New Maori MP nurtured in Nelson

November 15, 2008
To many voters, Rahui Katene came from nowhere to win the Te Tai Tonga electorate, but as she tells Geoff Collett, she actually came from Nelson and from a lifetime of political activism. --------------------
Somewhere in the Nelson Mail files, Rahui Katene is pretty sure, there's a photo of her as a teenager, standing on the street protesting against New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War. If that dates her as a baby boomer, it should even more firmly underline her pedigree in what some would call the protest movement, but what she calls standing up for her beliefs.
Whatever - the next time she got her photo in the paper was when she was on her way to Parliament, elected last weekend as the Maori Party's sole newcomer and fifth MP.
In some regards, the Nelson-born and bred Katene could claim the most impressive performance in the 2008 election. She had less than four months between securing the Maori Party's nomination and polling day, taking on Labour's three-term incumbent Mahara Okeroa in the ludicrously large Te Tai Tonga electorate. Less than four months to make herself known to thousands of Maori living anywhere from Wellington to Rakiura (Stewart Island) and all the way to the Chathams.
The compressed timeframe was fate - the party's first-choice candidate, Monte Ohia, died suddenly in June, leaving the organisation both mourning and scrambling. Then the party's Te Tai Tonga campaign manager resigned suddenly. More scrambling, with Katene having to help her people deal with their grieving for Ohia while motivating them to fight an election.
She freely admits that she was an unknown quantity to most in the electorate. While she could take some comfort from her lineage - she hails from one of Te Tau Ihu's (the top of the south's) best-known families, the Hippolites - she was rather less than a household name anywhere else. Te Tau Ihu iwi such as her Ngati Koata, Ngati Kuia, Ngati Tama and Te Atiawa (she also affiliates to Ngati Toa and Ngai Tahu) are relative minnows in Te Tai Tonga, with its hefty Ngai Tahu presence and its power bases of Wellington and Christchurch.
There wasn't much else for it, she reflects now, but to make herself known by personal contact. "Meet the candidates" gatherings were inevitably tilted towards the general electorates and offered no chance for her to stand out from the crowd. So she went doorknocking, from Wellington to Invercargill and all points in between - and when she wasn't, someone else was on her behalf, or she was organising and addressing her own hui, rallies and street corner gatherings.
It's not entirely true to say she couldn't bank on some name recognition. As Te Tai Tonga voters routinely heard during the months leading up to polling day, her father was "Big John" Hippolite, a legendary figure in Maori activist circles of the 1970s and '80s. Much of his legacy arises from his years living in the North Island, principally Hamilton, where he moved with his family (wife June and six children) when Rahui was in her mid-teens.
To give some sense of his work, while still in Nelson, she recalls, he was involved in a major study into unrepresented defendants in court (overwhelmingly Maori), which led to the legal aid system. In Hamilton, he was central to many of the landmark events of the day as Maori started asserting their rights and claims - the land march, Bastion Point, the Raglan golf course occupation, the Nga Tamatoa (young warriors) movement, which was a nursery for many of the leaders in Maori activism, and much more. At the time of his death, 15 years ago, he was a principal claimant in a still unresolved, high-profile Treaty of Waitangi claim, Wai 262 (a sweeping claim, including to the country's native flora and fauna).
Her mother, too, was a staunch political activist, firmly in Labour's camp until the "great leap Right" of the 1980s, as Katene calls it, when she stayed Left.
So Katene's immediate lineage alone speaks of some inevitability about where she was headed - not for Labour, though, which she dallied with as a young teenager before abandoning party politics for the next 40 years; and not naturally into Parliament, a thought she entertained half-seriously only with the advent of the Maori Party.
But politics and political activism in the broader sense were unavoidable.
"With a father like John Hippolite, you never could be not interested in politics. Politics was never about just going out on the day and voting, it was always something that we participated actively in."
On leaving school, she went into nursing and had five children. After the fourth, she decided on a career change. She was involved with the Women's Refuge movement while in Hamilton and saw the law as offering a chance to get more involved; as it was, her studies saw her gravitate instead to treaty law and Maori issues, and that is where her focus has been these past 15 years. Early in her career, she worked for prominent Maori lawyer Donna Hall and for the Crown Forestry Rental Trust (which works on Maori claims against the Crown where crown forest land is at stake); and more recently, with Maori Legal Services and as a legal consultant.
It was Hall who suggested that she put her name forward for selection for the Maori Party.
"My first reaction was no, because it was not something I had ever thought of doing, but when I thought about it, it was the next step on from being involved in community law and treaty law and working in Maori issues, where you're working with individuals but you've not got any influence on law- making or policy.
"When this was put to me, I thought, 'Yeah, that's how we can do it'."
Katene is cautious about revealing her aspirations, beyond saying that treaty and justice issues are an obvious fit, but she has other activities she wants to be involved in; that she will fulfil her duty to her new constituents, listen to them and represent their issues in Parliament; and always work towards the Maori Party's long-term goal "of getting the treaty into a written constitution, so it is protected, and what we can do in the short term to make that happen".
Where does she fit stylistically in the party? "I'm the friendly one who's prepared to listen to everyone until they start - I won't use the word bulls...ting, but words to that effect. And then I won't put up with that."
The zeal that drove the teenaged Rahui Hippolite to stand on the street protesting against a distant war obviously isn't far from the surface for Rahui Katene as a 54-year-old novice MP. Even a brief interview keeps leading back to her experience - and resentment - of the racism, both casual and overt, she has known all her life.
More than anything, what stirs her is the seabed and foreshore issue, the ignition point of the Maori Party. Mention of it prompts immediate bitterness from the treaty lawyer whose whanau and iwi were central to the claim to a portion of the Marlborough Sounds seabed, which ultimately led to the Government legislating to keep the country's coastal margin in public ownership - and by extension stripping Maori of the right to test their claims to the seabed and foreshore in court.
"I keep telling people that I cannot be objective about that, because it was us - our family, our iwi - that put that claim in the first place."
The initial Appeal Court ruling that Maori were entitled to pursue a legal case for the seabed and foreshore "was fantastic, and the immediate backlash was just so typical, but it was very hurtful".
So, unfinished business obviously?
"Definitely. And it's not just because it was our iwi that were involved, it was the whole way it was dealt with; it was the fact that Maori do not have the right like any other people in this country to go to court to sort out what the property rights are - it's a human rights issue and it's a crime."
Te Tai Tonga is too vast an electorate, and its city strongholds too strategic, to pretend that Nelson can seriously claim Katene as its third MP, alongside National's Nick Smith and Labour list MP Maryan Street. Katene lives in Wellington and is considering moving to Christchurch to be more central to the electorate.
Still, Nelson and Te Tau Ihu will always loom large in her life - she visits regularly (including fulfilling her duties to the Ngati Koata trust board, which she sat on until her political life intervened), "and of course, when I need time out, that's where I go, to Nelson and down the island (D'Urville/ Rangitoto)".
She says she owes a debt of gratitude to her Nelson supporters, and sees a particular challenge for the city's Maori population.
"It's a long, hard struggle to be Maori anywhere, " she says, but especially in a place where the Pakeha dominance in the community is so overwhelming.