Venu Menon
Wellington, September 11, 2023
“Politics is not for the faint-hearted,” Karuna Muthu says.
The National Party candidate standing from Rongotai in Wellington in the upcoming general election should know. He has had to face a booing crowd of predominantly Green Party supporters at a public meeting on Sunday, who lustily cheered their own Pakeha candidate. There were hardly any Indian faces in the Wellington Indian Association (WIA) hall in Kilbirnie that day.
But Karuna, among the minuscule number of ethnic Indian candidates in Wellington, is not known to flinch or be pushed.
The sight of him going head-to-head with Winston Peters on the steps of Parliament back in 2002, eyes locked and voice raised, is tattooed on public memory. Karuna had been demonstrating to get Peters’ inflammatory remarks expunged from Parliament records.
Karuna admits he has mellowed since. While his convictions have not dimmed, his approach is more transactional than agitational.
But Karuna is still passionate about equality. “Politicians like Mr [Winston] Peters come along and whip up fear in the minds of voters at election time. And we [ethnic communities] are the whipping boys for such people,” he rues.
He is “passionate about fighting racism, because there is an underbelly of bigotry and racism in this beautiful country.”
But he acknowledges that New Zealand has come a long way “since the days of my protest on the steps of Parliament,” when he demanded that Peters’ remarks “made under the cloak of Parliamentary privilege” be expunged.
Karuna is wiser now. “I feel that I can achieve the same results of engaging and educating the wider population about the bigotry and racism that still persists in our country.”
He has stood for office at a time when “you wouldn’t find any coloured person other than a Maori or Pasifika, in any political party.”
Karuna recalls he was among the rare ethnic minority line-up of the National Party in the Bill English era, which included Pansy Wong, Hekia Parata, Wira Gardiner, and Georgina te Heuheu. Since then, South Asian representation has grown across political parties. “That, in my view, is my small contribution to this wonderful country,” Karuna notes.
But there is more distance to cover. “Whatever I do is helping to chip away at those prejudices, and pave the way for our children and grandchildren, so they don’t have to go through what I had to go through.”
For now, his attention is focused on cost of living and crime, the key concerns of his Rongotai electorate.
The Green supporters baying for his blood at public meetings are reacting to Karuna’s vocal opposition to the Let’s Get Wellington Moving Scheme and its focus on constructing a network of cycleways.
He calls it an example of the Labour government’s wasteful spending on “ideological projects,” as well as bureaucracy and consultants.
“We have announced that when we come to government we will abolish and scrap Let’s Get Wellington Moving. After spending $70 million, the fruit of that taxpayer funding is a pedestrian crossing on the way to the airport that is not used at all. It cost $2.7 million, of which $1.6 million was [spent] on consultants,” Karuna points out.
He says the limits of credulity have been pushed to the point where some of the consultants “don’t even live here [in New Zealand].”
Karuna notes cycleways hinder mobility, unfolding a personal narrative to back that claim. “My mother, who was 89, passed away recently. I had to take her to the hospital. The car parks have been removed for the cycleway. Was my mother expected to walk the 200 metres distance to reach the hospital? I have a daughter with a disability, and I can’t take her on a bus [because the bus lanes have made way for cycle lanes].”
Thirty years after moving to New Zealand, the man who grew up in the shadow of the great social reformers of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is now driven by that reformist zeal to be a catalyst for change in his adopted country.
Karuna sees Aotearoa as a multicultural nation, not bicultural. “My vision for the ethnic communities is that we have an equal say, that we are recognised for our contribution to the country, and we get proportionate benefits for our contribution in every sphere of our lives, from school boards all the way to Parliament.”
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
