‘Always be number one’: Maori party MP Rawiri Waititi on Moses, winning and being a Maori

Once “overpowered” by Labor, Rawiri Waititi flipped the party’s own seat. Joel Maxwell follows the unexpected addition to Parliament of the MP from the Maori party.

I had a dream the other night.

I was walking through a house, old, maybe Georgian, and I wandered on the back deck until I reached an iron sand beach where I started digging and found bones. One was a lewd human jaw, with exposed teeth.

The skull was someone’s tupuna, an ancestor. I realized with horror that I was digging through a urupā, a graveyard, and soon I heard the thunder of feet: the descendants of this person, hundreds, thousands, chasing me. I woke up with a start, thinking for a moment that I might still be holding that jaw in my hand.

Damn, he was dreaming about the job again.

Starting a new job where you balance the expectations of Maori in a predominantly Pakehā world is an amazing thing. You try to reconcile opposing views and not trample on the mana of your ancestors, the mana of position, with the demands of success and the demands of a craft that, frankly, has never sat comfortably face to face with Maori things.

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It is with that in mind, just a few weeks after my new role in the Stuff press gallery team with a focus on Maori things, I have some sympathy for the brand new Maori Party MP Rawiri Waititi.

When I see him, it’s his first full day of induction, post-election. He’s in the Houses of Parliament, slumped in a seat while someone up front talks about spending or something. His ubiquitous cowboy hat is wedged on his head. His blue jacket is discarded next to him, and his shirt pattern, white on blue, is at least adjacent to Hawaii.

I wasn’t even planning on being here this week initially.

When I first spoke to Waititi on the phone to begin the interview, he thought he would go home for a week after the election, to Cape Runaway, on the eastern tip of the Bay of Plenty.

He was awaiting the final results with special votes yet to be counted and a small preliminary lead of 415 over Labor rival Tāmati Coffey in Waiariki, the Maori electorate that covers the bay and southern Waikato.

The next day, Waititi was unexpectedly on a plane heading to Wellington, after parliamentary staff told him that it didn’t matter if he wasn’t 100% sure about winning the seat.

“I told them why we can’t wait until the numbers come out. And they said, ‘No, you are the deputy right now.’ They said your numbers are what they are, and since the night of the election you are the deputy from Waiariki. “

Waititi was told that if he failed to enter Parliament, “at least he has had his induction,” he says, with a laugh.

Even if he is only a MP for a few weeks, indeed, especially if he is only a MP for a few weeks, Rawiri Waititi will be a legend for life.

The pub where he held his election night party “went nuts” when the vote count finally tipped in his favor. No wonder: Waititi is an incredible character, the first man with a full-face moko to enter Parliament in roughly 150 years, and a great Maori and English te reo phrase turner.

He is also keenly aware of the magnitude of being the only person, part of the one party, to change a Labor seat (Maori or general) in 2020.

Seven of the party’s waka came out and one broke the “red wash,” he says. His job here is to set up a beachhead for the next war party – build by 2023 when others can join him.

“There is only one other person to divide a Red Sea,” he says during his photoshoot, laughing again. “There is only one other person to divide the Red Sea, brother. You can read it all in Exodus. “

If the connection to Moses doesn’t work for you, then Waititi at least lived on a politically influential street when he grew up.

He moved to Tawa St, Te Atatū, in West Auckland, to go to secondary school.

There, in a corner, was John Tamihere, a former Labor MP, co-leader of the Maori party for the 2020 elections and now Waititi’s father-in-law. (He has married Kiri Tamihere-Waititi, whom he knew on Tawa St, and who was also his campaign manager for 2020).

Former MPs Tuku Morgan and Tau Henare also lived on the street.

“Crazy. All the birds of a feather, uh, if you think about it,” he says.

Waititi has come a long way since I first saw him in the campaign. It was Te Kura or Hirangi, in Tūrangi, where I crawled into a hall at the end of the pōwhiri while he finished his whaikōrero (traditional oratory in te reo).

Then, he picked up a guitar and played waiata together with his team in multi-part harmonies for the children. You are now part of a group of newcomers making their way through the arid administrative realities of parliamentary life.

He’s different from the others here, and he’s not just that mataora (moko). He carries on his shoulders the expectations of an entire party as the sole member of the party. And quietly the expectations of many Maori in general.

But Waititi is not alone with the weight of expectations. The Maori Labor caucus is also successful.

On social media, Tāmaki Makaurau MP Peeni Henare posted a selfie taken at the gym, wearing an inverted snap-button cap and tank top, The Beehive’s biceps, to let their leader know in the accompanying publication raising his hand to be minister of health.

I am not convinced that there is a correlation between being healthy and being a minister of health; but Waititi is at least certain that it is time for the Maori to flex for more power.

Of course Henare, currently associate health minister, it should be the minister, Waititi says. The party’s deputy leader, Kelvin Davis, should “stand up” and make sure he is also a deputy prime minister, he says.

The Labor Party now has a strong group of Maori who must be respectful.

“We hope that Meka [Whaitiri] to get the folder I had. Nothing less. “

This is one way Waititi can continue to put pressure on Māori MPs in Labor. Surely with all their numbers, there are some results they should be able to produce for Maori: influential ministerial positions within the Cabinet, for example.

Waititi is not exactly a stranger to the inner workings of the Labor Party – he represented the party in Waiariki’s electorate in 2014 and lost to then-Maori Party co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell.

Being a former Labor member is not unusual, he says, for his new party, for his constituency and for Maori in general.

“The Maori Party was formed with former Labor. We are proud on the coast to be the first to see the sun. Unfortunately, we are the last to see the light. But now we have seen the light. You know what I mean?”

But why did you quit the Labor Party and run for the Maori Party?

“So the last time I ran, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the messages I had to share. I didn’t like how subdued I was. How assimilated … I didn’t like any of that. “

Mothers, fathers, grandfathers, they voted for Labor “forever,” he says of the Maori electorate seats. The new generations are not like that.

“They are strategic, they know who they are and they know where they come from, that’s the key.”

It is a warning about generational changes that could have applied to National in the 2020 elections, and could apply to the Maori seats of Labor in the future.

Waititi says his victory in the midst of a Labor defeat technically “should never have happened.” “You know what I mean? This was the only party that parted the Red Sea.”

In the end, knowing their language, I believe you, is Waititi’s greatest victory, more than parting the seas.

“It is the most important thing: that is what makes us unique in the world. I have always told our people that we are magical. We are superheroes. There is no one else in the world like us, huh? We have to act like this. “

We must never forget him, he tells me in “the tiles,” a section of Parliament where he could soon be being questioned by herds of journalists.

“Never let anyone treat us like second-class citizens. We must always be number one. “

This is going to be hard work.

He joins generations of politicians who have walked into the house and done what the oldest and the smallest always do: fail to meet the expectations of the crowds.

I join generations who have done what we always do: measure and report on that perpetual gap between promise and performance.

We get our hands dirty and wait for the enraged hordes to catch up with us.