Happy in her own skin
“For the first time in 10 years, I didn’t look at emails for four days in a row.”
It may be still six months until the September election, but Paula Bennett estimates she is already pulling 90 to 100 hour weeks. On the day of her cover shoot, we are appointment three in a schedule that starts in the early hours of the morning and finishes late at night, before she’s up at 4.45am the next day to do it all again. In a tightly packed life like this, all you need is one domino to fall over and everything gets out of whack. So it’s Murphy’s Law in action when, on the way to our cover shoot, Paula stopped to get petrol and, along with a group of others, got locked in the petrol station for 20 minutes after the automatic doors stopped working. They did get a free coffee for their trouble though, she jokes, sipping her flat white, so that’s something. She arrives for the shoot like the energetic whirlwind she always is – Paula has one speed, and that speed is full-on. She’s particularly firing on all cylinders because, for the first time in about 10 years, she allowed herself to create a “politics-free zone” over the summer holidays. What does that entail? Well, in this case, it involved quality time with family, no technology
