Phillida Bunkle (born 1944) is a former New Zealand politician. She represented the Alliance in Parliament from to 2002, when she retired. Bunkle was for many years a lecturer at Victoria University.

Early life

Bunkle was born in Sussex, England, and was educated at Keele University, England, receiving a BA with First Class Honours; Smith College, Massachusetts, USA, receiving a MA; and St Anne's College, Oxford. She attended Harvard University, USA as a Kennedy Scholar and was the recipient of a Fulbright Award.

Life before politics

Bunkle lectured in history at Victoria University of Wellington. In 1975, she founded the Women's Studies programme (later department), the first of its kind at a New Zealand university. She taught at the university until her election to Parliament in 1996. She was married for many years to Jock Phillips, a university colleague and noted historian. The couple divorced in 1993, before Bunkle was elected to Parliament. Her position at the forefront of the women’s health movement was established when Bunkle researched and published, with Sandra Coney, An Unfortunate Experiment at National Women's Hospital, a piece which documented that women with cervical cancer had unwittingly been used as experimental research subjects at New Zealand's leading women's hospital. The original article has been reprinted numerous times. For their work Coney and Bunkle were awarded the National Humanist's Society Supreme Human Rights Award, the Supreme Media Women’s Award and the Governor General's Special Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Political career

Bunkle joined the Green Party (then a participatory member of the Alliance) in 1992, and unsuccessfully stood as an Alliance candidate in the 1993 election in Onslow, placing third. In 1995 she ran as the Alliance candidate for mayor of Wellington, placing a distant sixth. In the 1996 election, she was elected to Parliament as a list MP, sitting as a member of the Alliance. When the Green Party left the Alliance, Bunkle opted not to follow them. After the 1999 election, in which Bunkle was re-elected, she became a Minister outside of Cabinet in the new Labour-Alliance coalition government, serving as Minister of Customs and Minister of Consumer Affairs. Bunkle took a strong anti-gambling stance, being patron of Compulsive Gambling Society Incorporated and introducing a Bill to restrict gambling. She resigned these roles after a controversy surrounding her claims for a residential allowance, although she was later cleared of any deliberate wrongdoing. When the Alliance began to collapse in 2002, Bunkle sided with Jim Anderton's faction, but decided not to seek re-election. In 2020, Bunkle wrote an essay for Newsroom about her time in politics, in which she alleged that bullying, factional power-play and misuse of funding had been commonplace in the Alliance, and that this was an example of an abusive culture throughout Parliament that persists to the present.

Life after Parliament

After leaving parliament at the 2002 general election, Bunkle worked overseas, including in China as a women's studies teacher and in Britain where she completed an MSc in integrated health. In 2003 Bunkle was appointed as a member of the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand. She served two months before resigning her membership, citing her relocation to the United Kingdom as her reason for her resignation. In 2007 she was charged with theft after allegedly shoplifting a bottle of wine and two packets of coffee from a supermarket in Paraparaumu. She pleaded guilty and was given diversion.

Selected works