A Citizen in Christchurch

— some thoughts for the Tuesday Club

by vivian Hutchinson

November 2022 30 min read download as PDF

This paper is based on a speech given by vivian Hutchinson to the Tuesday Club, held at the Smash Palace Bar in Christchurch on Tuesday 1st November 2022.

I'M A VISITOR from Taranaki, and I suppose I am here because Garry Moore and I have worked together on many projects over the years. He’s asked me to speak because over the last decade — until Covid intervened — I have been part of running regular community circles in the New Plymouth District Council chambers.  You could say that we in Taranaki have been something of a distant cousin to this Tuesday Club here in Christchurch, especially in our common purpose of hosting conversations between active citizens.

I have also created and convened an award-winning community education programme called the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. This has been done with a team of local people concerned about how active citizenship is an important building block of healthy communities. I’ve also been working closely with local kuia Ngaropi Raumati, who has hosted the Masterclass at Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki, which is a tangata whenua development and liberation service.  

I'm pleased you have asked me to speak halfway through your process tonight, because that's what we also do at our Masterclass. Our own wananga sessions are three hours long, and participants are first invited to share their own keynote speeches on the topic at hand, and then have conversations in small groups.

Ngaropi and I often don't get to speak until about two hours into our process. This reinforces the fact that the most important thing happening in the Masterclass is not listening to us, but enabling active citizens to have much deeper conversations with one another.

When we do speak, we offer what we have called our “stretch” sessions ... because we see our job as elders and conveners as stretching the thinking that is already in the room.

During the Covid months, I took the opportunity to write up what had emerged from my own sessions, and this has turned into a series of essays which have been published under the title How Communities Awaken. They are freely available to read on the Community Taranaki website — you can also easily read them on your mobile phone — and we have produced a gift edition as a book.

Ngaropi Raumati has also captured her own stretch sessions by recording them on video, and these are available on the Tū Tama Wahine website, under the title Te Kai o te Rangatira.

Anyway, Garry has asked me to talk about the community and citizenship themes of my recent writing, and to offer some stretches on the things that have I have been thinking about while I have been here in Christchurch ... which could be a pretty wide selection of topics. 

But as a rough guide, and to try and keep things short, I thought I would talk about three things: The first is about a piano and a bull. The second is about a woman who is five stories high. And the last one is about a man who gets things done.

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YESTERDAY I VISITED the Christchurch Art Gallery with Garry's wife, Pam Sharpe. After exploring the different exhibitions in the Gallery, I was struck by the Michael Parekōwhai artwork outside on the forecourt. It is a sculpture in bronze and stainless steel of a piano with a bull standing on top of it.

I know its a famous sculpture here in Christchurch, but it was the first time I had seen it. The bull wasn't charging, but it was certainly full of muscle and aggression. If there had been someone sitting on the piano stool, they would be looking eye-to-eye with a very threatening creature.

“Chapman's Homer” bronze sculpture by Michael Parekōwhai outside Te Puna o Waiwhetū / Christchurch Art Gallery, October 2022

Who really knows what this sculpture is all about? Parekōwhai has named it “Chapman's Homer” which is a reference to a Keats poem, and sounds suitably artistic and esoteric ... which means I'll have to look it up on Google.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this sculpture has captured the hearts of Christchurch people where it has been seen as a symbol of the resilience of this city in the face of the powerful forces of the earthquake of 2011. 

But like any great work of art, we can invest whatever meaning we like onto it, and such meanings do tend to change over time.

When I looked at it, I was reminded of the charging bull that is in the heart of the financial district of New York. That public sculpture is a symbol of a “bull” market, a time that is supposed to bring us financial optimism and economic prosperity.

But looking at this Christchurch bull, I had other feelings.

I remarked to Pam that it reminded me of when I got angry over breakfast that very morning while reading the news. I had been following the reports where the New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr was saying that we needed to raise unemployment in order to control inflation.

I was angry because this seemed like a very familiar bull in our national financial affairs. It was a beast that has been plaguing my own work in our communities for decades.

The trade-off between unemployment and managing inflation might seem an esoteric matter of central banking to most of you, but not to me. Garry Moore and I have been working on various community employment projects for over forty years, and this is just the sort of hard-wired economic thinking that our efforts have been continuously up against.

We started the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs when Garry became the Mayor of Christchurch in the late 1990s. It had as its objective that no young person in New Zealand under 25 years would be out of work or training, or having something useful to do in our communities. It was a remarkably refreshing initiative and a national project. Nearly every Mayor in New Zealand —from across the political spectrum — signed up as a member and were engaged on local employment projects and sharing skills and ideas with one another.

I was there as an adviser from the community sector, and my main reason for getting involved was because I no longer wanted to live in a country that had no use for such a large number of its young people. And at that time, we had something like one in every six young people out of work or not connected to any education or training. 

Just as an aside, I need to point out that we are the only living creature on the planet that has unemployment as a fact of life for its young. And because this issue is so fundamental to wellbeing in our families and our communities, unemployment has always been at the forefront of our cultural and political lives. And let’s not also forget that one of our two main political parties is named after our ability to work.

But back to the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. One of our most significant early meetings was when a core group of Mayors met with policy advisers from the Department of Labour. They very kindly sat us down and explained to us the reasons why our goals for the full employment and full participation of our young people could not be achieved.

They explained to us that unemployment was built into the structure of how the national economy was managed. In their view, there was always going to be a trade-off going on between the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation. This understanding in economic orthodoxy was called the Phillips Curve (named after the theories of a New Zealand economist called Bill Phillips).

The Labour market advisors even have this policy device called the NAIRU, which stands for the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, which gives them the lowest unemployment rate that can be sustained without causing wage growth and inflation to rise.

Having these ideas hard-wired into the algorithms of our economic management can sound like a weird conspiracy theory to anyone not versed in the details of macro-economics. That's what I thought when I was first introduced to them.

I quite naturally thought: How can you have politicians and bureaucrats going around complaining about people being lazy or unskilled — pointing to their bad attitudes or shoddy work habits — when the sordid truth was that they were planning for these people to be unemployed and “losers” all along. From a family and community point of view, it seemed — and frankly still seems — crazy.

The core group of Mayors saw the role of the Taskforce for Jobs at that time as standing for the community goals of full employment and full participation. Nobody puts themselves forward to be Mayor of any place that has already decided that it has no use for a substantial number of its own young people. The Taskforce described its goals as “cultural goals” because we wanted a “zero-waste” of people in our own communities ... and we frankly expected the Reserve Bank and our national politicians to be our allies and collaborators in making these cultural goals happen.

What happened to the Mayors Taskforce is a story for another time. It is still going, and it is still doing good work. But I will let you judge for yourself whether it is also still seriously advocating for the “cultural goals” which have not stopped being relevant today. 

( Economists now have this thing called the NEET rate, which measures the proportion of young people aged 15-24 years who are not employed or engaged in education or training. Even at this time when the official unemployment rate is statistically quite low, the NEET rate here in New Zealand is still hovering around one in every seven young people. )

But back to the Art Gallery, and the sculpture of the bull and the piano ... it had stirred feelings in me as I was also thinking about that Reserve Bank statement.

I saw the piano as representing all the things that we value in our communities because it is an instrument capable of much beauty and celebration. But we will never to get to the music if we don't sit on that piano stool and face down that bull.  If we don't step up and stand up for the things we value in our communities — facing all the power and threat and aggression that the bull represents — then the piano stool will always remain empty, and it will also remain an indictment on all of us.

I do think we are going to look back at this time in our history and recognise that it will become as consequential to the wellbeing of our communities as the 1984 reforms were for the 4th Labour Government. You might not immediately recognise it as such, but that is because the algorithms driving these consequences are hidden in the macroeconomics of our financial decisions.

The financial journalist Bernard Hickey is an excellent explainer of what’s going on. He has spoken to this Tuesday Club over the last year, where he detailed the huge shifts of wealth that have happened since the onset of Covid. He describes it as happening “accidentally on purpose”, which I suppose is what takes place when there’s no-one sitting at the piano, and you just leave it to the algorithms.

Bernard Hickey reports that the Government and Reserve Bank have presided over policies which have helped make the owners of homes and businesses $952 billion richer since December 2019. The Covid years have seen what Hickey calls “the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand.”

Meanwhile, those New Zealanders who have missed out on that asset growth have been hammered with real wage deflation and rents rising faster than incomes. The poorest New Zealanders are now $400 million more in debt and need twice as many food parcels as before Covid.

That’s stunning. And it’s not the economics of community. It is certainly not an economics that reflects the best intentions of a “team of five million” which, you’ll remember, is how we branded ourselves in the early days of the pandemic.

For some of us, it is heart-breaking that this dramatic shift in wealth has happened under a Labour Government, supported by the Greens. For those of us who remember the 1980s, there is a definite sense of déjà vu.

You can only imagine what community workers in Taranaki like myself were thinking when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern turned up recently and spoke to her party caucus at a rural retreat near New Plymouth.

There she announced that her government had managed “equity and fairness” with “Labour values” during the Covid crisis, and would continue to “manage challenges and change when it comes to climate, housing, poverty, everything we continue to face as a nation.”

It’s the right words, for sure, and certainly what we want to hear as a “team of five million”.  And I’m not saying that our Prime Minister is a hypocrite.

What I am saying is that if she looks across the road, she would see that the bull is no longer in the paddock.

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IN THIS SECOND PART, I want to invite you to Taranaki and talk about another artwork which has just been unveiled in New Plymouth’s CBD. It is a five-stories-high mural on the back of our Puke Ariki Library building and it celebrates the radical activism and creative work of Hana Te Hemara, or Hana Jackson.

Hana Te Hemara (1940-1999) was of Te Atiawa descent, and born at Puketapu, near New Plymouth. She is well known as one of the dynamic founders of the activist group Ngā Tamatoa which demonstrated and organised around many important issues, including the revival of the Māori language. Their activism paved the way for the thriving kura kaupapa, kōhanga reo and te reo Māori movement we have in Aotearoa today.

Hana herself was a leader in many other ground-breaking initiatives. She helped Hone Tuwhare set up the first Māori Artists and Writers’ Conference, and she also later established the first Māori Business and Professional Association. She was a gifted fashion designer, and organised the first Māori fashion award, and the fashion shows which ran in conjunction with the Te Māori exhibitions.

Hana died quite young at aged 59, yet I think there are many of us who feel that she has left a tremendous legacy for future generations. So it is wonderful to see her being celebrated on our Library building.

Hana Te Hemara mural by Mr.G Hoete, on the Puke Ariki Library building in New Plymouth, September 2022

The mural is the work of prominent Māori artist Mr.G Hoete, and it was commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 14th September 1972. This was the day when Hana and Ngā Tamatoa walked up the steps of Parliament to deliver a petition calling for an official programme of support for the Māori language, and for getting Māori taught in our education system. Because of this petition, the 14th of September later became known as Māori Language Day, and eventually, the beginning of Māori Language Week.

The celebrations of this anniversary were led by Hana’s family and by Te Atiawa and there was also strong support from our local District Council. The Council not only approved the mural being on our local Library building, but ran banners around town proclaiming I Am Hana, and hosted a street party to celebrate the unveiling of the finished artwork.

Many of the Ngā Tamatoa activists, now in their 70s and 80s, were welcomed to New Plymouth and there were also public forums and a photo exhibition celebrating their work.

These anniversary celebrations were open-hearted, good natured, and almost completely without any polarising controversy. You might think that is unusual for Taranaki, given that we have gained a reputation on some contentious issues over the last decade, especially when trying to get more Māori voices around the District Council table.

And I feel I need to point out that this is the same District Council, under the same Mayor, that only four years ago fought for enabling legislation to be passed which succeeded in privatising the last of the stolen lands of Waitara.

These lands, known as the Pekapeka Block, were at the heart of the war that broke out at Waitara in the 1860s, and then spread to the rest of Taranaki. These are the lands that have represented a very long story of blood and dishonour connected to the original sin of our nation — the confiscation of Māori land upon which has been the foundation of so many of our towns and communities.

The introduction of the Waitara Lands Bill represented an opportunity for our generation to begin to really heal and address this injustice. It was an opportunity not taken. The Waitara Lands Bill was passed by the incoming Labour-led government and, since then, the District Council has sold many of the properties.

I knew Hana well, and I believe that, had she still been alive today, she would have been one of the leading voices in the fight to get these still-disputed lands restored to their rightful owners, the hapu of Waitara.

So you may imagine some of the complicated feelings brought up by my District Council choosing to celebrate this radical activist and the 50 years since the presentation of the Māori Language petition.

But it is important to recognise that some significant things have indeed shifted in just the last four years — and shifted in ways that perhaps we were not expecting. ( ... this hasn’t happened in terms of the Waitara land issues ... but that’s not a story that has finished yet).

I do think there have been important shifts that matter in terms of relationship-building. And there’s a new generation coming through that are just side-stepping the historical stuckness, and expecting things to be different, and they are getting on with it.

We have Māori Wards now throughout our district. We have a new generation of Māori leaders emerging who are taking their place not just around council tables, but in board rooms as well in lawyers offices, as accountants and as entrepreneurs.

I’ve noticed more people of all ages signing up to learn te reo, and to try and better understand the world view of Māori communities.

I’ve noticed a full embrace of the new and indigenous public holiday of Matariki and how this has immediately enabled us all to look up, and view our world within a profoundly wider story.

All these things are inevitably changing the character of our place.

So when I saw the I Am Hana banners flying around New Plymouth, I felt that yet another building-block of peace and reconciliation was trying to do its work in our city. The civic embrace of this 50-year anniversary was not just something we could all welcome ... but it was being done in such a way that we could genuinely appreciate this daughter of Taranaki as one of our many role models for future generations.

I seem to be continuously reminded that change often happens in ways that we least expect it, and in a time-frame that is seldom under our choosing. At the same time, I am also reminded that the responsibility of a community builder is to keep shaping those assets which are the building-blocks of peace and reconciliation, and can lead to the possibilities of change.

Hana and I were on the organising committee of the Māori Land March of 1975, and she knew well — as Whina Cooper and the other members of Te Roopu o te Matakite also knew — that the loss of land and the loss of te reo are inextricably interrelated.

So when it came to setting a date for the Māori Land March to begin, it was Hana who pushed for it to start on the 14th of September — the same day that Ngā Tamatoa walked up the steps of Parliament to present their petition for the protection and restoration of the Māori language.

Hana herself was not a fluent speaker of te reo. So her motivation for walking up those steps was deeply personal. She was determined that her own children and grandchildren were not going to suffer the same fundamental sense of loss.

Learning a language as an adult is no easy undertaking. I am Pākehā, and yet despite a lifetime in Māori company, my own proficiency in the Māori language has not really improved very much from the limited level that I had in the 1970s. I do get by on ceremonial occasions, but I honestly get quite lost in a deeper dialogue. I have found that without the senses that awaken within a fuller immersion, the academic learning of another language as an adult has not turned out to be one of my talents.

Nevertheless, I have been reflecting lately on how I have spent the currency of my life trying to preserve and regenerate some of the other languages which have also been under a constant threat of their marginalisation and extinction.

These have been the languages of community, the literacy of the commons, and a working vocabulary of what is expected from our citizenship at this critical time.

These languages underpin our common sense of how we can work together on the things that matter. They are complex and dynamic. They are also not easy to learn. But without these languages, and without the practical living skills that they articulate, then we just degenerate into a political and cultural morass of self-interest, toxic individualism and “me-first” economics.

I believe the language of community has been under sustained assault over the last forty years. Consequently, the voices and passions of the commons have become more and more inarticulate, or they have completely disappeared from the public discourse. As this has happened, we have lost a huge amount of the breadth and depth of shared meaning and understanding — and just the plain beauty — that is wrapped up in a community-centered way of looking at our lives and our world. 

This is one of the reasons why I started the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. It is a local and modest example of reclaiming that beauty, and of regenerating that community voice.

And when I look at the new mural on the back of our Library building, I recognise that we can learn a lot from Hana Te Hemara and the last 50 years of advocacy for the recognition and support of the Māori language. Because the fight is similar: it is not just about vocabulary lists of words-in-translation, but about the validity and honesty of an entire way of seeing and explaining the world.

The core strategy of our Masterclass is about slowly regenerating the shared language of community — one relationship at a time, one story at a time, and one building-block at a time. And over time, the health of community begins to piece itself together again, and we start to re-awaken the unique work that communities need to do.

We have only had about four hundred people go through our 3-4 month course, but it has already amounted to the most effective community development strategy that I have ever been involved in. Virtually every marae, church group, service club, and even some sports clubs in Taranaki, have had people come along and participate.

And we often hear people make comments like: “I feel more like myself than I have in a long time…” or “I do remember thinking like this … what happened? Why did we let this go?”

The answer to that “Why?” is a subject worthy of much more consideration. If our public institutions, our communities and our personal lives have become so successfully colonised by world-views that are serving goals other than our collective health and wellbeing ... then it is important to figure out how this happened.

In the meantime, it is up to community workers to make sure that every event we organise is seen as an opportunity to rebuild our social technologies, and to stress-test and maintain our infrastructure of public intelligence.

Just like the regeneration of te reo, our efforts to regenerate community may take two or three generations before we really start to see its fruits.

This is work we do with all our children and grandchildren in mind.

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MY LAST PART is about a man who will get the job done.

We’ve just had the local government elections and — let’s face it — the progressive voices of community were not the winners.

I’m not here to dissect and debate the results, but I do want to draw attention to the character of some of the main messages I have been hearing during this election time.

In the Mayoral elections both here in Christchurch, and also in Auckland, the winners were men who were campaigning under the slogans of “I’ll get it done”, or “I’ll fix it” … as if the main source of our collective problems is absence of anyone who has the strength and willpower to face them.

It reminds me a little of Boris Johnson in the UK campaigning (and winning a decisive majority) under the slogan of “I’ll get Brexit done”, or the former American President Trump when he said he would build a wall on his southern border, and get Mexico to pay for it.

This sort of branding and marketing is simplistic, yet obviously effective. You can’t really argue with “the action man”, or the idea of fixing things, especially when things are also so obviously stuck or broken.

Rosemary Neave and Garry Moore, organisers of the Christchurch Tuesday Club, November 2022

But there’s a warning here, and this is that the action man has often proven to be playing a shell game or a confidence trick with the voting public. Sooner-or-later we have to wake up to it.
You only need to look at the shemozzle happening in UK politics in the last few weeks to see that the emperors have no clothes, and even the financial markets are no longer going along with it.

One of the reasons the “I will get it done” message is so effective is that it rests upon the general story-telling in our culture that portrays the business-person as our saviour. We are willing participants in this confidence trick, because we have a definite hero-worship going on for the can-do entrepreneur.

The hero-worship has come at a cost, because these confident stories of business and entrepreneurship often end up diminishing of the very idea of public service, and the harder work of consensus-building.

And when we are seduced by business culture, we end up looking for the same answers from the same old toolbox.

Look at some of the big public issues facing our nation at this moment: the state of our health system, or the polytechs, or the maintenance of council assets (... now commodified and rebranded as “three waters”).

The answer always seems to be the same. Run them like a business. Reorganise and restructure them into bigger entities. Appoint new bosses (at salaries that match the private sector). Then double-down on the same management strategies, even if they may have led to our problems in the first place.

Again, the missing element here is the intelligence and wisdom of the citizens and communities that these public entities were meant to be serving. Our communities are the asset that is right under your nose, yet ordinary citizens have not been invited to the table.

So when it comes to “getting the job done”, I want us to notice that the “job” itself has essentially changed. Business-as-usual is no longer making sense. 

We need a political and cultural leadership that doesn’t say “I’m going to fix it” … as if all the rest of us can just sit back and be spectators and commentators, but essentially just leave you to it.

If you are a candidate for public office, your role now is to stop offering a consumer transaction with voters, and start directly asking for their participation.

We need to be electing people who are capable of turning the usual leadership story on its head. This is the leadership that looks the voter in the eye and says: “I need you to awaken. I need you to be as grown-up a citizen as is possible. Because every one of the big problems we are facing right now needs your engaged citizenship.”

And this form of leadership is not a job of branding and marketing in the context of retail politics. It is a job of invitation, and of connection.

And you may be surprised at just how many people are waiting to be authentically asked.

So my stretch is this: Beware the politician who is asking nothing of you.

Beware of the confidence of politicians that are telling you to leave them to it, and they will manage the disruptions, and keep all the threats in the paddock.

Be especially aware of the politician who is quite happy for you to be disconnected and disengaged at this critical time, and claim their own legitimacy while a third of the electorate are not even turning up to vote.

Instead, look towards the politicians who are capable of calling you to the commitments and responsibilities of your active citizenship … which is both the necessary ask of this moment, and the necessary ingredient to solving so many of the complex problems that are before us.

Look towards to the politicians who already know that “we” is not a small word, and that they have a specific role to play in making sure that “we” will get things done.

Our human capacity to think and create and respond together has been the real source of our species talent for hundreds of thousands of years.

We need these talents right now, and the job description of all our leadership is to call these talents forward.

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SO THESE ARE my offerings today, which I hope will become part of your conversations to follow.

I want to thank you for organising this regular focus of active citizenship on civic issues. It’s been a privilege to be here.

The Tuesday Club is important because it is a forum that adds community intelligence to the issues of our time.

And this public intelligence is the intelligence that needs a conversation for its thoughts to ripen and mature. That’s what’s afoot here.

