Efeso Collins: unflappable, cerebral crusader for social justice
Thursday, 22 February 2024
Efeso Collins died on Wednesday, while taking part in a charity event.
The Green MP was 49 years old.
A former Auckland councillor, he ran for the city’s mayoralty in 2022 before joining the Greens.
Fa‘anānā Efeso Collins was a quiet, softly spoken and thoughtful man, whose own journey and education had made him keenly aware of the prejudices he could face as a tall, powerful Samoan man from Ōtara.
Collins, who died suddenly on Wednesday at the age of 49, became a public figure as an Auckland mayoral candidate and latterly, a Green Party MP. But earlier, while a relatively-obscure local councillor he wrote blogs about the micro-aggressions he faced: on one occasion, it was being quizzed in an Auckland Town Hall lift as to why he was ascending to the councillors’ floor.
His solution was to moderate the way he presented himself to the world: while in private he preferred basketball singlets, league gear and hoodies, in public he was careful to be suited and clean-shaven. “I am a big guy, and I know that. I am very aware of it. You’ve got to get in the door and if that means you’ve got to dress a certain way for people to feel okay, and have a conversation, that’s the reality of it,” he told Stuff in a 2022 interview.
That was part of Collins’ personal approach; as an advocate for the communities he represented, first on his local board, then on council, then in Parliament, he knew he had to find a way to get the ear of people who didn’t look like him. In a piece for The Spinoff on Wednesday, editor Madeleine Chapman described that as being a “bridge between Pacific people and the whole of Aotearoa”.
It also showed in a debating style that was quiet, unthreatening, cerebral, reflecting his academic background. “I am prepared,” he explained, “to fight with my brain and my mouth. I don’t hit out, and I don’t swear. That’s not my style.”
He had the same approach to life, he said, partly due to his background refereeing touch and netball. “Someone said to me, you’re pretty unflappable. But that’s just the person I am. I play sport the same way. You shouldn’t get too excited. You shouldn’t listen to the noise on the side.” And never, he said, would he rise to anger. “Can I tell you the challenge? I know I am a tall, brown man, and anger can be misconstrued. Because I have to remember some people will not assess me the same as others.”
He was an introspective, thoughtful figure; an important part of his life was a monthly supervision session, where he could talk through his challenges with a peer. He said he was told he internalised and sifted things and often “carried quite a lot”. It was a burden he carried with good humour.
How do we re-balance?
Efeso Collins grew up in Ōtara, south Auckland, the youngest of six children of hard-grafting Samoan immigrants who arrived here in the 1960s, having been “told this was the land of milk and honey”. His mother, a nightshift cleaner, and his father, a taxi driver and Methodist minister, met at a dance at the Orange Hall in inner-city Newton.
He grew up in a state house and recalled a safe, loved childhood surrounded by extended family and friends, and afternoons playing on the street outside the local Four Square while a relative worked behind the till.
While his elder siblings went to work young, he was identified early as academically capable and sent to Auckland Grammar School. He only lasted a term, finding it culturally alien. He wished he had given it a little longer.
Instead, he attended his local school, Tangaroa College, but was elevated a year and won a place at Auckland University. Initially, he studied accounting, economics and English, but blossomed when he changed course to sociology, education and history in his second year, and found the education papers “opened the door to thinking a lot more critically about the world”, and particular perceptions of Pacific people.
He chaired the student union, making his first media appearance in 1999 when he questioned why the university was sponsoring television programmes when the student union was forced to run a foodbank. Then he went on to take a masters in education, writing a thesis on the notion of choice in education, and whether it truly did provide the prospect of upward mobility. By this stage, he thought, he had begun to form his central philosophy and the motivation to be politically active. “I think I am in this because I am committed to the question of how do we rebalance?” he said.
After graduation, he worked for the university in a youth mentoring role, encouraging enrolments from families unfamiliar with tertiary education. Then he was a civil servant with the ministries of education and social development, and ran his own consultancy business training middle managers in leadership.
The university job took him to the UK, Philippines and the US, studying how their institutions worked to assist ‘first in family’ students to succeed. It played a role in the maturing of his political beliefs: “It solidified my pursuit of social justice and rebalancing the books”.
Academia also caused a spell of depression. “I went through stages where I didn’t feel good enough. I felt insufficient, felt inadequate.” He said his academic supervisor said it was because deep down, he didn’t feel clever enough. In response, he enrolled in a PhD. It also helped deepen his relationship with his future wife, Fia. Their partnership had begun as a friendship but developed thanks to her steadfast emotional support.
Initially, Collins thought, he lacked the confidence to go into politics, but after his overseas experiences, he felt ready because, he said “I felt I could represent a community which had been sidelined or on the periphery. Often people who represented us in politics didn’t stay in the area or worked through a political system… I thought there could be an opportunity for a homegrown local boy.”
The couple had bought a home in the western suburb of Glen Eden so they could nurse Fia’s terminally-ill mother. But upon entering politics, Collins felt it was important for him to live in the community he represented, so they moved to an apartment in Otahuhu, where they raised two daughters.
