‘Politicians aren’t there to hear our people cry’

John Campbell was in Waikato when National made its major transport policy announcement this week. But the people he spoke to were outside the room and outside the world of politics.

Have you ever had an overseas friend or family member send someone to visit you?

“Oh my God, Denise! If you’re going to New Zealand you must go and see my cousins! They’d love to meet you.”

The day comes. They arrive. You’ve cooked something. Everyone makes a super effort. But it’s slightly odd. Not awful. Just a bit forced. And then they go. And you both know you’ll never see each other again.

And you sit there, the dishes waiting to be done, the empties already smelling of tomorrow, feeling slightly unsure what that was all about.

That, my friends, is the campaign trail.

On Monday, as the 2023 campaign began to gather steam (to use an uncosted transport idiom), those evanescent, travelling guests arrived in Hamilton.

This time it was the Nats. But it’s interchangeable. The major parties come and go, leaving a mess of bunting, or pamphlets, or sausage roll pastry. Although that mess is micro. The important messes are macro.

The Opposition says they’ll tidy the macro mess up. (Or build a road over it.) The Government says there’s no macro mess. (Or way less than when the Opposition was last in government.) Everyone leaves. Politics has been done. People on lower wages clean the micro mess away.

The Nats were being hosted by the Waikato Chamber of Commerce, at Wintec | Te Pūkenga – the Waikato Institute of Technology.

The function room was full, or nearly full. At the door people were greeted warmly. Finger food was served. And as is usually the case with a Chamber of Commerce event (almost anywhere in the country), the most well represented demographic was male, over forty, relatively well off, and white.

National was unveiling its “Transport for the Future” policy.

Inside, Christopher Luxon invited Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown to join him on the stage. Photos were taken. Roads were imagined. Promises were made. The business of campaigning took place without hitch or controversy.

Later, during the debrief that takes place after every such event, there would have been widespread agreement that it “went well”, or “worked”, or they had “nailed it”.

Outside, students, people for the future, were going about their day, largely unaware that National’s Leader and Deputy Leader were amongst them.

The campaign trail

This is how the campaign trail works. It needs a venue, or a backdrop, or somewhere that carries a narrative of success or failure.

It was the last day of July. Sun shone, equivocally, but with sufficient presence for students to be eating their lunch in the fresh air.

I introduced myself to two of them. Qdezjah and Tamya.

Qdezjah is studying midwifery. Tamya is studying psychology. They are 21 and 19 – and both radiate a shining, hopeful energy.

I ask them about politics. Neither of them can name the National Party leader, who’s talking, only metres away.

There is a reciprocity in this. The National leader couldn’t name them. (No politician could.)

That’s not some absurd false equivalence. Some expectation of the impossible. It’s a matter of access.

Inside, people will be introduced to Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, et al, or be close enough to introduce themselves. They’ll shake their hands, talk to them, name to name, and a good politician will remember their name and repeat it throughout the conversation. A sense of a bond is created. For years to come soundbites on the news will trigger the kind of memory that eventually becomes a family joke – “I’ve met Christopher Luxon, have I ever told you that?”

Some meet him. Some don’t.

Qdezjah and Tamya suspect they won’t.

This isn’t cynical, they’re not cynical, but it is their understanding of how the world works. They do not go to Chamber of Commerce lunches. They do not listen to RNZ. They do not live in one of those Wellington or Auckland suburbs where people talk easily about Central Government in a language that operates like a secret-handshake.

They do not have the handshake.

And the people who do have it sometimes forget the extent to which it locks Qdezjah and Tamya out.

I ask them what they want from their politicians.

“Just listening to, and understanding, people,” Qdezjah says, immediately, as if she’s been waiting for someone to ask her. “I know they go on about wanting what’s best for the people, but they don’t necessarily listen to our people cry.”

We pause. The words circle us.

“Yeah,” says Qdezjah, as if considering the magnitude of what she’s just said.

Tamya, who hopes to study Law one day, knows what she means.

“I was thinking of that, this morning, as I was driving around. And I saw a lot of signs saying, ‘vote for me’, ‘vote for me’. And I thought, ‘what actions did they take to get a government role?’”

People on the fringes

The paradox of the campaign trail, and I remember gradually becoming aware of this during my first trail as a journalist in 1993, is that people on the fringes understand it’s not actually for them.

I don’t know where I was, but I retain a strong mental picture of an elderly woman watching the rolling maul of Jim Bolger (or Mike Moore), surrounded by cameras, quickly heading past her, with all eyes inwards, alert to the act itself rather than the world it was taking place in. We had come to her, but it wasn’t about her, and she knew it.

“She’s got a baby. We both have babies,” Qdezjah says to me. And then she and Tamya list the barriers they must daily overcome to be at Wintec. Childcare, rent, groceries, power, the costs of studying…

“We have to pay to get an education, but they’re screaming out for midwives. Screaming out for healthcare workers.”

Qdezjah has a part-time job. Doing eyelashes.

Is she going to be a midwife, one day?

“Hopefully, yes.”

“Hopefully?” I ask her. “Why did you say ‘hopefully’?”

