‘Yes, we are racist in New Zealand’

Newshub’s Oriini Kaipara is an unstoppable force – a mother-of-four who once wanted to be a boxer and now fronts the nightly news, and she is only 37. Emily Brookes discovers she has a lot more she wants to get done.

ORIINI Kaipara is sick. I meet her in a cafe around the corner from her new workplace Three, but only after 18 hours of fraught text messaging with the Three PR. Kaipara is sick, I was warned last night. She has a cold, a croaky voice, she wasn’t on air today and won’t be tomorrow. But she’s very determined, she really wants to do the interview.

And then, at 8.15 that morning, the official word: She will do it. I soon learn that a sick Oriini Kaipara has the energy and verve of most of us on our best day.

Kaipara is one to throw herself into things. A mother of four, she was a radio broadcaster and documentary film-maker before moving to television news. You know her because in 2019 she made headlines for becoming the first woman with a moko kauae, a traditional chin tattoo, to present a mainstream news show when she filled in on TVNZ’s noon bulletin. She was a competitive boxer once – more about that later – and she loves golf.

Now, at 37, Kaipara is the newly-minted presenter of Newshub Live at 4.30pm, having made the shift from TVNZ a few months ago.

After that groundbreaking midday news report Kaipara, then employed as a reporter for the te reo bulletin Te Karere, made intermittent Englishlanguage appearances. She left TVNZ in part because she had been freelancing there and couldn’t secure a permanent contract, but also because she felt she had gone as far as she could reporting.

‘‘At Three, I saw there were big changes happening,’’ she says. It’s hard to tell if her burning eyes are due to fever or fervour. ‘‘I wanted to continue advancing and presenting [in the] mainstream. There were offers for lots of reporter roles, but I thought, mmmm it’s not the same. I want to get out of the grind.’’

At the time her new post was announced, she said she was ‘‘look[ing] forward to leading effective and positive change where Ma¯ ori issues and interests are respectfully conveyed and relayed on our platforms, where our voices and stories are told fairly, accurately and objectively’’.

In the great barometer of public opinion that is the Stuff comments section, views on her statement were divided. While there was general goodwill toward Kaipara, some wondered how someone whose job was reading a teleprompter could represent anyone, and indeed whether they should? ‘‘Journalist[s] should be presenting the news impartially and without prejudice,’’ offered one reader. ‘‘If she wanted to represent anyone she should become an advocate or commentator.’’ ‘‘I’m not sure why race would matter when reading the news but I’m sure she will do a good job,’’ wrote another.

Kaipara isn’t unsympathetic to this view. ‘‘When I jumped over, it was like, what am I actually achieving just by reading the news?’’ she says. ‘‘Is it the fame, being a well-known person on a key news programme, or is it more than that?’’

The answer, she says, came ‘‘from my own people, from

Ma¯ ori people, people I’ve never met before saying: ‘Just seeing you, spending a whole 10-hour day in a Treaty of Waitangi workshop with corporates trying to explain what that is, coming home to see someone like you with a moko kauae, bilingual, just introducing little bits of words, hearing Ma¯ ori on a mainstream channel, does so much for my people.’’’

When Kaipara was growing up in the 1980s and 90s in the Bay of Plenty, there weren’t a lot of Ma¯ ori faces on her black and white, bunnyeared television for her to look up to. There was Manu on Play School, there was Mihingarangi Forbes, in the very early stages of her career, and there was then-Te Karere presenter, Tini Molyneux. ‘‘Tini Molyneux was really the idol,’’ says Kaipara. ‘‘She still is.’’

Like Molyneux, Kaipara was raised bilingual in te reo and English (she is also Tu¯ hoe, like Molyneux, and of Nga¯ ti Awa,

Tu¯ wharetoa and Nga¯ ti Rangi descent).