I wish you all the best.

vivian Hutchinson
November 2022

Notes and Links

This paper is based on vivian Hutchinson's speech to the Tuesday Club, held at the Smash Palace Bar in Christchurch on Tuesday 1st November 2022

First published online in November 2022 at www.taranaki.gen.nz/citizen-in-christchurch

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012) and How Communities Awaken — some conversations for active citizens (2021). He is also one of the creators of Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz. For more, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/vivian

More information on the series of essays by vivian Hutchinson called How Communities Awaken, see www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Ngaropi Cameron video series of 'stretch' sessions called Te Kai o Te Rangatira, see www.tutamawahine.org.nz/tkr

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. See www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

The Tuesday Club is a regular gathering of active citizens "celebrating the People's Republic of Christchurch". It is held at Smash Palace, a bar at 172 High Street in central Christchurch. Some of the people who gather are decision makers in the city, many are active community advocates, all are concerned about the future, and they want to be part of creating it.
Visit http://tuesdayclub.nz/

Michael Parekōwhai "Chapman's Homer" (2011) bronze bull and piano at Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, see https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/l03-2014a-c/michael-parekowhai/chapmans-homer

suitably artistic and esoteric ... Google has pointed me to www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/k/keats-poems/summary-and-analysis/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer

Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr on the unemployment rate ... See Inflation response: Orr warns employment prospects to be increasingly compromised Radio NZ News 27 October 2022 www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/477495/inflation-response-orr-warns-employment-prospects-to-be-increasingly-compromised  or www.nzherald.co.nz/business/adrian-orr-beating-inflation-will-mean-higher-unemployment/

Mayors Taskforce for Jobs ... an archived website of its activities 1999-2005 can be found at www.jobsletter.org.nz/mtfjobs.htm

The current Mayors Taskforce for Jobs activities can be found at www.mtfj.co.nz/

The current NEET rate for young people aged 15-24 years can be found at www.mtfj.co.nz/youth-employment-dashboard/

Bernard Hickey on the stark explosion in inequality since Covid https://thekaka.substack.com/p/covids-big-winners-and-losers-revealed

Bernard Hickey speaking to the Christchurch Tuesday Club  www.facebook.com/tuesdayclubchch/videos/1453167848412267

Bernard Hickey Radio NZ Interview with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ Nine to Noon www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018828257/the-cost-of-the-pandemic-the-financial-winners-and-losers

Jacinda Ardern and “Labour Values” in Taranaki ... see Bernard Hickey report at https://thekaka.substack.com/p/covids-big-winners-and-losers-revealed

The I am Hana project was proudly supported by Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti, Puketapu, New Plymouth District Council, Creative New Zealand, Te Taura Whiri, Te Puni Kōkiri, Tui Ora, Venture Taranaki, Te Mātāwai, Toi Foundation, Spark and Nikau Construction. For more information see http://iamhana.nz

Mr.G - Graham Hoete mural artist see http://mrghoeteart.com

10 reasons why the government should return the Waitara lands by vivian Hutchinson and Carl Chenery in The Spinoff Ātea 21st April 2018 https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/21-04-2018/10-reasons-why-the-government-should-return-the-waitara-lands

This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

A Citizen in Westown

— some thoughts for "conversations that matter" at the Barclay Hall

by vivian Hutchinson

August 2018 30 min read download as PDF for print

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I was living at the end of the alleyway just beside this hall. I was here for several years before moving just a few houses down the road in Waimea Street. My mother also moved to the area and until recently she was living just across the road.

I have since shifted to Brooklands, but for half of my adult life I was a citizen here in Westown ... and it was from these streets that I have done most of my work and writing and teaching and the organising of community projects.

My father died quite young, he was in his 40s, and like many New Plymouth people, he was a friend of Ron Barclay. Before he died, my father gave Ron an oil painting that had been done by my great grand-father.

It was a picture of Michael Savage, based on the famous photo that a lot of my relations had on their mantlepiece in the 1930s and 40s. Actually, when I visited my god-mother in Wellington in the 1960s, she still had that picture above the fireplace and I grew up thinking that this man was probably a member of our family.

So it is great to be here, and to see that oil painting again in this room full of all the photos of the Labour Party leaders and the local MPs and Labour organisers of the last century. It is a history lesson in itself ... and it reminds me how history is shaped by the conversations that go on in rooms just like this.

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LABOUR WAS A cultural force before it was a political force. Two generations before television and the internet, rooms like this hosted many speakers and conversations on the great issues of the day – the issues that needed political attention: addressing poverty; ending unemployment; building affordable housing; creating a decent public health system; making sure everyone has access to a public education system.

The Labour Party was a focus to these cultural aspirations. These were the issues that shaped our Welfare State, and the post-War golden years of full employment in the 1950s and 60s.

But by the time I was entering my own adulthood in the 1970s, things were starting to come apart.

They were already coming apart when Norman Kirk died in office in 1974. The Third Labour government he was leading at the time didn’t really survive his passing.

But even the Third National government under the ruthlessness and cunning of Rob Muldoon couldn’t hold back the tides of change ... and the Muldoon administration basically ended up becoming the last hurrah of the RSA generation.

Yes, we were so pleased when David Lange and the Fourth Labour government took over in 1984. He was another “big” man ... and we expected him to be the true inheritor of the Norman Kirk legacy.

But little did we realise that the Fourth Labour government would become best known for its Great Betrayal of the cultural aspirations and principles that had woven the Labour political movement in the first place.

One of the main reasons that you never had many community organisers and activists like myself working more closely with the Labour Party in the 80s and 90s is because we were too busy cleaning up the consequences of what was unleashed by people like Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble at that time. And it was just bewildering to us that this Great Betrayal had come from our Labour leaders.

✽ ✽ ✽

BUT WE'VE NOW got a bit more perspective on those years, and we can see that this was all part of an international neo-liberal movement for change. It’s simplistic and seductive agenda was also happening in Britain under Maggie Thatcher, and in the United States under Ronald Reagan, and Rogernomics here in New Zealand was simply a local version of the same franchise.

The market fundamentalism behind this franchise turned into a mindset and attitude that came to permeate not just the business world, but also all our primary government and civic institutions. The powerful and insidious metaphors of this ideology trickled deep down into our private and family and community lives.

The Barclay Hall, Westown, New Plymouth.

The result was a colonisation of our lives that was as brutal and as effective and complete as the colonisation of Empire that settled New Zealand and so many other countries in the 19th century. But this modern colonisation was not so much a fight for land and resources ... it was a fundamentalism that involved a fight for our heads and hearts and attention and our bewildered consent.

✽ ✽ ✽

SURE, THERE WAS a push-back. Twenty years ago, I was running a national organisation, The Jobs Research Trust, which was based at my home in the alley next to this hall. Every couple of weeks we published a newsletter called The Jobs Letter which tried to keep community leaders and decision-makers in touch with the things we could practically do about unemployment.

In September 1998, I left my home here and travelled up to Cape Reinga to support the Hikoi of Hope which was an Anglican-led protest march trying to wake up the rest of New Zealand as to the sorry state of our key social foundations. This march walked all the way down to Wellington, where it met another group who had walked up the entire South Island.

The five “platforms” highlighted by the Hikoi of Hope were Poverty; Unemployment; Affordable Housing; A Health System We Can Trust; and Accessible Education. These of course are an echo of the standard Labour Party cultural aspirations that pre-dated the economic revolutions of 1984.

I will never forget the sight of our former Governor-General, Sir Paul Reeves, standing on the back of a truck on Parliament grounds leading the chant of “Enough is Enough!”. It was a weird moment for our country. As also a former Arch-Bishop of New Zealand, Paul Reeves was leading the protest chant in a definite liturgical manner. 

Anyway ... the Fourth National government of Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley was on its last legs, and, a couple of months after the Hikoi, we welcomed Helen Clark and the Fifth Labour government into power.

There were some immediate achievements in this new government, but we can look back now and say that Helen Clark’s administration did not really change the fundamentals on the things that mattered to us. Her leadership amounted to a kinder political management of the status quo. And there was a lot of lip-service to real change.

The huge gaps that had opened up between rich and poor New Zealanders in the 1980s were not turned around. And the managerial principles of neo-liberalism were still deeply embedded in most of our important institutions, and were not effectively challenged.

The Fifth Labour government really had no idea about how to do the cultural work that could re-build the mandate for a decent society. Nor did they know how to grow and renew the active citizenship that can make our deeper aspirations happen.

So in 2008, just a decade ago, we had the GFC or the Global Financial Crisis ... and it certainly felt like an important opportunity had been lost. Within months, we had the Fifth National government under the leadership of John Key which brought us mind-numbing years of austerity in the community sector, and the running down of the infrastructure of all the departments and services that had to do with “the people”.

✽ ✽ ✽

THAT'S ALL HISTORY now. But today I wanted to start off by talking about the main social and economic issues that matter to me, as a way of asking ourselves where we are at today.

The first is about Poverty and Inequality.

The global economy did recover after the GFC in 2008, but you may not have noticed that if you were focusing on “the people”. That is because 95% of the global gains in wealth in the recovery have gone straight to the top 1% of income earners.

And if you look at the investigative journalism into the leaked Panama and Paradise banking papers, you can see that this top elite of 1% is doing all they can to avoid paying their taxes and contributing their fair share to the common good. This includes many leading politicians from a wide spectrum of political parties, a whole bunch of music and sporting and media celebrities, and even The Queen.

But let’s just focus back here in New Zealand.

After the Rogernomics revolution of the 1980s, the gap between the rich and the poor in New Zealand grew at a rate that was the highest of any country in the OECD. The incomes for the richest New Zealanders doubled, while those for the poorest barely rose at all. And over the last thirty years, under both Labour and National governments, this gap has remained fairly constant.

It is this embedded gap between rich and poor that is the main reason why the older people in this room may no longer recognise the country they are living in.

And when you have a situation where half the country is just living precarious - living week-to-week financially - then this is the predominant reason behind why so many other social and economic factors – the jobs, the housing, the health, and the education – are continuing to crumble before our eyes.

✽ ✽ ✽

SO LET'S LOOK at the state of our children.

UNICEF is telling us that 290,000 children, or nearly a third of all New Zealand children, are living in poverty.

Half of these children are living in severe hardship which means they may have no stable home, or they are living in cold and damp houses and/or sleeping in shared beds. They are not eating fresh fruits or vegetables. And tens of thousands of these kids are turning up to their school without having had breakfast.

This issue is particularly motivating for me because I do not want to be living in a country where so many children are having such a rough start.

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LET'S LOOK AT our housing. According to the OECD, New Zealand has the worst homeless rate in the developed world, with our "severely housing deprived" population estimated at 41,200 people.

More than 80 per cent of these people are being turned away from community emergency housing providers because the system is bursting at the seams.

Michelle Ramage is here, and her group the Roderique Hope Trust has set up four emergency homes in the last few years, and they could definitely fill many more. Michelle does fantastic work and is an important young community worker and activist here in New Plymouth. And there is something that Michelle and I are in complete agreement with: We would rather be living in a New Plymouth that no longer had any need for such emergency homes.  

✽ ✽ ✽

NOW LET'S TAKE a look at job creation and unemployment ... which is the issue that has been the main focus of my own work in the community.

We shouldn’t forget that we are living in a country where one of our largest political parties is named after our ability to work. And yet both main political parties have continued to run an economy that has no use for a large number of our young people. 

One-in-eight young New Zealanders aged 15-24 do not have a paid job, and neither are they enrolled in any formal education.

We have organised our affairs so that we have no use for them. And we are the only creature on the planet that is doing this to its young.

✽ ✽ ✽

LET'S LOOK AT the Welfare State. Or perhaps, let’s question whether we continue not to look at it.

The architects knew there would be problems. The father of British welfare, Lord William Beveridge, wrote as early as 1948 about the problems that he could already see ... and most of his caveats were not about matters of economics, but of attitude.

But we still have no effective public conversation about how things need to be transformed apart from the economic questions of cut-backs and austerity measures. 

And in the meantime, in the neighbourhoods surrounding this very hall, you have too many of our most vulnerable citizens – the elderly, the economically discarded, the sick and the disabled – living in terror of the way they are treated by our current social welfare system.

Is it any wonder that this level of economic stress, social alienation, and disconnection is having an impact on our mental health?

Is it any wonder that we now have the highest suicide rate since records began?  

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FINALLY, LET'S JUST take a look at the whole issue of citizen participation.

If you look at the most recent election in 2017 you can see that we had a 73% turnout. That means that one in four did not bother to turn up. And if you were under 25 years of age ... the turnout was about 50%, or half the youth electorate is refusing or not bothering to vote.

( ... and don’t get me started on the participation rates in local body elections, where the recent turnout figures have dropped to as low as 48%.)

You have to contrast this with other times in our history – in 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s – then the participation level was above 90%. 

I know that many of you here have been leading the local celebrations for the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand. Well, our most recent low point in civic participation was in 2011 when the rate was at its lowest level since 1877, which was before the time when women got the vote.

There are many ways that we can measure citizen participation in our society, and perhaps this is one of our simplest indicators. But it seems to me that this crisis in our civic participation should be much higher on the agenda of political leaders than it is right now.

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NOW I'M NOT going into so much detail about all of these things just to depress you. Although it is stating the obvious to say that the social and economic statistics such as these are deeply shameful to a country that used to aspire to the notion that everyone should have “a fair go”.

I was asked to come to your meeting and begin a conversation about Active Citizenship, and I just wanted to draw the widest possible context within which all of our active citizenship is needed right now.

When you put it all together, it’s not a great look. This is not to say that I cannot spend half an hour telling you lots of good news stories too. There are plenty of good things happening out there, and I have written an entire book about some of the best.

But let’s not kid ourselves that when we do put it all together, the overall picture is much worse than it was in 1998.

Turns out that the “Enough is Enough!” chant on Parliament Grounds, twenty years ago ... was not nearly enough. And we’ve got to at least tell the truth to each other about what is going on.

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I HAVE ALWAYS voted Labour, even during the years of the Great Betrayal. That’s because you are like a member of my family ... and just like many members of my own family, and myself, we get things wrong from time to time. Sometimes devastatingly wrong.

And we also had a long-time constituency MP here in Harry Duynhoven. Since he was literally on my doorstep, I could see how hard he was working for local people, and that has always counted for something, and accounted for my vote.

When he later became Mayor, it was a pleasure to be able to ask him to launch my book called “How Communities Heal” at a public function at Puke Ariki.

I don't need to remind you here that Jacinda Ardern credits New Plymouth as being the start of her journey into Labour politics.

She joined the party at aged 17. Her aunt, Marie Ardern, who lives locally, told Harry about the teenage Jacinda's interest in politics ... and Harry jumped at the opportunity and rang her and invited her to come to the electorate to volunteer.

This was the first place that Jacinda cast a vote ... and that was in the election that brought Helen Clark into government in 1999.

Jacinda went on to work for two and a half years in the UK cabinet office of Tony Blair, and then returned to New Zealand and became part of the staff in Helen Clark's office. She entered parliament herself in 2008, on the party list.

And now she is our youngest Prime Minister in more than 150 years, and has become the first leader of a country in more than 30 years to give birth while in office.

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LIKE MOST NEW ZEALANDERS, it seems, I am very fond of the baby.

I loved seeing her recently at the United Nations, and it was great to hear this young mother and leader of our country talking to the world about kindness, and the need to foster co-operation between nations and our major international institutions. In a world of Trumpish drama and self-indulgence, I am proud of the tone of this Prime Minister.

I have to say I have also a great deal of respect for the way that Andrew Little handled the Labour leadership change. That’s another son of New Plymouth showing the sort of character in politics that we need right now.

I am also very proud to be living in a country where three significant parties – Labour, New Zealand First and the Greens – are managing to work together to get things done. We’ve had MMP for a long time, but this really feels like this system has come of age.

But of course I am concerned. Anyone who lays out the sort of statistics I have recounted here today knows that we have got a lot of work to do.

We need to keep awake to the real priorities. This government is going to need to do so much more than just be “Helen Clark – Part Two”.

We are going to need a much more transforming politics that can get to grips with the fundamentals. And we can’t just leave this work to Jacinda Ardern and Andrew Little ... because it is going to take a whole lot more than politicians to do it.

We are not going to get a more transforming politics until we transform the culture behind our politics. This is the cultural task that is the real work of local political parties right now.

Our current leadership may not yet know how to ask you to get on with this job ... but I also think it is never going to happen until we as citizens start to ask it of each other.

Beyond the austerities and cut-backs and struggles of the last decade, I still want to tell you that we are not broke.

What is broken here ... is the “We”.

That’s our missing ingredient. And the “We” is not created by politicians. The “We” is something that emerges out of our own acts of citizenship. 

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ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP IS not a paid job. And it’s not volunteering.

You are just very lucky if your interests as an active citizen happen to coincide with a paid job. If you are a social entrepreneur, then you will probably try to make it so. But that is not and cannot be true for most people. For most of us, it is the paid job that is supporting our active citizenship.

And of course volunteering is a great thing to be doing. I’m not arguing with that. So much in our community just would not get done without a team of enthusiastic and committed volunteers.

But volunteering is often just free labour for someone else’s system. And this is a different thing from the active citizenship I am talking about here.

Active citizenship is about all the things we can do to create the communities we want to live in, and to take care of the things that we value. And sometimes this involves the acts of creativity that are about disrupting and transforming the existing systems that are no longer fit for purpose.

Active citizenship is an act of ownership. It is about taking responsibility for our common lives ... especially by getting in touch with the specific gifts we have to offer our communities.

Our active citizenship is a personal response to three questions. The main purpose of any culture is to help you answer these questions ... and the asking of these questions is the real job description of our very best leaders, teachers and coaches.

The first question is: Where is your place? This is the question that is asking you to figure out where is home to you ... where do you feel that you belong?

The second question is: What is your story? This is the question that is trying to figure out what is the narrative that you have already started to write with your life?

And the third question is: What is your contribution to the common good? This is the question where you are challenged to pay attention to those gifts and talents that are special to you, and to find some way of weaving that contribution into your community.

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THIS “COMMUNITY” I AM talking about here is an important element in solving the big challenges I have described here today. And it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

It’s critical. It’s not just a nice thing to have once we have finished working through our social services and the other problem-solving strategies that we have on our list.

“Community” itself is a strategy. If we invest in our communities – our sense of connectedness, our sense of “We” – then we have less of a need for those same social services and so many of our toughest problems just get smaller.

Communities have work to do. The trouble is that we are living in a time when that work is just not getting done.

In healthy and thriving communities, this work is done through its active citizens.

They are not employed. They are not volunteering. They are just getting on with it because they know they belong to this place, and the people they love are here, and they have woken up to their story, and they have figured out what their contribution is to a common good. 

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I DEFINE “COMMUNITY” as a state of well-being that emerges after we have got a whole lot of basic things right.

The early Labour party, and the Hikoi of Hope, had almost identical ways of describing what that list of basic things was. I would say we have learned a few things since then, and I would be adding to that list our need to be living in a clean and green environment and a healthy planet. 

New Zealand used to have its own vision of fostering well-being that was, until recently, written into the very legislation behind our local government activities.

It was called “the four well-beings” and it was part of the Local Government Act where it said that the purpose of local councils was to work towards “the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of communities”.

It was this legislative mandate that had enabled me to do a lot of my work over the years in terms of community development, and setting up projects like the Mayor’s Taskforce for Jobs.

Anyway, John Key’s Fifth National government in 2012 changed this legislation and redefined the purpose of councils to be one of “providing good quality local infrastructure, public services and regulatory functions at the least possible cost to households and businesses.” 

There was some well-reasoned opposition to these changes at the time ... and Harry Duynhoven, by then as the New Plymouth Mayor, went down to Wellington to have his say. But any controversy about getting rid of “the four well-beings” was never very high in the public awareness, and it was generally regarded as an esoteric matter for government legislators.

Now I didn’t join in with making any submissions to government on this legislative change.

My response was to start Community Taranaki.

Instead of getting organised to complain to the government, or to the council about these legislative changes ... I thought that perhaps this was a time for active citizens to get together and begin to pick up this too-easily discarded mission.

Fostering well-being is the area where we as citizens have our own work to do – and this is the work of renewing the “infrastructure” of public intelligence that understands how our communities can heal, develop and thrive.

Glen Bennett, vivian Hutchinson and Ruth Pfister at the Springboard — Conversations That Matter at the the Barclay Hall, Westown, New Plymouth.

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GLEN BENNETT WILL soon be sharing with you a bit more about what Community Taranaki is up to, especially with projects like the Masterclass we run for Active Citizenship, the Community Circles that we run in the NPDC Council Chambers, and the Action Incubator for community projects.

Although I did initiate all these projects, I want to say from the outset that the fact that they exist is down to a whole team of people – some of you in this room like Glen and Michelle and Ruth Pfister – who have helped to make them happen.

This team has also included some other extra-ordinary Taranaki active citizens ... like Elaine Gill who was a long-time City Councillor and has been a driving force behind so many community groups over many decades; Dave Owens who set up the Great Fathers project which advocates nationally and locally for Dads to have a much closer emotional relationship with their kids; Ngaropi Cameron who is the founder of Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki, and she took our Masterclass and challenged us to make it an authentic bi-cultural learning journey; Lynne Holdem who practices as a psychotherapist and has been a driving force behind the local Supporting Families in Mental Illness and is a national voice in the public issues portfolio of NZAP; and Wayne Morris who is a local artist and musician and an international educator in creativity.

There’s all sorts of people involved in what we are doing, many of whom I am only just getting to know. Nearly 300 people have now gone on our four-month Masterclass ... and that has definitely started to change the nature of the conversations we are having with one another, and the work that we want to do together.   

