Ko Mihingarangi tenei e mihi atu nei ki a koutou katoa. Welcome to The Hui ` Maori current affairs for all New Zealanders. E taro ake nei. Mate kainga tahi ` ora kainga rua. - The director came out and he said, 'We need to find beds for 400 people. 'Tonight. Go and work your magic.' - After more than two and a half years of protecting Aotearoa from COVID, we're there as MIQ finally closes its doors. - I was a part of it from day one, and I'm gonna be here to turn the lights out as well, which is pretty cool. - Then we meet the wahine creating her own line of rongoa Maori soaps. - This was one of the strongest rongoa used by our tupuna. So when we take the bark, the bark is yellow. - And we speak to Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall. Tahuti mai. It's been a key strategy in our battle against the coronavirus, but now MIQ has finally closed its doors. Managed Isolation Quarantine began operation in April 2020, 41 days after Aotearoa recorded its first COVID case. The system is responsible for thwarting over 4500 cases of the virus at the border, The system is responsible buying precious time to protect our communities. Now one of its first kaimahi reflects back on the enormous challenges of creating and managing an operation never seen before in Aotearoa. Kei a Ruwani Pereira tenei purongo. - RUWANI PEREIRA: Jet Park Hotel in south Auckland was ground zero for managed isolation, the very first MIQ in the country to open in April 2020, and now the last hotel to finally close its doors. - From the start, this was dedicated as a quarantine facility, - From the start, this was dedicated so it took all of the positive cases as a quarantine facility, both from the border - From the start, this was dedicated and then from other facilities as a quarantine facility, as people tested positive. - Firstly, thank you all for coming this morning. - Today, Jet Park is being returned to the hospitality sector with an early morning whakanoa. - (PERFORMS WAEREA) - Rema Erueti helped set up MIQ from the beginning of the pandemic, and she's here to witness the removing of the tapu. - I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart ` the amount of aroha, the resilience, the laughs that we all had during that time. - As one of the few staff left who have been working behind the scenes of the quarantine system, Rema has earned the gratitude of Aotearoa. She began working for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise in 2009, long before the pandemic. - So it was really about trying to encourage more youth, Maori, Pasifika and women to consider the trades as a viable career option. - Then in March 2020, Alert Level 4 lockdown shut down construction and Rema was redeployed into a unique role never before seen in this country. - WOMAN REPORTER: Every New Zealander boarding a flight to come home will be quarantined for at least 14 days. - To be absolutely clear, no one goes home. Everyone goes into a managed facility. - It was meant to be for three weeks, so I came in as part of the Temporary Accommodation Service. So it was about being able to find people somewhere to go to to at least wait it out till they could return home. - Rema was thrust into the hot seat overnight, and the demands of this new job were huge. - The director came out and he said, 'We need to find beds for 400 people. 'Tonight. Go and work your magic.' - The notice was short, and from hour to hour, they had no idea how many people to expect on arrival. - We were thankful for the long-distance flights, because we knew when the doors shut, we had approximately nine hours to find beds for 260 people. - The Australia flights really put a lot of pressure on us, because, three hours, and at that time it was jam them where we could go. So it's like, you're ringing the hotels ` 'How many rooms have you got? What's the configuration? 'OK, we've got 40 here, 30 here. 'OK. I need you two buses to go here. I need this bus to go here.' - Can you describe seeing those first busloads of people arriving? - You know, you have people, particularly whanau from Australia, they just literally packed up everything and came home. They didn't know where they were going to. And so we'd chat to them and they're like, 'I don't have a bank account. 'I don't have an Inland Revenue number. I can't apply for this. 'My kids has got two nappies left.' Then it was the realisation that they're in a hotel room, potentially whanau as big as six, seven, eight, and they don't know where they're going next. Mental health took a` took a big toll, but also the diversity of people that we had coming in. And so it was clear quite early on that we needed to reach into our community for support. We needed to provide the manaakitanga. - The need to manaaki and cater to a variety of different needs and requests on a daily basis - The need to manaaki and cater to was relentless and went on month after month. - We'd find out from the airport, an unplanned flight is coming in from here or from here, and it's like, 'Shucks, we need to readjust. 