Many of our energy assets are built on Māori land, so why do Māori disproportionately endure power poverty?

Friday, 28 May 2021

Ezra Hirawani is the co-founder of Nau Mai Rā, a power retailer aiming to help lift vulnerable Kiwis out of power poverty.

He created a power company to help vulnerable whānau. Now, Ezra Hirawani is fighting to keep his dream alive. Jehan Casinader reports.

Ezra Hirawani, the man leading a quiet revolution in the power industry, is dressed by Kmart. Every few months, he buys a fistful of black, white and grey T-shirts. A pair of shorts completes his work outfit, and he’s confident enough to rock up to meetings with high-powered executives.

“When I started in business, I decided to be fiercely pono. That means authentic. I can’t hide behind a flash suit or big words. Some people say to me, ‘You should dress up, because people will take you more seriously’. If I chuck on a shirt, I’ll do it because I respect you. But I won’t wear it to impress you.”

With his understated style, Hirawani flies under the radar – but he has a fascinating story to tell. The 29-year-old is the co-founder of Nau Mai Rā, New Zealand’s first Māori electricity retailer. His goal is to lift Kiwis out of power poverty, and his methods are unconventional.

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Ezra Hirawani, co-founder of Nau Mai Rā, a power company set up to end power poverty.

“When someone wants to join Nau Mai Rā, we don’t do a credit check. Having power should be a right, not a luxury. It doesn’t matter whether you have a bad credit history or a criminal conviction. We’ll have a conversation with you and treat you like whānau.

“We don’t have a disconnection policy. You could miss paying your power bill 17 times, but as long as you’re in contact with us, and we can work together to come up with a solution, we won’t cut you off.”

Hirawani reckons he can help thousands of families living in energy hardship. But there’s one major obstacle: the system that created this problem in the first place.

“I don’t want the public to say, ‘Oh, here we go again – Māori are looking for another handout’. We’re not asking for money. We just want to be treated as a genuine Treaty partner, so we can look after all people – not just Māori – who are suffering.”

Hirawani (Waikato Tainui, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hako) was born in Tokoroa, but grew up in Australia. In his teens, his family returned to the Waikato. Hirawani says he lived “the normal Māori boy life: eat your lunch, chase girls, play sport and get into trouble”.

After high school, he played rugby in the United States, before embarking on a two-year Mormon mission in the Australian outback. He completed a management degree in Hamilton and earned a Prime Minister’s Scholarship, allowing him to learn Mandarin and do further study in China.

“While I was there, my teacher asked if I could address an audience in my native tongue. I started speaking English. She said, ‘But aren’t you Māori? Can you speak Māori?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t’. She said, ‘Well, you probably shouldn’t come to China and learn who we are, if you don’t understand who you are’.

“I felt like an idiot. I had gone to China because I wanted to fast-track my journey to wealth. But I realised that I couldn’t achieve what I wanted if I didn’t understand where I came from. That drove me to come home and connect with my Māori heritage.”

Back in Hamilton, Hirawani – who had never visited his own marae – began to explore his whakapapa. He took courses in tikanga Māori, and started learning te reo.

Joyce Maipi says the Huntly Power Station was “plonked” in place, and ghettoised people who had been forced from their homes.

“My parents are part of the generation that was taught to suppress their identity. Until I was 15, I just thought Waitangi was the name of a public holiday. I didn’t even know it was a place. I had heard of the Treaty, and I knew we signed something, but that’s as far as my knowledge went.”

As an aspiring entrepreneur, Hirawani decided to explore business opportunities with a tikanga Māori focus. He was perplexed by the lack of Māori-oriented services.

“When I lived in China, all of the apps were built for Chinese consumers. Their version of Facebook is similar to Facebook, but it’s built on Chinese values and lifestyles. I thought, ‘Why can’t we have that for Māori?’ In every sector, people should have the option to choose a Māori provider.”

A chance meeting with Rob Johnson, a Hamilton tech entrepreneur, led Hirawani to develop an idea for New Zealand’s first Māori power retailer. Johnson agreed to go into partnership with Hirawani, and Nau Mai Rā was born in 2019.

“The idea was simple: build a power company on Māori principles. Allow people to pay for power while donating money to their local marae and whānau at the same time. But as I learned more about the power industry, I realised there were 100,000 whānau living in energy hardship. I thought, ‘What the hell? Why is this?’ ”

You don’t have to venture far from Auckland to observe the impact that the power industry has had on Māori. The Huntly Power Station – our largest – is hard to miss while driving through Waikato. It was commissioned in 1983, as part of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon’s ‘Think Big’ initiative.

