Ex-student’s death driver for candidate
A long-serving primary school principal who never intended to enter politics says she changed her mind after an ex-student committed suicide.
Labour candidate Jan Tinetti, the principal of Merivale School in Tauranga, said the 20-year-old man had just been fired from a factory job.
“He was employed under the 90-day [trial] bill and lost that job on about day 88 or 89. He thought he’d brought shame on his whanau.
“That was the point that it hit me and I thought education is massively important, but it’s not the whole story. And we need to be advocating for people into better lives. That’s when I decided to stand.”
Tinetti is one of Labour’s promising new recruits, and will appear in a showcase of new women candidates at the party’s election-year Congress this weekend.
She will be up against Cabinet Minister Simon Bridges in Tauranga, who won in 2014 with a majority of nearly 15,000 votes. But ranked at 14 on Labour’s list, she is all but certain to get into Parliament.
Tinetti is Labour through-andthrough. She was born in mining country on the West Coast, and later became a primary school teacher and unionist. She admits to “wavering” in her political loyalty once in the 1980s, when she voted for Alliance in protest at Labour’s Rogernomics reforms.
She has been a principal for 20 years, the last 11 of those at Merivale.