Efeso Collins and the house of love

Vale 💚

“It’s hard to be poor, it’s expensive to be poor, and moreover, public discourse is making it socially unacceptable to be poor. Whether it’s bashing on beneficiaries, dragging our feet towards a living wage, throwing shade on school breakfast programmes, or restricting people’s ability to collectively bargain for fairer working conditions, we must do better to lift aspirations and the lived realities of all our people.

To that end, I want to say to this House with complete surety that the neoliberal experiment of the 1980s has failed. The economics of creating unemployment to manage inflation is farcical when domestic inflation in New Zealand has been driven by big corporates making excessive profits. It’s time to draw a line in the sand, and alongside my colleagues here in Te Pāti Kākāriki, we’ve come as the pallbearers of neoliberalism, to bury these shallow, insufferable ideas once and for all.

And this, sir, is our act of love.” - Fa'anānā Efeso Collins’ maiden statement to the House last week.

Photo by Robert Kitchen

To serve your community with the love and tenacity of Efeso Collins is something we should all aspire to. How grateful we should be for his mahi and legacy, and the road map he left of commitment to others.

At a time when so much of what we see in this world is immense pain and suffering - Efeso was a lighthouse.

In the darkest nights we look to our guides, those who are continuing against the odds - they give us light. They give us hope.

We are so heartbroken, weary, bruised and broken by the pain we see in our communities and in countries we will never visit. Our social media feeds are full of agonies we cannot stop, horror we cannot cease, and inhumanity on a scale we cannot process.

And still we try.

We try and try and try.

We try to find any light to share.

In his maiden speech Efeso said - “There’s a saying in Samoan, “E le tu fa’amauga se tagata” – no one stands alone, no one succeeds alone – and, for me, no one suffers alone.”

You are not alone. Our hearts break together for all of the injustices in our communities and around the world.

Our hearts break for a family who have lost so much, so profoundly.

In the gaping hole that is left with losses so hard to fathom, we have a chance to hold space for those who need it most.

I have said before that community care is a home. A home we all live in. A home that is under construction. We hold the roof and when our arms shake and become too sore to hold the roof any longer, another set of hands reaches up - we can rest as they keep this home safe for all who live within it.

Every act we do in this house matters. When we work, when we rest, when we provide shelter for those most in need, we are serving. We are reaching for liberation, for freedom for all, for bread and roses and a river for our mokopuna to bathe in.

This is our house. It’s very important existence is testament to our love for community.

Efeso said love is an act of courage and it is. This house, our house, is built on love and courage.

It stands strong, even as we weep for this great loss.

“Paolo Freire, in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, said love is an act of courage, not fear; love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is a commitment to their cause, the cause of liberation.

The most recent election campaign left many in our Māori communities bruised and targeted for the perceived privileges supposedly bestowed upon them. Shared governance is a rich concept about how we include those who’ve been excluded for far too long in the work of this House and the democratic institutions that are fundamental to our collective wellbeing.

We are Tangata Tiriti and we have nothing to fear.

As a New Zealand-born Samoan living in South Auckland, I’ve experienced, written about, and spoken about racism in this country.

I’ve also been on a well-publicised journey in understanding the needs and views of our rainbow communities, and I have a long way to go. And my message to whānau who often experience the sharp end of discrimination – disabled, ethnic, rainbow, brown, seniors, and neurodiverse – is thank you for trusting us with the responsibility of facilitating a new discussion on how we move forward together and make possible what was once deemed impossible.” - Fa'anānā Efeso Collins.

Shelter now. In this place that you helped create. In this house of love, the house of courage, this house of learning, this house of action - we will heal together and find strength.