MATTHEW TUKAKI

Surviving to tell his tale

Death is a springboard, but it was in Australia in 2001 that Matthew Tukaki discovered the pool at the bottom might be dry. He was a homeless young man in Belmore Park, a glade marooned in the middle of concrete in Sydney, next to the central station.

His dad, Midwinter Tukaki, had told him to stick it out in Australia until he made it – but then his dad, only in his 40s, died.

These fighting words from his father were meant to encourage – to impart determination – but they became an unresolved, unforgiving North Star to the son. He must succeed.

Tukaki was living on a bedroll under the trees, with his only suit, used for job interviews, carefully placed in a black plastic bag. Every night, his sleeping body doubled as a pressing service.

Sydney was still warming its hands on the afterglow of Olympic success: fireworks over the harbour bridge in a new millennium, Thorpedo in the pool, Cathy Freeman rounding the last corner of the track.

A bright century beckoned for the Lucky Country. Tukaki, on the other hand, had holes in his socks and was deeply hungry.

‘‘I’m a storyteller,’’ he says, from across the table in Copperfield’s, a cafe in The Beehive, 20 years later. He is in Parliament to watch a law pass that will ease the creation of Ma¯ ori wards on councils. A win for improving Ma¯ ori involvement in local government.

On this day he is talking about his own life and about the often untapped, innate potential of Ma¯ ori. One such talent, he tells me, is the Ma¯ ori ability for storytelling.

Tukaki has, in the past few years, made a rapid rise in advocating for Ma¯ ori in Aotearoa. This comes after astonishing success based on his own storytelling talents, in Australia.

Tukaki, with three siblings, was born in a working-class family in Upper Hutt. His dad, who died from an aneurysm, was of Nga¯ i Te Rangi from Matakana Island, Tauranga. He worked in the Dunlop tyre factory in Upper Hutt, near Wellington. His mother, Margaret O’Flaherty, was of Irish blood and worked hard herself through a series of jobs.

Tukaki attended St Joseph’s School in Upper Hutt, followed by St Patrick’s College in Silverstream.

At college, his academic achievement, never that great to be honest, ‘‘took a nosedive’’. He was a ‘‘larrikin’’, a class clown who could make connections and have fun with anyone.

Tukaki thinks the school system is too formulaic, locked into a curriculum that leaves kids who might have ‘‘different skill sets’’ behind. ‘‘For me it metamorphosed into storytelling. No matter how much trouble I’d get into, I’d always have a good story to get myself out of it.’’

What is storytelling today, he asks. It is the storytelling implicit in sales and business development. ‘‘No-one takes advantage of that inherent skill, and Ma¯ ori predominantly are great storytellers.’’

Tukaki drifted through a few jobs after quitting school in what was then fifth form (year 11) and doing some trades and polytechnic training. Eventually, in 2000, he headed to Sydney, just after the Olympics, in a bid to find his own success.

‘‘My dad dropped me off at the airport. Before we went to the airport he took me to Valentines in Petone for an all-you-can-eat buffet. I went to Sydney. I’d never been overseas before in my entire life.’’

Tukaki had no job to go to and was ‘‘running out of money’’, but his father helped him out as much as he could. ‘‘And in February 2001, dad died.’’

It was, he said, a horrible time. Just getting home was difficult. He had no money and he’d run his passport – still paper in those days – though the wash.

After his dad’s tangi, he remembered what Midwinter Tukaki had told him: Don’t come back from Australia until you’ve made it. ‘‘So I went back.’’

And so it was that Tukaki lived rough in a Sydney park on a bedroll covering his one and only suit. After a few months he met an old mate who helped him get a job in education software. ‘‘All of a sudden I’d gone from homelessness and being poor, to $65,000 plus superannuation.’’

Tukaki asked for his first pay cheque in advance. ‘‘Mate, I was hungry. I had holes in my undies, holes in my socks.