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IN MY FINAL comments, I want to address you in the room a bit more directly.

I am 63 years old, and of course I have noticed that the majority of the people in this room are older than me. I have also heard here today almost a voice of apology that there are not enough young people here, and it is a struggle to get them involved. 

Well, I’m not looking at a problem. But I am especially pleased that you are here, because I want to tell you that it is time for you to step into your eldership.

We’ve got enough old people in this community ... but we are desperately short of elders. It’s time for you to step up to that job.

The job of an elder is to turn up and interfere. I mean this in the kindest possible sense.

Your job is to turn up to the activities being run by younger people and, if you get the chance, remind them what it is all for.

This is not a job of turning up and giving them advice ... that’s what too many old people do. But an elder’s job is simply to be present and listen, and when asked, to speak on behalf of the common good. That’s a job that’s not being done right now.

If you become friends with the younger people in your lives, you might just get the opportunity to share with them what you have learned.

Of course, we all wish we were wiser. Perhaps we even imagined there were wiser elders around us in our youth ... but no, they were probably just people like us. They were people who turned up to listen, and by their presence they were reminding us what it is all for.

You do have a life experience that we all need to be paying attention to. Some of you lived through the Great Betrayal of the Labour Party. Some of you were a part of it.

There’s some hard-won wisdom wrapped up in that whole experience.

You found out about how we can too easily get confused about the lines between self-interest and the common good. You found out about the difference between organising problems and healing them.

There is a lot to learn from this experience ... and if we don’t learn from it, then we are surely going to find ourselves repeating it.

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I ALSO HAVE a message for the people in this room who are much younger than me: Now is your time to take over places like the Barclay Hall and turn them into the Centres of Active Citizenship that we need for the next generation.

We need to learn a whole new bunch of skills about organising for the challenges of today. The old Labour party clubrooms should once again become centres of this important adult education.

We need more public meetings discussing policy issues, and we should be supporting the active citizens who are stepping up to make a difference in all the main areas.

And in these days of coalition government ... you should be welcoming members of the Greens and New Zealand First into places like this to have these policy conversations. Get to know each other ... and deliberately cultivate friendships and dialogue with the people who think differently to you.

What you have got in common is your willingness to be active citizens ... and your recognition that there is nobody who joins a political party to make New Zealand a worse place.

I’d like to see you all working together to put up each other’s billboards at election time. That, in itself, would represent a huge difference.

These places like the Barclay Hall should not belong to any particular team. They should now belong to the game.

And I’m suggesting that the game here is about shaping the character and culture of active citizenship.

That’s really the local game in a mature MMP environment.

✽ ✽ ✽

ANYWAY, THAT'S MORE than enough from me to get a conversation started ... and I do want to thank you again for the invitation and the opportunity to speak to this Springboard session.

I belong to this “We” ... however broken I might imagine it to be right now.

We’ll get there. And it has been a privilege to be able to speak to it today.

vivian Hutchinson
4th October 2018

Notes and Links

thanks to Frank and Margaret Gaze

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur based in Taranaki. He is the author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012) and How Communities Awaken — some conversations for active citizens (2021). For more information see www.taranaki.gen.nz/vivian

First published online in October 2018

This paper is based on notes for a talk given on Thursday 4th October 2018 to the monthly New Plymouth Labour Party Springboard – conversations that matter – at the Barclay Hall, corner of Waimea and Tukapa Streets, Westown, New Plymouth, Taranaki.

Ron Barclay was the Member of Parliament for New Plymouth from 1966 to 1975, a New Plymouth city councillor from 1977 to 1989. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Barclay

The classic photographic portrait of the first Labour Party Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, was taken by Spencer Digby in 1935.

The “planks” of the 1998 Hikoi of Hope – see The Jobs Letter No.85 (27 August 1998)
www.jobsletter.org.nz/jbl08500.htm

Widening inequality ... see http://www.inequality.org.nz/ and also Max Rashbrooke comment "Despite what you hear, inequality has risen in New Zealand” The Dominion Post 8th July 2015 www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/70028600/despite-what-you-hear-inequality-has-risen-in-new-zealand

See also Robert Reich's film "Inequality for all" (2013) http://inequalityforall.com/ Robert B. Reich is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Reich has served in three national US administrations, including as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton.

The Panama and Paradise papers were special investigations published by the Guardian and other media outlets worldwide in 2016 and 2017. They were based on leaked documents created by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseka which shone a light on how the super-rich hid their money so they don’t have to pay taxes the way other citizens do. Other leaked papers exposed the workings of tax havens sheltering the wealth of prominent politicians and cultural leaders. See www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers www.theguardian.com/news/series/paradise-papers

Homeless figures ... The OECD paper says says that 0.94 per cent of NZ's population was homeless. The lowest homeless rate in the OECD was Japan, at 0.03 per cent. www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pdf. Also figures from "Severe housing deprivation in Aotearoa New Zealand 2001-2013" by Kate Amore, Department of Public Health, University of Otago www.healthyhousing.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Severe-housing-deprivation-in-Aotearoa-2001-2013-1.pdf. "Homeless crisis: 80 per cent to 90 per cent of homeless people turned away from emergency housing" by Derek Cheng, New Zealand Herald 12th February 2018 www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11992371.

the numbers of young people who are neither learning or earning ... "More young not working or learning" by Dene McKenzie Otago Daily Times 3rd May 2018 www.odt.co.nz/business/more-young-not-working-or-learning

Election night participation figures are from the New Zealand Electoral Commission. www.elections.org.nz/events/2017-general-election/2017-general-election-results/voter-turnout-statistics
These figures overstate the numbers because they only include those people who are enrolled to vote. once you take into account adult New Zealanders who don't enrol, the overall voter turnout for the election amongst all age groups was about 73 per cent.

See Bryce Edwards, New Zealand Herald, 3rd November 2017 “Political Roundup: New contentious data shows voter turnout” at www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11940333

See also Statistics NZ – Voter Turnout for Local Body Elections (2013 figures)

The four well-beings ... see “Councils to get shake Up” by John Antony, The Taranaki Daily News 20th March 2012

Community Taranaki ... How Communities Awaken – Masterclass for Active Citizenship – Tu Tangata Whenua, Community Circles at the NPDC, Community Action Incubators, for more see www.taranaki.gen.nz

This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

Community Circles

— some thoughts for organisers and networkers

by vivian Hutchinson

March 2021 7 min read download as PDF

notes written for a special meeting of Community Circle organisers
held at the New Plymouth District Council Chambers on 26th March 2021

THESE COMMUNITY CIRCLES have not been just events for me.

They have been part of a mission I have been on for much longer than the ten years they have been operating.

That mission has been about fostering more active citizenship and generous engagement in our communities, especially as we face some major issues affecting the wellbeing of our place.

This mission has encompassed many things for me over the last decade ... including establishing the Masterclasses for Active Citizenship that many of you have been on, and also the Action Incubators which have fostered new community projects.

The Community Circles here have tried to achieve both a community and a civic purpose:

Invite the active citizens of our district to meet on a regular basis and get to know each other better.
Talk about what we can and are doing to make a difference to the well-being of our people and our place.

I draw a difference and distinction between just booking a room and running an event ... versus regenerating a culture of “community”.

This is because I have essentially been in the business of regeneration and, when it comes to the community circles, this regeneration has been driven by three simple notions.

✽ ✽ ✽

The first is a simple idea: These are critical changing times, and we need to talk with one another.

The pandemic might seem like some sort of waiting room where we just sit things out until we get back to normal. But for far too many people in our communities — and for the planet itself — “normal” has not been a very good place for them.

We are on the edge of some historic issues, and it is critical that we have the conversations about what's going on.

The decisions we take together over the next 20 years will affect the quality of life and the well-being of all our descendants over the next 200 years.

We are also now part of the generation which is being called to make some fundamental changes.

The changes will touch all areas of our social, economic and environmental well-being, and our impact on these issues all hinge on our cultural capacity for diverse people to talk with one another well.

So that's the first thing — we need to talk with one another.

✽ ✽ ✽

The second distinction is that these circles are driven by a simple insight: We need to change the nature of the conversations we are having with one another.

These circles have been confusing to some people because they are not the usual public meetings that are topic or issue-based, or driven by a crisis, or dominated by the big personalities of invited speakers.

Public meetings such as these have always been useful. But they have often also made us just spectators to our changing times. These meetings very often end with a call for the better management of the symptoms of an issue, rather than opening up the space for us to really pay attention to the fundamentals involved.

And these events seldom invite us to turn to one another and figure out how we are both connected to our problems, and part of the solutions.

So our circles try to do something different. You know they are different because we break up into small groups. It's much harder to be a spectator in a small group.

Some of you have acted as secret facilitators of these small groups, armed with your yellow question cards. You've stepped into the job of encouraging people to listen and question and reflect.

That's the simple insight ... if we want to change the nature of our communities, then we need to change the nature of the conversations we are having with one another.

✽ ✽ ✽

Which brings us to the third thing. These circles have a simple vision that all our actions, all our work for the common good, will be different if we are better connected with one another.

Human beings are social creatures who survive and thrive through our connections and our relationships. That's the talent of our species. We don't always remember this in a consumer society with the self-interest that breeds individualism and isolation.

But gatherings such as these circles are cultural instruments of connection.

Doing this every three months is a simple affirmation of our need to be better connected, and to foster the many outcomes that flow from these relationships.

✽ ✽ ✽

It's all very well having an idea, or coming to an insight, or seeing the potential in a vision. It is another thing entirely to be able to weave it into our shared sense of culture so that it just becomes the way we do things.

It would be fair enough to say that most of the work of Community Taranaki has been under-resourced, certainly under-funded and sometimes actively marginalised. Our own active citizenship has been carried on the shoulders of volunteers, in our spare time, and with our own money.

This is a working environment that is very familiar to me as a social entrepreneur at a time when the concept of “community” is very low down on the totem pole of the things we most value.

This is another thing that must fundamentally change in the next 20 years. That's because I think that there is an underlying truth in the notion that whatever problems we are facing, they get better if we have a more healthy community. 

✽ ✽ ✽

One of the reasons we have held our circles here in this civic space is in recognition that this is one of the few places in our district where the fact of active citizenship is celebrated ... and you can see that in the annual Citizens Awards that are listed on the walls outside of this room.

My own name is there — dating from 2004 when I had already spent 30 years working in this district on fostering positive community action on unemployment and poverty.

That's 17 years ago ... almost two decades in the other direction. And I’m not sure I can look you in the eye and tell you that our collective acts of citizenship in the last 20 years have been the best that we could offer to our times.

But since the occasion of that Citizen's Award for my community initiatives on unemployment, I have come to realise that what is most in danger of becoming unemployed is now the concept of "community" itself.

So these circles have been one of the strategies for the practical regeneration of what we mean by community and how we strengthen the connections between us, and step up to the work that communities need to do.

I look forward to the conversations here today that will shape where this work goes from here.

vivian Hutchinson
March 2021

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur based in Taranaki. He is the author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012) and How Communities Awaken — some conversations for active citizens (2021). For more information see www.taranaki.gen.nz/vivian

First published online in March 2021

This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

A Letter to You in 2050

by vivian Hutchinson

Summer 2022 15 min read download as PDF

This open letter to the future is about our climate emergency.
It was originally written by vivian Hutchinson to his adult god-daughters, who are now in their mid-twenties and live and work in Auckland.
photo — Taranaki Mounga from Fitzroy Beach, February 2022.

WELL, IT KIND of crept up on us.

Of course that’s not true, but perhaps that’s what we would prefer to believe.

The real truth is much messier and shocking. There was a lot of money and energy going into keeping us all dozy and distracted and fundamentally damaged in our capacity to see and act on what was right before our eyes.

This Summer there has been a popular comedy film which has been one of the most-viewed movies on Netflix. It has cleverly captured this present moment.

“Don’t Look Up”, starring Leonardo de Caprio and Meryl Steep, is about a huge comet which is about to hit the earth in six months time and end all life as we know it. It milks its comedy from the inability of news organisations, politicians, celebrity culture, and tech billionaires to see beyond their immediate self-interest and appreciate such an existential threat.

The film hardly mentions climate change at all — but the belly-laughs coming from my activist friends are a little bit close to the raw nerves of their own frustrations and fears.

They know what is at stake right now. In 2022, we are already two years into what may be the most consequential decade of this century, where the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse is clearly also understood to be an existential threat to human life.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations last year declared this moment to be a “Code Red” for humanity. Yet, at a time when greenhouse gas emissions should be sharply falling, instead we are seeing the second biggest rise ever recorded.

There may be only five years left before humanity expends its remaining “carbon budget” to stay under the 1.5°C of global heating that was the primary objective of the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The last seven years have been the hottest on record, and climate change has intensified many natural disasters such as flooding, tropical storms and wildfires. We fear we may see the Amazon Rainforest and the Antarctic Ice Sheet pass irreversible tipping points of catastrophic change before the end of this current decade.

“Don’t Look Up” will already be an old movie by the time you read this letter. It may have made its way towards becoming an enduring cultural metaphor. The phrase “don’t look up” may speak to all those personal and collective acts of cognitive dissonance that enable us to keep pressing on with business-as-usual in the face of a very real emergency.   

✽ ✽ ✽

IT’S FEBRUARY 2022 here at the moment, and I am writing this letter to the future as part of a group exercise amongst a small  network of Taranaki active citizens who are trying to figure out what are our best contributions to make amidst this “Code Red” emergency.

I am writing while sitting in my car overlooking the Fitzroy Beach, which has been a morning thinking, walking and wading spot for me during this pandemic summer.

The beach today is strewn with the debris of storms — trees and branches and miles of wood chips and garden mulch hurled onto the foreshore out of the mouths of the Te Henui and Waiwakaiho rivers. Taranaki has just had a couple of its wettest weekends on record. There’s been major flooding out on the coast where rivers and roads have been turned into torrents as they have tried to cope with more rain in a day than we usually get in a Winter’s month.

Last weekend saw fierce winds as the tail end of a tropical cyclone also hit the west coast. Many trees fell over over, blocking roads. Roofs and verandas have been ripped off, and hundreds of homes are still without power.

I am looking out on the Tasman sea, and it is full of the cyclone’s fury with enormous spectacular waves. The steel three-legged Wave Tower near the end of the Lee Breakwater has been pushed over on its stilts as though it was made of driftwood.

We’ve had all these things before, and of course we have coped and cleaned up and moved on with our lives. But these weather events are not at all normal. What we are noticing is that they are happening a lot more frequently in our lives. The cyclones over warm seas are coming further south. Our Summers are regularly declared to be the hottest on record. The what and when of our own gardens, and the bird and insect life around us, is definitely changing before our eyes.

It’s not only the seas and skies that are in turmoil here in Aotearoa. As I write, there are protests entering a second week on Parliament Grounds. The protestors have set up an occupation with tents and blocked all the surrounding streets with their cars and campervans, and there are all the signs that it could last for quite a while.

You’ll know better than me how it all turned out, of course, from your viewpoint in the future. But to me, its like something we’ve never quite seen before. As you know, I have been part of several significant protests at Parliament, so of course I am taking a close interest.

But this is one that I will be keeping away from. It just feels like the madness and incoherence of America’s Trump, and Britain’s Brexit debates, are finally washing up here in New Zealand. And along with it, all the examples of menace and abuse and some very toxic versions of freedom and individualism. 

It depresses me, and I see these protests as a very unwelcome omen. They are glimpse at what it will probably look like when we try to make any headway on the entrenched vested interests surrounding the oil and gas and farming industries, and on encouraging New Zealanders to make fundamental changes to their lifestyles.

If these protestors are so ready to “die in a ditch” on Parliament Grounds for the sake of Public Health mandates … then we probably know what to expect if they think we’re coming for their SUVs and their dairy cows.

✽ ✽ ✽

THIS IS THE story that was told by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac a few years ago. They were the diplomats who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. Here, they are describing the world in 2050 — your world — and are imagining that it is already on a trajectory towards a 3°C temperature increase by 2100.

“The first thing that hits you is the thick air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear.”

“Extreme heat is on the rise. If you live in Paris, you endure summer temperatures that regularly rise to 44°C. Everyone stays inside, drinks water, and dreams of air-conditioning. You lie on your couch, a cold, wet towel over your face, and try to rest without dwelling on the poor farmers on the outskirts of town who, despite recurrent droughts and wildfires, are still trying to grow grapes, olives, or soy – luxuries for the rich, not for you.”

“More moisture in the air and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms. Recently, coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere have suffered brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing millions. This happens with increasing frequency now. Every day, because of rising sea levels, some part of the world must evacuate to higher ground.”

“Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. [...] Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its increasing scarcity, food can now be wildly expensive.”

“Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. [...] Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over water availability. [...] Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource.”

“The demise of the human species is being discussed more and more. For many, the only uncertainty is how long we'll last, how many more generations will see the light of the day. Suicides are the most obvious manifestation of the prevailing despair, but there are other indications: a sense of bottomless loss, unbearable guilt, and fierce resentment at previous generations who didn't do what was necessary to ward off this unstoppable calamity.”   

— The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis  by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac (2020)

Yes, it is sobering. And you will be able to judge for yourself whether these predictions for 2050 are anything like the reality that you are experiencing right now.  But these are the sorts of ominous tea-leaves that can be found almost everywhere here in my day, and are motivating our concerns and activism.

To be fair, in their book, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on and they lay out another more positive scenario where we fend off disaster and halve emissions by 2030.  I can only hope that some of the things we are doing here in this decade will indeed make such a difference — but all of this depends upon our collective level of commitment.

The latest projections coming from the COP26 conference, held in Glasgow 2021, tell us that our current global commitments will still take us to about 2.7°C of warming by the end of this century. Sadly, that’s pretty much in line with the more fearful picture being described here by these architects of the Paris Agreement.

✽ ✽ ✽

IT WAS AN old friend who really got me focused on this issue. Not by any particular argument, but by what I could see he was prepared to do.

Of course I already knew the basics of what we more commonly then called “global warming”. But it would be fair enough to say that I had filed all this information away in the “environmental issues” box in my mind.

Sure, I could see that it was important, but so too was the activism I was already involved with on major “social issues” such as unemployment and poverty, or land rights.

But what I hadn’t really taken on board was that this “environmental issue” was soon going to become a crisis that would change everything. I hadn’t thought through the implications that this anticipated calamity in the future meant that it was a definite “emergency” right now. And this was going to bring with it huge demands on our capacities as citizens to step up and meet this moment.

While my friend had been waking me up to the fact that this was an emergency, I was much slower in my response in figuring out the specific contribution I should and could make.

At the time, I had been running a Masterclass for Active Citizenship, and during the Covid lockdowns I had published a series of essays based on the sessions I had been leading in these classes.

In the final essay I quoted some comments from the climate activist Bill McKibben who observed that, at his public meetings, he was almost always asked the question: “What can one individual do?”

His reply was sharp and to the point: “Don’t be an individual.”

As important as individual action is, McKibben argued that it is not going to be the way we solve the climate crisis. This is because we are already long past the point where our personal and noble actions at home will be enough to make a real difference.

McKibben was arguing that the most important thing an individual can do now is to join together with others to create movements that will be big and broad enough to actually change systems and policies.

This is no easy ask in a world where the main economic and social policy drivers over the last 40 years have been emphasising our individuality and fortifying our acts of consumerism and self-interest.

In our world, the muscles of our active citizenship have largely been left to atrophy, and our capacities to step up to the necessary collective action have become weak and impotent. Acknowledging this has led to most of my community development work over the last decade.

But I could also now see that if we are going to address an emergency like the climate crisis – and address it at a structural and systemic level – then it is also going to take a much more creative sense of community than what we have right now.

✽ ✽ ✽

IN SPRING 2021, the American writer and activist Paul Hawken was about to publish a new book provocatively titled “Regeneration — ending the climate crisis in one generation”. He had already been a tremendous influence on my work and thinking over the last 40 years, so this book was coming at just the right time. 

Of course I was obviously going to read it. But I also knew that I was being challenged to follow the advice I had passed on in my recent essay: “Don’t be an individual”.

So, instead of curling up on my big green chair and disappearing into Paul Hawken’s next book, I organised a group who would be interested in reading it together — a Book Club. I wanted to read it with people who would also choose to have some deeper conversations on what to do about this crisis.

This was new for me at the time, and especially had some challenges doing it mostly online because of the pandemic. The Book Club has already evolved into an Action Incubator.  This process helps us get clear about the details of our best contribution to make, while sorting out what it is we already know, and the skills and assets and connections we already have, so that we can put them to good use over the next few years.

My own action details will obviously keep changing and evolving … but there are some things that I am sure about.

I will keep on participating in the disruption of the business-as-usual that is killing us. And I will keep on speaking up for our communities, for wellbeing, and for the common good.

✽ ✽ ✽

SO THIS ISN’T a letter of advice or instruction. It is much more simply a letter of connection.

You will be in your mid-50s by now and will probably be able to teach me a thing or two about the things I do not yet see or understand. In the long story of humanity, we are actually peers who have some very scattered ingredients to offer to one another.

Whatever the climate does look like in 2050 … I hope that it is  never accepted as the new normal. Because it isn’t.

We are all the inheritors of a beautiful thriving planet with billions of miracles delivered around us every day by Life. We were also the inheritors of a community wisdom that has long known how to live with, look after, and regenerate this Life.

For this is now the renewed job description of all of us as human beings: to be the instruments of the Regeneration.

And, while we are at it, to remember and tell the stories of how we got to do some things well, and how we have also had an awful capacity to get it so wrong.

