That ‘One NZ’ campaign
Kiwis make world-famous TV ads, using humour to ping and close that gap between our heartstrings and purse strings. Think the Bugger–Toyota Hilux ad. And now, the latest offering from One NZ, the rebranded communications company. One NZ describes it as a fun, engaging, light-hearted, fictitious story about human connection.
A man with Māori heritage stands beside a Highland cow with matching hair. He’s looking for his mother. We flashback to a hot tub with non-Māori parents casually revealing to their adult son that he’s adopted. A friendly person at One NZ shows him how to use his phone to make connections. There’s a fast-cut sequence alluding to inebriated sex leading to his conception and birth. The ad ends with a touching moment of recognition and the possibility that a mother-and-child reunion is only a moment away.
What’s not to love?
Your answer may depend on your position within the adoption constellation. In the late 1990s, 3.2 percent of our population was adopted. Today, that equates to over 100,000 people. Add in two sets of parents for each adopted person, and approximately 16 percent of the New Zealand population has a direct involvement with adoption. When you include grandparents, siblings, the children and now grandchildren of adopted people, it’s evident a large proportion of New Zealanders is touched by (stranger) adoption.
There’s a master narrative around adoption—a cultural script of rescue and advantage. No matter an individual’s good or bad adoption experience, the 1955 Adoption Act remains a statutory process to change a person’s status from illegitimate to legitimate. Even though the former no longer exists in any legislation in Aotearoa. Adoption is a process of networked loss involving multiple government departments and associated Acts and judicial decisions. Adopted people have no intrinsic right to the fundamental principle of whakapapa, no right to medical history or their adoption records. Today, the descendants of those adults adopted as non-consenting infants are also denied access to all records.
To be adopted is not fate.
It is entirely unnatural, proceeding from external, superficial, legislative, ideological, and interest-driven structures. It creates profound differences across all social metrics. Internal Affairs describes an adopted person’s amended, endorsed, and sometimes redacted ‘original’ birth certificate as “essentially ornamental.” They define the legal birth certificate showing adopters as actual birth parents as “legal fiction.” As adoption scholar Keith Griffith says: “The transformation of legal fiction into a general fiction is a delusion that became adoption policy and practice.”
To offend or not to offend?
It was clearly not One NZ’s intention to offend adopted people. But portraying a person who is denied their cultural heritage and lied to by omission as amusing and light-hearted has offended many. The forced removal of a newborn suffered by tens of thousands of mothers is treated as harmless fun. The ‘adventure’ of tracking down a lost relative trivialises the human need to know your roots and to exist as part of your biological family. It denies the need to spend large chunks of your life in the complex acts of kin-making and to grapple with obdurate authorities determined to block your access to the kinds of family connections taken for granted by the non-adopted. By playing the complexity of the adoption experience for touching humour, One NZ exploits the experience of lifelong disconnection to sell a service designed to connect people.
Photo courtesy of The National Trust for Scotland