There are not many people who can say they are standing for Parliament 22 days after being elected to Parliament, but Casey Costello is one.
She is a newly-elected list MP who was ranked No 3 on the New Zealand First list after Winston Peters and Shane Jones and is standing in the Port Waikato byelection on November 25.
She found out her ranking when the list was released to the public and got the shock of her life.
“I’m still not sure why I got No 3 but I’m very honoured,” she told the Weekend Herald.
Costello has made a name for herself since 2016 as a spokeswoman for Hobson’s Pledge, alongside Don Brash, on what she sees as a trend towards racial division and for which she has sometimes been called racist.
At the campaign launch for Port Waikato on Sunday, she set out her whakapapa.
“By way of background, I am the granddaughter of Hone Pani Tamati Waka Nene Davis who descends from Tapua, whose sons were Patuone and Tamati Waka Nene, two of the chiefs that signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
“I am also the granddaughter of Renee Costello, whose grandparents arrived in New Zealand in 1860.
“Like all of us here, I am a New Zealander and like so many of us, I am tired of the division that has driven us to different corners, reluctant to seek out our common ground and develop answers that will benefit us all.”
So how does she respond to being called racist?
“I’ll wear it. I’m not racist. I’m demanding that we are given respect as individuals to achieve our potential and the more we tell our that the world’s against you, that you’re a victim, we are no longer advocating for the victim, we are advocating for victimhood.”
“We’ve got to shift that dialogue because we are depriving them of their opportunity to succeed.”
She said she was advocating for Māori to be treated equally “and I think the worse thing we have done for Māori is tell our young people that you are pre-disposed to failure or that you are incapable of achieving on your merit.”
“That’s the message that’s coming through strongest.”
She said the emphasis should not go on failure but on aspiration - to lift up Māori.
“We are creating systems that are, to my view, racist. We are treating people on what their race is and not on what their individual needs are.”
The other MP standing for election 22 days after being elected is Andrew Bayly, the National list MP who wants to reclaim his Port Waikato electorate, which he won in 2020 with a 4313 majority.
The contest for the seat this election was postponed following the death of Act candidate Neil Christensen after nominations closed, and besides National and New Zealand First, no other parliamentary party is fielding a candidate in the byelection.
Costello said Bayly was “a great guy” but was more likely to be a minister with greater commitments than her.
She said if she became the local MP, the community would not lose Bayly - whichever of them wins the seat, they will resign as a list MP and their party will get an extra list MP to fill that list spot.
Costello is aged 57. She has two adult daughters and lives in Pokeno.
This is not quite Costello’s first rodeo in politics, although it was on a different horse that barely left the gate.
In 2011, her brother Dominic was standing for Act in Te Atatū and persuaded her to put her name forward for the party. She secured the list spot of No 35 for Act and the nomination for Māngere - it got one MP, John Banks. Her brother got 308 votes and she got 121. Don Brash was the Act leader at the time and it was when Costello first met him and later helped him to form Hobson’s Pledge.
She got talking to Peters after a meeting in the past few years and told him she was ready to be “part of the solution” and was willing to be a candidate. He approached her earlier this year to cement the offer.
Costello first met Winston Peters in 1990 after a demonstration at Parliament.
She was vice-president of the Police Association and he was a National MP in Opposition.
In a rare move, the police union had mounted a protest against Labour Government policy which was threatening to substantially erode police superannuation.
Steve Hinds was the president and Graham Harding, who later went on to work for Peters, was the general secretary. Costello says it was her work as a delegate and office holder in the Police Association that politicised her.
“That was an introduction to lobbying and standing up for things. Because of the rules around the Police not being able to criticise Government, the association held that role of advocating for better law,” she said.
She left the police as a Detective Sergeant after 14 years based in Papakura and Franklin.