'We need to just double-check and have another look.' So they were` they were some really long days. We were generally in here by 7am, and then generally it was myself and the transport logistics team. We weren't leaving until the last bus got to the hotel, and the hotel confirmed that they had enough rooms. We wanted to make sure, because otherwise we needed to find somewhere else. - The security on the outside hasn't fixed things on the inside here, where we've got mix-up of passengers coming in ` just seems such a shambles here. - Not only was their job - Not only was their job high-pressure, the media scrutiny was just as intense. - Not only was their job - WOMAN REPORTER: Two COVID-positive sisters who were able to leave managed isolation without being tested. - Obviously, that is hopeless and unacceptable. - And Rema says the constant stream of criticism posed one of the biggest challenges as they tried to do the best they could in an ever-changing environment. - WOMAN REPORTER: Kiwis around the world have been waiting and waiting for spots to open up. - WOMAN REPORTER: Kiwis around the - Quarantine accommodation was in high demand, and that created chaos. - At that stage, we were trying to look after the whanau in our community, but that did mean that there were less beds available for the whanau wanting to return from overseas. And so the criticism from both sides was really challenging. The hotels were full. They didn't always have the ability to have as much exercise or to get outside for some fresh air as you wanted. And it was our staff that bore the brunt of that frustration from the returnees. We've had people pass away. Um` we've had people that have come home extremely distressed, um... because their whanau are ill. They've come home for tangi, um... or they've come in for medical reasons. The family's been separated and they're in hospital, and the other half of the whanau are left in MIQ, and they've passed, and they've been on their own. And unfortunately, that wasn't just one day. It happened quite regularly. (SEAGULL CRIES) Everyone kind of understood ` our main aim is keeping our whanau safe. We would do whatever it took to` in order to be able to make that happen. - Those at the coalface believe that if we didn't have MIQ, the impact on our most vulnerable would have been much worse. - Well, we know that the Maori and Pacific communities, they don't have the same health outcomes as other parts of New Zealand society. So what I've seen of some of the modelling and estimates is that giving New Zealand the opportunity to get to a high level of vaccination saved thousands of lives. - Do you think we'd have a need to use MIQ again? - I think there will always probably be a need for a quarantine capability, and what the past two and a bit years has taught us is that the onset can come quite quickly. And so you always will need to have a readiness plan and an understanding of your trigger points. At what point do we start looking at what's happening overseas and just start making some moves there? Mm. - It's a rollercoaster ride Rema will never forget, and one she's been determined to see right through to the very end. - You don't often get to see through or follow through something that you've started. So I think that's one of the things I'm going to be really proud of. You sometimes actually have to sit back and think, 'I was a part of that. 'I was a part of it from day one.' And I'm gonna be here to turn the lights out as well, which is pretty cool. - Mate kainga tahi ` ora kainga rua. - Katahi te wahine ihu oneone. Na Ruwani Pereira tera purongo. After the break, I speak to the Associate Minister of Health, Dr Ayesha Verrall. It's nearly one year since new legislation restricting the sale of flavoured vapes came into force. Its aim was to reduce the accessibility of fruity and confectionery-flavoured vapes Its aim was to that are highly appealing to rangatahi, only making them available from specialty vape stores, rather than the local dairy, service station or supermarket. The regulations were announced by the Associate Minister of Health, Dr Ayesha Verrall, as part of a roll-out of smokefree legislation aimed to protect rangatahi from being influenced to start smoking. But 12 months on, hundreds of specialty vape stores are being built in existing dairies, some within metres of primary and high schools Hei matapaki i tenei take nui, kua hono mai te minita tuarua mo nga take hauora, a Takuta Ayesha Verrall, - Kia ora, Mihi. Thanks for having me on. - Yeah. So how many vaping licences have So how many vaping licences have gone out since the legislation passed last year? - Yeah. The, um` Look, I don't have that figure to hand, but what I can