Waitara: A Second Reading

Continuing the conversation about a very old land grab

by vivian Hutchinson

August 2017 35 min read download PDF for print

Ehara te Tiriti i te mea hei whakataunga.
Me whakahōnore kē!
The Treaty is not for settling.
It is for honouring!

1.

A land grab in the 21st century is not a matter of soldiers and guns with Majors and Generals, and Colonial Native Ministers riding on white horses. It is not so obviously a matter of surveyors, or pegs and property maps.

Instead, a modern land grab is more a matter of lawyers, politicians, policy advisers and public submissions. The instruments of extraction here are legislation, reports from Parliamentary Select Committees, press releases, public relations and social media.

The grab is not so obvious when looks like a government MP sitting in Parliament, and propping up his iPad on his desk so that he can photograph it to share a special moment with his Facebook feed.

The iPad here is displaying a press release about a contentious Bill that had been drawn up by the New Plymouth District Council and, as the local MP, Jonathan Young had sponsored it to the House. The headline in the press release reads: “Historic Day for New Zealand: Maori Affairs Committee recommends that the New Plymouth District Council’s Waitara Lands Bill be approved”.

An iPad in the House – photo Jonathan Young/Facebook

Jonathan Young introduced his Bill to Parliament on Wednesday 14th September 2016. This was already a significant day on the calendar for the original Maori owners of this land, as it was the traditional observance of Maori Language Day.

It was also the anniversary of the day that Dame Whina Cooper started her historic month-long Maori Land March from Te Hapua to Parliament Grounds ... to protest against the continuing legislative theft of Maori land.

You may well wonder why it is, after 40 years of progress with apologies and settlements following the 1975 Maori Land March, that the New Plymouth District Council and the Taranaki Regional Council and the Crown are still planning to sell the Waitara lands? And how come this can still take place in 2017 over the very clear protests of the tangata whenua who had their land stolen?

The answer is a sobering picture of power and memory and race relations in our modern nation. And it is also a story of resistance to the continuing loss of Maori land, and hope that the long troubles of the Waitara lands can be resolved with genuine peace and reconciliation.

2.

The Waitara lands have a special place in New Zealand’s history because this is where the Taranaki Land Wars first broke out on 17th March 1860.

The first shots of this war were fired at Te Kohia Pa, which had been erected on the edge of an area of land known as the Pekapeka Block (which makes up about half of the township of present-day Waitara). The ownership of the Pekapeka Block was in dispute in 1860, but the government had already begun to survey it for sale to new settlers.

Waitara also has a special place in New Zealand’s history because it reminds us of the original sin of our new nation: the theft of Maori land. This land grab was enabled through the legislative confiscation of huge areas of New Zealand by the new settler government.

In Taranaki, the politicians of the day told themselves that the land confiscations were a punishment for the organised resistance by Maori “rebels”. It seems pretty clear now that these “rebels” were simply protecting their own property.

And after the confiscations, the original Maori owners were forced to watch and accept a huge influx of new immigrants to the province, who then made their own homes and farms and livelihoods on the back of these stolen lands.

Since 1860, the original question of the ownership of the Waitara Lands has had rulings from Governor George Grey (in 1863), the Sim Royal Commission of Inquiry into Confiscated Lands (in 1927) and the Waitangi Tribunal (in 1996) ... and they all have acknowledged that these lands were taken illegally from their rightful owners.

The latest Waitara Lands Bill concerns the remaining leasehold lands within the region, which still are in public ownership 150 years after the original confiscations. The Bill proposes that the holders of the 778 leasehold titles in Waitara will be able to freehold their sections.

During the formal hearings on this Bill, the New Plymouth District Council, The Taranaki Regional Council, the MP sponsoring the legislation, and the various Crown agencies advising on it ... have all agreed that this land was stolen. Plain and simple.

But giving it back has been anything but plain and simple.

What was broken, cut-up and distributed in the 1860s has seemed almost impossible to put back together again. And “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” have been unable to translate the acknowledgement of historical wrong-doing ... into present-day justice.

the billboard on Devon St, in central New Plymouth photo/vivian Hutchinson

3.

Not long before Jonathan Young MP sat in Parliament celebrating the successful passing of the Second Reading of his Bill ... a billboard had been erected on the central main street of his New Plymouth electorate.

It showed the horses and men of the Colonial British Army standing on the Waitara lands. The land itself was drawn as a living entity in the distinctive style of Taranaki Maori carving.

This illustration had been provided by the prominent Maori artist Cliff Whiting, who had done a series of drawings about the Waitara Lands dispute in 1978. Whiting sadly passed away not long after the New Plymouth billboard was erected.

The billboard read: It started in Waitara. Let it end in Waitara. Return the Stolen land.

This message carried no signature of who had placed it there ... and this had led to a minor controversy in the local newspaper, The Taranaki Daily News.

The billboard had been organised by members of the Taranaki Maori Women’s Network, a loose collection of women from iwi throughout Taranaki who were supporting the Waitara hapu of Manukorihi and Otaraua in their fight to regain ownership and control of their former lands.

The Women’s network had been supporting the Waitara hapu at the Maori Affairs Select Committee hearings that were held at the Novotel Hotel in New Plymouth in November 2016, and later at the Owae Marae in Waitara in February 2017.

They had also organised and presented a petition with over 2,300 signatures calling on all members of Parliament to challenge and vote against the Bill, and encouraging the Council and the Government to create a new conversation that will be focused on healing and social justice.

The submissions at the public hearings were almost overwhelming in the numbers of people – Maori and Pakeha – who spoke to their rejection of the Bill. And the majority of the submitters were also loud and clear about their rejection of a process that had continued to marginalise the primary claims of the Waitara hapu.

It was not the place of the Maori Affairs Select Committee to defend the Bill, as it had been drawn up by the New Plymouth District Council. Their job was to listen and question and report on it, and suggest improvements and alternatives.
But the large number of submitters who spoke against the Bill had had an obvious effect on the members of the committee. As they considered and prepared their own report on the Bill, they were being left in no doubt that it was now their turn to step into the firing line of one of our nation’s longest-running disputes.

Maori Affairs Select Committee in session at the Novotel Hotel, New Plymouth 18th November 2016 photo/Taranaki Daily News ... L-R: Marama Fox (Maori Party), Jonathan Young (National), Chester Borrows (National), Tutehounuku Korako (National, Chairman), Nanaia Mahuta (Labour), Adrian Rurawhe (Labour), Catherine Delahunty (Green), Pita Paraone (New Zealand First).

And it was quite clear to them that there were many things fundamentally wrong with this piece of legislation. Even Jonathan Young himself was ready to concede that the Bill he was sponsoring was deeply flawed.

There were many reasons for this, but the most obvious one was that the needs and views of the original owners of the land were not being fully listened to and respected.

When it came to the question of how to deal with such an important Maori land claim, this NPDC Waitara Lands legislation was an example of how the national and Parliamentary consensus (even from within our most conservative political party) had moved well ahead of the political and bureaucratic world-view that still existed in the New Plymouth District and Taranaki Regional Councils.

Kuia Te Rau Aroha Watene Taungatara Denness at the head of the Peace for Pekapeka hikoi through the Waitara Lands, 21st September 2016 photo/Taranaki Daily News

4.

The legislation as drawn up by the NPDC was originally intended to be considered in Parliament by the Local Government and Environment Committee. This is because it was being seen largely as a complex matter of local authority leasehold management.

But on 21st September 2016, the day the Bill had its first reading in the Houses of Parliament in Wellington, a major hikoi took place that walked over the Pekapeka Block and through the streets of Waitara to Owae Marae.

The hikoi drew people from throughout Taranaki, and had been organised by the Taranaki Maori Women’s Network in their support of the Waitara hapu and their role as guardians or kaitiaki with mana whenua over this land.

As the Bill was starting to be read in the House, MPs had their attention drawn to the people who were walking through the streets of Waitara. They were reminded that they were about to discuss the historic and still controversial Pekapeka Block.

And, after some last-minute on-the-floor interventions by Green MP Metiria Turei and the Deputy Speaker Chester Burrows, Committee Chairman Nuk Korako, and the sponsoring MP Jonathan Young ... the Bill changed its destination within the House and was referred for consideration to the Maori Affairs Select Committee.

(... click for larger view ...) photos of Peace for Pekapeka hikoi taken by Jane Dove Juneau, 21st September 2016

It was probably a natural thing that the views of tangata whenua would be taken much more seriously at a Maori Affairs Select Committee. It enabled the whole question of the Waitara leasehold lands to be considered in a wider historical context, and by committee members who understood more deeply the implications of this legislation to hapu and iwi. It also meant that the local Taranaki councils had to step up to a new negotiating table.

