Te Pāti Maori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer waxing up her surfboard at Ōpunakē Beach in Taranaki. Photo / Mike Scott
“It’s not a road trip without my hip hop,” beams Debbie Ngarewa-Packer as she presses play on her Spotify and 2Pac starts blasting out of the campervan speakers, and we’re off down Taranaki’s Surf Highway 45.
Surfing with “Debs”, road tripping along the coast; this is exactly what I - “Manbun”, as Ngarewa-Packer has nicknamed me - had been imagining for the past two years since the Pātea-born Te Pāti Māori co-leader and I bonded during an interview over a shared love of surfing.
I’d somehow convinced my boss to let me travel up from Wellington to her electorate Te Tai Hauāuru, to take her up on the offer of showing me around her local breaks.
“I’ve listened to hip hop all my life,” she says, pausing her singalong to the late American rapper.
“They talk kaupapa, about real things, about racial inequality, about poverty, hard life... it’s what I could relate to growing up.”
We were on our way to Ōpunakē, a small beach town in Taranaki just north of Hāwera, near where Ngarewa-Packer now lives with husband Neil.
Ideally we’d be going to her home break of Pātea, but with a small swell and strong northerly winds, Ōpunakē looked like the best option for a rideable wave.
The trip wasn’t all plain sailing. When we showed up, Ngarewa-Packer was adamant she wasn’t getting in the water.
“It’s too cold, I can’t get sick - this is the campaign of my life,” she said, adding it would be all my fault if she caught a cold.
It was only just the start of spring and while the air temperature was warming up, thick snow and ice still covered the omnipresent maunga Taranaki, and the water remained a frigid 13C.
The campaign had just started too, and Ngarewa-Packer was hitting the ground running with the support of hundreds of volunteers to try to wrench the seat back off Labour - albeit with speaker Adrian Rurawhe stepping aside for newbie Soraya Peke-Mason - and continue a stunning resurgence for her party.
After a bit of gentle ribbing, I managed to convince her to at least head out for a look - I also had an inkling that once she saw the waves, there would be no holding back.
So with energetic dog Beau in tow, we loaded up the campervan, which she and Neil would almost live in over summers gone by, camping out with friends along the wave-rich coastline, but which has become far less common after becoming an MP.
As we passed through towns speaking to a once-prosperous era, Ngarewa-Packer recounted her upbringing in Pātea, with an Irish mother and Māori father - “a real-life Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership”, as she said in her maiden speech.
She spoke of growing up in a world still reckoning with the fallout of land confiscations - raupatu - and then the later freezing work closures and mass job losses and poverty that ensued.
Many of her tūpuna stood alongside Tohu and Te Whiti at Parihaka during the great resistance in the late 1800s. Her great-grandfather was her whānau’s only survivor to return home after being imprisoned and sent to Dunedin.
“I stand here as a descendant of a people who survived a holocaust, a genocide sponsored by this House,” she once told Parliament.
Ngarewa-Packer referred lovingly often to her “Koko”, her grandfather, who was in the first generation after those mass land confiscations but also lived through multiple social upheavals.
“Not many came out of the freezing works closures doing well, we were probably an exception to the rule.”
She first picked up a surfboard at 8 years old, joining her cousins and wider community in a “life at the beach”, and thus beginning a lifelong passion.
“Pātea is a coastal community. We lived off the sea, we played in the sea, we’d get well around the sea.
“Our whole world was Pātea.”
Ngarewa-Packer said her upbringing made her very conscious of her relative “privilege”.
“Living in this community you see it every day, the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
She had a daughter at 19 who she brought up alone, while studying and holding down two - at one time three - jobs. She met Neil at 23 and had two children (now adults) with him. She also now has nine mokopuna (grandchildren).
After a brief stint in the corporate world working in Auckland marketing, they came back to their roots to be closer to whānau.
Ngarewa-Packer says those perspectives around privilege are why she’s in Te Pāti Māori, and why she will no longer settle for “incremental change”, and won’t work with National or Act, compared to her party previously.
“We’re a party that’s taking on transformational change, we want to end poverty, protect our environment, not delay it, not incrementally address it.”
