What Matters to Mum - the dark truth

Hope, Dignity, and a Government Hellbent on Measuring Neither

In a stunning display of intergenerational heresy, a group of rangatahi recently dared to express human feelings about the Budget in front of a room full of economically embalmed boomers.

These wayward youth, failing to reference GDP, interest rates, or “return on investment,” instead spoke about things like their lives, their futures, and most provocatively, their mums. One young man in particular had the audacity to assess fiscal policy based on how it affected the woman who raised him. Disgraceful.

Where others saw Treasury forecasts, he saw the price of his mum’s medication. Where politicians saw savings, he saw the 14-hour shifts that now keep her upright and uninsured. It was, frankly, disgusting. This insistence on reducing the cold, clean lines of a budget spreadsheet into warm, messy human consequences.

Even worse, these rangatahi failed to cite a single think tank, preferring anecdotes, observations, and (shudder) empathy. What next? Policymaking based on the lived experience of people instead of the whims of offshore consultants?

While this sort of sentimental insubordination used to be confined to arts degrees and community halls, it’s now infecting serious discussions about infrastructure, climate resilience, and health. A recent event held by a community health trust even featured photographs of - brace yourself - real people. Not even stock images. Real humans, with stories. The horror.

Meanwhile, in Wellington, the Ministry of Monologues continues to confuse governance with asset management, confusing "services" with "outputs," and confusing human thriving with “target efficiency.” A perfect system, so long as you ignore the sick, the poor, the Māori, the Pacific, the young, the disabled and the emotionally inconvenient.

And while progressive institutions bravely pass reform after reform, each one celebrated with ribbon cuttings and media ops, no one seems interested in building the slow, unglamorous infrastructure required to actually deliver those reforms over time.

The result? Social services with the longevity of a mayfly, climate policies shorter than a news cycle, and equity strategies measured in election intervals. It’s transformation by press release - just don’t ask for follow-through.

Compare that to conservative networks who, while denying the very concept of “social justice,” have spent decades patiently building institutions that reliably roll back said justice. They think in decades. We tweet in disappointment.

Philanthropists, meanwhile, are told to fund “innovation”, provided it wraps in 18 months, delivers on KPIs and doesn’t challenge anyone in power. We celebrate “scaling up” but punish slowness, complexity and anything requiring trust.

What’s needed is obvious - systems that centre people, not performance indicators. Structures that embrace longevity over optics. But these require humility and patience and a willingness to listen to young men talking about their mums.

Unfortunately, none of those show up well in polling.

🧾 Government Press Release

From the Ministry of Participatory Efficiency and Sustainable Invisibility

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Budgeting for Tomorrow - Advancing Agile Human Outcomes via Metrics-Based Inclusivity

The Government remains deeply committed to a forward-facing delivery model which privileges impact-adjacent accountability pathways in order to incrementally enhance the lived stakeholder interface.

We acknowledge the vibrant discourse from our youth engagement sub-cohorts and welcome their value-affirming feedback loops, particularly as they relate to whānau-centred service consumption patterns.

Our latest Budget empowers all citizens (defined herein as tax-contributing service consumers aged 18+) through a blend of compassionate austerity, agile optimisation, and targeted rationalisation of underperforming empathy vectors. A new $6.1 million Innovation Listening Fund will enable ministries to acknowledge community voices in a proactive, silent, and mostly metaphorical manner.

As always, our ultimate goal remains the sustainable containment of human experience within fiscally appropriate thresholds.

#WeHearYou #WeSpreadsheetYou #BetterOutcomesFaster

📮 Letter to the Editor from a Community Health Trust CEO

Title “We Don’t Want Praise, We Need Resources”

To the Editor,

This week, our trust hosted a public photo exhibition to show the faces and stories behind the work we do. Not once did we mention productivity indexes or cost curves. We just showed people — our people.

Visitors wept. Not out of pity, but recognition. We serve solo mums, kaumātua, and youth in pain. We help where others have left. And yet, every year, we fight harder for less.

The Budget told us to "innovate," "collaborate," and "do more with less." We've been doing that for a decade. There is nothing left to cut that doesn't bleed.

What we need is not admiration but investment. Not another pilot project, but infrastructure. Not inspiration, but political will.

Because if one more politician thanks us for our “resilience,” I swear I’ll invoice them for the overtime.

Yours sincerely,
Jo Martin
CEO, Aroha Community Health