In writing this letter, I did not want to pass on to you an existential grief or guilt about the climate emergency and the loss of biodiversity around our planet.

But the fact of it is this: every generation is deeply flawed in some way or another, and all of us have led lives that have also had their own shadows. Yet none of this is any excuse not to step up to our own contributions to making a positive difference.

In making this connection, I naturally wanted to share some of my hopes for you and for the future.

I do hope you have loved Life enough to pass it on — in one way or another — and pass it on knowing all its problems and broken promises, as well as its dazzling brilliance and times of beauty.

I hope you also get to pass on the resilience to stay awake, the knowledge of how to heal, and the joy that will not stop thriving wherever all the varieties of love strike their light.

I hope that, amidst all this, you will fondly remember the times that we have shared together, and not judge me and my generation too harshly as you come to terms with what we have left you and yours in 2050.

arohanui

vivian Hutchinson
Taranaki
Summer 2022

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012) and How Communities Awaken — some conversations for active citizens (2021).

This open letter was first published online on the Autumn Equinox, March 2022

This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

Common Cause

— some thoughts for the Action Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 25 min read download as Masterclass PDF

I HAVE BEEN coming to this piece of the Brooklands Bush since I was a child. The bush is on the edge of Pukekura Park in the heart of New Plymouth City. This small pocket of old Taranaki lowland forest has survived the “developments” of settlers and farmers over the last two centuries, and my old intermediate school is right next door.

In the New Plymouth suburbia of the 1960s, it was a welcome patch of wildness and frozen memory. I loved all the varieties of green I could see, and the smells of this place. If I was biking into the centre of the city I would find any excuse to come through this bush and just breathe deeper than seemed possible on the usual grey streets.

My teachers had brought their classrooms here for years – to study insects in the leaf litter, to name the native trees, and to discover the layers of life that were available for us all to notice if we simply slowed down and paid attention.

And right next to one of the main gravel pathways is an ancient elder, the Historic Puriri tree that we were told had been standing here for over 2,000 years. I remember how one teacher glowed as she explained that the tree had been a seedling at the same time that Jesus was walking and preaching in the Palestine.

This was interesting, but I was much more impressed when I realised that this Puriri would have already been an old tree at the time when Robert the Bruce was hiding in a cave in Scotland, or when the Polynesian ocean voyagers arrived on these shores in the Tokomaru, Kurahaupō and Aotea canoes.

This was a tree that held far too much Time for a schoolchild to really comprehend. But it wasn’t going anywhere. And children tend to grow up.

THE NEW PLYMOUTH District Council had appointed me to their Community Development advisory committee in the late 1980s. I had co-founded a community organisation that had set up the Taranaki Work Trust to run training programmes for local unemployed, and had also established an Employment Resource Centre which we called Starting Point.

So naturally, I was keen to be on the advisory committee, and one of our first recommendations was to suggest that the council establish measurements that could track the local impact of the national economic changes affecting New Plymouth families. We wanted these measures to assess how the new political policies of the mid-1980s were affecting our communities in terms of joblessness, poverty, housing, health, education and other indicators of local well-being.

But we soon ran into a brick wall as the council officials had a completely different understanding of both the role of their advisory committee, and the purpose of community development.

I got into some unproductive arguments, and was particularly frustrated that the advisory meetings just seemed to be focused on very short-term matters, or were constantly distracted by the latest political or personality dramas happening amongst the council staff, or around the main council table.

We all seemed to be losing the ability to pay attention to a longer-term story, and to the consequences of national and local policies on our communities.

I decided to address my own frustrations by preparing for each of these meetings by going for a short walk beforehand in the Brooklands Bush. Talking to that 2000-year old Puriri tree helped me get into the headspace where I could more patiently push for longer-term values and objectives.

It certainly helped me, although my contribution to this committee was doomed to be a short one.

Within months, the senior council staff and the Mayor unilaterally decided to change the direction of their Community Development activities, and they disbanded their advisory committee.

✽ ✽ ✽

THE FINAL WORKSHOP of our Masterclass for Active Citizenship is the Action Conversation. It is a series of conversations over a three-hour period in which the participants get to talk about what they plan to do after their four months of meeting and talking together.

We begin the workshop with a thought experiment which seeks to expand the Time horizon of their action plans.

We ask participants to close their eyes and reflect on their whakapapa or genealogy as active citizens. This may be the whakapapa of a bloodline from parents and grand-parents, but it may also include other important linkages of faith and thought-leadership from mentors and friendships who have guided their activities as citizens.

Settle your thoughts on that part of yourself that is a descendant. Yes, a descendant of blood, but also of ideas, of values and cultures and heritage. Reach back generations, perhaps even hundreds of years ... and stand in that river of Life that is flowing into and through you.

And then the participants are invited to switch their attention to the future.

Shift your thoughts now to that part of yourself that is an ancestor. Yes, an ancestor in terms of DNA, but also of the actions of faith and wisdom and integrity that are flowing on from you. Imagine this river flowing forward generations, perhaps even hundreds of years. Imagine the contributions you are making today that may still be felt in a distant future.

And then the participants are invited to bring their attention back into the room, and to the present time.

Shift your thoughts to that part of you that is a citizen of right here and now. You are present. Here, you get to be the creator of the communities you are connected to. You get to be the steward of the things that need to be looked after. You are the producer of the possibilities that all our children will inherit. Your job today is to reach into the river of Life that is flowing through you, and to name and claim the gifts with which you can bend the shape of our common good.

As people are invited to open their eyes, they acknowledge their fellow citizens also sitting in the room. They may be freshly aware of the many-named rivers of Life that are gathered there in the disguise of their friends and neighbours. They may also be aware of a much longer now than when they first began.

And they have remembered that they have always been part of communities with the leadership and helping hands of active citizens.

And there’s still plenty of work to do.

✽ ✽ ✽

THE TWO PRIMARY action tools of a citizen are Love and Power. And these are instruments of Life that are abundant in their availability.

Love, in terms of our citizenship, is generated by our willingness to care about something and our ability to take care of the things that need our support and protection.

Power, in terms of our citizenship, is generated by our willingness to connect, to organise, and to steer the things that matter in the direction of a common good.

The path of our citizenship is one that is constantly growing our awareness and maturity in terms of how these qualities are expressed.

We need this maturity, because Love and Power have both generative and de-generative sides to their nature. They are not just instruments of Life ... they are tricky Gods. If left to act alone, Love and Power are qualities that can also cause all sorts of havoc in our lives, and in our communities.

Martin Luther King Jnr. points out that 

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.

They are qualities that need each other. But it’s another balancing act for grown-ups.

It’s another version of the over-lapping circles which reveal a necessary common ground. This common ground is created as these two very powerful instruments of Life begin to have their own Action Conversation.

✽ ✽ ✽

ADAM KAHANE is a consultant to business, government and civil society groups who want to address their toughest and most complex challenges. He has had a big influence on a generation of community activists, particularly when he published his ground-breaking book Solving Tough Problems (2004). His later book Power and Love (2010) outlines his theories and practice of how these two important qualities work together to produce social change.

It is an error in popular culture to imagine that these qualities are opposing forces – that “all Power corrupts” or “all you need is Love”.

Kahane points out that Love is what makes Power generative instead of degenerative, and Power is what makes Love generative instead of degenerative. They are perfectly complementary.

Kahane quotes a fellow management consultant, Charles Hampden-Turner, who offers some insight as to how to reconcile the common view that these qualities are opposing forces. Hampden-Turner points out that what makes these contrasting values seem so oppositional is that both are usually presented to us as if they are frozen at one moment in time. In reality, their effect on our lives is much more dynamic. 

In his book, Adam Kahane says that learning to act with both Power and Love is like learning to walk on two legs:

We can’t walk on only one leg, just as we can’t address our toughest social challenges only with power or only with love. But walking on two legs does not mean either moving them both at the same time or always being stably balanced. On the contrary, it means moving first one leg and then the other and always being out of balance – or more precisely, always being in a dynamic balance.   – Adam Kahane  

BILL McKIBBEN is an American environmentalist, activist, and journalist who has written extensively on climate change and the impact of global warming. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book on the climate emergency that was written for a general audience.

McKibben is a co-founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org which is active in 188 countries worldwide. The movement is named after 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide, which scientists have identified as the safe upper limit to avoid a climate tipping point. Today, the atmosphere is at 415 parts per million and rising – the highest level ever in human history.

We're no longer at the point of trying to stop global warming. Bill McKibben acknowledges that it’s too late for that. Our international efforts are now aimed at trying to keep the emergency from becoming a complete and utter calamity. The fossil fuel industry has five times more coal and oil and gas than it's safe to burn. And their current business plans are locking us into a future that we can't survive.

Climate is the crisis on our doorstep that really changes everything. There is not a community on Planet Earth that will escape the consequences of global warming, and every Action Conversation we have from now on will in some way be influenced by this emergency.

Bill McKibben has found himself almost constantly on speaking tours, and one of the questions he is often asked is: "What can I do? or, What can one individual do to make a real difference?"

His advice is sharp and to the point: Don’t be an individual.

As important as individual action is, McKibben argues that it is not going to be the way to solve the climate crisis. This is because we are long past the point where our personal and noble actions at home will be enough to make a real difference.

McKibben says that the most important thing an individual can do is to join together with others to create movements that will be big and broad enough to actually change systems and policies.

This is no easy ask in the Western World where our main economic and social policy drivers over the last 40 years have been emphasising our individuality and fortifying our acts of consumerism and self-interest.

It is not only the muscles of our citizenship that have atrophied to that of the comic-book 98-pound weakling. The muscles that propel our necessary collective action have also become weak and impotent. 

But if we are going to address an issue like the climate crisis – and address it at a structural and systemic level – then it is going to take community. It’s going to take the “We”.

Our future on this planet will be totally dependent on our ability to have the Action Conversations that reveal our common cause with one another.

✽ ✽ ✽

THE ACTION CONVERSATION at the Masterclass continues as we ask the participants to break into pairs or small groups in order to talk about their own plans for making a difference in their communities.

The participants are given a worksheet which is simply a device for having a conversation with themselves. They are invited to fill it in with notes and statements, or with pictures and colours – whatever works for them in order to have the conversations they need.

The first questions are about unlocking the instruments of Life – Love and Power – which set the direction of their active citizenship.

When I look at my community, my nation, and our planet, what breaks my heart is ...

If I could access all the resources I need, the main thing I would do for the sake of my community, my nation, and our planet is ...

There’s no exam taking place here. Participants are not expected to hand in their worksheets. They are encouraged to give themselves permission to play. Half-baked ideas are very welcome. Quarter-thoughts are OK. This isn’t a commitment they are making ... it is a conversation.

After five minutes of quietly thinking and making notes alone, participants are invited to link up with other people in the room and share their initial thoughts.

They are encouraged to practice strategic questioning and active listening. These are the questions and attention that enable us to dig deeper and explore possibilities.

What is your most pressing issue here?

How does it affect you personally?

What is the future going to look like if nothing is changed?

How would you prefer this future to look?

Then our Action Conversation moves into the details. The participants are invited to get specific about what they are imagining.

The questions that follow are based on my work with the New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship – a learning community of changemakers with whom I was organising retreats and meetings from 2006-2012.

I wrote up the stories of this Fellowship, and described many of the things we had been learning together, in my book called How Communities Heal (2012). All participants of the Masterclass had been given a copy of this book as a way of anchoring our conversations in practical examples of the entrepreneurship and innovation that is very much alive and thriving in New Zealand communities.

When I first published the book, I was invited to speak at various conferences about the Fellowship and its membership. I was regularly asked: What makes these people special? They have some very inspiring stories about what they are doing ... Are there particular things that make them effective in what they do?

I should point out that this group of social entrepreneurs wouldn’t see themselves as particularly special people. Yes, they have had some very interesting lives — but there’s no magic or fairy tales at work here.

If I was to describe any special talent that this diverse group of people had in common, I would simply say that they were citizens who knew how to have an Action Conversation with themselves.

For the sake of my speeches, I would go on to describe four main qualities which I saw the Fellowship members demonstrating in their own lives. These are the qualities that turn an active citizen into an effective changemaker. They are

1. Having an ability to make Time in their lives, and making their time work for them.

2. Having a clarity about the things they need to do, and particularly those things that “have their name on it”.

3. Having the attention that sees all sorts of assets in their communities which most people don’t usually notice.

4. Having the social skills that can find and connect allies who will turn up for support and collective action.

In designing our Masterclass workshop, these four qualities have been turned into the final questions of our dialogue together. And participants are encouraged to keep on being specific:

How can I free up at least five percent of my time to become a more effective active citizen?

What are the first ten things that I can get on with right now?

What are the five main gifts and assets that I can bring to these possibilities?

Who are the ten people I first need to connect with in order to make these possibilities happen?

You may appreciate that, by the time we have finished the workshop, there is a tangible sense of Love and Power in the room. And very few of the participants are thinking of themselves just as individuals.

They are figuring out how to work for community, in community.

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IN 2009, the New Plymouth District Council decided that it urgently needed to expand a driveway that allowed trucks to bring in gear for the music concerts that were being held at the Bowl of Brooklands, an outdoor venue that is right next door to the Brooklands Bush.

The Bowl has hosted many of Taranaki’s biggest concerts and music festivals over the years, including the annual WOMAD Festival, and concerts for Elton John, Sting, Paul Simon, Simply Red, and Fleetwood Mac. These music groups might turn up with large containers of staging and equipment, and their vehicles often had a precarious time entering the venue when using the existing driveway.

The trouble was, the plans for expanding the driveway meant taking out several hundred-year old Puriri trees, including another Notable and listed 400-year old forest giant which the former Pukekura Park curator, George Fuller, had named Enigma – because of the tree’s ability to survive and thrive while perched on the side of a cliff.

The Notable Enigma, or George Fuller’s Puriri tree, beside the driveway into the Bowl of Brooklands. (photo by vivian Hutchinson)

I had known George as he had been the curator of Pukekura Park for many years. During the 1980s, when I was part of starting an organic training garden for local unemployed, George was one of the first to generously turn up and offer his help and advice. He was a respected horticulturist, and a stalwart of the Taranaki Orchid Society. After his retirement, he was awarded an MBE for service to orchids and the New Plymouth community.

When the Council announced its determination to go ahead with the revamped driveway and remove the trees, George Fuller and other Friends of the Park were equally determined to protest and resist the developments.

It was a classic New Plymouth controversy complete with delegations to the council and letters to the editor of the Taranaki Daily News. One journalist observed that “...this is a battle fought with smiles and first names by people who have to live with each other whatever the outcome.”

Even with George’s status as a former curator and horticultural expert, it was looking as though their efforts were still not going to be enough to convince the council to change its mind.

So George tried something different. He put on his suit and his MBE medal, and told people he was going to stand at the trees each lunchtime for a week and explain to anyone who turned up just why these trees were special and important.

This was not so much a public protest, but an affirmation of his role as a kaitiaki, or protector of these trees. And he was demonstrating this not as an expert, or as a former employee of the council ... but as an active citizen.

And ultimately, the council did change its mind. More meetings were held, and some prominent local engineers took up the challenge of redesigning the driveway so that it could continue to proceed around the trees, rather than through them. As a result, the precarious life of the Notable Enigma continues to be part of our Brooklands Bush. 

And a few months later, in honour of his stand, the 80-year old George Fuller was declared Person of the Year by the Taranaki Daily News.

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WE’VE LEARNED SO MUCH more about the natural world since I was studying insects and the names of native trees in Brooklands as a schoolchild.

Yes, we know much more about the disastrous changes that humans have been making to our environment, and the planetary responsibilities that we have all yet to fully accept.

Yet we also know that even a modest patch of old growth forest like what we have at Brooklands is a much more wonderful and surprising thing than we previously imagined.

It is only in the last generation that scientists have begun to recognise that trees are social beings. Their lives are as complex as any animal.

They communicate with each other through their roots, and in an astounding collaboration with the fungal “wood wide web” that permeates the soil. Trees support each other as they grow by sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling. Together they create an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group.

In his book, The Hidden Life of Trees (2015), author and forester Peter Wohlleben refers to research from the University of Bonn that indicates that trees have “brain-like structures” at their root tips that analyze toxic substances and soil conditions and then send electrical impulses to redirect root growth.

Beneath the soil, tree roots and the mycorrhizal networks of exchange are constantly communicating, and growing and repairing and regenerating. This is an intelligent infrastructure that keeps on delivering the possibilities of Life.

We now know that, as social beings, the Notable trees are never alone. They are part of a community. In Brooklands, they are a part of a woven fabric that includes the Karaka, Kohekohe, Pukatea, Rewarewa, Nikau, Kawakawa, Tawa, and Titoki ... not to mention the birds and insects and moulds and mushrooms that also know this as home.

The health of the bush is not down to any individual tree or species. The smallest unit of sustainable well-being here is a community.

And so it is with the people and neighbourhoods that surround our public parks and reserves. The smallest unit of well-being for human beings is not found in ourselves as individuals, or even as extended families ... but as communities.

The enigma here is that, after all this Time, we are still learning how to recognise it.

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IN THE PURSUIT of well-being for our communities, we start to understand that it is not so much that you get to have an Action Conversation. Instead, we get to realise that all our actions are a conversation.

Our actions are conversations that pull and stretch between our invitations and our gifts, our dissent and our commitments, our sense of ownership and our awareness of the possibilities.

Our citizenship is essentially an action strategy where our connecting, our doing, our listening and our learning are all happening at the same time.

This action strategy is what enables our communities to awaken, heal and thrive.

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper Common Cause is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

The Brooklands Puriri tree (vitex lucens) is listed as Category 1 Notable Tree of New Zealand (TR/0135). Known by many as the “Historic Puriri”, its actual age is shrouded in myth and romanticism. The surveyor and ethnologist Percy Smith (1840-1922) may have been one of the earliest to assert that the tree was over 2,000 years old. A columnist writing on “Giant Trees” in the Nelson Daily in 1931 enthusiastically reported: “The late Mr Percy Smith estimated the age of this wonderful old tree at from 2000 to 4000 years – a grown tree perhaps before the Christian era! Verily it is a link with the past. It is one of the most valuable trees in the Dominion.”

The Brooklands Park information sign that is currently beside the Historic Puriri cites a visiting English writer and agricultural reformer, Sir H. Rider Haggard, who also estimated the tree to be over 2000 years old. Haggard was better known as an author of adventure fiction and a best-selling pioneer of the “lost world” literary genre. Regardless of the truth or fancy of its actual age, the Historic Puriri genuinely earns its title as one of the oldest and biggest of its species in our nation. And for this generation, it is an elder and icon that is reminding us of the longer-term heartbeat of the natural world of which we are a part.

Photopage: Brooklands — THE BROOKLANDS BUSH — (centre right) the Historic Puriri, with vivian Hutchinson’s grand-niece and nephew, Charlotte and Harrison Gibson (2017) Brooklands, New Plymouth, Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson

Long-term thinking ... Stewart Brand, Daniel Hillis and Brian Eno set up the Long Now Foundation in 1996 in order to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Stewart Brand's book The Clock of the Long Now (2008) is a fundamental reframing of the way people think in a faster-cheaper-disposable age. www.amazon.com/dp/B003P9XCY4

see also The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking (2020) by Roman Krznaric www.amazon.com/dp/1615197303

Martin Luther King on Love and Power ... is from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., (ed. Clayborne Carson 1986) www.amazon.com/dp/0446676500. The fuller quotation is “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Adam Kahane .... see Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (2004) www.amazon.com/dp/1576754642; and Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (2010) www.amazon.com/dp/1605093041

Charles Hampden-Turner ... quoted by Adam Kahane from Charting the Corporate Mind (1993) www.amazon.com/dp/0029137063

Bill McKibben ... for more, see Do The Math: The Movie (2013) directed by Kelly Nyles and Jared P. Scott. Full movie is at https://youtu.be/IsIfokifwSo

“Bill McKibben: The Question I Get Asked the Most”, in EcoWatch Environmental News 14 October 2016 www.ecowatch.com/bill-mckibben-climate-change-2041759425.html

Bill McKibben took up the challenge of a different sense of Time, when Time (the weekly news magazine) asked him to write their cover story for their special issue on 2050: The Fight For Earth, published on 12th September 2019. McKibben decided to imagine that he has reached the middle of the century and he looked back and see how we dramatically changed our society and our economy. His article is both sobering and hopeful. time.com/5669022/climate-change-2050/

common cause ... this is a phrase of action, meaning “to work together with a person, group etc that you do not usually agree with, in order to achieve a shared aim” – Macmillan Dictionary.

Strategic Questioning: An Approach to Creating Personal and Social Change (1997) by Fran Peavey, and edited by vivian Hutchinson https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KTioaDPkUhJk04ribD2zjgTMUyD6W_x3

New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship ... was founded in 2006 with funding from the Tindall Foundation and support from several other philanthropic trusts and community leaders. The Fellowship was initially designed as an experiment that would run for three years, but the membership found the connections and conversations so useful that they kept on meeting for a further three years. They also ran several retreats which included workshops and dialogue with a new generation of social entrepreneurs. The fifteen members of the New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship (2006-2012) included: Brian Donnelly, Emeline Afeaki-Mafile’o, Gael Surgenor, John Stansfield, Kim Workman, Major Campbell Roberts, Malcolm Cameron, Ngahau and Debbie Davis, Nuku Rapana, Philip Patston, Robin Allison, Stephanie McIntyre, Vivien Maidaborn, and vivian Hutchinson.

