By Melissa Low
A Young Labour Party member says New Zealand politics needs to find ways to appeal to people of diverse backgrounds.
Soraiya Daud, a 23-year-old Auckland University student, says she saw a lack of ethnic representation at a Young Labour Party conference and she would like to see more young ethnic people get involved in politics. Daud, who is a New Zealand-born Indo-Fijian, has been involved with Young Labour for the past four years. She says attitudes need to change if true representation is to be achieved.
Adapt to needs
“Organisations have to change and have to realise they have to adapt to deal with the needs of young ethnic people,” she says. “They struggle with that because it’s based particularly on what young Pakeha – politically active people – are interested in and want to do.” Becoming a diverse organisation means more than the inclusion of a few minority backgrounds, says Daud. “We have to be aware that ethnic diversity doesn’t mean another couple of groups into the mix.”
Daud says young people from ethnic backgrounds may struggle getting involved in politics for a number of different reasons, including the pressure to succeed academically at university. “If you’re a first generation immigrant, and you have to try really hard to succeed… doing all these extra-curricular activities can jeopardise your other stuff. It may not, but it can be difficult to manage all of that.”
She also says young ethnic people joining political organisations like the Young Labour Party need to get a worthwhile meaningful experience in order to stay an active member. “My main concern, particularly because of the demographic that I’m in, is around what happens to those second, third, fourth, fifth generation people of minority backgrounds, and how they engage in politics because I don’t think there’s places for them yet.”
Minority role models
Daud says there is a need for good role models in New Zealand politics for the younger politicians to aspire to. She considers former Prime Minister Helen Clark as being a great role model for females in politics, but does not think there has yet been an ethnic role model to “forge a way in [New Zealand] politics”. “I don’t know who those [role models] are going to be in the future, but I think that the day we have people in Parliament from minority backgrounds who have never not been New Zealanders, that will be the day that we would have shifted in our New Zealand identity.”
Daud’s involvement in the Young Labour Party was recently documented for the New Zealand-produced show, Both Worlds. The series follows the different lives of ten young second generation New Zealanders and their personal stories of living within two cultures. Producer for the series Julia Parnell says the people focused on the show are people navigating between their cultural heritage and ethnic traditions with their identity of growing up as a “Kiwi”.
Future of NZ
“They’re the next generation. This is what New Zealand is going to look like in the future, because we have got growing populations of other ethnic groups here, and these are the people we are going to see,” Parnell says. In Daud’s episode, the focus is on her journey to become the next vice-president of the Young Labour Party, and the way she pursues politics while trying to honour her Muslim beliefs. She considers her experiences filming for
Both Worlds and going after the position to become the next Young Labour vice-president to be “one of the fundamental life changing aspects” she has had. “The term ‘both worlds’, I’m really glad that they used that. That was a really positive aspect of the show, and I think that’s exactly where I am. I’m between two very different worlds,” says Daud. “I feel like maybe people will understand me in a way that they don’t understand me yet.”
Pacific Media Centre