Poster for Peace for Pekapeka Hikoi 21st September 2016

5.

And so it was. And as already mentioned, the public hearings at the Novotel and at Owae Marae saw an overwhelming number of people speak in rejection of the legislation. www.taranaki.gen.nz/waitarasubmissions

Jonathan Young later told Hokonui Radio that after the Owae hearings, he was driving to Hastings with his wife and he came to the decision that he had to do something about this. Young then came up with a plan to alter the legislation so that it would more decently recognise the claims of the Waitara hapu, and give them a much better slice of the pie when it came to the land sales. Young said: “... I came back, went to the NPDC, to the hapu and to different people. Everyone thought my plan would work ... and it has.”

Maori Affairs Select Committee Hearing at Te Ika a Maui, Owae Marae 17 February 2017 photo/Taranaki Daily News

What followed was a wholesale rewriting of the Waitara Lands Bill with the help of officials from the Office of Treaty Settlements. This was a complex matter of special meetings with various interested parties and authorities, and the Committee kept on delaying the publication of its report until the re-writing of the legislation was complete.

Then on Wednesday 2nd August 2017, the Maori Affairs Committee report was released ... complete with the media interviews by the New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom and Jonathan Young about this being an “historic day”.

The Mayor celebrated that this was “an example of how we can work through an extraordinarily complex matter ... to achieve a great result for our community while balancing the needs of all our 80,000 residents...” Other politicians observed that the solutions being proposed in the Second Reading of the Bill were a very “clever” solution to a difficult problem.

New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom

But once you got past the hyperbole, and a certain amount of election-year grandstanding ... you start to realise that this new Bill was being proposed and celebrated well before the Waitara hapu itself had fully discussed the options within this vastly changed legislation.

The public relations spin was definitely premature. There was no avoiding the fact that while the main politicians were making a song-and-dance about acknowledging a troubled history, and better recognising the claims of the Waitara hapu ... there were still significant parts of the Bill which many hapu leaders had consistently made clear that they had trouble with.

Not the least of their concerns is the major sticking point that the hapu will still have to pay to get back much of their own stolen property.

The votes for the Waitara Lands Bill 2nd Reading – Jonathan Young/Facebook

Away from the radio stations and the press statements and social media, the fact that the Waitara hapu still needed to think about it was properly acknowledged in Parliament when the Second Reading was held. Jonathan Young also conceded that he was giving up on his goal to get the legislation passed into law before Parliament went into recess ahead of the 2017 elections.

This meant that the Waitara hapu were being given a few months to come up with their response to the changed legislation, and to their new role within it ... before the Bill would probably be taken forward by a new government later in the year.

6.

Now let’s get this into some perspective.

The Waitara hapu of Manukorihi and Otaraua live within one of Taranaki’s lowest socio-economic communities. In the New Zealand of 2017, this means a lot in terms of their daily struggle to keep families fed and clothed and sheltered.

Their alienation from their own assets over 150 years has had definite consequences to their survival and to the level of shared trauma that has also persisted in their lives over that time.

These families heroically struggle with their own infrastructure issues and internal politics, while generously providing the hospitality and manuhiritanga that is expected of those with mana whenua over the Waitara area.

They have endured a very long process of public engagement over this Waitara Lands Bill. For some of them, this has still felt like being on the receiving end of a colonial process of power where the New Plymouth District Council and the Taranaki Regional Council have continued to de-legitimise their views and marginalise their contributions in shaping possible solutions.

As the Otaraua Chairman Rawiri Doorbar told the Maori Affairs committee hearings at Owae Marae: they are tired. Most of their leadership are also holding down full-time jobs, and then are expected to step up to being “partners” in this process when they get home from work.

They don’t have the resources to employ consultants, lawyers and real estate advisers, or have the time to grow the trusting relationships they would need to have with such professionals.

And now at this last-minute stage when the major politicians are finally recognising the primary claims of the Waitara hapu over these disputed lands ... these families are being given just a few months (in an election year) to come up with a considered response to a completely new version of the legislation.

Waitara and the Pekapeka Block

7.

Jonathan Young has told Parliament that officials expect that “... about $28 million will be available over the next 20 years for hapu to buy, develop, and maintain land in and around Waitara.”

Of course it looks a very tempting offer. That level of money speaks quite loudly. And because the new offer was drawn up under the guidance of the Office of Treaty Settlements ... it probably represents the consensus of compromise that exists around such settlements in 2017.

But there is no way that the institutions participating in this particular compromise – the Taranaki councils, the government agencies, or even a modern Crown-mandated iwi authority – would themselves submit to such a timetable for the consideration of an offer like this.

There is no way that these institutions would entertain a similar offer without going through a rigorous amount of due diligence and professional advice.

But we seem to be expecting the Waitara hapu to do such a thing – with such immense consequences for themselves and with repercussions for their communities.

The fact that this is happening in this way shows us that – after all the successes of settlements and apologies over the last forty years – our national and local politicians have still got a lot to learn about the process of reconciliation with Maori.

New Plymouth District Council (Waitara Lands) Bill 2018

8.

Let’s look deeper into the new version of the Bill.

Yes, the Second Reading version of this legislation contains substantial changes. It has gone through over 35 redrafts. There is hardly a page that does not have either new clauses inserted, or something deleted.

But the Bill has not changed its primary purpose and objectives. Although the New Plymouth District Council has made significant concessions to the Waitara hapu, the Council has not budged from their original intention to sell this stolen property.

The Bill will enable the current leaseholders to freehold their sections ... a process that will privatise this stolen land, and put it beyond the reach of its original owners.

The Bill encourages the hapu to consider an arrangement in which they will be able to buy back their own stolen property with some of the money gained from the land sales. Actually, the Bill only provides the Waitara hapu with about a quarter of the funds from the sales in order to do this.

This concept of having to buy back your own stolen property continues to be a real barrier to resolving the Waitara grievances.

This point was acknowledged by Labour’s new Deputy-Leader Kelvin Davis when he spoke in the House during the Second Reading. While supporting the Bill, Davis said that it was as if someone was to steal his car and the police came along and said "Kelvin, we've got your car here, but we want you to pay to have it returned." Davis said he would not be terribly happy about that ... but in effect, this is what Te Atiawa were being asked to do.

Meanwhile, the Taranaki Regional Council has also not budged from their original intention to use their former "endowment" funds from these lands to subsidize their statutory obligations to look after the Waitara River.

The costs of looking after every other river in Taranaki are paid for out of Regional rates levied on every Taranaki citizen and property owner. But in the case of Waitara, the original and current owners of the leasehold lands are still being expected to pay double for such a service. 

What is new in the Bill is that it offers a co-governance arrangement with tangata whenua on the management of the Waitara River, which is probably a good thing. But this arrangement is no compensation for the continuing injustice of what the people of Waitara are still being expected to pay. 

The Bill does give back land more directly to the Waitara hapu, or to the Te Atiawa iwi authority ... which is also a good thing. This includes about 60 hectares of reserve, and another 16 hectares which are available for residential development. The Council says that this means 45% of the endowment land “would be returned to mana whenua”. The hapu are also being given the rights of first refusal (RFR) on the possible future sales of some council-owned properties.
It does seem almost generous when you put it that way ... but then you have to remember that this is 45% of only the stolen land that still remains in public ownership. The rest of the former confiscated Maori lands of Waitara township have already been privatised at some time over the last 150 years.

As the former Te Atiawa Treaty settlements negotiator Peter Moeahu pointed out at the Select Committee hearings, the land on offer deserves closer scrutiny. He notes that the public reserves will essentially remain in NPDC control. He also maintains that the residential land for development offered in the Bill is part of an old rubbish dump. And he knows of no NPDC plan to sell the RFR properties, so these parts of the offer are being made without immediate benefit to the Waitara hapu.

Finally, in spite of all the delays and broken deadlines, when you read the report of the Maori Affairs Select Committee it still feels like a rush-job. And it is important to note that the committee have arrived at their recommendations without a consensus.

The recommendation for the amended Bill to go forward to its Second Reading was supported by the National-led government and the Labour Party and the Maori Party members. The New Zealand First and Green Party members had their dissent recorded in the report, but for different reasons. 

New Zealand First was against the establishment of any statutory authority (in this case, a co-governance board for the Waitara River) with a membership that included people who had not been properly elected to do the job.
The Greens were adamant that they were not going to support the Bill any further in the House until it was more fully considered and supported by the Waitara hapu.

9.

