Her departure should have her fellow MPs considering how much they’ve achieved in their own political careers, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell.

Buried deep in a plastic box in the garage is a purple autograph book I had as a kid.

In the back are notes about “suspicious” neighborhood activity scribbled during my child detective/nark phase. In the front, the signatures of netballers.

I collected the autographs of netballers back then, because netballers were my superheroes. I once jogged around a court, clutching my stomach, fevered and overheating in Adidas stirrup pants, five hours before my appendix burst on an operating table. I was desperate to impress Sandra Edge who was running the coaching session at my school.

I was particularly proud of collecting Louisa Wall’s signature. Like me, Wall played at wing defence. It is a maligned and underrated position so Wall’s sports stardom was inspirational to me. Dogged is a word often used to describe a good Wing-D and I elevated my play into a battle of archetypes – small and pretty good girls played at wing attack while tough, determined scrappers played at Wing-D, making their life hell.

At the start of a game of netball, you literally have to toe the line, staying in your goal third until the whistle blows and then move like lightning to get out in front of your wing attack. Moving over the line before your opponent, before anyone else on the court, is a defensive advantage.

This convenient projection of sporting clichés onto Wall follows news of her retirement from parliament on Tuesday. They’re hard to resist in her case. Wall was a sports star and has made enormous gains as a member of parliament, without being in cabinet and with a reputation for not being a team player. She has jostled, refused to toe the line, defended her position and moved with the speed necessary to leave behind a legislative legacy very few achieve. She has been dogged. As an electorate MP until the 2020 election she served Manurewa. She has also served the bigger constituencies of the queer community, and women.

The reason for Wall’s retirement has been well covered, her sometimes difficult relationship with the Labour Party well examined and her legacy, well acknowledged. For me though, Wall’s career and departure leave us with a larger question: what is it, exactly, that we want from our MPs? What kind of people do we want to attract to parliament and what is our role in creating an environment that enables some, and indeed, dissuades others from making that decision?

Henry Cooke at Stuff has written about Wall’s career and about politics as a team sport. He’s not wrong. The last few shambolic years of the National Party have given us spectacular insight into the importance of party unity and candidate selection and vetting processes. MMP has also somewhat disempowered the electorate MP.

“On message” unity and a more centralised, almost corporate, approach to communications has also been vital to Labour’s management of the pandemic. If the leader of the opposition can lose his head for breaking ranks with the national psyche, imagine the fate of a backbencher in government if they stepped out of line? David Clark lost his ministerial health portfolio for breaching lockdown rules, driving too far for a hoon on his bike. Bridges was out of step with the national mood and Clark committed the crime of being seen as hypocritical. Punishment for Clark’s demotion was probably justified but the public baying for their blood, amplified and whipped up on social media, which now counts as our town square, undoubtedly contributed to their downfall. Two years on, away from the fervor of the time, would we judge them as harshly? Prior to that, before the time of national unity and compliance as a literal lifesaver, before we found so much comfort in the same three to four ministers reassuring us at the podium, would breaking ranks be such a big deal?

All of this has increased the risk profile for MPs, especially those who are less polished and adept at managing themselves in an arena of parasocial relationships, high levels of public scrutiny and speedy news cycles. The risk of having your head shot off if you raise it above the parapet has increased.

You can easily see how these considerations might bleed into candidate selection processes where blameless lives, professionally polished communications prowess and a willingness to stay behind the party lines might be prized over genuine intent, diverse life experience and constituency representation. You can see how those who make the call to become involved in politics at a young age, rising through youth party ranks, would be more familiar with party expectations and less likely to have lived any kind of life that would represent reputational risk to the party. You can see how we end up with the idea of career politicians, selected and trained from a young age. You can see how service as an MP might be vastly unappealing to those who are not favoured or “brought up” by the party and therefore perhaps not extended the same protection under fire.

Will there ever be another Louisa Wall? Based on the bouquets she’s received over the last few days, she seems to be exactly the type of MP we want to see – doggedly committed to her constituents and prepared to sacrifice career progression to do what’s right. Yet many of us actively contribute to an environment where this becomes harder for people to do – the risk and sacrifice required too great, and the temptation to fall back to safety with the protection offered by the party apparatus, too strong.

In Josie Pagani’s Stuff column on Friday, she took aim at the 15 to 20 Labour backbench MPs who, on current polling, will lose their jobs at the next election. She essentially questions whether they will leave any kind of legacy, asking whether anyone other than their families even knows they were elected. Written before Wall’s announcement, Pagani quotes New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote about resumé virtues and eulogy virtues. “Resumé virtues are the skills that got you elected. Eulogy virtues are the things people will say about you after you leave parliament. What do you want them to say about you?”