As we travel along farming-dominated countryside, it is hard not to notice the sheer number of National and Act party billboards, the latter of which Ngarewa-Packer isn’t shy to show a little displeasure with.
“It’s like colonisation popping up again,” she quips.
But Ngarewa-Packer’s face is also in many of the right places. There is a momentum behind the party - currently on track to double its two seats to at least four after the October election - which Ngarewa-Packer says is because they are more progressive than any of the big parties, and future-focused.
It was also a reaction to the “race-baiting” going on from some politicians, she said.
“I predict in an election or two, they’re going to have to change their tune to appeal to the younger population.
“They’re more socially conscious and more culturally conscious and more politically conscious.
“They believe in living, in letting everyone else live in love for who they are.”
Ngarewa-Packer is also regarded as the favourite to win Te Tai Hauāuru for the first time.
She is well-known and liked across the area, was deputy mayor of South Taranaki and head of her iwi Ngāti Ruanui.
She also spearheaded Covid-19 efforts before entering Parliament at the end of 2020.
As we near the coast, Ngarewa-Packer the politician starts to be replaced by another person altogether.
Any hesitation Ngarewa-Packer had on the drive out was extinguished at the sight of perfect, chest-high waves peeling across the scenic bay.
Ngarewa-Packer was into her wetsuit and pulling out her prized longboard while checking in with locals but also - most importantly - checking just how cold the water was.
“Oh, but you’ve got booties on!” she says to one person who remarked it wasn’t too bad.
“Come on, Debbie,” I say, “It’s a lot better once you’re in.” Which she knows, of course.
After a quick wax-up of the boards we’re into the water.
Several expletives are heard as we dip in our toes, but once we’re over the first breaking waves, paddling side by side, Ngarewa-Packer is clearly in her element.
Sitting out the back really does feel a long way from Parliament, but not exactly from politics.
Ngarewa-Packer, despite leading a party big on being “unashamedly Māori”, is equally proud of her Pākehā heritage.
Māori have a strong connection to surfing, she says. Māori make up a disproportionate number of the country’s top professional surfers - from former World Surf League pro Ricardo Christie to the younger generation of Elliott Paerata-Reid and Te Kehukehu Butler.
But Ngarewa-Packer also sees surfing as a space to connect with tangata Tiriti - non-Māori - who are among some of her closest friends and the ones she spends most of her time surfing with.
In between catching waves, we talk about friends and whānau, relationships, and of course the environment.
We talk about the impact of land use on the waterways that run into and have actually formed many of the breaks here - the stench of cow poo is omnipresent, as is silt and sediment run-off in the murky water.
Many of the breaks in the area are devoid of marine life - it’s really hard not to notice the impacts of humans on the environment.
Ngarewa-Packer says it’s that connection to Tangaroa (god of the sea), largely built through surfing, that has driven a lot of her work today.
“We didn’t have a heck of a lot growing up, but what we did have in the moana was really precious.
“And that’s why you see me fronting the battle to stop seabed mining and stop the pollution of very precious taonga.
“The moment you become attached to the water, the ocean, you become guardians, kaitiaki.”
It’s unclear exactly what the future holds for this region but Ngarewa-Packer clearly sees advocating for a more prosperous future, potentially one rooted in clean and sustainable energy, as her calling.
Given the relative temperature, we decide enough talking and time for some more waves.
A large set approaches and we’re up and riding together. After a few more, I decide I don’t want to be blamed for Ngarewa-Packer getting pneumonia - but she’s absolutely buzzing.
“I really needed that,” she beams.
“You get so caught up in the grind of everything else and serving others sometimes you forget what you need to serve yourself.
“But it was freezing, I froze my balls off!”
It soon also became evident the cold wasn’t her only reservation about doing a media interview in the waves.
“It’s a privilege [as an MP] to have a platform to talk about things and to fight for things and push for things that matter.
“But I think it’s really important, and I say this to every other person I know that’s looking to serve, is save something for yourself.
“A little bit of me was anxious, because it’s a real private part of my life that I don’t open up to a lot of people.
“I guess it’s one of those last bastions of absolute serenity you have in your life.”
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