“Because it’s really hard, and it’s difficult to manage everything. And cost plays a big part in it.”

Tamya tells me why she choose psychology.

“I love the human mind. I love trying to work out why people do what they do. I also find my baby very interesting, and how she develops. Mental health is such a huge issue, as well, in New Zealand. I think I can make an impact. One person at a time.”

One person at a time.

After Qdezjah and Tamya have gone off to class, I head back towards The Atrium, where Christopher Luxon is speaking.

I’m standing at the top of the steps leading down to it, when two older students start climbing towards me.

“John Campbell!”, they exclaim. Laughing.

Maine Te Aroa Natua and Sunny Amopiu are both doing a BA in counselling. They take me up to their class to say hello, and I find myself unusually shy as I stand before a room of people who are all determined to make a difference, one person at a time.

I ask their lecturer for permission to borrow Maine and Sunny for a few more minutes, and we sit in the corridor outside and talk about what politics means to them.

Not much.

This isn’t a repudiation, by the way. They’re not nihilists, or anarchists. I did not meet Guy Fawkes. It’s exactly what Qdezjah and Tamya were talking about. A sense that their lives and Parliamentary politics don’t often intersect. That politicians aren’t listening to them cry.

Make a difference

Maine and Sunny are both in their thirties. They come from Tokoroa and Putāruru.

“I’m not criticising the Government, or opposing what they think,” Maine says. “I’m just trying to do my part. I can see the gaps. We live in the gaps.

“Starting with me is my response. And so I’m working on myself to be able to get to a position to make a difference. And that starts with training myself. Sunny being Māori and myself being Pacific, we can make a difference in Māori and Pacific communities. And if we can, we should.”

Sunny starts talking.

“We’ve suffered quite severely with loss through suicide in our community (Putāruru). And it affected my life, quite heavily. I lost my partner six years ago. He’d been to so many people for help, but he just kept getting triaged to nowhere.

“So, for me studying counselling is about bringing it back home and addressing things for my children, and all our children, so that they don’t experience the same thing. So that people can get help when they need it.”

I ask them both where you go if you need mental health care in Putāruru and Tokoroa.

Maine answers.

“Just to a GP. But we already have a GP shortage. So my reason for doing counselling is being able to provide access for our communities in Tokoroa.”

“So you see a problem?” I ask her, “and you’re going to save it with…”

“Myself? Pretty much. Yeah. I’m hoping that with me undertaking training in counselling it will help bring others to train in counselling as well.

“At the moment our mental health responses feel too generalised and not specific. That’s why I choose to do counselling. You can’t go wrong when someone wants to sit down and really listen to you talk. Especially when they come from where you’re from. It’s just being heard.”

“We’ve walked the walk”, Sunny says. Who has. More than anyone should have to.

“We’ve lived these things. People in boardrooms might think they know our communities, but are they in them? If you wait for the government to make changes, nothing’s happening on the ground. That’s where the change needs to be. So we’re not waiting for government. We’re going to do it ourselves. Does that make sense?”

It does.

Then Sunny tells me the story of how her father became a teacher in his early forties. He understood the difference he could make. And realised he had to make it.

“I want to do that. Bring skills back to our community, so there are avenues and links for people, especially our males, to be able to talk openly. Normalise it.

“We don’t have to carry that traditional indigenous mana of men who appear physically strong but don’t talk. No more. For me, I want to go back to our tamariki. Work with our children. Listen to them.”

Listening is a recurring theme.

Qdezjah, Tamya, Maine, Sunny – none of them think that politicians listen enough. Not meaningfully. Not to people like them.

I am standing outside The Atrium now, when from out of the office directly beside it bursts a group of people alive with the day they’re having.

It’s Rose Marsters and the team from the “Centre for Learners of Oceania and Vocational Excellence”, which seems a ridiculously long title until you realise their acronym is C4LOVE.

Treasures

I go inside this special place. There are treasures on the wall.

C4LOVE is home to a collaborative partnership between Wintec | Te Pūkenga, Te Whatu Ora NZ and the Ministry of Social Development, who’ve collectively launched the Wayfinder project, “a Pacific workforce guided pathway with a focus on health programmes”.

I meet Dip and Lota. They are 19 and 22.

They write their names down for me, on my spiral notepad, and what they’re studying – “Health Pathway”. And Dip also writes, “then hopefully nursing for both of us”.

Hopefully.

I ask them what they want from their political leaders, and their answers bounce off each other like a duet.

“Someone who focuses on all the communities.” “Someone who listens.” “Someone who cares about Māori and Pasifika.” “Someone who sees us.”

There’s a state-supported programme designed, in part, to get more Pasifika students into healthcare.

In a way, they have been seen.

But Dip and Lota regard politics as another country. As belonging to other people. As power for the already powerful – not for them.

In The Atrium, just metres away, National’s transport announcement receives enthusiastic applause.

The campaign trail has made its way to Wintec.

And Qdezjah, Tamya, Maine, Sunny, Dip and Lota were right there when it passed through.

So very close.

Six students who have believe that making change begins with them. And who hope (hope) they’ll be able to do so. One person at a time. Outside politics. Despite politics. Because if they don’t, who will?