Shane Te Pou – Dear Deputy Prime Minister

I’m writing not as a critic for the sake of it, but as someone who has spent a working life in the kind of jobs that don’t often get talked about in Wellington, and who has strong views about what this country does well .

Let me start with what the Prime Minister gets right. When he heads off on a big overseas trade trip, he doesn’t just take a business delegation — he takes a kapa haka group alongside them. I would bet my bottom dollar that every single business person and politician on that delegation, without exception, has appreciated and been genuinely thankful for that presence. It sets the tone before a word of is said . It tells folks in the room who we are before we tell them what we’re selling.

Having travelled extensively, I can tell you that when people talk about New Zealand, two things come up again and again: our natural beauty and the haka. Both are expressions of something uniquely ours, and the haka in particular is a powerful way of championing our unique indigenous culture to the rest of the world.

There are plenty of New Zealand businesses that already understand this: our culture is not a side issue to our economy, it’s part of how we sell ourselves and our products to the rest of the world. It gives us something money can’t buy and it is uniquely ours.
Firms like PwC, and most of our major law firms, have built tikanga Māori into their everyday practice for exactly this reason — not as a gesture, but because they understand what it means for doing business with a growing Māori economy and a world that is watching how we carry ourselves.

Deputy Prime Minister I know that public servants are an easy whipping horse. Yes they might take a small part of their day to learn a Mihi or a Waiata but again it brings a connectedness in a uniquely Kiwi/Maori way . A connectedness not just to their fellow workers but Yes, to the community they serve.

I say this having had the privilege of working for a disability provider supporting people with intellectual disabilities, and of holding very senior roles in the private sector, both here in New Zealand and internationally. That’s the lens I bring to what follows.

In every one of those roles, one thing stood out. The people who did the job well and understood the cultural needs of the people they served. They worked alongside them. They played alongside them. And almost without exception, they understood how collectivism actually functions — not as an abstract debate, but inside a workplace, inside a community, inside a whānau. That’s the same instinct the Prime Minister shows when he puts a kapa haka group at the front of a trade delegation. It’s a pity it isn’t shared right across his government — starting, if I’m honest, with you.

You recently spoke about visiting an organisation in South Auckland — nine or ten people doing genuinely good work tackling school absenteeism — and went on to suggest that culture and language “weren’t important” to them. I doubt you sat down and actually talked to those people about what matters to them, because my experience of South Auckland tells a very different story. Māori and Pacific communities that are bound tightly together — te reo Māori, karakia opening the working day, waiata sung and cherished by Māori and non-Māori alike. I would be astonished if the very kaimahi doing that absenteeism work weren’t drawing on their collective reo and their tikanga every single day, because without understanding whānau, without understanding ‘āiga, without understanding the Samoan, Tongan, Niuean and Māori concepts of extended family, that work simply does not succeed. You cannot walk into a family’s home and expect to be effective if you don’t understand what holds that family together. That is their Tikanga

This is my lived experience, Deputy Prime Minister — not just an Epsom-based one, but a Kawerau and South Auckland, blue-collar one. These are communities that stand by each other through the tough times and the good, and for far too many, the tough times still come around more often than the good. So when policy pushed by your party pushes down on minimum wage, chokes off collective bargaining, and guts pay equity, that has a very real, material effect on the same people you praised for getting kids back into the classroom. If our culture is good enough to open doors in Washington, Beijing or Brussels sitting alongside the Prime Minister’s business delegations, it is more than good enough to be spoken of with the same respect when we’re talking about South Auckland.

I’d simply ask that the tone the Prime Minister sets overseas be the tone you set at home too.

My instinct tells me this was never really about what’s happening in South Auckland. This is about you weaponising te reo, weaponising indigenous language, to manufacture a culture war that simply doesn’t exist — and I don’t believe the majority of New Zealanders are buying it.

Shane Te Pou is a political commentator and Māori broadcaster. It is TDBs privilege to platform his political analysis for the Election.