‘Working class . . . looked after each other’

The latest instalment of our Money Talks series, featuring well-known Kiwis talking about the impact money has had on their lives. This week: Political commentator Shane Te Pou

Why is it that some people are rich and some are poor? What’s at the root of inequality?

Political commentator Shane Te Pou has some strong views on money and has never been shy of sharing them.

“The founder of Amazon [Jeff Bezos] has tens of thousands of workers who live in poverty and I just don’t know how he can sleep at night,” he says on the latest episode of the Money Talks podcast.

A former unionist turned business executive (with data-storage company Mega), Te Pou grew up in working-class Kawerau in the 1970s with a Ma¯ori mum and Pa¯keha¯ dad.

He acknowledges the role strong parenting, wha¯nau support and a bit of extra discipline played in giving him a good start — even as others in his community were drawn down the gang path.

But ultimately, arguments about individual responsibility only go so far, he says. “We have a generation of New Zealanders living in indentured poverty. And the inequity is growing.

“If you have a kid that goes to school hungry and cold and has poverty related diseases, like rheumatic fever, he or she is never going to get ahead. It doesn’t always work out that way, but the numbers are against the kids born in poverty.”

Te Pou describes his mum as rich, even though she worked until she was 69, held down two or three jobs and regularly went without in order to help others.

“My mum’s measurement was, if I’ve got enough kai for me and my mokos then we’re doing okay and we can look after others,” he says.

Te Pou acknowledges his whakapapa and the Ma¯ori perspective around money and finances, but says his is also very much a story of class consciousness.

“We were working-class and working-class families looked after each other,” he says.

One of his earliest memories is when Norman Kirk died in 1974 “because it really upset my father, he cried . . . it was like a brother had died.”