Photopage: Fellowship — THE NEW ZEALAND SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR FELLOWSHIP (2006-2012) — photographs by vivian Hutchinson. Workshops and conversations at the NZSEF Retreats at the Vaughan Park Anglican Retreat Centre, Long Bay, Auckland (bottom left) How Communities Heal : Stories of Social Innovation and Social Change (2012) by vivian Hutchinson and the New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship. Fellowship members (top row) Brian Donnelly, Vivien Maidaborn, Emeline Afeaki-Mafile’o, Kim Workman, Major Campbell Roberts (middle row) John Stansfield, Debbie Davis, Ngahau Davis, Stephanie McIntyre, vivian Hutchinson (bottom row) Gael Surgenor, Malcolm Cameron, Philip Patston, Nuku Rapana, Robin Allison.

How Communities Heal: Stories of Social Innovation and Social Change (2011) by vivian Hutchinson and featuring members of the New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship. Available as a book, and also eBook, Kindle and PDF for iPad editions. Individual chapters and resources can also be viewed and downloaded at www.taranaki.gen.nz/hch

George Fuller MBE (1929- 2015) Pukekura Park curator. For more, see “A Tree, a Man, a Council and a Decision” www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/lifestyle/2545175/ and “Old Man of the Park” (August 2009) www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/lifestyle/2554454/

The Notable Enigma, or George Fuller’s Puriri tree ... photograph by vivian Hutchinson (2020)

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015) by Peter Wohlleben www.amazon.com/dp/1771642483 explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in forests and the amazing scientific mechanisms behind these wonders, of which we are usually blissfully unaware.

the smallest unit of wellbeing ... “I believe that the community — in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures — is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” — Wendell Berry, American writer, environmental activist, and farmer from his classic essay called “Health is Membership” (1994).

ISBN 978-1-92-717641-2 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

Outrageous Abundance

— some thoughts for the Gifts Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 23 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE TARANAKI MUSEUM, Puke Ariki, has an online catalogue of its collections and I was browsing through this list one day and came across a photo of a paua shell. What surprised me was that I thought I recognised it. And when I looked deeper into the accession details in the catalogue, I could see why. The paua shell was one that Aunty Marj had brought to the museum.

A large paua shell (haliotis iris, or rainbow abalone) Puke Ariki Accession No. TM2000.133

In the 1950s and 60s, especially in working-class New Plymouth families, it was not unusual for people to have these rainbow-coloured paua shells in their homes where they were being used as ashtrays. But Aunty Marj had not brought this shell to the museum for the smokers. She had brought it to collect koha.

As an active citizen, Aunty Marj was an early supporter of the Taranaki Museum, the New Plymouth Public Library, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. She thought it was important that these civic institutions had authentic connections with the local Maori community, and she acted as an unofficial volunteer and adviser for many decades, becoming a friend and mentor to many of the Directors and Managers.

If she was at a public meeting, you would not be surprised to see Aunty Marj reach into her kete and pull out a paua shell, and invite people to contribute to the running of that meeting, or to funding the purpose that we were meeting about.

Of course she knew that the Taranaki Museum was funded by our local body rates, and that the people she was supporting there were paid staff members. But Aunty Marj was demonstrating the importance of koha as an everyday cultural practice, and she was not going to stop doing it just because this was a publicly-funded institution.

Koha is the act of gifting and generosity, and it is not always a matter of money. It is an expression of a living economy which reflects your values and your deepest intentions. The everyday practice of koha is the way that active citizens turn those values and intentions into the tangible assets of community.

I’m sure that the paua itself didn’t really matter to Aunty Marj, and she would probably be quite amused to find this artefact officially listed in the museum collections. What really mattered to her was the continuing practice of koha, and how this cultural understanding of our gifts and generosity is an essential part of the craft of community-building.

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I FIRST WENT to Parihaka as a teenager in the 1970s to support Aunty Marj and other elders as they welcomed and looked after a constant stream of visitors to the marae.

During this time, Aunty Marj was leading the restoration of the historic Te Niho o te Atiawa dining room at Parihaka so that it could become a new venue for welcoming visitors. When the restoration was complete, Aunty Marj symbolically gave the key of the house to the “students and teachers of the world” in the hope that it would continue to serve as a place of inspiration and learning.

In the years that followed, the elders of Te Niho generously extended their hospitality to hundreds of new visitors. They introduced a whole new generation of people to the legacy of the Parihaka prophets of peace Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, and their acts of non-violent resistance in the face of war, colonisation, and the legislative theft of Māori land.

Te Niho o te Atiawa Meeting House at Parihaka Marae 1977 (photo by vivian Hutchinson)

At the time, I was curious about how the elders of Te Niho were paying for everything. I didn’t see anyone sitting down at the kitchen table and filling in funding applications. How were they making ends meet? Surely they couldn’t be keeping the meeting house open on the back of their pensions?

What I discovered was that, yes, they were paying for many things themselves. But they were also able to provide their welcome and manuhiritanga because they were part of a cultural economy of koha.

When there is a gathering at the marae, people don’t pay registration fees as you would at a Pākehā conference. You come and leave behind a koha. This is not a market-based transaction, because you are invited to contribute an amount according to your ability to pay. And regardless of what you do pay, the hospitality extended to you is abundant, and generous.

Koha is not the same thing as what a “donation” means in modern society. The word is not a direct translation because there are relationships implied in koha which are a much more complicated thing. 

Koha is a tangible form of reciprocity and trust which has an economics of its own. It is not a commercial transaction based on a fear that we won’t make ends meet. It is a cultural form of economics that is based on our gifts and the weaving of those gifts into the fabric of our common lives.

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THE ECONOMICS OF COMMUNITY is something that active citizens are rediscovering and recovering for our modern age. It is not an easy thing to re-establish because community-based cultures have a whole different narrative about economics – one that is fundamentally different to consumer capitalism.

Community economics is based on our gifts, rather than our appetites and desires. A community-builder is someone who invites their friends and neighbours to focus on their gifts, and not their deficiencies, and then invites those gifts to work for the common good.

In contrast, the marketplace economics of our mainstream culture is trapped in a mind-set of scarcity and insatiability. It is a consumer system that relies on keeping things scarce, and then has a vested interest in people never finding complete satisfaction.

The ability to be blind to our own gifts is one of the great achievements of a consumer society – because then we think we have to go out and buy what we are imagining we don’t already have. 

The economics of a healthy community understands the importance of the practical limits that exist in both our natural environment and our social systems. Yet, within these limits, it also recognises that there is plenty of creative room for abundance and generosity.

Our guide to this creativity is the natural world, where there are many examples of an intelligent and elegant dance going on between the limits and the fruitfulness.

You only need to see an apricot tree in flower to realise that nature itself practices an outrageous abundance.

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OUR GIFTS ARE not at all scarce. But most of the time we are just not seeing them and certainly not valuing them.

I once had several women attending the Masterclass where they talked about the meetings they were having about growing their local community organisation.

One of them said, “We started with nothing.” Another remarked, “There were lots of meetings and families who turned up, but nothing happened.” The third person commented, “We needed a legal constitution so that we could apply for government funding.”

Each of these statements was an example of how they and their community of friends and family members were trapped in a form of scarcity thinking. They had not brought their creativity to their limits. They had gone to the trouble of calling their meeting, but there was not the leadership there that could name and value the gifts that were already in the room.

Here are just three of the gifts in which that were already obviously abundant:

– the ability to associate with one another and bring goodwill to that association.

– the ability to offer and keep offering hospitality, especially to strangers

– the ability to get into conversation with one another about the resources and assets that they already have in the group

The job of a community-builder is to release these primary resources, first. And then notice and celebrate that they are already abundant.

No community group has ever started with nothing. And if they think that the starting point is to find someone who will rush off and fill in a funding application, then they are completely missing the point. 

I have put in many funding applications myself and served on boards that have made funding decisions. Yet I recognise that community-based economics has a different perspective on the concept of charity, or economic patronage.

I have also become wary about those types of philanthropy which are just another way of buying things without making any ongoing commitments to a relationship.

Some years ago, I was asked to speak to a network of community groups in the South Island. They were all involved in employment creation or social services, and were doing great work. I heard many familiar stories of how these groups were constantly struggling with the finances. They specifically wanted me to talk about fundraising, so I thought I would start off by asking a few provocative questions:

How many of you are putting your own money into your activities? How many of your trustees are prepared to back you financially? How many of you speak to your friends about what you are doing and that you need financial help?

The responses were fascinating. Only a few of the groups said they were putting their own money in, or had trustees that would be prepared to. This begged a further question: Why do you expect other people to invest in your vision for your community if you are not prepared to invest in it yourself?

I have asked these questions in other public meetings and have received similar responses. People tell me, "Get real – this is my job!" Or they say, "I give lots of time – do you really expect me to give money as well?"

We seem to have very few hang-ups about being generous with our time. So why is it almost unthinkable for some of our friends and colleagues to consider being just as generous with their own money? I suspect it is related to a similar form of scarcity thinking.

I’m not suggesting the people who set up community groups should expect or try to pay for everything themselves. Building strategic partnerships with funders is an important challenge to the community sector, and a challenge that all of us can still learn a lot about.

But I do believe that the people with the most interest in a vision for a community project should be the first to start the ball rolling in terms of their own financial contributions. It is not so much the amount of money that is important here – but more a recognition that the critical starting point is a conversation we can have about our gifts and our generosity.

In my own experience, this conversation gives a whole different sense of ownership, alignment and commitment to the projects that we are trying to make possible.

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I BECAME A philanthropist when I first went on the dole. This was the early 1980s, and I had moved back to New Plymouth after living in Auckland for a few years. Unemployment was rising everywhere, and I decided that this was an important issue for me to focus on.

The Salvation Army was just starting their first work schemes and I joined their work. What I found was that there was plenty of government funding available if we wanted to organise work gangs cutting scrub on the edges of town – good work, which kept us satisfied for quite some time.

But there was little money available if you wanted to do something deeper about the issue of unemployment. And, in those days, I was fighting for the right of unemployed people to have access to training programmes that could increase their employability.

So when my supervisor contract ran out, I went on the dole to support my work and vision for wider community action on employment. Actually, I just kept on turning up to my office at the Salvation Army, and I continued to get tremendous support from them for the projects I was trying to create.

But going on the dole did bring up all sorts of feelings in me about my self-worth, my place in the community, and how my own creative contribution was valued in the face of the status quo.

It also brought up feelings in me about my attitudes to money. I started to think more about the nature of abundance and my own generosity, and what had I been doing to support the gifts and possibilities around me.

It was at this time that an unusual Australian accountant called Lionel Fifield was doing a lecture tour of New Zealand. His presentations centred around personal growth and self discovery, and he also spoke about our personal relationship with money. When he came and spoke in New Plymouth, I found his message — and his personal example — quite challenging. Lionel’s view was that, when it comes to money, many people’s lives became stuck when they only see themselves as receivers. He told powerful stories of how people and communities construct all sorts of blocks surrounding the giving and receiving of money in their lives.

His view was that an ungenerous person was like a dam in the flow of money and their own gifts. Just as it is a natural law that most of us need an income to survive, so too is it a natural law that we need to practice generosity in our lives.

At the time, I could see how his stories related to my own experience of welfare dependency. I could see that the “stuck-ness” came as much from solely defining yourself as a receiver, as it did from being in a structural “welfare trap”.

Lionel Fifield advocated tithing — and it was the first time I had heard of this term outside of a Christian context. He wasn’t, however, talking about giving money to a church but about giving 10% of your income to the current point of inspiration in your life and to the people and organisations who you think are doing great work for the common good.

Lionel himself was an inspirational speaker, but was quite unlike similar leaders of the 1980s New Age movement who were marketing “abundance consciousness” and all sorts of pyramid money schemes. This fairly modest accountant made it quite clear that he had no vested interest in changing anybody, nor did he ever claim to be right. He also didn’t charge a cent for his lectures, but had a container at the back of the room available for donations.

At the time, I would have to admit that his lecture made me quite grumpy. I spoke to him afterwards, and complained that, “You’ve never lived on the dole in Taranaki!”

At this time the unemployment benefit was about $66 per week. I had no savings in the bank, and I certainly didn’t feel abundant. In fact, if I was honest, I would have to admit that I was having to face my own challenges with stuck-ness and depression.

Lionel challenged me to give the tithing a go, which I did. Each week I put $6 aside, and when it had accumulated to $100 I sent off an anonymous cheque to someone or a group who I thought was doing good work.

There was no magical thinking about all this. I just lived on less, while choosing to share in a way that makes a difference. There was no bargain going on that involved a faith that “... if I give, then so shall I receive”. It was just a simple and practical way I could play my part in making what I value come alive in the world.

And, in the meantime, something did indeed lift inside me. I found myself in a wholly different head-space. It did feel like a dam was opening and a river was flowing again. Yes, I was still living on the dole, and had all the limits that this implied ... but I was also a contributing part of the flow of an outrageous abundance.

So from then on, tithing just became part of the framework of how I ran my personal finances and remains so today. It is not a tax on my income, or a burden. It is my first 10%, not my last. It is a delight. It is a modest and personal contribution to making things happen, and to stepping up to an economics of possibility.

My decisions about what I contribute to are a mixture of regular payments to some groups I support, and also some more random contributions to things that are inspiring me at the moment.

There are lots of New Zealanders who tithe for the common good from their personal income, and my personal story is by no means a unique example. Many people are choosing to take up tithing as a way of affirming the importance of generosity and personal philanthropy in their own lives.

Over the past thirty years, this has created its own economy for community initiatives. Many of the projects that have emerged out of my friendship networks have first of all been financially supported by our shared koha economy – long before we put in any funding applications into a government department or a large philanthropic foundation.

✽ ✽ ✽

WHEN TALKING about an economy of generosity with Aunty Marj, she was quick to caution me that koha is not a fundraising strategy. It is something deeper than just raising money for your projects.

Aunty Marj told me that Taranaki Maori had a different tikanga or protocol around koha, compared to iwi from other parts of the country. At Taranaki gatherings, a koha was not placed on the marae for all to see, but it was a much more discrete exchange that took place between visitors and the people of the marae.

She talked about a fundraising event that she went to that was raising money for the refurbishing of a marae. She was a part of two bus-loads of Taranaki elders and their families which had travelled to support the marae and renew their kinship linkages. And as was usual, the koha for the marae was collected on the buses on the way to their destination.

When they arrived, they found that the marae was decked out like a fairground with all sorts of activities and stalls. In the centre was a caravan with a speaker system playing loud music – and also announcing the donations that had arrived with various visitors.

A Taranaki kaumatua went over to the caravan and handed over their koha saying, “We would prefer no announcement, thank you.” But as he was walking away from the caravan, an announcement did blast out from the loud-speaker, profusely thanking the Taranaki visitors and stating the amount of money that had been contributed to the fundraiser.

The kaumatua was immediately incensed. He had not traveled all this way to come to a fundraising gameshow. He turned around, marched back into the caravan, and grabbed back his envelopes of money. He then went up to a nearby hill and threw it all into the air, and stood and watched as the money-notes floated all over the marae, and was chased by the kids.

I immediately burst into laughter when I first heard this story and imagined the comedy of the scene. But when I turned to Aunty Marj I could see that she was not amused. She recognised that it was no laughing matter what the kaumatua had done. His actions were his affirmation that the Taranaki koha was not part of a fundraising strategy. Their koha was an expression of something much more valuable. It was a tangible assertion of a whakapapa, a connection, and a relationship that had endured through tough circumstances over many generations.

That koha brought with it a much deeper economy – a living economy – and a much older wisdom about how possibilities happen.

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I HAVE OFTEN wondered: What would it look like if generosity was stitched into the very identity of ourselves as New Zealanders?

New Zealand is already an abundant nation, but in too many ways we are not yet a generous one.

The gap between our existing abundance and our potential generosity is also a cultural gap. It has to do with how both giving and receiving are already stitched into our identity as New Zealanders. It has to do with our personal and collective attitudes as to what is enough, and our hopes and fears for the future.

Our job as active citizens is to respect the practical limits of our environment and the sensible boundaries of social systems that can give us well-being. Yet, within these limits, our job is also to find the creative ways we can stitch our generosity into how we run our personal and family finances, our community organisations, our schools, our churches, our marae, our businesses, and our governance.

The conversation that stretches between our boundaries and our gifts is how we get to awaken a generous nation.

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper Outrageous Abundance is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

The Puke Ariki online catalogue data for the paua shell from Aunty Marj is at https://collection.pukeariki.com/objects/28054

Lionel Fifield is the co-founder of the Relaxation Centre of Queensland, a unique adult educational organisation. Lionel has travelled extensively throughout Australia, and in many other countries, speaking to diverse audiences on a range of themes including prosperity, self esteem, honesty, relationships, laughter, listening and being true to one’s self. He is the author of several books, including Your Partnership with Life (pub 1990). The Relaxation Centre, cnr Brookes and Wickham Streets, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland 4006, Australia.

ISBN 978-1-92-717640-5 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

A Trusted Promise

— some thoughts for the Commitment Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 17 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE COMMITMENT CONVERSATION is about the promises you are making to yourself, and to your community. This conversation is the place to explore the responsibilities that you are willing to undertake to make things happen. And it is the place to build the significant relationships within your community that can help you steer your commitments into reality.

It is all very well asking yourself the question, What is my contribution to the common good? But it obviously needs to go much further than that: What are the promises you are making to ensure that this contribution is actually delivered? and, Who are you making these promises to? 

The commitments of an active citizen are not achieved alone. We need people in our lives that we trust enough to help us steer our decisions, give us feedback on our assumptions, and hold us accountable for our actions.

These are the people to whom we entrust our promises. Their trusteeship is a critical function of a healthy community.

This trusteeship is different from a formal governance appointment or a supervisory relationship you might have with an employer or someone within a community organisation. The relationship I am referring to here is much more personal and involves the level of trust and accountability that we are able to offer each other as fellow citizens and as friends.

A community trustee is your peer, and the conversations that you have together involve the promises that are made between you as peers. A friend and a fellow citizen is turned into a trustee when they are prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with receiving such a promise. Your commitments become much more real and powerful when they are made within the context of such a relationship.

The purpose of a community trustee is to pay attention, and be a voice for the common good. Their trusteeship usually involves having regular conversations with you that reflect on your goals and objectives, how things are changing, and what you are noticing and learning.

A trustee pays attention to what you are serving in the community, and then gives feedback on the impact of what you are trying to do. They pay particular attention to the everyday blind spots that all of us bring to our work and service.

Trusteeship is the way that your personal aspirations and promises are turned into a living function of community. It is this trusteeship that ensures that your commitments are not a solitary purpose, and nor are they completely dependent on matters of your own individual willpower.

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I HAVE BEEN a self-employed community organiser for most of my adult life. I have regularly taken on jobs and contracts that have paid the bills, but my real career has been an expression of the passions and commitments that come with being an active citizen.

And for most of my life, I have been fortunate that these activities have been done in the context of peer-based community trusteeship, and this has included many different associations of friends and colleagues.

They have been prepared to pay a deeper attention to my intentions, and do me the great favour of giving me feedback or intervening when they think I am getting things wrong. They have stood alongside me when my activities have required me to be more courageous and persistent or kind. And they have often commiserated with my failures and celebrated my accomplishments.

In many cases, the trusteeship in my life has been a mutual relationship as I have done the same for these friends and colleagues and their own passions and activities as active citizens.

Some of these associations have become formal arrangements, but most of the time they have been based on very informal meet-ups. We have gathered in each other’s homes, or used spiritual Retreat Centres or camping venues at National Parks — where we can step outside our often stressful daily lives and walk and talk and reflect on the matters at hand.    

A network of trusteeship, and a culture that encourages these sorts of meetings and conversations, is a sign of a thriving community. It is important to the resilience of our shared lives, and it means we are taking seriously the commitments and accountabilities that come with our intentions to change, create or to take care of the things that matter to us all.

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SUCH COMMITMENTS MIGHT seem a strange thing in a modern society which is dominated by self-interest, short-term thinking, consumerism, and disposability. Such accountabilities do seem strange in a society where our concept of “freedom” usually means that we step back from asking the best of each other.

And yet we are clearly living with the consequences of these attitudes of self-interest, and the lack of that ask.

Our major social, economic, and environmental systems are under stress, or facing collapse, and our usual sources of authority are heavily compromised. But the everyday function of community trusteeship is also being marginalised at this stressful time. Active citizens need to rebuild this capacity with one another.

This is because we are in urgent need of a much deeper cultural binding to our better angels. This is the binding that is woven as we dare to step forward and ask the best of each other, and then hang in there as we each learn how to rise to our necessary commitments.

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COMMITMENT IS NOT just a process of resolve, or of positive thinking or clever time management. If you want to see fundamental change in your community, then you will need to recognise that the promises you are making are not matters to be taken lightly.

This is because your commitments will often be at war with a whole host of influences designed to keep things exactly the way they are right now. Your promises will find they need to navigate their way through a dense and complicated swampland.

And this is not work for the faint-hearted.

The swampland is full of over-grown pathways that make their way through your own inadequacies and incompetencies, your fears and anxieties, your procrastinations and addictions, the unexpected oppositions and dissents, the helpful and unhelpful comments of friends and families, the seductive persuasions of the status quo, and sometimes very direct threats from the powers-that-be.

There are lots of voices with reasons as to why you should never even start on your commitments. If you only listened to them ... then you never will.

This is why active citizenship is something we do together. We need the courageous conversations that community trusteeship brings to the promises we are making. We need each other to get through the swamp.

