“Through government policies, they just keep tramping and tramping our people into the dirt all the time. All these different policies that keep coming up every three or four years.”

Take the Work and Income rules around temporary work. “You go out, it rains for a week. Then that whanau are at home for the rest of the week and it’s just never-ending. You can’t go back on the benefit because you’ve got a part-time job. So you don’t say that you’ve got a job, you stay on the benefit just to make sure that if it rains at least you’ve still got the benefit to rely on. So it kind of pushes everyone into that undercover life just to survive. Whanau are placed into this position just to be able to put food on the table.”

Ngarimu says his observations are borne out by statistics, which show widening inequality post-Rogernomics. Until the 1990s, Māori rates of home ownership lagged behind Pākehā, but were on a gradual upwards trajectory, with more than 50 percent of Māori owning a home in 1991, even as Māori and Polynesian unemployment sat around 25 percent. Unemployment rates eventually dropped, but Māori home ownership declined by nearly a third, and by 2013 was about 37 percent. Pākehā home ownership also dropped, but from a high of above 75 percent to just below 70 percent.

One factor is that house prices have vastly outstripped wage growth. Even in south Auckland’s Otara, at the low end of the city’s market, houses typically sell for about $580,000. Many of the houses on the market are now being bought by investors (this is also happening in places like Gisborne and other regional towns, as Auckland property owners leverage their equity, pushing up house prices nationally). Ray White real estate agent Tom Rawson, who specialises in south Auckland, says of the roughly 4500 homes in Otara, 3000 of them are owned by Housing New Zealand, probably 900 by investors and 600 are owner-occupied.

Owning a home is one thing. Not having shelter at all is another. In Auckland a recent survey estimated that 800 people were living without shelter – sleeping rough or in a car – across the region. While Māori make up only 11 percent of the Auckland population, they made up 42.7 percent of those without shelter and 39.9 percent of people sleeping in temporary accommodation.

While house prices, rents and living costs have rocketed over the last few decades, wages have not kept pace, pushing more Māori, typically already suffering poverty rates double the non-Māori population, further into deprivation. A household income report from the Ministry of Social Development, while debating a definition of poverty and whether it exists in New Zealand, had this to say: “No semantic niceties can change the reality that there are children in New Zealand who are going without the very basics, without items and experiences that virtually everyone would say that all children should have and none should be deprived of in New Zealand in 2017.”





If a kids' chess club seems inconsequential in this bleak picture, the club is one small part of a community response. That response is not based on any grand economic plan or political agenda. It’s more about trying to restore people’s dignity.

Ngarimu and a group of volunteers run Ka Pai Kaiti, a trust that is part of a loose network of people trying to turn things around in Gisborne and the East Coast, one of the most economically challenged regions in the country and one with a high Māori population.

Asked what their work involves, Ngarimu answers, “Whatever walks in the door.”

People are coming through the door, he says, because they’re reaching out for support and there’s not the support out there. “I had a guy [who’d been] up for 14 days [on P], walking in, wanting help. I know the help that that guy wanted. And I knew that we couldn’t give him that help.

“Are we waiting for a guy that’s flipped out and hasn’t had a sleep for weeks to bloody shoot everybody before we get anything bloody happening? It’s kind of like they’re waiting for something to really tip over the edge before something happens. We know there’s nothing out there to support them, so we do it ourselves.

“We thought, let’s put it out there, so we set up a support night for whanau. It could be grandparents, it could be a brother or sister with somebody that’s on meth. Grandparents were the main ones we were looking at because a lot of grandparents are looking after the mokos and they don’t understand all that meth thing and they’re scared. So we decided to have this night where they could all come in, sit in a safe space and just talk to each other. If there’s whanau that come in and they want to get off meth, we’ve managed to find a process where we can get them support out of Gisborne. That’s another big barrier for our whanau here. All the support seems to be out of Gisborne.”

The gap between the government agencies who have the power and the resources and those in need has become something of a standoff, he believes. Those agencies are disconnected but they are also harming communities. “I started seeing domestics out the front here. I’d go out here and there’s a laundromat next door, kids in there because it’s warm. I says, ‘What are yous doing?’ ‘We’re waiting for mum and them.’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘They’re in there’.”

“In there” was the pokies.

“So I started digging down into what was going on ... The misery that was going in there. A lot of the time the kids were involved when they’re having domestics out there, about losing all their money in the pokies. So we saw the harm and the damage it was doing to our community.”

He discovered, to his horror, that in one year $12 million had gone into pokie machines in the Gisborne region.

“Twelve million dollars. In one year, for God’s sake. That would clothe and feed the whole of the Tairawhiti.”

