On the cusp of the release of Budget 2024 John Campbell took a roadie and found that in the minds of struggling Northlanders, Wellington is a whole other country.
In the office of the Mid North Budgeting Service Trust, on Marino Place in Kaikohe, Kane Lyden is telling me about the lives she sees.
“Everyone’s struggling.”
How often does she see that?
“Every day,” she replies. “Every day.”
The office is concrete block. The sofas have throws over them to conceal how long it’s been since they were new. Getting by. Making do. Surviving.
There’s a computer, a printer, and the kind of phone that flash city desks don’t have much anymore.
And there is Kane. Smiling.
Kane Lyden has been doing this work for over 20 years. She tells me the cost-of-living crisis has been hitting people hard, then harder, for about three years. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen it worse than it is now.
“If anything”, she says, quoting a friend she’d spoken to that morning, “it’s like an economic Covid without the masks.”
She leans towards me, clenching a fist as if she’s compelling me to understand. Repeating: “An economic Covid without the masks.”
The land of ‘multiple deprivations’
We’re on a roadie through the Far North.
Clinton Bruce, a cameraman I briefly worked with 30 years ago, then didn’t see much again until I followed him to TVNZ in 2018, and me. A reunion tour. Both of us bewildered by how quickly the years have vanished.
We want to know what people most want from the upcoming Budget. Which means travelling.
The challenge for journalism in an age of reduced newsrooms, of immediacy, of the constant pressure for “content” (that most dreadful of c words), is that journalists have to work fast. And working fast means staying in newsrooms and phoning people whose numbers we already have. Contact book journalism.
And whose numbers do we have? (You know the answer, eh?) The same people. The same economists. The same bankers. The same commentators. The same unionists. Good people. People who generously make life easier for journalists by making themselves available. But people whose small number and repeated use shapes our national discourse. A gentle form of hegemony, packaged as universality.
In the normal course of events, almost everyone asked to seriously comment on the Budget will be tertiary educated, probably home-owning (with mortgages, or not), and disproportionately from households whose incomes are higher than average.
So, we’ve driven north. The less beaten track. Why north? Well, the New Zealand Index of Multiple Deprivation has been here before us.
In 2018, when the District Health Boards still existed, the area covered by the Northland DHB had an overall deprivation ranking of nineteenth out of twenty. Relative income deprivation? Twenty out of twenty. Education deprivation? Twenty out of twenty. The more purple each map the greater the deprivation. One map, the Access to Services measure, is completely purple. No other colour breaks through. Like a ferociously stubbed toe.
Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand) is matter of fact in its stocktake. “Northland has a very high proportion of people in the most deprived section of the population”. And then a small, sad detail. “Northland’s Year 8 students have a higher number of decayed, missing or filled teeth.”
Which is not to say that everyone here has lives directly shaped by inequity and deprivation. They don’t.
![Horse riding on Ahipara Beach, Northland.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/ahipara-beachjpg-T3W7R7OIBNCOVHHGXPTHIHJNJM.jpg?auth=12294647e536a086abb537e51936a848058102405455c7e77b7e3362396e589a&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=1978%2C997)
And it’s not to say that it’s not a special place. It’s so very special that there are times when I’m in the Far North that I wonder at the madness of living anywhere else.
But also, to quote the stark, brilliant poetry of Wanda Coleman, “i have been three months behind in my rent for thirty years. my countrymen do not love me.”
Sometimes, it feels like we love the beaches, but we don’t see the people so much.
When Christopher Luxon visited during the election campaign, he went as far north as Kerikeri, perhaps the region’s richest and whitest town. (He’s not alone in that. It appears the last prime minister to visit Kaitāia was Jacinda Ardern, more than four years ago. Kaikohe hasn’t seen a PM for even longer.)
So, we’re starting in Kaitāia, then dog-legging south, through Broadwood, Rawene, these tiny places, then to Kaikohe, and then taking the long road home.
The Gateway to Paradise
If the roads are all open, and they’re currently not, Kaitāia is only four hours something from Auckland. You could drive State Highway 1 the whole way if its passage through the Mangamuka Gorge hadn’t been smashed like a piñata back in 2022. It’s remained closed ever since. Twenty months and counting.
Kaitāia, the tourist brochures tell us, is the “Gateway to Paradise”. Except the gate is closed. Traffic detours up State Highway 10, bypassing Kaitāia unless travellers choose otherwise. But paradise is everywhere up here. I once went to a beach that had just been named one of the 39 best beaches in the world. There are maybe a dozen better beaches in the Far North.
