Newstalk ZB
For an accomplished politician, Vanessa Weenink had an unlikely start to life. One of the National MP’s earliest memories is watching from her family home in rural Marlborough as police cars rushed on to their property to arrest her father. She was just 5 years old. “My dad was a bit of a character,” she told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night. “He left home when he was about 14 and went into the forestry service, and had a bit of a rough time there. He was always an entrepreneur and started all sorts of businesses; we had a mussel farm, we had goats, pigs, all sorts of things. “But then he went into horticulture, as I put it. He was a bit of a pioneer of the cannabis industry – unfortunately, not necessarily on the right side of the law 40-odd years ago.” That’s when the police arrived, a dog squad in tow, to take her dad and his cannabis plants away. “That sort of changed him, and changed his outlook on things,” Weenink told Cowan. “He became very much an anti-authority kind of person – somebody who ended up being on the edges of society because of the fact that he’d been in prison, found it hard to get work and have his own businesses.” Despite her difficult upbringing, Weenink had what she now recognises as an “idyllic” childhood in the small settlement of Canvastown, west of Picton. “It was the 80s, we were free-range kids. We jumped on our bikes and went down to the river, went swimming and hunting cockabillies. In the creeks up the back of the house, we’d look for freshwater cod and go hunting eels. “We had a block of native bush at the back of our property that we would just sort of stroll around in and make huts; we played bull rush at school and had mudslides and all sorts of fun things.” The absence of her father was keenly felt, but Weenink’s mother – “a hardcore feminist” – raised her to have confidence in her ability. “It was always instilled in me that I could do anything that I wanted to do as long as I really, truly believed it in myself,” the 47-year-old told Real Life. “She was an interesting person. She was very creative, really hardy, but at the same time she could be irrational and vulnerable and maddening as a mother – as I think probably all women find their mothers!” At age 8, there was more hardship for Weenink as she was rushed to hospital. “I got a horrible infection called osteomyelitis, which is an infection in the bone. I was really quite sick, I had sepsis and had to go to theatre and have my bone scraped out,” she recalls. “[It was] a huge amount of pain – I was in the hospital for six weeks and the doctors saved my life. They were amazing.” It was at that moment she decided she wanted to start down the path to be a doctor herself. National MP Vanessa Weenink during a finance and expenditure select committee hearing at Parliament in 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell “I looked at other options when I was in Year 13, I thought about other career paths that I could take – but I realised that there was nothing else that I wanted to do. That was all I wanted to do.” Weenink enrolled at the University of Otago in her first year out of high school, studying hard to get accepted into medical school, when more tragedy struck. “The dean of the hall had to call me in and tell me my father had died,” she recalled. “He was 52, and it was a huge shock because he died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism … I had to try and process that whilst trying to study and concentrate on getting into med school. I probably delayed my grieving process a bit by doing that.” Despite her grief, Weenink did make it into medical school and several years later graduated, enabling her to work for 20 years as a GP. She also served in the Army for more than two decades, being deployed as a military doctor on two tours of Afghanistan and one in East Timor. On her second deployment in Afghanistan, a patrol she was part of was hit by an IED (improvised explosive device), though no one was injured. Weenink says she...
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