I can’t say where I went today or who I spoke to. He was a very nice man, working very hard, in a health system that is in disarray. It was illuminating and distressing – at one point, I heard a woman say ‘it’s a first-world problem.’ But we have let this first-world country become third-world in places. Which has led me to think about other countries – there are pockets of third world in Australia and the United States, countries much richer than New Zealand. But we are Kiwis. We are tough, resourceful, resilient, and we can do much better. We will do much better.
Tonight I am back at our house on the shores of the Kaipara.
Tomorrow I will finish my tour of Northland with a range of feelings and memories:
- Yesterday, a man said to me, ‘Our communities will solve their own issues.’ Yes, they will, but they won’t do it without the resources to enable change. People affected by meth with children affected by their addiction can’t fix their problem by themselves.
- Northland is one of the most beautiful and productive parts of New Zealand. We must strive to turn these natural resources into wealth that can be shared throughout the Northland population.
- We are asking our frontline people in health, education, law enforcement, etc, to solve massive dysfunction. This is impossible when they are up to their bottoms in crocodiles trying to work out how to drain the swamp.
- The solution to me is to support the not-for-profit sector to work together to help schools, wananga. academies, etc, to teach young people; good values and attitudes and the confidence and skills to pursue their dreams. But we need to work in collaboration to achieve holistic community outcomes.
- We have proved it can be done. Infometrics have calculated that the return on investment of our programmes is $10.50 for every dollar invested – not many companies can match that.
- When I called Jo-anne at the end of the day, she made my day (as she always does) by saying Northland needs a plan like the rebuild ones post WWII where multi-faceted issues were addressed in an holistic way. The scale is clearly not comparable but for example, the German plan was only 16 pages long. Surely our plan to support Northland can be no more than a page or two but with substance and not waffle.