By dint of a high list placement or being catapaulted into a safe seat, new faces will head to Wellington after October 14’s election. They're the sure things. In the latest part of this occasional series, David Williams talks to Laura Trask, number 10 on the Act Party list.
I feel woefully under-prepared as we take a seat outside a popular café in one of Christchurch’s southern suburbs. Laura Trask orders a cappuccino with cinnamon, and I ask for a hot chocolate.
There’s little trace of the 38-year-old on social media.
Her official Act Party profile lists her as having owned a small business yet she doesn’t appear, in her married name, on the Companies Office. (Her husband does, though, and she’s the former shareholder of a company in her maiden name.)
She’s not been the officer of a charity.
Let’s get something of a pre-inspection checklist of Trask’s views.
What are her thoughts on climate change?
“There’s been a lot of conflict in the last few years around are humans making climate change come quicker, and then there’s all the people that are climate deniers. What we all need to agree on is our climate is changing – whether we’re making it go quicker, it’s changing.”
So, is climate change human-induced?
“I personally think we are speeding it up, for sure,” she says. But without the likes of China and India reducing emissions, New Zealand is going to bear the brunt of climate change, she says.
“Obviously, the Greens have all kinds of other policies around like reducing emissions and stuff, but I think it’s a little bit too late on some of that and we need to adapt now.”
(Climate experts say there’s still time to act, and doomism – the idea it’s too late and nothing can be done – is another tool being used to delay action to reduce emissions.)
Is she concerned about the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, or 15-minute cities?
“Don’t even go there,” she says. “It’s not a thing for me. What we’re seeing overseas is a pattern of distrust in government.”
She leaves the door ajar by saying when there’s smoke there’s sometimes fire, so perhaps not all of it is a conspiracy. However, she says that’s another deflection from the campaign’s core issues.
Transgender rights? She’s all for them. “I couldn’t care if you were purple.”
What Act is against, she says, is groups having specific extra rights. And being able to have conversations freely is the way society progresses.
Which brings us to co-governance.
Trask mentions her children and husband are Māori. “So it’s extremely important that we uphold their culture and the values and everything that makes them Māori but it’s also what makes us Kiwi.”
However, it’s unfair if people who aren’t elected are appointed to governance positions, she says. She’s also against what she calls race-based health waiting lists.
(As my colleague Jo Moir reported, experts say clinical need always takes precedence in surgery waiting lists, and health data show ethnicity is a factor in those who are disproportionately waiting for surgery.)
Trask says “this stuff” has happened without consultation, so Act’s proposed referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi would properly define Treaty principles so “it’s all agreed”.
Isn’t there a danger, though, of defining something so old, that is the basis of things like Treaty settlements, that already has a written-word meaning?
Act is 100 percent behind Treaty settlements, and righting past wrongs, Trask says. The problem is “when we’re talking about a certain group of people in New Zealand having more privileges just because they’re that group”.
“That’s when we’re starting to find that it’s not a really fair democracy any more.”
In a recent opinion piece, Anaru Eketone, an associate professor in social and community work at the University of Otago, wrote: “I cannot help but laugh when I hear scaremongering about the Māori elite coming to take over the country. Not even the most ardent of Māori nationalists have that fantasy.”
Given her lack of public profile, my opening questions to Trask are: who are you, and where do you come from?
“I didn’t think I’d be a politician. If you told me this 10 years ago I would have absolutely laughed.”
The mum of two children, a girl aged seven and a 10-year-old boy, chooses her career as the entry point to her story.
She started as a pharmacy technician in Christchurch, with some study on the side. Then she moved to Wellington, got married, and had her first child.
The family business – that of her parents, Bill and Sharyn McClure – was fire evacuation and emergency response planning. The McClures were sizing up buying a similar business in Auckland, and chatted to Trask and her husband about taking it on.
“I always said I wouldn’t work for him,” she said of her father.
However, her pharmacy registration had lapsed, and her husband was working crazy hours as a project manager in the construction industry. She thought it would be good to work for themselves, and have a lifestyle balance – even though it meant cutting down to one wage, and moving north.
“I knew the business model, which helped, as I’d worked for them on and off part time growing up, as a student.”
They grew the Auckland business by 300-400 percent, and Trask’s husband and a friend bought the Auckland business from her dad. A move back to Christchurch has necessitated frequent travel back and forth to the North Island.
When asked to put her hand up for Act, Trask was reluctant, at first.
“We’re starting to do so well with work; I’m in a really good financial position with that and I enjoy what I’m doing,” she says.
“But the conversations I’m having with people from working with Act, and going to places like the home shows and talking to the public, I really felt motivated that if I didn’t do something now, would I kick myself in the future?”
