voting in the blood

Time for another post about the upcoming election at home... less than two weeks to go...

I was looking through some online records today, trying to find some documents so I could pin down some specific dates around Hamuera's time in the USA. I was on a genealogy website, looking through a bunch of records they had uploaded... 'Te Punga' showed up several times across the vairous records: phonebook entries and arrival records of ships for my two great-uncles Uncle Martin and Uncle Fatty who had doctorates and spent time researching/ studying in the UK; ships' passenger lists for Hamuera as he travelled to Springfield (he spent a day or two in Honolulu on the way!); enlistment and military honours records for Grandad and Uncle Paul during WWII; and, by far the greatest number of hits, electoral records for voting in NZ general elections.

In one page, arranged in time order, a whole lineup of Te Pungas came of voting age in a gentle and neat pile. Starting with Hamuera and Lydia, who were both enrolled to vote in the 1919 election (Lydia had arrived in New Zealand for the first time only 6 years earlier; I am yet to find her naturalisation records, or even whether she needed to legally naturalise in order to vote). For the election, they voted from Lower Hutt because they lived in the original family house on White's Line in Waiwhetu (yes, years before the present marae was built there). For the later elections, they appear (on separate rolls, of course: Hamuera on the Maori roll and Lydia on the General) as residents of Halcombe and ultimately, for Hamuera, Auckland. After a few elections, Martha D Te Punga joins the voting members of the family, and just a couple of years later, Hamuera Paora. Finally all of the siblings appear on electoral rolls, and finally the grandchildren start to arrive: Anne Te Punga in Gisborne, and then all the cousins who followed. Because quite a few of Mum's first cousins are women who have since taken on married names, I realised this was the first time I'd seen some of them as 'Te Punga' in an official as opposed to social capacity... I mean, they're all Te Pungas all the time, but on these electoral rolls they appear as such. In black and white.

It made me think about what it means to vote. This is a coming of age activity, in which members of our whanau take advantage of the right they have to participate in our democratic system. For some reason, seeing all of the names there lined up like that, a small expression of almost a hundred years of Te Punga participation in voting, made me realise again the significance of this act.

I realised that voting is in my blood. This is who we are - it's not all we are, we have other allegiances and affiliations too - but this is a part of who we are: we play our part, we pay attention, we do our bit, we vote for those who can't.


I know I said I'd try to hold off on becoming a party political broadcast, but I have to say that whoever you vote for just make sure it's not National or Act. Don't be sucked into the lines about 'stability' which scare people into voting for the unknown or for change... unless you are happy with a status quo in which more of NZ's children are living below the poverty limit and less of NZ's rich pay tax; a status quo in which Maori and Pasifika people are framed as dole-bludging criminals rather than a community which makes a higher contribution to NZ's economy than we receive from it; a status quo in which financial firms owned by white boys who have been friends since they went to their flash private schools are 'bailed out' for many times the amount that is spent on settlements with Maori over historical breaches of the Treaty; a status quo in which a Prime Minister is happy to lie to our faces regularly in any language as long as it's English. Feel free to make your choice on election day, but when you vote for tax cuts and decreased government spending remember that this means less money for health and education.  

(In case you're not in NZ and familiar with the 'ghost chips' ad, check out the ad this one is referencing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIYvD9DI1ZA)