Former finance minister Grant Robertson’s memoir goes full circle, from his political baptism in Dunedin through the toll of the Covid years to his return to Otago.
The last time the Listener spoke to Grant Robertson, he was stiff as a board. The editorial brief had been to get some colour, which was not an unreasonable expectation given his customary ebullience. But Robertson, minders in tow, was tense and guarded. The then-deputy prime minister and finance minister had reason to be. The day of the interview, January 17, 2022, was supposed to have been the beginning of the end of the fraught MIQ (Managed Isolation and Quarantine) system.
But three weeks earlier, as Covid’s Omicron variant raged outside our borders, the great opening-up had been postponed. Furthermore, inflation was up, globally, and the Reserve Bank had begun to act. Robertson remarked that a stomach complaint had, among other things, limited his tolerance for beer.
According to his newly released autobiography, Anything Could Happen, things only got worse. By the beginning of 2023, Robertson, never exactly a picture of health and fitness, was in bad shape. He had developed a condition called esophagitis that meant he struggled to swallow. Worse, a cortisone injection to ease the pain of a compressed disc in his spine temporarily paralysed him.
The shock of that event, and the knowledge that Jacinda Ardern was considering resigning as prime minister – at that point strictly a private conversation between the pair of them – produced a panic attack that caused him to shake uncontrollably. When the bad thoughts lingered, he consulted a doctor, who diagnosed “extreme stress, compounded by the trauma of the temporary paralysis”. Then he consulted a therapist “who would help me through my remaining time in Parliament”.
On a lunchbreak from his post-politics role as vice-chancellor of the University of Otago, Robertson, now 53, is clearly not only healthier, but happier.
“I recognise now that I was very stressed, quite anxious and struggling in a lot of ways,” he says. “And yeah, I definitely feel I’m out the other side.”
How much was the stress a product of the times, and how much simply the nature of politics? “I think it’s a fair comment to suggest that politics has always been a robust and draining exercise. Everybody I see looks better when they stop in politics than they did when they were in it. So, clearly, it isn’t unique to me or unique to the times. But I also think that was a particularly difficult period for everyone who was in government, around the world.”
Much of Anything Could Happen, through his career as civil servant, MP and minister, depicts politics as a matter of trying to appear unbothered while paddling furiously below the surface. He points out that as the pandemic took hold of everything, looking calm was a crucial part of the job.
“But this is probably an existential question for politics globally. How much do we reward honesty and vulnerability? I have a friend who’s written a book about that recently. And a number of times in government, I can recall, certainly in my advisory role, that moment of thinking, you know, the best policy here is just to say, ‘We didn’t get that right; this is how we’re changing it.’ I think in general, the public probably does reward that. But the maxim that underpins a lot of political work is that you don’t do that. You don’t show vulnerability, you don’t show weakness. And I do think there’s an issue there.”
The book’s title comes from the song of the same name by canonical Dunedin band The Clean (the song itself is a tale of going to the doctor to try to score drugs and getting a lecture instead, but let’s not tarry there). Robertson also leaned into his love of the city’s music a year ago when he stepped up to MC the funeral of The Chills’ Martin Phillipps. At that time, he revealed he was writing a book to rebut what he expected to come from the sequel to the official Covid inquiry announced by the coalition government. What has actually emerged is something different.
The first half of Anything Could Happen is an engaging explanation of how Grant Robertson came to be. His love of rugby, cricket and music, and his struggle to embrace his sexuality. The well-known disgrace of his lay-preacher father who went to jail for stealing about $120,000 from his employer is covered, along with the less-well-known story of his mother coming out as lesbian after his parents separated.
There is a fair bit of drinking involved – including the occasion when, as a schoolboy, he necked a potentially fatal quantity of gin on the way to a rugby teammate’s party where he expected to be shunned on suspicion of being gay. He survived and discovered a facility for politics.