He found sports clubs and other organisations were getting a small proportion of that money, through community grants, but most of the rest went into the pockets of the owners or to Internal Affairs. “Ten to twelve million for Internal Affairs came out of the Tairawhiti region.”

“We decided to do something about it. We set up a protest. We got together and came up with a strategy on how we’re going to close them down. Two years later that strategy has worked. They’re gone. That just goes to show that if you really care about something and you can see the harm that it’s doing to our people, you do something about it and there’s a good chance that it’s going to happen. That’s a good example.”

Ngarimu is not the only one involved in that “flaxroots” political pushback.

Josh Wharehinga wouldn’t look out of place amongst the hipsters in Cuba Street in central Wellington. But by his own admission he’s always been a Gizzy boy. Born and bred in the region, he went to university, only to boomerang back as soon as possible. It’s the only place he wants to be.

Josh Wharehinga Josh Wharehinga

He is a district councillor and also on the boards of Tairawhiti District Health Board and the tertiary education provider Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. He says being in the governance space has opened his eyes to inertia at the political level.

“Every governance role that I’ve come into, I’ve gone, I’m going to do this, this, this and this. This is going to be radical, this is going to be massive. I was like, man, I’m going to do some cool stuff here, I’m going to progress some rapid change. And then you hit the bureaucracy. This wall of bureaucracy, this wall of compliance and policy and all of those kinds of things.”

What is not new to him is what he sees as the prejudiced assumptions from those at the top. He finds it both slightly amusing and frustrating when politicians choose to vilify certain marginalised groups of people, because he usually belongs to those groups.

“It’s hardcase politicians always throwing the gang thing out there, or always throwing the beneficiary thing out there, always throwing the solo benefit thing out there, always throwing the Māori thing out there, cos I’m those things. They’re like, oh there’s a problem with – insert Māori statistic – and 99 times out of a 100 I am one of those statistics.

“It always cracks me up when those politicians are having those kind of conversations, because 99 times out of a 100, they’ve never been on the DPB, they haven’t grown up in a gang-affiliated environment, they don’t actually know, meaningfully know, about the struggle that a lot of New Zealand and a lot of Māori go through. It would be like me trying to represent Federated Farmers with my garden of silverbeet in the backyard. Oh yeah, I know exactly what it’s like to till the ground. I can talk about silverbeet but that’s probably about the limit.”

When he came back to Gisborne from university he got involved in teaching, then worked as a social worker for an NGO. He’s witnessed the negative reaction from people who have a long history of reasons to distrust authority and he finds their alienation completely understandable.

“I remember turning up to a house. I never introduce myself as a social worker. I never, ever said I was a social worker because as soon as you say, “Hey, my name’s Josh, I’m a social worker,” they’d automatically think I was CYFS and, you can f*** off, and all that kind of stuff. Which is a fair reaction, you know. CYFS, child welfare, have a history of coming in, messing up families, taking away children, interrupting their whakapapa. That’s a justified reaction.”

He frequently sees the disconnect between what the community needs and what various agencies provide. Ka Pai Kaiti and other community-led initiatives have sprouted up to fill the need, but they operate on little to no money.

“The system is not of us. The system is in Wellington, that’s where the system is. The police is not a regional organisation. Oranga Tamariki, formerly known as CYFS, is not a regional organisation, it’s not a Gisborne organisation.”

“If the people that are of here are working with the families that are of here, then it’s a lot less of a hurdle to be able to engage with those whanau and move our region forward. Move whanau forward.”





Hilton Collier Hilton Collier

Hilton Collier has just flown home from Wellington and orders the first round at a pub overlooking the Turanganui River. A stone’s throw down the river is the spot where Captain Cook first greeted tangata whenua, after a fraught – and deadly – first encounter.

Collier is Ngāti Porou through and through and is the general manager of Pakihiroa Farms, a group of tribally owned farms on the East Coast.

He sips the froth from the top of his first pint and ponders which direction to take with the questions put to him. I mention the conversation with Ngarimu and the work he and others do. He knows them and the people they serve. They’re whanaunga.

“You have a group of people who understand reality at the coalface, they understand what it means, in business-speak, to be consumer-centric. Their consumer happens to be a beneficiary or someone who has run into trouble somewhere, so they understand the issues they’re facing and understand the support they need. Unfortunately the system is compartmentalised and resourced to do something very specific. So the solution becomes very prescriptive. You cannot prescribe success.”

He also sees the entrenched poverty and the negative spin-offs that have become generational. But he doesn’t believe that the current approach to those caught in that trap is working.