Judith Collins continues calls for Commissioner's resignation over gang koha

July 7, 2021

The National leader says Paul Hunt sent the wrong message by giving $200 to the Mongrel Mob's Waikato chapter.

National leader Judith Collins is continuing to call for Paul Hunt’s resignation as Chief Human Rights Commissioner over a koha he gave to a gang. 

On Monday, it was revealed the Human Rights Commission had given the Mongrel Mob’s Waikato chapter a $200 koha after Chief Commissioner Paul Hunt attended a hui it organised in May. 

The commission said the koha had been provided in accordance with cultural advice given to Hunt. 

When asked whether Hunt was just doing his job by engaging with the group, Collins said the gang was simply a criminal organisation, and was “not there for anything else other than that”. 

“This whole nonsense about communicating with them, engaging, for goodness sake. The police have been doing that now for about the past so many years. Look what’s happened,” she told Breakfast.

“These are the same people who have been, a whole tranche of them, arrested during this international clampdown on methamphetamine dealing . They are actually not there for all the right reasons.”

It follows him giving a koha to the Waikato chapter of the Mongrel Mob when he spoke at a hui in May.

Among those arrested in the clampdown were senior members of the Mongrel Mob’s Waikato chapter. 

Collins said Hunt “just shouldn’t be there” because it gave credibility to the group. She also said he should have used his own money for the koha because the taxpayer-funded $200 “sends entirely the wrong message”. 

She added that the koha was “such a slap in the face” for families and communities grappling with the harms of methamphetamine. 

However, a Māori academic said it was "short-sighted politically" of Collins to criticise the Human Rights Commission's koha.

AUT associate professor Ella Henry (Ngātikahu ki Whangaroa, Ngāti Kuri, Te Rārawa) told 1 NEWS on Monday Collins should be looking into her own party's history.

AUT associate professor Ella Henry says it is politically short-sighted of Judith Collins to criticise the Commissioner’s $200 koha to Mongrel Mob Kingdom.

"Need I remind the National Party that [former Prime Minister Robert] Muldoon used to regularly visit gangs for the same reason — that is easier to intervene from the inside than the outside, where we spend billions on jails, courts and police to seemingly no avail,” Henry said.

Henry also explained koha is bound up in the notion of reciprocity.

"So as two parties meet, the idea of gift giving shows mana to both parties. If you do not give a gift, then you are depleting their mana.

"If you do not receive a gift, then they are depleting yours."

She said the $200 was a "reasonable" amount of money and had more than likely gone to the kaumātua and kuia who had organised the hui.

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