‘‘By that stage my white business shirts were gone and I had the coloured shirts.’’

He saved for a bond and found a home, then gradually caught up on his debts over the next year. ‘‘Then I knew that if I was going to sustain this, I just had to work hard. I couldn’t give anyone a reason for wanting to sack me.

‘‘Eventually I used the art of storytelling once again, my sales thing, to actually say, ‘I can do a better job than that bloke.’ ’’

In a short amount of time he was the state manager for the company. ‘‘My salary had gone from 65 to 75 to 85 [thousand dollars], and that’s where it all began.’’ Eventually he struck out with a group of friends in his own business, getting into what was one of the first online retailers in Australia, specialising in Samsung products.

However, selling toner cartridges, for Tukaki, wasn’t exactly riveting. So the group launched a subsidiary doing ‘‘knowledge management’’. Knowledge management, to the best of my research, appears to revolve around how a company stores and shares regularly needed information – within the company and with customers.

The challenge of selling the concept and associated paraphernalia, I think, is something akin to hocking off individualised plastic wrappers for bananas.

Tukaki started taking the workshops on the road himself – ‘‘but in order to make it work we knew we had to be known as the gurus of knowledge management’’.

They came up with the idea of running ‘‘a global knowledge management conference’’. Heavy-hitting international experts were brought in from around the world. Tukaki set himself up as the conference facilitator.

‘‘Then all of a sudden you hit guru status by association.’’

A strange thing happened. He got a string of major knowledge-management contracts reviewing federal and state organisations. His guru-hood became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

‘‘You go from making it up through the story, to, at some point, you do know what you’re talking about.’’

The list of what he has done since in Australia is so long that you wonder where he found the time: a mix of business, personal and community work.

He became the boss of the Australian branch of the international recruitment agency Drake International.

He became chairman of Australia’s National Coalition for Suicide Prevention. He became a talk radio host. He became the country’s representative to the United Nations’ corporate sustainability programme.

The lifestyle, and demands of the work, almost became a springboard into death.

Tukaki had not only developed an infection of the lining of his heart after a trip to India, but he also had a deep love of not-so-healthy food. ‘‘I was notorious for carrying around a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in my backpack . . . on the off-chance you get prawns at a hui.’’

He was giving a speech at the Business and Professional Women Australia conference, when he suddenly felt like a train had hit his chest. ‘‘I just wrote it off, because I’d had an allyou-can-eat buffet for lunch, so I thought I had really bad indigestion.’’

He caught a train home to Redfern, then had a lie-down but couldn’t get comfortable. Eventually he stopped at his GP clinic on the way to have a beer with mates. There he blacked out, was resuscitated in an ambulance ride to hospital, and eventually woke up in the cardio ward.

He has been up and down on a weight-loss journey since then – a journey many other Ma¯ ori are familiar with.

Tukaki shifted back to Aotearoa about three years ago. He is the executive director of the New Zealand Ma¯ ori Council (a statutory authority), and he leads the National Ma¯ ori Authority. And he was shoulder-tapped to lead a ministerial advisory board to help fix Oranga Tamariki.

It started work in February and the highprofile, high-mana membership also includes Dame Naida Glavish, Shannon Pakura, and Sir Mark Solomon. (Sir Wira Gardiner became the acting chief executive after the departure of former chief executive Grainne Moss.)

The Government showed great courage in appointing him, says Tukaki.

He didn’t hold back in his previous criticism of the agency – or anything else he saw as damaging to Ma¯ ori.

It’s been a helluva story for Tukaki so far, and as its central character he can be fun, disarmingly honest, and occasionally blunt.

‘‘Everybody knows that’s who I am . . . I’m hard in calling out ho¯ ha¯ , and nonsense and silliness.’’

And if you didn’t know that, then you’ve missed the point, he says.

‘‘No matter how much trouble I’d get into, I’d always have a good story to get myself out of it.’’