Photography by Emily Chalk
It’s been a huge year of firsts for Nicola Willis. Her first year in Government as deputy leader of the National Party. Her first budget as Minister of Finance, during a cost-of-living crisis and a bruising economic recession no less.
She now has two former prime ministers phoning her for chats about the country’s future and sometimes for her advice. And people stop her in the street or in cafés to compliment her on her work. On the flipside, however, she draws more viciousness from anonymous detractors, particularly on social media, reviling her as a politician and even a mother. So has this been the weightiest 12 months in the 43-year-old’s life?
“It’s been massive and relentless,” admits Nicola. “The intensity is very high and very consistent – like, it never lets up. But there was a time in my life where I had three children under the age of three, and significant periods of my life where I had a house of very young children and a colicky baby. That was harder.”
There was the time when, as a sleep-deprived mum, she set fire to herself leaning over a gas stove.
“I remember boiling baby bottles to the point where all the water had evaporated from the pot,” the mother of four recalls. “You’re not your best self. You’re just surviving each day. Being a parent to young kids is a hard job. Yes, you’ve got your support, like your partner, your family and your friends, but you’re doing it alone a lot of the day.
“Whereas in my work now, I’m always surrounded by people on the same team helping me do the job. I’ve got my team of incredible staff members and the officials who work with me. I’ve got my colleagues, my caucus and my cabinet. And on top of that, I’ve got the Prime Minister.
“There are all these layers of people who are on the mission with you. Parenting can be much more isolating and can really get to your sense of self. You question, ‘Am I failing? Am I doing it wrong?’ And I found that much more challenging, in terms of my own confidence.”
So now, as she enters a new phase with two teenagers in her Wellington household, where her husband Duncan Small holds the fort, does Nicola feel she has the balance of power and parenting right?
“It waxes and wanes. If you find me a parent who says they’ve got that nailed, I want to meet them and know how!” she laughs. “I have days where I have been so distracted by the things my family needs from me that I wonder, ‘Am I focused enough on the work thing?’ Then I have weeks where I think I’ve been working so hard, I’m not as emotionally available for my kids as I need to be and I need to check in with them.”
Nicola has become better at setting herself rules and habits to try to keep the balance. When she’s at the dinner table with her family, she puts her phone in another room. She also makes sure the conversation isn’t about work or what’s happening in politics.
“If I’m not coming home till late, I’ll make sure we FaceTime at 5.30pm,” she shares. “Sometimes one of them will take the phone into their room and lie on their bed because they want to have a chat with Mum.
“I make time to watch the kids run cross-country and go to school interviews, even if it means missing Question Time [at Parliament]. Sometimes the parent-teacher interview is the most important thing that week. But am I nailing it every week? No way.”
Family matters
During Nicola’s photo shoot in Auckland for this story, the Wellington-based list MP, who stood unsuccessfully for Ōhāriu at the last election, put her phone aside for a few hours and didn’t check it until after the last shutter click.
She had nine text messages to attend to before she’d even looked at the missed calls. Broccoli and noodles at the airport would be a quick dinner ahead of her flight back to the capital. By the time she arrived home in Karori, husband Duncan would have seen to dinner for their four children. Nicola is mum to James, 14, Harriet, 13, Reuben, 11, and Gloria, who just turned nine. And he would have made their school lunches for the next day.
The couple, who met in the debating club at Victoria University, made an agreement back in 2018 – six months into Nicola’s career as an MP – that still works today. Duncan, who’d worked in Treasury and in Parliament, decided to become a part-time business consultant and part-time stay-at-home dad.
“Duncan was flying to Auckland twice a week and I was trying to be a 24/7 MP. It got really tough,” Nicola says. “It was a big sacrifice to make because Duncan has always loved his work. I’m really conscious he did it because he knew I couldn’t step back. One of the luckiest things in my life was finding him and having the good fortune that he fell in love with me, and vice versa.”
They’d never planned to have a large family. “We were still young when we started having children, so that choice to have more was there for us,” says Nicola, who is the eldest of three siblings. “Duncan tells a bit of a mean joke that he wanted two and I wanted four, so he compromised and had four!” But Nicola adds that her redheaded husband has a “special kinship” with their two youngest children, who inherited his auburn hair.
“Our parenting has become more relaxed over time,” she continues. “There’s a big element of everyone just pitching in and doing their bit. We certainly don’t have the tidiest house or the best outfits on school photo day. Sometimes people forget their PE gear. But we do our best.”
