To write about poverty, Rebecca Macfie had to understand how New Zealand’s benevolent state granted her privileges long denied Māori.
In 2023, a landmark series of articles, “Hardship & Hope” launched listener.co.nz. The stories exploring poverty – and the grassroots work building hope – were the result of in-depth field research and reporting by award-winning journalist and author Rebecca Macfie, a former Listener staff writer. Last year, Macfie was the JD Stout Research Fellow at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, where she continued her work building on the stories of “Hardship & Hope”. As part of her fellowship, Macfie presented the annual Stout Lecture, when she talked about her project, and the hard questions she first had to ask herself. This is an edited extract from that lecture.
In my 30-plus years as a journalist, it was always a given that you didn’t bring yourself into the story. You were just an observer, a questioner getting answers. Who you are didn’t matter.
Now, spending time in communities, on marae, in schools, with whānau, grassroots leaders and NGOs, I’ve had to profoundly rethink that. If I want people’s stories and to know their journeys, that requires relationships of trust. And so I’ve come to realise that, to build and honour that trust, I need to be clear about my own story and where I’ve come from.
What business do I have coming into places with my notebook and recorder, taking the words and knowledge of those who know poverty and who are doing the real work? Ko wai au? Who am I?
These questions have weighed on me since I began a project to direct my journalism towards deepening public understanding of the causes and harms of poverty in this country.
This is how I’ve tried to make sense of what I’ve been doing, and whether I have any business doing it.
I’m a 64-year-old Pākehā baby boomer. I grew up on a sheep farm in South Otago. I’m a beneficiary of a benevolent state.
My father served on a naval destroyer in the Indian Ocean for the last two years of World War II. He was a town boy from Ōamaru, and when he was discharged, he got an “A” grade certification. This meant he was entitled to become part of a scheme to resettle returned servicemen on farms. Under the scheme, returned soldiers were offered plots of land through a ballot.
In 1951, Dad drew the property on which he and Mum raised me and my brothers and sisters.
Dad was barely 26 when he got the farm. He had zero money and zero business experience. His sheepdogs were his only assets.
But it didn’t matter, because he was supported by a benevolent state. The State Advances Corporation provided him with a mortgage, a living allowance and budget supervision.
Our farm was among about 1.4 million acres acquired by the state for the rehabilitation of returned servicemen. We were surrounded by neighbours who got their places the same way as Dad.
We grew up on the story that the benevolent state helped rehabilitate the servicemen who served in the war. Only in recent times have I learnt that this benevolence didn’t extend to everyone.
The price of citizenship
When it came to post-World War II rehabilitation support from the state, there was unequivocal assurance that Māori and Pākehā would have “equal opportunities”.
The state spoke of Māori returned soldiers being treated in exactly the same way as Pākehā returned soldiers.
As I now know from Terry Hearn’s work for the Waitangi Tribunal’s Military Veterans Kaupapa Inquiry, that promise of equality was false.
Even Māori veterans who were “A” grade like Dad were excluded from ballots for crown sections, because of an alleged “inability of Māori to manage their financial affairs”.
It was also assumed that iwi would use the little land still in their ownership to cheaply settle Māori servicemen.
Access to land for Māori veterans was “significantly constrained”, writes Hearn.
Many gave up waiting for that sweet promise of equality and joined the wave of migration to the cities to search for waged work.
Yet these were servicemen who had answered Sir Āpirana Ngata’s call to pay “the price of citizenship”. They were men of the Māori Battalion, in which the casualty rate was 50% higher than the average for other New Zealand battalions.
I also grew up on the story that New Zealand had the best race relations in the world.
The merits of Māori assimilation into Pākehā life, and intermarriage, sort of floated in the cultural ether as “good things”. I think Dad – who, unusually for a farmer, was a lifelong Labour supporter – genuinely believed this to be true.
We lived in the South Island for my entire childhood, but I didn’t know what Ngāi Tahu was as a kid. Like other Pākehā of my era, I was raised ignorant of our history.
I grew up in a time of cultural and historical erasure. My four-year history degree didn’t alter that. I learnt about Ngāi Tahu only in the 1990s, when I did some reporting on their treaty claim. I learnt how a series of dishonest and, in some cases, fraudulent land purchases left them landless and impoverished.
