Listen Now: 
Twelve hours. That’s all I did.
One night in a car. Cold. Cramped. No toilet. No comfort.
My dog Bobby, whining. Me calculating water intake so I didn’t need to go to the wharepaku, and thanking the goddess I no longer had the discomfort of my ikura – so the constant need to shower. This wasn’t a challenge or a stunt. It was a glimpse, a brief encounter with the brutal, daily reality of our kāinga kore whānau.
I could leave. That’s the difference. I had the choice. Most of our people don’t.
What I learned is simple and enraging: this isn’t poverty, it’s policy. Whānau living in cars, tamariki raised in back seats, māmā with no access to toilets, this is not accidental. It’s the direct outcome of political decisions. Tax cuts for landlords, consultants paid millions, housing promises kicked down the road, while whānau sleep on the side of it.
We like to call it a crisis. But that’s a cop-out. A crisis implies urgency. This? This is a slow, deliberate erosion of rights. For tangata whenua to be landless on our own whenua is not just failure, it’s a breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Let’s stop pretending.
Panadol, a safe place to sleep, a toilet, somewhere private to shower, brush your teeth – these are not luxuries. They’re human rights. And when those rights are denied to whānau Māori while upheld for others, it’s not policy. It’s cruelty. It’s colonisation in real time. And we should all be ashamed.
