“You can be changed in the blink of an eye.”
Talking about his personal relationship with money and the economy, Robertson highlighted the shock he felt at his father’s 1991 conviction for theft and the impact it had on his family.
“As a family, we were comfortable, but not rich. I would put that in a middle-class New Zealand context. My father worked initially in banking and then as an accountant in a law firm.
“There was money to go out to restaurants for birthdays and holidays, although not really abroad.”
It was a middle-class education in a working-class community, he says.
“I was aware, in the community I grew up in, South Dunedin, that there were a lot of people who had no money.
“I had to go to university, but a lot of people I knew didn’t.”
But the certainty of that bourgeois upbringing disappeared when his father was arrested.
“Obviously things went very wrong for my family because my father was eventually arrested for theft as a clerk. So that changed a lot in terms of the wealth we felt around us.”
“It was a huge shock,” says Robertson. “He was an accountant at a law firm. Which eventually came out over the course of a 10-year period, he had about $120,000 stolen, but it had been pretty even, so we didn’t notice. There was nothing flashy about us.” to live.”
“But Dad had tragically ended up in a situation where he thought he would keep his family together this way.”
Robertson says he spoke with his father – who passed away 12 years ago – about the reasons for his actions.
“It was tough,” he says.
“I loved him, he was my father, but I never really forgiven him. It was such a stupid thing to do.”
“The motivation was around his desire to keep his family together and essentially he bought our love to a degree. That’s a terrible thing to even say. But his psychology at the time was that he had to do that and It’s a real downward spiral.”
The events had a very direct consequence in terms of money. Robertson had just left home and was in college in his early years.
Suddenly there was no family backstop at all.
“I vividly remember entering the university registry building to get a scholarship, which I was previously ineligible for [because of his father’s income],” he says.
“They asked me for evidence and the only evidence I could find was the newspaper clipping of his conviction.
“I went from having that backstop of a family to being extremely cramped.”
Robertson says the events have really made him clear about the risks of sudden financial shocks and how they can mean taking money quite seriously.
“The other thing I would say about my relationship with money is that it made me very aware of the fragility of the situation. In my case the shock came from my father doing something terrible, for other people it could just be an illness to be.
“Money plays such a big part in the way we live our lives. You can be changed in the blink of an eye.”
In the podcast, Robertson also reflects on his student activism in the early 1990s and how the neoliberal policies of both the Labor government and National shaped his political thinking.
“I don’t think we called it neoliberalism at the time. But I was really aware of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Rogernomics and when that flowed through,” he said.
“We did look at Keynes and others to see, what are the other ways things can happen.”
The 1980s and 1990s were a time of economic turmoil that scarred many Kiwis, he says.
“I have a theory about New Zealand politics… that everything eventually comes back to Rob Muldoon,” he says.
“That’s what happened in the 1980s. When NZ put itself in a position as a country where we were essentially broke, it meant that the incoming Labor government in 1984 … was faced with these extraordinary fiscal and economic problems .
“A lot of the things they did they had to do…then of course Roger had another plan that went much further, to which David Lange responded. And everything follows from that.”