Mau than a second act

Monday, 15 July 2024

From her prominent roles in television to her leadership in the NZ #MeToo movement, Ali Mau’s journey has been one of resilience and passion. Now, at 59, she’s channelling her efforts into Tika, a digital platform aimed at providing justice for survivors of sexual harm and proving that her best work might still be ahead.

This is a story about things going wrong, and things going right, and good people and awful situations.

Alison Jane Mau is one of the good people in this scenario. You’ll know her as Ali Mau (pronounced more), the Australian journalist who moved across the ditch after meeting her former husband, TVNZ news reader Simon Dallow.

For 30 years, Ali’s dance card was full: presenting the 6pm news alongside Dallow, working with industry titans Paul Henry and the late Paul Holmes, becoming a founding member of Seven Sharp and sharing a Radio Live microphone with Willie Jackson.

The 59-year-old eventually used her powerful voice to become a champion of NZ’s #MeToo movement, heading up a Stuff investigative team for five years which uncovered sexual harassment in the workplace (more on this later).

Two things to know about Ali: she has a deep sense of social justice and she hates giving interviews.

“I did my last magazine interview in 2011 before I was outed by a woman’s magazine,” says Ali about her same-sex relationship with partner Karleen Edmonds, who works in the non-profit sector.

“I was gaslit and the paparazzi stalked my family. It was so awful I vowed never to do another one.”

The reason Ali is speaking to me today is to spread the word about Tika, a digital platform she co-founded with Auckland barrister Zoe Lawton. The first of its kind in Aotearoa, Tika aims to provide access to justice for those who’ve experienced sexual harm at home, work, school or online.

“Tika will be available free to anyone who’s been the victim of physical or verbal sexual harm,” says Ali with a faint, almost imperceptible, Australian accent. “That includes women and men, Māori, Pasifika, migrant communities and the LGBTQ community.”

Figures show that 1-in-3 Kiwis will experience sexual harassment or abuse in their life. And a whopping 92% of that sexual harm will go unreported.

Roll those numbers around your brain for a moment.

“I’m still shocked by how high those figures are,” admits Ali from the Muriwai home she shares with Karleen, their dog Frankie and horse Bex.

“So many survivors don’t report abuse because they fear not being believed or they’re nervous about trying to negotiate the legal space alone. Many don’t know for sure that what’s happened to them is illegal.”

Tika — translated from te reo Māori as truth, justice and fairness — is a secure and private online platform for people to report their experiences, including the name of their alleged perpetrator. The Tika database, which launches later this year, will then be cross-checked for any other registered clients who may have been harmed by the same person.

“Survivors will be advised if anyone else has registered the same person and they’ll be given legal advice and a choice of reporting pathways, which might be the criminal justice pathway via the police or the civil justice pathway via the Human Rights Commission which offers a mediation process for sexual harassment. If that isn’t suitable for the survivor, they can apply for their case to proceed to the Human Rights Review Tribunal.”

There’s also the option of bringing a civil case in the High Court.

It’s never easy interviewing a fellow journalist: there’s the worry they’ll try to take over the interview, turn up their nose at certain questions or demand copy approval.

Not the affable Ali: with those big blue eyes goes a big heart.

It’s why she and Zoe have spent almost a year navigating a series of mazes to set up Tika, including self funding it.

“Since I was made redundant from Stuff in May last year I’ve been eking out my redundancy payment and relying heavily on my partner. We’re currently working on getting sponsorship because Zoe and I need to eat!”

Besides, she adds, her “final sprint” is too important to ignore.

“I’ve written about these issues for a long time but am still frustrated by the lack of systemic change. Our hope is that Tika will be the key to raising NZ’s very low sexual harm reporting rates and provide access to under-utilised criminal, regulatory and civil justice processes.”

It’s also personal: as a TV reporter in late 90s Melbourne, Ali experienced sexual harassment in the newsroom.

“It wasn’t physical touching but involved extreme verbal harassment. When the #MeToo stories started to break globally, it was extremely triggering for me. I kept waiting for someone in NZ to start chasing stories of sexual abuse here.”

