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.

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