“The power station was an uninvited guest in our community,” says Joyce Maipi (Waikato Tainui), a local Māori leader. “It was plonked here because the Government saw the natural resources – the coal, the land and the river. They were not interested in having a relationship with us, or understanding the impact the power station would have.

“Land was seized under the Public Works Act. People were forced to leave their homes. They were ghettoised in other parts of Huntly, and disconnected from their tribal land. The local school was moved. Swimming holes were cut off. Our frog and eel populations were decimated. A delicacy called puhi tuna was also lost.”

Maipi says Huntly and its people are “beautiful”. But those people are mainly “poor, brown, young, unemployed and sick”. Rising rent prices and a lack of access to health services are causing despair. Although the power station’s presence hasn’t caused all of these issues, she is certain that it has contributed to them.

Māori households spend more on electricity than non-Māori, a disparity that’s predicted to widen.

In the mid-2000s, when the station was to be upgraded, Māori protested. As a result, six marae entered a relationship with Genesis, the operator of the facility. Maipi says the company has invested in infrastructure for local marae, environmental mitigation and the employment of local people.

“We’ve made our relationship with Genesis work. They were forced to the table, because there were protests going on. Historically, power companies have not wanted to share their wealth with communities. The irony is, many Māori are in power poverty – while living on the back doorstep of a power station that’s using their land and resources.”

While creating his own power company, Ezra Hirawani discovered that many of New Zealand’s energy assets have been built on Māori land. In some cases, he says, landowners allowed this to happen after being “seduced” by power companies.

“When a generator says, ‘We’ll give your marae free power for a year’, that sounds really great. Until you realise that your marae’s power bill is only around $2000 a year – a quarter of a household’s bill – because no-one lives there.”

He says some power companies have secured access to valuable natural resources by offering meagre compensation, like paying for apprenticeships for local teenagers, or covering the cost of their driving licences. Those gestures make Hirawani angry, because they’re tiny in comparison to the profit generated by those assets.

“Māori have found ourselves in a terrible situation, due to a lack of knowledge and insight. Māori landowners have allowed power companies to build generation plants on their land, yet their own people derive almost no benefit from them. Power companies have exploited Māori leaders who lacked commercial nous.”

In 2019, a review by the Interim Climate Change Committee found that Māori households spend more on electricity than other households. The report predicted that as New Zealand moves towards a low-carbon future, power prices will rise further and Māori will be disproportionately affected.

Jamie Holmes and her sons, Branden 12, Jupiter, 22 months, and Jakaia, 14, are customers of Nau Mai Rā.

This information startled Hirawani, and his goal quickly expanded. He didn’t just want to give Māori a power company to call their own – he also wanted to get them out of power poverty.

“When someone calls you and says they’ve been heating their home by opening their oven, that’s a joke. People shouldn’t have to do that. It’s 2021. It shouldn’t be happening.”

For the past two years, Hirawani has travelled up and down the country, signing agreements with generators, meter companies and lines companies in each region. Those agreements allow Nau Mai Rā to access the complex web of infrastructure that delivers power to our homes.

Hirawani runs Nau Mai Rā with 29-year-old Ben Armstrong (Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Hine), “the heart and soul of the operation”, and a small team of young staff in Hamilton. In 2019, they took on their first customers, and word quickly spread – especially among those who could not secure power from other retailers.

“I was turned down by every single power company,” says 32-year-old Jamie Holmes. “I knew it was my fault, because of what I had done in the past. I had a bad name with everyone. I was really worried that I wouldn’t get power for my family.”

Holmes (Ngā Rauru) had started accruing debt in her late teens. At the time, she was in a violent relationship and in an “emotionally dark place”. She didn’t care about the bills she was racking up.

Hirawani says generators have told him their relationship with Nau Mai Rā is not “commercially beneficial” to them.

“I was living in the moment,” she says. “I thought, ‘I don’t feel like paying my bills. I need money for other things. If I put something on my credit card, it’s not going to affect me. If I don’t pay one power company, surely there are 10 others.’ I had no idea what I was doing.”

Holmes had three children, and spent a long period in emergency housing. Two years ago, Kainga Ora secured a home for her in Napier. When she had to arrange her own power provider, Holmes was confronted by her bad credit history and “freaked out”.

She heard about Nau Mai Rā through a Facebook post. Having been rejected by other power companies, she wasn’t sure “if they would even answer the phone”. But Nau Mai Rā agreed to accept Holmes as a customer. It bills all of its customers weekly, to help them to manage their spending.