So ... in the twilight zone of a national election and the formation of a new government, the Waitara hapu are being left to do their own “due diligence”, and to make their decisions on whether they support or decline their new role within this Bill.

There’s a lot to talk about in a few short months, and many questions to resolve. Whatever they decide will naturally be up to them. And like any group of families ... there are a diversity of attitudes and opinions that need to be worked through.

At the time of writing this article, no one can be certain that the Bill will definitely be taken forward by a new government ... or if it will lapse at this stage of its Second Reading, and the New Plymouth District Council will be forced to start again.

And similarly, it is not at all that clear what will happen if the Waitara hapu decline to accept the “opportunities” that are being presented to them in the latest version of the legislation.

10.

Early on the morning of the day that the public hearings were being held at Waitara, a small group of the Taranaki Maori Women’s Network gathered in the rain at Robe Street Park, outside the Courthouse in New Plymouth.

They were standing around a bronze statue of Frederic Alonzo Carrington – the man often referred to as “the Father of New Plymouth”. Carrington had been the chief surveyor of the Plymouth Company who in 1841 selected the site of New Plymouth and oversaw the surveying of the street plans for town. At the time, his assistant surveyor was his younger brother, Octavius Carrington.

Moewai Aterea leading karakia with members of the Taranaki Maori Women’s Network gathered around the bronze Carrington Statue outside the New Plymouth Courthouse 17th February 2017 photo / vivian Hutchinson

In 1860, Octavius Carrington had been appointed the Provincial Surveyor for Taranaki, and it was in this role that he led a team of workers out to Waitara to measure up the disputed Pekapeka Block, in preparation for its sale.

The Te Atiawa leader Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitaake had made it clear to both Carrington and to the chief land purchase commissioner, Donald McLean, that he would not permit their survey or their occupation of the land.

Te Rangitaake sent out groups of Te Atiawa women to disrupt the survey teams and pull up the survey pegs that had been left in the ground.

Cliff Whiting, from Bitter Payment:The Taranaki Troubles by Michael Keith (1978) NZ School Journal

This was one of the acts of “rebellion” that led to the first shots being fired at Te Kohia Pa a few days later, and the commencement of the Taranaki Wars.

Cliff Whiting had memorialised this resistance in his 1978 illustration of the Atiawa women pulling up survey pegs that had pierced a living earth. He pictured the women chasing off Carrington and his survey team from the Pekapeka Block.

It was the descendants of those Atiawa women who had pulled up the pegs, who were now gathered outside the New Plymouth courthouse in the rain.

It is not their view that what took place 157 years beforehand was an act of “rebellion”. They now describe it as the first steps in a much longer passive resistance movement against the theft of Maori land. And it was this resistance that had immediately led to Te Pahua Tuatahi – Te Pahua o Whaitara – the plunder of Waitara.

But in 2017, the women and their children and friends had come to the Carrington statue with their own wooden pegs. These had been created by local artist Moewai Aterea, and had been inscribed with the names of Taranaki hapu and the Taranaki iwi and community organisations that had been supporting their kaupapa.

After a karakia, or blessing, Moewai Aterea chose a wooden stake on which she had inscribed “Return 2 Sender”. She deliberately hammered it into the ground before the statue of Frederic Alonzo Carrington, while chanting

E tu nga wahine o te wa o te kore
E tu nga wahine o Te Atiawa
E tu nga wahine o Te Pekapeka
E tu nga mokopuna o naianei
E tu, E tu, E tu

We have brought our own pegs ... photo/Robin Martin RNZ

11.

Surveying is both the functional and the symbolic act of dominance that is the consummation of colonisation.

Surveying is an act of framing, and of extraction, and of commodification. It reduces the living, the messy and the grab ... into a tidy representation that is ripe for transaction and for sale.

It is no great mistake that “the Father of New Plymouth” was not a significant statesman, or spiritual figure, or a visionary with a poetic sense of what this new nation could become. No, he was the man who measured up the maps.

In choosing the Cliff Whiting illustration to be the symbol of their Peace for Pekapeka hikoi in September 2016, the Taranaki Maori Women’s network were trying to symbolise “pulling up the pegs” on the proposed Waitara Lands legislation ... and from any such maps that would lead to the final alienation of these lands from their original and proper owners.

As we mark the Second Reading of the Waitara Lands Bill, this might be a good time for all of us to reflect on what has taken place so far.

While the Waitara hapu make their own deliberations on the legislation ... we might like to reflect on the proclamations by the local Mayor and MP that the latest Select Committee report amounts to an “Historic Day for New Zealand”.

We may even begin to recognise that the Waitara hapu are a group of people that might have their own idea of what “historic” would look like to them.

And we could even realise that it would be worth everyone’s while if Manukorihi and Otaraua were able to fully make that case.

vivian Hutchinson
August 2017

Notes and Links

The Peace for Pekapeka website of the latest news and media about the Waitara Lands Bill is at http://www.taranaki.gen.nz/pekapeka

Peace for Pekapeka is an initiative organised by the Taranaki Maori Women's Network and supported by Te Roopu Kaumatua o Whai Tara, Peaceful Province Initiative and Community Taranaki.

opening whakatauki taken from “Te Reo Hāpai – the Language of Enrichment” by Keri Opai (2017) published by Te Pou o te Whakaaro Nui download from www.tepou.co.nz/resources/te-reo-hapai---the-language-of-enrichment/809<

Jonathan Young’s iPad in Parliament ... photo from Jonathan Young Facebook page 2nd August 2017 at www.facebook.com/MPJonathanYoung/posts/2018026105126370

Press Release “Historic Day for New Zealand” ... from New Plymouth District Council Website at www.newplymouthnz.com/Council/Council-Documents/News-and-Notices/2017/08/02/Historic-Day-for-New-Zealand-Maori-Affairs-Committee-Recommends-NPDCs-Waitara-Lands-Bill-Be-Approved

The New Plymouth District Council (Waitara Lands) Bill Parliamentary page is at www.parliament.nz/en/pb/bills-and-laws/bills-proposed-laws/document/00DBHOH_BILL69946_1/new-plymouth-district-council-waitara-lands-bill

Report of the Maori Affairs Committee, New Zealand Parliament, and copy of the new version of the New Plymouth District Council (Waitara Lands) Bill 2nd August 2017
"... We note that there are ongoing discussions between the Waitara hapū, the Trust, and our advisers. The Waitara hapū are yet to finalise their position, but support the bill to the second reading." www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/SCR_74760/e12facfba71f0fe00d9c826defbe7a14a4552760

The Waitara Lands Bill in Parliament (a Directory by the Peace for Pekapeka campaign) www.taranaki.gen.nz/waitaraparliament

Whina Cooper and the 1975 Maori Land March on Parliament ... see full-length documentary at www.nzonscreen.com/title/te-matakite-o-aotearoa-1975

1863 Governor Sir George Grey decision on the Waitara Lands ... see 1863 Despatches from Governor Sir George Grey dated from November 1863 to March 1864 to the Duke of Newcastle declaring the abandonment of the Waitara purchase" paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/parliamentary/AJHR1863-I.2.1.6.3

1927 Sim Royal Commission into Confiscated Lands and other Grievances report can be read at atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1928-I.2.2.6.13&e=-------10--1------0

1996 Waitangi Tribunal report – Te Kaupapa Tuatahi Wai 143 available at forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_68453721/Taranaki%201996.compressed.pdf

Native Affairs - Selling off Waitara (7 mins) by Iulia Leilua, Native Affairs (Maori Television) 20th September 2016 The New Plymouth District Council is being accused by some Waitara Māori of selling off stolen land through the Waitara Lands Bill. Interviews with Dr Leonie Pihama and former NPDC councillor Howie Tamati. www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/native-affairs-selling-waitara

Cliff Whiting (1936-2017) was a Master Carver and a leader of the Maori artistic renaissance as an influential sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker and photographer. He was central to designing and creating the contemporary marae on the top floor of Te Papa. He was also a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the highest New Zealand honour. Cliff Whiting profile on Waka Huia (2015) www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5LK4nJOnY

Cliff Whiting’s illustrations were made available courtesy of the artist to the Taranaki Maori Women’s Network for use in the Waitara Lands campaign. They are taken from “Bitter Payment: The Taranaki Troubles”, by Michael Keith, New Zealand School Journal, Part 4, Nos 1 & 2, 1978 (Ministry of Education)

Billboard on Devon Street, New Plymouth. See “Waitara land bill controversy posted up in city's main street” by Tara Shaskey, Taranaki Daily News 14 July 2017 www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/94726077/waitara-land-bill-controversy-posted-up-in-citys-main-street

black-and-white photographs of the Waitara Peace for Pekapeka hikoi taken by Jane Dove Juneau 21 September 2016. Her full album is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1121891231212252&id=165228956878489

money speaks loudly ... and there is another amount of money that is perhaps not speaking loud enough in this whole debate. This is the amount of money that the Crown and the various Councils have continued to extract from leases and sales of the Waitara Lands over the last 150 years. It has never been officially counted. So in a context where everyone agrees this is stolen property, the officials do not seem to be able to tell us how much money they have made from these assets since they were confiscated.

