Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer wants people to know the party cares for all New Zealanders, not just Māori.
“I can see where that narrative comes from, but our actions completely say the opposite. The hikoi shows we are completely the opposite.
“Our support for other people, Palestine, our support for environmental issues, and our support for everyone being well, completely show the opposite. We want to look after all workers and all New Zealanders.
“It’s a narrative that’s been deliberately designed. But I always think actions speak louder than words.
“For example, Rawiri [Waititi] and I, Whanau Ora, Waipareira, a lot of the heart of Te Pāti Māori, showed our actions during Covid. We looked after everyone. We looked after the whole community,” she said.
Ngarewa-Packer told The Front Page that while Te Pāti Māori is an indigenous-led party, it was “never about living alone”.
“We were always united in our fight against seabed mining; we are united in our fight to make sure that we can give good jobs, good homes, good lives, and a good education system for our people.
“What we’ve had to contend with is a rhetoric of ‘they’re extreme’. Well, yeah, we are extremely optimistic. We are extremely Aotearoa-centric. And if we were to look at our values, everything about it is actually bringing the balance back into life in a restorative mana approach for everybody,” she said.
This year Act leader David Seymour, when asked about health outcomes for Māori and Pasifika, said having a “preferred lens for partitioning human beings”, like race, is “clumsy, quite icky, and doesn’t get us to target the people in greatest need”.
“The whole debate, and the fundamental difference between the likes of us and Act, is that we don’t deny our history,” Ngarewa-Packer said, “We don’t deny that we have inequities. We don’t deny that we’ve all arrived at today with different parts of what makes us who we are.
“And that’s the biggest debate that we’re having, is we have a politician like David Seymour, who’s pretending that we wipe out the history of colonisation, we wipe out the history of two to three generations of trauma ...
" We wipe out the history of the weight that it takes to break the cycle of deficit thinking, to break the cycle of poverty, to break the cycle of being able to feel at one with the rest of your community.
“That is a bigger systemic issue that they’re refusing to accept which effectively says, a bit like the Treaty, colonisation never happened ... In fact, Māori and Pasifika, and not just us, but women, and not just women, those who are disabled, buckle up. We all are treated the same, and the reality is you and I know on an everyday basis that that’s not the fact at all.
" We believe in investing in equity and doing a targeted approach to addressing inequities, and let us get on and do it once and for all, and get us all to a stage where we can live equally," she said.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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