The Hewitson Profile: Is Celia Wade-Brown the perfect Green MP?

Celia Wade-Brown, the former mayor of Wellington and the Greens’ newest MP, is emphatically not a hippy. I had made the mistake of saying she looked like a hippy. I’d been looking at pictures of her when she was the mayor. She had a short, sensible hairdo which, heavens, may even have had a passing acquaintance with a bottle of dye, and sensible suits. She wore a smidgen of makeup. She was doing a good impersonation of a member of the Wellington establishment, albeit a Green one. Now, she wears her hair long and grey and sometimes a bit wild. Honestly, she looks like a different person. “Oh,” was all she said then. About 40 minutes later, she said, apropos of nothing, that she couldn’t be a hippy. She doesn’t wear dozens of clinking bracelets and what’s more, she’d brushed her hair nicely. So there. She’s not a hippy. What she is is funny. She has a talent for drollery.

At the end of our interview, she asked whether I’d found anything surprising about her. She’d have to wait to find out, I said, while thinking: How about almost everything? Including her sense of humour. I asked her age and she said, “The same as Gerry Brownlee.”

She arrived to pick me up at the gate to her 250ha property bordering the Tararua Ranges, an entrance signalled in advance by a chug, chug, chugging. She splashed across the river in Peggy, a bright-yellow electric all-terrain vehicle. Peggy is cute, but I look at her in trepidation. “Have you got your seatbelt on?” she says. This is not reassuring. She assured me she had off-road-driving training. Somehow, this was also less than reassuring. I had already travelled down the most terrifyingly narrow gravel road, which consisted mainly of blind corners and hairpin bends, just to get to the gate.

You’d have to be intrepid and adventurous to live the Wade-Brown lifestyle. She likes tramping and cycling and kayaking. In 2016, she and her husband, Alastair Nicholson, walked the 3000km Te Araroa trail in three stages. In total, they walked for five months. So what’s a few stomach-clenching bends and a bumpy Peggy ride? I think she’s part mountain goat.

She gives no warning that you are going to put your life in her hands before you get a cuppa. I’d imagined we’d have a country-side meander to the tiny house, across gentle meadows say, to the tunes of native birds and the trickle of gentle streams. Oh, ha ha. Across the river we went. Up, up, up we went. At times vertically. At times Peggy balked. We stalled. The driver was visibly enjoying herself. I was hanging on for what felt like dear life. On our return journey across the river, she “forgot” to warn me to put my feet up so that I wouldn’t get soaked. I got soaked. She got a good laugh. She has a wide streak of mischief. That might have come as a surprise. She didn’t say I was a wimp. But she might as well have. Serve me right for that hippy jibe.

I ask about what she thinks her public profile is, and although she says she doesn’t give it much thought, she thinks the one thing most people know about her – “the most famous thing, which is not the most important thing” – is that when she was mayor, she cycled to Wellington Airport to greet Hillary Clinton. Clinton didn’t know she’d done this because, no, the mayor didn’t turn up wearing Lycra. “If you really want to know, I had a pair of bike pants on under a very polite dress. Which did not stop everyone imaging that I had arrived hot and sweaty in Lycra to meet one of the more important women in the world.” She did, by the way, like Clinton. She is warm, she says, which doesn’t translate through TV. “But in person, you felt that you were the only person in the world that she wanted to talk to.” She will also drag out some of her Wellington clothes now that she’s an MP. I forgot to ask whether she’d be wearing her bike shorts underneath. She will wear make-up “sometimes”. She draws the line at high heels. You couldn’t hoon about in Peggy in high heels, though it would be good fun to see her try.

She’s greener than a frog. Home is a cosy tiny house, off-grid, on what was formerly cow and sheep farmland in West Taratahi. About half the land is regenerating native bush. She and Alastair, who works in IT, have two sons whose private lives are just that, private. The couple spend their time here farming carbon and killing pests – with gusto. There is a picture of her on the RNZ website holding up two dead rats by their tails. She is grinning broadly.

She is not squeamish about much, you surmise. There are, much to her delight, geckos living behind her bread board. There are long-tailed bats on the property. There is a pond where the eels live. She feeds the dead vermin to them. She keeps an old bone-ladled butter knife on Peggy’s dashboard. It is for smearing peanut butter on the rat traps. Does she eat the eels? “No. I say hello.” She is, of course, mostly vegetarian, although she will eat a bit of fish, and pig and deer shot on the land. Waste not, want not.

She is frugal by nature and by nurture. She grew up in a Greater London Council flat in Paddington which was “one of those lovely Georgian terraces. It looked a lot more elegant outside than inside.” They shared the loos on the landings with other tenants. They never had a car or a telly or a fridge. When she was about eight, the family managed to buy a house in Berkshire.