Kaitaia College has a role of just under 900. Its principal, Louise Ānaru (MNZM), won the Supreme Award at the 2018 Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards for her previous work at Flaxmere College. She’s a brilliant, passionate educator.
It’s just after first bell on Monday morning. I’m seated on the assembly hall stage with Zamara Marshall (Head Girl), Nicco Parsonson (Head Boy), Nathaniel Vemoa (Student Rep on the School Board) and Ash Lucich (Deputy Head Boy).
What a shining quartet.
![Kaitāia College students, from left to right: Nathaniel Vemoa, Nicco Parsonson, Zamara Marshall and Ash Lucich.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/kaitaia-college-students-from-left-to-right-nathaniel-vemoa-RH23TNOBRREERIYHZIMX7ZSY2M.jpg?auth=28629d568d21bfb99a975941c836d190c8f8f811af4f15550167bedcb9217f19&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=1229%2C616)
Zamara is a vaulting champ who wants to be a New Zealand Defence Force medic. Nicco has dreams of a career in the navy, and of fulfilling his potential as an athlete. Nathaniel wants to study and get into a position where he’s working for himself, because agency is strength. And Ash is going to study forestry, because getting that right will be transformative in parts of this country.
I ask them if they ever think about politics – and whether they think politics (as in central government) thinks about them.
“There’s a saying,” Nicco says. “Not much goes north of the Mangamukas.” He smiles at how true that feels to people up here.
![Road slips in the Mangamuka Gorge have resulted in State Highway 1 closures since 2022.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/road-slips-in-the-mangamuka-gorge-have-resulted-in-state-hig-MKP5MCE2KVBXPIKRC6DFVD4BPI.jpg?auth=0ec6b74ddb73533f60a82442e6d603bc0723ebc3ffa43ce79149c1f3cb016b52&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=938%2C348)
The Mangamuka Gorge is very roughly half-way between Kaitāia and Kaikohe. It’s current closure is entirely emblematic of Nicco’s point.
Nathaniel has previously lived in Wellington. There, he felt that politics and politicians were a present, visible reality. “But when I moved up to Kaitāia, I noticed our isolation. When we hear Wellington on the news, I view it as a whole different country.”
“I don’t know if we are seen that much,” Ash answers. “I’d like to be seen more. And if we were seen more, I’d hope that the Mangamukas would get re-opened.”
Ash plays rugby. Saturday trips to away games have been frequently made much longer by State Highway 1’s closure. He thinks of the cost in fuel, in labour hours, in time, for the businesses bringing things in and out of Kaitāia. Cost passed on to a population that often can’t afford it, on top of the cost-of-living crisis.
Later, outside, in the soft, blue light of a northern autumn, their principal tells me that what she hopes for is equity. Equity in opportunity. Equity in resources. “So, they can participate and engage.”
![Kaitāia College principal Louise Ānaru (MNZM).](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/kaitaia-college-principal-louise-anaru-mnzm-L4LH3OO2WZGPRPSXIB3AJFQ6UQ.jpg?auth=daae65297970b20a6a85db073664699052026fa95d84a00bfcd4c561634b8520&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=899%2C466)
“We know it’s not a level playing field,” Louise Ānaru says.
Do we?
Zamara Marshall highlights the Ka Ora, Ka Ako Healthy School Lunches programme and the difference it makes for some of her schoolmates.
Throughout our trip, anyone even vaguely connected with education mentioned this. That the programme is surviving, after David Seymour’s initial descriptions of it as “wasteful”, “unaffordable”, and a “marketing stunt” is very welcome news.
But there are concerns. In what form will it survive? What will $100 million being cut from its total budget look like? Taste like? How will it impact on nutritional value? And what does “an interim model” followed by “a full redesign of the programme” actually mean?
Zamara knows what the programme means now. “A lot of people, I have noticed, take home their lunches. If there’s extra ones in the class they take them home. And provide them for their families. Or eat them for dinner, or something.”
![Deputy prime minister David Seymour.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/deputy-prime-minister-david-seymour-N2EWT6G64VHOXLROE6GPVGOH5I.jpg?auth=940ad23f0981f290d40d2225efa5b0a8d07d5abcb99e40ba936827bf1323d2f8&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=960%2C540)
“It’s a little bit harder”, she says, “because we’re not as well off up here”.
Nico agrees. “I definitely think that there are a few people up here that do struggle.”
That’s something the rest of the country understands.
