One of New Zealand’s youngest political candidates, 21-year-old Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, has experienced more politically targeted abuse in the past week than many senior politicians have experienced in their entire careers.
The candidate for minor party Te Pāti Māori, has had her home broken into twice, her belongings and rubbish bins rifled through, a threatening letter left in her mailbox and a man turn up to her house in the early hours of the morning yelling racial slurs while trying to break down her fence.
In the same week, Labour candidate Angela Roberts was confronted by a member of the public who, she said, grabbed her shoulders, shook her and then slapped her face with both his hands.
Two weeks earlier, Labour’s MP for Northland, Willow-Jean Prime, said she experienced the worst racism of her career, after a crowd shouted and jeered at her for using Māori words during a candidate debate.
“When I said Aotearoa, the crowd shouted ‘it’s New Zealand’,” Prime said in a media conference, adding she was told to stop speaking “that language”.
“That is racism … and that is unacceptable,” she said, adding “what is really worrying is that they feel so emboldened that they can come out and say these things publicly.”
New Zealand enjoys relatively open access to its politicians, and historically election campaigns have been fairly safe. But abuse, threats and attacks have been ramping up as the 14 October election draws near, with women and Māori candidates being especially targeted.
Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, told the Guardian the party was no stranger to hate speech and online threats, but that the attacks directed towards their candidate, Maipi-Clarke, had crossed a line.
“It’s hard to pull the handbrake now on years of consistent messaging that is anti-Māori. It’s easy to excuse it as rhetoric but the reality is: abuse has been incited and it has manifested into an absolute violation.”
Christopher Luxon, leader of the centre-right National party, said on Monday its candidates had also faced threats, predominantly from gangs.
Candidates are being given instructions on how to cope with abuse as threats increase, says Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, the chief executive of Parliamentary Services, which is responsible for parliament security. “The landscape has changed compared to previous years and both the parliamentary service and the members are probably a little more vigilant,” he said.
Last year’s unprecedented occupation of parliament’s grounds by anti-vaccine protesters – which turned into a violent riot – has likely contributed to the change in tone this election, he added. “What we saw last year was more than a protest … and it was very, very difficult to deal with.”
‘Extreme views being emboldened’
In various speeches last week, Labour leader Chris Hipkins condemned the attacks on candidates. He took aim at National, as well as the libertarian-right-wing Act party and populist New Zealand First party, who look set to form a government based on current polling, for stirring up anti-Māori sentiment.
“I think there has been more racism and misogyny in this election than we have seen in previous elections,” he said. “There are clearly some parties that are deliberately trying to persecute minorities.”
“Christopher Luxon reiterated his commitment to abolishing the Māori Health Authority in favour of ‘one system for all’,” Hipkins said in a speech on Friday. “One liners like ‘one system for all’ [are] putting the narrative that Māori somehow are getting things that other New Zealanders aren’t. This approach plays on people’s fears – it’s not pretty and it’s wrong. It also ignores basic facts.”
Hipkins said Act’s policy to redefine the country’s founding document – the Treaty of Waitangi – would “undo decades of progress and legal precedent” between the crown and Māori.
Meanwhile, New Zealand First says it wants to crack down on “woke virtue signalling” , which includes getting rid of Māori names on government institutions and last month, its leader, Winston Peters, who is Māori, claimed Māori were not indigenous to New Zealand.
A group of Māori leaders have called for an end to end “race-baiting” for votes. In an open letter, the leaders, who include former politicians, academics, community leaders and representatives of the Kiingitanga (Māori King movement) said: “dog whistling and the outright public displays of racism from political candidates have increased to unacceptable levels”.
In a statement to the Guardian, Act party leader David Seymour said the party condemned any acts of abuse or violence on the campaign trail but said it was dangerous to politicise the attacks by placing blame on other party leaders.
“New Zealanders are sick of being accused of wrongdoing or racism for having a conversation on the constitutional future of the country, based on what the treaty actually says,” Seymour said.
But the tenor of his response to accusations of race-baiting was more charged online. In a social media post, Seymour accused Labour, Te Pāti Māori and “their allies” of being the “real racists” and, in another post said the current government had been “the most divisive in NZ history” for “going after landlords, farmers, business owners, the wealthy and the unvaccinated”.
New Zealand First has been contacted for comment.
Richard Shaw, politics professor at Massey University, says people are being emboldened, in part, because the internet allows for extreme views to be anonymously spit out at a speed and scale not seen before.
But Shaw also believes that some of New Zealand’s political parties are inflaming these views. “Parties like Act and, increasingly, New Zealand First, are perfectly happy to engage in … simple extremist views and racism,” Shaw said.
“They feel it is appropriate to do that because there is some twisted understanding of the nature of freedom of speech, which in the mouths of people who support solemn individualism, is about the right to say whatever you want without any regard for the consequences for other people.
“It’s a bastardised, juvenile and immature approach to the politics of the logic of freedom of speech,” Shaw said.
Shaw is worried that the more extreme ideas about Māori – and denial over how colonisation has affected Māori wellbeing – could become entrenched, should the parties who hold those views get into power.
“[These views] come from a place of deep and unacknowledged fear, and it is a fear of reckoning with a history which is selectively being forgotten.”
