Chris Hipkins

And I was in a minority in the school in that I was Pākehā kid.

The biggest population was Pacific.

The second biggest population was Māori.

And then us Pākehā kids were the third biggest population.

And then after that, actually, we had quite a big Indian population there too.

And mum and dad decided that we should go to a school, a secondary school, that meant that we weren't just surrounded by other kids that were just like us.

They wanted us to grow up surrounded by kids who came from different backgrounds, different life experiences.

And I never will ever regret that.

I think that was a really, really powerful thing for them to do for us as kids, to give us that appreciation that life is full of diversity, it's full of challenges for different people, and you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of other people.

So I went to, a month or two back, it was last year sometime, the drug and alcohol court that operates here in Auckland.

And I remember sitting there thinking, listening to their stories, thinking, if I was in that environment, how would I have coped with that?

Could I have found myself in the position that some of those people do?

And the answer, if you're being really honest, the answer is yes.

Because it's easy to look at life from your own advantages and your own perspective.

Putting yourself in the shoes of someone else is a lot harder.

And you don't have to have lived that life yourself.

You have to be able to relate to people.

You have to be able to sit there and go, if that was me, how would I cope with that?

One of my mum's favourite things when we were kids growing up was that you should always treat other people as you wanted to be treated yourself.

And so one of the questions that she would ask us, because, you know, my brother and I, we used to fight with each other.