Hawke's Bay Person of the Year Minnie Ratima goes global at ICOPA conference in London

Minnie Ratima and 91-year-old Pat Magill flew into Napier on Tuesday night at the end of a trip to the ICOPA conference in London. Photo / Warren Buckland.

Hawke's Bay Today Person of the Year for 2017 Minnie Ratima never thought of herself as an academic, and never pretended to be one.

Thus even the housing and social activist and now international traveller was confused after delivering a well-received address at the 18th International Conference on Penal Abolition at Birkbeck University of London, from which she returned on Tuesday night, somewhat more than the sidekick she had expected to be for travelling companion and 91-year-old ICOPA regular and veteran Napier social activist Pat Magill.

"They all thought I was an academic," she laughed as she and Magill were greeted by the small group that braved the cold.

"They asked me what university I went to, I didn't go to university, I'm from Maraenui," she said

While the real academics delivered their addresses scrolling their screens or from reams of foolscap, Ratima delivered off the cuff.

A Canadian indigenous studies scholar among her audience was so impressed she's now been invited to a conference in Canada next year.

It's been an interesting six months for Ratima, now in her 50s, once a child runaway and state ward who until a trip to Vanuatu with Magill late last year had never travelled abroad.

In December she was stunned to be named by Hawke's Bay Today as Hawke's Bay Person of the Year, and the heady moments continued as she attended this month's four-day Abolitionist Futures conference, where she was one of about 150 community organisers and activists, legal practitioners and academics from 18 countries.

The conference delivered more than 75 workshops, presentations, strategy sessions and papers, alongside film screenings, poetry readings, art displays and theatre performances.

A 56-page conference programme headlined the lone New Zealand address on the first morning of the conference proper as asking why the incarceration rate in New Zealand had doubled in the 21 years since ICOPA was held in Auckland in 1997, and "why are Maori people still so over-represented in the prison system?"

"Minnie and Pat will share their experiences from the New Zealand context of efforts to resist imprisonment and to address the problems of criminalisation faced by Maori people," it continued. "Minnie will also discuss the Robson Collection, housed in the Napier Public Library, which was supported by speakers at the ICOPA Auckland in 1997 and offers resources for restorative justice."

Magill, attending his seventh ICOPA conference, says he "pretty much left it to Minnie" but he backed her up with a few words on Napier as a child-friendly city and his belief that if the city he's lived in all his life doesn't take charge of its own issues then it contributes to the spiralling prison statistics.

Ratima, who remembers first seeing Magill in the 1970s, when she was a budding teenager and he was developing the Downtown Y youth activity centre in central Napier, is a latecomer to activism.

She's always voted in general elections, doing so because her father told her to vote "Labour".

But she says she really only "chose" to vote "Labour" in the last few years, and until 2016 kept her nose out of local government elections because she didn't know anything about the people who were standing for places on the city council.

The new sense of achievement is now her motivation as she looks to a future where Maori will feel more included in the debate and, as a result, all of society will benefit.

She prefaced her address with her pepeha, explaining her attachment to the waka Takitimu, to Kahungunu, the land, the river, the mountain, and how we all relate back to Papatuanuku, which - for the sake of the audience - she described as mother nature.

"Things are on a roll," she says, and ponders the notion that maybe it is because there is a new government and those in authority in the nine years of the old one may sense they are not as well protected as they were.