Grant Robertson: ‘A lot of the history of my time was being written around me’

Sunday, 17 August 2025

Towards the end of his memoir Grant Robertson, the former finance minister and deputy prime minister who helped shepherd the country through the pandemic, describes himself as a “recovering politician”.

Robertson, widely remembered for those two top jobs during Labour’s run from 2017 onwards, quit the Beehive in 2024 after 15 years roaming the halls of Parliament. Since then, he’s largely receded from public life - until now.

In Anything Could Happen, his first book, named after The Clean’s song, out Tuesday, Robertson lifts the lid on life in power during some of the most difficult years for a government in recent memory: the Christchurch terror attacks, disasters, a pandemic.

It was the latter that ultimately contributed to his decision to bow out of politics: the abuse that came with the Covid-19 years, being afraid to leave his house, combined with a debilitating back injury and his first (and he’s grateful to say only) panic attack, as well as his friend and then prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern also deciding to go.

“[The job] was an extraordinary privilege,” Robertson said from Dunedin this week. “I think kind of fondly of it to that extent, but I don’t miss the stress, the abuse and all of that.

“It’s a hard thing when I get lots of people asking me, should they go into politics? I try to be positive and say, look, you can make a big difference, and it’s a really important job, but it comes with a health warning. And I think that health warning is greater now than it has ever been.”

It’s the first time Robertson has publicly revealed the extent of the toll his job was taking. He was pretty good at hiding it, he reckons. But exiting politics, getting his weekends back and flying under the radar, confirms that life had become hard.

“You need to think of yourself in recovery mode, because it takes a little while,” he says of returning to “normal” life.

And it was a long career in politics. Robertson colourfully writes about his rise to the top: climbing the ranks of the student union movement as the then National government imposed 8% interest on student fees; an MFAT posting that took him to New York City; and a foot in politics advising former Labour MP Marian Hobbs, before being elevated to to Helen Clark’s office as a general support person.

In 2008 he became an MP himself, for Wellington Central, which was followed by a couple of failed - and painful - bids for Labour’s leadership.

The idea for a book was not Robertson’s, it was his publisher’s - and he says he was reluctant.

Which largely answers the Star-Times’ first question. How much did he want to set the record straight? As of course his decision-making is still a topic of conversation, even though he’s no longer there to answer the barbs during Question Time. His, and the Labour Government’s decision-making continues to reverberate.

A Treasury report out last week that said the Labour government had been warned about its spending during the Covid years, and this interview was conducted a day before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response shot a bow across the Labour camp, claiming Robertson and his former colleagues had refused to front in public.

But Robertson is no longer engaged in the politics of the day - and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do a book either.

“I wasn’t sure that I had sufficient perspective,” he says. “[But then] I realised that history gets written very quickly these days, and a lot of the history of my time was being written around me.

“I certainly wanted to put my perspective forward around our time in government and my time as minister of finance. You know, an awful lot gets written about that, and there’s an awful lot of hindsight in the book. I talk about the new branch of economics that Covid created, called hindsight economics.

“In hindsight, we can look at elements of some of the policy decisions we made and say, was that the right one? Was that not the right one? But I guess the book’s an attempt to say, this is why we made the decision. This is how we made it.”

Robertson’s memoir comes hot on the heels of Ardern’s own, A Different Kind of Power, published in June.

Although both canvas their personal histories, Ardern’s was marketed as a think-piece on leadership, and has been criticised for leaving out the nitty-gritty. But where Ardern’s is light on political gossip and intrigue, Robertson appears to spill a bit more, though he concedes not every story made it in.

There’s glimpses of the fractions that arose when Ardern was installed as leader weeks out from the 2017 election; Robertson grappling with accusations that he’d orchestrated it. (Says Robertson: “It was a couple of people. It wasn’t the whole caucus or anything like that. I think we were all experiencing the trauma of having rotated through leaders.”)

There are accounts of what felt like an agonising coalition negotiation with NZ First, grappling with a mercurial Winston Peters (“I came to the view that Winston hated making decisions,” Robertson writes) and frustrating run-ins with the wider NZ First caucus with Robertson describing relations quickly fraying.

Robertson says he and Ardern certainly confabbed as they wrote. “’Did that happen in that order?’ Or, ‘do you remember that?’

After following Ardern, more or less, through the exit door in early 2024, Robertson is now vice chancellor of Otago University; a far cry from his earlier days as a rabble-rouser on the executive of the students’ union at the university in the early 90s.

His position now is an anomaly for the university - it’s typically handed to academic stalwarts, and Robertson is proud to have it though he finds it “bizarre” being back on campus, witnessing the new generation of activists and recognising lecturers who are still around 30 years later.

You’d imagine the politics and law students would love having Robertson in their midst, but aside from the question about whether to go into politics, another common one is: “How’s Jacinda?” which Robertson seems to welcome.

Now, he loves being back in Dunedin with longtime partner Alf, and near to his mum. His nostalgia for the city is evident in the cultural touchstones in his writing: the Dunedin sound and even a Bain family member make appearances, interspersed with Robertson’s early years grappling with his sexuality, his parent’s marriage break-up and his father’s imprisonment for a significant theft.

Life, now, is as normal as it can be. Robertson has his weekends back. He’s out walking the Otago Harbour most days. His job is busy. And he’s quite proud of his latest accomplishment - this book - which saw him only skip a few days of writing over summer, for Christmas and New Year.

Politics, perhaps, is a distant memory.

“For the first year or so, I paid very little attention to politics. And even now, I think I’m more like a normal person. I’ll see a headline … and if I do read the story, I almost certainly won’t read all the way through it, you know. So I think I am engaging more like an interested person in politics, rather than the politician itself.”

And so Robertson is reluctant to weigh in on Labour’s position, nor whether he thinks a capital gains tax or a wealth tax is the right direction for the party, though he’s on the record in general as saying tax reform is a good idea.

But he does have thoughts on Treasury’s recent report into Covid-19 spending, which said the money drive went overboard, into areas that weren’t specifically Covid-related.

On that, Robertson has a few points: Treasury, during Covid and for the most part, was backing the Government’s approach to spending; and he recalls even Christopher Luxon, then the opposition leader, calling for government spending.

Recovery was also complicated by the dual weather events of Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary floods. And finally, he knew the 2024 budget, if he were to still be finance minister at that point, would have had to look very different to his previous ones, and that he’d already started seeking, and finding, savings.

“And that’s, I guess, my comment,” he says. “Time doesn’t stand still. I spent a lot of time in the 2023 election campaign telling people how hard Budget 2024 was going to be.”

Ultimately, “you are who you are at the moment … not who you might have been.”

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Anything Could Happen: A Memoir (Allen & Unwin), is out Tuesday, RRP $39.99.