Alex rises before dawn, quietly scoops up her daughter, makes for the car

Sunday Column. Who has time for politics?

Who has time for politics? Not everybody.

I’m on my feet all day working, that's all I do, our daughter’s immigrant restaurant boss told her one night. It was not his polite way of saying no politics chat from students here please, he genuinely meant he had no idea what was happening, who the players were, any of it. 

His day was prep, and orders, and arranging deliveries, and lining up staff, and taking his turn in the kitchen, and making the customers welcome, and cashing up, and turning everything off at the end of the night, and making his way home to his young family. 

Who has no time for anything but barely coping? Too many.

Not in this welfare state of ours, surely? Let’s hold that thought as we turn on Netflix and roll the opening scenes of Maid, as young American mother Alex rises in the light before dawn, her partner still sleeping off the drink, quietly gathers a few essentials, pads to their daughter’s room, scoops her up whispering reassurance, makes for the car, turns the engine, guns away as her partner, now woken, comes after them.

Keep holding that thought as we see her seek out a safe place to sleep: not friends, because the partner will follow her there; not her unstable mother; not the car, says a police officer tapping the window to move them on.

Keep holding that thought as we watch her now at a welfare office applying for support. No, she has no income, she was the at-home parent; no, she has nowhere to live because she has fled an abusive partner; no, she has not filed a police report about this, the abuse was emotionally intimidating but not physical, not yet, but she fears it is looming. It adds up to a grievous need for help but there is none to be had because her circumstances don't meet the threshold.

There will be much more of this, many more hoops and obstacles, screeds of paperwork; legal nightmares as the angry father’s family sues for custody and - no, wait, don't go there's more to go wrong yet!

Keep holding those thoughts as we watch her now pick up work as a cleaner, and watch an occasional tally of figures run down the screen from time to time showing her meagre hourly pay quickly wiped out by expenses - cleaning supplies just for starters. Watch as she takes on daunting, sometimes vile, tasks.

Keep on watching, as she drives in the evening to redo a job for a dissatisfied client - no pay until the client is happy - with three year old Maddy in the back seat. Alex is jollying her along, Maddy holds the doll out the window to watch her blonde hair trail in the wind. Of course the doll slips from her hands and of course Maddy is inconsolable and of course Alex pulls over on the highway to dash back along the roadside for it and as she finds the doll there’s a sickening sound behind as a car crashes into theirs. There is so much more for her yet to endure.  

It's possible for a stranger to see Alex at any random moment in this story and find fault with her bad choices, but if they stay for any stretch of time to see the steps that lead to things falling apart, the inescapability is just all too clear.

You’re thinking, hoping, things might start to level out now but when you're in this position, you forever struggle to get a toehold. Something as small as running out of phone minutes when you are all out of money can compound into the worst kind of problem.

Thank god things aren't so bad here, thank god being poor and entirely out of options is some American thing that doesn’t happen here, right? Maybe.

We have, some people will say, a more supportive system, fewer holes in the net. But the people who say this will tend to be the people running the system or people who have not actually had contact with it. Those who have been through it can give less encouraging accounts.

Hold that thought as we turn back the screen to watch The Justice of Bunny King.

Here’s Bunny, bouncy, sassy, also vaguely brittle, working the traffic lights in Auckland with a squeegee. What we gradually learn is that her children are in foster care and that she is trying, precariously, to earn her way back to having them once more. How and why she has lost them is not initially clear but soon enough we sense it has something to do with an abusive partner and what may have followed.

And once more we are in the meeting rooms watching a mother short on options being told she doesn't meet the required criteria. She's in Auckland, she needs a home -  no home, no stable environment for her children  - but to repeat: we’re in Auckland, well-maintained scene of complete and utter housing market carnage. And to further repeat: she is short on options.

Again, easy enough to fault her at a given random moment, far less easy to watch the whole story and say things might have gone better if it had been me.

Is it encouraging or dispiriting that the putting these stories to screen - these stories which truly reflect so many true life agonies - make it more possible for doubters to recognise the injustice and unfairness and failures of the system?

Voices often heard in our politics and media about that safety net may come dressed in sympathy and compassion but it can be freighted with judgement and assumption: yes we must help them, but it must be a hand up not a hand out, it's not unreasonable to ask people to make good choices.

People who praise making good choices don’t always stop to consider that making those good choices has a lot to do with having good choices.

What are we willing to do to make those good choices truly available to everyone?

Can we find a fairer, more inclusive, more generous way? Or are we going to go on leaning into a cold wind of free market and individual enrichment?

We could make huge meaningful improvements for the better:

• a vastly more active State, investing vast amounts in affordable housing

• a move towards guaranteed basic income or services

to choose just a couple of colossal examples.

The voices we hear in politics and media are those most free to talk. The ones we hear little are those on their feet all day, all night, the ones barely holding it together, just fully occupied with working out a way to cope.

We need to hear them too, and not just up there on the screen while we enjoy our ice cream.