Tapu Misa: Taito's actions fair enough? No, we deserve better

I was a friend of Taito Phillip Field's when he was a young trade unionist with big ambitions and good intentions.

We were part of a group that started the first Samoan sports awards in the early 80s, when he was being tagged as a future leader.

We had a lot in common - both our families moved here from Samoa when we were youngsters - and I thought I understood him. He was earnest but untutored, and rough-edged, as we all were.

He seemed to know what he wanted to do but not always how to go about it. He seemed not entirely comfortable in either the Palagi or Samoan world.

Those rough edges worried me when it became clear he would become the first Pacific Island MP. I say Pacific Island rather than Samoan because his official profile describes him as a more electorate-pleasing ethnic cocktail: a New Zealander of Samoan, Cook Island, German, English and Jewish extraction.

However he may have wanted to present himself there was no escaping what he was: a figurehead for the Pacific Island community - which, as any figurehead knows, is both a blessing and a burden.

When you're the designated torch-bearer for a community, particularly a minority community visible for all the wrong reasons, you're never there just on your own account.

Taito was expected to be more than just an advocate. He held our mana. It was a mantle that obliged him to be so much more than a well-meaning man with suspect judgment.

That, at least, is my most favourable reading of Dr Noel Ingram's lengthy and in many ways frustrating inquiry into Taito's affairs. But no matter how many fond memories I have of Phillip, I cannot understand how he and his supporters can claim exoneration of the allegations about him for the past 10 months.

Ingram's report doesn't quite hang Taito out to dry, but it has exposed him in ways that he seems not to have grasped when he says he expects to be reinstated as a minister.

It's true that Ingram has been unable to point unequivocally to evidence of wrongdoing, but he has highlighted enough instances of bad judgment and dubious conduct to make any such reinstatement untenable.

Taito has been stingy with the truth on more than one occasion, to the point where he compromised his colleague, Damien O'Connor, then associate Minister of Immigration.

When he asked O'Connor to intervene on behalf of Sunan Siriwan, the Thai overstayer at the centre of the most serious allegations, he left O'Connor with the impression that Siriwan's New Zealand-born child was still in the country. And he neglected to mention that Siriwan was at the time living and working in his house in Samoa and that he wasn't being paid for his labour.

Taito says he didn't know about this until late in the piece, but Ingram notes that even if that were so, he didn't inform O'Connor when he did find out, and didn't take any steps either to stop Siriwan doing the work, or to ensure that the tiler was paid.

Taito and his wife Maxine protest that they were motivated by a desire to help - and I believe them, even if that generosity wasn't entirely selfless.

More difficult to swallow is the way Taito blithely and blindly walked into a political storm without apparently being aware of the signs - and what appear to be his attempts since then to fudge his actions.

The allegations into his purchase of a house in Otahuhu from a desperate constituent, from which he profited to the tune of $136,000, might well have passed as another well-meaning but fortuitous error if not for his subsequent actions in trying to shut down the story when it came to light.

I'm sure he genuinely wanted to help Patrick Cole, a Samoan solo father with Parkinson's, who was facing a mortgagee sale at the time. A more prudent, politically attuned person would have insisted on an independent valuation, but Ingram's report makes it clear that Taito appears to have paid a fair price, and that his gain from the sale of the property 15 months later was in line with market trends.

Ingram says Cole and his family weren't disadvantaged by the sale, but this was a matter of "good fortune rather than good management" on Taito's part.

More troubling is Taito's reaction when the news broke. He rang Cole and told him to tell his son to "back off", and then he sent a couple round to Cole's with a written statement for him to sign putting Taito in the best possible light.

He also claimed he allowed Cole and his family to live at the Otahuhu property rent free, but when confronted with evidence to the contrary this turned out to be the result of another lapse in memory.

Ingram says Taito's explanations about other Thai people alleged to have worked on his properties were "unsatisfactory". Despite Taito's denials regarding an arrangement with a Thai worker he'd previously helped with immigration, Ingram's "strong inference" was that Taito had arranged for the man to paint one of his houses, that the man had been significantly underpaid, and that he had done it out of gratitude or some sense of obligation.

Some Samoans seem to think Taito's actions are fair enough, because he meant well. They're wrong. We deserve better.