7 minute read
Interview: New local-board chair Toni van Tonder
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 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
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
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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“All those jobs I had were good for me,” she says. “Instead of just listening to the rules of Mum and Dad, we were out in the real world, listening to the rules of the boss. We grew up fast.”
Amber was a good student and later qualified to become a tax lawyer. But van Tonder recalls herself as a “pretty average” student at her decile-1 secondary school, and a fairly rebellious kid at home.
“I was the wild one. A little bit eccentric and a bit creative and pushing the boundaries at home.” She had her driver’s licence at 15 and, at 17, moved out of home as a school-leaver.
The wild child’s mother and stepfather had sufficient faith in her to buy van Tonder her own set of wheels, an early-model, gold Ford Laser.
“They were sick of driving me around,” she chuckles, “and buying me that car was a big thing they did for me, but it was the only way I could get places.”
Van Tonder went to the University of Canterbury, and tentatively explored studies in arts and in law. Big sister Amber had another idea.
“She told me to take a paper in politics. She said, ‘you will like it because you are argumentative’”. And big sister was right. Van Tonder loved it.
When Amber moved to Auckland and the promise of a bright career, van Tonder went too, transferring to the University of Auckland.
Once she graduated, she found herself again wondering about what direction to take. She took work in a music shop until her mother visited from Christchurch and told her she should be doing more with her education, suggesting teaching.
Van Tonder went back to postgraduate studies to become a secondary school teacher. She travelled and found work teaching teenagers in London. Back in New Zealand, she was pleased to land a job teaching English at Takapuna Grammar.
“I loved, it and the kids were fantastic,” she says, but, after a year in the classroom she decided the administration and the endless paperwork weren’t for her.
“I am more of a projects person, and I like to change things around with fresh challenges.”
And she and her husband Pierre (a commercial architect) wanted a family.
“Once I was pregnant with Jasper, I realised I didn’t want to be tied to a regular full-
time job and be missing out on special moments with my kids when they were little.”
Although van Tonder describes herself as ambitious, she wanted to balance a career around challenging projects and having children.
Her children – Jasper, now 11, Sadie, 9, and Sid, 6 – are, she smiles, “the most awesome little people”, with Jasper fiercely interested in her board role and all the issues she is contending with. Her days often have to run to the hours of Belmont Intermediate and Vauxhall School.
Her first foray into working in the community, when she went out looking for something to do with a young child under her arm, was to take on the unpaid job of revitalising the Devonport Arts Festival, in 2012.
With her strong interest in the arts, it was a good fit at the time and, she says, garnering support and cooperation came naturally. “My father is a natural salesman,” she notes.
Through the arts festival and subsequent work with the Kaipataki Project’s environmental initiatives, she developed connections in the community.
She was disappointed when she missed out on the job of Devonport Business Improvement District manager when she first applied, but later, in 2017, was appointed to the role.
With it came closer and more regular contact with the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board as well as the workings of Auckland Council.
She decided to run for the board herself in 2019, and credits Takapuna businessman Aidan Bennett for helping make it happen, with her as part of the ‘A Fresh Approach’ team.
“I learned so much from him about how to get things done. One day, before the elections, I saw him by chance in Devonport and I said ‘shall we do this?’. And they did. “It was a pretty last-minute thing.”
What followed after their election in 2019 was far from smooth political sailing. Three years of dysfunction and frustration on a divided board almost saw her call time on her fledgling political career.
This time around, she believes there is the promise of a more collaborative approach.
“We won’t always agree, but we will be respectful of our differences and opinions. And I believe there can be a solution at the end of every conversation.”
Is this her future? Who knows, she asks. “It takes a big toll on family life. I’ve probably got at least another career challenge ahead of me.”
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