Across the Waiariki electorate, mental health data point to suicide as a particularly persistent concern, with the Rotorua Lakes District sitting among the areas nationally where suspected suicide figures are notably elevated. Provisional figures released by the Office of the Chief Coroner put the district's suspected self-inflicted death toll at 19.1 per 100,000 residents across the twelve months ending in June, a rate that placed it above those recorded for Auckland, Northland, and Waikato over the same period.
Among Māori men — particularly those between 25 and 44 years of age — the proportion of deaths recorded as suspected suicides sits at its highest point across the country. That gap has held steady across a span of more than 15 years.
Ihakara Pene, who was 19 at the time of his death in 2017, was the second-oldest among the four children of Karen and Robert Pene. Competing across New Zealand in BMX and mountain biking, Ihakara had built a place for himself among the country's promising riders, with his family making a point of attending each event, boarding a bus to follow the circuit from one venue to the next.
The last exchange Karen held in memory was a Friday-evening phone call during which Ihakara sought guidance on preparing steam pudding, as he was lending a hand to a friend at a baby shower. Karen described the experience as one that upended her family's sense of normalcy, while he had not appeared at work that Monday.
Overnight, the group bedded down on the front steps in the open air, with whānau and friends arriving to drop off food and bedding. Rain had been expected to move through the region overnight, yet the clouds passed without releasing a single drop.
That July, dozens of bereaved whānau members — Robert and Karen among them — gathered in Rotorua for a wānanga understood to be the first event of its kind aimed at supporting those who had lost someone to suicide. Spanning two days, the gathering was convened by He Aturangi Kā Māmao Collective — a network of advocates and organisations drawn from across the region — and took place at a site beside Lake Ōkataina, roughly 30 km north-east of Rotorua.
Eugene Temara, speaking on behalf of Te Arawa Whānau Ora, described the toll of suspected suicide-related deaths on the community — particularly among young Māori men over recent years — as deeply troubling, while noting that no demographic group had been left untouched by the loss. Participants noted that the remarks shared throughout the preceding day reflected how each person moves through this process along a distinct route.
Morehu, who has written and taught on the subject, described the wānanga as unlike anything else available, noting that the space created for whānau carries real weight — rewarding and motivating, yet at times a burden — and that those who attend while still raw from loss deserve recognition for the courage that takes. She lost her own two sons, Kahu at 17 in a 2009 car crash and Hepa at 16 to suicide in 2011, and she holds that grief of that kind reshapes a person in ways that do not fade.
Angela Angell, a Tauranga mother whose 18-year-old son Te Rangikotia died in 2024, described how some people around her withdrew from contact because they found the subject too painful to approach — a silence she experienced as its own form of loss — and noted that shame and stigma extended further, with a number of marae in the area not taking up her son's tangihanga, leaving her family to search at length before finding one that would. "Access to bring him to that location was granted up until the point when the manner of his death became known," she explained. The family was informed that the body could only be placed near the entrance, in the area used for footwear.
Angell, who attended the wānanga with her daughter Cyrin Rangitakatu, said there was a point beyond which her companion could not go — something she found distressing — and that the overall experience left her with a sense of being genuinely known.
Kirsty Maxwell, who has spent 24 years working across mental health and suicide prevention, told reporters that the figures released do not reflect the full extent of the problem. As leader of the Poutiri Wellness Centre in Te Puke — a health and social services organisation operating throughout the Waiariki electorate — she told reporters that four whānau had lost members to suspected whakamomori (suicide) across the Eastern Bay of Plenty in the preceding six weeks, among them a child aged 12, and that it had become hard to find a whānau untouched by suicide in some form.
Practitioners in the field are encountering elevated rates of psychological distress, depression, and layered personal difficulties at a depth not previously recorded, Maxwell noted, adding that these conditions tend to cluster around economic hardship — households where keeping utilities connected, affording food, and meeting children's basic needs remain daily pressures that compound one another. Heavy use of digital platforms has been linked to growing feelings of social withdrawal and reduced face-to-face connection among users.
Barkley, who brings nearly four decades of health sector experience to her current role at Korowai Aroha — a kaupapa Māori provider based in Rotorua — noted that relationship breakdowns ranked among the leading contributors to mental distress, especially among younger people, pointing out that time constraints within healthcare settings often prevented practitioners from fully engaging with patients' experiences. Maxwell added that kaupapa Māori organisations could at times provide a degree of care and cultural grounding that mainstream services were not positioned to offer, yet continued to face obstacles in securing commensurate recognition, with one voice from that community observing that reduced investment in culturally responsive health and social services left some Māori whānau encountering an environment that felt impersonal and disconnected from their needs.
Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey, who also holds the National Party spokesperson role on the portfolio, stated that no number of suicides could ever be deemed acceptable. Figures from the most recent reporting period placed the Māori suicide rate at 16.0 per 100,000 people and the national rate at 17 per 100,000 — each representing the lowest reading recorded in more than ten years — while the minister's statement pointed to suicide prevention and quicker pathways to mental health support as areas of ongoing policy attention. Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora noted that, set against the rolling 17-year average, the gap in those figures did not clear the threshold for statistical significance.
Among the measures Doocey drew attention to were the Suicide Prevention Action Plan and a set of Waiariki-based programmes — among them crisis recovery cafés and mental health co-response teams.
Suicide rates among certain Māori male populations sit at roughly three times the level recorded for other groups — a gap that data show has remained largely unchanged across successive governments. Ingrid Leary, who holds the Labour Party's mental health portfolio, told a broadcaster that two areas warrant closer attention: the structural drivers behind those inequities, spanning social conditions, resource allocation, and equity considerations, and the development of Māori-specific interventions that are properly funded and designed to endure. Leary also noted that viewing the issue through a party-political frame carries its own complications, given that the persistence of these figures is not an outcome any political actor would want to see continue.
Redstone made his way to the wānanga at Lake Ōkataina without any companions. Thirteen years have now passed since the death of his son George, who was 16 years old at the time. Redstone described the loss as one of the hardest a person can face, adding that unresolved questions have a way of staying with those left behind.
He described the difficulty of continuing as a parent after the loss, telling health professionals that prescribed medication had brought no relief, and that the questions left behind by the death were ones that could never now be resolved. He noted that the wānanga gave participants a deeper grasp of the issues involved, and expressed a wish to see programmes of that kind expanded.
Drawing on a phrase that calls men toward shared purpose, one programme brings together wānanga, physical activity, peer support, and cultural connection. Haimona Seymour, who took part in the programme, described how it had shifted the way he thought about life, noting that time was a resource he had come to value far more carefully. Reflecting on years of bereavement and shifts in his personal circumstances, he described having developed an ability to endure and adapt.
Maxwell noted that Māori-led programmes were producing tangible results in communities yet remained largely unacknowledged within formal health structures, with the health system yet to treat such approaches as validated, evidence-grounded methods for supporting whānau. Robert Pene added that speaking openly about his experiences had helped ease an internal burden, describing how verbalising them felt like releasing weight into the air around him.
Tessa Malton, who has personally navigated the loss of several whānau members to suicide and survived her own attempt, described leaving the wānanga with a sense of connection she had not felt before — noting that as attendees began sharing their grief openly, a feeling took hold that everyone present was travelling the same path.