The thing about erasure is that it deprives you of the structural building blocks of accurate historical knowledge. Without the basic facts, it’s hard to join the dots to form an accurate narrative of your own place.
And so it was only last year that I finally clocked that our farm was almost certainly within the southern boundary of the largest of those dishonest and fraudulent transactions: the 1848 Kemp Purchase.
The benevolent state
There were six of us kids growing up on the farm. In 1956, when Mum was 25, with two toddlers and pregnant with my twin brothers, she contracted polio and was left quite significantly disabled. My younger sister and I were born later.
So, there we were. Heaps of kids. Isolated location. A stoic, hardworking young mum struck by an awful disease that seriously impaired her movement. A husband out until all hours fencing, draining gullies, lambing, on the tractor.
But no one turned up at the farm to take us into care. No. Instead, we were raised up by the benevolent state.
I had no concept that the state could be a threat to my liberty or wellbeing. As a teenager, hanging out on the streets of Balclutha, I would drink under age, get into cars with drinking, speeding drivers, and experiment with weed. Through all of this, I don’t recall interacting with the police.
Certainly, there was nothing like what I saw when I was a little older, aged 24, and working for the Police Association.
The benevolent state that I grew up believing in, and benefiting from, can be a violent and oppressive state for others.
I was sent by my boss, Bob Moodie, to South Auckland to find out if there was racism in the police. I rode around in the back of cop cars on the late shift. They would slow down and stop alongside Māori and Pasifika teenagers walking along the street, and the driver and his partner would turn to each other and say: “Turn them over?” before getting out and doing just that.
The benevolent state also educated us. It didn’t belt us for speaking our language.
For me, that benevolence included five years of free university education. Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, when I needed work to pay the rent on my student flat, the benevolent state provided student job schemes.
I graduated with zero student debt, as would most of my contemporaries, many of them now in positions of power in the law, in business, in government, in politics, in medicine.
When my husband and I bought our first home in 1988 in Christchurch – a three-bedroom wooden bungalow – it cost $92,500. At that time, average house prices were under three times the average income.
Our income wasn’t very high. I was a first-year journalist on a dying afternoon paper, and my husband was a young engineer in a construction industry that was on its knees after the sharemarket crash.
But when we bought our home, the state had been an active participant in the housing system for 50 years. It provided mortgages to low-income families buying their first homes, and there had been mechanisms like the capitalisation of the family benefit that enabled people to put a deposit together.
And, of course, the state built state houses. In 1991, it had a portfolio of 70,000 homes. That’s roughly the same as the state owns now, for a population that has since grown by 1.8 million.
So, purely by an accident of demography, we have been able to accumulate wealth and lifelong housing security, from which our children have also benefited. You could say we’re “sorted”.
The great divide
In 1991, the housing system that created the conditions that prevailed when we bought that house was smashed apart when the government led by Jim Bolger decided that the state had little business in the housing system and that the all-knowing market would do a better job.
The conditions were set for today’s catastrophe – a society divided between those who own houses and those who don’t.
Opportunists seek to drive a poisoned wedge between us, as we try to redesign our way out of the extractive prison of neoliberalism
We saw a collapse in the construction of low-cost homes. We have one of the highest rates of homelessness in the world. For those condemned to be tenants, and therefore second-class citizens, there are compounding harms.
They are subject to eviction at short notice, with every move potentially meaning the kids have to change schools. They are subject to uncapped rent rises and the judgment of property managers turning up for three-monthly inspections of the lawns and the state of the toilet bowl.
Today, 43% of kids under 15 live in rentals and are thus denied fundamental stability in their lives.
What do I know?
So, back to that question. What do I know of hardship? I’ve never had to go to a food bank. I’ve never paid 60-70% of my income in rent. I’ve never queued at WINZ. I’ve never experienced the humiliating, shaming, careless, violent state.
But I’ve worked as a journalist for 36 years. Journalism is grounded in a perpetual state of inquiry and curiosity. It’s fuelled by doubt and scepticism. You live in a state of discomfort about why things are the way they are, and who decides they should be that way. About who benefits and who pays, and who determines how that equation falls.
