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Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)
Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)

OPINIONĀteaOctober 3, 2020

My beloved Māori Party has let me down with its immigration policy

Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)
Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)

After meeting yesterday to address its unpopular policy that called for immigration to be halted, the Māori Party has made some concessions. It still isn’t good enough, writes former candidate Carrie Stoddart-Smith.

Like most people who become a core base supporter of a political party, we each have our story of why. Sometimes our story continues, and sometimes it ends. This is my story.

It began in 2014, when I was at the point of not voting at all. Part of that was based on the personal politics I held – mutualism, a form of anarchism. I’d taken a profound interest in Māori politics in the few years preceding that election. The child of an urbanised and relatively politically disconnected whānau, I didn’t grow up immersed in conversations about tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake, but I have come to cherish these concepts and what they meant for ngā Māori katoa. However, at the time I still lacked confidence in actively participating in te ao Māori.

Under the pseudonym of Ellipsister, I wrote a post about how the Māori Party was the party most closely aligned to my values. Then party leader Te Ururoa Flavell reached out on Twitter to tautoko me and my writing. We began regular Twitter exchanges and soon after, the party reached out to me privately. From there, I grew to understand more about the party’s founding and its aspirations from a perspective quite different to what I had access to in the media. For me, I’d finally found a kaupapa whānau where I felt my voice was valued and with whom I felt culturally safe, despite my personally limited confidence with te reo Māori and tikanga. I felt at home.

I soon became involved with the core party base and through those early interactions, I forged what I know will be some lifelong connections. I readily gave the party my vote in 2014, and I don’t regret that choice.

I continued to stay involved in the party as much as possible. Re-entering the public sector in 2015 had the effect of limiting the extent to which I could publicly comment on political issues or participate in public Māori Party forums. But I also saw how the machinery of government impacts smaller parties, the level of opposition they face and the concessions made on both sides. While I didn’t necessarily agree with all the policies the party had prioritised, I felt like it was making a tangible contribution because it was shifting language and attitudes across government. There was a visible uplift in agency commitments to exploring policy impacts on Māori and strengthening engagement protocols. While a lot of negativity continued to be shared about the Māori Party, in my experience, its tenure in government laid the groundwork for a more inclusive and culturally aware public sector than the Labour Party has been able to successfully build on. It’s still not perfect, but the work continues.

When I was invited to stand for the party in 2017, I accepted with pleasure. The support I’d received from its executive team and the party members had been an overwhelmingly warm experience. As the story goes, along the campaign trail things began to unravel for various reasons. And when it exited parliament after failing to reach the party vote threshold, or retain any of the Māori seats, I shed tears. Tears for the legacies that had potentially been lost and tears for the possibilities of what could have been. I decided to step away as a member, so I could fully reflect on what happened, but I remained a supporter at a distance.

While I had limited involvement early in the policy development phase, over the past few months, I’ve watched closely but still stayed at a distance as the party’s policies have been released. Time and time again, I’d been impressed. I was excited and even warming to all the candidates. But I wasn’t prepared for that heart-sinking moment of reading the immigration ban that formed part of the Whānau Build policy – a policy propagating a falsity that has been researched heavily and dismissed, including by our very own Māori housing and immigration experts.

I confronted a mix of emotions. A party I loved that had given me a home only a few years earlier became a party whose home I did not want to enter.

The campaign period provides ample opportunity to spotlight housing issues, such as the role of corporate monopolies in the construction sector and the failure of the Crown to address regulatory and tax issues that could have at least made some difference to Aotearoa’s housing futures. Instead, the party turned its gaze towards an old racist trope: that immigrants are taking all our homes. It’s a trope built inside the house of white supremacy. Therefore, it’s a policy that undoes the anti-racism work the party has championed for many years and a policy that undermines previous election commitments to advance an inclusive and cohesive Aotearoa. A policy that could have been easily retracted without pulling down the whole manifesto, and in effect that retraction would have served to strengthen the manifesto and demonstrate that it is a party that listens with its heart. A party that promised to do just that after its downfall at the 2017 election.

After meeting today to rethink the policy, which has become a barrier for many supporters of the party, rather than retraction, it has opted to change the wording to a “curbing” of immigration rather than a “halting”, and to make an exemption for refugees and displaced peoples. While the language has softened, the intent has not. Promulgating a false narrative serves to entrench the trope through confirmation of the original policy. That is, the party still considers immigration a cause of the housing supply issues in Aotearoa, revealing an unsophisticated and deeply populist understanding of what is and is not driving our housing crisis.

My politics is my person. There is much to admire with the broader raft of policy produced by the party for this election, and I wish them all the best on their journey back to parliament. But for me, a home that doesn’t welcome everyone is a home that welcomes no one.

Carrie Stoddart-Smith ran for the Māori Party in the electorate of Pakuranga in the 2017 general election.

