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United leadership that enables all whānau to flourish in Tairāwhiti.
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Manaaki Tairāwhiti | Nicky Solomon 14th May 2017 Photo: Nicky Solomon. We need a vision — from a vision comes a plan, from a plan comes progress.
Recently, my Facebook feed fleetingly featured an opinion piece reflecting on the 1664 painting by Caspar Netscher, depicting a lace-maker of the period. The painting pays homage to the skill, expertise and intelligence the young female subject brings to the equivalent of a latter-day minimum wage job.
The writer of the piece espouses the view that the plight of the working poor would be somewhat alleviated, if we all viewed the working poor with respect and truly admired the hard work and skill that is required in low-wage occupations.
On one level I agree with the sentiment of the writer, but it feels to me trite, and risks allowing us all to cop-out. I don’t think that we do hold our working poor in low esteem — we are bigoted in our commentary about the unemployed, but largely it seems to me that public commentary with regard to the working poor is sympathetic and respectful, but somehow accepting of the fact it is quite normal to work in a full-time job and still not be able to make ends meet.
That’s the cop-out — no matter how full of respect we are, it’s not OK to be creating a society in which it is accepted that a large chunk of the population just can’t make ends meet — whether working or not.
Do we agree that it is a fundamental right of every baby born in this country to live in a warm, dry house, to be well fed, and to have the same access to healthcare and education as every other baby born on that same day?
Then at what point do we start blaming that baby for not being able to procure a warm, dry house, for not being well-fed, and for not accessing healthcare and education. When he or she is five years old, 15 years old, becomes a parent him- or herself? Because that is what we do.
At some point we decide that each individual is responsible for carving out a life within which these basic needs are met. But we are not all equipped to do that — and it’s no fault of that baby born into that damp leaky home, to parents ill-equipped to support and nurture him or her.
As we head into another winter with headlines screaming about the ‘housing-crisis’ our Government seems completely at a loss with regard to how to address the huge raft of social calamities that face us.
We have families living in garages, families plagued with P-use and all of the ills that come with it, families in which parents work so hard to make ends meet that they never see their kids. And the Government is . . . buying motels.
Michael Savage must be turning in his grave. We have gone from being the first nation in the world to establish a social security system, to one where it’s now almost acceptable to have people living in cars.
So if central Government can’t figure this one out, what is there for the rest of us to do?
Maybe we need regional leadership on this one. Maybe we need to say that we want our region, the beautiful Tairāwhiti, to be a place where people are cared for. Maybe we have a vision that poverty is eliminated from our region by 2037.
I think we could do it. Once we agreed to that goal, we have the means to make it happen. We have Manaaki Tairāwhiti — local leadership of our social services. We have the Eastland Community Trust with a substantial amount of capital.
We own much of our own infrastructure — port, airport, electricity network. We have abundant natural resources; we have people who care about each other. In truth, poverty and deprivation affect everyone in a community our size, whether the effect is direct or indirect.
Economic development and job creation are a big part of what we need, but our vision needs to be bigger than that. Job creation won’t address the void that must be crossed in order to enable many of our most vulnerable to access a job, once it exists.
Our 20-year plan needs to address the unacceptable living conditions for many and to ensure that our babies are well-housed and have their needs met. We need to enable our children to look after themselves and each other, and we need to completely turn around the growing divide between those who are meaningfully engaged in society and those who are not.
As an outcome of the series of “Tackling Poverty” workshops conducted around the country by the McGuiness Institute in late 2016, a proposal was put to the Prime Minister which included a number of “Radical Reform Ideas” gleaned from community workshops around the country, including in Gisborne. These would be a good place to start.
We need a vision — from a vision comes a plan, from a plan comes progress. I’ve lived through the 1980s, the 90s, and the first part of this millennium, and I don’t like the way it’s going. I think that we can do it differently in our place.