Kiritapu Lyndsay Allan (, ; born 1984) is a New Zealand lawyer and former politician. She was a member of Parliament (MP) in the New Zealand House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023, representing the Labour Party in the East Coast electorate.
Allan was a junior minister in the second term of Jacinda Ardern's Sixth Labour Government and a senior minister under Ardern's successor, Chris Hipkins. She held the positions of Minister for Emergency Management and Minister of Conservation from November 2020 to June 2022 and was Minister of Justice from June 2022 until July 2023.
In June 2023, concerns about how Allan treated her staff were raised. She took time off from her parliamentary duties after a relationship breakup and, on 24 July 2023, resigned from her ministerial roles after she was arrested for careless driving the previous night. In May 2024, Allan pleaded guilty and was convicted of two charges of careless driving and failing to accompany a police officer.
Early life Allan was born in Te Karaka, of Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāti Tūwharetoa descent. She is the ninth of ten children and was named after her grandmother. As a baby, she was whāngai – given to an aunt and uncle, Gail and David Allan, who lived in Paengaroa. She was raised in a Pentecostal Christian community, which she said contributed to her perspective on helping others. Her family were cleaners and agricultural workers who experienced layoffs due to the "Rogernomics" reforms in the 1980s. Some family members had experiences with the criminal justice system and Allan later said that criminal justice reform was a motivator for her to enter both law and politics.
Allan, who is lesbian, struggled with her church's teachings about her sexuality as a teenager and wrote in 2022 about her experiences undergoing conversion therapy. After being outed at 16, she was "ejected from the household for a time" and ultimately left the church when she was 18. She later joined the Rātana church.
Allan moved to Auckland at age 10; her secondary schooling was at Auckland Girls’ Grammar in Kahurangi, the reo Māori unit. She left high school at 16 and started work at a KFC franchise in West Auckland. She also joined the Service & Food Workers Union at that time. At 17, she hitchhiked south and took her next job as a cherry picker in Blenheim.
Returning to Auckland, she began university study at Unitec, studying Māori language and tikanga. The next year, she enrolled at Victoria University of Wellington where she studied law and politics, and joined the Labour Party. She decided on law because of advice from former University of Otago law professor Mark Henaghan, whom Allan befriended while working in a bar, and joined Labour after her politics lecturer Margaret Clark told her that joining a political party would teach her how politics worked.
During her university studies she interned with Prime Minister Helen Clark and later for Māori lawyer Annette Sykes.
Legal career After finishing her law degree, Allan was a judge's clerk for a period before taking a role at law firm ChenPalmer, where she worked for two years. Later she joined Kāhui Legal, a specialist law firm focussed on issues related to Māori development in Whakatāne before standing as Labour candidate for the East Coast in 2017.
Member of Parliament
Allan stood for Labour in the electorate in the and was placed 21 on Labour's party list. The former deputy prime minister, Sir Michael Cullen, and his wife, the former MP Lady Anne Collins were Allan's campaign chairs and political mentors. She came second to Anne Tolley in the election, but entered Parliament via the party list. In her maiden speech on 9 November 2017, Allan recalled the first time she saw the Beehive at age 17 and recited a poem she had written at the time.
In her first term in Parliament, Allan was a member of the finance and expenditure committee and the primary production committee. She was also elected a junior whip of the Labour Party. She joined the Epidemic Response Committee during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the chair of Labour's rural caucus.
In 2018, she launched the down-to-earth political podcast Authorised By with Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick. She got on well with Swarbrick and they both felt the average Kiwi on the street was detached from politics. By the end of the year, Allan was labelled a strong performer among backbenchers in Parliament and a potential future minister.
The 52nd Parliament voted on several conscience issues. Allan generally maintained a progressive voting record, voting in support of the third readings of the End of Life Choice Bill and Abortion Legislation Bill. She had previously voted against the End of Life Choice Bill in the second reading, due to concerns that it did not sufficiently protect vulnerable people, and supported efforts by Jenny Marcroft to ensure the bill would be voted on in a binding referendum.
Ahead of the 2020 New Zealand general election, Allan was ranked at 25 on Labour's party list and was selected to contest the East Coast electorate again. Tolley retired, leaving the seat open. Amid a landslide nationwide victory for the Labour party, Allan defeated new National Party East Coast candidate Tania Tapsell by 6,331 votes to win her second term in Parliament and her first as an electorate representative. After the election, Allan was one of several MPs who received petitions calling on the government to change the laws related to Māori wards and constituencies.
Minister in the Sixth Labour Government
On 2 November 2020, prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced Kiri Allan would enter Cabinet during her second term in parliament, becoming Minister for Conservation and Minister for Emergency Management. In addition, Allan also assumed associate ministerial responsibilities in the Arts, Culture and Heritage and Environment portfolios.
Allan gained prominence in early 2021 when she fronted emergency management press conferences about tsunami threats following repeated severe earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands that led to the largest evacuation in New Zealand history. Allan's authoritative yet informal communication style was marked out for further praise when it was revealed she had a medical examination that later confirmed a stage 3 cervical cancer diagnosis on the same morning as the disaster. She took three months leave to seek treatment and was eventually declared cancer-free.
As conservation minister, Allan oversaw the continued roll-out of the Jobs for Nature employment scheme and implementation of the government's biodiversity strategy. She announced a review of the Wildlife Act 1953 in December 2021. One week later, as Minister for Emergency Management, Allan also announced work to modernise emergency management legislation. As Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Allan was responsible for a new law that marked the celebration of Matariki with a public holiday starting from 2022.
In a June 2022 reshuffle, Allan was promoted from her existing roles to instead be Minister of Justice. She also joined the government's economic ministerial group as an Associate Minister of Finance. Following Jacinda Ardern's resignation as prime minister in January 2023, Allan was speculated to be a Labour leadership candidate, but declined to run and instead co-nominated senior minister Chris Hipkins' successful candidacy. Hipkins, as the new prime minister, continued Allan in the justice portfolio, promoted her to tenth in the Cabinet, and also appointed her as Minister for Regional Development and Associate Minister of Transport. She was a lead minister in the response to Cyclone Gabrielle in the Gisborne and Bay of Plenty regions.
As justice minister, Allan was a highly active legislator. At one point it was reported that of the 26 government bills being considered by committees, she was responsible for six of them. She led the government's work on electoral reform, sponsoring legislation on electoral finance reform, broader voter eligibility for New Zealanders living overseas, and reform of the Māori Electoral Option. A bill to lower the voting age to 16 was considered after the Crown lost in Make It 16 Incorporated v Attorney-General but was ultimately not progressed. In judicial system reform, Allan completed the government's long-promised repeal of three-strikes sentencing law, which had been linked to the over-incarceration of Māori, and also increased access to legal aid. Allan also led proposals related to the sale and supply of alcohol, hate speech, counter-terrorism, name suppression, surrogacy, and lobbying.
Heading into the 2023 general election, the government was criticised as being "soft on crime". In response, the government adopted "tougher" youth justice policies such as the creation of a new offence for ram-raiding, which Allan announced on 18 July 2023. Allan later said these policies were not aligned with her personal values and contributed to a mental health breakdown soon after.
In mid-2023, Allan was involved in a number of personal and professional scandals including making inappropriate comments about Radio New Zealand hiring practices and allegations of bullying within her ministerial offices (see: Controversies). Ultimately, Allan resigned from her ministerial roles and declined to seek re-election after being arrested for careless use of a motor vehicle and refusing to accompany a police officer when she crashed her ministerial car the night of 23 July 2023. In exit interviews the next year, Allan revealed that she had intended to end her life that night.
On 11 September 2023, Allan was granted the use of the honorific prefix The Honourable for life, in recognition of her term as a member of the Executive Council.
Controversies
Radio New Zealand speech Allan made a controversial speech at Radio New Zealand's (RNZ) Wellington office on 31 March 2023 as part of the farewell event for departing employee Māni Dunlop, who was her fiancée at the time. Dunlop had been a front runner to take over Susie Ferguson's role on Morning Report, but resigned when the role was offered to Ingrid Hipkiss. Commentators have suggested the reason Dunlop wasn't offered the role was because she was engaged to Allan, a senior Cabinet Minister, which would make it difficult for her to cover crime and justice related stories.
However, at the farewell event, Allan chose to comment on RNZ's alleged inability to retain Māori employees and suggested the senior leadership team needed to look into it. Allan later acknowledged that her comments might have been interpreted as giving RNZ instruction on how to manage its staff or organisation, which Ministers are not allowed to do. She later apologised and stated that was not her intent. Three months later, it was reported that Allan and Dunlop were no longer in a relationship.
Meng Foon donations During the 2020 general election campaign, Allan received donations from Meng Foon, the former mayor of Gisborne and current Race Relations Commissioner, including a rent subsidy from one of Foon's companies for the lease of Allan's electoral office in a storefront previously occupied by Foon's wife. When Allan became justice minister two years later, she gained ministerial responsibility for Foon in his role as Commissioner. The donations were revealed in April 2023. While Allan did make the necessary declarations of the donations under electoral law, she was criticised for not proactively identifying a conflict of interest between her and Foon, although she later corrected that. Ministerial responsibility for the Race Relations Commissioner was transferred to the associate justice minister, Deborah Russell, before Foon resigned in June 2023 for failing to declare other conflicts of interests.
Bullying allegations