tell you is that we've made a lot of progress in building a regulatory regime around vaping. And one of the key things that you didn't mention in your intro is it's also that vape products are only for R18s, so they're not meant to be being sold to rangatahi at all. And I think what we've seen come through in the statistics, though, is that the number of young people who are vaping has increased concurrent with those measures coming in. So it's, um` it's not totally` we haven't seen the impact of our full regulations yet, So it's, um` it's not totally` but I am particularly concerned that rangatahi appear to be vaping at a higher rate than we'd want, because we think vapes should be a tool to help support mostly adults quit smoking. They shouldn't be something that people take up initially for the` without being smokers first. - The Ministry of Health tells us 697 licences have been issued since the legislation last year. Aren't you just replacing one bad habit with another bad habit targeted at younger people? - You mean with respect to tobacco? - Yeah. Like, you know, those numbers are going down. But what we're` what you're doing ` 697 specialty licences for vape shops in just one year. Are you concerned with that? - Yes, I am. And let me just` let's just go back to that comparison between tobacco and vaping. I just want to be really clear that tobacco is the most deadly product that we legally sell in New Zealand. It kills half the people that we use` that use it. In the bill I've just introduced to the House, the modelling predicts that we'll get rid of the` a quarter or a third of the difference in life expectancy between Maori and non-Maori. a quarter or a third And so being focused on tobacco is really important, because tobacco kills people. Vapes, however ` vapes are far less harmful than tobacco, but they are still of concern. We don't want young people vaping, and so I think we do need to look at what our regulations can do to support a reduction in vaping for young people. So, firstly, we've made all of those changes over the last 18 months to make sure vapes are, um, specialist, um, uh` those flavoured vapes are only in specialist stores, that there` there's no vaping in schools, indoor workplaces or childcare centres. - OK. - But we need to look at what else we can do. - OK. Let's just come back to that` just come back to that, - OK. - But we need to look at what else we can do. 'cause, I mean, everyone agrees, you know, that the Smokefree` it was actually the Maori Party that brought in a private member's bill, I think it was back in 2006. And so each conse` successive government has kept to it, and I think to 2025, you might` I think it might be something like 5% of New Zealanders might still be smoking, which is fantastic. But when you look at what` at some of the surveys that are coming out of vaping, what can you tell us about the numbers? So if 1.4% of young people are smoking tobacco today, how many are vaping? - More than that, and some estimates around 10%` - 20%. 20% in some surveys, and for Maori, for Maori women, young Maori women, 40%, in some schools. - Yeah. And I agree that is something that we will work on. So I have additional work planned on that. - No, well, let's just go back to the 697 licences that you've handed out. How is that helping? So what the, um` those licences are specialist vape stores which are more restrictive. - Are they, though? Are they? - Yeah. Look, Mihi, I think it is` it is` Yes, they are, and there are additional requirements on them. - OK. - But I think` and there are additional I think the point is that I agree requirements on them. that the vaping increase, - OK. particularly across the last year, is not right. So what we are doing through the Smokefree Bill, So what we are doing through the Smokefree Bill, which is, as I mentioned, predominantly around tobacco control, is we will have in that measures that will help us enforce vape regulations, regulations against vaping. So, for example, it means that every vape retailer will have to be registered with the Ministry of Health, not just the specialist ones. - OK. - In addition, we have other options within the bill, which I'll receive, within our existing legislation, to tighten up on that. - I want to talk to you about the specialist` 'cause I understand all that. I want to talk to you about those 697 specialist licences, because, you know, I drive around central Auckland and I can see that dairies are simply converting their dairies into specialist vape shops, literally 100m away from a predominantly brown high school where those rates are really high. What are you doing to monitor that? - So what I have` what I'm doing to fix it is I am going to ask for additional advice on whether those issues, including the issues of proximity to schools, are ones we need to look at. There are also other issues about whether the type of device that is being sold targets young people, if it's single-use or something like that. So there is` I agree, we are not in the position we want to be in with youth vaping. In my view, vaping should be a tool for promoting people to quit smoking. - It shouldn't be` - But` - We've seen far too many people start down the path of vaping as their first` vaping up front, as opposed to using it to` - You say that you're really concerned about it, yet your ministry's given out 697 licences and done how many stings, how many monitoring, how much of that licence fee ` it's 1.4 million that the Government's taken in revenue ` how much of that has been targeted or spent on regulating, or stings or monitoring? - Well, we've done a number of things, and I can quite clearly demonstrate we've had a record of progressive movement on this issue. So we started out with the regulations to` under the bill that was passed in the last term of government to ban vaping in particular places, to make them R18, and to limit` limit flavours to specialist vape shops. We now have more measures under way, and it does relate to your question about enforcement. Through the Smokefree Bill, there will be a provision in there to make sure that all vape sales are registered, which helps us with our enforcement, because we're able to do stings if we know where those places` where those places are. Overall, if I recall, there's been about 300 or 400, um` control operations, which you call stings, in the tobacco control space over the last` over the last two years. And then the changes that we make through the law will enable us to be more effective in our prosecutions against vape retailers. - OK, so going forward ` so the rate of specialist vape stores' licences has been about two a day for the last year. Going forward, would you look at capping, a sinking lid, or something like that? Because I guess, you know, parents are really concerned, teachers and principals have already told you that it's just too accessible. - Look, I agree that we are not` - Look, I agree that we are not` we do not have the right balance in our regulation at the moment. It is too accessible. And what I will` what I am doing, in addition to the changes we're making through the Smokefree Bill, will be to seek advice on that. But there is a balance to struck` to strike here, because we do want vapes because we do want vapes to be available to support people to quit smoking. And we made the biggest progress we ever made in supporting people to quit tobacco ` which is the most deadly legally available substance ` in the last couple of years, and that largely is down to` well, I'm told it's down to the availability of vapes to help adults to quit. So I agree. We totally need to strike a better balance than we have now. - Ka pai. Let's go to COVID now. Looking like` In recent days Looking like` In recent days we've been told that it's turning down, the numbers are turning down, Looking like` In recent days yet when you consider a year ago, we were` the government was ramping up for a vaxathon to bring up the COVID vaccination levels. When you look at the booster, are you concerned with some of those numbers? In Maori communities, 50 to 60% only so far with a booster. - That's right. And that's why we're making sure that our outbound call system, which` I visited iwi health providers, who are making many of those outbound calls to target Maori and Pasifika, um` who are eligible for that fourth booster. And as you know, we have a lower age criteria of eligibility for Maori and Pasifika, recognising the increased impact COVID had` has on them and their communities. - Do you have a goal? Would you like to see` do you have an expectation Maori vax, uh` booster rates up to around to 80 again? - Well, I think the really challenging thing with the booster is that you can't have the booster within three months of being` of having had COVID. So that creates a challenge, because if we set a population target, there is, um` there is that difficult thing that some people have just had COVID, so they can't get it immediately. - Kia ora. - However, we accept that people` we don't want an inequitable vaccination rate, and we want it to be` we want it to be equal, and to be high. - Ka pai. Tena koe. Ko Takuta Ayesha Verrall tera. Next ` we meet the mama creating a unique line of rongoa Maori soaps. Next ` we meet the mama creating No reira, kia piri tonu mai. What started as a quest to soothe her daughter's eczema has turned into a booming small business for a south Auckland mum. Roimata Taniwha-Paoo has now been making soaps and rongoa using traditional practices and native ingredients for the last 16 years. Roimata hopes to expand her business and show how matauranga Maori can transform the health and beauty industry in both a sustainable and empowering way. Kei a John Boynton te roanga