Kevin Rooke

I’ve grown up in Nelson and lived in Tasman since 1993, with years in between spent around New Zealand and Australia. I’m father to two daughters who now live overseas.

After six decades watching this country change, I’ve seen wealth pulled upward into the hands of a financial elite while ordinary people shoulder the consequences.

I hold a B Comm (Information Systems) and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Accounting from NMIT. My working life has spanned small business ownership, home and garden maintenance, kayak manufacturing, hang gliding instruction, business administration tutoring, machine operation, and other roles. I currently work with teenagers in a secondary school hostel as a weekend supervisor.

In April 2025, I took part in the Post Capitalist Aotearoa Conference in Wellington, where economists, environmentalists, unions, cooperatives and community organisations confronted the systemic problems the nation faces. Organised by Progressive Party of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leader Bruce Dyer, the conference underscored what many already know: meaningful change is overdue. Child poverty still affects roughly one in five New Zealand children. The resulting harms — illiteracy, truancy, youth unemployment, mental and physical illness, suicide, violence, addiction, crime — cascade through our families and communities. These are foreseeable consequences of policies prioritising profit over people.

Their costs are enormous.

New Zealand has repeatedly elected governments that underperform or fail to improve social and economic wellbeing. In 1984 the Muldoon government brought the country to the edge of bankruptcy. Of the following 42 years, 27 have been held by neo-liberal governments. The erosion of workers’ rights, weakening of pay equity law, and retreat from Treaty obligations have deepened inequality. Removing full employment from the Reserve Bank’s mandate has further harmed low paid workers, and employment prospects for our young.

Threats from artificial intelligence, global capital flows, housing unaffordability, disaster vulnerability and regressive tax policy are widening inequality. With the disposal of strategic assets since the mid-eighties, including the Ministry of Works and NZ Electricity Dept, the cost of infrastructure and power has hindered our growth and increased costs. We need renewed investment in strategic capability, cooperative ownership models, innovative technology and stronger local resilience, especially in renewable energy, bio-diversity, weather event management and food production.

I hold a deep love of Aotearoa and our people but we are judged by how we treat our poorest and most vulnerable, and also by how we develop our upcoming talent to reach their full potential and build their own secure futures here! We can do better — and we must.