logging truck behind me going honk, honk, honk! I just stayed in my place. Then we got to the bottom of the hill, and I thought I’m going to be able to take off now - which I did.”
It will take more than a road-raging truckie to deter Dame Kiri, 79, now happily, blissfully back living in New Zealand after more than 50 years in the UK and a lifetime building her internationally acclaimed career – one of the most famous opera sopranos in history – in which she performed on the world’s biggest stages, mixed with royalty, trained and protected that voice constantly, and built a circle of dear friends, many of them household names.
She says over lunch at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel in Russell: “I’m still a little girl from New Zealand, I’ve never forgotten that.”
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa opened up over lunch in May about her homecoming, her husband and family, a life of adventure … and a hilarious bedroom encounter with a Formula 1 star.
Paddy Gower is in such deep thought and talking so animatedly that he is ignoring – or completely oblivious – to the hurricane-force water blaster unleashing a torrent underneath the Viaduct restaurant deck.
The tsunami-like noise erupts suddenly. It is so deafening and overwhelming that I fear it will drown out everything else on the digital recorder placed directly beside Gower on the restaurant table.
But not even a fully powered industrial machine can silence Gower. It takes him 15 minutes before he has a proper breather and – after a selfie with another adoring fan – fully acknowledges the horrific din.
“It’s making me grumpy!” he says finally, grabbing his jacket as we hightail it inside.
Paddy Gower is about to be full-noise himself. With a new weekly TV show, Paddy Gower Has Issues, launching this month, he has reached the rarefied broadcasting air of having his name on the marquee. Only a handful of New Zealand TV current affairs shows and stars have been here before – think Holmes, Campbell, Fraser.
It’s creating a new form of pressure.
“I get extremely nervous and I do get stressed out. But this time around, I’m trying to cope with it through maturity. Previously I turned to booze, or I was just generally getting stressed and acting strange at work. Getting grumpy and that kind of thing.”
As we meet over lunch at White & Wong’s restaurant, any nervousness has been parked up, replaced by what seems like an intense focus and an ability to take conversations into all sorts of quirky and curious directions.
Over lunch in May, Gower opened up on regrets, empathy, motivating the All Blacks, the ‘This is the F***ing News’ meme … and growing a mullet.
Sophie Moloney has come to lunch armed with her laptop and a set of headphones, and wearing what she describes as her lucky shoes.
The Sky TV boss pulls the laptop from her bag and punches in a password to light up the screen. I clear away a menu and plate, don the headphones and settle in for a completely unexpected lunchtime video show.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin blasts through my brain while a visual symphony sweeps across the laptop screen. It’s all action.
Sport! The Warriors! The All Blacks! Entertainment! Hollywood! News!
Moloney has been showcasing the video to staff at special internal meetings, promoting the company’s newly defined “purpose” – Share stories, Share possibilities, Share joy.
It’s a call to arms for the staff to understand why Sky is important in people’s lives and to help give them a sense of why they come to work each day.
And if that sounds like marketing mumbo-jumbo, think again.
Over lunch in October, Moloney opened up on Sky’s next big moves, family and grief.