Young Kaipara would avidly wait for the Te Karere bulletin: ‘‘I wasn’t interested in news, I was interested in the Ma¯ ori ladies speaking Ma¯ ori on the TV for four minutes a day.’’ In those days, there was little te reo to be heard in broadcasting. That’s perhaps why a bilingual kid, schooled in the kura kaupapa system, didn’t consider journalism as a career path.

‘‘Journalism chose me, to be honest,’’ Kaipara says. When she had her second child, aged 17, Kaipara’s mother told her she either had to study, or find a job. Flicking through the job ads in the Western

Leader one day, Kaipara came across calls for applications for Ma¯ ori and Pasifka scholarships to study at South Seas Film School. She applied. She was successful.

‘‘Because it was a scholarship, quite a big one as well, I saw it as my only opportunity really at that point in life to carry on,’’ Kaipara says. After the one-year course she did some work experience at Ma¯ ori Television children’s show

Pu¯ kana, then spent about a year honing the craft with a variety of independent Ma¯ ori producers.

Kaipara had, she says, ‘‘a few rebellious moments’’. In her early-20s – spontaneous, always up for a challenge, perhaps not much has changed – she decided she wanted to be a boxer. It was a short-lived hobby.

The first time Kaipara got into the ring she lost to a younger girl, and on top of the bruised ego came a bloody nose. ‘‘My mum said, ‘You are never doing anything like that again’... She was going to get into the ring and bash [my opponent]. There was more drama out of the ring than there was inside.’’

So she bowed out of boxing, but not before it led to a job opportunity that would define her career. A couple of mates worked at the iwi radio news service Ruia Mai and asked her to conduct an interview as a ‘‘boxing expert’’. ‘‘I wasn’t,’’ Kaipara says. ‘‘It just happened because I speak Ma¯ ori and there’s not enough Ma¯ ori speakers in the country.’’

Nonetheless, she caught the attention of the station manager, who asked her if she’d be interested in becoming a reporter. ‘‘I said, ‘What do reporters do?’ I had no idea.’’ The learning curve wasn’t always easy, but she had plenty of mentors. Shane Taurima, Tina Wickliffe, Annabelle LeeMather,

‘I internalised for a few years about exactly what I believed was Ma¯ori reporting. The way we were pushing that message across from Ma¯ori media, it didn’t feel right for me. Like we’re trying to be too much like everybody else. I just want to be authentically Ma¯ori.’ ORIINI KAIPARA

Piripi Taylor, Scotty Morrison: Ruia Mai was a breeding ground for top Ma¯ ori journalists. Kaipara moved to Ma¯ ori Television via the documentary strand Waka Huia – ‘‘talking to the old people,’’ as she puts it – until a call from the head of news in 2005 saw her move into reporting. There, she says, the emphasis was on being a journalist first.

‘‘My identity crisis, I’ll be frank, happened while I was working amongst Ma¯ ori media.’’ In Ma¯ ori broadcasting, says Kaipara, there was a feeling that to be recognised in the mainstream the presentation needed to go into direct competition with it, what Kaipara describes as being ‘‘more than just Ma¯ ori’’.

‘‘I internalised for a few years about exactly what I believed was Ma¯ ori reporting,’’ she says. ‘‘The way we were pushing that message across from Ma¯ ori media, it didn’t feel right for me. Like we’re trying to be too much

like everybody else. I just want to be authentically Ma¯ ori.’’

Of course, ‘‘authentically

Ma¯ ori’’ is a tricky phrase. Kaipara is at pains to stress she can’t purport to represent all

Ma¯ ori; hers is a cultural identification based on a childhood immersed in Tu¯ hoe culture and tradition, and te reo. She grew up during the Ma¯ ori Renaissance. Kaipara’s grandparents were beaten for speaking te reo at school. It’s nothing new to say the movement to revitalise tikanga and revive te reo has created divisions not only between

Pa¯ keha¯ and Ma¯ ori, but within Ma¯ oridom itself.

