Rebecca Macfie: Unpacking poverty in Aotearoa

Hardship & Hope published through Bridget Williams Books and Pakukore which she co-edited, explore the everyday struggles whanau across the country are facing and analyses the systems, institutions and policies that perpetuate cycles of poverty.

“It's one thing to know that a system is unjust and inflicts injustice on other people. And it's another to try and identify where you yourself sit within that system,” she told RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

As a 65-year-old Pākehā who grew up on a farm in South Otago, she was “absolutely conscious that that has bequeathed significant privileges”, she says.

Not only did the “accident of demography” mean her education was free and she was able to buy a house when they were affordable in the 1980s, her father obtained a farm with a cheap loan through the State Advances Corporation in the 1950s, she says.

“He went from a person of no wealth to a person of land ownership.”

She was telling her story to Zack Makoare who has developed a papakāinga in Hawke's Bay, she says.

“I had started to tell him a little bit about my background. And I just distinctly remember him saying, our people didn't get that.”

She discovered through subsequent research that Māori were not given this access to land after World War II, she says.

“I learned through the Veterans Inquiry, the Kaupapa Inquiry that the Waitangi Tribunal is doing, that what Dad got was explicitly denied to returned Māori soldiers from the same war.”

That explicitly laid bare the specific privilege her family enjoyed, she says.

“Denialists can offer up any kind of excuses they like, but here I had, in my own family, this kind of literally black and white comparison of what racism and colonisation had bequeathed to people and what the advantages of being the dominant culture had given me and my siblings and my family.”

New Zealand has an abundance of knowledge and research about poverty, she says.

“There was data for Africa, there was analysis, there had been expert working groups, there was research, there was scholarship, there was so much material, there was global scholarship on the harms that poverty inflicts on people, and particularly on children.

“And I kept on looking at all of this thinking, it's not that we don't know, it's not that we don't have knowledge, we have all of the knowledge we need to change things.”

And yet “nothing was changing”, she says.

“We are not, not fixing poverty because we don't understand it, we don't know the causes, we absolutely do, and we are still not fixing poverty.”

Her aim was to write stories that added no further harm to a “space that was already just full of harm.”

“And also, that would give voice to people who were working away in communities, doing, difficult, brilliant, genius, innovative work who don't normally get heard.”

People, particularly Pakeha, have an obligation to develop a deeper understanding of the “systems of poverty” in New Zealand, she says.

“The fact that we have overflowing prisons in this country is a fundamental part of why poverty continues to persist.

“They have to understand that the fact that we are condemning more and more and more people in this country to not having any housing security, because we will not give tenants housing security in this country.”

The people she talks to in Pakukore, Poverty by Design are fighting back against the idea that poverty is unavoidable, she says.

“We have absolutely some of the most experienced and best thinkers in the country on these difficult, complex, deeply, deeply multi layered, historically anchored issues.”