The culture of giving and receiving

REMEMBER THE TIME: Taito Phillip Field, Labour MP for Mangere, circa 2002.

BACK IN TIME: Taito Phillip Field, with Helen Clark during the 2005 election campaign.

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A little band of matai or chiefs stood at the door of my Samoa hotel suite, trying to look past to see if the high chief was behind me.

Dressed up in their traditional finery, they had gifts to bestow on Taito Phillip Hans Field, High Chief of Manase, famous across Samoa for banning dogs.

The hotel had made a mistake and while I had a suite, the matai MP, was struggling with a pokey room down the back intended for reporters.

Field is a year old than me, born in Apia of mixed Samoan, German and Jewish background. While my children are more Samoan than he is and I too lived in Samoa, we are not related.

Field was an old-style trade unionist from Wellington's Gear Meat Works who was regarded as an early Labour Party bright hope, winning the Otara seat on his second attempt in 1993. When David Lange retired from Parliament, Field took over his Mangere seat. He had the biggest majority in Parliament.

A gruff kind of character, he won few friends in Parliament and only an associate cabinet posting before the Thai scandal engulfed him.

He fought the allegations but was expelled from the Labour Party in February 2007. He remained an independent and then formed the New Zealand Pacific Party.

Field lost his seat last year to Labour's Su'a William Sio.

Although the scene outside the Apia hotel room with the chiefs had spoken of the complicated world of Samoan cultural service and gifts, known as lafo, it was the Thai world that bought him down.

He was seen by Thais as poryai, which was translated in the High Court as "big dad". His defence said it meant respected elder.

Field found himself in the Buddhist Thai karma world of "bun khun" which in the West can be perceived as corruption. In the High Court it was argued Thais did favours, not for Field, but to achieve Heaven in the next life.

The fate of deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is on the run from corruption charges, suggests that Buddhism is no excuse there.

Thirty years ago in the Samoan Prime Minister's Department, I was to have a front row seat in court cases involving the custom of competing politicians holding feasts and paying, as they put it, "bus fares" to voters.

Corruption has never been acceptable in Samoa or Thailand, but it takes someone smarter than Field to know the difference between what's enough and what was too much.

In his mansion in the hills he found that.

- © Fairfax NZ News