Anaru Eketone: I celebrated when I turned 60, because life expectancy for Māori is 59

OPINION

Turning 60 is a traumatic event for many as we start thinking about how short life really is.

Last week was my 62nd birthday and I was again reminded of the day I turned 60 where I punched the air and said “woohoo, I’ve made it”. No, it wasn’t because of a near-death experience, but because for most of my adult life I knew that the average life expectancy for Māori born in 1961 was 59 years for a male and 60 years for a female. Therefore, getting to 60 gave me the feeling that I had beaten the odds.

Internationally, average life expectancy is an important measure to judge the health and mortality trends of entire populations. It incorporates all the information available at the time, of the age people die at and what they die of, and works out an average life expectancy for each person born in a particular year, but it is an average.

However, I had this irrational worry that I was going to die when I was 59. Having this number “59″ hanging over my head did make me question a few things. For example, why should I save for retirement when the chances are I won’t get there? More to the point, why should I pay taxes to pay for other people’s retirement when the chances are I wouldn’t ever be old enough to receive the same benefits?

Happy birthday - for last week - Anaru Eketone.

In the lead up to my 60th birthday I decided to look up what the average life expectancy at birth was for my wife, to see if there was any difference. As she is a New Zealand Pākehā it was 74 (69 for a Pākehā male). A 15-year discrepancy compared to me. When I told a Pākehā friend of mine this, he said that in this one example you see everything you need to know about why we need improved health outcomes targeted at Māori.

Our public health system has improved so that for Māori males born in 2019 the life average life expectancy has risen to 73.4 years, slightly less that my wife’s who was born in 1959. However, it is still well short of 81 years for a European male and 84.5 of a European female. Note however, that those figures are for those born today.

While average life expectancy has improved for everybody in the last 60 years we have only narrowed the gap by a couple of years. For those of us, like myself who were born over 60 years ago, we still face a likelihood of poorer health outcomes. For those who would lay the blame at the individual, or more specifically at choices like smoking, the 15-year gap between myself and my wife was estimated before it was known that smoking was such a deadly activity.

The Māori Health Authority was to be an attempt to improve Māori health outcomes by targeting specific health issues. Its disestablishment by the coalition Government is an effort to return to the way things were done in the past. If it worked poorly in the past, why go back to a system that proved to be largely ineffective in achieving equity?

That is the problem with the coalition’s ideology, it hinders the opportunity to find more creative answers. They are locked into rigid ways of doing things where any innovation has to meet their political correctness test (yes both the left and the right have their own forms of political correctness).

While we are not allowed to see if the Māori Health Authority would work, one of the successes in the last few years has been the aggressive attack on tobacco and we look to see its overall impact on Māori health. In recent years Māori smoking rates have dropped from 38 per cent in 2015 to 17 per cent in 2022. With the 2022 smokefree legislation we truly were looking at the last generation who would take up smoking by making it illegal for those born after 2009 to ever buy cigarettes.

Anaru Eketone. Photo / Supplied

According to the minister of finance this has now been repealed primarily because the tax money from tobacco is needed to pay for middle-class tax cuts. The other reason is the need for the right wing to again have its politically correct agenda advanced by crying “nanny state”. Whenever one person is calling “nanny state” there is someone behind them saying “if people want to destroy themselves then I should be free to exploit them and make profit from their demise”.

This is all scandalous and makes the Minister of Health Shane Reti a genuine target for disappointment, because as a senior Cabinet minister he would have signed off on this. He always portrayed himself as a concerned health professional, but these decisions cause us to doubt that commitment.

Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in social and community work at the University of Otago and a columnist for the Otago Daily Times.