Shane Te Pou – Where Has Our Humanity Gone, Aotearoa?

I’ve been away from home for nineteen months now, living in Europe, and there’s something about distance something about being away that gives you a different perspective. You start to see your own country the way a stranger might — not through the daily happenings of it but in the gaps between visits, in the things that have changed since I were last home.

Before Europe, I spent twelve years working in the Auckland CBD. Tamaki Makaurau. And in that city, on the corner by the dairy next to the casino, you’d find Eugene , he called me Tuhoe Te Pou .

If you’ve taken the time to get to know Eugene — really know him, not just walk past him — you’ll know two things. He carries demons , who doesn’t. Mostly he lives with schizophrenia, and he’s been institutionalised more times than anyone should have to count. But the second thing you learn, usually within the first five minutes of a real conversation, is that Eugene is sharp. Genuinely, remarkably sharp. Ask him about the rugby league season, the NFL, the horses running that weekend, and he’ll rattle off odds, averages, jockeys, form — an incredible mind for figures, wasted on a footpath because we never built anywhere for it to land.

Eugene has a mate, Robert, though the two of them fall out something shocking from time to time and go their separate ways for a while. Robert’s story is a different kind of sadness. Rejected by his whānau. In and out of Borstal as a young fella, a bit of time here and there since — nothing major, but enough. And once you’re in the system, you know how it goes. It doesn’t let go easily. Robert struggles to get bail because nobody will vouch for him, nobody will take him in. So he stays where he is. On the street. Which is, of course, exactly where our new laws now say he’s not allowed to be.

Then there’s a woman whose name I don’t know. I’ve tried to talk to her a few times, but she’s often hyper, angry, and yelling out. One time she was upsetting the local store — I get that, it’s disruptive to their business. I simply went up to her and said I’d buy her a couple of pies, but she had to promise me no more being a hoha. She smiled at me, took the pies, and off she went.

I tell these stories because they’re real people’s stories. And while I’ve been away, this Government brought in “move-on” powers — police can now order rough sleepers to shift on, and if they refuse, they can be arrested. I keep thinking about Eugene and Robert and the woman I call pie woman, and the obvious question nobody in power seems willing to answer: move on to where? Home? They don’t have one. That’s rather the point.

I’ve been reading about three deaths back home these past few weeks, and taken together they tell me something is badly wrong.

A man died sleeping rough yeah outside the very office of the Minister most associated with these move-on powers, in Epsom. The Auckland City Mission called it a tragedy that could have been prevented with proper services. The Minister said it would be wrong to politicise it. But when someone dies of exposure outside the door of the person responsible for deciding where rough sleepers are allowed to exist, I don’t see how that isn’t political. It’s about as political as it gets.

Then there’s a death in Gisborne, still murky in its details, but enough has been said by people who work with the homeless to suggest this isn’t only a big-city story. It’s everywhere. It’s the whole country.

And then the one that should shame us most: a man collapsed outside a medical centre in Mt Albert. A passer-by, a former anaesthetic technician, did CPR for fifteen minutes on the footpath. And according to witnesses, staff inside that centre wouldn’t bring out their own defibrillator — wouldn’t even bring a pillow — because he wasn’t their patient. In the end, someone had to run to a gym down the road to get the machine that might have saved him. A gym had more humanity that afternoon than a medical centre.

I don’t offer any of this as a political point. This isn’t National, it isn’t Labour, it isn’t the Greens. I’m not interested in scoring points off dead people .
This is about something underneath all of that — our collective conscience, the thing that’s supposed to make us who we are as New Zealanders. Manaakitanga isn’t a word we’re meant to keep in a cabinet. It’s meant to be how we treat each other, especially the ones who have the least.

Eugene, sitting outside his dairy doing maths in his head that most of us couldn’t do with a calculator. Robert, locked out of bail because nobody believes in him anymore. A man dying on a footpath while the people with the means to help him worked out whose patient he was.

Is this who we’ve become? A country that would rather move people out of sight than actually see them?

New Zealand, we are better than this. I have to believe we are better than this. But believing it isn’t enough anymore — we have to act like it’s true. We have to build the services, hold the door open, stop pretending that arresting a man for sleeping rough solves the problem of him having nowhere else to sleep.

Then I woke up to the news today that ACT has a election policy to effectively lower the minimum wage
Then to top it off young people who will only receive 60% of the minimum wage whilst paying 100% of rent 100% of food 100% of transport 100% of dentist and medical bills this really is a race to the bottom

We must do better. Because right now, from where I’m standing, an ocean away, I’m not sure this is us.

Or maybe it is. And that’s the question that should keep every one of us up at night.