Transcript
Treasury, the government's strategic economic policy advisor, runs a series of guest lectures as a source of intellectual stimulation, and to foster debate that can broaden its thinking. Auckland University academic, and director of the New Zealand Institute of Pacific Research, Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa was invited to present a Pacific view. Treasury's principal Pacific advisor Su'a Kevin Thomsen said it's important to have Pacific perspectives reflected in the programme.
"I think it was really important to bring Damon down to start talking from an academic sort of perspective on what the future looks like, especially around Auckland which is the critical mass our population."
A quarter of all children born in Auckland are to Pasifika families. Damon Salesa presented some damning figures on Pasifika and says there need to be key areas of focus for things to change.
"The big thing has to be housing, health and then quality education."
Dr Salesa said the fundamental solutions feed into each other.
"The number one thing, and the number one thing for most New Zealand families is a place to live, and so people need a quality place to live where can be secure and particularly when you have children. We need children to be going to the same school or not changing schools frequently so we need quality housing for families particularly those that are the poorest in our nation... and too many of them are Pacific."
Dr Salesa said the way Pacific families engage with schooling in New Zealand needs to change.
"Families with high parental knowledge and high parental engagement tend to have children who do better because those parents are giving them a leg-up, they help them make the right choices in schools, whereas too many Pacific parents are struggling to understand a fairly complicated system and are not as connected with the schools as we'd like them to be."
Damon Salesa said government agencies like Treasury need to invest better in the changing face of New Zealand or the entire country may miss opportunities.
"The dream in New Zealand is that talent will find opportunity and we know that talent is distributed equally among everyone, there are proportionately as many talented Pacific people as non-Pacific people. So why are those talented Pacific people not finding those opportunities? We have to get them to those opportunities and that's a struggle across everything we do as a nation. If the smartest kid in the world is born and they're a Cook Islander in South Auckland we have to live in a country where they meet every opportunity that they deserve to meet... and at the moment we're so far from that it's a problem for New Zealand, for all New Zealanders."
Su'a Kevin Thomsen said the open invitation to Dr Salesa's lecture allowed the broader public sector to benefit.
"Not just Treasury, to get a number of senior officials from other government departments who are here this afternoon to actually listen and share some of the information that he obviously possesses and it's his academic discipline to actually crunch the data in the way that he does and to present it to us again in a way that we can all understand and sort of empathise with."
Treasury's chief economist Tim Ng agreed.
"What we hope will happen is that the analysts sitting there to write reports and advice will have a broader perspective on the needs of all citizens in New Zealand and all residents in New Zealand that we're trying to produce policy advice about. So not just reflecting on ourselves as Treasury officials, which are a little bit more homogenous than the New Zealand population, so that we can take into account those diverse population perspectives that we're trying to serve."
Dr Salesa said Treasury and other government agencies should be positive about the future.
"Pacific people have the ability and the capacity to address all the problems they face and the problem at the moment is that many of the things we put before them are getting in the way. So a lot of it is about reducing some of the problems we are actually creating in Pacific people's lives so they can better take control of their future."
Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa's Pacific Futures at Treasury is one in a series of guest lectures with a Pacific focus.
