From Te Rerenga Wairua at the top of the country, right down to Rakiura, we’re taking a look at our seven Māori electorates and the candidates contesting the seats. In this edition: the ‘super city’ electorate of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Tāmaki Makaurau is a completely urban electorate, centred on greater Auckland south of the Harbour Bridge. To the west it includes the suburbs of Kelston, Glen Eden, Glendene and the Henderson Valley (some west Auckland suburbs such as Te Atatū are part of the Te Tai Tokerau electorate), and the west coast communities from Bethell’s Beach to Whatipu. Further south, its border bisects the Manukau Harbour and incorporates the suburbs around Manukau. Its most southern border runs through Chapel Downs, East Tāmaki, and along the east coast including Cockle Bay and Buckland’s Beach.

There are currently 38,756 people enrolled in the electorate. In the 2017 general election, 19,251 valid candidate votes were cast, only a 59% turn out – the lowest of all seven Māori electorates. Labour’s Peeni Henare won for a second term, with 49% of the vote. Henare has held it since 2014, after Pita Sharples retired from politics, having held the seat since 2005.

Labour also got 58.46% of the party vote in Tāmaki Makuarau.

Four candidates are contesting the seat in 2020. Incumbent Peeni Henare will defend his seat against the Greens’ Marama Davidson, Māori Party co-leader John Tamihere and New Conservative candidate Erina Anderson.

Henare (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupouri, Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Whātua, Te Whakatōhea, Ngāti Kahungunu) comes from a large political family. He is the great-grandson of Taurekareka Henare (MP for Northern Māori, 1914-1938), grandson of Sir James Henare and son of former Māori language commissioner Erima Henare. He is also the cousin of former National MP Tau Henare, and uncle of Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime.

Henare says one of his biggest priorities for Tāmaki Makaurau is housing, arguing that Labour is already getting Māori into homes through the Kainga Ora house building programme and its progressive home ownership scheme. As he explained to The Spinoff, “whānau buy a portion of a house, which means they can start paying off the mortgage, rather than paying rent to a landlord. Over time whanau can buy another portion of the mortgage, until they fully own it.” Henare is the Whānau Ora minister and associate minister for health.

This is Marama Davidson’s (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Porou) third time challenging Henare for the seat. The Greens co-leader lists poverty, public housing and climate as her priorities for Tāmaki Makaurau. “When Māori children are more likely to grow up in damp, mouldy homes; when our rivers are polluted; when our Māori communities are more at risk from sea level rise – these are problems that need bold leadership for real change,” she told The Spinoff. As part of the Greens’ Poverty Action Plan, Davidson is campaigning for a guaranteed minimum income of $325 per week for students and people out of work. She has also advocated strongly during her campaign for wāhine Māori-led solutions to Te Tiriti justice, children’s rights and the environment and has been critical of Oranga Tamariki and child uplift practices.

As number seven on the Māori Party list, John Tamihere (Ngāti Porou, Whakatōhea, Tainui) is unlikely to return to parliament as a list MP. He has held the Tamaki Mākaurau seat once before, from 2002 to 2005 (he was in fact the first ever MP for Tāmaki Makaurau, as Auckland was included in the Te Tai Tokerau electorate prior to 2002). He was unseated by the Māori Party’s Pita Sharples, who held the seat from 2005 to 2014 before retiring from politics.

A long time advocate for urban Auckland Māori, Tamihere is the CEO of Te Whānau o Waipareira urban authority and had a run at the mayoral election in 2019. He advocates for reforming Oranga Tamariki as a Whānau Ora-led organisation and wider Māori Party policies include a separate Māori parliament, te reo Māori as a core subject in schools and higher wealth taxes.

Erina Anderson is listed as the New Conservative candidate for Tāmaki Makaurau but no information about her or her campaign has been released.

Rāhui is an indigenous science that has been gaining recognition in Aotearoa. More recently, political parties and people in government have taken to using the term to describe their policies. This has been met with resistance from community leaders within te ao Māori.

In this interview, I speak with Tāwhana Chadwick about rāhui and what he understands it to mean. Tāwhana is a waka hourua captain with 50,000 nautical miles of blue water experience. He is also a Tiriti educator with a passion for justice.

Laura O’Connell-Rapira: Kia ora, e hoa. Thank you for making the time. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about your background?

Tāwhana Chadwick: Nō Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Maniapoto. I grew up in kōhanga and kura kaupapa. Went to Victoria University. During that time, I was involved with the waka hourua and waka ama community learning about sailing, navigating and mātauranga Māori. Through that I met lots of other Pacific peoples and learned about our shared heritage and whakapapa. My mum is what they call a Pākehā Treaty worker and a lot of my whānau are teachers and so Tiriti work, facilitation and education are all passions of mine.

