‘What did you do, Koro?’ Māori ward councillor brings ‘home truths’ to Pākehā voters

Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Māori need to vote if they want to keep their seat at the table says Waikato’s Tilly Turner. She speaks to Joel Maxwell in a series that catches up with Māori ward councillors from the four corners of the motu, on their thoughts in the year of the referendum.

Just when she thought she was out, she got pulled back in again.

Retirement beckoned for Tilly Turner, 73, current Māori ward councillor in Waikato District - she even had just the right person ready to fill her spot.

Now, she says, that succession plan is gone: she can’t leave someone else to fill a seat that could be dumped in three years time.

Turner spoke to Stuff as the final voice in a series on Māori ward councillors around New Zealand facing an October referendum to decide the future of their very council existence.

Waikato District is sprawling, rural, and its 400,000 hectares border Hamilton to the north, east and west. It takes in the heart of the Kīngitanga, Tūrangawaewae Marae, in Ngāruawāhia, and Port Waikato, where the region’s namesake river meets the sea.

Turner, one of two Māori ward councillors for the Waikato District, said she was talked into standing in 2022 by her daughters - she has seven. She also has one son, her youngest child, seven in-laws, 26 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.

“I’d done a lot of things in the Māori world but very little in the Pākehā community … not really sat down with a determined idea to move into that space,” she said.

Last year, a law change by the coalition Government forced most councils with Māori wards to either dump them, or put them to a public referendum alongside October 11 council elections.

If dumped by referendum, existing Māori wards would vanish for the 2028 elections.

In August, her council voted to put the wards to a referendum in a meeting that included speakers from Waikato-Tainui, the council’s largest ratepayer, and architect of the legislation that eased the creation of the wards, Nanaia Mahuta.

It came after a positive term, said Turner, in which the Māori councillors offered a new perspective on decision-making.

“We do mokopuna decisions, that’s a long-held goal of most Māori communities, you don’t think about what you’re doing at the moment, but what you’re going to leave as your legacy to your grandchildren.”

Turner, who grew up in the Kīngitanga movement, was “of the age that I should be retired right now”, and had hoped to stand down and hand the torch to a younger woman.

Now, with the referendum, she’s returning, in case the seat is dumped and someone needs to sit out its final term: “That’s why I’m standing because I’m not confident that we’re going to survive it.”

Turner said there would probably be community lobbying against the Māori wards, as there was before the last general election.

“I’m not sure how we counteract that kind of belief system. I know that the hīkoi has been a great collectivisor, the King’s kōrero about ‘be Māori every day’, all of those things that he did before he passed has collectivised us.”

Turner said she had been talking to Pākehā constituents, pointing out that the true history of the region was going to be taught in schools, to their mokopuna.

“It’s never been taught before, but what will you do when your mokopuna says, ‘What did you do Koro, to make this right?’”

Māori would need to vote to make sure the seats were safe, but Turner said they had not always valued participation.

There was hope though, as young people immersed in the Māori world grew up.

“We’ve gone through eight generations to our Queen now, and we’re used to being the waiters, but we’ve got to collectivise ourselves; the rangatahi that we've got there now have been educated through kōhanga reo, and know that inclusion is the way.”

What’s good for Māori, Turner said, was going to be good for every New Zealander.

Click on these links to read about Pera Paniora on losing her seat before she could even stand, Kahu Paki Paki on the older voters who want to ‘burn down the house’, and Toni Boynton on ‘the Aunties in the room’.