KEY POINTS:
Here is how small the Pacific Island community is: when Matt Saunoa was crowned NZ Idol on Sunday night, my father was excited to discover that we were related. Practically cousins. Apparently, Matt's dad is the son of ... well, never mind.
We'd always liked Matt, even though most of the family had been in Indira's camp. She goes to my sister's church and teaches my niece singing, and her father is ... well, you get the picture.
There are times when our corner of the world is so small that six degrees of separation seems positively distant. Try one or two degrees.
So it is with the Taito Phillip Field affair, which continues to cast its divisive, and, yes, cancerous shadow over the community, as it does over the Labour Party.
The low point came last week when police raided Field's offices and home (a year too late, surely?) - giving the Mangere MP another ignominious distinction. The first MP to have his offices raided, my 13-year-old observed sadly, and he's a Pacific Islander. Former Prime Minister, David Lange, who tried unsuccessfully to keep Field out of his beloved electorate more than a decade ago, would have been horrified. And maybe vindicated.
Something is rotten in the electorate of Mangere, and if the Labour hierarchy didn't know it before last week, it knows it now.
Two days before the raids the results were out for the byelection to elect a Manukau City councillor for Mangere. The news wasn't good for Labour.
Mangere, the electorate that gave Labour its biggest majority of the 2004 general election, had taken a step to the right, rejecting the Labour candidate, a Samoan woman, and electing the C & R's Sylvia Taylor, a conservative Palagi who seemed as surprised as anyone to find herself the victor.
Unexpected? Unaccountable? Not if you'd been watching Mangere closely. A Labour stronghold it may be, but down in the trenches, the electorate organisation is so divided that many former Labour supporters, and even a few present ones, were quietly campaigning for the opposition.
One of those known to have supported Taylor is the woman whose allegations about Field pocketing of donations helped spark the police investigation: Siniva Papali'i. She'd worked in Field's electorate office and was subsequently replaced by Field's wife's daughter.
Papali'i is also the sister of the former Manukau City Councillor (James Papali'i) whose resignation created the byelection. Despite being convicted of fraud in August, for what supporters say was more stupidity than corruption, he continues to be hugely popular, mostly on the strength of his community work.
"We supported him because he'd done a lot of good works for the city," said one party insider. "But Taito's done nothing. He's been in Mangere for 10 years and what has he done? I think he's been too busy feathering his own nest."
All roads lead back to Field. Critics say he put his energies into the Samoan community, while relying on traditional Labour loyalty to bring other groups under the party wing. There isn't, for example, a Tongan branch in Mangere, and the once-solid Cook Island support disappeared after the 2003 byelection fiasco.
That time, Mangere's electorate committee overlooked the chairman of the Samoan branch, and put in a Maori candidate, apparently to please Head Office. He lost to Alf Filipaina, a Samoan policeman, who stood as an independent. When Field later decided to put Filipaina on the Labour ticket, the Cook Islanders decamped.
Fuelling the growing disillusionment is the disgust felt by many at the blind loyalty of some local party officials to Field.
A friend wonders why the damning revelations from Sunan Siriwan, the Thai tiler at the centre of the Field controversy, haven't had more impact on Field's supporters. They're waiting, of course, for the findings of the police investigation, still some months away.
But it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Thai's claims provide a more convincing explanation than Field's less than credible story about what Siriwan did in Samoa and how much Field knew about it.
Field told the Ingram inquiry that there was no plan for Siriwan to tile his house in Samoa before he left New Zealand, that he had no idea Siriwan was tiling his house when he made representations to the Associate Immigration Minister on Siriwan's behalf, and that an application to the Samoan Government for a work visa for Siriwan had been made by Field's wife, Maxine, without his knowledge. Apparently, all of Samoa knew the Thai man was tiling Field's house, except Field.
Ingram couldn't find any evidence to contradict this. Ingram never interviewed Siriwan (he sent a more junior lawyer to Samoa), but there seems little doubt that his findings would have been different if Siriwan had told the inquiry what he has since told his lawyer, Olinda Woodroffe.
Why didn't he? Siriwan claims he was told to lie. Woodroffe also questions the competency of the interpreter, pointing out that fluency in a language doesn't automatically qualify someone as an interpreter. She used a court interpreter with whom she had worked on a number of cases.
Field, through his lawyer Simativa Perese has denied all of Siriwan's claims, including the MPs alleged attempt to buy his silence earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the dispute got personal when Perese told the Herald that Woodroffe was motivated by disagreements between herself and Field, going back to 1993.
Woodroffe dismisses that as a red herring, and intends to complain to the Law Society about Perese. She has her own issues with the smooth-talking Perese, whom she blames for the demise of the Pacific Lawyers Association. (Perese was its president from its inception till its early death.) Did I mention we were a small community?
