Merepeka Raukawa-Tait to stand for Te Pāti Māori in Rotorua general electorate

Freeloaders can “bugger off” and she’s sick of seeing people walking around Rotorua with “their bloody pyjamas on”.

But Merepeka Raukawa-Tait is worried the poor are being demonised and Rotorua is becoming a city of two halves: “Those who have and those who don’t.”

Raukawa-Tait believes the main political parties have failed Rotorua - including by selling off state housing, doing a “shoddy” job of assessing who legitimately needed emergency housing and draining Rotorua’s police and health resources with too many MIQ hotels.

She narrowly lost her position as a Rotorua district councillor last year in the local body elections after serving for 11 consecutive years, but Raukawa-Tait says she is not done with politics and there is work to be done to help Rotorua “bounce back”.

Te Pāti Māori officials announced at a dinner in Rotorua tonight she will be the party’s first candidate to stand in a general electorate.

The announcement comes at a time when Te Pāti Māori support is surging. The latest polls show the party has jumped 2.5 per cent to a record high of 7 per cent support.

It potentially puts Te Pāti Māori in the box seat as kingmaker come election day on October 14, as both Labour and National do not currently have the numbers to govern alone.

If Te Pāti Māori names Raukawa-Tait high enough on the list, there is the potential she could enter Parliament as a List MP.

But Raukawa-Tait is not thinking ahead to any of that, saying instead, she will leave all those decisions up to the party’s officials.

Merepeka Raukawa-Tait was critical of the Government's actions over emergency housing at resource consent hearings in Rotorua last year. Photo / Andrew Warner

Her sights are firmly on Rotorua - her home as a Te Arawa descendant and a place she said she was genuinely worried about becoming divided into an “A team and a B team”.

She told the Rotorua Daily Post some people were looking sideways, not wanting certain types living next door to them, and some people of her generation were finding it difficult to understand how others were struggling so badly.

“People who have never experienced poverty and who own their own homes and who are, like myself, from a generation who could walk out of one job one day and go into another one the next day ... so for us and my generation, it is difficult for people to understand there are others who are just not coping - many of them are barely surviving.”

She said Rotorua could "bounce back".

“But we can’t afford to carry everybody. Everybody has got to pull their weight in Rotorua. If you want to freeload, bugger off and go elsewhere. I’m sick of seeing the increase of people walking around this city with their bloody pyjamas on.”

While she was critical of the way Labour handled the emergency housing crisis, she said the Government had tried to “redeem itself” of late by supporting big grants for the likes of the Rotorua Lakefront, the museum and the Sir Howard Morrison Centre.

During the pandemic, she said Rotorua was used as a “drop-off centre” with three managed isolation and quarantine hotels.

In her role at the time of being a Lakes District Health Board member, she said vital health resources needed in the community were redeployed to the hotels. She believed police were rostered at the hotels instead of helping with what she said was a time of rising crime rates.

“I think that started to really get me thinking about the decisions the Government makes and the impacts it can have on your local community ... Don’t get me started on the motels, everything that’s happened was so predictable and so preventable.”

She said before Covid-19, Rotorua only had about 100 homeless people.

“Then suddenly everyone decided to declare themselves as being homeless and requiring emergency accommodation. The assessments were shoddy, wrap-around services were inadequate ... People tried their best but they were overwhelmed, and the motels saw it as an opportunity to live off the misery of those [people] to keep their businesses going.”

But as a staunch advocate for families, Raukawa-Tait said she did not want to see a mum and her children living in a car at Sulphur Point.

“That’s totally unacceptable. Housing is a basic human right, so we are demonising the poor and we are demonising the children of the poor, and if I’m honest, it wasn’t the poor who sold off the state houses.”

Raukawa-Tait was named on the Te Pāti Māori list at the last election.

She said while Te Pāti Māori was “fearless” and “unapologetically Māori”, it was also appealing to all New Zealanders, particularly with its call to drop GST on food.

“I can’t believe the number of people on the general roll who aren’t aware they can vote Te Pāti Māori for their party vote. That tells me something about voter awareness.”

In terms of her own chances locally, she said voters knew what they were getting with her.

“People will understand I will speak out. They might not like my opinions, but I think they do respect the fact I will have an opinion and I will voice it.”

She “limping along” was not an option for Rotorua.

“If they [voters] say, ‘No, kei te pai’, you can’t get your knickers in a twist ... I know the issues of Rotorua and I’d be a staunch advocate for that ... If people say ‘no’, then I’m not going to die in a ditch over it.”

Kelly Makiha is a senior journalist who has reported for the Rotorua Daily Post for more than 25 years, covering mainly police, court, human interest and social issues.