It’s a fair question to ask of those MPs, especially when we consider Wall’s career and the long list of career eulogy virtues she’s inspired this week. But it’s something we all need to think about, given our involvement in creating a culture where it might be easier for people to carve out lower-risk parliamentary careers, drawing on skills better suited to a celebrity to survive.

Wall entered parliament in 2008 before a reality TV star came to power in the United States and before the ubiquity of social media, which has contributed to the rise of celebrity politicians. As a sports star in Aotearoa, Wall was a celebrity and would’ve encountered an inherent cynicism about her intentions. It would’ve been easy to coast on name recognition and slick public performance, extending the life of the profile enjoyed in her previous career. Celebrity politicians borrow from the entertainment industry’s playbook on self-styling public perception and feeding an insatiable appetite for the distillation of life into pop culture moments. In 2022, we’re probably a little too comfortable with performance as a substitute for the right stuff.

Wall leaves parliament as almost the antithesis of a celebrity politician. Her legacy is one of deeds, not riding easy, of delivering results and not just rhetoric. She was a childhood hero to me as a netballer but departs parliament a hero to many. I collected netballers’ signatures because I aspired to be like them, not because they were celebrities. I am still proud to have collected Wall’s autograph, even more so now than back then.

Follow The Spinoff’s politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

Yesterday, parliament’s most tireless supporter of queer rights resigned. Sam Brooks thanks Louisa Wall for the road she paved.

On April 17, 2013, the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill passed in New Zealand, 77 votes to 43. The bill inserted a definition of marriage into the Marriage Act of 1955 as “the union of two people regardless of their sex, sexual orientation or gender identity”. The member’s bill was submitted by Louisa Wall, who yesterday announced her resignation from parliament after 14 years as a Labour MP. It was her first member’s bill and the one that defines her legacy.

The details and drama around Louisa Wall’s resignation will be discussed elsewhere, by people who are far more qualified to speak to those specifics. I’m not writing here about that. I’m writing here to thank her.

On that night in April 2013 I went into the third night of a production of my play, Queen, an earnest screed about being young, queer and othered in a society whose elected officials debated and voted on my rights. 

Look, I never thought that same sex marriage would pass in my lifetime. I remember, like some awful Tarantino flashback, the debates around same sex marriage that happened in both society and parliament. 

I remember feeling anxious and sick to my stomach after the first reading of the bill, which passed 80 to 40, and how it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like 40 too few votes. It feels odd to walk around in a society, counting up to 120 random people, and believing that at least 40 of them don’t want you to have the same rights. If I was aware of that at the time, there’s no doubt Wall was even more so. Last year, she told The Spinoff that she received “thousands and thousands” of pieces of correspondence opposing the bill.

I also remember, with the kind of pride that I rarely reserve for elected officials, the fearless statements of Louisa Wall in that select committee. She pointed out the failings in our society, presumably knowing that it wouldn’t be popular. Take this quote:

“One of the motivating factors for the opponents against this bill is the fact that they still haven’t acknowledged or appreciate that homosexual New Zealanders have the same rights and privileges as non-homosexual New Zealanders.”

At that very same committee, she had to, as a queer Māori woman, defend against the idea that this bill – the right to legal definition and protections – would lead the country on a slippery slope to polygamy, incest and bigamy. That’s the kind of indignity I wouldn’t wish on anybody. At that point, I wouldn’t begrudge anybody steamrolling toes on the road to progress, let alone treading on them.

The second reading passed 77 to 43 – still 43 too few votes in favour – and the third reading followed the same. When it passed, Wall compared the feeling to winning a World Cup final – a feeling that she can actually speak to, having won the Women’s Rugby World Cup with the Black Ferns in 1998.

I could end this piece by thanking her for this bill alone, but Wall has never stopped speaking out for the rights of queer people. In an interview with Express in 2020, she gestured vaguely in the direction of homophobia existing within the Labour Party, suggesting an element of crossover between religious leaders in the Pacific community who didn’t like who she was or what she did with some members in the party. It’s hard to point out the flaws in your own party publicly, and a popular one at that.

Notably, she came to the defence of Laurel Hubbard, the transgender weightlifter who competed at the 2020 Olympics. She stated, with no doubt, that Hubbard had every right to be there. An elected official, a successful sportswoman in her own right, speaking out for the rights of a transgender woman publicly, shouldn’t be an act of bravery, but in an age where Terfs roam the internet freely, it is.

I can’t say if our parliament is worse without Louisa Wall, but it will certainly be less queer. She is not the only person to have worked for queer rights in this country, but I can’t think of anyone who seemed to piss more people off doing it. For every person she pissed off, though, there are thousands who she has made happy, made equal, made human.

On that night in April in 2013, I came out of my show with more rights than I went into it with. I came out into a world where my play was a period piece. I came out feeling happy, feeling equal, feeling a bit more human.

Thank you, Louisa Wall.