The Devonport Flagstaff Page 30
Interview
November 4, 2022
Early jobs formative for local-board chair Raised in Tokoroa and Christchurch, Narrow Neck’s Toni van Tonder is a new leading light of Shore politics. She tells Helen Vause about her early years, and hopes for a more cohesive local board. At one time, Toni van Tonder would never have seen herself heading into local politics. But in her mid-30s, as a young mother, raising her family on the North Shore, she began to reflect more about the workings of the world around her, and the people with the power to make things happen in her community, and thought: “There is a place for someone like me at their table.” And once that idea came into her head, she never stopped thinking about it, she says. Recently re-elected as a second-term member of the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board, van Tonder last week became its new chair. Now aged 41, she talked to the Flagstaff about the journey that’s taken her into the heart of local issues. At her kitchen table in Narrow Neck, she talked about the work ahead, and finding a balance with family life. Looking at her three children today, with a middle-class life and a comfortable home, she recalls that her own early life was much less privileged. She spent her early childhood in Tokoroa where her grandparents had settled when they came from the Netherlands, and where her own parents chose to put down roots, thinking they’d have a chance of having a home of their own there. She still has a photo of their stark little house on a large open site. But before van Tonder was out of her primary school years, her parents split up. She and her her older sister Amber went to Christchurch with their mother. Until their mother re-partnered, the family endured an unsettled time in a series of different addresses. Van Tonder eventually attended seven different schools. “It was hard but we weren’t unhappy. Mum worked very hard, and she was strict because she had to run a tight ship with us. With all the moving around, we just learned
Stepping up... Toni van Tonder was recently re-elected to a second term on the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board, and last week became its new chair fast how to adapt and settle in somewhere new. I soon worked out how to get along and how to make new friends.” Amber was only 18 months older than Toni and the two were close, with Amber later often influencing her sister’s choices. The girls always had little jobs after school, on the weekends and in the school holidays. “As kids we had to work for whatever we needed and pay for our own stuff.” Amber had a milk run, out with heavy crates in freezing weather. When she was barely a teenager, van Tonder got her first
real after-school job, doing filing and document-shredding in the offices of a shipping company in Lyttelton, where the family then lived. “I still remember what we used to earn and how it got better and better. When I got a job at Countdown, I was earning $5.11 an hour, and then later, I was making $8.50 an hour at McDonald’s.” By the time she was 10, she was doing the vacuuming at home and making dinner. “It was schnitzel and chips and frozen veggies most nights.
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