The curse that haunts a charmed MP

Associate Justice Minister Taito Phillip Field orders a Herald reporter to get off his property in Mangere. Picture / Dean Purcell

EXCLUSIVE - Maxine Field broke down and cried on the phone when the Herald rang her this week.

Her husband, Associate Justice Minister Taito Phillip Field, the first Pacific Islander to be elected to the New Zealand Parliament, had just been re-elected MP for Mangere with the country's biggest majority. But all journalists wanted to talk to him about was why a Thai tiler called Sunan Siriwan had been tiling the Fields' new house in Samoa while waiting for a New Zealand work permit.

Seven months ago, Taito Phillip Field asked his colleague, Associate Immigration Minister Damien O'Connor, for a special direction to officials to grant work permits to Siriwan and his partner, Aumporn Phanngarm ("Luck"), despite the fact that both had claimed refugee status and had stayed on illegally after their applications were rejected.

After receiving an indication that O'Connor would look at the case "favourably", Field arranged tickets to Samoa for Siriwan and Auckland bathroom renovator Keith Williams, who was married to a Thai and had met Siriwan at a wedding about a year before.

"We only wanted to help him," Maxine Field said soon after the story broke in the week before the election. "To me this is like a curse, like it was planned. It's like we give everything and then get punished."

And in a sense it was planned, in that few people had been watching the case for a while.

On February 25, three weeks before Siriwan and Williams set foot in Samoa on March 16, Auckland immigration consultant Tim Spooner, whose wife is Thai, emailed a Thai-speaking detective in the Asian crime squad at Counties-Manukau Police about their plans.

The way Spooner set it out in the email is not quite how it happened. But to understand what has happened, it may help to start where life began for Phillip Field - in Samoa.

When Field was born in Apia in 1952, Western Samoa was a New Zealand colony, having been captured from the Germans during World War I.

His family moved to New Zealand in 1959, at the beginning of the great migration of Pacific Islanders, which has now emptied some islands of more than half their people.

Like almost everyone in that migration, Field started at the bottom - in the meatworks. He became secretary of the West Coast sub-branch of the Meatworkers' Union in 1976 and gradually worked his way up through the union movement.

At the same time, in 1974 when he was only 21 or 22, he received the title "Taito" as "matai" or chief of the Samoan village of Manase. Throughout his career in the unions and in Parliament, he has made frequent trips home to fulfil his chiefly responsibilities.

In "Fa'a Samoa", or Samoan culture, those responsibilities are expressed in mutual gift-giving and service.

Palelei Vaialese, who founded the newspaper Samoana in Auckland in 1979, says that if anyone in Samoa wants something from a chief or MP, the normal practice is to give a donation, or "lafo".

"I myself as an example, most of the time I'd go and see the Prime Minister or my MP [in Samoa], I said, 'Okay, I've come to see you about help with my immigration papers, can you help me?' Then I said, 'Here's your lafo to have breakfast or dinner.'

"The more people who come to the office each day, the more lafo you have. By the end of the day you make almost $500, or almost $1000, all through lafo.

"Then the next day you come back and bring food for them. It's not really bribery. It's not like when you go and see a Palagi [European]."

In Otara, where Field became an MP in 1993, and in Mangere, where he moved in 1996, these customs are still so strong that a sign had to be put up in Field's electorate office, after a visit by the Parliamentary Service in 2002, stating that services provided in the office are free.

From the start, immigration has been a major part of Field's electorate work.

"I get Pacific people from all over Auckland coming to me," he says. "It's part of my culture that when someone comes to you for help, it's unacceptable for you to turn them away just because they don't live in your electorate.

"So we have huge clinics. I have immigration up to my eyeballs. And now with the Asian people I treat them just as I treat the Pacific people. I do the best I can to help people."

This attitude has caused some ructions in the office. Two long-serving secretaries, Maria Coady and Siniva Papali'i, quit three years ago because of the workload imposed on them by accepting people from outside the electorate.

They were also upset when they both took holidays at the same time and came back to find that Maxine Field had taken charge.

"Both of them sacked themselves," Maxine Field says. "They were not answering the phone. They didn't like me coming over insisting the office should be open till 5pm. They were closing the office at 3pm."

An older woman, Loimata Lilo, was brought in to help part-time, and shared her wages with Maxine Field despite a parliamentary rule that MPs cannot employ their own spouses on the public payroll.

"I said to Loimata, 'I don't want any of your wages. It's yours'," Maxine Field says.

"Loimata insisted. She's a very generous lady. She said, 'Who's going to tell me who to give my money to? You deserve it, Maxine'.

"I couldn't help it because I gave it to her and she put it in my pockets. She's still doing it now."

For a man who started at the bottom, Field has succeeded in his political career, and had success in business, too. The public register of ministers' assets shows that last December he owned seven houses in Auckland, a property investment company T.P. Field Developments, the now-famous house on Mt Vailima in Samoa, and joint interests in three other Samoan properties totalling another 1.2 ha.

When Keith Williams went with Siriwan to see Field early this year and told him that he renovated bathrooms, Field got him to fix a blocked shower in one of these houses in Church St, Otahuhu - a large brick house on a back section which he says was "full of Thais".

"I didn't charge him. I was only there for 15 minutes," Williams says.