That doubt and discomfort is what sends us out to look and ask. It also puts us in a position of great privilege.
Journalists can go places and say, “Please start at the beginning. Help me understand. Tell me about you, and who you belong to. Tell me about how you think this has come to be.”
And so, everything I know about hardship is learnt from others through this window of journalistic privilege.
I undertake this work knowing I can never fully understand, always fearful of doing more harm. And now also deeply aware that the benevolent state that I grew up believing in, and benefiting from, can be a violent and oppressive state for others.
My project, Hardship & Hope: Stories of resistance in the fight against poverty in Aotearoa, got off to a slow start nearly three years ago.
Scott Gilmour, who leads the I Have a Dream project in New Zealand, threw down a challenge. How about I start writing about inequality and poverty in a way that would encourage people to think about it, understand it, see its harms, and motivate them to support change?
I struggled to see how I could contribute anything worthwhile. The evidence and reports and data were already out there by the truckload. Anyone who didn’t already know or care, didn’t want to. What could I do that wasn’t more poverty porn?
But one day I talked to the wonderful Tracey McIntosh [Professor of Indigenous Studies in Te Wānanga o Waipapa (School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies) at the University of Auckland ] about whether, and how, I could make a useful contribution.
“There has to be hope to create change,” she said. “There have to be spaces of hope.” The idea of hope gave me a handhold, a kind of permission to get going.
Hope is not optimism
Even then, who was I to say what hope meant for people on minimum wages working to exhaustion scrubbing floors in the middle of the night, yet still having to go to the food bank? Or for single parents with the impossible task of stretching a benefit across power, rent, food, petrol? Or the person ensnared by debt, having money sucked from their earnings under an attachment order imposed without their knowledge by the courts?
I feared writing saccharine “good news stories” that would make people with the kind of advantages I’ve had feel better about “the poor people”. Then I came across a passage by [US writer and activist] Rebecca Solnit, writing in the context of climate change and climate activism. It resonated equally with the story and struggle against poverty.
She wrote, “Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognising the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it.”
So that was it for me. Provided I came to the work with uncertainty and discomfort and an open heart, I felt there was something worthwhile for me to contribute.
And so, over the past two years, I’ve been spending time in communities, trying to learn why things are the way they are in that place. Learning about the action, resistance, innovation, risk-taking and vulnerability rising up from that place, and how that can help shape the future.
One important lesson I’ve learnt is that behind every data point recording deprivation is a story of talent and skill and productivity that is being oppressed by constant scarcity, constant stress and the powerlessness of being forced to engage with a harsh, judgmental state for survival.
None of the stories I’ve recorded are sweet “good news” stories.
Instead, I’ve learnt about how people in communities are working hard to share power and space. I’ve learnt about the compromises and conditions that allow whānau to fulfil their aspirations.
None of the stories I’ve heard cures the housing catastrophe, or delivers a fair tax system, or fixes frightening levels of school disengagement. Nor does it rain thousands of living-wage jobs down on deprived areas.
But it’s given me a glimpse of what can be unlocked with tikanga, manaakitanga, whanaungatanga and aroha as the framework for action.
It’s a glimpse of what hope looks like: risky, uncertain, vulnerable to setbacks and loss, and aching with the possibility of a better future.
Let me give just one example. When I met Malcom Northover from Hawke’s Bay, he was looking a bit grass-flecked because he’d been on the weed-eater before he sat down to talk to me.
Malcom was 18 in 1985 when his father asked him to look into what was happening with ancestral whenua to which his tīpuna had been granted title by the Native Land Court in the 1860s.
By then, about half the land in Hawke’s Bay had been acquired by the crown for a pittance, and on false promises, and then sold to speculators and settlers. The Native Land Court largely finished off the job of dispossession.
This was intentional. Justice Minister Henry Sewell in 1870 described the court’s purpose as to “bring the great bulk of lands in the Northern Island within the reach of colonisation” and the “detribalisation of the Māori – to destroy, if it were possible, the principle of communism upon which their social system is based and which stands as a barrier in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Māori race into our social and political system”.
Malcom’s task 120 years later was to find out what was left of his tīpuna’s land – what had survived what historian Richard Boast described as “fraud and dubious dealings” and the “economy of speculation and graft” unleashed by te kōti tango whenua, the “land-taking court”.