Without this level of support and accountability, an individual is in danger of isolation and surviving by their wits. You might start to imagine that you are some sort of solitary hero or changemaker. But these inflations are yet more distracting pathways in the swampland. 

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THERE ARE PLENTY of other distractions to your commitments. Some of them are quite clever. When I was first reading Peter Block’s book Community, one of the things that really struck me was where he pointed out that the greatest enemy of commitment is not opposition, but it is lip service.

In his book he describes lip service as “an agreement that is made standing next to the exit door.” He says it offers an empty step forward, and if we genuinely want movement on an issue, then “... we can move forward with a refusal; but we cannot move forward with a maybe.”

Reading this was one of those moments when I sat back in my chair with a huge sigh. This was something that had often been true in my own experience – as lip service has led me into a great many swamplands.

What I have learned is that lip service does not really want you to have the Commitment Conversation. And it is the way that our major systems are structurally kept in denial of their need for transformational change.

Lip service is so highly developed in our culture that it comes smartly dressed up as marketing messages and policy advice and political talking points. There are entire job descriptions and economies and contracts based on this avoidance of the need for real change.

Lip service is essentially an instrument of power and one of the dark arts of privilege. And it is toxic to our communities because it occupies the space we need to act and make a real difference.

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I EXPERIENCED A CURIOUS example of the nature of lip service while I was part of hosting a conference in Wellington in 2012. The event was called Doing Real Good, and it was one of the most diverse conferences I had been to in a long time. It had brought together a very unusual mix of social entrepreneurs with government leaders, local government officials, business leaders, academics, community leaders, and disability activists.

At one of our sessions, we had a top-level manager from the Ministry of Social Development giving us a speech on what was going to be a significant change in government policy relating to social service providers.

His speech focused on framing government as a “social enabler” and a provider of the resources for “building social capital”. He was blunt in his view that the current models of social service were out-of-date, and he was going to lead a fundamental change in the nature of government contracts and tenders so that they would become more “outcomes-focused”. He had already told his staff that making this change would be “... the most important work they will ever do.”

The government speaker then finished off his talk with a short video. This technique for closing a speech had recently become something of a standard at business conferences, and was designed to deliver something of an entertaining or inspiring “Hallmark moment” at the end of a presentation. I had been at some conferences where the closing video at the end had very little connection to the subject of the speech that had just been made ... but this particular video turned out to have its own unexpected results.

The video was called The Power of Words and it shows a blind beggar sitting in the middle of a city square in Scotland. The man is sitting cross-legged on a blanket while many people are briskly walking past. He has a cardboard sign propped up behind his begging tin can, and the sign says, “I’m Blind, Please Help.”

But he isn’t getting very many customers.

The Beggar in the “Power of Words” video.

Then a young woman walks by, and she is smartly dressed with some particularly stunning green leather shoes. She passes the beggar, but then stops and turns back and walks up to him.

She doesn’t talk, and neither does she place any money in the tin. Instead, she bends down and picks up the sign, turns it over and pulls out a black marker-pen that she just happened to have in her coat pocket. She writes a new message and replaces the sign, before mysteriously walking off. 

As the music builds on the video, we see a dramatic change in response to the blind beggar. The people who were previously walking briskly past are now stopping to bend over and putting plenty of coin into the beggar’s tin can.

The blind man is left sitting there somewhat bewildered.

It is now later in the day and the same woman is walking back through the square and she stops in front of the beggar to see how things have improved. The blind man recognises her because he had previously touched her distinctive green shoes. He now asks her, “What did you do to my sign?”

She crouches down and tenderly touches him on the shoulder, saying, “I wrote the same, but different words.” And then she walks off again.

The camera then slowly moves onto the new sign, which reads, “It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it.”

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SO WE ARE BACK at the conference again, and the video is finished, and the lights have come back on. Half the conference participants were sitting in their chairs, smiling to one another, and saying some version of, “Oh – that’s lovely!”

But the other half of the room were sitting there extremely grumpy.

The government manager was confused. He’d shown this video before, but this was quite a different reaction which he hadn’t been expecting.

He turned to the chairperson of the conference, who explained the reaction to him by saying, “You are showing this in a room full of community activists and social entrepreneurs. They are asking themselves, “Why is that man still begging?”

Several of the community activists later stood up at the conference to challenge the assumptions in the video and how it might well be connected to the government manager’s overall presentation. One asked, “What is the conclusion we are meant to be drawing here? Does your Ministry just want us all to become better beggars?”

This conference was being held in Wellington at a time of increasing government austerity measures aimed at the social services sector. The Minister of Social Development at the time was trumpeting changes to the welfare rules that would possibly save the government as much as $1.6 billion.

But the active citizens at this conference could see that this money was being taken out of some of our poorest communities, who could not feed their children on The Power of Words.

While the government manager may not have intended it this way, his use of the video had become an important teaching moment for the whole conference – which, after all, was called Doing Real Good.

Few of the participants were ever going to argue with the idea of common-sense outcomes contracting. Many of them had already been shaping their social services around these principles for quite some time.

But the issue here was: Who had the power to determine what those outcomes were? and, Were these outcomes a real indication of what we commonly value?

The power of words behind many government and departmental outcomes can too quickly wash up as lip service on the shores of our communities. If we are indeed going to be in the business of doing real good, then we need to better understand how to close the gap between what is said and what is really delivered.

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A GAP THAT ALSO needs closing is the one that exists between the authenticity of our intentions, and the cynicism and distrust that pervades far too much of our political and community affairs.

The paradox here is that the Commitment Conversation is definitely based upon the power of words. These are the words that weave the promises made between friends and fellow citizens. They become the infrastructure of a living and thriving culture of community trusteeship.

Our commitments grow into their authenticity when they speak of the intentions that we are inhabiting. These intentions can grow beyond our skepticism when they are entrusted to relationships which dare to keep us honest and on track.

We might have started off by trying to change the nature of the conversations we are having ... but this is just the beginning of our journey of awakening.

Our communities really do start to transform when we are capable of changing the nature of the promises we are making to one another.

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper A Trusted Promise is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

The Commitment Conversation “... a promise made to peers.” see Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008) Page 137; and “...the enemy of commitment is not opposition, but it is lip service.” Page 136. This book is available at www.amazon.com/dp/1605092770. Peter Block is also co-author (with John McKnight) of The Abundant Community — Awakening the Power of Families and Neighbourhoods (2012) at www.amazon.com/dp/1609940814. For more information on Block and McKnight’s work see www.abundantcommunity.com

Photopage: Tauhara — TAUHARA CENTRE GATHERINGS at Acacia Bay, Taupo — Since the 1970s, the Tauhara Centre has been a venue for encouraging unity and dialogue between the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. It has also fostered positive ways that we can work together as New Zealanders and as global citizens. Some of the gatherings held at the Centre have included the One Earth Gathering, The Festivals of Co-operation, Men’s Gatherings, Women’s Gatherings, the Stewardship Learning Community, and Heart Politics. (top and middle left) home discussion groups from Heart Politics gatherings and the Stewardship Learning Community (top right) Tauhara Centre Sanctuary at Dawn, August 2005. photo by vivian Hutchinson (middle left) Strategic Questioning paper by Fran Peavey with vivian Hutchinson (1997) (middle right) vivian Hutchinson in workshop at Heart Politics Kauaeranga Valley, Coromandel, Summer 2012. photo by Robin Allison. The One Earth Gathering Workshop Leaders at Taupo Airport, November 1983 (left to right) Canon Peter Spink (UK), Te Atu Rangi Nepia Clamp, vivian Hutchinson, Soozi Holbeche (UK), Brian Woodward, Bill Watson, Pamela Mathews, Aunty Marj Raumati Rau, elder Guboo Ted Thomas (Australia) (front) unknown, Grasshopper the Clown, Lynn Noonan (USA), Basil Avery, Marjorie Clark and Dorothy Maclean (Findhorn, Scotland) (bottom) Heart Politics gathering welcoming line, Summer 1990.

“The Power of Words” a video produced by the Glasgow-based marketing firm Purple Feather www.purplefeather.co.uk www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU.  This is an English version of the Spanish short film Historia de un letrero, directed by Alonso Alvarez Barreda, Wama Films (2007) which can be seen at vimeo.com/32651216. And for more background on these videos, see Jana Brech blog at webwisewording.com/the-story-of-a-sign/

ISBN 978-1-92-717639-9 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

Fierce Friendship

— some thoughts for the Dissent Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 22 min read download as Masterclass PDF

A HEALTHY COMMUNITY is one that is safe for dissent. Not only is it safe, but dissent is welcomed as part of the process of fostering genuine engagement, commitment and creativity in all our community activities. 

The choice of dissent as one of our main topics of community conversation provides us with an important re-framing of dissent as a community competency. The dissent we welcome here is understood and respected as a critical component in the art of community-building. 

This dissent challenges us to re-examine our prevailing ideas about what makes up the health and strength of our communities. It is not necessarily found in unanimity. The cohesion of our communities may be only as good as the authenticity of our invitation to dissent. 

You know that you are in a healthy community when there is a nay-sayer in the room and it is no problem whatsoever. This is because, in such a community, it is obviously safe for a diversity of opinions to be expressed.

The nay-sayer might not feel compatible with other people, and probably not comfortable to whatever status quo they are bringing into question. But the nay-sayer is not a disruption to our harmony. 

The plain fact of it is this: harmony cannot happen if we are all singing the same note. 

Dissent is the difference between cult and culture. A cult has an authoritarian mind-set that has already settled into its own form of “right” and “wrong” thinking. A dissenter within a cult can often face the threat of emotional or even physical consequences if they don’t tow the line. 

But a culture is something different. It is a much messier and rowdy place. It doesn’t bury disagreements under a sentimental call for us to “just get along”. A healthy culture knows how to welcome the doubts and criticisms and questions and ongoing inquiries – because they are also the natural expressions of friendship, family and community. 

The dissent is welcomed, because it is still part of the “We”.

Real dissent takes courage ... but so too does an authentic engagement with disagreement. This courage-on-both-sides is the basis of how we are able to live together and still agree to disagree. 

This courage enables us to grow fierce friendships –where the act of saying “No” is greeted with the respect and curiosity that it deserves. 

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I AM UNDER NO illusion that we are living within such a healthy culture. My experience as an active citizen has seen too many times when my dissent has been written off as trouble-making. My willingness to stand for a different point of view has too often been pushed to the margins, or has been aggressively met with some form of bullying. 

Of course I would have preferred to see my own activism genuinely welcomed as an embrace of diversity, or as a contribution to creativity and solution-building in our communities. But we are not living or working in such a culture. 

I have worked with many government departments, and political leaders, and local council bureaucrats, and I have often found that active citizenship was considered an unwelcome form of criticism. Our community action was seen as direct feedback on their competency as professionals, and their ability to manage our problems. 

There have been many calls over the years for community groups to engage in better partnerships with government and local authorities. While these partnerships may have led to funding contracts and formal Memorandums of Understanding ... we still have a long way to go before we have a genuinely shared understanding about how to deal with dissent. 

Yet, amidst all this, I would have to concede that the community and voluntary sector itself does not have a better track record of embracing disagreement.

I have been involved with many businesses, foundations, sports groups, spiritual associations, marae committees, political parties and pressure groups – and they all have come with plenty of examples of toxic power and control issues, and policies of “right” and “wrong” thinking. 

In this sector – often known as “civil” society – I have experienced no less a culture of bullying and the uncivil silencing of dissent. 

While this has often left me bruised and frustrated, it hasn’t made me cynical. Instead, it tells me that a real conversation about dissent is well overdue. 

We’ve got to talk about it, and begin to learn the social skills and capacities for becoming fiercer friends with one another. Having the Dissent Conversation may prove to be critical in dealing with the major challenges of our time. 

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ONE OF MY MENTORS on the subject of dissent was the former New Zealand Governor-General, Sir Paul Reeves (1932—2011). In the early days of his career, he served as the Vicar of Okato in coastal Taranaki. He was a long-time friend of Aunty Marj, and with his whakapapa links to the Puketapu hapu of Te Atiawa, he was the first Governor-General to be appointed of Māori descent. 

Paul Reeves was a passionate advocate for the importance of common ground, and the need to grow trust between people so that dissent can breathe. 

He saw common ground as not just a place where people are “nice” to one another – but were able to focus on the values and principles which underpin our mutual well-being. 

The leadership task here is to grow this common ground because, without this space, our communities just polarise into tribes of “right” and “wrong” thinking. 

The cultural anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond spoke about the importance of Sir Paul’s leadership in developing this common ground when she gave the first Reeves Memorial Lecture at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland in 2012.  

Her talk was entitled Beyond the Binary – Shifting New Zealand’s Mindset, and she called for our nation to move on from the “black and white” binary thinking that dominates so much of our public life. 

Anne Salmond argued that, in this binary mind-set, our views are abstracted and purified of any qualities they might have in common, and are opposed to each other. When we think like this, we cancel out the possibilities of a middle ground. 

She proposed that the logic behind the middle ground is neither utopian nor sentimental. Instead, it is a logic that affirms that life is about negotiation and exchange, and it recognises that such engagements often fail: 

“ Genuine differences do exist between Maori and Pakeha, men and women, Left and Right - but so do networks of interlocking relations, shared values and mutual dependency. Rather than excluding the middle ground, the challenge is to get the networks of relations across it working in ways that are mutually positive and creative, not hostile and destructive. This, I think, is the task that Sir Paul set himself, and why his life mattered so much to us all."  – Dame Anne Salmond

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AS A COMMUNITY ACTIVIST, I have learned that there is a subtle yet important distinction between the concepts of the middle ground, and the common ground. They are both critical tools to have in dealing with conflicts and disagreements, but they differ in the depth of their long-term impact. 

The middle ground is often where politicians and mediators try to settle disputes by forging a compromise. When a middle ground negotiation is done well, it is usually something that everyone can live with. The settlement might lead to a pragmatic and an immediate resolution of a disagreement, but it may not stand the test of time. 

The problem with the middle ground is that it often involves the sort of deal-making that addresses the symptoms of a conflict, rather than the underlying causes. This deal-making is still embedded in the same binary thinking that Anne Salmond was addressing in her lecture. It is the place for bi-partisan bargaining. It is the transactional space between this position, and that. 

Finding common ground is different because it is not focused on winning or losing, or creating a “deal”. It is about stepping out of this oppositional thinking and choosing to discover the places where we have common purpose. It is the place where we seek to resolve problems by focusing on the values and principles that different parties bring to a conflict. 

Finding common ground involves growing a level of trust that enables the stories of those values and principles to be shared and heard. It tries to build connections at the living level of culture. It is usually a much slower process, and for some communities, it might even involve the work of generations. 

Common ground is made possible by a genuine curiosity about the things we share, and where we agree. It starts with these connections, and then builds bridges. And it is also a place where completely fresh solutions can emerge – solutions which many of the “usual suspects” may not have thought of yet. 

Imagine two circles that overlap. The area they share is the common ground, and the place where we can build our connections and bridges. The non-overlapping areas are where our differences reside, and our disagreements are hatched. 

We can choose to focus on these disagreements and use them as wedge issues to reinforce our separate identities and drive the circles further apart. But if we really do want to live together, then we need to focus on the values and principles that we share. 

Conversation is one of the main tools for finding this common ground. For the active citizen, these conversations are warrior work – not a warrior in terms of combat and violence, or winning and losing – but a warrior in terms of the courage and bravery, the skill, the teamwork and the persistence needed to change our usual ways of talking and thinking together. 

The conversation we need is not about making an argument, or closing a deal. The point of the conversation is not even about saying something, or being heard.

The origin of the word “conversation” does not mention speaking or listening. The word comes from Latin roots that mean “an act of living with or keeping company with.” 

In this context, the point of a common ground conversation is to develop a connection. The conversation itself is the creative act of figuring out where our circles overlap.

PAUL REEVES WAS a supporter of my work in the 1990s with The Jobs Research Trust and The Jobs Letter. He also encouraged our network of community employment trusts to get involved with the Anglican-led Hikoi for Hope in 1998. 

This was a time when many elements of New Zealand’s social and community services were starting to find themselves at breaking point. The neo-liberal revolution after 1984 had taken over the policies of both our main political parties. The consequence was that the incomes for the richest New Zealanders doubled, while the incomes of the poorest barely rose at all. 

Policy changes meant that welfare benefits to the poorest New Zealanders were cut in 1991, Housing New Zealand tenants were forced onto market-based rentals, and a new Employment Contracts Act led to an increasing casualisation of the national workforce. In this precarious climate, more and more New Zealanders found themselves struggling to make ends meet. 

The Anglican Church decided to focus their concerns about this by staging the Hikoi of Hope in the Spring of 1998. It was a call for a national conversation on the basic issues now polarising our communities: how to address poverty, create real jobs, build affordable housing, organise a health system we can trust, and guarantee access to education. 

The month-long Hikoi had teams marching on Parliament from Cape Reinga at the top of the country and from Stewart Island in the South. It is estimated that over 80,000 people joined the protest at sometime during the month. Each evening when the Hikoi stopped, public meetings were held so that local people could share their stories on the social and economic concerns of their own communities. 

At Parliament Grounds, over 10,000 people gathered for the final day of the Hikoi, making it one of the largest gatherings ever held at Parliament. The marchers were greeted with a karanga from Aunty Marj who welcomed the protestors onto what she considered to be the marae of Parliament Grounds. 

It was both surprising and troubling to see Sir Paul Reeves, our former Governor-General, standing on the back of a truck as he invited the crowd to join him in chanting, “Enough is Enough!” 

BUT IN THE TWENTY or so years since that national protest, we have learned that “Enough” has not proven anywhere near enough. The gap between rich and poor has not been fundamentally challenged by either Labour-led or National-led governments, and the deterioration in our economic and social landscape has basically become the “new normal” of New Zealand life. 

It has also become much more of a struggle to get ordinary citizens involved in thinking and working together on the basic issues of well-being within a decent society. 

Incivility itself has become a strategy of political advancement, while continuing to feed the oppositional appetites of the mainstream media. 

This binary mind-set has been amplified by the new and more personal social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The new media has ironically become a commodification and parody of both “friendship” and “community”. 

The algorithms that drive the attention economy behind their “news-feeds” cleverly reflect and reinforce our existing personal, family and affiliation networks and the information filters that come with them. 

The impact of these supposedly “connecting” technologies is that there is less diversity in the voices we are hearing — and  consequently, less common ground from which we can address our complex issues. 

This is a mindscape that ends up brewing a very toxic mix of both isolation and fundamentalism. The same coarseness and indecency that we are quick to point out and reject in many political leaders is a perfect reflection of the lack of empathy that is being deliberately fostered and fermented within our own thinking.

SO MANY OF OUR CURRENT community and national issues just feel too big, too complex, and too stuck to ever be effectively addressed by our political system. 

It is a very real question of our planetary age: when faced with the big issues such as a global pandemic, the climate emergency, the collapse of eco-systems, unresolved questions of racial justice, and continued income inequality ... can a liberal democracy ever really undertake these challenges? 

Is the current shape of our democracy fit for purpose? Or are we just destined to deteriorate into an authoritarian future that is incubated within the frustrations and desperations of political deadlock? 

I don’t think so. I just think we haven’t been investing in one of our most under-appreciated resources: the common-sense and contribution of everyday citizens.

Nor have we been investing in bringing citizens into a useful dialogue on our most pressing issues – the very challenges we all share that are big, complex, and currently stuck. 

One strategy for inviting this participation can be found in the concept of a Citizens Assembly, which is a gathering of ordinary people commissioned by the state to consider issues of national importance. 

The Citizens Assembly is not made up of politically appointed experts, or representatives of sector groups. The membership is a random selection of strangers drawn from the electoral roll, and they are chosen in such a way that reflects the age, class, regional and ethnic differences of the nation.

It is an approach towards decision-making that dates back to the early Greeks who invented democracy in the sixth century BC. The Citizens Assembly is not a replacement for an elected House of Representatives, but it is a way that we can add a completely fresh voice to the conversations that our nation needs to be having. It is based on the notion that a deeper deliberation, and not just voting, should be the primary source of legitimacy for our laws and policies. 

As the journalist and political adviser Sonia Sodha wrote in The Observer:

"What’s so attractive about Citizens Assemblies is that they enable people from different backgrounds and perspectives to find common ground. They undermine the patronising but fashionable idea we’ve become two cultural tribes who no longer know how to talk to each other. And in the right circumstances they can profoundly shift the national debate." – Sonia Sodha

In 2016, the Irish Government established a Citizens' Assembly (An Tionól Saoránach) as a strategy for deliberating on some of their most complex and polarising political questions – such as abortion, constitutional reform, issues arising from an ageing population, and climate change. 

There were 99 people chosen as members of the Assembly, and their commitment was to attend the Assembly for one weekend meeting each month over a year. There was no payment for their participation, although travel expenses were reimbursed. 

The Citizens Assembly met at a Dublin hotel, and listened to expert presentations, and to the stories of people impacted by the problems. They had debates and roundtable discussions, and convened plenary sessions. These meetings were all livestreamed on the internet. Finally, they compiled a report of conclusions, and voted on their recommendations.

At the beginning of 2018, the Assembly stunned the Irish nation by proposing a series of exceptionally liberal changes to the abortion regime. The Government was expected to bow under political pressure and water down the proposals ... but instead, the politicians (including some prominent socially conservative figures) produced a response that was broadly in line with the Assembly. 

This profound national turn-around on the abortion issue followed an earlier Citizens Assembly which was part of the Irish Constitutional Convention. These deliberations had led directly to a transformative Irish referendum on same-sex marriage. 

