It’s a tumultuous campaign in the North for Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime, who is fighting to keep her seat. As David Fisher writes, she seems to be going about it in an unusual way.
Willow-Jean Prime is a political puzzle.
She’s on the campaign trail to keep her Northland seat and has described some voters as Nimbys, misogynist and racist.
Prime has escaped the gravitational pull of MMP that generally draws politicians from major parties towards middle New Zealand.
Instead, here she is making it clear just where she stands in the long, sprawling electorate of Northland with its extremes of poverty and wealth.
“I don’t have my office in Kerikeri, like the National Party does,” she says. Indeed not. Her office is in Kawakawa, through which State Highway 1 carves a path. It’s somewhat of a generalisation but that stretch of tarmac serves as a demarcation between those who “have” and those who “have not”.
To illustrate – and generalise – take the mid-North in an electorate that runs from just outside Wellsford to Cape Reinga, a drive of almost five hours (assuming the roads are open).
In the mid-North, Kaikohe is to the west of SH1. Nice enough town, no beach, poor and mostly brown. Drive 25 minutes east and you’re in Kerikeri. Nice enough town, no beach, comparatively wealthy and mostly white.
Prime’s office in Kawakawa sits on the western side of SH1. Northland’s last MP was one-termer Matt King. His office was in Kerikeri. She took the seat from King last election with a slim margin of 163 votes – the first time Labour has held the seat since 1938.
Every poll made public says Prime will lose to National’s new candidate, dairy farmer Grant McCallum.
And while she was embraced and loved on the streets of Kaikohe, it was a different story when she turned up to a recent pub debate in Kerikeri.
It was an unruly affair, often ugly, during which the crowd hooted abuse at Prime, howled derision when she used te reo Māori (like the time she said “puku”) and volubly sneered when she dared suggest what she considers the Government’s accomplishments.
“I have never experienced anything like it before,” Prime told the Herald. “I have never experienced that level of vitriol.”
She has a point of comparison. She has stood in five general elections and two local body elections.
“It’s becoming a bit of a theme. It feels like there is dog whistling going on.”
She tells of being invited to a “men’s networking forum” at which she spoke to about a dozen men. “They did not stand up and did not shake my hand to greet me. They would not have done that with a male candidate. That’s misogyny.”
Then most of the questions were about supposed Māori advantage – “they have more votes” and so-called “special treatment” in the health system. Prime explained what was really happening behind the headlines, how clinical need comes first, and so on.
“I gave them all the info… [they] still didn’t like it. Just racist.”
Volunteer supporters have been copping it too. One at the Paihia market overheard a conversation next to her – volume pitched to carry – that “everybody Labour should be burned and killed”.
When told Kerikeri constituents mutter darkly about never seeing their MP, she asks: “What are their issues? [That’s] a bit of a generalisation [but] they don’t email my office.
“We’re not fair and equal. We have inequities to address.”
Kaikohe – and other places to the west of SH1 – have issues galore. Prime ticks through achievements. There’s state housing development in Kaikohe, methamphetamine harm reduction support, the geothermal plant, the business park and so on. These are projects that “don’t just happen”, she says, without a local MP’s shoulder to the wheel.
Sure, she wasn’t at the huge public meeting in Kerikeri where 1000 people gathered to raise concerns about Kāinga Ora plans for state housing in the town. She says organisers wouldn’t shift the date to allow for her increasingly busy schedule as a Cabinet minister with five portfolios.
Not that she wasn’t engaged, she says. She’s heard the arguments about a lack of doctors’ services for a new influx of residents or a lack of sewage capacity.
“If that’s your argument, then it stands to reason there shouldn’t be any private development. But you’re not arguing that, are you? You’re just saying you don’t want Kāinga Ora.
“Nimbys,” she says, then adds: “That’s not all of Kerikeri.”
Tell Prime she doesn’t sound like she wants to win with language likely to upset some. “I want it,” she says, and the extra funding and staff it brings “with which to service the community”.
Even so, it seems an uncharacteristic way to try to win. Voting patterns suggest the pathway to winning Northland is to listen closely to those voters on the east of the SH1. On the other side, where the population is poorer, disenfranchised and predominantly Māori, fewer people get out to vote.
“Every vote counts. There’s still a lot of work to do to make sure people exercise the franchise of voting.”
McCallum – a Maungaturoto dairy farmer an hour south of Whangārei – recognises inequity exists in Northland. Queen Elizabeth II landed at Kaikohe’s airport in late 1953 on her coronation tour when it was the mid-North’s bustling business and service centre.
“When you tell people that, their jaws drop,” he says. Now, the problems are there to see – on the street and in all the social indicators.
“For me, the thing I think about most in Northland is how do we lift the standard of living in Kaikohe?”
McCallum says infrastructure is the answer. Projects delivered under the Provincial Growth Fund brought some of that, he concedes. Kerikeri’s wealth – and the resulting philanthropic benefits enjoyed by the town – has its roots in a dam supported by Sir Robert Muldoon in the 1970s. Kaikohe got one only this year.
“The most important thing we can do is a four-lane highway all the way north. My vision would be north of Whangārei. We just need more opportunities for people to earn a decent living.”
Northland has one of the largest National Party memberships in the country. There’s an argument that says the electorate gets short-changed because it’s seen as a safe blue seat. Ask McCallum if there’s been enough money into Northland from Wellington over the years and he says: “No, probably not.”
McCallum – who would like to be agriculture minister at some stage – is no political naif. He served on the National Party board for 10 years from 2005-15 during the (now Sir) John Key years.
Key was “amazing” but it was his successor as prime minister, Bill English, who provided McCallum’s greatest political lesson of taking people with you. He’s a fan, too, of English’s social investment concept of targeting assistance at families identified through data.
