Outgoing Papakura MP Judith Collins delivered her valedictory speech to Parliament on Tuesday evening, closing the door on 24 years in the House and 18 ministerial portfolios with a defiant, often funny address that praised ten National colleagues for their courage and warned journalists to stop becoming the story.
Collins, who first entered Parliament in 2002 after a career as a lawyer and as president of the Auckland District Law Society, told the chamber she had arrived “genetically incapable of sucking up to hierarchy in order to get ahead”, a line that drew laughter from across the House. She told MPs she had little patience for the convention of doing her time and knowing her place, and admitted she had at times been “a bit brutal”, reflecting her background in commercial litigation rather than the slow ascent through party ranks favoured by many of her colleagues. She is leaving Parliament to become president of the Law Commission, the statutory body that reviews New Zealand law and recommends reform to the Attorney-General. Her resignation will not trigger a by-election in Papakura because of how close the seat sits to the 7 November general election.
The most striking moment of the speech, according to RNZ, was Collins thanking ten current and former National MPs by name for showing what she called “courage” during the party’s darkest period in opposition. The list, reported by 1News, included current Speaker Gerry Brownlee, Health Minister Shane Reti, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, Trade Minister Todd McClay, plus David Bennett, Jacqui Dean, Andrew Bayly, Stuart Smith, Harete Hipango and Maureen Pugh. “We never gave up and we did not run away,” Collins told them, recalling the 2020 period when she became the third National leader in seven weeks as the party imploded ahead of the pandemic election. She described those months as the toughest of times and said the experience taught her that “you don’t get resilient unless you have to be”.
Collins reserved her most pointed remarks for the press gallery. She told journalists that headlines now “often seem completely at odds with a substantive article” because of the pressure to chase advertising clicks, and offered a parting instruction the gallery is unlikely to forget. “Report the news, don’t be the news. And for the avoidance of doubt, the news should be the truth, the facts, not someone’s reckons,” she said. The line landed in a year when relationships between politicians and the parliamentary press gallery have been unusually fraught, with Te Pati Maori threatening formal complaints about coverage of its internal leadership ructions only days earlier.
She also chose to revisit one of the more controversial episodes of her time as Defence Minister, the 2024 grounding and sinking of the HMNZS Manawanui off the Samoan coast. Without naming any individual, Collins maintained the inquiry’s findings did not justify the gendered commentary that followed. “It was not a tragedy. It also had nothing to do with gender,” she said, framing the loss as an operational matter rather than a cultural one.
On the substance of her record, Collins listed several pieces of work she said gave her the most satisfaction. As Attorney-General she settled the long-running Nelson Tenths litigation, ending 16 years in the courts and what she described as 180 years of injustice for the iwi of the top of the South Island. She credited the Stafford family, Crown Law, Te Puni Kokiri, current Maori Crown Relations Minister Tama Potaka and her parliamentary colleagues for getting the deal across the line. She pointed to the Legislation Amendment Act 2026, which makes all secondary legislation freely available online, as a long-overdue piece of cross-party work she started in the Regulations Review Committee in opposition. She mentioned banning smoking in prisons despite lacking initial Cabinet backing, expanding police access to tasers, and rallying parliamentary support for Ukraine during her stint at Defence. She also told the House she was proud to have served as the country’s first Minister responsible for the Government Communications Security Bureau and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, after the portfolios were split out of the Prime Minister’s office.
Collins addressed family at length, thanking her husband David Wong-Tung and son James, and crediting her late father, a King Country dairy farmer, with the advice that shaped her career. She said he taught her to “never let anyone make me feel less than them”, a line she returned to several times across the 40-minute address. Reflecting on her eight consecutive electorate wins in Clevedon and then Papakura, she said the support of South Auckland voters had been the constant of her career.
The Law Commission appointment moves Collins from elected politics back into the legal world she came from, though the role is far from a quiet retirement. The Commission is currently working on reviews of adult decision-making capacity law, surrogacy, and the law of succession, all of which are expected to land on the desk of whichever Attorney-General is in office after November.
Her departure leaves National facing a generational reset on its front bench heading into the campaign, with Collins joining a list of long-serving ministers stepping away this term. Whether her parting advice to the press gallery and her tribute to the ten who stayed loyal becomes the lasting memory of her speech, or whether voters remember the swagger, the smoking ban, the Manawanui defence and the 18 portfolios, will be settled by historians rather than headline writers. With six months until polling day, the question of who replaces voices like hers is one for the electorate. You can compare every party’s current positions in our voting tool ahead of the 7 November election.
What do you make of Judith Collins’s career and her parting shot at the media? Was she a politician who told it straight, or one whose style finally caught up with her? Leave a comment below and join the conversation.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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