The Tamaki Treaty Workers network in Auckland have done some research on this in 2017. They have estimated that the councils have pocketed between $95m and $140m, excluding interest and any money from land sales.

“Council earned $140m from stolen land - Treaty Workers “ by Robin Martin, Radio New Zealand News Te Ao Maori 4th May 2017 www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/330067/council-earned-%24140m-from-stolen-land-treaty-group Interview with Carl Chenery and Rawiri Doorbar www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201842582/council's-earnings-from-waitara-land-bone-of-contention

Jonathan Young interviewed by Bryan Vickery on Hokonui Radio 4th August 2017, from from Morris West / Facebook www.facebook.com/morris.west.965/videos/vb.731938277/10155662939668278

Mayor Neil Holdom and Hapu Chairman Rawiri Doorbar on Waatea Radio
“Waitara Bill change needs hapu debate” (audio) Rawiri Doorbar interviewed on Radio Waatea by Dale Husband 3rd August 2017 www.waateanews.com/waateanews/x_story_id/MTY5MTA=/Waitara-Bill-change-needs-hapu-debate
“Waitara Bill sweetened for hapu” (audio) Mayor Neil Holdom interviewed on Radio Waatea by Dale Husband 3rd August 2017 www.waateanews.com/waateanews/x_story_id/MTY5MDk=/National/Waitara%20Bill%20sweetened%20for%20hapu

“Hapū support for revised Waitara land bill conditional” by Robin Martin, Radio New Zealand News 3rd August 2017 www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/336389/hapu-support-for-revised-waitara-land-bill-conditional
Otaraua hapū chairman Rawiri Doorbar said Waitara hapu considered the revised version a fresh start, but there was more consultation to be done. "The timeframe we were given hasn't allowed us to take the complete revised Bill out to our people, so ultimately the jury is still out on whether this is a Bill our people can live with."
Manukorihi hapū chairperson Patsy Bodger said any decision that resulted in the land not being returned to Waitara hapu would be difficult for some members to stomach. "It will be a huge discussion point with some of our hapu members because it's always been seen that what they wanted was to have the land back."

“Maori Affairs Select Committee recommend Waitara Land Bill be approved” by Tara Shaskey, Taranaki Daily News 3rd August 2017 www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/95367783/maori-affairs-select-committee-recommend-waitara-land-bill-be-approved

“Waitara Lands Bill passes second reading, moves into committee stage” by David Burroughs, Taranaki Daily News 10th August 2017 www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/95621096/waitara-lands-bill-passes-second-reading-moves-into-committee-stage

Waitara Lands Bill numbers (graphic) from Jonathan Young Facebook Page 9th August 2017 https://www.facebook.com/MPJonathanYoung/posts/2022001121395535

Kelvin Davis speech during the Second Reading of the NPDC (Waitara Lands) Bill, Parliament 9th August 2017 https://youtu.be/7UbVMs1PUEU

Peter Moeahu submission to the Maori Affairs Select Committee 1st October 2016 www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/51SCMA_EVI_00DBHOH_BILL69946_1_A536216/8fd0a31e6774b8dc3e928f4c6692b4c9b0630576

Ngaropi Cameron oral submission to the Maori Affairs Select Committee 18th November 2016 www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/51SCMA_EVI_00DBHOH_BILL69946_1_A542501/21fa83a55ef7fb0e375777446636bb19e7500349

Waitara – one of Taranaki’s lowest socio-economic communities ... see presentation on poverty in Taranaki and New Zealand by Local Pediatrician Dr Nicky Nelson (given at the
Tick 4 Kids Election Forum at the Plymouth Hotel August 2017) https://youtu.be/dcwdNGaVIcA

historical trauma ... see "Stolen Land and Healing Historic Trauma" by Awhina Cameron, from her opening korero at the Spring Taranaki Community Circle at the NPDC Council Chambers, 7th September 2016 drive.google.com/open?id=0B7p1jVWu6lEXNHRxeVc3amg3OVk

Moewai Aterea chant may be interpreted as ... Stand up women from the times of nothing / Stand up women of Te Atiawa / Stand up women of the Pekapeka / Stand up descendants of today / Stand up, Stand up, Stand up.

Other articles by vivian Hutchinson on the Waitara Lands dispute include “Watching the Seabirds at Waitara — we need a new conversation about a very old land grab” (2016) www.taranaki.gen.nz/watching-the-seabirds-at-waitara and “How to Explain Waitara to your Pakeha Friends and Relations” (2017) www.taranaki.gen.nz/how-to-explain-waitara

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    

How to Explain Waitara to your Pakeha friends and Relations

by vivian Hutchinson

February 2017  9 min read download PDF for print

The dispute over the Waitara Lands is one of the thorniest issues in Taranaki, and in our nation’s history.

This is not just because the conflicts in Waitara in the 1860s were the first engagements of the New Zealand Land Wars. It is also because of the land confiscations that followed these conflicts, and then the giving of some of this land to the predecessors of the New Plymouth District Council. This has ensured that the complexities of the Waitara dispute have endured until our present generation.

But it is not a complex issue. Any child knows the common-sense fair go that says if you steal something, then you should give it back. The dispute over the Waitara Lands is only complex when you are able to come up with 1001 ways of avoiding this common simplicity.

Let me try to give my European or Pakeha family and friends a more direct account of what the Waitara lands dispute might feel like if they were in the shoes of the Manukorihi and Otaraua hapu, the families who are known as the Waitara hapu of Te Atiawa.

And let’s shift the story:

Imagine that you are in the Argyle area of Scotland, and it is 1860, and you have just been visiting a family headed by a Mr McIntyre. This is quite a large extended family living on a ¼ acre section, on a street in a small rural Scottish village. The McIntyres are actually part of a Scottish clan that has lived in the Argyle area for nearly a thousand years. You found that this family were very hospitable, and were quite happy on their street and their modest section.

But, not long after your visit, the McIntyres, and many of their neighbours, were forcibly evicted from their homes by the English who wanted to sell their properties to someone else. In the case of the McIntyre in our story, it was a violent eviction and the roof of his home was removed. This was hotly resisted, and one of the McIntyre sons was killed in the altercation.

Just a few years later, Mr McIntyre and his family actually were able to return to live on that same section on the same street, only this time McIntyre was paying a leasehold rent to the English (a payment he called “the ransom”), along with the property rates he paid to the local Council, and the interest rates he paid to the local bank manager for the mortgage loan he had taken out to rebuild his home and pay all these ongoing expenses.

But McIntyre never forgot that the land he was living on had been stolen from him ... and over the next 160 years, his children and his children’s children never stopped telling the story of this theft, and their desire to have their stolen property returned.

Now imagine that 160 years have passed, and the English government has had a change of heart. In fact, they formally apologised for the theft of the McIntyre section, and other properties in the area ... and they said were sorry for the violence which the family and clan had suffered in the process. The current Mr McIntyre – six generations on, and still living in the same house – was very pleased with this.

But McIntyre’s section was not returned to him, nor was any of the other land that had been stolen from his clan. Instead, the English government had decided to pay a sum of compensation to another person, a Mr Campbell, who was a distant relative of McIntyre and who lived on the same street.

It seems that the main qualification that Campbell had for receiving the compensation was that he seemed to be the sort of Scot that the English could do business with. And he particularly needed to be someone who would take the money in order to fully and finally settle this old dispute – and not harp on about needing the actual land to be returned.

(I should point out that Campbell has said that he would spend the compensation money – minus his own expenses – for the betterment of all Scots living in the Argyle.)

But McIntyre’s story does not end there. He did some research and found that the English government (which by this time was calling itself The Crown) had given his section, and many other properties on his street, to the local Council. The Crown had given this land to the Council for no payment, and were describing this as an act of philanthropy that had magically transformed this land into an “endowment” which provided ongoing money to pay for Council activities.

Despite the goodness of its name, this “endowment” was simply based on members of the McIntyre clan, and their other neighbours, still paying their “ransom” over many years.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the local Council got caught up in the change of heart about what had happened 160 years ago, and decided that it would like to do something to make amends. But it didn’t deal directly with Mr McIntyre, nor most of his neighbours who had their land stolen.

