Corina Shields
Accountability. It’s one of the things Jacinda Ardern asked for when she stood at Waitangi on Waitangi Day in 2018 and made her Powhiri speech and it’s my belief that this speech shows just how far off track she is. Just to break this speech down would need an article of its own, so I want to focus on two things: child poverty and mental health. You can find the full speech here: Prime Minister’s Waitangi powhiri speech | Beehive.govt.nz
In 2017 when Labour got into government, they created the role of Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, a role that ultimately went to Jacinda Ardern. As noted in The Guardian at the time:
Combating child poverty has been a lifelong cause for Ardern and is the reason she entered politics aged 17.
I find it hard to believe that the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction is claiming child poverty has reduced despite the fact that homeless children, over 4000 of them, were NOT included in the latest poverty report.
If you’ve listened to her speak, you may have noticed she keeps bringing up “The 9 measures we use” but I’m yet to see in any mainstream media what those nine measures are. Is this not public interest information that should have been covered by the Public Interest Journalism fund?
You don’t need to be an academic to understand that there is a connection between poverty and mental health. I have seen firsthand how one affects the other and creates a cycle that is hard to break. My mother (and my father before his passing) lived in a Kainga Ora home. There came a point when my parents gave up ringing to have maintenance issues dealt to because most of the time they were poorly done, so I became their agent. I spent the next two years fighting Kainga Ora, not only for maintenance to be done but also for Healthy Homes Standards (HHS) for my terminally ill father. It was only because I went to mainstream media that I was able to finally get the HHS done.
But what I saw in my parents was a change. They looked sad and there were many days my father spent in bed because of how cold it was. And it is because of what I saw in them that I kept fighting. I can’t tell you the number of tears I cried over the two years of fighting.
Unfortunately, my father never got to see the end result because he passed away earlier this year. I’m not telling people this for pity; I’m telling you because his death came before I was able to finalise everything with Kainga Ora and I felt like I had failed him. To this day I still kick myself that I didn’t fight harder against the system. I’ve cried for the lost moments I should have spent with my father but that were instead spent fighting the system or waiting for contractors to come to do repairs.
The system has physically and mentally affected my parents, the children my mother raises and me.
What I realised rather quickly into that two-year journey was that my parents are not the only ones. There are many Kainga Ora tenants who are in the exact same position, some even worse off, and many of them have children of their own.
I also discovered that a lot of these people don’t speak out because they are scared of retribution from government agencies. They’re scared they’ll be kicked out for asking for their leaking toilet to be fixed. They’re scared their benefit will be cut if they ask for a review of a decision or some other nonsense state service workers seem to put them through. It came to me rather quickly that I have a voice that many vulnerable people in this country don’t.
As a person who doesn’t rely on the state to survive (although who knows how long that will last with all that this Labour Government has put us through the last two years), I could say whatever I wanted about issues that affect people and I didn’t need to worry whether I would get kicked out.
I started my own FB page and would even tag Jacinda, Kainga Ora and a myriad of others into my posts about issues affecting people.
I’ve written to so many politicians over the last two years over many different issues that I’ve lost count. The responses to some have been better than others.
You learn quickly that when you post online (especially when it comes to a government agency) that their social media team will be on it so fast to shut it down. At times I found social media were the only way I could push things forward.
I didn’t “just complain”. I’ve been forthcoming in sharing information I’ve found out along my journey with people who have come to me to tell me about the issues they face. For example, I now know there is an HHS escalation policy for people with illness, something that was never disclosed to my whanau or me in all my dealings with KO. It was only because of Brooke Van Velden that I was able to look into and obtain the details of the policy.
There were also times when food came from my cupboard because people were denied food grants during level 4 lockdowns when we were all told to stay home.
In September I wrote to a number of MPs including David Seymour, Karen Chhour, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, Rawiri Waititi, Nicola Willis, Matt King and Chris Baillie and asked them if they would support my parliamentary petition asking Jacinda Ardern to step down as Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, based on my belief that there has been a lot of hiding of information.
I’ve had one reply that told me the petition is sitting with a MP “for her information”. And so, I find myself writing this on a Sunday afternoon asking the public of NZ to please sign the petition asking Jacinda Ardern to step down as the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, if like me you believe Child Poverty hasn’t reduced.
It seems to me that politicians don’t seem to be interested in the matter just as they don’t seem to be interested in children’s mental health issues. And yes, I realise this is the weekend of Labour’s annual conference and they have promised more money to more people, but money alone does not solve the problem. You only have to look at the lack of results from the $1.9 billion mental health funding to know that.