“It took me a while to get used to having a bill every week, and having automatic payments going out,” says Holmes. “But soon, it became normal. Now, I pay all my other bills on time too.”

Nau Mai Rā accepts customers of any race and background. Hirawani says he doesn’t seek out vulnerable families. But once they are with Nau Mai Rā, he says, those customers are “amazing” at paying their bills on time.

“If someone calls us and says ‘My name is Ezra Hirawani’, they’re not talking to someone overseas who says ‘Can you spell that for me?’ People appreciate that, and they want to pay us on time.”

As an added incentive, a portion of each power bill goes to the customer’s local marae or a nominated community initiative. Alternatively, it can be placed into a “whānau fund” to help families in extreme financial hardship. Hirawani says this collective approach is what makes a kaupapa Māori business different.

“There’s no better feeling when someone calls and says, ‘Ezra, I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done. For the first time in my life, I’ve paid all my bills – not just my power bill. I have a job, and I’m not on the benefit any more.’ ”

Over the past two years, Nau Mai Rā has gathered 1000 customers across the country. Without spending any money on marketing, it has another 10,000 people waiting to join. But the business has hit a roadblock.

As a retailer, Nau Mai Rā buys wholesale power from generators and on-sells it to consumers. Hirawani says many major generators promised to work in partnership with Nau Mai Rā to improve outcomes for Māori.

However, as power prices have risen, their enthusiasm has waned. One company claimed it was not “commercially beneficial” for them to work with him, he says.

“It feels like these big companies are blocking us, which is annoying as hell. The amount of power we want to buy from them is super insignificant. We can take all the vulnerable people in this country, and ensure they have warm, dry homes. But the generators don’t want to help us to do that, because they can’t make a lot of money off it.”

Hirawani has been unable to secure a long-term supply of power at reasonable fixed rates. As a result, Nau Mai Rā is unable to take on extra customers, and is increasingly exposed to the volatile floating price for electricity – the ‘spot price’ – which continues to surge.

Unless this changes, Nau Mai Rā will have to shed up to half of its customers in the coming weeks. Families like Jamie Holmes’ could be left in the dark, especially if other companies won’t take them on. Hirawani says that outcome would be heartbreaking, but it may be unavoidable.

“Nau Mai Rā has a solution for vulnerable whānau in energy hardship. If we can’t solve this problem, it’s because the generators don’t want to help us to do it.

“I walked into one power company and the word ‘manaakitanga’ was on the wall. At another company, their meeting rooms are named after our maunga. I’m thinking, ‘We give you the opportunity to partner with Māori, and you decline it’. That’s what hurts. Don’t use our tikanga if you don’t want to live by it.”

In 2019, the Electricity Price Review recommended that the Government contract a “retailer of last resort” – a company that can guarantee a supply of electricity to Kiwis in energy hardship or with a poor credit history. That recommendation was not accepted by the Government, but Hirawani says his company is already playing that role.

“The Government spends a huge amount of money dealing with whānau who have had their power cut off – covering their bills and getting them reconnected. We are saving the Government money by preventing people from ending up in that situation in the first place.”

Hirawani recently appealed to Energy Minister Megan Woods, asking if she could pull any levers to ensure that Nau Mai Rā had a continuous supply of power.

In a statement to Stuff, Woods said she “commends Nau Mai Rā’s continued commitment to ensuring that vulnerable consumers and whānau are not being left behind”. While the Government cannot compel power generators to reach agreements with Nau Mai Rā, she “urges everyone in the sector to keep open dialogue” to address energy hardship.

If Nau Mai Rā can’t secure power, the only option is to fund and build its own generation assets – a costly, mammoth task. Hirawani says he would much rather work alongside existing power generators.

“There are problems here that can only be solved by Kiwis working together for everyone’s benefit. That’s what true partnership looks like.

“If you were a power company, wouldn’t you want the kudos of being the premium supplier of power to Māori? Imagine the opportunities that would be available if you could demonstrate what you have achieved through a Treaty-based partnership.”

For Hirawani, the two-year journey to create Nau Mai Rā has been stressful and exhausting. He spends much of his time travelling, and relies on his wife – an “absolute champ” – to look after their three young children. But he’s determined to keep the lights on for Nau Mai Rā, and the whānau who rely on it.

“I take strength from my whakapapa. That doesn’t mean, ‘I’m Māori, so I’m strong and I can do whatever I want’. But I understand what my ancestors went through, and that makes my own challenges seem easy. I don’t have any fear.”