As Brett Henning, the co-founder of the Sortition Foundation, observed: 

"Both Assemblies opened up the political space for dramatic change – and, interestingly, politicians happily stepped into those spaces, basking in the legitimacy for their stance provided by these Assemblies populated by ‘everyday people’." – Brett Henning

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OTHER COUNTRIES have been recently exploring establishing their own Citizens Assemblies, with interesting initiatives in Spain, Belgium, Japan and Canada.

A Citizens’ Assembly in Scotland has proposed the idea of establishing a permanent assembly at the Scottish Parliament. This would be a “second chamber” for the consideration of legislation and review of government initiatives. Advocates say that this “House of Citizens” would represent a “shining example of trust in our communities” when compared to a fully-appointed House of Lords.

A New Zealand version of these Assemblies could lead to a fresh national conversation on the challenges most affecting our nation. It could prove to be a useful way to break the partisan gridlock created by funders and advisors and vested interest groups who have successfully captured so much of our everyday political process.

Imagine a national conference centre, like the one at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, turned over to a Citizens Assembly for one weekend in every month. The proceedings could be broadcast live on TV and the internet in the same way that we now follow the debates in Parliament. 

And if it was to be held at Te Papa, these conversations could be informed by the taonga and artefacts and artworks that we have preserved from our past, and can speak to us of our connections and our best intentions for the future.

Imagine the marae, on the top floor of that Wellington waterfront building, becoming the national common ground upon which a Citizens Assembly can have its more courageous conversations. 

Such an Assembly might also forge and demonstrate a more healthy culture where the Dissent Conversation is made welcome. Our disagreements would not be there to ignite the political polarisation around an issue, or to sell newspapers, or to feed the click-bait, or signal virtues to a tribalised electorate. 

Instead, our dissent would be more deeply called onto the marae of our common ground. And this could be the beginning of us thinking together and discovering where we might possibly agree on the things we need to do.

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021

This paper Fierce Friendship is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

The Hon Rt Rev Sir Paul Alfred Reeves, ONZ, GCMG, GCVO, CF, QSO (1932 - 2011) was Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand from 1980 to 1985 and the Governor-General of New Zealand from 1985 to 1990. For more, listen to Paul Reeves interviewed on Ideas National Radio 8th May 2011 at www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ideas/20110508

“Beyond the Binary - Shifting New Zealand’s Mindset” by Dame Anne Salmond, the first Bishop Sir Paul Reeves Memorial Lecture 2012, delivered at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland on Friday 17th August 2012. A video of this presentation is at vimeo.com/49300122. The Radio New Zealand Reeves Lecture page is at www.radionz.co.nz/national/lecturesandforums/reeves 

imagining of this as two circles ... thanks to ideas by David Maxfield in his 2012 article “Finding Common Ground When You Know You're Right” at www.vitalsmarts.com/crucialskills/2012/12/finding-common-ground-when-you-know-youre-right/

the origin of the word “conversation” is from 1300AD Anglo-French conversacion, from Latin conversatio, from conversari to associate with, society, intercourse, (Miriam-Webster and dictionary.com)

The Jobs Letter was produced every 2-3 weeks from 1994-2006 by The Jobs Research Trust. It was edited by vivian Hutchinson and Dave Owens, and offered “essential information on an essential issue”, covering the areas of unemployment, job creation, the future of work and related education and economic concerns. All back issues of The Jobs Letter are archived online at www.jobsletter.org.nz

The Jobs Letter was also one of the first community sector websites to be established in New Zealand (before the advent of social media technologies). For this work, the Jobs Research Trust was awarded the Premier prize in the Internet category of the 1999 Media Peace Awards, organised by The New Zealand Peace Foundation.

The 1998 Hikoi of Hope .... for more on the march and its five planks see www.jobsletter.org.nz/jbl08500.htm; also interview with Stephanie McIntyre by Steven Robinson Jan/Feb 1999 in Share International tinyurl.com/3hzayrb

vivian Hutchinson on the Hikoi of Hope ... see “Walking for Change” speech given at Parawhenua Marae, Northland on 2nd September 1998 at tinyurl.com/8345162

Photopage: Hikoi of Hope — HIKOI OF HOPE 1998 — (top) David Williams, Dave Owens and vivian Hutchinson at the start of the Hikoi of Hope at Cape Reinga, in the Far North. (middle above ) Hikoi marchers in Whangarei, Northland and New Plymouth, Taranaki, Anglican bishops leading marchers into Parliament Grounds. photographs by vivian Hutchinson (middle below) Hikoi marchers being greeted by Sir Paul Reeves outside the Beehive building, and Aunty Marj welcoming marchers onto Parliament Grounds. photographs TVNZ (bottom) Hikoi of Hope marchers at Parliament 1st October 1998.

Photopage: Peace — 2016 PEACE WALK TO PARIHAKA — A 3-day Taranaki anti-racism hikoi from the New Plymouth District Council to Parihaka Pa, led by New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd. (top) Peace hikoi on way to Parihaka with Mounga Taranaki. photograph by Glenn Jeffrey. (top middle) Walkers on way to Parihaka, Parihaka roadsign. photographs by Taranaki Daily News (middle left) front page of Taranaki Daily News Saturday 18 June 2016 (middle right) Community Conversations held at town halls during the hikoi run by Community Taranaki. photographs by vivian Hutchinson (lower middle) Race Relations commissioner Dame Susan Devoy greets Wharehoka Wano during the powhiri Parihaka. photo Andy Jackson / Taranaki Daily News (lower middle right) Peace hikoi organiser Glen Bennett (bottom) Peace hikoi arrives at Parihaka Pa, led by children. Friday 17th June 2016 photograph RNZ / Robin Martin.

Photopage: Waitara — PEACE FOR PEKAPEKA / WAITARA LAND RIGHTS 2016-2018 — (top left) Pekapeka stake in ground, next to the Carrington surveyor statue, outside New Plymouth Courthouse 2016. photograph by vivian Hutchinson (top left) Return the Stolen Land Billboard with Taranaki Troubles graphics courtesy of Cliff Whiting (top middle) Peace for Pekapeka hikoi from Te Kohia Pā to Owae Marae photographs (left) by Jane Dove Juneau and (right) Taranaki Daily News (middle and bottom) Submissions to the Māori Affairs Select Committee Waitara Lands Bill hearings at Novotel Hotel, New Plymouth, and at Owae Marae, Waitara photographs by RNZ / Robin Martin and Taranaki Daily News (bottom left) Watching the Seabirds at Waitara paper by vivian Hutchinson, July 2016.

The Citizens Assembly ... see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly

“How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens” by James Bridle, The Guardian 25 December 2018 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/25/break-brexit-deadlock-ancient-athens-sortition

“A Citizens Assembly can sort Brexit mess” by Sonia Sodha The Observer 3 March 2018 www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/03/brexit-citizensassembly-compromise

BBC Radio 4 Programme on Deliberative democracy by Sonia Sodha 10 March 2019 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002z9g

The Sortition Foundation campaigns for a world free from partisan politicking, “... where representative random samples of everyday people make decisions in informed and deliberative Citizens Assemblies.” www.sortitionfoundation.org

“How 99 strangers in a Dublin hotel broke Ireland's abortion deadlock” by Patrick Chalmers, The Guardian 8th March 2018 www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/how-99-strangers-in-a-dublin-hotel-broke-irelands-abortion-deadlock

Doing Politics Differently Report of the Citizens Assembly of Scotland (2020) https://citizensassembly.theapsgroup.scot/report/

“Revealed: Support for 'House of Citizens' second chamber at Holyrood to keep MSPs in check” by Scott Macnab, The Scotsman, 12th December 2020 www.scotsman.com/news/politics/revealed-support-house-citizens-second-chamber-holyrood-keep-msps-check-3065227

ISBN 978-1-92-717638-2 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

The Transformation of Belonging

— more thoughts for the Ownership Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2021 35 min read download as Masterclass PDF

THE OWNERSHIP CONVERSATION doesn’t just invite us to consider a “switch in thinking” on our most difficult issues. It is also a conversation that delivers its own surprises when reconsidering the nature of ownership itself — especially that face of ownership that has to do with property and possession. 

For me, the Ownership Conversation has been a life-long dialogue that has challenged and transformed my understanding of the nature of belonging.

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ONE OF THE STRONGEST influences on my life as an active citizen has been Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (1913-2010), the Taranaki kuia who was popularly known as Aunty Marj. I loved her, and we had an unusual friendship that stretched over four decades.

I first met Aunty Marj in my teenage years while I was still at High School. She had known my mother’s family during the 1930s and 1940s, and during the War they had worked together when the local Scottish cultural groups and Māori cultural groups had joined to do patriotic fundraising for the troops.

Aunty Marj was a great role-model for me of an active citizen who took a deeper level of ownership of whatever community issues she wanted to address. Her life was an everyday expression of rangatiratanga. She was determined not just to be “the author of her own experience”, but she was committed to keep on turning up – even to those places where she was not always welcome, or she would be the only Māori woman in the room.

As such, she became a living bridge between the majority European culture and the Māori communities that, for most of her life, had been actively marginalised in local civic affairs.

Aunty Marj and I were both involved in land rights campaigns while supporting Dame Whina Cooper and the Matakite movement that organised the Māori Land March of 1975. So we had plenty of opportunity to talk together about the concept of ownership as it related to land, and how this concept was seen very differently in a Māori world-view.

For Aunty Marj, ownership was not centrally a question of possession. It was more a question of the kaitiakitanga or stewardship of those places where you had a deeper sense of connection. The ownership of land brought with it responsibilities to the wider life of that place. To her, these responsibilities were not just to the present health and well-being of the land, but they also included an aliveness of the legacies of its past and how this land will be serving generations yet to come.

Aunty Marj argued that, in fighting for the return of Māori land, activists were in danger of accepting a coloniser’s view of property — and that, in her view, may end up becoming a greater loss.

She explained that the Māori world-view turns the usual life of property on its head. Over time, and as connections grow, instead of the land belonging to you ... you start to recognise that you belong to that place.

And when this happens to lots of people, the life we share and the communities we create are an expression of this wider sense of belonging. 

Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) in the Brooklands Bush, New Plymouth, Taranaki. photo portrait by Margaret Bake (1981)

IT WAS AUNTY MARJ that coined the term “tū tangata whenua” to describe in te reo the concept of active citizenship. Her choice of these words reflected not just her perspective on citizenship, but also her view on the concepts of ownership and belonging.

Aunty Marj had a vision of “tangata whenua” that was not based on transactional ideas of ownership, or genealogies of blood, or the rights of “who came first”. For her, “tangata whenua” was not an identity, but a job description. It was a job description that included the responsibilities of honouring and taking care of what was not just a place, but a living being.

In the late 1970s, Aunty Marj and I were co-hosting a series of gatherings at Parihaka Marae which were introducing Pākehā people to the Māori world on their doorstep.

The gatherings featured presentations on local history, justice and cultural matters, as well as conversations about alternative lifestyles and different spiritual traditions.

The 1970s were the early days of an emerging world-wide environmental movement, and we also held workshops on pollution, waste management, organic gardening and alternative approaches to agriculture and horticulture.

At one of our evening circles, Aunty Marj was obviously frustrated with the proceedings. She suddenly stood up, and provocatively declared that Pākehā people will never solve their environmental problems until they have learnt how to become “tangata whenua”. 

She argued that a more personal and deeper understanding of the job description of “tangata whenua” would lead to a necessary transformation of what we mean by our active citizenship.

This deeper understanding comes from a transformation of your personal sense of belonging, and of home. The healing of our communities and our natural environment is built upon the re-weaving of ourselves as an integral part of these environments.

AT THE TIME of the Parihaka Festivals, I was enthusiastically embarking on my own alternative lifestyle within what was generally described in the 1970s as the hippie movement. For a few years, I lived in a caravan amidst a small rural “intentional community” that was being established on 60 acres of land and native bush on the slopes of the Pouakai Ranges of Mount Taranaki.

This community was called Ka Tika Rā, after the nearby mountain stream, and it included several huts and houses built largely from car-crates and other recycled materials, and a community house in which we had our meetings, shared meals, and could accommodate visitors.

The hippie movement was a youth-led counter-culture that was popular in Europe and the United States, and flourished in New Zealand in the late 1970s, culminating with a series of huge summer music festivals like Nambassa in the Coromandel. It was essentially a reaction (or “counter”) to the post-war consumer society and nuclear families of the 1950s and 1960s.

The counter-culture shaped many of the curiosities, inquiries and naiveties of my own youth, and it was easy to get caught up in the sense that our own generation in the 1970s could be part of a positive and creative “new age” of possibilities.

In Taranaki, there was a loosely connected network of alternative lifestyles and friendships that were influenced by the hippie movement. Some of our local initiatives included not only the Ka Tika Rā Community and the regular festivals at Parihaka, but we also produced a seasonal newsletter called Foxglove, established a large organic training garden in New Plymouth for unemployed people, and hosted regular adult education evenings at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Right from the start, the Ka Tika Rā community members had to come to grips with the Ownership Conversation. This is because we were already the second group of people that were trying to establish an intentional community on that piece of land — and the first families were wanting to sell up and take their investments elsewhere.

So we worked out a financial scheme where those of us (who could) took out personal loans from a bank and pooled the funds in order to purchase the land. We were reimbursed from the rents paid by residents and visitors over the next several years.

At the same time, we decided to take the Ka Tika Rā land out of private ownership, and collectively invest it into a legal structure that had as its purpose

“... to care for the Earth and restore its sacred purpose of nurturing life for now and future generations.”

In line with Aunty Marj's challenge to Pākehā people that we would need to step up to the job description of “tangata whenua”, the name chosen for this new legal structure was “Taranaki People of the Land”. When the constitution was signed up, it was witnessed and endorsed by Aunty Marj and other elders from Parihaka. 

The people and families surrounding my time at Ka Tika Rā have continued to be some of the strongest friendships in my life even though our hippie days are now long over.

As for the community itself, there has been an ongoing turnover of residents, with all the conflicts, dramas, break-throughs and joys that come with any group of neighbours and friends — “intentional”, or not.

None of the original community members are still living on this particular piece of land. But most of us still have a heart-felt sense of connection to the place and to the mountain that was ever-present at our back-door.  Ka Tika Rā has proved to be a very significant part of our growing up as active citizens and as leaders and creatives now living in wider communities.

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GIVEN THE GENEROUS mentoring by Māori elders in my teenage years, and an early activism on land rights issues, I really have little excuse for a lack of curiosity about my own family history.

I am bewildered to look back now and realise that it wasn’t until my 40s that I started to dig into the details of where my own people had come from, why they came to New Zealand, and what they did when they first got here.

Amidst my passions to see justice over the theft of lands, or my embrace of an “alternative” lifestyle based on common ownership, or within my various creative contributions to solving problems in our communities ... I was totally unconscious as to how my own family histories had been woven into the problems and issues and lifestyles I was trying to address.

I can only conclude that I was the descendant of a forgetting, and I had very little understanding as to how this had been achieved. 

I eventually started to dig deeper and piece together the stories and legacies of my ancestors, and discovered that the forgetting was not an unusual characteristic of my fellow New Zealanders. It is a legacy of Empire.

Amnesia may well be one of the main organising principles of colonisation, and an important part of how power maintains its privileges across generations.

Amidst its own continuous histories of violence and oppression, forget-and-move-on had become such a deep mind-set of European culture. This mind-set can be both be a strategy for survivors of the abuse, and also a smokescreen for the victors and perpetrators. The vagueness just becomes another way of hiding from the consequences.

The forgetting also becomes another face of privilege. When Pākehā people do not to know our own histories, then we can avoid engaging with our own family participation in those events that have led to historical trauma. This collective amnesia means that the blood and dishonour and injustice in these histories simply becomes absorbed into the structural architecture of the next normal.

Awakening to our histories means interrupting the current stories that you may be telling yourself, and interrupting the privileges that come on the back of those stories.

This may also disrupt your current sense of identity — because you are being invited to take ownership of the things that many people in your community have been determined not to remember.

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MY FATHER'S FAMILY come from Northern Ireland and, in terms of the ownership story of land and property, theirs is a long history of being part of the machinery of dispossession.

The Hutchinsons were probably poor and protestant lowland Scottish farm workers who were “planted” in the Ulster province of Northern Ireland sometime during the 1550s to the 1620s. This displacement of the indigenous Catholic Irish, and the confiscation of their land, is one of the earliest acts of British colonisation.

The conflicts and trauma of this dispossession are still very much a part of the life of Irish communities today. Nevertheless, these Irish plantations (which were funded both by Crown and private interests) became a template for the global spread of the British Empire over the next few centuries.

If we skip forward nearly 300 years, the Hutchinson family were still poor tenant farmers in the Fermanagh County of Northern Ireland, barely surviving after the potato famines of the 1840s. My ancestor Robert Foster Hutchinson left his home to join the British Army and rose to the rank of sergeant in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. This army was sent to New Zealand in 1863 as part of Governor Sir George Grey's plans to invade and confiscate the rich lands of the Waikato.

Veterans of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, including Sergeant Robert Hutchinson, parade beside the statue of Queen Victoria in Albert Park, Auckland 1917 (Photo: Frank J.Denton)

Robert Hutchinson and the Irish regiment fought in many of the major battles of the Land Wars, under the command of General Duncan Cameron. This included being a participant in the atrocities of Rangiowhia, where an unfortified village of women, children and old men were attacked, and several people were burned alive in their homes. The 18th Royal Irish also fought at the siege of Ōrākau, the battleground made famous by the call of Rewi Maniapoto that he would not surrender.

In doing my research into this military history, you might imagine how I felt once I realised that I’d been walking through these same battlefields with Whina Cooper during the Māori Land March of 1975, while completely unaware of my own family connections to what had taken place.

My Hutchinson ancestor was also part of the military campaign in Taranaki that was controversially described as a “holocaust” after the release of a Waitangi Tribunal report in 1996. Under the Irish-born General Trevor Chute, the British troops engaged in a “scorched earth” campaign which destroyed seven fortified pā and 21 open villages around Taranaki mountain. The soldiers completed the devastation by stripping these communities of all they could get their hands on.

These same men were given a hero’s welcome into New Plymouth, which, by then, had become a settlement dominated by its military.

It is somewhat baffling to me that, only a hundred years later, I could grow up in a New Plymouth in the 1950s and 60s within a majority culture that had no real memory of these events. There were no stories within my own family of our participation in these acts of dispossession, and we were not taught any of the details of this history in our schools.

The fact that our communities, and our provincial farming wealth, was based on war and the confiscation of land was never a topic of conversation amongst those who were the inheritors of its privileges.

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MY MOTHER'S SIDE of the family were people who, in the 1850s, arrived in New Zealand as a result of a recent and violent experience of being dispossessed.

They were cleared from their lands in Scotland in what was not so much a decision of Empire, but a matter of business. And yet just as curiously, the details behind what had led to their migration to this country had also been lost to a culture of forget-and-move-on.

My mother’s family comes from the Scottish clan of McIntyre, who were part of a community of tenant crofters living on the island of Barra in the Scottish Western Isles. They were subsisting under a feudal system that had been held together over hundreds of years by war-lords and clan chiefs.

The Clearance of Barra was done on the instructions of a new owner of the island, Colonel John Gordon, of Cluny Castle in Aberdeen. This business entrepreneur was “the richest commoner” in Britain, and he had bought land on the Scottish mainland, and the outer islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Barra. He also owned six slave-based plantations in the Caribbean.

He gained a reputation as “the most hated man in Scotland” for his role in the clearing the crofting families and communities from his lands, and replacing them with sheep which would earn him much more money.

In one of the more infamous Clearances in 1851, the tenant farmers of Barra were called to a meeting to “discuss rents” and were threatened with a fine if they did not attend. In the meeting hall, over 1,500 tenants were overpowered, bound, and immediately loaded onto ships bound for Canada. One eyewitness reported that “people were seized and dragged on board. Men who resisted were felled with truncheons and handcuffed; those who escaped, including some who swam ashore from the ship, were chased by the police”.

At the time of these Clearances, the Gaelic bard Angus MacMhuirich composed a lament which referred to an earlier prophecy warning the people of the Western Isles that they would be replaced by sheep.  

The jaws of sheep have made the land rich,
But we were told by the prophecy
That sheep would scatter the warriors
And turn their homes into wilderness

The land of our love lies under bracken and heather,
every plain and every field is untilled,
and soon there will be none in the Mull of the Trees
but Lowlanders and their white sheep.

—  Angus MacMhuirich

Many of the Barra crofters did escape to Glasgow, including my own 3rd great-grand-parents Ranald and Mary McIntyre. But like so many other refugees expelled from “the land of their love”, they became paupers in the industrial city and ended their days in the Glasgow Poorhouse.

It was the children of these McIntyres who managed to emigrate to New Zealand. For them it was not so much a choice as it was a matter of survival. The indigenous crofters of the Western Isles had been forced to leave their only home — where their ancestors had lived for perhaps hundreds of years — because they had no land rights.

They were living under a feudal system where their precarious tenancy had long been stitched into their identity. And there was little opportunity for them to imagine any other framework of ownership and possession of their land, or how to achieve it.

✽ ✽ ✽

DURING THE FIRST HALF of the 19th century, the British Empire was trying to come to terms with reimagining the ownership and possession of something else entirely: human beings. So much of the wealth of the Empire and its commercial companies was based on the slave trade, and there had been a long process of campaigning and social change that had led to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

What is not generally known is that with the passing of this Act, the slave owners were fully compensated by the British government for the loss of their property rights. They were paid for the value of the slaves that were being freed, roughly £20 million (or about £2 billion today). No such compensation or reparation was considered for the slaves themselves.