They’ve also reached a stage, Nicola feels, where they can add a new family member – a dog. She’s lobbying hard.
“There are five campaigners in the house – me and all four children. Duncan has this incredibly, irritatingly reasonable position that as the chief caregiver, he’s the one who will end up having to walk and feed the dog, and clean up after it. I just see all the awesome things that would come with it. And our eldest is 14. I don’t want him to have grown up without a pet.” But she knows this may well be a debate she won’t win.
Holding the ministerial portfolios of Finance, Public Service and Social Investment, as well as being Associate Minister of Climate Change, Nicola has done a lot of internal travel this year. By mid-September, she’d made 24 visits to Auckland alone.
“I love it, the travel, because the greatest danger you face when you’re in Government is that you become so focused on trying to get your work agenda and your policy through, you spend your entire time in your office, in the Beehive, talking to officials,” she says. “The whole reason we’re here is because of the world out there. And the world in Kaitaia is different from the world in West Auckland and Invercargill and Blenheim. So you have to be travelling, being amongst it and hearing from people, and that’s where I get the gems.”
Like flying to the Far North to meet Kaitaia College student and entrepreneur Lennox Goodhue-Wikitera after she saw his story about the school shutting down his ice-block business. She’s promised to help the 17-year-old find an internship with a leading Kiwi company.
“That’s my favourite trip – honestly, I was just fizzing after that,” Nicola says. “Let’s not cut down the tall poppies. Let’s celebrate the people who go above and beyond, who are ambitious and want to do things differently.
“This kid is special, so if I can do one thing to make him feel encouraged and connect him to other people who’ve been successful, I’m going to do it.” Nicola’s Instagram message inbox has been flooded with offers of help for Lennox.
Mentors are Key
Nicola is conscious of the importance of mentors and role models, having had some impressive people play influential roles in her life. That started with her parents, lawyer James Willis and Press Gallery journalist Shona Valentine, who are still very much involved in her family’s life, and continues through to past prime ministers Sir Bill English and Sir John Key. Nicola worked for both leaders early in her career.
Rather than go to Bill and John for advice these days, Nicola reveals they’ll now reach out to “reflect” with her.
“Bill got in touch recently and said, ‘Shall we have a chat about how the economy’s going? I’m interested to hear what you’re thinking.’ I love that because we’ve got so much shared history that we can talk about what I’m seeing and experiencing. I can ask, ‘How did you approach this and how did you find that?’ It’s a very equal conversation. At the end of the day, it’s a small circle of people who’ve sat in these chairs to do these jobs. It’s a unique perspective, so it’s interesting to swap notes.
“Often when John calls, he says, ‘I’m not ringing you to talk to you about anything work-related – it’s not a policy thing!’ We might be going to the same birthday party and he wants to know where we’re all staying. They’re both really cautious not to cramp my style – they didn’t want their forebears cramping theirs.”
When making decisions on delivering tax cuts and funding more cancer drugs, Nicola sometimes sees the influence of her mentors. But, she insists, it can also be the opposite. “Sometimes I think, ‘Here’s what I’ve learned over time. It’s wise and judicious, and a balanced approach based on the way I saw John Key and Bill English lead, and the way I saw other politicians do their job.’ I want to be able to replicate the good things.
“But sometimes I quite specifically and deliberately see we’re in a different time. The approach that worked then is not sufficient now, so we have to approach this anew. People elected Chris Luxon and Nicola Willis, and we’re a different team. I’ve got a different set of experiences that I bring to my work.”
As the deputy leader of National, Nicola has had a close working relationship with PM Christopher since he chose her for the role in late 2021. She has also formed a personal bond with her leader. “We are friends and we have a professional relationship that is also grounded in friendship,” she says.
“His role as Prime Minister is incredibly demanding and so is mine. We are such a team in the sense that I need his backing and he needs my delivery. We rely on each other to do our jobs really well. That way, we can deliver the things that we’ve committed to New Zealanders we will do. A lot of challenges we work on are done together. We look across things like education, health, law and order, inflation and infrastructure. Some of my colleagues are focused on their piece of the puzzle, but both of us have to look across the whole puzzle.”
Nicola says she has seen the PM’s leadership come to the fore since entering the office a year ago, having had glimpses of it while they were in Opposition. “You can see the chief executive in him come out. It’s his job to manage people and get the best out of people, and that’s about driving performance, accountability and targets. I still learn a lot from him.”
If there’s one thing Nicola has learned about him in the past 12 months, it’s that he loves to talk.
