Horsing around with Marama Fox

Herald journalists have been spending time with party leaders for election series Leaders Unplugged: eight parties in eight days.

‘Bring gumboots,” Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox texts the day before we met. “Walk on the clumps,” she advises now as we pick our way across a partflooded paddock on the outskirts of Masterton.

Up ahead are the Fox whanau’s newest members, Whero and Huaki. The family took on the two horses in February from a friend who was moving to the city.

Ben Fox, a softly spoken shearer, had never even touched a horse before but has schooled himself up by watching online videos.

“He is now the horse whisperer. He watches horse whispering on YouTube,” Fox teases, as the animals follow her husband as if to prove the point.

Fox’s daughters have already helped feed the horses breakfast and choose to stay in the truck for this media photo op — a decision justified as sheets of rain blow in. Whero’s past life was as a racehorse in Hong Kong, living in a high-rise complex, Fox says. Who knows what he makes of the depths of this Wairarapa winter.

The plan was to go for a ride but headline-making rain saw that scrapped in favour of 10-pin bowling. Fox was happy to oblige our lastminute request for some pictures of her with the animals, even if it means her heeled boots are now streaked with mud.

She has swapped her usual flatpeak baseball caps for an orange beanie but otherwise seems oblivious to the cold.

I clumsily pat Huaki’s nose, and Fox puts her hand under the horse’s mouth. “Down here, like this,” she demonstrates.

Back at our car she pulls up with a plastic bag for my just-bought gumboots. I’m feeling looked after, but in truth Fox is allowing me to intrude into precious mother time.

Nineteen — yes, 19 — call the Fox double villa (plus sleep-outs) home.

“I’ve got five sons, four daughterin-laws, six moko, three daughters and my husband — they don’t count me in that number. I’m never home,” Fox explains.

“And there is one other daughter who is schooled in Hamilton.

“That house is full to crowded to overflowing. We are the blinking poster family of overcrowded communicable diseases. I have had the flu three times already.

“We got conjunctivitis one time. My son got it. His girlfriend got it. Her family got it. Our family got it. The rugby team got it. And they called it the Fox Eye.

“The whole town got it — I’m not even lying.”

Fox’s background is education — as a teacher in kohanga reo and kura kaupapa and as a Ministry of Education adviser.

Former Maori Party leader Tariana Turia asked her to stand for the Maori Party twice, but both times she was pregnant.

In 2014 she wasn’t and after entering Parliament she became coleader along with Te Ururoa Flavell. Fox, who affiliates to Ngati Kahungunu and Ngati Porou, will stand in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti electorate in September’s election.

Her energy and willingness and ability to rattle off a great soundbite mean she is often sought out as MPs weave their way through media on their way to question time.

All the same, it has been a tough transition.

“Going all over the place to different hotels or eating alone in a restaurant or in your room. Boo. That sucks,” she says of an MP’s lifestyle.

“Because you are a co-leader of a party, and because you are Maori, every Maori in the country wants you to come and solve their problem. I get rung up to go everywhere.

“I mean we go back to Parliament for a rest from recess.”

A goal to be home for the weekends was revised to Sundays to Sunday afternoons, “and now I have just told everybody I will not be home any weekends between now and the election”.

Living close to Wellington has advantages, and Ben sometimes