That house, now empty, has a real estate sign outside describing it as "a mini-Ponderosa" and "Sold."

The other four properties still listed in his name in public records - three in Mangere, including his own modest home in Massey Rd, and one grander modern house in Papatoetoe - are all heavily mortgaged. The properties have mortgages on them totalling $1,575,000.

One of the Mangere houses, in Blake Rd in the shadow of an industrial area, is rented by a young Samoan family related to Maxine Field. Other Samoans live in units at the back of the Fields' own home.

Phillip Field says Siriwan is the only immigration client staying in any of his houses.

"I can't think of any other case," he says.

Many Thai people, however, have had immigration problems. Many were encouraged by Thai agents in the late 1990s and early this decade to claim asylum here as religious refugees, claiming that Buddhists in Thailand were in danger from Muslims.

Thais have been second only to Chinese in the numbers claiming refugee status here - 1562 claimants in the past eight years. Only 15 (1 per cent) were accepted.

Both Siriwan and his partner Luck were among the 99 per cent who were rejected, and Luck was unlucky enough to get caught while attending a party near the couple's New Lynn home early this year.

She was jailed, and deported to Thailand a few days later.

A Thai friend of the couple, Nina, says Siriwan was "very upset".

"He moved from house to house. If he stayed in one house, he worried that, because Immigration knew where she lived, they would find [him] and [their] baby."

The baby, Henry, was born in New Zealand, so could have stayed here. But officials told Luck that she would have to adopt him out if she wanted to leave him here, with his father in hiding. In the end, she took the baby with her.

Siriwan, aged nearly 50, was desperate. Nina says he was earning up to $2000 a week as a tiler and was supporting not only Luck, aged about 31, and Henry, aged 2, but also his original wife and children in Thailand.

"Sunan is a hardworking man, a really good dad, but he really fell in love with this girl even though he had a wife in Thailand," Nina says.

"He's really good for responsibility - saving money for his kids to go to school in Thailand and looking after this lady in New Zealand.

"If he goes to Thailand, he can't get good money. He has two wives and a few kids, one coming up to university age. That costs a lot of money."

With Williams' help, Siriwan tried several lawyers and consultants, including Spooner - who advised him that his case was "hopeless" and he should return to Thailand and apply again from there.

Eventually he was referred to Field because he had helped other Thai people. Siriwan and Williams went out to Mangere to see him.

"He asked what Sunan did. Sunan said he was a tiler," Williams says.

"As soon as he heard that he said, 'You can tile my house. I'll get a work permit for you'.

"He said he had to pull strings to get his work permit arranged in Samoa, and he had to get him out of New Zealand because he had to leave before he could come back anyway."

FIELD agreed last week that he told Siriwan that he would have to leave the country because he was an overstayer, and he could apply again from overseas. He said he had sent a Ghanaian and a Punjabi to apply from Samoa because it was cheaper than returning to their home countries, so he suggested the same idea to Siriwan.

"I said, 'If you decide to look at those options, I have to check with the Associate Minister of Immigration if it's feasible for you to be considered reasonably for coming back'," Field said.

"I made it clear that there was no point in going to Samoa if his case was hopeless. The fact that he had a New Zealand-born child was a plus.

"I sat with Damien O'Connor and ascertained what his views were. When we met [Siriwan and Williams] the second time I had checked out the feasibility of going to Samoa as a Thai person. It was clear to me that it was possible.

"Also, in relation to Damien O'Connor saying he would consider a representation on behalf of the man, it looked favourable."

He then raised the issue of how Siriwan might survive in Samoa for three or four months until his New Zealand work permit came through.

"He had no money. I said, 'We'll have to get a work permit to allow you to survive over there'.

"We discussed options of accommodation. I said, 'We have a half-finished house. There's no tiling, there's no water, there's no walls. [But] if you decide to go, it might be liveable by the time you get there'."

Siriwan accepted the offer. Field went on: "I said, 'There's tiling that needs to be done'. There was no employment arrangement. There was no obligation on his part to do anything, except the clear understanding that to have his keep - free accommodation and food we provide because he is foreign to the country - that was the understanding.

"He queried about where the area that needed tiling was. I said, 'There is a plan'. That was it."

Later last week, Field said Maxine Field organised the Samoan work permit and that he did not know about it until later. The permit, which expires in February, was granted to Maxine Field on March 17 conditional on Siriwan's "continued employment with Field".

In fact, Field said, Siriwan finished work on his house in May, and has been doing other jobs around Apia since. But he said the family continued to pay him up to 170-200 tala ($91-$108) a week and paid 5400 tala ($2900) to bring Luck and Henry to join him.

O'Connor directed his officials to grant a New Zealand work permit, as planned, but it was subject to health and police checks, which have taken time to get.

"Unfortunately the family in Thailand could not get the police check and had difficulty getting it through the mail to Samoa," Field said last week. "It came through last week [Sept 5-9], the original document from Thailand. It has been forwarded to Samoa."

But by the time it got there, Williams had lost patience and gone to the media. O'Connor is now reviewing his decision, and Auckland Queen's Counsel Noel Ingram has been appointed to investigate the case.

The lives, not just of Siriwan and his two families but also of Taito Phillip and Maxine Field, hang in the balance.

- additional reporting by Cherelle Jackson in Apia and Eugene Bingham