“I’ve voted for almost every political party in New Zealand, except for the Greens.”
Trask is the eldest of three children, with a younger sister and youngest brother.
Her mum, Sharyn, was one of eight children, who were raised in state housing. She left school at 16 and became a hairdresser.
Her dad, Bill, an Englishman, came to the country in the 1970s with four other lads. They all stayed and married Kiwis. He went on to become a general manager at food company Kraft, before starting the family business, with the help of her mum.
It isn’t necessary to ask the classic Christchurch question – she offers she attended Burnside High School. “My mum went there.”
Initially, the family lived in the Papanui High zone but then they moved.
Politics were discussed at the family dinner table.
“My mum was a staunch Labour supporter, and my dad a staunch National supporter,” she says. Political conflict came up in conversation, which Trask reckoned stimulated her interest.
“Because my parents both had differing views it allowed me to develop my own perspective, and my own views. So that was kind of cool.”
Trask characterises her younger self as a classic swing voter – “I’ve voted for almost every political party in New Zealand, except for the Greens.”
What honed her politics was “growing up, owning a business, and realising the realities of the world”. “Also, how small businesses are affected when it comes to rules and regulation from the Government.”
She didn’t always agree with Act’s policies but says for the most part they were common sense. Like not going “overkill” with rules and regulations on businesses, so they can expand and innovate.
“That just really resonated with me.”
Trask lives agonisingly close to the Banks Peninsula electorate she’s standing in. A resounding issue she’s hearing in electorate meetings – “and I feel the same way” – is when it comes to conservation, ensuring what we already have is preserved and protected.
There’s no door-knocking in Banks Peninsula because Act is running a party-vote-only campaign, because of the party’s “scope and size”.
But hasn’t it collected more than $1.5 million in donations?
There has been a good run of support, Trasks says, but given smaller parties get smaller chunks of government funding to assist with the election – the broadcasting allocation – “that money is going solely on our full campaign”.
She hopes the National Party wins Banks Peninsula this time, but, in the future, “I’d love to be potentially the MP”.
Trask says she’s been flung into politics and didn’t expect to be so high on the Act list.
“I have no set, specific goal – other than the fact that, with health and safety, I feel like we are in a period where we need to be careful with how much we’re regulating around it.”
Her big goal as a parliamentarian is health and safety reform. She also likes the idea of being involved in Act’s proposed Ministry of Regulation, which would police new rules and regulations.
Some industries – Trask names forestry and ports – could do with “mega-improvement”, she says. But for some small and medium-sized businesses, health and safety is a hurdle “that is holding people back”.
Over-regulation is turning people off, she says. People should feel they’re getting a benefit from these rules not just ticking boxes because they have to.
Yes, she notes, her family’s business is part of that regulated industry, and fewer regulations might have an effect on the company.
“So for me to come around and say, actually, it’s getting too much, it’s kind of ironic.”
Trask says many health and safety regulation changes in 2018 were good and not “majorly restrictive”. However, the industry felt it wasn’t properly consulted.
The example she gives is people requiring assistance – “If someone’s able to access your building, or go up a level via an elevator, for example, then you must now get them out”.
Owners of existing buildings may now require new evacuation equipment, and training for staff.
(This requirement triggers memories of the do-it-yourself rescue from the 18-storey Forsyth Barr building in central Christchurch after the February 2011 earthquake, in which people abseiled from windows after fifteen flights of stairs collapsed.)
While the rule is fair, Trask says the regulation doesn’t tie in nicely with the Building Act, and is a “hidden cost” because many owners of new buildings aren’t initially aware of it.
Even consultants, like herself, have a pre-start health and safety checklist including: is it raining, could I slip over, is my vehicle in good condition?
“This is meant to be a daily thing, and I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I’m ‘tick, tick, tick’ through that file. And I just think, how many other businesses are doing this?”
GST, tariffs and inflation
We meander through Act policies.
The party has an awesome alternative Budget, Trask says, including removing tariffs on things like clothing and dried food goods, and making it cheaper to build homes by the Government sharing GST with councils.
(The money, to be spent on infrastructure, will only be granted if councils promise to build more homes.)
But when Labour announced it wanted GST removed from fruit and vegetables, Act leader David Seymour accused the party of “GST meddling”. Isn’t sharing money with councils a similar complication to a simple tax?
Trask says it’s probably more complex to take GST off an array of different products, and “it’s just another thing that business don’t require right now”.
How about removing tariffs? Won’t that be a problem for international trade?
Some would be quite easy to remove straight away, Trask says. Generally, tariffs would be removed from things not made in New Zealand “like all our canned tomatoes”, dried pasta, and other daily staples. (The Wattie’s website notes its tomatoes come from Hawkes Bay.)