Amotai supplier members AP Civil Construction. (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)
Amotai supplier members AP Civil Construction. (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)

ĀteaOctober 2, 2020

How we can right the waka for the stormy economic seas ahead

Amotai supplier members AP Civil Construction. (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)
Amotai supplier members AP Civil Construction. (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)

Auckland Council has relaunched its supplier diversity intermediary service with a new name and national focus. Community and social innovation manager Tania Pouwhare explains how this service could play a crucial role in New Zealand’s economic recovery.

One of the rallying slogans of Covid has been that famous whakataukī “he waka eke noa” – the canoe that we are all in without exception. But while some are in luxury yachts, others are in crafts of varying seaworthiness and many are clinging on to debris for dear life. For Māori and Pacific peoples, we’ve always known that we’re not all in this together; every single economic shock this country has experienced has taught us that much.

Since the 1970s, each time there’s an economic downturn the impacts on south and west Auckland, and Māori and Pasifika in particular, are predictable; far higher than average job losses followed by a long, arduous trek back to square one. We still haven’t recovered from the global financial crisis some 12 years ago. In Tāmaki Makaurau, the Māori median income is less in real terms than in 2006, whilst the city’s median income in general kept rising even throughout the GFC. During the “rock star economy” period of 2013 to 2018, we appeared to have missed the boat altogether, with the income gap widening between Māori and Auckland medians. 

I work for the innovation team The Southern and Western Initiative at Auckland Council. Our job is to positively disrupt the socio-economic inequity that has blighted south and west Auckland and to demonstrate that a just economy is possible. We are a small team and don’t have macro-economic levers, so we used the levers we did have – influencing the council’s purchasing power through requiring employment and other socio-economic objectives in tenders and contracts. 

We had some successes with Auckland Transport in creating quality jobs and paid work experience for young people. But we needed to democratise the means of production so that everyday people have a stake – a real stake – in the economy. Māori and Pasifika business ownership is woefully low, at just 1% of Māori, and even less for Pasifika peoples nationally, yet it’s an important pathway to mana motuhake, having agency over your life. 

We were always convinced that Māori and Pasifika businesses were the under-utilised and undervalued change agents in our communities and that was proven when TROW Group, a Pasifika civil construction company, won a council contract to deconstruct and salvage reusable materials from an old council building. Now, they lead the country in deconstruction services and have diverted a thousand tons (that’s 38 adult humpback whales) of perfectly good materials away from landfill to community projects that need them, employing scores of people in the process. This was the breakthrough into the mainstream of council’s procurement spend that we needed.

All of these enterprises were doing good for the ’hood and showing that there’s a different way of successfully doing business that’s laden with Polynesian values. And that’s what we set out to create – a movement for change, real change, not just replication of the same dead-eyed capitalism but with a brown face. What’s more, the council family was diversifying its base of contractors so it looked more like the citizens and communities we serve.

Amotai supplier members, advertising agency RUN (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)

Procurement is a tricky business, with technical, strategic and tactical knowledge required. It is also a door that can only be opened from the inside. Hence we created an intermediary that gets the people with the money and the power to open the door for Māori and Pasifika businesses. We provide hands-on help to buyers to design and implement first-rate procurement strategies so that the door is not only open, but the doormat says haere mai. We then match our businesses to the tender process and work with them to understand the written and unwritten rules to be successful. 

This week we are relaunching from our original name, ironically He Waka Eke Noa, to Amotai, aptly meaning “sea swell” in te reo Māori. It is a reference to our Polynesian ancestors’ skills in navigating new territory, and the courage, innovation, risk taking and fortitude needed to settle Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa. 

This is the origin story of Amotai, our flagship economic initiative that was born in the south and raised in the west of Auckland. 

In the last 12 months alone, Amotai has facilitated $45 million worth of contracts to Māori and Pasifika businesses, more than half of which was during the first lockdown, undoubtedly saving many Māori and Pasifika jobs, and creating more. Our colleagues across the public sector, such as the Link Alliance, Kāinga Ora, Auckland Transport and council’s Waste Solutions and Community Facilities teams, have got behind this transformational cause. We were chuffed to see Auckland Council as the first public body to set a target (for social enterprises and Māori and Pasifika owned businesses) and we hope that central government will follow. We have 400 Māori and Pasifika-owned businesses registered with us and the movement is growing daily.

It’s not been easy and it’s still fragile. But I’m really proud that one of the most effective economic initiatives for everyday whānau and ‘aiga came out of the areas that are usually branded with unjustified and negative narratives of social and economic deficit and failing. And it’s been done with street smarts, pure determination and the smell of an oily rag, as all good movements tend to do. 

Supplier diversity isn’t a silver bullet; such a thing doesn’t exist. We can’t save every Māori or Pasifika business from the tempest of Covid-19, but we will use Amotai to carry many more waka to safe harbours.