Efeso Collins was taking part in ChildFund Water Run to raise funds to support local communities in the Pacific when he collapsed. Video / Carson Bluck
OPINION
The last time I interviewed Fa’anana Efeso Collins was in the late stages of his mayoral election campaign in 2022. He knew it wasn’t going well but that wasn’t stopping him. We were in Manukau and he’d come from a morning visiting entrepreneurial start-ups in the town centre. He wore a small backpack, schoolbag size, and when we went over to the local mall, he ordered a strawberry milkshake.
Really? I said.
“I like them,” he said. But there was something else. It was what he drank with his kids. He was integrated into their lives in ways you don’t often see in a politician.
He talked about living in Ōtāhuhu, the potential of that town centre, the good public transport there, the strength of the communities he and his two daughters and his wife Fia were part of. He knew his main opponent, who would go on to trounce him in the election, was part of a different Ōtāhuhu. Wayne Brown owns a pub there and it’s pretty rough.
Efeso Collins wasn’t a rough politician, or a tough one. He seemed at times not really like a politician at all. I don’t think I’ve ever met one with a sunnier disposition.
“How’s it going?” you’d ask, and he would always, always, raise his eyebrows and beam at you and say, “Oh good!”
Efeso, I said to him once, that’s what my kids used to say when they came home from school. He laughed. He knew it. He was happy being in touch with his inner kid, even if, in that sense, it was trivial.
We knew Collins for his commitment to Samoan and Polynesian communities, to South Auckland, to his church. But to my mind, the values on which he stood most firmly, the wellspring to everything in him and the thing that clearly gave him the greatest pleasure, was children.
Fa'anana Efeso Collins was integrated into his kids' lives in ways you don’t often see in a politician. Photo / Michael Craig
It isn’t why he got into politics: Collins was a student politician at the University of Auckland and then a radio activist in Manukau long before he became a father. But it did seem to be what kept him there.
You can call it sentimental. You can call a lot of things about Collins sentimental. He was the biggest softie in the world. But it’s also how he died: running around with buckets of water to raise money for ChildFund, a Pasifika charity.
We could do with a few more politicians who put children first, if you ask me. We could do with a few more who find happiness in doing it and are not afraid to show it.
Efeso Collins - Fes to his friends - held the Samoan chiefly title of Fa’anana from the village of Satufia, Satupaitea in Savaii. He was a popular chair of the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board and went on to become a popular councillor for the Manukau Ward, working alongside his friend and mentor, councillor Alf Filipaina.
He found politics hard. The byzantine rules of the council and city administration didn’t sit comfortably with him, but nor was he the kind of person who overthrows rules. He was a member of the Labour Party but struggled sometimes to find a place in its machine.
Collins collapsed while participating in a charity event in central Auckland earlier today. Photo / Jason Oxenham
But he was in politics for a reason and he pushed on. His oratory was inspirational. Learned, witty, captivating. There were times when it felt like a blessing to listen.
His optimism was infectious and his good humour too, even in the times when he must have been far from happy. The racism he encountered on the mayoral campaign trail and elsewhere was hurtful and not just for him. As he said often, he was trying to do his bit to nudge us all past that, for the sake of his children, for the sake of all children.
“I want my girls to see their parents standing up for them and for a climate that’s going to be better,” he said once. “For a society that’s going to do better for them. My girls are brown. And the data is clear that it’s brown women that make the least. I want them to know we’re in this fight together.”
The wealth divide in this city upset him. At some events in the eastern suburbs, he would talk about how great numbers of our fellow citizens struggle to get their kids to school and to the doctor, are working three jobs to get by and living with black mould in the bathroom. And when he’d done that, the response was genuinely puzzling to him: what appeared to be an army of grumpy folk couldn’t stop complaining about road cones and parking.
Collins was the son of a pastor and grew up with the conservative beliefs of a Pasifika church. But as a politician, he was challenged on that, especially in relation to gay rights and gender issues. He spoke often of his own path to an inclusive understanding, risking alienation on both sides, but he didn’t hide from it, not for a second. When he thought something was right, as he came to accept about rainbow causes, he stood proudly and said so.
In the mayoral campaign, Collins did something that is rarely encouraged or successful in politics. Photo / Michael Craig
When Covid struck, Collins was one of the community leaders on the ground in the epicentre of risk, South Auckland, who did so much to prevent the pandemic from becoming a catastrophe. That was a story of heroes and it will be written one day.
And in the mayoral campaign, he did something that is rarely encouraged or successful in politics. With his advisers, he created an inclusive, reforming, coherent view of what Auckland could be and how it might get there.
They brought together progressive thinking from many corners - economic, environmental, social, ethnic, urban design, transport and housing, welfare, new business opportunities, education.
In politics, it’s often easy to praise and reward the politicking. But Collins was useless at all that. It’s harder to grasp the value of a political programme, but Collins turned out to be pretty good at it.
And yet. On the last Friday of the campaign he was at Masjid-e-Umar, the mosque on Stoddard Rd in Mt Roskill.
He was meant to be glad-handing the thousand or so worshippers expected for lunchtime prayers. Instead, he got himself deep in conversation with small groups of people. He loved having a proper conversation and he always asked a lot of questions. It was one of the best things in him as a human being. But he wouldn’t have got many votes from it.
Let’s find ourselves more like Efeso Collins. That’s the tribute we owe him now. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Last year, he joined the Green Party and was placed high on the party list. That’s hard to do as a newbie and it was testament to both his people skills and the integrity of his politics. In Parliament, he barely had a chance to make his maiden speech.
At a campaign function at Tangaroa College in Ōtara, where he’d once been a student, he received a reception both solemn and joyful. But with the election slipping away from him, it was tempting to wonder, is this a backwater?
Fes wanted us to know it wasn’t. It was the heart and soul of his world. And that his world deserved to be part of the heart and soul of the city.
You could say he wasn’t meant to be a politician. I’d put it differently. I’d say, let’s find ourselves more like him. That’s the tribute we owe him now.
Sa e finau ia manuia Aukilani, ma ia manuia o tatou tagata. O se galuega sa e tumau pea i ai. O le a matou manatua pea oe. Manuia lau malaga, Fes.
Go well, Fes. You wanted to help us make a better city and become better people, and you never stopped believing that you could. We will honour you.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
