Pacific community feeling the pinch in Wairarapa

Pacific Communities in New Zealand’s regions are feeling the pinch from cost of living pressures and government cuts to social support services in the past couple of years.

That’s the message from people working in the area of social services – who are themselves often Pacific people, feeling their own strains too.

RNZ Pacific visited Masterton to talk to workers from two Pacific households in the Wairarapa.

The last census shows Pacific peoples make up just 3.7 percent of the Wairarapa population, or almost 2000 people out of around 50,000 residents.

But like elsewhere around the country, they often do the frontline work with society’s most vulnerable.

Social strains

Kalolaine (Kalo) Tulia, a young Tongan mother of six, is a Whānau Support Worker for Family Works, based in Masterton. She also works for Pathways as a Mental Health Worker.

“There’s a lot of Pasifika in our clients, struggling with mental health, struggling with addiction as well,” Kalo said.

“Some of them doesn’t really understand what that they are actually capable of or qualify for, and then not only that, but there’s not a lot of funding that’s coming through to help, because there’s a lot of cuts.”

Masterton-based Whānau Support Worker, Kalolaine Tulia.
Photo: RNZ Pacific / Johnny Blades

The people who Kalo works to support are often dealing with lifelong struggles with mental health or addiction – putting the little money they have towards their addictions means they don’t have enough to look after themselves.

“What we do, we have a wellbeing workshop for them and help them to budget themselves, and to navigate through these lives without having a mental health breakdown,” she said, adding that Pacific people also struggle for adequate housing in the region.

Kalo is just trying to help her clients keep their heads above water, to be able to simply survive each day. But cuts to the agency’s funding in the past couple of years have added strain.

“We don’t have enough workers to cover a lot of clients, it’s only two people working in the Wairarapa, but the whole lot of work has to be done by more than two people, and it’s not done by two people.

“There will be a lot of people who will be missing out for her from our services because there’s not enough people to cover that,” she said.

Self-reliance

Kalo’s husband died in the past year, and bringing up six kids as a solo-parent is hard, especially with the cost of living so high

Dependent on the hours she does each week in her two part-time jobs, Kalo sometimes has some support from WINZ, but mostly she is on her own.

“You try to navigate life without having to step on other people’s toes, and you’ve got to be more like reliant on yourself to do all what you can do to provide for your children.”

She’s just one example of Pacific people in Wairarapa who work on the social frontline and feeling the bite of hard times themselves.

Other examples are Fijian couple Iliana and Waisake Sabutu who moved to the Wairarapa twenty years ago, and have three children.

Iliana has a background in health and is working at Family Works as a Senior Whānau Support Worker. Waisake works for Corrections at Rimutaka Prison over the mountain range in Upper Hutt.

Remutaka Hill, Wairarapa, Rimutaka.
Photo: 123rf

“It’s very challenging nowadays. We are both full-time workers, but we can feel that [cost of living pressure], and we’ve got a side hustle as well, a business on our own, so we do that when we can,” Iliana said.

Their costs are also high because Waisake has to pay for petrol each day to travel over the Remutaka Range for work.

Stressful work

Waisake’s work with incarcerated people in difficult, complex circumstances presents constant challenges.

“The challenges change every day. You’ve just got to set into a right mind to get into work every day, because when you get into the gates, when you open the doors, you don’t know what to expect, because everything changes within the speed of a second,” Waisake explained.

In her area of work, Iliana is seeing certain trends among Pacific families, including growing pressures on families who are new to the area, seeking to navigate their visa requirements.

“Most are struggling with their visas. The visa fees here – it used to be like a grand for the whole family – but now I’m seeing other families, they have been struggling with a couple of grand for just one person, for a main applicant,” Iliana said.

Adding to the stresses is the fact that young Pacific families in particular face persistent difficulties in securing adequate housing in the area, Pasifika O Wairarapa Trust told RNZ Pacific.

Survival mode is a common way of operating for many households in these times – this is why Kalo Tulia said the social services sector needs more support itself.

“So that people can get out there, the community, and help those that are in need to help them to be able to stand on their own to feed.

Community

Where possible the small but growing Pacific community in the Wairarapa gains support from each other.

“We have our Fijian community. It’s like three years now [since it was formed]. It is growing because of our new families that move over for our forestry workers, caregivers, nurses,” Iliana said.

“So it’s growing. Before it used to be just a few, roughly five to six families. Now it’s growing into, say, more than fifty or sixty.”

Iliana and Waisake, and Kalo as well, say they strive for a future where their kids can stand on their own feet, and they will keep working hard to do that.