Instead, the Council made an offer to Mr Campbell that it would hand over all the lands that it had in its “endowment” leases ... but only if Campbell was prepared to pay a current market rate for these sections. When Campbell thought about it, he decided that this was an outrageous idea and turned it down. Why should he be expected to pay for something that had been stolen in the first place ... and had been given by the Crown to the Council at no charge?

The local Council was a bit surprised at this rejection ... but soon got over it. It quickly decided that it was going to sell its leasehold sections anyway, if it could only get itself out of the strict legal conditions that the Crown had imposed on its original “endowment”.

So that’s where we are today, and there is no happy ending yet in this particular tale.

Yes, the present-day Mr McIntyre has ended up with an apology ... but it hasn’t amounted to anything that really mattered to him. He never got his land back, and he is continuing to pay his leasehold rents to the local authority.

It is a story that could drive you to drink. But that didn’t happen for the Mr McIntyre in our tale until fairly recently. I think the tipping point came one morning when McIntyre was walking up his street past another section that had been originally owned by his clan, but was also stolen and sold off by the English.

On the side of the road, he saw a sign that said the local Council had bought the section, and were now turning it into a museum for tourists and back-packers. This museum would become a place that would tell the story of the Scottish clearances and the terrible violence and murders that took place on that very street, 160 years ago.

Of course you can see that I am making up an allegory here ... yet it is a story that comes somewhat close to the experience of the extended families of the Waitara hapu of Te Atiawa.

The point of this story-telling is that I don’t know a Scotsman alive that would settle for the sort of deals that our government and our Council are expecting the local Maori people to settle for. And I believe there just hasn’t been enough energy put into listening to Maori, and trying to really see things from their point of view.

If you take a look at the majority of submissions to the Maori Affairs Select Committee on the proposed Waitara Lands Bill, you will see that they are opposed to the Bill. This includes Maori and Pakeha submitters. A great many of them spell out clearly how the latest proposals to freehold the Waitara Lands will create yet another layer of historical grievance.

Let’s stop this.

Let’s figure out how to finally return this stolen property – at no cost to the Waitara hapu, and with no strings attached.

This may be the best opportunity we have had, in our generation, to try to bring real peace and reconciliation to these continuing grievances.

Waitangi Day
6th February 2017

vivian Hutchinson is a trustee of Community Taranaki.

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    

Watching the Seabirds at Waitara

We need a new conversation about a very old land grab

by vivian Hutchinson

July 2016 35 min read download PDF for print

1.

It is perhaps quite appropriate that the Taranaki Peace Walk to Parihaka started on the same day that submissions on the Waitara Lands Bill were being heard by the New Plymouth District Council.

The Waitara lands remain a political hot potato because they are part of a shameful history of conflict going back to the 1860s. The first shots fired in anger which sparked the New Zealand Land Wars were fired over the Waitara lands.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that the war that followed was known to many Maori as Te Riri Pakeha, or “the White Man’s Anger”.

The wounds created by this anger have been with us for 160 years, and at one time or another the stories of these wounds have been on the table of everyone who has sought to govern the Waitara lands.

The fact that we, as New Zealanders, still have to resolve the question of Waitara just shows us how such anger can still have its effects felt many generations later.

It also tells us about the sorry state of our governance.

Half of the Waitara leasehold titles are on the Pekapeka block. It was the disputes over purchasing this block which led to the outbreak of the first Taranaki Land War of 1860. Five years later, the local iwi and hapu lost most of their tribal lands by legislative confiscation.

It was upon assuming title by this confiscation, that the Crown gradually gifted pieces of these lands to various local authorities, who then leased them out.

The New Plymouth District Council now has “ownership” of these lands largely because it inherited the political pass-the-parcel that had occurred during the shifting sands of local government restructuring and treaty settlement negotiations.

Today, the New Plymouth District Council owns 778 leasehold titles in Waitara, the majority of them in residential sections. The annual rental for these leases is around $1.3 million.

The draft Waitara Lands Bill proposes to enable these leasehold sections to be freeholded. And the public debate at the moment is largely about the price that current leaseholders will have to pay once the bill is passed into law.

But the story of this particular land is also a good illustration of what the Taranaki Peace Walkers have been talking about when describing the need to “...walk into a new conversation” about race relations, civic inclusion, and peace and safety in our communities.

In the context of the New Plymouth Council hearings taking place last month on the Waitara Lands Bill ... perhaps the Peace Walk itself was a submission.

The Waitara Lands – “ Our people have never relinquished our claims to this land. This whenua is our parent. This river is our lifeblood. Our tupuna are buried here. Our ancestral links stretch back in an unbroken line to the time when people first settled here ...” – Moki White, speaking to the Waitangi Tribunal 1991   (photo Phillip Capper / Flickr)

2.

The current conversation we are having about the Waitara lands is just not capable of serving the deeper needs of our communities at this time ... as it only continues the old story of picking winners and losers.

This old story is policed and mediated - at considerable ongoing public cost - by council and government lawyers and policy advisors who do not seem capable of laying out a pathway that will lead to authentic peace and reconciliation.

There is an assumption in the proposed bill that “freeholding” is a widely held goal. It is argued that this freeholding will open up Waitara to new economic development, as investors and home buyers and shop-keepers will not be constrained by the current leasehold arrangements.

But the privatisation of the leasehold titles can also be seen as the latest iteration of the land grabs of the 1860s. The bill as it stands simply continues the process of alienating the original owners from their assets ... assets that are still very much needed to be working in their interests.

The freeholding process itself - in our current and crazy housing market volatility – is most likely to lead to a feeding frenzy by real estate agents, valuers and mortgage brokers.  And the release of these market pressures will see poorer people - Maori and Pakeha, and especially the elderly and people on fixed incomes - ultimately forced to move on from their homes on formerly leasehold properties.

Of course there are other options. But it is much harder for them to emerge out of the current conversation, or the current processes of council submissions and governance.

3.

I say “good-on-you” to Te Atiawa for themselves choosing to pass ... when the Waitara lands were finally offered to them in the 2014 Treaty Settlement process.

The government would have been handing to them a real risk and burden, especially with various politicians over the years promising leaseholders that they will soon be able to freehold their homes. Te Atiawa would have been walking into a real powder keg of expectations that were not of their own making.

The Treaty negotiations over these lands even came with a price attached. Te Atiawa were being offered their own stolen lands at an average valuation of about $30,000 per lease — $23 million all up.

When you consider that Te Atiawa – like so many of the other tribal groups around New Zealand – were signing a “settlement” of their Waitangi Treaty claim for less than 1% of the value of the land stolen from them ... then perhaps you might appreciate their response.

I would argue that it is the business of government to sort out these historical grievances without further burdening the original owners. Perhaps it might be more correct to say that it is the business of the Pakeha-led government to sort it out.

The Waitara lands are definitely a case where Pakeha need to wake up and talk with other Pakeha.

4.

New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd himself has certainly woken up. It was the case of the Waitara lands that led the Mayor to a personal realisation that his own attitudes on race relations needed to change.

The Mayor made national headlines in May when he announced he wouldn’t be standing for re-election following a backlash from voters after he’d tried to introduce a Maori ward in New Plymouth. Judd described himself as a “recovering racist” and spoke about a cultural awakening that had made him realise his attitude towards Maori needed to change.

Until Andrew Judd read the historical accounts of the Waitara lands, and saw “through Te Atiawa’s eyes” how they’d been alienated from their assets, he’d been on the other side of the issue – seeing the leaseholders as the victims of unreasonable Maori demands.

As he’s said: “What jumped out so loud to me was ... not only what had happened, but how it had happened in our past. And that planted a seed that has been a constant journey for me about why I didn’t know this. Why didn’t I know?”

This realisation was the beginning of his own unusual journey that led to last month’s Taranaki Peace Walk to Parihaka.

But it is significant that Mayor Judd has also realised something else: that we will just keep on making the same mistakes unless we fundamentally change the conversation we are having.

Children at the front of Taranaki Peace Walkers arriving at Parihaka Pa, 17 June 2016 (photo Robin Martin/RNZ)

5.

The Peace Walk to Parihaka was in some ways an echo of the Maori Land March to Parliament led by Whina Cooper in 1975 – particularly in the way that both walks were dignified events which bore none of the media protest clichés of placards, banners, flags or chanting.

Such hikoi are designed not to shout at you, but to invite people to talk with one another ... and to talk in ways that break new grounds of possibility.

