After only one term, and with its very existence on the line this election, incumbent Māori ward councillor Allanah Burgess will return unopposed to the council table.
The Marlborough District Council voted to establish the Māori ward in 2021. Burgess beat Tony MacDonald to become the first Māori ward councillor in the 2022 local body elections.
In 2024, the council voted unanimously to retain the seat and put it to a referendum, as required by the coalition Government’s changes to the Electoral Act. If people voted to remove the Māori ward, it would be dropped in the 2028 local body election.
Burgess, who was Waikawa Marae manager when the ward was first established, said at the time she and her community were sceptical of how effective a Māori ward would be at representing their interests at the council table.
“Lots of people that I grew up with, we kind of [viewed] councillors like the people over there that make all the decisions, and you know, do we like them very much? Not really. But are we doing anything about it? No,” Burgess said.
“I guess that we were trying to be convinced of [Māori wards] not being tokenism ... that it wasn’t just a tick box thing.”
When a friend encouraged her to run for the Māori ward seat, Burgess said she initially laughed it off, but her iwi encouraged her to think seriously about it.
“My plan at the beginning was, how could it hurt?” Burgess said.
“Understanding what local council is ... it helps us see how everything works.
“The plan was to learn, just observe and learn, and say stuff when I needed to say stuff.”
One term later, Burgess said her constituents had come to embrace the Māori ward as being more than just tokenism, and the wider public seemed to accept it too.
“Three years ago [people said] ‘you get all this special treatment and ... our rates have gone up this much because we’ve got to pay for your seat’.
“[It’s] a bit more normalised now ... It has that feeling of, ‘oh yeah, that’s her role ... within my community’. I’m fortunate to be asked to speak, to represent.”
She said a highlight of her term had been working closely with the youth council, being a former youth councillor herself.
Burgess also spoke up at the council table on issues such as banning vehicles on east coast beaches, and the transparency of council workshops closed to the public.
Deciding to run in this year’s election involved different considerations than her 2022 candidacy. Her original plan was to do one term, then to stand in the Marlborough Sounds ward and open up the Māori seat to someone else.
“Then we have two Māori on the council possibly, if I got elected,” she said.
Her decision to stick with the Māori ward was made at the very last minute.
“I had lots of support for both [options], from different groups of people,” she said.
“I don’t think I’d made the decision until the day before [nominations closed]. I had both nominations sitting in front of me.”
But it was a discussion with her iwi that helped her choose, she said.
“I made the decision to go with Māori ward because I’d had more conversations about the support that I might need, and how other representatives in the community could support me.
“[It was] a decision made together.”
Marlborough Sounds candidate Anteisha O’Connell said she considered standing for the Māori ward.
“But in terms of what I’ve seen Allanah Burgess achieve in that role, I wasn’t really wanting to run against her.
“I think she’s done an incredible job over the last three years and will continue to make really good strides in the Māori ward seat.”
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
