Kelvin Davis

Man of his people

If you miss the State Highway 1 turnoff to central Kawakawa – with the tracks running down the middle of Gillies St, and those too-interesting-to-pee-on Hundertwasser toilets – and follow State Highway 11, you find Whiteman’s Rd on your left.

Turn, and you come across a cul-de-sac called Leonard St.

I cruised along this street via Google Maps (sitting in an office in Wellington) out of curiosity, after Cabinet minister and Labour deputy leader Kelvin Davis spoke about his childhood here.

There are chilled-out weatherboard homes, and stretches of paddock over yonder, behind the houses.

The latest street view shows two cars parked side by side, pushing out off the berm on to the rounded end of the street. Such encroachment would be untenable on middleclass streets – a thumb in the eye to uptight residents. I like it.

‘‘So my inspiration for being in politics, in fact in all the jobs I’ve had, be it a school teacher, a school principal, really stem from Leonard St in Kawakawa,’’ Davis says.

Davis, 53, is one of Labour’s five Ma¯ ori ministers inside Cabinet: an extremely grassroots rugby player, an educator, and a politician who lost several times in the electorate he now represents, Te Tai Tokerau, before becoming a high-ranking member of the first Labour team able to govern alone under MMP.

There are not a lot of profiles on Davis-theperson – the only one I could find on Stuff was three years old.

He’s on familiar enough ground when questioned about the perpetual blister-on-theheel that is Oranga Tamariki – now his responsibility.

He seems rusty, though, when talking about Kelvin Davis, human, spreading his hands on the table in his seventh-floor Beehive office and asking what happens next – so you just want me to talk about myself?

We start with Leonard St. There were 14 families in Leonard St when he was a kid, he says. ‘‘Thirteen of them [the families] were Ma¯ ori.’’ Altogether, there were 94 Ma¯ ori kids – all wonderful people, he says.

‘‘But then I look back now and I see how things have gone in life. And there were only three of them, to my knowledge, that got a university degree. One was my brother, one was my sister, and one was the girl across the road.’’

(Davis has spoken before of the discipline of his working-class parents, Panapa and Glenys, who pushed the four Davis siblings to work hard in their learning.)

Fewer than 10 of the kids in his street probably even ended up with School Certificate (the then-major qualification for Year 11 students), he says.

This was one of the reasons he ended up becoming a teacher.

There’s a story he tells about when he became principal of Kaitaia Intermediate in 2001 and found only 4 per cent of Ma¯ ori students – numbering about 12 in total – were working at their age level. This was in a school where eight out of 10 pupils were Ma¯ ori.

He called a staff meeting. Davis didn’t know what he expected, but what he got was a collective shrug; one teacher – breaking the awkward silence – said they already knew about the sluggish Ma¯ ori progress, but what were they expected to do about it?

‘‘I just said, ‘OK, meeting’s over.’ I went into my office, closed the door, put my head in my hands.’’

Davis says that within two years the school had turned around its Ma¯ ori achievement levels – so change can be made to happen, and quickly.

That explains why he is associate education minister and minister for children – but why did he want Corrections? Let’s be honest, people don’t have a lot of time for prisoners.

‘‘When I look at prisoners, I see guys I went to school with, I see cousins and nephews, and I see whanaunga [extended family]. For any government to accept . . . ’’ Davis breaks off mid-flow and points to a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi on the wall next to his office door.

‘‘My tu¯ puna [ancestor] is the third name down . . . it says ‘Po¯ mare, Nga¯ ti Manu’.

‘‘When he signed that document, he did not sign it for his people to be the most incarcerated people in the world, certainly not in the country. I owe it to him to make a difference for our people.’’

We’re achieving a breakthrough here – Davis’ emotional guard is down. Unfortunately the prime minister is making an unexpected visit, so we must pick it up again on another day.

Part 2

There are good rugby players and lousy rugby players, but in the end the game is still brutalising. You get smashed, do some smashing, regardless of your skills. So, you know, it’s an egalitarian team sport.

The ‘‘team-on-team’’, camaraderie stuff was particularly enjoyable for Davis.

I don’t know what the rugby-playing history is of the entire Labour caucus, but you have to admit it’s a tight political team – now that it’s winning.

I do know, now, that Davis finished playing rugby aged 40, relatively old in sport years – even for a forward.

‘‘The older I got the more I enjoyed it, because I knew my All Black aspirations had long since faded, and you could just play it for the sake of playing the game, instead of trying to prove anything.’’

We are back in Davis’ Beehive office and I bring up rugby, and life in the north.

I say there’s nothing quite like that drive up to Kaitaia, it’s like travelling into a different world as you head past Auckland.

‘‘So I would actually say the opposite to what you say,’’ says Davis. ‘‘I’d say the rest of the country is a different place. I just grew up in the north and I just thought New Zealand was like that.’’

Davis loves the north, his home in the Bay of Islands, that little valley in Karetu to the east of Kawakawa.

He says there is a Leonard St in every town, not just the Far North: I take that to mean a street filled with the people of his childhood, mostly Ma¯ ori, deprived of the same educational opportunities as affluent streets.

Indeed, about 776,000 Ma¯ ori live in New Zealand and not a lot of us, only about one in six, can even speak our own language to a halfdecent level.

So Davis, a crew-cut in a Parliament of coiffed heads, says he has a job to do, and that’s why he’s in politics. When the changes are ‘‘embedded’’ he will happily leave the work to the next person, he says.

He said before Parliament ended in 2020 that he planned head back to Karetu valley and ‘‘just go up the bush’’.

‘‘I’m just going to throw on my backpack, walk into the bush, literally by myself for as long as I can . . . take a couple of books and read, and just chill, walk around and get lost.’’

My tu¯ puna is the third name [on the Treaty document] . . . He did not sign it for his people to be the most incarcerated people in the world.’’

Part 3

A lot has happened since last year’s interviews with Davis.

Oranga Tamariki? Forget troubled kids and their families – now we have 16 prisoners departing the scorched husk of a prison wing: escorted by Ma¯ ori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi after a five-night stand-off in January.

Davis says the plight of Ma¯ ori in the prison system is a big ship to turn around, and points to increasing funding, a new replacement prison that will open in 2022, as well as the pressing need for cells for Waikato prisoners awaiting trial in the meantime.

The Government had ‘‘safely reduced the prison population by 20 per cent since it peaked in March 2018’’.

A new strategy to deal with these problems, Ho¯ kai Rangi, is in only its first year of a fiveyear programme.

Whatever happens with that programme, time is up for our interview. As with that copy of Te Tiriti on the wall of Davis’ office, we wait and see what history says about his turn at the helm for our many people of Leonard St.