National’s East Coast candidate Tania Tapsell (Photo: Alex Braae)

ĀteaAugust 16, 2020

The youngest in the room: Meet National’s 28-year-old East Coast candidate

Staff Writer

National’s East Coast candidate Tania Tapsell (Photo: Alex Braae)

When the National Party talks about renewal, their East Coast candidate Tania Tapsell (Te Arawa) is a potent symbol. Alex Braae went to Whakatāne to find out what drives her to push so hard for political success.

She was the youngest person in the room by far. Admittedly, that room was the Whakatāne Bridge Club on Monday morning, but Tania Tapsell still stood out. As the National Party’s 28-year-old candidate for the East Coast electorate, Tapsell is living proof of the party trying to renew itself. She’s been unusually successful in local government – a contrast to the many candidates who’ve come through the parliamentary staffer machine – and is unafraid of speaking her mind, even if her stump speech sticks close to the party line. She’s also Māori and a woman, in a party that has lately been criticised for lacking both.

Her speech at the Bridge Club was bright and cheerful, underpinned by both sheer enthusiasm and a more subtle sharpness. Without notes, she went for about 20 minutes, without ever once getting lost or heading down an inconclusive tangent. She had the feel for public speaking of someone who had been prepared for leadership roles from a very young age. Almost as a joke, I asked if she’d been head girl at her high school.

“No, I dropped out of high school,” she said. “I left school when I was 16, the one size fits all system just didn’t work for me, so I was very independent. But I just had this huge drive through the challenges I faced and saw my community facing, I developed a huge drive to serve my community.” She also left home at the same time, but at 16, she was too young to get benefits so worked two jobs instead.

But dropping out of high school didn’t mean dropping out of society for Tapsell. She still participated in youth council and was the youth MP for Rotorua’s Todd McClay after having joined the National Party as a teenager. Instead of being in school, she did business studies and had a stint at Deloitte doing business consulting before being elected as a Rotorua District Councillor at 21 years old. By then, she’d resolved to become a politician “because I believe it doesn’t have to be as hard as it is for people to get ahead”.

Tania Tapsell putting up hoardings on the East Coast (Photo: Facebook/Tania Tapsell)

As far as life stories go, it’s pretty much the perfect narrative for the National Party worldview. While some on the outside look at the party as being a force for maintaining and entrenching hierarchy and privilege, those inside the party see it as a force for aspiration and ambition. It’s why concepts like “a hand up, not a hand-out” are such potent political lines for National supporters.

But can it really be a party for everyone? The event she was speaking at was a monthly meeting of the Whakatāne National Party called Blue Mondays, started by popular but retiring MP Anne Tolley. For Blue Mondays, MPs or prominent candidates are asked to come up and say a few words about their particular portfolio areas and interests, such as Botany candidate Christopher Luxon and MP Nicola Willis.

Held just before new cases of community transmission were announced, those who turned up to this month’s event had come from various professional backgrounds: former teachers, community service workers, and businesspeople. By and large, though, it was a room full of retirees and predominantly Pākehā. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it does make it harder to claim the party is being rejuvenated.

Blue Monday at the Whakatāne Bridge Club (Photo: Alex Braae)

Being the youngest in the room is a fairly common experience for Tapsell, who said it’s part of what drives her. “A big reason why I’ve wanted to get into this space is to let other young professionals and young families know that this is a space for us.”

Surely that’s particularly a problem within National? “We’ve got a lot of long-serving members in the National Party,” she conceded, which is a good way of not saying old. “But we’ve got this fresh, exciting new wave of experienced young candidates that are coming through the party. We’ve got a very active Young Nats group, and that’s something I want to help grow in the regions as well.”

If anyone can make that happen outside of the big university cities, it’s probably Tapsell. She’s immensely popular at the local government level to the point where a mayoral candidate last year described her as a “pied piper” for younger voters. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but she said they now get on OK around the council table.

Former speaker of the house Sir Peter Tapsell (Photo: Getty Images)

For those who recognise the Tapsell name, her allegiance to the National Party might come as a surprise. After all, her great uncle was Sir Peter Tapsell, who served five terms as Labour’s MP for Eastern Māori, an electorate that no longer exists. However, Tapsell said her family has always been supportive of her political allegiances, saying it was “clear to them that I leaned to the right”.

“Even as a child, I couldn’t understand how some of Labour’s policies were so hurtful to rural communities. And I’ve always really loved how National is about limited government, and supporting individuals and families to get ahead.”

There’s pretty much only one way Tapsell can make it to Wellington, and that’ll be as an electorate MP. She’s fine with that, casting her low list ranking (64) as a combination of both National Party processes around new candidates, and a sign of confidence from the party that she can actually win the seat. When I point out to her that a balanced National caucus would probably have more people like her in it, she points to incumbent health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti, and new candidate Dale Stephens, who is Te Rarawa.

“Māori are well represented, but it’s my personal opinion that you should be placed somewhere on merit,” said Tapsell, with a slightly wry suggestion that she’d expect a better list ranking if she becomes an MP.

But to become an MP, she faces an extremely formidable opponent. In the last election, Labour’s Kiri Allan was 5,000 votes short of incumbent Anne Tolley. But after a solid term in parliament, Allan has already started campaigning hard to win the vacated seat. On the same day Tapsell was at the Whakatāne Bridge Club, Allan was in Kawerau – an industrial town that’s now been plastered with her signs and is always hearty for Labour. The East Coast electorate might include a lot of rural areas (farmers were well represented at Blue Monday) but it also includes towns like Murapara, Ōpōtiki and Kawerau where National traditionally fairs less well. And of course, many of Labour’s voters in these towns are also on the Māori roll.