Keep left
One story that goes untold in the book – and he’s not quite sure why – is his part in a secret blogging operation while he was working in Helen Clark’s prime ministerial office during the 2005 election campaign. Keep Left NZ, whose creators identified themselves as John, Paul, George, Ringo and Yoko, was an entertaining presence in the then-flourishing local blogosphere. And no, Clark did not know about it.
“It was a group of people who worked in government, but were doing it separately from our from our day jobs, as it were,” says Robertson. “I do recall a conversation at one point with a senior person who suggested they might have worked out it was us. But certainly with Helen, no, we didn’t talk about it there at all.”
He says the blog did play a role when then-National Party leader Don Brash sensationally admitted to Noelle McCarthy on 95bFM that he had in fact known that the controversial Exclusive Brethren church would be distributing pamphlets attacking National’s opponents and was “delighted” that church members were putting up hoardings for his party.
“It was a brilliant moment. I so vividly recall that, and then realising, because it was bFM, we needed to help the story out a bit further, which is what we did. Don Brash, even today, has a tendency in interviews to just say any old thing, which occasionally reveals more than he thinks.”
In the book, Robertson attributes the work of turning the interview into a mainstream news story to a “rapid response group” in the PM’s office, which included “a newly arrived adviser named Jacinda Ardern”. Does this mean the two groups were the same – and that Ardern was therefore Yoko? No, he says, the two were separate, “but some of the people involved were also involved in Keep Left.” Given that in one Keep Left post Yoko promised a “love-in” with other bloggers, this is perhaps best left unexplored.
He’s prepared to give up one Keep Left name: that of Jason Knauf, who at the time was a media assistant in Steve Maharey’s office and who later made global headlines as the royal aide who reported alleged bullying of staff by Meghan Markle.
Nicky Hager’s book The Hollow Men subsequently underlined how strange the 2005 campaign had been. But the discourse of the time seems quaint in comparison to the nature of political speech 20 years on. Robertson writes in his book that in 2023, a Taxpayers’ Union ad imitated his voice, he believes using AI. He frets about a new era of “post-truth campaigning”.
“I think the participants have to just say, this is a race to the bottom, and we have to stop,” he says. “At the margins of politics, you might not be able to stop it, but in the mainstream, you should. I think there needs to be a coming together around that to foster and facilitate good debate. I think we all need to own that.”
Robertson writes of his time as a student at Otago with fondness, not least in his description of his time as Otago University Students’ Association president in 1993, when he was the face of student protests about fee increases. He organised marches, liaised with police and debated then vice-chancellor Sir Robin Irvine live on Holmes. So, has the vice-chancellor in 2025 been targeted in protests?
“I have,” he says, with an emphasis that sounds like satisfaction. “I most definitely have, mainly around the issue of Palestine and the position the university can or can’t take on political issues like that. And I accept that given my background, people are probably going to push the boundaries a little bit there, given what I was doing.”
From his view at the top of the university, he sees much that is the same as when he was a student there more than three decades ago.
“I still see students who are finding themselves, getting new understanding about the world around them, making their lifelong friends. I see and hear them debate issues, morals and ethics. Some of the flats are exactly the same as they were when I was a student – and that is not a good thing!
“What is different is that I think students today are under more pressure. There is more assessment, more often, and there seems to be a greater pressure on getting higher grades to go further in some programmes, like health sciences. The mental health issues that we see in society are very much present at university. On the activism side, there are still many students politically motivated and ready to have their voice heard. Some of the issues are different, and the protests are a bit smaller, but the passion is there nonetheless.”
Otago students are also, of course, still drinking, and Robertson says he is awaiting a report on a review of student entertainment options. He’s not averse to the idea of reviving student pubs, an idea proposed as a form of harm reduction.
