Tomorrows people: Maori and proud of it

This young woman knows where she's going and how to get there. She talks to GREG DIXON about it.

Lily Fraser's infectious giggle fills the air of the quiet hotel lobby. The young medical student has spotted an irony, and once again she's quick to set her high, ticklish laugh adrift as she considers what's just said.

It turns out, you see, that she isn't really that impressed by doctors.

"My perception is that they sit there and they write a prescription and they hand you the drugs and that's it."

She chuckles again, then adds: "But I don't go to the doctor that much [her family consults a tohunga], so maybe that's not true. I do think doctors do wonderful things. But it wasn't that I ever aspired to do it when I was younger."

Indeed, the question of what Fraser - a graduate of a Maori immersion and Kura Kaupapa Maori education - would do with her life was somewhat moot for some time.

"I used to hate that question, 'What are you going to be?' people would ask, and I'd say, 'I'm only 13, I don't know yet.' Or it was, 'I'm 16, I don't know yet ...'

"When I decided to be a doctor I was so relieved. I was like, 'Yay, I can tell them what I want to do.' I think it's a really hard to make that decision.

"It doesn't mean it's the right decision, but having made the decision, it's just such a relief."

But the big decision to be a doctor - she's just successfully completed her first year at the University of Auckland's School of Medicine - was also partly political.

As the first graduate from Kura Kaupapa Maori to go to med school, she felt she has something to prove to others.

"People always have this perception [of the value of Maori education]. When I started going to [Kura Kaupapa at West Auckland's] Hoani Whititi Marae, friends from when I was younger, from primary school, would ask why I was there and say, 'Oh, my God, she's just going to ruin her whole future.'

"I think I was lucky."

Born at her family's marae at Otakou on the Otago Peninsula (she still visits it at least one a year) and brought up by her solo mother, who is Maori and an artist, Fraser is staunchly proud of mum, family, Maori heritage and culture.

A year in France eight years ago heightened her sense of distinctiveness.

"Coming back I really appreciated New Zealand, things Maori. Basically, if I wasn't Maori, I don't think New Zealand would mean much to me. I think, for me, it's the Maori things about New Zealand that I love, and I love them because of the way I've been brought up.

"I could be anywhere in the world and it could be the same. But being Maori in New Zealand make me unique to New Zealand."

However, she is unimpressed by the unhappy socio-economic, educational and, particularly, the health status of Maori - "obviously something isn't working for it to be like that" - and has committed herself to doing what she can.

"At first I though I'd specialise in paediatrics because I love children, to me that is a possibility. But I feel that specialising would mean cutting off a whole lot of other people. Being a GP or working in community health is most appealing because then I can work with a wider range of people."

Money is not a driving force. Though she receives cash from her iwi, is working through the holidays (at a Maori radio station and doing some paid research) and applies for what grants she can, she accepts that she will have a hefty student loan to repay when she finishes med school.

"As far as I'm concerned I'm going to be a doctor and money's not going to be an issue for me because it's going to be way more than I've had in my entire life.

"But money doesn't motivate me, it doesn't cross my mind. It's like an added bonus."

Fraser's view of the country isn't quite so sunny. She worries about the widening wealth gap, the dismantling of the welfare system and education.

"I still think [the education system] is in a shocking state and yet that is what the new generation has got. It's their first view, their first experience of the system. If that's not giving them opportunities that they're entitled to, something is wrong there."

But her greatest fear is that New Zealanders are continuing to lose control of their country, and she believes it is inevitable that New Zealand will managed by those living elsewhere.

"We won't have a say any more in how we live our lives, how much we pay for things.

"Take the Bendon factory [closures]. Simple things like that mean jobs, and maybe they're just factory jobs for some people, but for others that's bread on the table. So that worries me."

She has no personal fear of failure, however. Ask her if she's competitive and there is long pause before she offers that she doesn't have an obsession with winning, "but I always succeed."

Well, almost always. She and other med students in her year were warned at the start of the long, challenging path to a degree in medicine that they might taste failure for the first time in their lives.

Fraser did, but she adopted the attitude that a test was just a test.

"Luckily I passed the whole year, but there were things I just made it through. It really was scary checking marks.

"But my mother said it doesn't matter [if she fails], you can do it again, just keeping trying. And if you don't like it you don't have to do it."

What she will be doing - come hell or high water, by the sound of it - is having children. During our hour's chat she weaves the subject in an out of our conversation. And she's prepared to do what her mother - "a very strong woman" - has done for her and younger brother, Rata: make sacrifices.

"I want my children young. I know that's going to be quite hard given the career option I've chosen, but they're a definite must for me. I would take time off to watch my children grow up. And if that means I have to be broke to do it, I would make that sacrifice."

Another contagious giggle says she means it.