Among the big cases she worked on was the Red Fox Tavern murder in 1987 and the Schlaepfer family massacre in 1992 in which Brian Schlaepfer murdered six family members, his wife, three sons, a daughter-in-law and grandson, before killing himself. One young granddaughter saved herself from the rampage by hiding in the wardrobe.
Before joining the police in 1986, she had been working on her father’s local newspaper in Papakura, the Counties Sport and News, covering general news.
“I had done a few stories around policing and you get a bit romanticised about saving the world. I never thought I’d get in.”
She is super proud of her father, John Costello, who was a legendary racing journalist, a three-pack-a-day man, who worked for the Northern Advocate, the New Zealand Herald and the Auckland Star.
He was the first journalist inducted into the Horse Racing Hall of Fame and he wrote The Linda Jones Story, a book about the first professional woman jockey in New Zealand.
Costello used to catch a ride with her father into the Auckland Star office, catch a bus over to St Mary’s in Ponsonby to go to school, bus back to the Star in the afternoon and drive back with him to Papakura. He died in 2018 not long after dictating his last story to his daughter for the Turf Digest.
There were six Costello kids “and when you grow up sharing one bathroom, you learn the art of compromise and negotiation very early,” she said at the campaign launch.
But Costello says her mother, Maryann, is her inspiration. Costello says she gets her strength, her work ethic and her stubbornness from her mother.
Her mother is living up north at Bland Bay, Whangaruru, not far from Whakapara on State Highway 1 where her mother grew up.
“She’s the old kuia that lives there,” says Costello. “She goes to bed and has a nap and wakes up and there’ll be a bowl of fish heads sitting on the kitchen bench. She thinks she’s the queen.”
It was quite a sporting family. As Maryann Davis, Costello’s mother represented New Zealand Māori at tennis and her mother’s sister, later Neti Traill, was a champion table tennis player winning eight singles titles. They went to school with some of Winston Peters’ sisters at Hekerenui.
Costello who affiliates to Ngāti Wai (Peters’ iwi), Ngāti Hau and Ngā Puhi, was related to Kelvin Davis on one side of her mother’s family and the Harawiras on the other.
The church at Whakapara, just across the road from the marae, was built on land donated by one of her Māori relatives and Costello said it was one community. Māori and Pākehā were buried in the cemetery.
Costello said that what got her involved to begin with was a resistance to people making statements claiming that “Māori think this...”
“All I could see was we were talking a lot about differentiating rights but we weren’t talking a lot about improving outcomes.”
So what is her goal in the next three years?
“I want to be part to be part of delivering outcomes,” she says and as an example, cites changes in perception of Māori in prison.
“If we have an issue with Māori in prison, I want to be part of delivering something that keeps Maori out of prison.”
But she argues that the problem is not as big as is made out - Māori make up more than half the prison population but less than 1 per cent of Māori are in prison.
“The narrative is that Māori are over-represented in prison but 99.7 per cent of Māori aren’t in prison. People have got this impression that half of Māori are in prison. Half of Māori aren’t in prison. Most of us are successful.”
Some Members of Parliament said democracy had failed Māori “but they are there - they are part of the decision process but they are not sending that message”.
“We don’t need to create a co-governance structure that appoints people with no accountability to people they are claiming to represent.”
She described the Treaty of Waitangi as an “amazing document - unprecedented in the world.”
“It’s an incredible document - we are all going to be treated equally before the law... but it has been weaponised, it has been misused, it has been used to support a narrative.
“But it’s simple; we ceded sovereignty, we protected our property rights and we are all to be treated equally before the law. That’s what it means to me.”
Costello is not exactly new to Parliament. In the early 2000s, as a security specialist in Auckland, she was recruited to become the manager of security and operations at the time to oversee the security upgrade.
She would sometimes spend her breaks watching debates and question time from the galleries above the debating chamber.
When she arrived at Parliament as an MP shortly after election day, one of the security guards she had worked with gave her a big hug.
To be returning as an MP is what she calls “surreal.”
“It’s just crazy privileged. It’s just amazing that I can be part of this.”
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