This compensation money had a huge impact on Britain at the time as the beneficiaries of slavery made extensive purchases of land and estates throughout the nation.

Of course, these payments were also made to Colonel John Gordon, of Cluny Castle, who was given the equivalent of £2.9 million as compensation for the more than 1,300 slaves on his plantations in the Caribbean. In 2020, researchers at Coventry University and the University of Glasgow concluded that Gordon had used his compensation money to pay for the Scottish islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Barra, from which he later evicted nearly 3,000 people. 

So a perverse result of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and bringing to an end the morally-hazardous concept of the “ownership” of people ... was that it directly led to the 1851 dispossession of my ancestors on Barra, because they had no rights within the equally-hazardous concept of the “ownership” of land.

✽ ✽ ✽

I DO FEEL HOPEFUL that a reimagining of the ownership of land in New Zealand has the potential to transform our communities into places that will look and feel very different from how they are today. In many ways, our challenge here is very similar to the long power struggle to end slavery and reimagine the idea that people can be owned.

Out beyond our colonised mental concepts of what we currently mean by the “ownership” of land, there are many indications that this reimagining has already started to happen.

Te Urewera (photo Wikipedia Commons)

Tāmati Kruger is an iwi leader of the Tūhoe people, and he was the chief negotiator of the 2013 tribal settlement over the Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.

As far as this settlement is concerned, Kruger observes that there is an important distinction between justice and redress. He also warns that we shouldn't under-estimate the coloniser's capacity for forgetting.

In a 2018 interview for the web-magazine e-tangata, Tāmati Kruger argues that the Waitangi settlement process only delivers some redress, and Māori need to give up on the expectation that going into negotiations with the Crown will deliver justice for all the wrongs that have been done.

“ Iwi should never have that expectation. History shows that the Crown specialises in injustice. It arises from the fact that the Crown has a faulty memory. It can't remember what it promises.” — Tāmati Kruger

While the Tūhoe people have negotiated and accepted a settlement, Kruger has no illusions about the real work ahead. He believes that it may take two or three generations for his iwi to reconstitute an authentic kinship with their land. And in order to do so, he says that Tūhoe will need to fight the concept of “ownership” and the way this attitude infiltrates all our thinking.

Tāmati Kruger explains that the terms “mana whenua” and “tangata whenua” have nothing to do with ownership:

“ Mana whenua has to do with acknowledging that the land has mana, and fulfilling your obligations and your kinship relationship with the land. That’s what it is — not an ownership or property relationship. It’s you saying: “I think I kind of look like the land, and my language and my poetry and my literature and my cuisine and how I live comes from that. I am an expression of the land, and without it I will become blank. The further away I am from the land in my kinship, in my caring and my connection, the smaller I will become, until I am nothing. So I must keep that connection.”

Kruger has a vision for our nation where all of us, regardless of blood and heritage, can come to understand that we are tangata whenua.

 “ I see a time in Aotearoa when there are no Europeans or New Zealanders living here, only tangata whenua. And that means that we are of this land, that this land has made us who we are. We have let this land create us in its image, and together we are proud of who we are and where we come from.” – Tāmati Kruger

✽ ✽ ✽

KENNEDY WARNE IS the journalist who interviewed Tāmati Kruger for the 2018 e-tangata article. He is a former editor of the New Zealand Geographic and a frequent commentator on environmental issues for Radio New Zealand. And he has been on his own journey of awakening as to what it means to be tangata whenua.

Also writing in e-tangata, Kennedy Warne quotes the poem “The Gift Outright”, by the American poet Robert Frost. It begins with the lines:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. — Robert Frost

Kennedy Warne says the poem is about “an invitation to belonging and a reminder of the desolation that follows when land is seen as properties to be owned and not places to be loved”. While the poem is about the history of the United States, it could also be describing the history of New Zealand.

“It is the history of every settler nation. First the desire to possess, to own, to call the land “ours”. Then, later, a long time later – and for some, perhaps, never – the awareness of a need to belong, the impetus to preserve and respect. A turning away from objectification and towards subjective engagement, from resource to relationship, from land-as-commodity to land-as-identity, from foreign soil to whenua.” – Kennedy Warne

Who is invited to make this journey of belonging? We all are. 

And it is an invitation that can come at the most unexpected times. Allen Curnow, one of New Zealand’s leading poets, may well have glimpsed such an invitation as he was looking at the skeleton of a Great Moa in the Christchurch Museum:

Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.
— Allen Curnow

Kennedy Warne offers the view that the process of belonging takes place “one step at a time” as we engage with the places of our lives. Belonging comes through knowing a place, and letting the place know you. He describes this as a “conversation with landscape”. 

My own understanding is that we descendants of settlers can only enter into this conversation because the seeds of a deeper relationship with the land are already there — albeit hidden under many generations of marginalisation and forgetting.

The seeds are already there because this relationship with the earth comes built-in as part of our wholeness as human beings.

They are already there because we can still hear the names of these seeds hidden within the languages of our own elders.

✽ ✽ ✽

WHEN MY McINTYRE ANCESTORS first arrived in New Zealand in the 1850s, they were Gaelic speakers — it was then the primary tongue of the communities of the Western Isles. Gaelic is the language of that land. It is also a language that reaches back before the time that mental concepts such as “ownership” were forcibly redefined at the beginnings of the feudal age.

Not unlike the Māori language, Gaelic has words for many concepts that have no real equivalent in the modern English tongue. Take the word “dùthchas”, which is a Gaelic term that was widely used in Scotland before the Clearances. It has no succinct English translation, but it describes a principle of interconnectedness between people, the land, and all living creatures.

The author Madeleine Bunting was digging into the origins of this word while writing her book The Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey (2017). She describes how — compared to English — the Gaelic language provides a language of “resistance to modern capitalism”, and is “inherently counter-cultural”. The language offers a definite challenge to such concepts as the notion of private property: 

“ On the Isle of Lewis, I was told that [the word “dùthchas”] means much more. It’s a collective claim on the land which is reinforced and lived out through the shared management of that land. It is a right which is grounded in daily habits and activities and it is bound up with relationships to others, and responsibilities. It gives rise to the idea, identified by the scholar Michael Newton, that “people belong to places rather than places belonging to people”. Gaelic turns notions of ownership on their head.”  — Madeleine Bunting

In her research, Madeleine Bunting also decided to turn her attention to English words to see if they might contain the seeds of an older world-view that has largely been forgotten in their modern use.

“ I looked up “belonging” in an English dictionary; tellingly, the first definition was a matter of property as in “belongings”. The next definition was status as in “having the right personal and social qualities to be a member of a particular group”. A very English concept. But dig deeper and the word originates in the Old English term “gelang”, which means “at hand, together with”. Buried in the etymology of the word is an understanding of touch, physical closeness and how that generates solidarity.” — Madeleine Bunting

This attention to language may be much more important than we usually give it credit for. Peter Block, in his book Community, asserts that all transformation is linguistic. This is why so much of his leadership and consulting work has been focused on improving community conversations, and creating those spaces where there can be a shift in speaking and listening.

We are starting to see such a shift happen as much older, and sometimes ancient, frameworks of community life are beginning to reassert themselves within the modern nation of Scotland. The reclaiming of “dùthchas” in contemporary Scottish affairs — with its deeper ecological understanding of place and belonging — has already started to redraw the map of ownership in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. 

✽ ✽ ✽

IN MAY 2000, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a bill that, after nine hundred years, abolished feudal tenure. At the same time, an £11 million fund was created to assist community buy-outs of tenanted land.

The Scottish land rights campaigner, Alistair McIntosh, reports that the legislation aims to redress the inequitable ownership pattern left behind by feudalism. It offers crofting communities an automatic right to buy their land at any time based on a government valuation. A more limited provision for other rural communities gives rights of pre-emptive purchase if and when land is put on the market.

Alistair McIntosh has been at the forefront of the campaigns to put the Isle of Eigg into community land ownership, and to assert traditional land rights on the Isle of Harris while stopping a local mountain from being turned into “the gravel pit of Europe” by a multi-national road-stone company. Both these successful campaigns are outlined in his book, Soil and Soul (2004).  

The Community Flag of Barra, in the Scottish Western Isles

These land rights reforms have reached as far as the Isle of Barra. Unlike elsewhere in Scotland, where community land trusts have been diligently raising money and working with the government to be able to buy their land from the (often absentee) owners, the Barra landlords have surprisingly been very willing to hand it over. 

The traditional owners of Barra had long been Clan MacNeil, who were said to have lived on the isle for nearly 1,000 years, until it was sold in 1838 and the Clearances began. But in 1937, most of Barra was bought back by Robert Lister MacNeil, an American descendant of the original clan chiefs.

In 2003, his son, Ian Roderick MacNeil, announced that nearly all his family land on Barra — including the foreshore and fishing and mineral rights — would be gifted to the Scottish Executive, with the intention of it eventually being handed over to the Barra community free of charge.

The Scottish Executive is a partially-devolved form of government which was established in 1999 following a referendum on independence. The Scottish Parliament has been determined to encourage a fundamental change in the nature of land rights, and to shift all croft land (which accounts for more than three-quarters of the Western Isles) into community or public ownership.

✽ ✽ ✽

WHEN THE CONCEPT of ownership is turned on its head, so too is the political geography of land rights. Once we regain a genuine relationship of interconnectedness with the Life of our place, we can also begin to understand that the land itself has rights.

In December 2017, it was announced that our local mountain, Taranaki, would be recognised as its own legal personhood. This means that in legal terms it would be owned by no one but, in practical reality, it owns itself.

Under the agreement between the government and the eight iwi of Taranaki, all of the Crown-owned land within the former Egmont National Park is vested in this new legal identity, and the job of stewardship or kaitiakitanga of the mounga is shared between local Māori and the government.

This is not an act of obscure judicial symbolism buried in the long-overdue settlements that have followed Treaty of Waitangi tribunals. It recognises the existing tikanga and mātauranga of the iwi who have long acted as kaitiaki of these places. It also reflects an international “switch in thinking” about care for the environment, and the legal rights of nature.

By recognising Taranaki mounga as having the same rights and powers as a citizen, it sets a whole new benchmark of empowerment for nature on its own terms. It crosses the line of thinking about ownership and who’s in charge. As the former Māori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples has said, “... it is a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world.”

This change in the legal status of Taranaki mounga is similar to the legal status already established for the Te Urewera homeland of the Tūhoe people in 2014, and for the Whanganui River and its tributaries, collectively known as Te Awa Tupua, in 2017. As in Taranaki, these changes were also negotiated as part of Treaty of Waitangi settlements.

Kennedy Warne describes the passing of these statutes as among the most significant geographical events of our time. The establishment of legal personhood for these sacred areas of our nation is being watched intently from around the world, and similar initiatives are being tried elsewhere.

At the announcement of the creation of a legal identity for the Whanganui River, the lead iwi negotiator Gerrard Albert told the Guardian newspaper that these measures would ensure that the river was treated as a living entity, rather than viewing it from a perspective of ownership and management.

“ We can trace our genealogy to the origins of the universe.  Therefore, rather than us being masters of the natural world, we are part of it. We want to live like that as our starting point. And that is not an anti-development, or anti-economic use of the river, but to begin with the view that it is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief.” — Gerrard Albert

Former Prime Minister Jim Bolger grew up in a Taranaki farming district close to Parihaka marae. But he concedes that his upbringing and schooling had not taught him of the unique history of this peaceful community and its prophetic leaders. He is also the descendant of a forgetting.

In more recent years, Jim Bolger has worked closely with Tāmati Kruger and the Tūhoe Board, and he has become an important advocate of the “switch in thinking” behind the concept that a significant place can have it's own legal identity, and “own itself”.

“This whole idea that the Urewera owns itself is a concept that looked totally radical and off-the-wall. Unlike the Pākehā view that everybody owns something. But we discuss the issue of the land having been there forever. So it owns itself. And our responsibility is a version of kaitiaki. [...] In a sense, it’s a matter of being humble in the face of its greatness. These are totally new concepts. In one way, I can see them fitting in quite easily to the whole environmental movement worldwide. It’s just that the human population hasn’t been respectful enough to the land, the water and the atmosphere. We’ve always just presumed it was always there, forever, and it was unlimited. In the colonial mindset, the land was unlimited. Now we all know land is limited and already severely damaged. So we have a responsibility to care for it. We have to manage things differently. We have to change.” — Jim Bolger

✽ ✽ ✽

In 2017, the Tūhoe Board published a statement of its priorities and direction, called Te Kawa o Te Urewera. This document is much more than a new management plan for the resources of the former Te Urewera National Park. It is a uniquely indigenous call for resolving the relationship between humans and nature. It shows that, deliberatively, the Tūhoe people are choosing to “reset” their human relationship and behaviour towards nature.

“ Our disconnection from Te Urewera has changed our humanness. We wish for its return.”

The final page of Te Kawa o Te Urewera perhaps points to the universality of this need for a transformation of belonging, and a healing between people and the only planet to which we all belong. The document ends with lines from an American-English poet:

We shall not cease
from exploration,
and the end of all our
exploring will be to
arrive where we started
and know the place
for the first time.  

   — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

Notes and Links

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012). He is also one of the creators of How Communities Awaken - Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz.

First published online in June 2021. revised 18 June 2021. 

This paper The Transformation of Belonging is part of a larger series of essays by vivian Hutchinson entitled How Communities Awaken. For more information, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. For more information, visit www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

Kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa - Aunty Marj. For more on her life and service see vivian Hutchinson - Kuia Matarena (1913-2010) at https://drive.google.com/file/d/17V7cQaMB1eBOAbgSJbwGPBpPBm786MvV/

Photopage: Matarena — MATARENA RAUMATI RAU KUPA MBE (1913-2010) Aunty Marj — (top) Taranaki Kuia at Owae Marae, Waitara, photographed during the ECO (Environmental and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand) Conference 11th August 1985. This was the first ECO Conference held on a marae. (left to right) Ina Okeroa, Mary Matewehi Turner, Ivy Werenia Papakura, Mimosa Jury, Sally Mana Te Noki Karena, Neta Wharehoka, and (front) Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) photo by Philip Simpson. (middle left) at the Tangi of Whina Cooper at Panguru, Hokianga, March 1994 (left to right) Steve Tollestrup, kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj), vivian Hutchinson and Tony Hansen. DVD cover of Parihaka - A Photographic Survey (1981) a 30-min slide-show documentary on the history of Parihaka, compiled by vivian Hutchinson and Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa for the Taranaki Museum for the centennial commemorations of the sacking of Parihaka on 5th November 1881. 2013 a digital restoration of the documentary was re-released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kuia Matarena (Aunty Marj). (middle right) kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) photographed at Te Rewa Rewa Pa, near the site of the present-day Te Rewa Rewa Bridge over the Waiwakaiho river on the New Plymouth foreshore walkway. photo by the Taranaki Daily News (bottom) Aunt Marj with friends in Te Niho o Te Atiawa meeting house, Parihaka Marae, Taranaki (1977) (left to right) Pat Brophy, Wai Uatuku, Alwyn Owen, Te Miringa Hohaia, Katerina Hohaia, Ngahina Hohaia, Dr Huirangi Waikerepuru, vivian Hutchinson, Aunty Marj Raumati Rau, and Hilary Baxter. photo vivian Hutchinson

Maunga or Mounga ... in the dialect of Taranaki iwi, the word for mountain is more often pronounced Mounga, rather than Maunga. Both pronounciations and spelling are used to refer to the mountain.

Ka Tika Rā ... See The Katikara Community Experience (2014) compiled by Sue Carter and published by the Taranaki People of the Land Inc. Society For more see “Sue Carter compiles stories from Taranaki's eco-community Katikara” by Yvette Batten Taranaki Daily News 27 August 2015 https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/midweek/71492570/sue-carter-compiles-stories-from-taranakis-eco-community-katikara

Photopage: Katikarā — KA TIKA RĀ COMMUNITY and the FOXGLOVE GROUP — (top left) The Community House at Ka Tika Rā Community on the Pouakai Ranges of Taranaki Mounga, early 1980s (top right) aerial view of the Ka Tika Rā Community on the Pouakai Ranges (middle) working bee in the Ka Tika Rā community gardens (l to r) Joy Minthorn, Rhyll Stafford, James (Chip) Dale, Ray Edward, Dieter Meier, and Daniel Joblin. Photos by Graham Brown. (middle right) participants at the Spring Equinox Festival 1981, North Egmont Camphouse, Taranaki Mounga. (bottom right) kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa (Aunty Marj) answering questions on Taranaki history during the Autumn Equinox Festival 1983, Te Niho o te Atiawa, Parihaka Pa (bottom left) Foxglove, a Taranaki People's Newsletter, produced every few months (from 1978 - 1986) with the aim of fostering friendship amongst people living under the mountain. Contributions came from the readers, and the letter was edited by the Foxglove Group which shared the responsibilities of typing, layout, production and distribution.

Parihaka Earth Festivals ... see Album - The Parihaka Earth Festivals 1978-1984 compiled (2018) by vivian Hutchinson https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qAiv3uU1dbQWWRIV9uRxotSDQQnQzyga/ A Facebook album is at www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10215169840053601

for more on the forgetting, see “The Anniversaries of Our Amnesia” by vivian Hutchinson, e-tangata 8th March 2020 https://e-tangata.co.nz/history/the-anniversaries-of-our-amnesia/

Scottish land rights ... see “A Common Right: Scotland” film by the international Land Rights Now campaign https://youtu.be/fI1aNnPSIco

Angus MacMhuirich lived on the Isle of Mull and was a member of Clan Ranald's prestigious MacMhuirich bardic family. “Jaws of Sheep” is quoted from The Highland Clearances (1969) by John Prebble

“The Jaws of Sheep: The 1851 Hebridean Clearances of Gordon of Cluny” by James A. Stewart, Jr. in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium Vol. 18/19 (1998/1999) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20557342

“How Profits From Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands” by Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine, 17th November 2020 www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-investigates-how-enslavement-profits-changed-landscape-scottish-highlands-180976311/

Allen Curnow “The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch”, as published in O’Sullivan, V. (Ed.). (1979). An anthology of twentieth century New Zealand poetry. Wellington: Oxford University Press. The poem is also the source of the name of Don McGlashan's 2009 album Marvellous Year.

The Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey (2017) by Madeleine Bunting www.amazon.com/Love-Country-Hebridean-Journey-Madeleine-Bunting/dp/1847085172

“The language of resistance: Gaelic's role in community fight-back against corporate greed” by Madeleine Bunting The Herald 25th September 2016 https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14763202.language-resistance-gaelics-role-community-fight-back-corporate-greed/

“Down that way, glory waits” Tāmati Kruger interview with Kennedy Warne, e-tangata website, 9 September 2018 https://e-tangata.co.nz/korero/tamati-kruger-down-that-way-glory-waits/

“Listening to the People of the Land” by Kennedy Warne, e-tangata website 24 March 2019. https://e-tangata.co.nz/reflections/listening-to-the-people-of-the-land/ This is a chapter of the 2019 book Listening to the People of the Land: Christianity, Colonisation and the Path to Redemption (Accent Publications) www.accentpublications.co.nz/shop/listening-to-the-people-of-the-land/

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (1923) from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53013/the-gift-outright

Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (2004) by Alastair McIntosh, published by Aurum Press www.amazon.com/Soil-Soul-People-versus-Corporate/dp/1854109421

“Clan chief gives his lands to the people Historic day for crofters as Macneil hands over 9000 acres on Barra” by The Herald (Glasgow) 6th September 2003 www.heraldscotland.com/news/12533071.clan-chief-gives-his-lands-to-the-people-historic-day-for-crofters-as-macneil-hands-over-9000-acres-on-barra/

Photopage: Taranaki — TARANAKI MOUNGA — photographs by vivian Hutchinson

“A Landmark Day for Taranaki Maunga” statement by Hon Andrew Little, Minister of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations 20 December 2017 www.beehive.govt.nz/release/landmark-day-taranaki-maunga, “Iwi closer to having Taranaki Maunga become a legal person”, by Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, Te Manu Korihi Radio NZ 21 December 2017 www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/346683/iwi-closer-to-having-taranaki-maunga-become-a-legal-person

“New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being” by Eleanor Ainge Roy, The Guardian 16th March 2017 www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being

“Place as person, landscape as identity: ancestral connection and modern legislation” by Kennedy Warne, Auckland University School of Environment Cumberland Lecture 2019, delivered 22nd August 2019 https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/auckland/science/About-the-faculty/Environment/Documents/School%20of%20Environment%20Cumberland%20Lecture%202019.pdf

“Jim Bolger: Maybe the Urewera owns itself” by Wena Harawira, e-tangata web magazine 30 April 2016 https://e-tangata.co.nz/korero/jim-bolger-maybe-the-urewera-owns-itself/; “Jim Bolger and Tamati Kruger in conversation” at the Wellington City Art Gallery 20 August 2017 (audio) Radio New Zealand www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/smart_talk/collections/current-issues/audio/201852348/jim-bolger-and-tamati-kruger-in-conversation

Te Kawa o Te Urewera ... see press release from Te Urewera Board 19 May 2017 www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1705/S00487/te-kawa-o-te-urewera-draft-released.htm.
The document can be read at https://issuu.com/teurutaumatua/docs/te_kawa_o_te_urewera_-_english/60 and see also Te Ohu 4-day live-in gathering (2018) at https://issuu.com/teurutaumatua/docs/te_ohu_2018

ISBN 978-1-92-717637-5 This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en