Paula’s fresh start ‘I FINALLY CAN BE ME!’
‘I built a lot of walls around me because being a woman in politics is hard’
When Paula Bennett left politics in 2020, she knew that it was going to be tough living life on the outside, but now she says she has finally found her way back to the real Paula.
The 53-year-old former Deputy Prime Minister has always been an outgoing person, but politics shaped her into someone she confesses she didn’t feel entirely comfortable being for a long time.
“People would always say to me, ‘You’re so much more fun than I thought you would be.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, a two-minute interview on the tiles of Parliament when I’m being asked if I’ve misspent $20 million isn’t fun,” says Paula.
“I still get asked a lot about politics, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t traumatise me now quite as much as it did for the first 12 months after I left.”
One surprising thing