‘‘Some Ma¯ ori feel displaced by the likes of me, who can speak Ma¯ ori.’’ Kaipara says she is considered ‘‘privileged Ma¯ ori’’ because she was raised bilingual, even though it was the source of some bullying when she was a child. She struggles with the designation of privileged, as she does with what she calls ‘‘trendy’’ performative Ma¯ oritanga – tribal tattoos with no cultural significance, haka for the purposes of pure entertainment, and people speaking te reo without any knowledge of, or interest in learning, what it means either literally or culturally.

‘‘If it doesn’t mean anything, don’t do it,’’ she says. ‘‘If you don’t believe in it, don’t do it. And that’s OK! I don’t want people to be like’’ – and here she drops all accurate pronunciation in perfect mimicry of cringingly phonetic tokenism – ‘‘‘Oh here’s a karakia!’ If you don’t believe in it, then don’t do it. Don’t waste your time, but don’t tick a box either, because it means more than that. Doing a mihi you know, te¯na¯ koe, how are you – make it sincere as opposed to, tena-ko-ay, I’ve got to do it for my Treaty of Waitangi thing. Just don’t do it!’’

For Kaipara, te reo is the foundation of Ma¯ oritanga, and what shapes her ‘‘difference’’ as a wa¯ hine. She is a staunch advocate for te reo and passionate about preserving and growing the language, but says she is ‘‘not here to shove it down anyone’s throat’’. The phrases she uses during a Newshub broadcast are, she points out, translations of those that viewers know well in English. ‘‘Anyone who religiously watches the news programme would be able to recite what the presenter’s going to say [next],’’ she says, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out that e haere ake nei is ‘‘coming up next’’, or po¯ ma¯ rie is ‘‘goodnight’’.

She does a short mihi at the top and bottom of the show, and uses bilingual place names,

Ta¯ maki Makaurau for Auckland and Te Waipounamu for the South Island. ‘‘Those are official names, so I don’t think I’m pushing too many boundaries, but I am conscious about how much is too much, and I think that’s enough for now. It’s a warm-up, you’re warming people up to hearing it, to seeing it, to being OK with it.’’

And really, there’s a lot of warming up to do. Kaipara insists she doesn’t read comments about her performance, but she is well aware that newsreaders, Ma¯ ori or not, who employ te reo are often subject to complaints. ‘‘A mihi that lasts for two seconds overshadows the whole 30-minute bulletin.’’

Is New Zealand racist? ‘‘It’s a broad statement, but I’d have to say yes. Yes, we are racist here in New Zealand.’’ That’s across the board, though. While Kaipara has been the victim of racist views directed towards Ma¯ ori, she also grew up in a Ma¯ ori community and is under no illusions about the attitudes that can thrive within. ‘‘The language that was spoken around us – I’m just talking about everyday language, the verbiage that was around when I was a kid – it’s not really nice. A lot of F-bombs and B-bombs about other races because they’re the enemy type of thing.’’

The way out, she thinks, is education, which isn’t to say an anti-racism module in NCEA; this kind of education comes from visibility, from awareness. Like a woman with a moko kauae integrating te reo into a mainstream, English news broadcast. But Kaipara says she’s not done with her own education. After all, there are three official languages in New Zealand. ‘‘I’d like to learn sign language,’’ she says, ‘‘so one day, when it comes to Sign Language Week, I’m signing!’’

There’s little doubt that Kaipara is ambitious. The move to a permanent presenting role at Three is a goal achieved, but there’s plenty more to tick off the list. She’d like to host a foreign news programme, she says, on a platform like Al Jazeera, although she’s aware that presents a particular challenge. ‘‘Our media industry here is going through a major paradigm shift in terms of accepting te reo and moko kanohi like myself as part of the mainstream fabric of Aotearoa. Whereas overseas... I’m not too sure how accepting or open they will be to having me present their news.’’

But the ultimate goal is to permanently anchor the 6pm news at Newshub. You know? I think she’ll do it.