“I think there is a place for student pubs. They provide a safe, secure and responsibly run venue for students to socialise. The impact of the demise of the pubs was highlighted by police during the Sophia Crestani coronial inquest, where one police representative said that now pubs had closed, ‘flats had become nightclubs.’” Not, he adds, that either pubs or drinking are what all students want or need.
He seems to be faring well enough with his students. A recent poll conducted by the Otago student paper Critic Te Ārohi gave Robertson (“the jolly guy from the university’s Instagram videos”) a rating of 3.66 out of five, with nearly 40% of students polled awarding him four stars.
“The one-star cohort are either salty about him raising tertiary fees last year or found out he’s from Palmy,” the paper concluded.
Reviews have been more mixed of his performance in his last job, as minister of finance. His book emerges in the wake of a widely reported Treasury briefing that said while Treasury had urged a “strong fiscal stimulus” when Covid arrived in 2020, by the following year it was warning the economy was faring better than expected and stimulus spending should not continue past Budget 2022.
“First,” says Robertson, “Treasury are not exactly renowned for their support of spending large amounts of money. Every government ever has been advised by the Treasury not to spend as much money as they usually end up spending.
“The second thing I would say is that I think you need to look carefully at the wording of that statement. In August 2021, when we went back into lockdown, Treasury were supportive of us continuing where we were. They were beginning to say, ‘You’re going to have to think about the impacts of this.’ So, in reality, I’m not certain I see quite the dramatic difference that’s being extrapolated out of that. I mean, we closed the Covid Response and Recovery Fund in May 2022.”
But Budget 2022 did contain nearly $15 billion over four years in new health spending. And it’s almost a mainstream economic commentary view that we now have a structural deficit and it’s Robertson’s fault.
“I’ve certainly read some economists and some people who like to construct it that way. I go back to the fact that throughout the period of time that I was the minister of finance, the international ratings agencies, Standard and Poor’s and so on, consistently gave us good ratings. Our ratings went up, and they were maintained at that level. So I think the external analysis is that we did all right. Those ratings agencies, like everybody else, said, ‘You’ve got to be careful, there needs to be a balance here. But everybody understood that and we started to do it in the 2023 Budget. We had to find that money for the cyclone recovery, but we also were asking agencies to cut back their spending and we found billions of dollars of efficiencies and savings.
“We all knew that time was coming. You then make policy choices after that. The current government is needing to defend their policy choices, because they, too, have been criticised for levels of spending around where we were. They chose to do tax cuts. We chose to do other things.”
He acknowledges his own government bit off more than it could chew. “We wanted to fix Three Waters, we wanted to make sure vocational education was organised and funded properly, we wanted to get the planning system to be more balanced from a sustainability point of view. So we took on all of those things. And in each of those areas, we got a long way, or completed it. It was a highly ambitious programme that undoubtedly we could have phased differently and better.”
In the case of, say, light rail in Auckland, he says, “we just got ourselves caught in a series of processes”.
“We made progress, particularly around housing – we built a lot of state housing over that period. Transport was harder because we felt that the policy balance that underpinned transport spending wasn’t right. It was very road-focused and we wanted a multi-modal approach. This government’s come in and veered back more towards the roads. That’s politics, I guess, that’s democracy, but you’d like to think we could have a bit more certainty around that.”
That’s about as close as he’ll go to criticising the coalition government that has torn up most of Robertson’s prized initiatives. He’s out of politics and not looking to buy a fight.
His favourite part of the book, he says, is its epilogue, which is the story of him stepping away from politics and coming home to Dunedin. It opens with Allen Curnow’s famous lines about “standing upright here” and cites Colin McCahon, Janet Frame and his mum. It celebrates a litany of achievements that, he acknowledges, fall outside the present political moment – from the Waitangi Tribunal to homosexual law reform and generations of “kōhanga kids” – and declares any stalling of social progress “but a blip”. Home, it seems to say, is not only where you live, but where you stand.
Anything Could Happen, by Grant Robertson (Allen & Unwin, $39.99) is out now.