Politics path started at home
Palmerston North’s Youth Space is celebrating the meteoric rise of a recent graduate, who transformed from a high school dropout to a regional councillor.
Stacey Rose, 19, is the youngest person to claim a regional council seat in recent memory and he did not even have to mount a campaign for the Tauranga constituency he now represents.
A trained hairdresser and barber, Rose said he had long held a passion for politics, and the life coaching and support he got from Youth Space gave him the confidence to go for it.
The staff there were early on his list of people to visit days after his win and he popped in last Friday for a catchup.
He had aspired to run for the Greens in the 2017 elections, but the deadline for nominations was five days before his 18th birthday.
Having moved recently to Tauranga, he planned to campaign for the Bay of Plenty Regional Council elections in October, pulled out to develop his barbershop interests, but was then prompted by a friend at the last minute to put in a nomination anyway. Barely 24 hours later he got the call to confirm he would be elected unopposed to the vacancy created by retiring regional councillor John Cronin.
Rose said his first reaction to the unexpected election was to ‘‘freak out really badly’’.
On one hand, he recognised the huge opportunity to be a voice for young people, particularly on climate change, and the need to improve public transport.
But it would also be a vast amount of work and responsibility sitting on the richest regional council in the country, helping manage its majority ownership in the Port of Tauranga, to reduce CO2 emissions, tackling traffic and transport and climate change issues in the region.
Already, he has faced negative comments about being too young to know what he was doing. He said that just made him more determined to prove people wrong.