Scott Summerfield

My name is Scott Summerfield, I’m 26 and live in the Coromandel.

I am a passionate advocate for social justice and environmental protection and will give everything I can to supporting these causes.

I believe in making Aotearoa a place where we support each other irrespective of our differences and where we respect our natural environment with full awareness of how we rely on its health to sustain us. We have some pretty common shared values which we can all relate to: fairness, equality and a sense of pride for our reputation as being clean and green. Let’s build on these values together in 2017.

I grew up in Ashburton, Mid-Canterbury and moved to Wellington to study and work in 2008. Moving to the Coromandel in 2014 after six years in Wellington, I’ve come to see the lost potential of regional New Zealand and am committed to campaigning for jobs, housing and strong communities to support a future for young people in smaller centres.

I have worked at the Office of Treaty Settlements on settlement negotiations, and have completed a Master of Arts in Maori Studies focusing on the failure of settlement agreements to decolonise the Crown-Maori relationship and to redress fundamental injustices in how economic, political and social systems in Aotearoa are structured. These two contrasting positions have helped me understand what Te Tiriti o Waitangi means and how we can honour it, as well as how important it is to our shared future to urgently move towards a positive relationship under Te Tiriti.

My husband, Ross, and I live at Te Wharau/Thornton Bay on the Thames coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. We both work in Thames and have strong connections with our community here. I currently work at the Thames-Coromandel District Council as the Strategic Planning Team Leader. I think local government is an incredibly important part of our democracy and as local voters and members of a community, we have to make the most of governance options available to us in our day to day lives. Government must also empower local government to work for communities, to charge them upholding local environmental standards and to act as a support for the amazing outcomes their varied communities are working for.

I have strong egalitarian and ecological principles and am not afraid to take a stance on national and local issues which may be controversial or unpopular but I think is the right thing to do. I believe that if we take good care of our environment and our communities then everything else will follow.