Maori kids overlooked

Iread an argument somewhere that the whole faeces-in-the-wall story at Middlemore Hospital, running in various media over the past month, was a beat-up. once visited my mum in hospital in Auckland after she was diagnosed with creeping but, they told us, inevitably terminal leukaemia.

Over the course of 15-plus years as a journalist, just an average journalist to be honest, I had to ask questions and talk to people about the most agonisingly personal things, at the most agonisingly personal times. I’m not even a particularly good hunter of stories, but these events fall in your lap in the course of the job if you stay on long enough.

I was there at so many dark moments – more than I can remember. I looked people in the eye and asked about their own impending death, or the recent murder of their child, or the destruction of everything they owned in flames. What did it feel like for them?

It prepares you, I thought, for speaking about hard things.

Not one single syllable was harder than sitting next to my mum in a hospital room and – mostly unsuccessfully – helping her understand she would have to say goodbye to life. I was her baby once.

It all begs the question: how much faeces in the walls of hospitals is appropriate?

Given the nature of our experiences in all hospitals, the every-day life of life-and-death, like my visit to my mum, the answer is obvious. You can’t argue that just a little faeces is OK, any more than saying a pinch of listeria in your luncheon meat is acceptable.

It is equally difficult to argue against Budget priorities announced by the Government on Thursday, which were a win for health spending. The Government will spend an additional $750 million fixing urgent building problems in hospitals. Nice. In this case they said ‘‘hello’’ to more health spending, and ‘‘goodbye’’ to wall faeces. A simple and decent choice.

Priorities are what make Budgets interesting. Budgets are, after all, just giant versions of what we do every day in our lives: We make choices about how we spend our money.

I’m often delighted and horrified when Governments share my approach. I know it’s wrong, but there’s something that lights up in my heart when they buy garbage too.

This Government has decided to spend $100m on a support package for hosting the America’s Cup in Auckland.

I see there was much made of the fact the money would not go directly to Team NZ, which to me is somehow worse. We don’t even get a catamaran to keep at the end of it all. We could use it for weekend outings, activities. Emergency housing.

Meanwhile, in the dusty corner of Budget coverage that was Ma¯ ori development, there were a couple of stories about $15m in new funding, to be shuffled out over four years, to help rangatahi – young people – without jobs, training or education. There’s about 84,000 of them, we were told. That’s a whole city’s worth of emptiness.

Flicking between Budget stories, I realised a life without dreams, decent work, or connection to te ao Ma¯ ori leaves our kids in a limbo that no amount of high-end yacht racing can fix.

As the son of a farm labourer (let me stress, not a farm owner) I grew up working hard. But my dad and me are, in many ways, very different. He has an extraordinary capacity for working with his hands. I can’t fix machinery, I only destroy it. On the farm I was always just waiting for my white collar and my desk. I could write, and I knew I would get out.

Right now I have a unique perspective on the issue. I am learning te reo Ma¯ ori fulltime, and for the second time in life I have cheated my circumstances. I was just a journalist and now I’m some place where the leadership and generosity of teachers and students are remaking me.

This is where rangatahi should be. This place, these people, should be getting more money.

Take that $100m and use it for Ma¯ ori development by and for Ma¯ ori. (In the spirit of generosity we could take that $15m tagged for rangatahi and support the America’s Cup.)

I know what some people are thinking.

The question of priorities – spend here?, spend there? – is one thing. There will be plenty of people with legitimate responses to yachts vs youth. But for some there simply isn’t a debate. Some would never spend a cent on Ma¯ ori development.

I think racists are smart enough to know we should at least try to understand the shared lesson of our history, our society, our biology, our consciousness, our world, and our universe. But they inevitably blow it. They are, after all, still pretty dumb.

No matter how simple things get, they walk away with the wrong answers. Particularly to the simplest question of all: what is the right thing to do?

Budgets are, after all, just giant versions of what we do every day ... We make choices about how we spend our money.