On McCallum’s bookshelf at home is a blend of political autobiographies and rugby books. A bookmark in former attorney-general Chris Finlayson’s autobiography reveals a marked-out passage which talks of National’s MPs as custodians of the party’s brand.
McCallum’s role on the board gave him a helicopter view of politics. “I know how that stuff works.” Now he’s campaigning in the weeds, “I just have to shut up”.
Then he doesn’t. “There are very few people in our caucus with much background in the National Party. That’s one of the things I bring into the caucus, if fortunate enough to be there, is understanding of the party. Prime ministers come and go but the party is still here.”
He disputes Prime’s take on the environment in which they are campaigning. “I find calling people racist is unhelpful.” Times are changing, he says, with successive generations increasingly comfortable with the role Māori have. And no, he doesn’t consider those objecting to Kāinga Ora housing in Kerikeri to be Nimbys.
“It’s easy to be a conviction politician when you’re No 9 on the list.” His point: Prime will get back to Parliament anyway. All this raises a question – if you’re a custodian of the party’s brand and not high on the list (he’s at 68), how do you influence change for those most in need?
On the debate at which Prime was abused – including by McCallum’s supporters – he’s somewhat sanguine. “When you hold a debate at a pub and they’ve had two to three beers, what do you expect?”
He didn’t approve. “That does my head in. It’s not my style of politics.” Then: “She should have brought a crew of people with her.”
That palaver of a debate is on the minds of other candidates. Shane Jones – the loyal lieutenant to NZ First leader Winston Peters – regrets not stepping in and has said so to Prime. “I could have easily stepped in and defanged that feral behaviour.”
He blames National supporters, although the Herald watched Matt King’s Democracy NZ and Jones’ own supporters having a go.
Jones is not expecting to win. He is expecting to help lift NZ First’s party vote. And he wants National to feel the challenge. “It’s actually very bad for Northland if National continues to assume they have won it as of right.”
It was Jones’ and NZ First’s Provincial Growth Fund that firehosed around $660 million into Northland after the 2017 election. It prompted the creation of infrastructure – like the Kaikohe dam – that might otherwise not have been built. It also paid for the sculpture at the Kerikeri roundabout on which the community holds similar views to the imposition of Kāinga Ora housing.
It’s a lot of cash and – depending how you see it – either compensated for generations of neglect or propelled the region ahead of where it was.
Jones’ pitch is NZ First can get things done. This election those things needing doing include law and order, infrastructure, dabbling in the transgender debate with bathroom laws and Peters’ insistence that Māori are not indigenous.
On the latter, Jones can’t get those same words out of his mouth. He recasts what Peters says in a few different ways. He says Peters meant labels of indigeneity such as “iwi” and “hapū” being used by Māori to pervert democracy.
Reminded that Peters didn’t actually say that, he retorts that Peters meant we were all settlers, adding: “Māori were the first group of settlers.” When told that’s actually the dictionary definition of indigenous, he refers the Herald to Peters to continue the debate.
He will not say himself – as his leader did – that “Māori … are not indigenous”.
Green Party candidate Reina Tuai Penney holds Jones in high regard. “Shane Jones is at the top of the ladder when it comes to te ao Māori-kaumatua status.” So she’s not surprised he dodged the question. “We know what they’re doing – they’re getting the vote.”
And, she claims, they’re doing so by courting those who seek racial division rather than the unity she grew up with on the Hokianga, “where we do things together”.
Based in Mangamuka, Penney is a lawyer who has worked in the government sector and returned home to a village isolated by the closure of SH1. As a mum of three and a busy community leader, the road closure has made campaigning difficult.
Her objective is to raise the profile of the Green Party, which she joined because of what she considers the depth of its policies. Asked what single thing would help Northland, she explains the importance of the interconnectedness of many policies.
Better pay for workers, better roads to travel to work, public transport to travel those roads, social housing to come home to, a universal basic income to provide surety.
And her campaign, amid a string of centre and right-leaning candidates, is to “make some sense in all the bullshit that’s out there”. “If Willow is not there, I’m the only one talking sense.”
Also not intending to win Northland is Act’s Mark Cameron. One of three farmers, with King and McCallum, he says standing in the electorate is “an exposure thing”. “We’ve always been campaigning for the party vote.”
Asked for his top three issues, he lists roading, then biosecurity to support the tourism economy and representing the interests of the rural sector. In Northland specifically, addressing school truancy and championing police. Asked about Kaikohe, he says “it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats”, which should have been sorted by successive governments given it’s been “an ongoing issue for decades”.
He says he has also expressed regret to Prime over the pub debate. It’s not behaviour he supports, he says, and characterises it as “a reflection of the anger and disdain for the current Government and the previous one”.
If the election were a contest in billboards, King would probably win. They are everywhere. Since leaving National (they left me, he says, by supporting mandates), he has helped set up a new party, spoken at almost 100 meetings across the country and set his sights on winning back his electorate. He’s worked incredibly hard.
When King beat Peters (MP from 2015-17) to take the seat, he was cock-a-hoop. He spent three years calling himself “King of the North”. When he lost, “I felt kicked in the guts.” He actually increased his vote and, he reckons, would have been assured of three more terms as National’s MP if only he hadn’t stuck to his beliefs and principles around Covid-19.
Those curious threads on which he pulled unravelled his political career. He’s still pulling threads – climate change, for example – and transgender bathroom politics. Old political rabbit holes have been joined by new ones: he’s convinced McCallum planted questions for the pub debate and speaks of attempts by NZ First to infiltrate Democracy NZ.
But, say what you will of King, he tells you what he believes if you spend time asking the question. Farming, family and freedom are his party’s trinity of beliefs, with a healthy dash of belief divergent from accepted science.
And he is also relentlessly driven.
“In the passage of time, I will be vindicated,” he says.