Stuff: The half-hour trip that robs some Kiwis of 10 years
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Yesterday I embarked on the most depressing road trip imaginable. It began in hilly Wadestown, one of Wellington’s wealthiest suburbs, where serene white-painted villas, each one a picture of colonial confidence, fetch an average of $1.5 million at auction.
The suburb’s inhabitants, who like its houses tend to be white, enjoy rich lives – and long ones, too. As Wadestown is in the wealthiest tenth of New Zealand neighbourhoods, boys born there will, according to official statistics, live to 85 on average, and girls to 88. I mention this because my road trip was, at heart, a meditation on one of the most basic and alarming forms of inequality known to humankind: the disparity in the time we have on this earth.
Life expectancy is shaped by many forces, including ethnicity: Māori live on average seven-and-a-half years fewer than Pākehā. That gap is closing, albeit so slowly that parity will not be attained until 2090. Worse still is the life-expectancy gap between rich and poor, which is not just large, but widening.
Every New Zealander carries with them a mental map of the country: the hills and valleys, the crenellated outlines of the coast. On that map can be overlaid something that public health specialists call an Atlas of Inequality. It is created by totting up the markers of poverty in each area: how many people are claiming benefits, turning off heaters to save power, wearing shoes with holes because they can’t afford new ones.
The volume of these shortfalls gives an area its deprivation ranking. In the resulting atlas, the least deprived are coloured off-white. Among them is Wadestown, its cadastral pallor recalling the Double Alabaster and Eighth Parchment paint-hues that adorn the suburb’s houses.
Public health experts often talk about social gradients, the way that health declines along with income. My trip was marked, too, by an unmistakeable slope. As I drove along the winding road from Wadestown, passing the private hospitals of prosperous Crofton Downs and the Ngaio residents walking their white poodles, through leafy Khandallah’s Empire-themed streets and down towards commuter-belt Johnsonville, I could see in my mind’s eye the Atlas of Inequality changing hue, shading from white into yellow-orange as the level of deprivation slowly rose.
In Johnsonville, the quintessential Kiwi suburb, modern and comparatively modest houses were selling for a mere $1m on average. Just 10 minutes into my journey, life expectancy had already fallen: boys born here might expect to live to 81, girls to 84, several years less than their wealthier counterparts.
From there I continued north, shadowing the train line down to sprawling Tawa, reportedly home to more churches than any New Zealand suburb. Like Johnsonville, it was a sea of yellow-orange zones of middling affluence, spotted with small islands of deprivation marked in the red that, in the atlas, denotes the most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods. Tawa’s life expectancy was, on average, fair, if a shade lower than it had been back down the road.
By the time I reached Porirua, crossing over the highway and entering the city’s east, the atlas in my mind was a blotch of angry scarlet. Islands of deprivation had become a sea. And life expectancy had plummeted, to 74 for boys and 78 for girls. From Wadestown to Waitangirua, in a trip that took just half an hour, 10 years of expected life had ebbed away.
As I sat in my car, parked outside Waitangirua’s strip of roller-door shops, I thought about all the barriers that society puts in the way of poorer families trying to live well. The racism. The underfunded schools. The health system that charges people to see a GP. The mouldy homes that send kids to hospital with respiratory diseases. The cost of a bag of oranges at the local superette ($4.90) versus a loaf of white bread ($1.90).
I thought about the way that poverty leaves scars – worse school results, damaged heart valves – that later affluence often can’t erase. I thought about how, in an interview, Porirua College principal Ragne Maxwell had described a community proud of its strengths, its whānau and aiga connections, but also habituated to people dying well before their time. “It’s a killer,” she had told me. “Poverty, in this community, is a killer.”
I thought, too, about how easy it is to ignore these disparities when they work to one’s advantage; how challenging – yet how enlightening – it would be for people to take that 30-minute drive, to widen their sphere of empathy.
And I thought, finally, about the urgent need to close such gaping disparities in a nation that still calls itself egalitarian. So many hopes, triumphs, joys – and yes, tears – are packed into a year; yet poverty robs people of 10 times that. We have only one life, and it is the most awful injustice that some get so much less of it than others.