Cam Slater: Dodgier than a Week Old Chicken Wing

When the Maori party aren’t race baiting, or blagging the systems they are troughing from in the order of millions of dollars, they seem to be doing increasingly dodgy things to remain at the colonialist trough they so hate:

A Te Pati Maori MP and the marae she once ran are at the centre of claims that private information collected during the census was used for political campaigning.

Stats NZ, the Government’s official data agency, is now investigating after a whistleblower from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) came forward with a series of allegations relating to Manurewa Marae.

The whistleblower also laid a complaint with police last week.

Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp stood down as the marae’s chief executive last year after narrowly beating incumbent Labour MP Peeni Henare by only 42 votes in the election’s Tamaki Makaurau race.

The urban marae was part of a Whanau Ora Commissioning Agency drive to promote last year’s census, between March and June last year.

It then became a polling booth at last year’s general election, a controversial decision because of Kemp’s candidacy for the Maori seat.

Te Pati Maori strongly denies the claim that census data was mis-used.

The probe comes as a number of former marae workers have alleged that:

• Hundreds of census forms collected by marae staff were photocopied and retained; and data from the forms such as personal contact details, household occupancy and birth dates was entered into an online database and sent to the Waipareira Trust. Te Pati Maori president John Tamihere runs the social services charity and is chief executive of Whanau Ora, and denies this.
• They believe that information was then used to target Maori electorate voters in the Tamaki Makaurau electorate.
• They also allege that Marae staff who delivered census forms also included enrolment forms for voters to change from the general to the Maori roll.

Further allegations are that:

• Participants were given $100 supermarket vouchers, wellness packs or food parcels to induce them to complete the forms.
• Visitors to the marae last year were also given $100 supermarket vouchers when they completed the forms to switch rolls.
• Attempts were made to alert Stats NZ and MSD, but neither agency acted.

The Post

Naturally they deny any wrongdoing, but that’s a whole lot of smoke coming from that hangi pit.

Tamihere strenuously denied that census information was collected and misused. He said the allegations were driven by complainants with a gripe.

Former staff have told the Star-Times how they were tasked with a ‘team challenge’ to get as many people as possible to complete the census. They were then paid $100 per form, with some teams racking up tens of thousands of dollars in payments.

They spoke to the Star-Times on condition of anonymity, afraid of community backlash. The staff are all pursuing personal grievance complaints against the marae for various claims including bullying and constructive dismissal.

Two revealed how they visited clients, who receive social services support from the marae, and encouraged them to complete both the census and enrolment forms.

They were then given $100 Pak’nSave gift vouchers, which were ordered in bulk by the marae. When the vouchers ran out, participants would instead get a kai parcel or wellbeing pack.

Kemp officially announced her candidacy in February 2023.

The Post

Numerous illegal activities are described; paramount amongst them would be treating. If allegations of treating are proven then the individual or individuals who organised and orchestrated it would be found guilty of a corrupt practice, and if it was the MP they would be tossed from the house.

If I were Peeni Henare I’d be seriously looking at an electoral petition.

This is very serious, with a whistleblower or whistleblowers both speaking to media as well as to various authorities.

And it seems the MP in question is directly implicated:

Personal data is invaluable to political campaign teams who use it to target voters. But census information is strictly protected.

Throughout the year, staff say were repeatedly drilled to get marae visitors and clients to switch rolls. “The directive was continuous. Every time we had morning debriefs, it would come up.”

Messages between Kemp and staff show that 109 enrolment forms were collected in one day in May.

Kemp wrote: “Awesome … we want to collect data from the forms. Name, address, contact number, ethnicity can we get the 109 names onto a spreadsheet please. We will double check the census data and tick off from the data base.”

The marae also held a series of ‘activation days’ – community events which offered free hangi, ice-cream, hot drinks and merchandise, like hoodies. These were targeted at increasing participation in the census, and then later voter registration.

Staff claim the food-truck operators were paid from marae funds.

At these events, people were encouraged to switch to the Maori roll and handed a $100 gift card on completing the form.

“For the Tamaki area, Peeni Henare was disadvantaged because he didn’t activate the way that Tarsh [Kemp] did, with the funding that she had,” the senior staffer said.

“If I look back at all the funding that we spent, one activation could cost us $10,000. She was paying for ice-creams, coffee, hangi, vouchers, bouncy castle, staffing time.”

Another source described what they saw at the marae’s census hub.

“There were staff and volunteers, which were the kids of staff members. And then I saw one of the kids making photocopies of the census forms. And there was a whole stack of them.

“I said to her: ‘What are you doing?’ She said: ‘I’m photocopying these for the boss.’ Every single form… I seen with my own eyes, they are photocopying the census.

“At the time, I thought they were keeping it for funding applications.”

This was confirmed by another former employee who said they frequently had to change the photocopier’s toner.

“I would see them bring all these forms in and start photocopying. It was jamming up what we were doing… [I had to] change the toner heaps and put in paper. They were the census forms or the voting forms to change over.

“I said: ‘You’re not allowed to keep that, what are you doing with it’?”

They said they witnessed the papers being boxed and taken away, but not by the marae’s regular secure document destruction service.

The marae staffed a dedicated desk for visitors to fill out the enrolment form, the ex-employee said. “The vocab they were told to use was basically: ‘Sign this, or you can’t get that.’

“They would say: ‘Tick that box … to change rolls, and then we can give you your voucher’.

“To me they were using a community that was already in poverty, using the food and that so they will come in. They knew that they’d come in because they’d get vouchers and free coffee and ice-cream.

“A lot of people came. We were overrun.”

Some of the food parcels and wellbeing packs were stuffed with Te Pati Maori flyers, one ex-employee claimed.

The Post

I’m not sure flat out denying everything is going to wash.

This is pretty serious stuff, but no doubt the Maori Party will use the investigation to claim that the racist colonialists are out to get them.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. Cam blogs regularly on the BFD - where this article was sourced.