My father, Haare Williams, is here today. He's in his late 80s, or early 90s maybe—we don't know. He's never had a birth certificate. Dad wasn't a poor kid, because that would suggest that he didn't have enough money to get by. In fact, he had no money, never had a reason to see it, and never handled it. He was raised by his Māori-speaking grandparents on the shores of the Ōhiwa Harbour, in a raupō whare with a dirt floor, in a place that was sacred to the Hāhi Ringatū and to Te Kooti. These were people whose first touch-point with the State, after years of not being extended the rights of every other citizen, was the extension of the old-age pension to Māori by Michael Joseph Savage and the first Labour Government. That meant Dad didn't have to spend his childhood gathering kaimoana and caring for his kui. That meant that he started primary school as a big nine-year-old and learnt to read English from the only book that his grandparents had: the Bible. 