Malcom’s work took years. He picked his way through documents in the Māori Land Court and traced the fragmentation of the whenua down through the generations: blocks partitioned, blocks sold and land taken by the council and government for public works.
Eventually, he found there were 323ha left, fragmented across 23 blocks, from one acre to 90. It was all farmed by Pākehā under low-rent leases overseen by the Māori Trustee – leases that rolled over without consultation. For any whānau wanting to build homes on the whenua, the obstacles were virtually insurmountable. Council rules forbade building houses on small blocks. Banks wouldn’t lend on land with multiple owners. There was no infrastructure. The land was leased to farmers. Descendants were scattered far and wide.
They were so alienated from their own whenua that when Malcom got everyone together in 1998 to visit it, aunties and uncles wept. They had never before stood on their land.
The tide turns
Some councils – especially the Hastings District Council, fired up by the formidable Ngāhiwi Tomoana, past chair of Ngāti Kahungunu – loosened the constraints on building papakāinga on ancestral whenua.
Tentatively, and inadequately, a trickle of finance has come through Kiwibank. Some infrastructure funding has come from the government, and more significantly, a boost through the Whai Kāinga Whai Oranga scheme in 2021.
Malcom’s whānau took back control of the leases and renegotiated those that were up for renewal. And now, on a 2.8ha block of that ancestral whenua, there is Puke Aute [a papakainga housing development near Te Hauke (Listener, July 29, 2023)].
It took years of persistence. It’s hard, complicated and under-resourced work. But around Hawke’s Bay, papakāinga are popping up. Whānau are starting to build homes on their own land. Malcom’s cousin Zack Makoare has been the driving force of the papakāinga. When I called in to see Zack a few months ago, he was out in his garage with a whānau group who had come for advice on building their papakāinga.
Doing this is about to get harder again. The Whai Kāinga Whai Oranga money [a $730 million commitment to speed up the delivery of Māori-led housing] has largely run out and there is no more in this climate of austerity [though on February 26, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka announced a further $36 million for 100 affordable rental homes under the Ka Uruora partnership].
But the possibility and potential is there to be seen now. Skills have accumulated, and people like Zack are sharing what they know. I have a feeling the momentum will endure.
My privilege as a journalist allows me into such spaces of hope. And, in truth, I’m gaining more than anyone, as I work to overcome that erasure I grew up with and learn our historical truths.
I recently heard Tracey McIntosh use the expression “productive discomfort”, which perfectly fits my experience. Over the course of this project, I’ve learnt to live with feeling utterly out of my depth.
Recently, for the first time, I dared to stand and begin my pepeha with “Kō tangata Tiriti ahau” – I am tangata Tiriti – and I’ve begun to understand what that means.
I can’t imagine this country going back to a time when not only was te reo stolen from those to whom it belongs, but from all of us. I can’t imagine going back to a time when we were denied the window it provides on other ways of being together.
Especially now, as opportunists seek to drive a poisoned wedge between us, as we try to redesign our way out of the extractive prison of neoliberalism, and try to rethink our systems and ways of living together in these magnificent, fragile islands.
The threats and risks can seem insurmountable. Obscene inequality, shameful levels of deprivation and climate change and ecological degradation, to name a few.
But what this project has taught me, a Pākehā baby boomer, is that we have answers and initiative. I’ve seen a glimpse of the power of manaakitanga, aroha, whanaungatanga and tikanga at work.
We have ingenuity and innovation. We have determination and vision. We have kotahitanga.
Together, we are hope.
Rebecca Macfie’s Stout Lecture was first published in abridged form by e-Tangata. Her Hardship & Hope stories, can be found here:
Part I:
Hardship & Hope: Child left with life-long illness due to unhealthy Kāinga Ora housing
Hardship & Hope: The nurses who help prevent life-threatening skin conditions for kids
Part II:
Hardship & Hope: Porirua community class teaches locals how to cook healthy food
Hardship & Hope: How financial programme helped single mum who racked up thousands in debt
Part III:
Hardship & Hope: How reclaiming ancestral land helps whānau struggling with housing crisis
Part IV: