I have repeated this often over the years when I have met the spouses of new MPs. It’s a wry joke. It is also a reality-check, a warning about how life will likely be for the duration of the new job.
There are many opportunities to meet new people and hear about issues and to attend events that otherwise you might never attend. It can be a shocking eye-opener about real politics, the inner workings of political parties and messiness of law-making.
The pay is secure and, while there are fewer opportunities for travel and perks than some think, there is this amazing feeling of being at the centre of things that is mostly the preserve of MPs and their staff.
But the downsides are very real too. It can be deeply isolating. The spouse is left with the kids, the pets, the house, the family, the friends, the missed birthdays, the vacant seats at school prizegivings and the many excuses for their MP partner’s absence in their lives.
This would be familiar to anyone whose partner has a job that takes them away for long periods. Spouses and families can and do make this work all the time.
But there is also the public scrutiny of MPs’ spouses and their families that others do not have to endure.
One spouse of a retiring MP told me they could finally give bad drivers the fingers. For 15 years, they had been an (un)characteristically considerate and careful driver for fear of the political consequences for their MP partner if they were not.
Not that I am arguing for giving bad drivers the fingers, and this is a pretty amusing complaint, but the impact of the constant scrutiny is not amusing at all. Strangers comment on their driving, on what is in their shopping trolley, complain about what the MP partner did, or said or — if the MP partner is a woman — wore on TV.
Handling these intrusions with restraint is a daily part of being an MP’s spouse.
Worse still is the struggle with how to protect any children from that same scrutiny. Spouses run constant vigilance for their children, where they are, what they are doing and who they are with just to make sure that the children are safe from anyone who has a bone to pick with their MP parent.
We all know how much worse, how much riskier that has become in the years since I left Parliament
But that is not all. Beyond the vigilance by spouses over what they, their children and their whānau do and say, is the enforced silence.
MPs have to be out in the world, building a public persona, pleasing some people and annoying others. They have a very public voice — it would be in the MP job description if there was one.
They can fight back, publicly and openly, when they are attacked. They have a wide media platform to challenge public criticisms. They also have protection, with their staff and others who help them respond.
But their spouses do not. Spouses really do have to maintain a silence that can be extremely hard to bear.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with politics or the MP partner at all. It might be a completely benign view in a conversation or a post on social media or a comment at a function. These are after all just normal conversations and social events that we all do from time to time.
But there are a thousand people watching for any excuse to criticise or humiliate the MP partner and they will use spouses as the weapon if they can. And the spouse cannot safely defend themselves or respond in anyway.
Other times it is the strain of watching the MP partner be excoriated in public, being asked about the drama by friends or colleagues. The spouse has to say nothing, mount no defence, offer no explanation for fear of making it all much worse.
Other times it is the experience itself of being the spouse, the abandonment, the public scrutiny, the fear for children, the fear for your relationship, the political responsibility that can never be expressed to anyone.
No-one will sympathise, just criticise for complaining. Worse, someone will take that deeply personal and very real experience and turn it into a public political attack. For the spouse of an MP, all the benefits are ancillary and all the costs are acute.
When the strains on a family from political widowhood spill out into the public realm, for whatever reason and through whatever channel, these are deeply personal, tightly held matters.
Most of all, they are none of our business.
- Associate Prof Metiria Stanton Turei is a law lecturer at the University of Otago and a former Green Party co-leader.