ake o nga korero. (TINKLING, PEACEFUL MUSIC) - (PERFORMS KARAKIA) - JOHN BOYNTON: Roimata Taniwha-Paoo feels the presence of her tupuna every time she steps into the ngahere. - He wairua to te rakau, he tupuna to te rakau. As soon as I go near a tree or in a ngahere where I can just feel and sense and hear the insects and the manu flying, I know I'm home. - Roimata is a passionate kaitiaki for the taiao. You'll often find her fighting to preserve the small pockets of native bush still left in urban areas of Tamaki-makaurau... - This is the older brother, older sister ` tuakana ` to the karamu, or the Coprosma robusta. ...and sharing the matauranga of the ngahere that's been handed down to her. - This was one of the` one of the strongest rongoa used by our tupuna. So when we take the bark, the bark is yellow. - Roimata would come to rely on this matauranga after her eldest daughter was born with severe eczema 17 years ago. - When she was born, we figured out that there was something severely wrong with her skin, and so we went to the doctors, and the doctors gave us all of these... medicines and potions and stuff of theirs. We needed something that was a bit more gentle and it could seep into her skin. So I'll go down as deep as the rakau will let me, 'cause the rakau will tell me when to stop. - Struggling to find a treatment which would work, her nan, Te Ao Biddle, offered her some guidance. And she said, 'What are you doing? You need to go to the bush, and you already know what to do. 'You already know what rakau to use and all of that.' 'Cause Nan brought me up in` in, around, inside the bush, how to walk with them, how to listen to them. - And she listened, and started to experiment with using rakau and rongoa. - One of my friends, she was like, 'Why don't you try making soap?' It was just an offhanded comment. I was like, 'Oh yeah, I can give that a go.' So I had a look online, and then I saw that the process takes six weeks, and I was like, 'Oh hika, that's too long. I'm not gonna do that.' So with my bit of science brain, I figured out how to make it a bit faster. We saw an immediate change in her skin, mostly in her structure, mostly in the moisturising of her skin. She was able to retain a lot of the natural moisture, the natural oils. - And it was a recipe she perfected from her garage using rakau like kawakawa, tanekaha and kumarahou. - So, where normal people would take six weeks to cure theirs, we can make it within an hour, and then about 12 hours later, we can cut them up and use them. And that worked perfect for me, And that worked perfect for me, because I'm the most impatient person in the whole wide world. And that worked perfect for me, - Three years ago, with support from her friends and whanau, she decided to sell her soap to the public, and her small business, Soaps by Roi, was born. - Oh my gosh. Soaps has taken over our lives. So people think that this is my full-time job. It's not. This is something that we do when we get home because we enjoy it. The mahi that we do, rongoa, it's not just a thing that we do. The mahi that we do, rongoa, It's` it's a lifestyle. - During the start of the COVID pandemic, orders skyrocketed, with huge demand from marae and large businesses, and talk turned to upscaling operations. - I don't know what happened to the soap production in New Zealand, but it felt like we were taking on, like, the brunt of it from our two little garages. (LAUGHS) One of the things One of the things that we never, ever pictured ` Soaps getting to this point, getting to the point where we need to scale up. It was just something that we made out of need, not something that we ever considered being able to use as a platform to privilege matauranga Maori and tupuna narrative. - Roimata's operation will soon move out of her garage to be made by a larger local manufacturer. With plans to rebrand and launch overseas, she wants to ensure the soap is made sustainably and traditional matauranga is protected. - We must not go to the` to the ngahere to get our stuff from there, 'cause we'll just wreck it. And that goes against what we're about. It's tough because you're holding so much` There's so much matauranga and tupuna at your back, and you don't want to dishonour them by saying something or doing something in a way that... that just is not good in their eyes. - Even though she's excited to see the business grow, Roimata isn't losing focus on what's driving her mahi. - For the time being, Soaps has been our way that we can help people reconnect with Papatuanuku. The possibility and the opportunity to privilege tupuna narrative ` that's what keeps me going. - Rawe era hopi. Na John Boynton tera purongo. Kua hikina Te Hui, e hoa ma. Noho ora mai ra. Captions by Lena Erakovich. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2022 - Ko te reo te take. - Na Te Puna Whakatongarewa Te Hui i tautoko.