Don’t we?
Ten fewer years to live
We left Kaitāia and drove south. Twenty-six kilometres to Herekino, although that carsick of a road, as windy as a drunk’s pee-stream, made it seem longer. Through farmland that seems occupied by neither stock nor people, through the Herekino Forest, famous for its kauri (but its beloved track closed due to Kauri Dieback), through Herekino itself, once home to multiple vineyards planted by Dalmatian immigrants who even in their determination to find a new home could never, surely, have imagined themselves so far from the old one?
And into Broadwood.
Journalism is full of memory notebooks. I had driven through Broadwood at Easter, clocked the General Store, and thought, I’ll shoot an interview out the front of there one day.
And here we are.
![Rush hour outside the Broadwood General Store.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/rush-hour-outside-the-broadwood-general-store-L6KK4XCY2NEW5FYRJJH7HGA7AQ.jpg?auth=a97d4e73d2e1651b777a4b302347fca374cd26596908a6249bd8d6bc9c6c6cf8&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=2058%2C1077)
When you step into a general store in a one store community you’re mainlined straight into the heart of the place. No preamble. No introductions. In.
It’s low-key bustling. Mail being delivered. Groceries bought. Takeaways sold. Cars gassed up from pumps out the back. The kind of commerce that the internet and mega-stores haven’t yet deflated.
Tulisa Linder is one of two women running the counter. People call her Lisa. Mel holds the shop and Lisa comes and sits with me outside.
![Inaccessible healthcare in Broadwood concerns Tulisa Linder.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/tulisa-linder-Z2UL5HO5U5H5TKR5Y6YI2CUPN4.jpg?auth=8f7a74816960b6dbb07ae0ebb6ea44d2d2fd83cce2f64bd40c1fae9af2a85f0a&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=1953%2C984)
She is shy, at first. And then not. Cars pass and she waves to their drivers. Customers arrive and she greets them by name.
She loves this place.
I ask her what would make a transformative difference here, she says greater access to healthcare.
“We have no healthcare here, eh. In my opinion, it stops at Whangārei.”
Whangārei is how far away?
“A couple of hours.”
She’s echoing Nicco’s sense that, “not much goes north of the Mangamukas.”
And Lisa says it without hesitation. With the insight of having watched the people she lives among struggling to access healthcare, particularly for serious illness.
What does this struggle mean?
The most recent Health and Independence Report tells us. “Higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation are clearly associated with poorer health outcomes. Life expectancy is around 10 years lower for people living in the most deprived areas.”
Ten years.
“Māori and Pacific populations are over-represented in the most deprived areas”.
For Lisa, it’s about getting to hospital – for oncology care, for heart care, for diabetes, for dialysis, for respiratory care. For the illnesses made more likely by poverty; the same poverty that then complicates access to treatment. Roads closed. Cars expensive. Maintaining cars expensive. Petrol expensive. Little or no public transport. A local GP shortage, although that’s not unique to here.
This is the equity that Louise Ānaru was talking about.
And, as she told us, and the Te Whatu Ora report on Te Tai Tokerau (Northland) tells us, it starts in childhood: “The deprivation index, which divides the population into ten groups according to their deprivation scores, placed 80 percent of Northland’s child population on the most deprived half of the index.”
Which is why, as Zamara told us, some children take school lunches home for dinner.
We know that, eh?
Do we?
‘What’s not to love?’
It’s a beautiful, sunny day. Lisa and I sit out the front of the store. Life sweeps softly in and out. She tells me why she’s happy here. “The people. What’s not to love, eh? I mean, look at where we live… The food. The food is the best, eh?”
What’s the best food?
“Hangi. Kūtai (mussels). The fish.”
Even in these strange, taut, bristling times you meet people on the road who contain such kindness that it almost feels like an act of defiance. A declaration of the value of good.
“Are you sure you don’t want a cuppa?”, Lisa asks me, as our interview comes to an end. In three decades of making television, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that on camera before.
![The town of Rawene, approached by the ferry.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/rawene-approached-from-the-ferry-HYB6KDJQSNAJZP3CLJGFWZHHVE.jpg?auth=9de074fc2faab8da777a2ccf864f22bf2a7fdfb1b747f3036445bc2bc67ea587&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=1862%2C1278)
We head south to Kohukohu, where we catch the car ferry to Rawene.
