There’s something eerily hush-hush about the fact that billionaires from all around the globe are snatching up pristine lands in Aotearoa, at scale. Meanwhile, Māori homeownership rates have been in steady decline for decades.
So while regular New Zealanders are being priced out of paradise, billionaires are swooping in and scooping up swathes of our precious whenua. Either to boast an egregious holiday home, or build an exorbitant bunker to cowardly hide away from this climate-change mess, that they actively caused and continue to profit from.
Don’t be fooled. The top 1% have the money, influence, resources, and power to address the climate crisis at the scale and intensity it requires (they are, after all, the ones who got us into this mess). Instead, they selfishly hoard wealth and continue to rape and pillage our natural world in the name of profit.
The working class doesn’t have the privilege of hiding away in a bunker. Instead, we must throw ourselves into community like our lives depend on it, because they do.
As climate-fuelled weather events intensify and grow more frequent, billionaires will withdraw to their holiday homes and doomsday bunkers stocked with plastic water bottles, canned fruit, solar energy and toilet paper. The wealthy have spare cars, resources and insurance up to their eyeballs – meaning that one of these devastating climate events that completely tear the livelihoods of the working class apart, is simply an inconvenience to the top 1%.
But all hope is not lost, because while we may not have seven holiday homes and a fully electrified bunker, what we do have is community. And when you have community, it’s not about “what do I have?” It’s about “what do WE have?”. How do we pool our collective resources and care for one another so that if I have a drill and you have a chainsaw, together we’re sorted. If you grow kūmara, and I grow corn, we can share the load of feeding our whānau.
Our Para Kore ‘He Kai Kei Aku Ringa’ campaign is about empowering whānau with practical tips and tricks to grow, share, reuse, repair and repurpose at home. It’s not a new concept – it’s about returning to our old ways that are tried and true.
So while Billionaires build bunkers, let’s build a community, you and me.
That’s us,
Para Kore.