I was involved in the organising of the 1975 Land March and it was not an event that was primarily motivated by historic grievances. It was a reaction to the very contemporary legislation that was still alienating Maori land – the Public Works Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, and the Ratings Act.

Legislation was still the preferred instrument of theft in the 1970s, as it was with the massive land confiscations of the 1860s.

James K. Baxter

In 1972, the poet James K. Baxter summed up the attitude of the government by likening it to a dog crouching under the table on which somebody is crumbling a loaf of bread.

“... Each time that crumbs fall to the ground the government licks them up with its tongue. It hopes in time to devour the whole loaf.”

The bill which the current New Plymouth District Council is sending to government for approval is just another step in the breaking up and devouring of the loaf that is the Waitara Lands.

In the privatisation of the Waitara leases, the old dog still hopes to devour it all.

Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake

6.

When we change the conversation, we just might get to listen to the words of Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, the Waitara chief of great influence and authority in the 19th century. As the leader of Te Atiawa, he spoke for the original owners of these lands.

Wiremu Kingi often wrote of his wish for friendly relations with Pakeha settlers, but he did not believe he should have to sell land to achieve this result.

The main street in Waitara today is named after Donald McLean, the chief land purchase commissioner of the 1850s. This man shares no small responsibility in fostering the conflicts that led to war, the alienation of the Waitara lands, and the confiscation of most of Taranaki province.

Just before the first shots were fired at Waitara, Wiremu Kingi wrote a letter to Donald McLean about the pressure to sell. He said:

“These lands will not be given by us into the Governor’s and your hands, lest we resemble the seabirds which perch on a rock. When the tide flows the rock is covered by the sea, and the birds take flight, for they have no resting place.”

War and the legislative theft of land did follow. And this forced so many families of Te Atiawa into becoming the seabirds that Wiremu Kingi predicted in his letter to McLean.

The seabirds are an ongoing legacy that has come down until the current day.

The continuing and widening gaps in well-being between Maori and Pakeha in Taranaki are a real consequence of a people spending decades dodging the tides, and not always finding a rock on which to land.

Donald McLean

7.

Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa Taranaki is the post-Treaty settlement governance entity of Te Atiawa, and it has come out in support of the draft bill that is now being sent to parliament.

Under the bill, the iwi authority will also be given a couple of council reserves, a block of land zoned for residential development, and first refusal rights on other surplus land.

While acknowledging the return of a small portion of the disputed land to the iwi, the authority is also clear that the bill is not the deal that they would have preferred.

In their statement on the proposed legislation, the authority first points out that the bill “...does not fully recognise or compensate for the fact the land confiscations [of the 1860s] were wrongful, unjust and in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi.”

But Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa says it is prepared to support the freeholding initiative in the interests of “compromise” and “moving things forward”.

The authority says that Te Atiawa iwi and hapu “...have been expected to make immense compromise in order to progress these issues.” The authority also remarked that it hoped that others are open to working with them “... so that our community can move forward together”. 

Community Conversations on the Taranaki Peace Walk 2016 “Such hikoi are designed not to shout at you, but to invite people to talk with one another ... and to talk in ways that break new grounds of possibility.” (photo vivian Hutchinson / Community Taranaki)

8.

It is worth noting that Mayor Andrew Judd has also got in behind the freeholding bill even though he, and several other influential councillors, have had serious doubts.

Here too, they are speaking the language of “compromise” in the interests of getting “political movement” over a vexing issue. And when questioned, it is also clear that they are trying to be pragmatic about what they think they can get approved by their political colleagues.

Yet I am left thinking: Why on earth are we expecting that the settlement of this, the original land dispute that broke our new country into war, to be based on such a significant level of compromise?

What is it about our settlements process that just expects such a significant level of compromise from the negotiating partner that has the least resources?

In especially this case of the Waitara lands, shouldn’t the Pakeha-led governance be going the extra mile to do the right thing ... rather than just what might be easily palatable to the current crop of politicians?

There is a real problem here that too much “compromise” means that we are left with just the lip service of reconciliation.

And this means that the real issues of justice over the Waitara lands will still be left for a future generation to more fully resolve.

Otaraua Hapu leaders Rawiri Doorbar and Donna Eriwata present their submission to the New Plymouth District Council Hearings on the Waitara Lands Bill, 15 June 2016 (photo NPDC / Facebook)

9.

The position of compromise taken by Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa Taranaki, is a stance that is not supported by all its contributing members. The iwi authority has faced significant opposition by the Waitara-based hapu of Manukorihi and Otaraua, as well as the nearby hapu of Ngati Tawhirikura.

These three hapu opposed the signing of the $87m Treaty deal in 2014 between the Crown and Te Atiawa, because they felt the deal undermined the position of those tribal members who would rather have their confiscated lands returned. This is one of the reasons why the signing ceremony for the Treaty settlement did not take place at Te Atiawa’s primary home of Owae Marae at Waitara.

Part of the problem here is that government authorities had already pre-determined that their settlement process will be negotiated between the Crown and iwi ... and not at the more local level of hapu.

In 2014, some members of the local hapu ploughed a section of land in central Waitara and held a peaceful protest... an action imitating the historic Parihaka passive resistance ploughing campaigns of the 1880s. This dissent was aimed as much at the Te Atiawa authority as it was at the Crown.

And members of the Waitara hapu also spoke at the most recent hearings on the Waitara Lands Bill. Again, they restated that they didn’t want their iwi to sell and take the money ... they wanted their ancestral land back.

As one of the Manukorihi elders told the hearing, the original declaration by Wiremu Kingi – that this land will never be relinquished – was as strong today as it was in 1860.

New Plymouth District Councillor Howie Tamati

10.

Former rugby league star Howie Tamati has been a New Plymouth District Councillor for the last 15 years, and is the only Maori at the District Council table. Like Mayor Judd, he also plans to step down later this year, at the end of the current term of office.

Tamati says he has been unable to sleep well since he read the papers on the Waitara lands, and he realised that this issue was going to be one of the last things he would have to deal with as a District Councillor.

On Tuesday, 5th July 2016, at the Council meeting to finalise the details of the Waitara Lands Bill, Tamati stunned his colleagues with a speech that broke with their collective intention to “move things forward” on the basis of selling the leases.

Warning his fellow councillors that he was close to tears, Tamati said that his thoughts were with the men and women of Te Atiawa nui tonu who, along with other tribes of Taranaki, had protested against the injustices placed on them by the confiscation of their ancestral lands.

Tamati read the names of many prominent Te Atiawa elders over the past 160 years who have fought to try and reclaim what was taken ... telling his fellow councillors, “Those people are with me now.”

“I look at the hapu of Otaraua and Manukorihi, like all hapu members around the country have forcibly had their rights and views put aside by the government to allow ease of negotiations with iwi entities which represent all the collective hapu. This [bill] is not the making of Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa, but is based on agreements made before their establishment, and abiding by the rules of the Crown.

“Waitara is in the rohe of Otaraua and Manukorihi and it is their taonga, their turangawaewae ... it’s their place to stand. They have had little say in this decision today – and they are hurting and they are aggrieved.

“I stand here today and say I can’t and will not support this bill going forward to parliament. My tupuna are saying to me: Do not sell the Pekapeka. The lands in Waitara were stolen illegally, and they should be returned to those it belonged to, and they should not be required to buy it back.”

After Tamati’s short speech, there was a long silence from his peers.  And then all the other councillors voted in favour of accepting the bill and sending it to Parliament ... with Tamati being the only voice saying “No”.

His dissent was not recorded in the official minutes of the meeting.

Howie Tamati: “My tupuna are saying to me: Do not sell the Pekapeka. The lands in Waitara were stolen illegally, and they should be returned to those it belonged to, and they should not be required to buy it back ...” (photo NPDC)

11.

The push to privatisation of the Waitara leases, without returning the lands to the original owners first, is the primary reason for the failure so far of all the governance attempts to “move things forward” over this issue.

Everything else that has been tried is simply a way of avoiding the plain fact that the various statutory authorities are acting as the receivers of stolen goods.

I am Pakeha, and yet I join with Howie Tamati in the hope that the proposed Waitara Lands Bill – with all its compromises and good intentions – fails to be passed by government. We can, and should, be doing much better.

As New Zealanders, we should be asking a lot more of ourselves. Even at this very late stage, we should be doing all we can to roll back this final incarnation of the very old land grab that is woven into the origins of our nation.

I am reminded that similar attempts to sell the Waitara leases have already failed in the past, and for good reasons.

It was in my grandfather’s time, in 1927, that the Sim Commission concluded that the wars of the 1860s were wrong, and the confiscations were unjustified. The Waitara lands were not returned then ... but at least it was the beginning of saying: Sorry.