If you’ve never taken it, the car ferry crosses the Hokianga Harbour surprisingly far inland from where the Tasman cuts in at Ōmāpere. On a still day it’s a strikingly lovely trip. And Rawene, with its boatsheds, and historic homes, and weatherboard shops, some of them brightly painted like a story book illustration, reaches out onto the water to awhi you in.
In this gentle place, Rawene and then in Kaikohe, where we head next, our roadie changes tone.
Hold the sugar
Kaikohe is where we meet multi-tasking community stronghold Kelly Yakas, Far North mayor Moko Tepania and budget advisor Kane Lyden (who described the “economic Covid without the masks”).
While all three are full of warmth and kindness, full of an aspiration to lead and lift and inspire, there’s a greater edge to their comments. As if what we’re describing is so broken there’s no point in sugarcoating it.
I ask Kelly Yakas what the Government could do to make a transformative difference to the lives of people in the Far North and she answers, “resign”. Kane Lyden tells me she’s never seen it worse than now.
Mayor of the Far North Moko Tepania talks about how these communities need to be entrusted with the resources to take more care of themselves, rather than wait for the hit-and-miss prescriptions of distant, disconnected governments, who inevitably know less about the Far North than Far Northerners know about themselves.
This isn’t tribal enmity, or party politics, it’s a deep weariness. And, they would argue, it’s empirical. The result of living here, caring deeply about here, and seeing the impact (or non-impact) of central government politics.
“Successive governments”, Tepania says.
![Far North Mayor Moko Tepania.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/moko-tepania-far-north-mayorpng-5FOZVGLXXFBWVHZ5DSNCF65IVE.png?auth=b50376f37e497b1f53811f1b02df945a66359d82d0d4552570dc5505516697c0&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=944%2C335)
I’ve come to see Tepania to follow up on stories I wrote and filmed in March when I drove through the lower North Island to talk about the state of water infrastructure. Now I want to ask what, if anything, is being done to manage water infrastructure here.
Tepania almost laughs.
“We don’t have the money,” he says. “The Far North has the second most water infrastructure in the country, but we also have the lowest median household income.”
He’s responding to the government’s Local Water Done Well policy. Essentially, the policy puts the responsibility for our often aging and overwhelmed water infrastructure into the hands of councils, but without significant new central government funding to support the policy.
“The early signals are that under the legislation we’re going to have to ringfence a certain amount of funding and target it to water infrastructure. But even if we were to put 100 percent of our $172 million annual budget into that, it’s still not enough. And then, how do we keep our district running?”
How much are we talking about to fix the region’s water problems, all up?
“The figure that our Chief Executive put on it is $660 million, to plug the deficit that we have across the 16 wastewater treatment plants and eight water plants that Council looks after.”
And what is your chance of coming up with that much money?
“Oh, zero chance. Zero chance.”
Another mayor, who got my number and phoned me after those water stories went out, told me, “Devolution without adequate financial support is actually abdication.”
That mayor was seriously angry. Moko Tepania just thinks we can do better.
“If this Government could do one thing”, I ask him, “that would be truly, meaningfully transformative to the Far North, what would it be?”
He giggles. Like a quiz show contestant asked how they’d spend the big prize.
“The one thing that this Government could do for the people of the Far North is have trust in us to be able to make our own decisions and come up with our own solutions… Giving us the funding and letting Far Northerners use that funding to implement the appropriate solutions to the issues and challenges that we face.”
“We’re another country to the people in Wellington”, Moko Tepania says. Again, that sense of being unseen. Almost exactly the same words Nathaniel used at Kaitāia College.
What and where and how would there be the metrics, measurements, accountability, oversight on this funded devolution?
“We have a word for that now, in Local Government,” says Tepania. “Localism… The other 66 mayors of this country will also stand up and preach the power of localism… And doing a better job of it. And when people talk about the metrics and accountability and things like that, what does the accountability of central government to our people look like?”
Local input, local solutions, local control
I found Kelly Yakas after a painstaking search for someone who’d worked meaningfully at multiple levels of community engagement in the Far North, but who hadn’t been endlessly interviewed.
From early childhood education, to governance roles with primary and secondary schools, to mentorship, to legal work preparing Waitangi Tribunal claims, to her belief in the health benefits of exercise leading her to establish (and teach) local aerobics classes, Kelly Yakas is determined the Far North and its people will do as well as they deserve.
And she doesn’t think the new(ish) Government is helping with that. Quite the reverse. Emphatically the reverse.
