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First published JUL 24, 2023
Updated 3 hours ago
Comment
Chris Hipkins summed up the tragic downfall of his Justice Minister describing her as ‘an incredibly talented person who clearly has been battling some demons and has not won that battle’.
Comment: It’s impossible to know what was going through Kiri Allan’s head when she crashed into a car and allegedly refused to accompany police on Sunday night.
Such is the complexity of mental health problems that it may be some time before Allan even pieces together her actions.
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On Wednesday Allan had delivered a masterclass in a press conference announcing new youth justice reform alongside Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
She was calm, measured, across the subject matter, and there was no question that she couldn’t answer in detail across the 40-minute announcement.
Allan looked like she was back in control.
If that was the person Hipkins spoke with on his return from Europe just a few days earlier, then it’s easy to see why she was back at work so quickly after publicly conceding she was struggling with her mental health.
Having required Allan to take some time off despite her resisting doing so, Hipkins said she got counselling and “gave strong indications to me she was ready to take on the job”.
It was only a couple of weeks’ break and throughout she was continuing to do her heavy portfolio work while under the spotlight about her behaviour towards her staff.
She was also going through a very public and traumatising split from her fiancé.
When Hipkins spoke to her at length about whether she was ready to come back to the bear pit of Parliament she was clearly in a good place.
As Hipkins said on Monday morning, “You’ll have seen from last week that I had no evidence to question that”.
He described her as being at the “top of her game” on Wednesday.
Allan’s good mindset continued across her return to work last week, both in press conferences and the House, but at some point over the weekend it changed.
Having resigned all her ministerial portfolios Allan has gone home to consider the rest of her political career and it’s difficult to see how she would choose to come back to such an environment like Parliament.
Being charged with criminal offending while the minister of justice is not something that will ever be wiped from public memory.
The 10pm phone call to say his Justice Minister had been arrested and charged will be one he will never forget in his prime ministerial lifetime, however long that happens to be.
Hipkins would have known his decision to bring her back into the Cabinet fold could be the wrong one.
But as untenable as it now is for Allan to be Justice Minister, it would also have been untenable for Hipkins to fire her for having mental health struggles.
Allan will not be alone in Parliament with that.
Where Hipkins may look back in hindsight was when he chose to keep her on after issues were raised publicly about her management style in her ministerial office.
If a formal complaint had been made, Hipkins would have demoted her from Cabinet, but without that he had to choose whether to force her out on what was more speculation and rumour than fact.
Like most people around the building, he will have heard the stories, and while his political radar would have told him it would probably come back to bite, he was already three ministers down and genuinely wanted to back Allan to sort it out.
As Wednesday proved, she was a competent minister with a lot to offer, and if Hipkins honestly thought she could get back to that, then he was willing to take that risk.
Where all that falls over is not about the mental health breakdown but actions that could have caused harm to others when she crashed into a car, and then refused to accompany a police officer.
Those are the actions she’s rightly being judged on.
Hipkins will now be feeling like his own political career is in free fall having been dealt two ministerial sackings that didn’t happen on his watch but had to be addressed by him, plus Meka Whaitiri defecting and now Allan.
It looks like a government in chaos.
Hipkins’ judgment will be questioned over how he dealt with Allan and with less than three months until the election he’s running out of runway to correct the growing public perception that his team is not able to govern.
The 10pm phone call to say his Justice Minister had been arrested and charged will be one he will never forget in his prime ministerial lifetime, however long that happens to be.
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