Green MP Tamatha Paul on trying to navigate a fine line - Audrey Young

Tamatha Paul loves being an MP, despite having faced a lot of criticism. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It is surprising to hear that Tamatha Paul loves being an MP, given the various pile-ons she has experienced for things she’s said, not to mention the heavy issues she is immersed in, such as homelessness and crime.

But here she is at 28, in her office at Parliament, looking like a model in her Ralph Lauren shirt, stylishly tattooed arms and perfect nails, full of positivity and charm about her first 18 months as a Green MP and the MP for Wellington Central.

“I feel genuinely lucky that I get to wake up every morning and decide what issue is worth pushing on today and what, how I can use my, the tools I have available to agitate on those issues, ask questions, get some accountability, scrutinise, talk to my audiences and, and the people I represent about what’s going on,” she says in an interview.

“That to me is very empowering rather than just watching all these decisions be made.”

There’s a stark reminder of a former life on the wall behind her. It’s an election billboard from her four years on the Wellington City Council.

It was vandalised, and instead of throwing it out, she asked graffiti tagger Pork, variously known as an artist or a vandal, to put his stamp on it. She adds stickers to it occasionally, creating a piece of evolving art.

The first thing she enthuses about is the recent Speaker’s tour she took to Washington DC and New York with Gerry Brownlee, Labour finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds, National’s Andrew Bayly and Act’s Todd Stephenson.

And she highlights four aspects of the trip: political lessons for the New Zealand Left, meeting a key adviser to the New York socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, seeing Brownlee and Edmonds operating at close quarters, and seeing a piece of art paying homage to one of her favourite hip-hop groups, the Wu-Tang Clan mural on Staten Island.

Or five, if you count the fact she spotted the Ralph Lauren for $10 in a New York op shop - but that emerges much later in the conversation.

The highlight of Tamatha Paul's trip was meeting a housing adviser to New York socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Photo / Mark Mitchell

One of the things she wanted to get out of the US trip was to find out how people were feeling under the second Donald Trump Administration.

“I also wanted to figure out where the Left went so deeply wrong over there and bring those lessons back for us,” she said.

“We met more Democrat adjacent people than Republican adjacent people, and their reads on the situation were pretty similar around the kind of alienation of the working class and kind of intellectual elitism that the Left can sometimes be guilty of.

“That turned a lot of working-class voters off the Left and towards Trump. So that was a good lesson, I think.”

She was pleasantly surprised by how the group got on, including Stephenson, the Act MP.

“I wasn’t expecting us to be at war with each other, but I was expecting a few cheeky jabs here and there in some of our meetings, but it was actually really good.

“Being able to talk to Todd like a human being was nice. But I think a lot of the value I took from it was observing Gerry and observing Barbara.”

Brownlee seemed to have an appreciation for young people who were genuinely curious about why things were the way they were, she said.

And Edmonds was a sharp, brown woman carving out a space on how to take the economy forward.

But the highlight of the trip for Paul was meeting Cea Weaver, who wrote the housing policy for New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, including rent freezes, greater funding for public housing and taking on “big New York City landlords.”

Mamdani has become an instant magnet for the left across the world, including Paul, having won the Democratic primary for the November election by presenting unapologetically left-wing policies rather than hugging the safety of the centre.

“I really wanted to meet him,” she said. “But then meeting [Weaver] was just as good to understand how that would work for them. That was probably the best part of the trip for me.”

Paul has an impressive line-up of portfolio responsibilities, all of which she sought: Housing, Corrections, Police, Youth, Youth Justice, Maori justice issues and the Government response to March 15.

And she has some deep personal connection to most of those areas.

Speaking in Parliament last year about abuse in state care, she talked about one of her grandfathers “who ended up in a borstal in the 1970s, where he was subject to seclusion—which is solitary confinement for kids—where he was subject to a number one diet [bread and water], where he was showered by being hosed down with a fire hose. That is why I refuse to accept that this House continues to perpetuate the same conditions that he had to endure, because he deserved better.”

It is one of the reasons she is so adamantly opposed to boot camps.

In an interview with E-Tangata online magazine before becoming an MP, she recounted how her father was refused entry to Australia to be with his dying brother.

“When my parents landed in Brisbane, they were met with M5 assault rifles,” she told Dale Husband. “They weren’t allowed to enter Australia because of crimes that my dad had committed more than a decade earlier. Despite being honest and hardworking ever since. Despite the fact that he’d been homeless and alone from the age of 14 and had been forced to commit crime to survive.”

He had been brought up in complete poverty, she tells me.

“I come from a family where there is a lot of trauma, and that informs the way I do what I do, and that’s why I care a lot.

“I think people can disagree with what I say, but they can’t argue that I don’t care about these issues because I can see the impacts that our systems have on people.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that if people do not have the basics to live, they’re going to have absolute crap lives and make absolutely terrible and incomprehensible decisions. And I think we can eliminate that risk if people just have what they need.”

Tamatha Paul, the youngest of seven, was the first of her family to go to university. She was dux of Tokoroa High School in 2015, she got a BA at Victoria University, funding her studies from work at KFC and the Tokoroa Club and a Victoria scholarship. She eventually became student president and then got a Master’s in Resource and Environmental Planning from Massey University, with her thesis being on public housing.

She was influenced by social justice activists such as Julia Whaipooti and started volunteering for Just Speak when she was aged 18.

She said many members of her family had done awesome things. But some had done time in prisons, and some are in gangs.

“I remember going to a really big public meeting in my first year at uni at Old Saint Paul’s, which Moana Jackson was speaking at, and just being like having an epiphany about how like that made sense of all of the stories I had heard growing up in Tokoroa and in my own family.”

Tamatha Paul says she does not try to be deliberately provocative. Photo / Mark Mitchell

She says she was first radicalised when she was a teenager in Tokoroa during the term of the John Key Government. Her mother was a care worker working night shifts, and her father was a truck driver.

She remembers Key visiting the town and being puzzled by photos of him being mobbed by kids.

“It didn’t make sense to me that you had so many hard-working parents, yet us, the kids were not able to afford uniforms, not able to afford to go on the school trips, still struggling.

“But our parents were working hard, and it didn’t make sense to me around how we were supposed to get ahead when we were doing everything we possibly could to work hard and follow the rules.”

There were a lot of great things about Tokoroa, “but it was commonplace to see domestic violence spilling out onto the streets or addiction issues, gang violence. That was kind of normal, and I didn’t understand why.”

Justice issues and especially youth justice and punishing young people were “heart” areas for her.

“They are areas I care a lot about that keep me up at night, that I think a lot about because I’ve seen the impact of those systems.”

As Corrections spokesperson, she has exercised the statutory right of MPs to visit any prison and has visited 15 of them, with only three to go.

“You can ask to see anything you want,” she said.

She said she was usually accompanied by a senior team leader and she was able to talk to people randomly, not handpicked people.

“I’ll just walk through a landing or a wing.”

“There’s things I look at at every site, which is usually ‘show me a standard cell, show me your ISU, your intensive support unit, show me your rehabilitation spaces.

“The sad thing I’ve seen is that effective rehabilitation is not happening.”

The only scary time Tamatha Paul had in prison was when six staff escorted her around Paremoremo. Photo / Mark Mitchell

She had never felt unsafe, although there was one time when she had high security touring Paremoremo with six staff.

“It was actually scary because of that.”

Some of her comments around prisons have made her a target for the Government MPs.

She said on TikTok that the vast majority of people were in prison for non-violent crimes – which she later acknowledged was not true – and that most people were in prison because of disabilities, conditions like fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and undiagnosed autism or ADHD.

“They’re being punished for being disabled, they’re being punished for being poor, they’re being punished for being Māori, they’re being punished for our system that we have in our country,” she said at the time.

She was then rubbished by the Government for claiming a woman was in prison for having stolen $12 worth of goods.

Last month, in criticising changes to shoplifting laws, she said if people did not have enough money for food, they would turn towards shoplifting. That was characterised by the Government as giving the green light to shoplifting.

Controversy has also centred on her responsibility for Police. While she has never called for the defunding or abolition of the Police, she told her social media followers in March she would be speaking to a policing forum in Christchurch with Peace Action Ōtautahi “to talk about the Police and what alternatives we could have to the Police and what radical kind of Police abolition could look like in real terms”.

At the forum, she said: “Wellington people do not want to see police officers everywhere, and, for a lot of people, it makes them feel less safe. It’s that constant visual presence that tells you that you might not be safe there if there’s heaps of cops,” she said at the time.

“All [the police] do is walk around all day, waiting for homeless people to leave their spot, packing their stuff up and throwing it in the bin.”

The Government was making a big deal of having more police on the beat at the time and she was branded as being in “la la land”.

So does she feel as though those were mistakes that she has learned from, or does she feel as though the pile-on that they unleashed was unfair?

“I think it is a good opportunity to talk about the issues that I want to be national conversations,” she said. “Particularly thinking of recent examples with the prisons and police.

“Those are the conversations I want us to be having.”

"This job is not worth not being able to sleep at night," says Tamatha Paul. Photo / Mark Mitchell

She doesn’t call them mistakes, but she does not feel picked on either because the criticisms were about issues rather than about her personally.

“Personal elements come into it in maybe the way other politicians describe me.

“But for me, I think that is my job, to make things that I am working on - or want to bring attention to - a national conversation.

“That’s not to say I go out of my way to try to be purposefully provocative.”

She was aware she was walking a line between representing the varied views of Wellington Central constituents, and “trying to be true to the Green kaupapa”.

“Then there is another element of being true to who I am, because to me…this job is not worth not being able to sleep at night.

“Probably everybody says this, but authenticity is really, really important to me, and there is nothing in this job that is worth me not being able to look myself in the mirror anymore. That’s the fine line I am constantly trying to navigate.

“I know that I am saying some things that haven’t been said in here this way before. And I want to bring people along.

“The best way to do that is by doing really good, deep scrutiny of ministers and their portfolios and by supporting people who are actually affected by these issues.”

And she is not averse to working with the Government in the interests of improving things.

“I think the US trip also really entrenched that for me, too.”

When she gave her maiden speech in Parliament in February last year, she was a renter living with five flatmates in the Aro Valley and her English Bulldog, Biggie.

She remains a renter but has moved to a flat in the sunnier hills of Brooklyn that she shares with her partner and his dog Max.

Unwinding involves spending time with Biggie in places such as Red Rocks, and in creative pursuits such as drawing, painting, music and fashion.

At present she is doing as much sewing as she can. Hence, the revelation about the New York origins of her highly tailored shirt, which, no, she didn’t make.

“I love fashion so much,” she said.

“You can just take so much from a person based on what they are wearing and the way they present themselves to the world.

“And I just like making stuff. I like thinking about ‘if you deconstructed something, how would you put it back together and like, how can you make something have a good form or good structure, and what kind of materials do you use for what?

Paul is one of three Green MPs who have an electorate, the others being Julie-Anne Genter in Rongotai and Chloe Swarbrick in Auckland Central. Paul beat former Labour list MP Ibrahim Omer by 6066 votes in the usually safe Labour seat after it was vacated by former Labour Deputy leader Grant Robertson. The seat is expected to be harder to win next year after significant boundary changes.

So how does she enjoy being an electorate MP?

“Oh, I love it,” says Paul. “It makes me feel a lot more grounded.”

“Sure, we can talk about laws, we can talk about the choices the Government is making, but I can see what the real-life impact is because I’ve met with the woman who has applied for 400 jobs and been declined for every one or I’ve met with a man who’s now on a job-seeker benefit”, even though he was working Te Wahtu Ora’s IT.

She is definitely up for standing for the seat again next year.

“I’m meeting with real people and seeing the real impact of these decisions… Being an electorate MP makes it even more real.”