![Kelly Yakas, Northland](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/kelly-yakas-northland-IUOD2UHDGRA6VNUIIQGUDY233I.jpg?auth=57ba60c31d14384ac1e639b58768f21fe8c235e40dfac6296270a7b714d2bb86&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=906%2C380)
“All I can see… is that they’ve actually created more harm than they have good,” she says. “It’s outrageous, in terms of the level of… disregard of those who are our most vulnerable… And when you see bills through parliament, like the Fast-Track Bill, that’s going to harm our environment, when you see the repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki, that is going to cause more harm than good for our Māori children.”
I ask her, given that, despite her encouragement, the government is not going to “resign”, what can it do to make a difference whilst in power? And, like Moko Tepania, Kelly Yakas argues for greater local input, local solutions, local control.
“Listen to the actual people that are working on the ground with these communities.”
One of them, is Kane Lyden.
I began this story with her because, for 23 years, the faces of poverty have walked through her door to try and make little go further. Or nothing go somewhere.
They are shadows, often, in our reporting of politics. They do not have press secretaries and comms people. They will never attend a Budget Lock-Up, or be used as an expert in post-Budget analysis. They may never even go to Wellington in their lives. But in the office of the Mid North Budgeting Service Trust, Kane Lyden hears their stories, day after day after day.
“The struggle is real”, she says.
It’s the way things add up. We’ve talked about the lack of public transport, the expense of maintaining old cars, the rising cost of fuel. Then there’s rent, which has risen sharply in Kaikohe over recent years. And food. “Meat and vegetables, people are struggling with,” says Lyden. “People are going around looking for food parcels.” Obtaining basic hygiene products can be difficult. “It’s hard.”
I ask if she thinks those of us who can afford to buy food know enough about those lives.
“No. No. We don’t.”
![One of the many beautiful beaches of Northland: Ahipara.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/ahipara-sunset-SCYX6CLZWVDR7EQI66KNJJKR3A.jpg?auth=e51f7936cc34f2cd2cd9436527f15e5633d7ad5fffa4299bed967ebbbc95c00d&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=2016%2C1134)
That other country
Throughout our roadie, I was struck by how little connection people in the Far North have with “Wellington”. Not the city itself, but their sense of the politics coming out of it. The idea of parliament (and the reporting of it) as the central pillar of our political discourse. In the Far North that discourse feels remote and inward looking. A power circle. Politicians, journalists, commentators. Little of it crossing the Mangamukas, to quote Nicco Parsonson, again.
This isn’t an overstatement. Almost every person I spoke to expressed some version of this. Moko Tepania and Nathaniel Vemoa talking about Wellington as another country. Nicco’s Mangamukas line. Ash Lucich saying, “I don’t know if we are seen.” Zamara Marshall gently, kindly explaining the impact of lunches in schools, as if those of us who’ll read this, or watch our interview with her on TVNZ+, wouldn’t know what it is to have to take leftover lunches home for dinner. Tulisa Linder’s sense that healthcare stops at Whangārei. Moko Tepania and Kelly Yakas advocating for localism, because centralism doesn’t feel like it’s for them. Kane Lyden saying we don’t know the stories of these lives.
![Watch John Campbell interview the people in this story in his 'Budget Roadie' on TVNZ+.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/john-campbell-in-northland-OE4BQSVKDJCMDCAOSD76THVL5Q.jpg?auth=e084107cac9ff6663ca591696a4f202539cfa6d0a1fa112cef0c5beffe9fabd2&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=951%2C498)
After I returned to Auckland, I began to receive phone calls from people who’d heard I’d been in the north. People I’d spoken to had told them I was there and passed on my number, and people who work in community support, in social services, in organisations dealing with poverty began to phone me.
It can’t be allowed to get worse, they said. Whatever happens in the Budget, it can’t make things harder for those at the bottom. Because it’s already hard enough.
Some worried about changes to benefit eligibility.
Two people explicitly expressed concern about the targets contained in the Child Poverty Reduction Act. These were particular phone calls. Deep detail.
However much those targets may really mean, however transformative they’ve actually been (and the general consensus is not nearly as much as most people in the sector had hoped), the targets are there and they’re an agreed measure. Don’t alter them or resile from them, these people begged the government. We must maintain targets and we must measure progress, they say, or we’ll lose sight of where we are. And then more school lunches will have to go home for dinner.
