Tamati Coffey fronts a new show in which couples decide to leave Auckland and head to the provinces.
Tamati Coffey, who is now a Labour MP after winning the Maori electorate of Waiariki, is returning to TV for a new series called Moving Out With Tamati. The Rotorua resident tells Sarah Nealon what the programme is all about.
Couples ditching Auckland for a better life in the provinces is a familiar story.
Fed up with housing costs and sitting in traffic, many people are farewelling the City of Sails and relocating to the provinces.
Former TVNZ presenter Tamati Coffey and his partner Tim Smith bid farewell to Auckland several years ago and moved to Rotorua where they paid $445,000 for a four-bedroom, two-storey house with panoramic lake views. They have also opened their own bar.
And Coffey will have to adjust to “moving out” again having won the M ori electorate seat of Waiariki, beating the Maori Party’s Te Ururoa Flavell.
“I haven’t had the full details on it, but as I understand you do have to spend a few days down in Wellington,” says Tamati.
“So I’ll be looking for a little place to stay down there while the house is sitting and when I need to go and do that Wellington business. But Rotorua, the Bay Of Plenty, is home for me. “You’ve got a real responsibility to your electorate that vote you in to make sure you’re still here on the ground, you’re still getting around and making sure people are being looked after and listening to their concerns. I’ll be doing that on the four days that I won’t be in Wellington.” Tamati is a popular Rotorua identity, thanks not only to politics but also because of the 10 years he spent at TVNZ on Breakfast and New Zealand’s Got Talent. He is now back on TV to present Moving Out With Tamati,a
documentary series which profiles couples who have left Auckland and shifted to provincial centres.
“I epitomise what the show is about,” says Coffey, 38. “Moving out of Auckland, out into the regions,
“It’s really scary because you’re basically pulling the rug out from underneath itself and giving away the well known and the familiar.” – Tamati Coffey
looking for a better life and finding it. This show really struck a chord.”
Each week the series focuses on a couple and first up is the husband and wife team of Kiel McNaughton (formerly of Shortland
Street) and Kerry Warkia. The couple, who have three children, have their own production company, Brown Sugar Apple Grunt, which has made Auckland Daze and Find Me A M ori Bride.
The family were living in the West Auckland suburb of Laingholm and are now residing in Hawera where they have a larger property and no Auckland traffic problems.
In Tamati’s case, quitting TV and swapping Auckland for Rotorua didn’t meet everyone’s approval.
“Many people thought I was nuts and that’s OK,” he says. “Essentially it was just a realisation that life is short and I’ve got a big list of things I want to do with my life.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ve done 10 years in TV, I’ve had great times but it’s time for me to go and tick a few other things off my list and one of them was opening a small business.”
For Coffey and his partner, moving to Rotorua was not a decision taken lightly.
“It’s really scary because you’re basically pulling the rug out from underneath itself and giving away the well known and the familiar and are very uncertain and unsure. So it’s a really big step that these people (in the doco series) take and say, ‘OK I’m not enjoying life as much as I could be right now’ so you talk to your partner and say, ‘Are we up for it? Are we strong enough to do it?’
“My partner and I, we faced that decision too. We said, ‘We’re potentially leaving very well-paid jobs for a life in the country. Is that really what we want?’
“There was a bit of soul searching to do around that but once we’d made that decision, we just did it and it’s been brilliant.”
Relocating to Rotorua means Coffey is closer to his parents who live ‘down the road’. They helped fuel his interest in politics.
“My mum and dad were union reps,” he says. “They were factory workers. They were hard workers so I guess in that sense they were always fighting for the rights of workers and making sure the bosses weren’t getting too much power and holding them to account. So in that sense we have always been a political family.
“When I went to university prior to my life in television, politics was what I wanted to study and that’s what I wanted to get into.”
But Coffey, who has an honours degree in political science and worked for the Auckland Regional Council in its iwi relations unit, ended up on TV – a medium he loves but no longer wants to do full-time.
“But I wanted a challenge. I wanted to get out there and make a difference so that on my dying days, on my death bed, I can say, ‘Hey I did pretty good job of leading a cool life’.”