Candidate Kōrero: Tamatha Paul for Wellington Central

Tamatha Paul (Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Awa) was in Bunnings trying to find a new light for her flat when her phone “started blowing up” with the news that Labour Party MP Grant Robertson wasn’t standing for Wellington Central this year. 

After receiving a phone call from Chlöe Swarbrick urging her to “just do it bro” and being pestered around Wellington by Green Party Councillor Thomas Nash, Paul said “the stars just aligned” and she decided it was the right time to run for Parliament. 

Re-elected last year to Wellington City Council, the 26-year-old Green Party candidate says her time as a student, 2019 VUWSA President, and past four years on Council, allow her to be “a real vocal champion for the things that our city needs”.

Despite Grant Robertson having held the seat for 15 years, Paul rejects the idea that Wellington Central is a safe Labour electorate. “It really pisses me off. [...] The Labour Party are not entitled to Wellington Central, and they are gonna have to work a lot harder”.

Running a two-ticks “serious Green campaign”, Paul is confident that she will be able to turn the seat green, saying “Wellington Central is super progressive”. In 2020, the electorate gained the highest proportion of Green Party votes in the whole country.

Housing:

When asked what her main policy goal is, Paul said that “the biggest thing that I want to be judged on as in my first term as MP is how many houses I can get built.”

“I want more public housing and more affordable housing, because I think that if you look at the city, and what is holding us back, it's the lack of affordable housing and good quality housing.” 

As an Aro Valley renter, “most of my money that's coming in every week is going on my rent, and that seems to be the universal experience,” Paul said. “We're all paying exorbitant amounts on rent, [...] but we're paying to live in shitholes. We are living in the darkest, dingiest, mouldiest flats. There are landlords in Wellington who get away with this behaviour. We've become accustomed to this idea that it's some kind of rite of passage for young people and for students to live in terrible housing.”

Paul said the Green Party’s rent controls policy, which would restrict landlords to a maximum of a 3% rent increase per year, “will be awesome” for fixing the rental crisis, “because we know our landlords love to just put our rents up arbitrarily.”

Transport:

Regarding Wellington’s bus system woes, Paul said the bus driver shortage is the key issue. “We are really struggling to attract bus drivers to Wellington because why would you drive a bus for $26 an hour when you have to deal with driving on the worst streets in New Zealand, [...] and then go home to your mouldy flat that you live in. It's the city itself that can't attract bus drivers, because who would want to do that?”

In answer to this problem, “First of all, get an MP that actually catches the bus,” she said. “We need to bring public transport back into public ownership because it's these foreign companies who do things like reject the living wage for their workers. [...] We need to reconfigure our streets, take out a whole lot of car parking because it is so hard to drive a bus in Wellington, and we need to make sure that bus drivers have top class facilities at any part of their journey, [such as] access to a toilet.”

Students:

On student issues, Paul says she’ll advocate for the policies put forward in the Greens’ 2023 manifesto. This includes making student allowances universal to all students, including postgrads, increasing allowance levels, free public transport for students, extending the winter energy payment to students, and “working towards establishing a 'fee-free' public tertiary education system”.

Paul said although she did “go hard” to advocate for more university funding amid VUW’s recent staff cuts fiasco, she would've gone “even harder” given the platform of a local MP. 

“I took real exception to this whole issue, because you've got people making funding decisions in the Beehive who benefited from free tertiary education, and here we are racking up massive student loans having to put big life decisions on hold because we still paying off our loan and having to pay back living costs.”

“So what the heck, what kind of, like, dystopia are we living in that we have to pay back debt for wanting to do something useful and productive for society?” she said.

When asked for her pitch to students, Paul said, “You can send a strong message to the government that you want them to take the cost of living crisis seriously, that you want them to apprehend the terrible landlords that we have to deal with, and improve the quality of houses that we have to live in.”

“If you want them to take seriously protecting nature, and taxing the mega wealthy, and evening the playing field and putting that money to work to bring in a universal student allowance, [...] then the biggest way that you can do that is to vote for me on October the 14th and flip what they think is a safe Labour seat into a Green seat.”

Opponents:

Paul isn't afraid to dish the dirt on her fellow Wellington Central contenders, taking aim at the fact that both National’s Scott Sheeran and Labour’s Ibrahim Omer have been living outside of Wellington until recently. “They can’t ride in on the coat-tails of other people and parachute in from Auckland and from Abu Dhabi and do a good job. [...] Who do you guys think you are that you can just come in here and give us what we need? You don't know what we need.”

If successful in getting into Parliament, Paul would vacate her seat representing the Pukehīnau / Lambton Ward on council, causing a $70,000 by-election. “It’s a small price to pay for the democracy and the representation that you deserve,” she said. 

Paul said that, ultimately, it's up to the people of Wellington to decide whether or not to send her to Parliament. As she's not going on the Green Party list, she will only leave her position on council if she wins Wellington Central in October

Listen to the full interview on Salient’s Unedited Session podcast! Stay tuned for more exclusive interviews and election coverage.