Returning home to New Zealand after more than 10 years away I find a country both hearteningly buoyant and unsettlingly fragile. Let me explain - the view of one returning son.
I am a children's doctor and a researcher, a Kiwi who flew the nest in 2003 with my family to live and work in West Africa. The Gambia is a small, impoverished but hospitable nation, where I have been working in child survival in communities and hospitals. Death and illness are common and health services struggle to cope. On arriving I saw premature babies just like our eldest child, who was born months before we left New Zealand. The sobering reality was that these little ones had only a 50/50 chance of surviving, while our son had sailed through without difficulties in the secure hands of a very good health service.
There has scarcely been a day I have been away that I have not followed the news in New Zealand, often in this newspaper. But this did not prepare me for all I found on my return. I have been shocked at the cost of living. A look at data from Statistics New Zealand confirmed that the cost of basics like housing, electricity and groceries has outstripped overall inflation rates. A friend who works in a budgeting service tells me that many people simply cannot make ends meet now. I see this in operation within our wider family, where a young grandmother has taken on the care of her granddaughter with special needs. She dares not risk losing the little benefit income she has by taking on insecure part-time work.
These people, and others, are falling through the cracks. According to the Ministry of Social Development 17 per cent of our children are living without basic needs being met. Can we be satisfied with this? Where I have been living you simply cannot ignore the poverty around you. In New Zealand it is possible to pretend it isn't happening. That is human, but I don't think it reflects those things we most love in the Kiwi character, like enterprise, creativity, compassion, hard work, realism and a sense of fairness. These are admirable qualities with which to tackle this problem.
People have asked me whether countries like New Zealand are living it up at the expense of impoverished nations. There are complex issues of global (in)justice and mismanagement at work certainly, and we cannot ignore what is happening beyond our shores, but my answer has never been that things in New Zealand should get worse. Rather, I believe we should be both thankful and dissatisfied. Thankful that we have it as good as we have. Dissatisfied with poverty, injustice and mediocrity. If we are not dissatisfied we will not push to improve and we will tolerate what erodes the very core of our humanity, which we must not. Not in New Zealand. And not worldwide.
