OPINION: In the latest in our State of the Nation series, we talk to a New Zealander who, despite living in a large Australian city, still keeps an eye on politics at home and will be voting this November.
How old are you and what do you do? I’ll be 40 next year and I’m a nurse practitioner.
How long have you lived in Australia? I moved here in 2012, so 14 years.
Do you do you feel at home there now? Yeah, I always saw it as a temporary thing. There's always just that feeling that it's not home. But at the same time, I’m still enjoying the life here and feel like this is the right place to be at this time.
Is part of that for economic reasons? A lot of it is economic, yeah.
How many people live in your household? Five. Me, my husband, and three kids.
How much annual income do the pair of you make, before tax? My husband and myself combined make $200,000.
Do you believe you'd earn a comparable amount in New Zealand? I don’t know, but probably not.
Do you still keep an eye on the political situation in New Zealand? I do try to. Most of my family is still back there, and it always comes up in conversation. I follow Tamatha Paul, she's pretty inspirational. I probably only see the stuff that goes around on social meda.
Are you on the Māori roll? Yeah I am.
Who did you vote for in the 2023 election? I think I my party vote was for Labour. I remember watching Moana Maniapoto’s interview with Chris Hipkins [a few days before the 2023 election] and I really liked what he had to say about the treaty partnership and that’s why I voted Labour. I would never vote for National. That's just a 'no' from the beginning.
Have you consistently voted Labour over the years? I swing between Labour, the Māori party, and the Greens. I usually choose Labour as the party vote, and then I pick the MP whose party values I really support. [Overseas residents enrol in the NZ electorate in which they last lived for a month or more.]
I do really like the policies that the Green Party are bringing. That's where I'm leaning – I think it will be between them and Labour.
Te Pāti Māori, I don't know. They had some some issues recently in the party. I still really like Hana-Rawhiti [Maipi-Clarke] and I feel like they need to be in parliament just to to advocate for for Māori values. But I don't necessarily think they are pushing a lot of policies that are really essential at the at the moment.
Do you do you have faith in the leadership of Te Pāti Māori?
Yeah, I do. And I still have a lot of faith in in their values. I just haven't heard anything about them recently. They’ve kind of gone quiet.
What’s your impression of the current New Zealand government? The current government has made me really angry. A couple of years ago my daughter went back to New Zealand to live with my parents for her last year of schooling. It was during the time when all the talk about the [then proposed, since defeated] Treaty Reforms Bill was happening.
Because my oldest kid was five when we moved here, they didn't get to experience a lot of Māori culture, so part of the reason for me sending her back to New Zealand was to get some exposure to the culture, and those attempts to change things, did really affect how I felt [about this government].
I think too there was talk about penalising parents for kids not attending school, and I feel like that doesn't it doesn't take into account the family situation. There's only so much that parents can do to get their kids to school, and if they're struggling with that, then they obviously need help. Coming from a health background, I'm always thinking: if someone isn't able to do something, what are the reasons for that? What supports can be put in place to help them achieve that?
I just feel like there's been a lot of wasted time and wasted resources with the current government, especially when it comes to Māori issues, like changing the government branding, I feel like it was just unnecessary.
It wasn't harming anyone, so why waste all that time and money in removing it? And then the one that just passed making English a national language. I thought that was a waste of time.
A lot of their policies are just going backwards in terms of like changing the school curriculum. It was announced how well kura kaupapa Māori had done in in their schooling and NCEA, and then to have that have [the government] come in and say, ‘Well, NCA isn't good enough’. It’s kind of diminishing their achievement.
Do you think that te reo Māori should be taught to all New Zealand children in primary school?
In primary school, yes. Because when you understand te reo Māori, you see the world differently, and for people growing up in New Zealand, it gives you a connection to a different world – and I feel like every child deserves that. And then whether they continue that journey in high school is completely up to them.
You might be interested in other languages in high school, and having that baseline of a second language under your belt is just going to help you.
The government has proposed raising the superannuation age to 67 here, as it is in Australia. Does that seem fair to you? I think it's a bit harsh. Even though people are living longer, it doesn't mean they're healthy, and it’s the most vulnerable people in the population who have less life expectancy – they’re the ones who are going to be hard done by. We know that people who earn more money live longer in general, so they’re probably the ones who are fine with it because they already earn more money to start with.
Looking at New Zealand from afar, do you have other observations about the direction of the country?
I haven't seen a lot of good things recently. I really liked the first year of uni free for students. I thought that was a great policy that would really help kids who would otherwise not even attempt to go to uni. It gave them an opportunity. Then when they flipped that to the last year being free, I felt that well, those kids who get to the third year were going to finish their degree anyway.
That free final year has now been scrapped, too.
Right, so it was like they dangled a fish, then flipped it, and now it’s gone.
What do you think about the the Green Party's proposal of a wealth tax?
It makes sense in theory. I think the hard thing is that the rich are good at avoiding tax. Yeah. So whether they'd end up paying more tax or not, and whether it would filter down, we don't know.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The views expressed do not represent those of TVNZ.
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