In 1996, the Waitangi Tribunal upheld the long-held Maori claims over these confiscated lands, and also concluded that the Crown had acted wrongly. The Tribunal acknowledged the ongoing impact that the loss of confiscated lands has had on Maori communities.

A bill to freehold the Waitara leases was attempted in government two decades ago, and thankfully the then Treaty Minister Doug Graham stopped it. He wanted to see the lands available for the Settlement process with Te Atiawa.

But just because Te Atiawa did not pick up this option when it was offered by later treaty negotiators, doesn’t mean that the Pakeha-led governance responsibilities over these lands has ended.

The pressing responsibility of Pakeha here is not to sit at a table and hear yet more painful “submissions” from the real owners of the land. Our responsibility is to transform the conversations we’ve been having with each other over these important issues.

Waitara remains a continuing invitation from Maori to Pakeha that, as New Zealanders, we should be doing the right thing. 

Why is it so difficult for the statutory authorities to get their heads around the idea that the right thing is to simply hand the control of these leases back to the original owners ... with no-strings-attached?

The Pakeha-led governance responsibility here is to get out of the way. 

Like really.

12.

One of the most interesting things in this story is that we can have a great deal of confidence that when we actually get out of the way, Pakeha people in our communities will still be treated with civility and respect.

It is important to note that the Te Atiawa voice of compromise is being offered in the face of some over-the-top demands and threats from a section of the leaseholders. 

There have been street protests, and the threat to disrupt some World Cup Cricket qualifying matches in New Plymouth, as a way of drawing attention to their situation.

A few of the leaseholders have threatened to set fire to their own houses if they are unable to freehold their leases on favourable terms (... a threat being taken seriously enough by the local fire brigade who has visited the people to tell them not to do anything stupid). 

But any fears and inverted projections that Maori landlords will enact some sort of economic revenge on the Pakeha residents of leasehold lands, is not something that holds real credence when you look at the actual history of the area.  

Yes, the leaseholders at Waitara have been living off a privilege that was delivered to them by war and theft. They may not have personally engineered this predicament, but nevertheless they have been the beneficiaries of it.

And yes, this privilege has come at an inter-generational cost to the individuals and whanau of Te Atiawa.

Yet despite all this, under the continuing influence of the prophets Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi of Parihaka, the Maori families and the communities around Owae Marae at Waitara have preached and tried to demonstrate a message of peace and forgiveness.

For Pakeha people, this is a message that is not intended to just give us good feelings ... but it should be a message that awakens our responsibilities.

Peace and forgiveness are the qualities that give us the space to enable a different conversation. One of the purposes of peace and forgiveness is to foster the hope that we will indeed wake up, and then act for real justice and reconciliation.

13.

The land in dispute here is often referred to as the Waitara “endowment” leases ... as if the word “endowment” itself implies some sort of philanthropic gesture or legacy from a former generation.

There is some irony in this ... yet perhaps these lands are indeed an ongoing legacy: a legacy that keeps on inviting us to do the right thing.

The new bill proposes that the proceeds of land and leasehold sales be vested in a continuing fund that will benefit “the people of Waitara”. Some of the uses of this fund, as proposed, would include such things as repairing the Waitara riverbanks, or upgrading the Waitara Library ... things that will benefit “all the residents”.

The administration of the fund will be a convoluted arrangement that splits the proceeds between the Taranaki Regional Council and the New Plymouth District Council.

The Regional Council share of the funds will be used “...to perform TRC statutory duties in Waitara”. The New Plymouth share of the fund will be overseen by a six-member statutory authority (yet to be established), with three members appointed by Te Atiawa.

In other words, in the end, the original owners will only be left with minority stake in making decisions on the total income from the Waitara lands.

And, as some of the submitters to the bill pointed out last month: Why should such a fund be set up to pay for the very things that Waitara people are already paying rates for?

The proposal smells like the establishment of a Waitara slush fund, and one of the primary beneficiaries will be the various Council administrators who are trying to find revenue for local services.

There are many faces to a land grab ... or a value grab ... and to this one I believe we should continue to say: hands off!

The Taranaki Peace Walk was sparked by the backlash experienced by Mayor Andrew Judd when he called for better representation of Maori in local government affairs – something that is already a requirement enshrined in law, and by the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi. 

If the existing statutory authorities of the Taranaki region are unable to properly include Maori in their decision-making right now, then why should anyone trust these institutions to properly administer the proceeds of the sales of the Waitara lands or the leasehold rents?

14.

Freeholding the Waitara leases may well be the ultimate outcome of all this ... but that should be a decision made by the original owners, and not a choice primarily made by the political descendants of the thieves.

Similarly, it should be the choice of Te Atiawa and its hapu as to any special arrangement made for those low-income leaseholders who would be struggling to meet their commitments under fair market levels of rent for the land.

It is just patronising for anyone to assume that Te Atiawa is unable to make its own choices for the common good of Waitara and its most vulnerable residents.

This is what “no-strings-attached” really means when you hand things back to the real victims of this historical disgrace.

“No-strings-attached” means that Maori communities and their political institutions get to grow up and mature into their own sense of real authority. They get to make their own mistakes, have their own arguments between each other, and sort things out on their own terms ... just like any other group of families who don’t always act with one mind.

The restored Maori owners may indeed make choices in the interests of community stability which would put some of the current District Council proposals to shame ... choices that might include freezing the rents until a vulnerable leaseholder dies, or decides to sell their property.

The current Council proposal in the Waitara Lands Bill is only to freeze rents to leaseholders for a year ... to give people the “breathing space” to sort their finances out.

Community Conversations on the Taranaki Peace Walk 2016 – “Peace and forgiveness are the qualities that give us the space to enable a different conversation.” (photo vivian Hutchinson / Community Taranaki)

15.

There is good reason to think that the restoration of Maori ownership might lead to some innovative solutions of their own. That’s what “getting-out-of-the-way” really enables.

One of the many suggestions in the reports about the use of the funds from the Waitara lands is the establishment of an affordable housing strategy.  This is interesting to me because, ironically, the privilege given to Waitara leaseholders (over the hundred or more years) has been a privilege of affordable housing.

The leaseholders have been able to create their homes on lands that have had the advantage of relatively low rentals. (For example: a local real estate agent has estimated that some leaseholders had enjoyed 21 years of paying the equivalent of $5 a week rent.) 

One possible and practical act of reconciliation would be to see the Council lawyers and advisers offering to work with Te Atiawa to establish their own Affordable Housing Trust, based on the income from the Waitara lands. The beneficiaries of such a trust would be not only be the current low-income tenants of the leasehold lands, but also the young families of Te Atiawa’s future.

The biggest social issue of our current day is the growing gap between rich and poor in our communities. And the largest contributor to this gap is the lack of affordable housing. We are currently spiralling into a national vortex of pass-the-parcel on this issue. The current housing market bubble is putting more and more seabirds – Maori, Pakeha and new immigrant families – into a desperate search for a resting place. We are seeing too many New Zealand families living in overcrowded houses, rented garages, or even cars that are parked up in public parks.

The affordability issue affects the young families of Te Atiawa in Waitara no less than anyone else living on modest incomes throughout New Zealand. There are real governance responsibilities here in terms of ensuring that families have a pathway to affordable homes.

There are plenty of examples around New Zealand and the world of how Affordable Housing Trusts can be established and administered. It’s the sort of thing that the various advisers should be looking into, and working with iwi to fashion to their own needs.

Such a collaboration holds the possibility that a sense of stability in your own home, and the vibrant community that rests on this stability, could become a real “endowment” for Waitara and its future generations.

16.

Perhaps the final piece of a necessary conversation is about the naming rights and the memorials that we create as a legacy of the sorry tale of the Waitara lands.

We should be turning that legacy from one of anger, ignorance and amnesia ... towards one of memory, humility and reconciliation.

In a move championed by Mayor Andrew Judd and Councillor Howie Tamati, the New Plymouth District Council has just announced that it will buy the land at Te Kohia, the pa site over which the opening shots of the first Taranaki War were fired.

This is a good decision, and the establishment of a fitting memorial would at least remind all of us of the significance of what happened there. Mayor Judd’s hope is that Te Kohia will also fulfil a public education role ... filling in the gaps created by the constant forgetting of history by our majority culture.

And while we are at it, let’s also talk about changing the name of the main street of Waitara from “McLean” to “Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake”.

That would be another act of remembering, and of peace-making. It would also be a clear signal that, all these generations later, we have seen the seabirds at Waitara ... and we have finally “got” Wiremu Kingi’s letter.

vivian Hutchinson
July 2016

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 July 2016

portrait photo of vivian Hutchinson (right), taken outside the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth (July 2015), by Graeme Lindup.