![The lunch budget for secondary school students will drop from $8.62 to $3 under the changes.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/the-lunch-budget-for-secondary-school-students-will-drop-fro-IFQQHHT4FNDRTCMANM5WIFSE7I.jpg?auth=da25e1178a1b8d39dee10539165281d7bed92033729c9ec890977cc5a3999949&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=1280%2C720)
After the floods
In March of last year, weeks after the double whammy of the January floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, when the rain’s impact on the kūmara crop that helps make Dargaville such a vibrant town was beginning to reveal itself, cameraman Andy Dalton and I went north to shoot a story on the crop loss.
A year and a bit on, we went to see Michelle Ruddell, this time Clint and me, and this time on the land she farms with her husband, Troy, roughly 30 minutes north-west of Whangārei.
How is she going?
Good, she tells me. Smiling. Although it’s a busy time of the year. The calves are feeding, their tails wagging. The grass is green and lush. The sky is free of menace. It feels, even to townie like me, hopeful.
![Michelle Ruddell, dairy farmer, Chair of the Rural Support Trust in Northland.](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/michelle-ruddell-dairy-farmer-chair-of-the-rural-support-tru-KRH5PSNMRFFLVE7332PQVOQGMY.png?auth=13fc012c5d28d8ac58a44a3d24b53914b4fe7fb54531cf6582efc2804c8a4d8a&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=960%2C540)
But the storms of 2023 have had a long tail, for some. And the cost of living crisis has made it to farms, too. And interest rates. And a sense that even though this is a profoundly different group of people from Kane Lyden’s clients in Kaikohe, there are also people on farms struggling against a tide of factors largely beyond their control.
Do you think we know your story, I ask Ruddell, those of us who live in the cities where the decisions are made?
“Not the day-to-day story, no”, she answers. “That’s why it’s really important for local people to support local people. Because we know the challenges. We live it to day to day.”
There it is, again. In different words, and from a different perspective, but the same sense of what Moko Tepania called localism.
What can the government do for the communities you represent?
“Some more certainty,” says Ruddell. “I guess that comes down to funding, for the Rural Support Trust. I’d really appreciate certainty of funding, so that I’m not having to fundraise 70 to 80 percent of my yearly budget.”
This is the recurring theme, that empowering communities to take better care of themselves, requires supporting communities to do so.
Farming can be lonely, Michelle Ruddell tells me.
Part of what she and the Rural Support Trust are trying to do is give fellow farmers support by being there. “Smoko on us,” she says. “Turning up and providing morning tea.”
When people are doing it tough, how do you help?
“We listen, and we listen without judgement. And that’s huge.”
How huge?
“My team has grown from six ag facilitators supporting 40 clients, to 16 ag facilitators supporting 160 clients. In Northland. In the last year… That we’re supporting, one on one.”
And what are your clients dealing with?
“At the moment we’re working with them on an accumulation of prolonged stress and financial difficulties and the ongoing recovery from losing their crops last year.”
And in the most serious cases, how intense is the stress?
“Massive. Massive. And that has a ripple effect, because when you’re supporting someone, you’re supporting them, you’re supporting their family…”
Their business, their community.
And outward. The ripples.
We were away for five days.
Everyone we met was kind, pleased to be asked for their views, thoughtful in their responses, hopeful of their capacity to make a difference, but uncertain whether they’ll be better enabled to.
Nearly everyone we met saw politics both as built elsewhere and built for elsewhere.
It ripples out to them, for better or for worse. But does it know who they are?
“This should be a country of aspiration, where every child can pursue big dreams,” Nicola Willis, now minister of finance, said in her maiden speech to parliament. “New Zealand has enormous potential, and I am determined that we realise it.”
![What will Finance Minister Nicola Willis's Budget 2024 deliver for Northlanders?](https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/tax-cuts-still-on-cards-but-may-look-different-to-what-was-p-WOPBSHYGHVAFLB43QLGRG2ZLTI.png?auth=e522b4cc58d1fdda97194946c8fe546ee1c4cb948528bbafd590b1c4476271a9&quality=70&width=767&height=431&focal=960%2C540)
In Kaitāia, where the secondary school principal dreams of equity of opportunity, children are taking leftover school lunches home for dinner.
In Kaikohe, the cost-of-living crisis has become “an economic Covid without the masks”.
None of this is new. (None of it.) But Kane Lyden, who’s been responding to poverty for over two decades, says she’s never seen it worse.
How do we address that?
And how will that happen in the Budget?
Watch John Campbell interview the people in this story in his ‘Budget Roadie’ on TVNZ+.
PLUS: Have a question for John about next week’s Budget? Flick an email to [email protected] with JOHN in the subject and he’ll answer them live on 1News.co.nz on Tuesday.