“Even though he comes across as very black and white, and meticulous and process-oriented, he actually just loves having a yarn. He’s a bit of a chatter. At first, I thought that, as Prime Minister, he wasn’t going to have time for that. He was going to want the quick five-minute conversation. But it turns out he really wants to talk through an issue. I enjoy that too because I’m a bit of a talker, especially having those conversations with someone you trust.”
Budgets & biscuits
When Nicola delivered her maiden Budget to the nation in May, her children delivered a batch of their homemade chocolate-chip cookies for her to share with the Prime Minister and her staff.
Past finance ministers have always created their own Budget Day traditions. Bill English would eat a pie, Grant Robertson always ate a southern cheese roll and Steven Joyce would have a haircut. Nicola will make the biscuits her tradition “as long as the kids are willing and I’m delivering Budgets”.
She continues, “Even though Chris is my colleague, it’s still special for my kids that the Prime Minister of New Zealand is eating their cookies. They were very proud because they were very good – and a lot more perfectly shaped than they usually are!”
She nicknamed her work the “Goldilocks Budget”. She claims, it was “not too little, not too much and just right”. Its intention was to rebuild the economy, ease the cost of living, deliver better health and education services, and restore law and order. But is New Zealand reaping the rewards of this Budget yet? While it’s still tough for many Kiwi families, Nicola believes she sees “green shoots” emerging.
“The way I describe it is, we’ve been in a tunnel and we can now see the light – we can see the way out,” she insists. “I always said the first thing we’ve got to do is get inflation under control because that’s underlying the cost-of-living crisis and driving the big price increases.
“We’re now seeing inflation come down quickly, quicker than many people thought it would. Interest rates are also dropping, both for those who have mortgages and also for businesses, who are feeling confident about borrowing, investing and hiring more people. Things at a macro level are moving in the right direction. However, I won’t deny there are families and businesses who are finding it really tough. That’s the reality of where we are now. We’ve just got to keep pushing to grow our way out of it.”
Her message to New Zealanders who are struggling is that things will get better. She wants Kiwis to celebrate the “awesome things” that are happening in innovative businesses that are taking risks. “I want New Zealand to be confident that we have a great future ahead of us,” she says.
‘The soft part of me’
As a mother, Nicola often thinks about her children’s future. But she also thinks about kids in this country who are less privileged. “It’s really emotional for me, that sense of, ‘My kids have this and I want other kids to have this too.’ It’s important seeing things through those eyes.”
She’s also keenly aware that having a high-profile political career puts her at risk of losing her vulnerability and becoming desensitised.
“When I became a politician, my great fear was that I would lose the soft part of me. That is a really important part of who I am,” Nicola says.
“That can happen because to do the job, you have to be brave and strong. You have to put on your armour and believe in things with conviction, even when big groups of people are telling you you’ve made the wrong decision and you’re going the wrong way. You have to put your shoulders back, and be decisive and clear. But what you don’t want to happen in the process is to lose the part of you that can see the other side of the story and is worried about the implications. ‘Yes, I’m doing it this way, but who’s that affecting?’
“I work really hard to keep that side of me open, to feel emotion and to be teary. For example, when I’m listening to the apologies for the abuse in state care. My husband, my kids and my parents all remind me why I’m there. My kids are so good at saying, ‘Mum, are you okay?’”
Because there are days when the highest-ranked woman in Government is not okay. Nicola says she regularly gets “positive affirmation” from people in the street or in emails “giving me completely unearned praise”. However, she is also the frequent target of harassment and online abuse. She even keeps a “folder of doom” to store the more vicious social media posts, typically from anonymous accounts.
“There are people who have a completely different view than I do, or that my party or our government does. The vast majority of people are capable of expressing that respectfully and debating the idea,” Nicola says. “But some people can be a little bit confused and make it really grossly personal. I’ve learned to get my head around that, for example, when people start talking about my physical appearance. They pick on what I’m wearing and how I sound, or speculate on what sort of a parent I am. The fact they go there tells you a lot more about them and their minds than it does about me.”
But on the days when she’s feeling a little more sensitive, Nicola goes for reassurance to the WhatsApp group populated by her university girlfriends. “If there’s a comment that’s particularly cutting because it’s something I think might be true, I’ll screengrab it and send it to my besties, asking, ‘What do you think of this one, ladies?’
“It’s unashamed seeking of flattery and it works every time. It just reminds me these are the people I love, and what they think is so much more important than what some anonymous creature thinks.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