Spoiler alert: no one did. Eventually, reluctantly, Ali put up her hand. Her two worlds — of journalism and women’s rights — didn’t so much collide as agreeably overlap at Stuff where she led the team investigating sexual harm in the legal, academic and fast food industries.

For her efforts, Ali was subjected to abuse, stern lawyer’s letters and, once, a newspaper cartoon depicting her as a witch on a broomstick.

None of it stuck. “I’m so proud of the work we did and the difference we made in people’s lives. Besides, as a female journalist you grow a pretty thick skin.”

When Ali was made redundant from that job, the fifth redundancy of her media career, she did a lot of navel gazing about where her future lay.

“I wondered if I should stay in journalism, given the appetite was waning for the kind of long form investigative stories I love to write, the kind that take months. Or if I should use the knowledge I’d built up over the past five years to do something in the NGO space where I could platform as many survivors as possible.”

After a period of licking her wounds, Ali chose the second option, partnering with Zoe whose mahi in this area had already led to changes in the legal industry.

Ali grew up with a journalist father and grandfather, both of whom worked for Melbourne newspapers. There was never any pressure to follow suit and both her older sister, who runs a company in New York, and her younger sister, an artist, didn’t.

But the young Ali was good at storytelling and even though a teacher advised her not to bother with journalism, she mustered her best I’ll-show- you attitude and landed the only cadetship going — at a newspaper in a rural Victorian town whose defining feature was wheat fields.

“I was 18 and desperately missed the city but I stuck it out for two years, eventually landing a job at the Melbourne Herald and escaping back to the city.”

A Contiki tour to Europe in 1988 set her fate when she met Dallow. London is also where Ali dipped her toe in the television market. “I started off writing scripts for BBC World but one day the boss said to me, have you got a nice jacket because I’m putting you on air?”

She did not have a nice jacket. She also wasn’t sure that TV journalism, which wasn’t highly regarded by the print journos in her family, was where her talents lay.

“But I ended up loving it, especially the adrenaline buzz of live television.”

After moving to Auckland in 1993, Ali had two children with Dallow (daughter Paris, now 26 and son Joel, 22) and filled her CV with on-air roles at every leading Kiwi broadcaster.

The common denominator throughout her career has been a desire to make things better for women.

“I’m often asked what motivates me and it’s anger. In my professional work I’m furious at the power structures that hold women back. In NZ we like to congratulate ourselves that we were the first country to give women the vote but that was more than 100 years ago. Women still face untold levels of violence and abuse, they’re underpaid at work and undervalued at home. But because I’m a woman, I’m not allowed to be angry or speak out. However, I’m at the stage of my life where I can happily say what I think so that’s what I’m doing.”

Ali turns 60 on Valentine’s Day next year, a milestone she’d like to celebrate overseas.

“People keep saying, you have to have a big party but that’s the last thing I want. Karleen and I had a trip to Spain planned but Covid scuppered that so it’s time to revisit those plans.”

She doesn’t really have an off switch: when Ali isn’t working on Tika, she’ll be riding her beloved horse. Having not jumped a horse for 30 years, she and Bex recently took out honours at the Horse of the Year competition in Hastings.

“We won third best in NZ in our championship class, which absolutely blew my mind. Competing was a lifelong bucket list item and now I’m a little bit obsessed.”

Having devoted most of her life to distilling complex issues into digestible stories, Ali is comfortable rising at 5am each day to write her second book (her first involved ghost-writing an account of the first NZ woman to undergo gender reassignment surgery in 1969).

This time around she’s two-thirds through a non-fiction manuscript she’s keeping under wraps.

“I’m too anxious to talk about it yet. What I can say is that writing a novel is like pulling teeth with pliers! But writers are compelled to write so I have to do this. As with Tika, it’s proof that you’re never too old to do something that’s important to you. Society wants to hide older women away but we don’t have to accept that. Live your dreams and do what you want!”