She’s also up against the fact that the campaign has now been suspended due to a change in alert levels. With just a few weeks to go before voting begins, Tapsell said all activities had been put on hold “until we can guarantee it’s safe”. In the meantime, her existing profile will have to do a lot of heavy lifting, along with the hundreds of hoardings her campaign team have put up across the electorate.

If Tapsell wins, she wants a role in either local government or the environment. And if she loses, there’s always the possibility of a mayoral run which she said some had asked her to consider in 2019.

The last question I ask is perhaps the only one that throws her: if it weren’t for politics, what would she be doing right now?

“Having a life,” she jokes, before a long pause. “I don’t know, I’ve always been interested in serving the community, so whatever way or role I could do that, yeah.” Then, after another pause: “I’ve never thought about anything else.”

Alex Braae’s travel to Matamata was made possible thanks to the support of Jucy, who have given him a Cabana van to use for the election campaign, and Z Energy, who gifted him a full tank of gas via Sharetank.

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(Image: The Spinoff)

OPINIONĀteaAugust 13, 2020

How to talk to whānau about conspiracies

Laura O'Connell Rapira

Contributing writer

(Image: The Spinoff)

Māori are particularly vulnerable to conspiracy theories – especially ones that relate to the eradication of people – because that has been the reality for indigenous people. But if we’re going to protect our whānau from Covid-19, we need to engage, not block.

If you’re Māori and on Facebook, chances are you woke up today to two types of posts on your newsfeed: conspiracies about Covid-19, 5G and Agenda 21, and people telling the folks sharing conspiracies to unfriend them.

I get it. Dealing with disinformation is exhausting. We have to protect our hauora and mauri. But what if in protecting ourselves now, or washing our hands of it, we are inadvertently endangering our future? Excluding and shaming people who already feel ostracised, misunderstood, powerless or neglected is a recipe for failure.

Pushing people out only pushes them to dig in.

A recent Princeton University study found that conspiracies are more likely to find a welcome home in the minds of people who are lonely and seeking meaning. The report’s co-author Alin Coman says this can create a vicious cycle where lonely people will share their conspiratorial beliefs, which can drive away family and friends and result in further isolation. Excluded and ignored, the loneliest among us join conspiracy communities where they feel welcome, which in turn further entrenches their beliefs.

In short, people who are left out are more likely to believe conspiracies.

A recent report from the Helen Clark Foundation describes loneliness as “the painful feeling that occurs when one’s needs for meaningful connection are unmet”. Those most likely to be experiencing chronic loneliness are people on very low incomes, those who are unemployed, Māori, young people, single parents, and some older people, particularly those living alone. In other words, many of the people who are most likely to feel alone are also people who have been let down by the multiple systems that govern and shape our lives.

Māori have been silenced, ignored and abused by merchants of colonisation for 180 years. Many of our whānau are on low incomes because we’ve been let down by people in government who fail time and again to prioritise a decent income for all. Media have contributed to awful stereotypes about our people, stirring up racism for clicks.

This loneliness, intergenerational distrust of government and media, plus lived experience of systemic neglect are all factors that are at play when our whānau share conspiracies. That’s why we need to take an approach based on understanding and āta whakarongo if we are to help people see things differently.

For the past 18 months, ActionStation has been experimenting with listening-based approaches to facilitating more informed, thoughtful and compassionate conversations about racism online. We’ve trained over 150 volunteers who have had thousands of conversations. Here’s what we found worked for shifting the tone of a conversation from adversarial, angry or dismissive to being more open to other perspectives: show people you understand where they are coming from. Lead with shared values and speak to a common vision. Help people feel heard so that they’ll hear you.

Facts are ineffective. Debunking doesn’t work. Neither does telling people they are wrong.

As indigenous rights expert Tina Ngata recently outlined in a Facebook Live, Māori are made particularly vulnerable to conspiracy theories – especially ones that relate to the eradication of people – because that has been our reality. There are records of people in parliament speaking about the best way to get rid of us. Isaac Featherston once said it was the duty of Europeans to “smooth down the dying pillow” of Māori. It’s not hard to convince us the systems that rule our lives are corrupt.

Last year, The Workshop launched a comprehensive report on digital threats and opportunities that found the solutions we need are those that require the least effort from individuals but have the most significant impact on people’s lives and outcomes. These are called “upstream” solutions and they place less emphasis on individual behavioural solutions such as greater education around critical thinking (which can help, but won’t fix everything) and more focus on the structural drivers that cause the problems in the first place.

Focusing on systems-level solutions means solving loneliness, powerlessness and disconnection. It means living into the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi by guaranteeing rangatiratanga to Māori so that we can make decisions about our whānau, future, and land. It means holding social media platforms to account for what appears on their site and for the algorithms that promote and target hateful or harmful content to susceptible audiences. As Jacinda Ardern once said, social media platforms are “the publisher, not the postman”. They curate what we see and monetise us as audiences, making a tonne of money along the way.

Systems-level solutions can mean requiring digital media platforms to pay taxes in the countries they take money out of. That funding can be used to set up structures for regulation and accountability. It could be used to help fund a strong and vibrant public-interest media to counter the prevalence of mis-, dis- and mal-information online. Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of $98.6 billion – even a slice of that would go a long way to helping meet some of our biggest societal challenges.

Instead of unfriending whānau who have problematic beliefs, I believe we need to see the whakapapa that lies behind those beliefs, we need to engage in hard conversations with our conspiratorial cousins and we need to advocate for systemic solutions. Our whānau who don’t believe this pandemic is real need us to engage. Our mokopuna even more so.