Based on your understanding, and the lessons that have been shared with you, what is your understanding of rāhui?

I think in its simplest form – without getting into the social, political, economic stuff – it’s a restriction or prohibition applied to an area, space or activity. For example, if it’s around kaimoana, it could be applied to a specific species, how you acquire kai, when and why.

The placement of rāhui is related to events and the whakapapa of that activity, area, species or mahinga kai.

The concept of a rāhui has been gaining traction in the national discourse. I hesitate to say mainstream, because that others us, but like a lot of our mātauranga it has been experiencing a resurgence in public consciousness.

Earlier this year, there was a bit of controversy around the Green Party describing lockdown as a rāhui. I’d love to get your thoughts on who gets to decide when a rāhui is enacted and how those decisions are made?

Bringing in some of my Tiriti knowledge here, my understanding is that governments can’t call upon or institute rāhui. It has to be through hāpori which is defined by me as hapū and hapū collectives, such as iwi.

Rāhui are decided under the mandate of hapū and instituted through rangatira or people who are given rights to be rangatira, by hapū, and so at the end of the day it’s hapū.

What is the tikanga around rāhui?

I think that it changes hapū to hapū, and that’s why this is difficult to answer. Because it’s hapū that decides to enact a rāhui it means the tikanga can be different.

For example, when someone died or drowned in our awa back home there was karakia and official announcements that there was a rāhui – not just through the kūmara vine, but through the media. There would also be an announcement made when the rāhui was lifted.

In modern times, we understand that when someone breaks a rāhui, they won’t be punished in the same ways they might have been. But what we miss is that rāhui are there for the person’s own protection because there could be, for lack of a better word, bad wairua around the area or activity. With kai, for example, if you eat all the fish then there won’t be any left so it’s a practical response.

Recently, the Māori Party have described their proposed ban on immigration as a “rāhui”. As far as I know this policy is not supported by any evidence from te ao Pākehā or te ao Māori. What do you think about the Māori Party using the term “rāhui” in this way?

It’s similar to how I see the Greens describing lockdown as a rāhui: A government institution can’t institute a rāhui. That’s for each and every hapū to decide in their rohe.

Rāhui are based on science and mātauranga. Informed consent by hapū is really important. Otherwise the intention and motivation for the use of this word rāhui gets really lost. Is it just to say that it’s not racist because it’s tikanga?

Given your experience as a voyager, and this policy around immigration, how do you think our tūpuna saw migration?

The first thing I’ll say is that not all of our tūpuna migrated. In the Hawke’s Bay, we have tūpuna who come from the ocean – not from the ocean in Hawaiki, but the ocean in Hawke’s Bay. We have tūpuna who come from this land, and maunga and awa here who are our tūpuna.

But talking specifically about those tūpuna who came from waka, I think they had really different ideas about whenua and moana. Nowadays there are these legal terms like ‘countries’, ‘exclusive economic zones’ and ‘foreshore and seabed’ that are used to define a piece of land, then the piece of land that’s in the tidal range, then the ocean that is within 12 miles of the coast, then the water that goes 200 miles beyond our ‘land borders’.

We don’t see whenua or moana like that. That’s why I talk about Aotearoa being land, not a country. Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa isn’t a body that has a border at all. It goes beyond borders. I think our tūpuna would have seen it that way.

We’re attached to these ideas of moana and whenua but not as a commodity.

One of the things that we do in Treaty workshops is talk about how our tūpuna saw migration. How they saw Pākehā migration to Aotearoa, and also the links we had with the Pacific, including South America.

Our tūpuna instantly perceived the benefits of forming relationships with other peoples, especially around trade. Trading kūmara for chickens, and different skills and artefacts that our tūpuna knew and received from those tūpuna of Peru for example.

Our tūpuna always saw the benefits of forming those relationships. I think we have to go back to the tikanga that are the bedrock of Māori society. Even through colonisation and language loss, some of the longest surviving things, even in the most marginalised Māori communities, are manaakitanga, kotahitanga and whakawhanaungatanga.

I think that works with the Māori Party’s ideas of tino rangatiratanga, mana motuhake, Te Tiriti and Whakaputanga. Those documents along with Matike Mai and our tikanga are ways forward for Aotearoa.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

I think it’s important for us to keep dismantling oppressive systems. The government is a system of white supremacy that places some people on top of others in the ladder of life.

As long as these systems exist, we’ll always come back to these situations where people think it’s OK to debate the humanity of migrants and refugees but it’s not.

This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.