Collins was first elected in 2013, to the Ōtara-Papatoetoe local board. Ambitious and driven, in 2014 he sought the Labour nomination for Panmure but lost to the future minister Jenny Salesa, and so instead refocused on local politics. When he won the Manukau council seat vacated by Arthur Anae in 2016, his oath-taking ceremony was punctuated by singing from his proud family.
Collins entered a council that was split down the middle between those who liked mayor Phil Goff and those who didn’t. His response was intriguing: as a long-time Labour member, he might have been expected to blindly follow Goff, but instead straddled a line - generally cleaving to Goff’s left caucus but often taking an independent stance.
In particular, he spoke against Labour’s regional fuel tax, saying the 11.5 cent per litre impost on petrol would unfairly hurt his poorer constituents; he later said the resulting rift with Goff needed a Labour cabinet minister to intervene to broker peace.
He was keenly aware of his place and role in the Pacific community, but unafraid to take positions at times that ran counter to traditional values or placed him at odds with the narrative.
Deeply religious, he went on a “journey of understanding and empathy” around gay marriage and abortion and earlier this year he was tweeting about the marginalisation of transsexual people.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was a regular commentator on the need for vaccination, a media-friendly voice for overseas media such as the ABC and The Guardian even when there was some pushback from more conservative church voices. He also diverged again from Labour, arguing the government should have rolled out universal vaccines to south Auckland early. “The Crown got it completely wrong. So here I was, a Labour ward councillor, saying to Labour: ‘you’ve got it wrong’.”
He also spoke out about how he saw the television show Police Ten-7 as reaffirming stereotypes - he called it “low-level chewing gum TV” - and about the proliferation of fast-food deserts in poorer parts of south Auckland.
That criticism of Police Ten-7 led to a death threat, and the bomb squad sweeping his office and his Ōtāhuhu apartment. He had to explain both that and the swastika graffiti to his eldest daughter, then nine, which he said caused a “depth of sadness that my poor girl is experiencing this”.
What appeared to particularly pain him was how those who opposed him didn’t share his measured approach to the debate. He wanted things to be more polite. He didn’t want to say it, but he didn’t like the rambunctious way one of his mayoral opponents, Leo Molloy, conducted his campaign.
When Collins did run for the mayoralty in 2022, on a platform of affordable housing, free public transport and climate change action, there was a feeling in the ranks that Labour wanted anybody but Collins.
But he played the politics cannily, floating his interest early and forcing a nomination process which led to official party backing and support, even if Goff’s own endorsement came late. It didn’t bother him - he intended to keep disagreeing, politely, when he needed to.
His defeat to Wayne Brown, underlined the painful lessons he’d learned on the campaign trail. Collins knew he had support among young, the left-leaning, and the rump of Polynesian voters in the south; where he lacked backing was in the older and whiter central and northern suburbs, and he stoically made a play for those areas with repeat visits to often hostile crowds. He’d wanted to be an “inclusive, open and honest” leader who engaged everyone.
After his defeat, Collins publicly renounced local politics and briefly went back into consultancy work, but it seemed inevitable he would return to the fray and he agreed to take the 11th list place and subsequently a seat in Parliament, with the Green Party. He said then that Labour had, perhaps, taken Māori and Pacific votes “for granted”.
While Collins may have stood somewhat apart from Labour’s south Auckland heavyweights, he was conscious of helping others up the ladder behind him.
Among those he mentored were Auckland councillor for the Manukau ward, Lotu Fuli, and the deputy chair of the Māngere local board, Harry Toleafoa.
In 2021, Toleafoa, who had met Collins when he was mentoring Pacific youth into tertiary education, described him as “incredibly encouraging, really affirming. He has a great sense of humour. He has a really calm temperament: he’s excellent at handling a crowd.
He said Collins’ humour and confidence was rooted in his deep connection to his family. “He’s secure in himself, secure in his family and knows exactly what he does.” While Wayne Brown - whose children are all long grown up - installed a beer fridge in the Mayoral office when he was successful, Collins’ plan would have been to devote a corner of his office to toys for his daughters, whom he spoke about frequently.
The community advocate Dave Letele, who was with Collins when he died at a charitable event in central Auckland, said that Collins “meant a lot to people like me coming from south Auckland. Some people who leave south Auckland don’t come back but he kept fighting for our community. That’s what he was doing when he died, that’s what he was there for.”
The Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, said Collins was “very clear in his values. And he was very clear about who he was in public life to serve.”
It’s just one week since Collins gave his maiden speech to Parliament as a new Green MP. In it, he referred to his roots, talking of being a “son of Samoan immigrants who made the mighty Ōtara 274 - Southside hard”.
The Greens leader, James Shaw, said yesterday: “ Efeso Collins was a good man… We needed him. Every day that he came to work he carried the expectation of his south Auckland community… he made it look easy, fun, even.”