An edited version of this paper has been published on the e-tangata Maori and Pasifika Sunday Magazine, entitled “Waitara – a new take on an old crime” Sunday 24 July 2016 http://e-tangata.co.nz/news/waitara-a-new-take-on-an-old-crime

Cover illustration of seabirds on the rocks by Cliff Whiting, from “Bitter Payment: The Taranaki Troubles”, by Michael Keith, New Zealand School Journal, Part 4, Nos 1 & 2, 1978 (Ministry of Education) courtesy of Cliff Whiting.

Taranaki Peace Walk from New Plymouth District Council to Parihaka Pa, 15-17 June 2016. See and overview of this event at http://www.tutamawahine.org.nz/peacewalk2016

photo of the Taranaki Peace Walk arriving at Parihaka by Robin Martin/RNZ.
Caption: “Children at the front of Taranaki Peace Walkers arriving at Parihaka Pa, 17 June 2016. In the centre of the photo is New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd (wearing his Mayoral chains), with (on left) District Councillor Howie Tamati, and vivian Hutchinson.” photo Robin Martin/RNZ, with permission.

See also “Walking into a New Conversation – some thoughts on the Taranaki Peace Walk” (2016) by vivian Hutchinson published in the Taranaki Daily News 15 June 2016, and available from https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxbYoHP-24n7ZjJmc0lhX0xfLTg

Photos of Taranaki Peace Walk Community Conversation Groups by vivian Hutchinson
Caption: Community Conversations on the Taranaki Peace Walk – “Such hikoi are designed not to shout at you, but to invite people to talk with one another ... and to talk in ways that break new grounds of possibility.” photo vivian Hutchinson / Community Taranaki
Caption: Community Conversations on the Taranaki Peace Walk – “Peace and forgiveness are the qualities that give us the space to enable a different conversation.” photo vivian Hutchinson / Community Taranaki
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10208301137980342.1073741835.1060631424&type=1&l=b2e6352ca0

James K. Baxter ... He Tokotoko Mo Te Koroheke (A Walking Stick for an Old Man) published 1972 in the first New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue edited by Owen Wilkes et.al. Published by Alister Taylor

Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake ... Waitara chief and a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi. He was the leader of Te Atiawa at the time of the 1860s land confiscations see http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t70/te-rangitake-wiremu-kingi
Photo of Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, taken about 1880, photographer unknown Ref: 1/2-022668-F Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, Wellington, New Zealand. http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/wiremu-kingi-te-rangitake

McLean Street, Waitara ... see McLean Street in The Daily News 29 May 2010 http://ketenewplymouth.peoplesnetworknz.info/taranaki_street_names/topics/show/803-mclean-street-waitara-dn-29052010
Photo of Sir Donald McLean KCMG in the 1870s photographer unknown Ref: 1/2-005166-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22331041

the awakening of New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd ... see “Andrew Judd: An upbringing too white by far” interview with Dale Husband in e-tangata.co.nz 15 May 2016 http://e-tangata.co.nz/news/andrew-judd-an-upbringing-too-white-by-far

Waitangi Tribunal, Taranaki Report 1996 Wai 143 available at https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_68453721/Taranaki%201996.compressed.pdf

Report on the Waitara Lands Bill November 2002 by Rachael Willan available at http://www.newplymouthnz.com/nr/rdonlyres/ae2d4f22-f261-4579-93e6-6950db1f8ae0/0/waitaraendowments.pdf

Statement of Proposal – New Plymouth District Council (Waitara Lands Bill) available at http://www.newplymouthnz.com/NR/rdonlyres/ED24E472-F299-4375-B323-4F1F7FEEA59C/0/WaitaraEndowmentLandStatementofProposala.pdf

New Plymouth District Council Webpage on the Waitara Lands Bill
http://www.newplymouthnz.com/HaveYourSay/CurrentConsultations/NewPlymouthDistrictCouncilWaitaraLandsBill.htm

Video of the New Plymouth District Council special Community meeting on the Waitara Lands Bill (Waitara 15 June 2016) is at http://livestream.com/accounts/15233126/events/5593841

Other video of the New Plymouth District Council meetings can be seen at http://www.newplymouthnz.com/TheCouncilAndItsPeople/Meetings/MeetingsOnVideo.htm

Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa statement on the Waitara Lands Bill (April 2016) FAQ document available at http://teatiawa.iwi.nz/waitara-endowment-lands/
See also Waatea News 7th April 2016 "Te Atiawa sacrifice allows Waitara solution" http://www.waateanews.com/waateanews/x_story_id/MTMyOTE=/National/Te-Atiawa-sacrifice-allows-Waitara-solution
Radio New Zealand 13 April 2016 "Long-running land dispute nears resolution" by Robin Martin http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/regional/301346/long-running-land-dispute-nears-end

Dissent by Waitara hapu ... see Taranaki Daily News 30 June 2014 “Owae Marae shuts door on ceremony” by Deena Coster http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/10213296/
Taranaki Daily News 25 August 2014 “Parihaka spirit present at protest” by Isobel Ewing http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/10418997/
Radio New Zealand 21 June 2016 "Te Ātiawa 'blood money' accusation" by Robin Martin
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/306870/te-atiawa-'blood-money'-accusation

Dissent from Waitara leaseholders ... see Background article on the Waitara Lands Bill by Jim Tucker in the New Zealand Herald 11 March 2014 “Leasehold fight drags over decades” available at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11217778
also Radio New Zealand 5 April 2016 “Land offer after iwi deal labelled racist” by Robin Martin at http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/regional/300743/land-offer-after-iwi-deal-labelled-racist

Submissions to the Waitara Lands Bill ... see also editorial opinion from Jim Tucker “Hikoi date clash makes you wonder” Taranaki Daily News 25 June 2016 available at http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/81410763/jim-tucker-hikoi-date-clash-makes-you-wonder

Taranaki Daily News coverage of the Waitara Lands Bill hearings ...
Taranaki Daily News 21 June 2014 "Council criticised for sad leasehold saga" by Taryn Uiger http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/10184845/
Taranaki Daily News 4 April 2016 "Freehold titles on the cards for Waitara endowment land leaseholders" by Hannah Lee http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/78538316/
Taranaki Daily News 7 April 2016 "Bill offering freehold titles for Waitara leaseholders to unlock town's potential" by Hannah Lee http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/78646673/
Taranaki Daily News 12 April 2016 "Council elated as Waitara endowment land local bill put out for consultation" by Hannah Lee http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/78820774/
Taranaki Daily News 16 April 2016 "Waitara Leases Unfair" by Taryn Utiger http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/67787943
Taranaki Daily News 15 June 2016 "Waitara Land Bill public hearing debates the value of the town's lands" by Taryn Utiger  http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/81077839/
Taranaki Daily News 20 June 2016 "Council votes to have one year price-freeze if Waitara Lands Bill passes through Parliament" by Taryn Utiger http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/81241973/

Dissent from Councillor Howie Tamati ... see The Daily News 6th July 2016 “Waitara Lands Bill heading to Parliament but there's 'no winners here', councillors told” by Taryn Utiger
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/81797260/
Radio New Zealand 6 July 2016 "Māori councillor votes against Taranaki land sale" by Robin Martin http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/308061/maori-councillor-votes-against-taranaki-land-sale
Photo of Howie Tamati from e-tangata Maori and Pasifika Sunday Magazine Sunday 24 July 2016

Minutes of an ordinary meeting of the New Plymouth District Council held in the Council Chamber, Civic Centre, Liardet St, New Plymouth Tuesday 5th July 2016 at 4.30pm http://www.newplymouthnz.com/NR/rdonlyres/983EA8C1-97DF-4559-9DD7-6149E28077FC/0/Councilminutes5July2016.pdf

Affordable Housing Trusts ... see profile of the work of Brian Donnelly and The Housing Foundation at “Affordable Housing for All” extract from “How Communities Heal” (2012) by vivian Hutchinson, available at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1QP9wfqqKMXWDBKak9kMF94OTg

Te Kohia Pa ... see Taranaki Daily News 27 June 2016 "Pa at centre of Taranaki Wars bought by New Plymouth District Council for $715,000" by Matt Rilkoff http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/81490524/
Taranaki Daily News 1st July 2016 "Council unanimously votes to buy historic Taranaki pa site behind closed doors" by Taryn Utiger http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/81587531/

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 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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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?  

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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. 

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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. 

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.   

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

>click< for photopage

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.

>click< for photopage

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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.

✽ ✽ ✽

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