JUSTICE WARRIOR

Julia Whaipooti

Julia Whaipooti is a self-confessed rampaging bull pushing for justice reform. Pushing for it might be an understatement. Demanding it seems more accurate.

The crisis that is mass Ma¯ ori imprisonment, she says, enrages her soul and must be stopped. To watch and listen to Whaipooti is to feel her indignation and grasp the urgency of her mission to fix our ‘‘broken justice system’’.

When it comes to over-representation of Ma¯ ori in prisons, the numbers are criminal, she says. Ma¯ ori made up 50.7 per cent of New Zealand’s prison population, despite accounting for just 14.9 per cent of the population at the last census. Sixty-five per cent of male prisoners and 63 per cent of female prisoners under 20 are Ma¯ ori. Ninety per cent of prisoners under 20 have had contact with Oranga Tamariki or the former Child, Youth and Family service.

‘‘We have one of the highest incarceration rates and yet we have decreasing levels of crimes. The structural racism that exists in our prisons is part of the crisis. It’s really unacceptable when you talk about the fact that if Ma¯ ori were incarcerated at the same rates as non-Ma¯ ori we would have one of the lowest prison populations in the world.’’

The way our justice system has responded to our high prison muster is like a slow-motion train wreck, she says. ‘‘Given our rich resource and our small population our justice system should not look the way it does. The fact that it’s coloured with so many Ma¯ ori reflects on the historical impacts of colonisation. It reflects the ongoing social and historical failures in our country.

‘‘The living impacts of colonisation are breathing in our prisons and the impacts are felt by our wha¯ nau who are living in that space.’’

It’s hard to talk about complex social issues, Whaipooti says from the home in Aro Valley, Wellington, she shares with her partner of five years, Emma Whiley. ‘‘We find that hard to do in terms of finding solutions, which is why we have entrenched our approach with a need to be ‘tough on crime’.’’

The issue is pretty personal to Whaipooti, who is at times moved to tears as she discusses the fight for a better system. Her brother has been in and out of prison and it is partly his experience that feeds her desire to revolutionise the justice system.

‘‘When people talk about stats and numbers I see faces. When I talk about this it’s not lip service.

‘‘We just can’t accept the crises that we live in because for me that looks real. It looks like my [future] kids, and my niece and nephew. Statistically it looks like they don’t have any choices but I refuse to accept that because it’s very real and very personal and I’ll use all the tools I have to change that because it’s not fair.’’

Whaipooti, 30, is a force in the conversation around justice reform. Former ACT MP and Sensible Sentencing Trust lawyer David Garrett once called her a Ma¯ ori activist ‘‘like it was an insult’’, she says.

She recently returned from a United Nations forum on indigenous peoples. Last month she was appointed to the Government’s Safe and Effective Justice Programme Advisory Group – Te Uepu¯ Ha¯ pai i te Ora, which is headed by former National MP Chester Borrows.

She joins a panel of people who, she says, have been advocating in the justice sector longer than she has been alive – the likes of Kim Workman and Warren Young. Workman has been something of a mentor to Whaipooti. ‘‘I could see her potential the first time I met her. She’s a bright and passionate person who speaks from the heart,’’ he says.

She is a board member and former chair of Just Speak, a movement created by young people to advocate for justice reform. She has been involved in the Community Law movement over the past eight years and is now a senior adviser at the Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

Born in Gisborne, Whaipooti is of Nga¯ ti Porou descent. She spent the first few years of her life living in Ruatoria with two of her four siblings before a move to Australia, where her father trained and worked in the police force. Her mother has worked hard all her life, sometimes multiple jobs at a time.

The family moved around Australia, her father’s work eventually taking them to Brisbane by the time she reached high school.

Whaipooti credits her mother for her highly developed sense of justice. She always called out injustices she experienced as a Ma¯ ori woman – a trait that initially embarrassed the young Whaipooti, but one she now admires.

The family returned to New Zealand while Whaipooti was at high school, to be closer to extended wha¯ nau.

She grew up expecting to go to university because her mother had instilled this in her for as long as she can remember. No-one in the family had done so before. ‘‘She knew that was a key to doing well and she wanted everything to be better for us. So it was drilled into our head from when we were little.’’

But when the time came she paused. She didn’t have the money to enrol at university. She didn’t even know what she wanted to study so opted to work fulltime to save money till she figured it all out.

She had been working part-time at a supermarket and about to start fulltime at Mitre 10 when fate stepped up in the form of a regular customer, a practice manager at a local law firm, who offered her a job.

She started out as a gofer at the law practice but soon showed her worth and went on to become a conveyance secretary, writing wills and powers of attorney.

She learned the ins and outs of daily life in a law firm and realised she knew a hell of a lot more than the law graduates who dropped in for work experience.

She came to a crossroads where she could carry on in her job or study law herself. Of course, she followed the latter path.

Victoria University further ignited her sense of justice, but when it came to criminal law the conversation around Ma¯ ori was troubling, she says. ‘‘I remember the feeling in class when they were talking about the over-representation of Ma¯ ori in prisons and it was such an uncomfortable conversation.

‘‘There weren’t many Ma¯ ori in the lecture

. . . it felt like we were being talked about like we weren’t in that room and it was an uncomfortable, displacing lesson.

‘‘It was a really key time in law school where I thought, this feels so wrong. I know heaps of cool Ma¯ ori and at the same time [was] questioning why those statistics were true? I didn’t understand. That triggered my desire to find out why.’’

Whaipooti calls prisons ‘‘universities of crime’’ and a Band-aid response for all sorts of social harms. ‘‘We imprison poverty, we imprison health issues. Ninety per cent of people imprisoned at any one time have a lifelong mental health diagnosis.

‘‘If people have a drug and alcohol addiction, they are illnesses. If we treated them the same way we treat diabetes and cancer – as illnesses – then we treat what, in many instances, are the drivers of the offending.’’

There’s no doubt that Whaipooti has the courage of her convictions – as an activist, lawyer, justice advocate, raging bull. She’ll put her hand up to all of these labels, but first and foremost she’s a proud auntie. Wha¯ nau is everything.

What she wants for her young wha¯ nau and all children in Aotearoa is simple: a chance to reach their potential. If that means stoking the rage in her soul, then so be it.

‘‘If Ma¯ ori were incarcerated at the same rates as non-Ma¯ ori we would have one of the lowest prison populations in the world.’’