“The other things that we’re going to do is obviously cut the government spending significantly, and when you cut the government spending down that should, in turn, bring inflation down.”
The causes of inflation are complex, of course. There might be some correlation with government spending and inflation, but there are other factors, such as high oil prices.
“You are right, it’s definitely a part of it,” Trask says. “There are other things that are external factors that sometimes you cannot control, like a war, and the fact that we are at the bottom of the ocean and getting trade and things in. But you can quite quickly tap back on that [inflation] if the government stopped spending.”
Where is the biggest waste? “Don’t ask me this,” Trask says. “There’s so many different areas.”
She picks out bureaucrats and consultants, and wasteful spending without getting a final product – like $51 million spent on the abandoned cross-harbour cycle and walkway.
“We don’t need to be doing that.”
Trask talks about youth crime, including ram raids in Christchurch.
Is the idea of building a 200-bed youth justice facility, and ankle bracelets for serious young offenders, backed up by research?
Says Trask: “I think the research does show us that being kind and caring in the current model isn’t working because we’ve got higher crime rates.”
Higher crime rates?
At the weekend, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said youth offending is going down, but the “severity” of offending by a small group of youths is going up.
An investigation by the Herald showed the total number of people charged and convicted for all offences, between 2017 and 2022, dropped by a quarter. Further, the number of people charged with a crime is about a third of the number in 1981 – when the population was much lower.
“Some crimes” are going up, Trask says, “which tend to be by these groups of youth”.
Get-up-and-go attitude
Trask started volunteering for Act in Christchurch about three years ago – for Toni Severin, a sitting MP from the city’s east.
“She arrived at one of our meetings in Christchurch, and she just impressed me with her get-up-and-go attitude, and her Act views and values,” Severin says.
What kind of views and values are those?
“Well, she wants to make New Zealand better for her children,” says Severin.
(Trask is number 10 on the list while Severin, the sitting MP, is 14.)
Severin asks: Did I realise Trask’s children are part-Māori?
“With this whole system that’s going on, people are concerned about how this is going to work, especially for a lot of children that are of mixed race – how they are going to be seen, and how that’s going to influence on them.”
Children shouldn’t have to question who they are, and what their identity is, Severin says.
“We want them to just be part of New Zealand – and New Zealand as a whole. I have nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and nieces, that fit into this category. They just want to be called Kiwis and New Zealanders.”
One of Act’s key planks is scrapping co-governance because there should be “one set of laws for all New Zealanders”. Its website says: “No one should be treated differently based on who their ancestors were.”
(In February, my colleague Nikki Mandow wrote co-governance at work is “shockingly tame”.)
Late last month, Trask was asked on the Act podcast if she was worried about the education system. It came after Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced compulsory teaching requirements for maths, reading and writing by 2026, to deal with “wide variations of teaching”.
Trask said on the podcast the Government had its collective head buried in the sand for the past six years “while they’ve been basically undertaking a social experiment with our children”.
It’s not the fault of teachers, she said, who are adhering to a curriculum that’s “incredibly woke”.
I ask Trask what woke means to her.
She says it means policies and ideologies imposed on communities, or especially within education, that have little or no benefit. At schools, woke policies detract from the main reasons for being there.
Trask’s son is the kaiārahi Māori leader at his school, who gets extra te reo tuition on Wednesday mornings before school starts. “It’s fantastic,” she says.
But she wants to be sure te reo isn’t being taught at the expense of other subjects.
“The curriculum, when it comes to incorporating te reo, takes up so much of the teachers’ time, because the teachers are now having to extend themselves and go on to do all sorts of other education around it, that they are actually finding that they’re not having the same amount of time to spend on things like reading and literacy.”
Mark Potter, the president of NZEI Te Riu Roa, an education union with more than 46,000 members, says of Trask’s comments: “It’s just not true.”
He notes his nieces in Denmark can speak English, Danish and German because they learn those languages at school.
“Certainly you ask any teacher, that won’t be what they say is taking up the majority of their time. The majority of their time is taken up with the complexities of teaching diverse children.
“It's not te reo Māori, it’s around children who are neurodiverse, children who have disabilities. There are just so many more things that teachers are now expected to do that they weren’t so much 30 years ago.”
Going back to Severin, what advice does she have for Trask, who is likely to be in Parliament after the election?
“Expect the unexpected, and just continue through.”
Trask's clearly diplomatic. After we wrap up the interview, and find somewhere in the southern Christchurch café to take a photo, she chats to someone who pooh-poohs the idea of boot camps for kids – a policy of Act's likely coalition partner, National.
The biggest thing for Trask is being able to make family occasions – those special events for the kids. “We’re a team, and if there’s anything that needs to be done, we're here to help.”
