Green Party MP Marama Davidson is piling pressure on retailer Farmers over its handling of an alleged racist incident in one of its stores.
Aiomai Nuku-Tarawhiti, 15, and her cousin, Shae Brown, 25, were at a Farmers in Tauranga earlier this month when they claim a staff member told Aiomai she looked "undesirable" and might be planning to steal something.
Farmers initially said it was investigating the incident, but on Friday posted a message to its Facebook page that poured fuel on the fire. In addition to saying it was working with the family and the Human Rights Commission, the statement asked the public to "allow the parties to deal with this matter in a calm and respectful way".
Nearly 2000 comments were left on the article, and based on those Newshub saw, most were overwhelmingly negative. Some people pointed out Farmers was yet to apologise to the teenager, whose cousin said "has to live with that for the rest of her life", others announcing they'll never shop at Farmers again.
Among them were Davidson, who accused the 112-year-old department store chain of minimising "people's understandable rage at the violence of racism".
"You should have IMMEDIATELY come out with a very strong message against all discrimination and profiling practices in your store and that you stand very strongly for values that people of our beautiful country expect," Davidson, of Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Porou descent, wrote.
"Regardless of any investigation outcomes - that stance should already have been your immediate stance and would not have pre-empted any fair investigation process. So it is quite telling that you did not immediately come out to state very clearly what your own workplace culture is about. Wrong move."
Davidson said she rang the store and spoke to the manager "to encourage a full and thorough investigation that leads to both justice and accountability and an improvement in workplace culture and standards", and told the company via email the message posted to social media wasn't good enough.
She even revealed that despite being in Parliament since 2015 and a party co-leader since 2018, she herself still gets "racially profiled" at a "range of retail and hospitality businesses" - including Farmers.
Previous posts by the department store on Facebook have been bombarded with negative comments and copies of the video the Aiomai and Brown posted online, which sparked the furore.
A survey earlier this year found 93 percent of Māori experience racism daily. Most said they had been followed, watched, or asked to open their bags in a shop, and a quarter said they were followed by staff all of the time or often.
