Source: University of Auckland (UoA)
This month, Sir Collin Tukuitonga became one of two professors of Niuean descent in the world.
Professor Sir Collin says it’s an honour to join the ranks of his University of Auckland colleague, Professor of Pacific Health Vili Nosa, also from Niue – one of the smallest countries on the globe, with a population of less than 1,700 people.
“I’m not a true-blue academic. I didn’t do a PhD and stay in the university forever. I gained a lot of practical experience elsewhere, so it’s nice to be accepted by my peers in academic medicine,” says Sir Collin.
He is a director of Poutoko Ora a Kiwa – Centre for Pacific and Global Health at the University, was knighted in 2022 and is a man with his own Wikipedia page. His ‘practical experience’ spans everything from being chief executive of the New Zealand Ministry of Pacific Affairs from 2007 to 2012 to developing a global strategy to improve diet and physical activity that was adopted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2004.
Addressing health inequities faced by Pacific and Māori people has been the motivating force behind Sir Collin’s career over the past 45 years.
“People with the means often get too much medicine and those who need it the most get the least.
“Those inequities stick out to me – Māori and Pacific people have poorer health and it’s entrenched.
“We have the resources, skills, equipment and facilities to make a change and yet we haven’t.
“It seems unfair, unacceptable to me – and that’s the key driver, why I’m involved in public health,” he says.
Growing up in Niue, seeds of caring for family and community were planted that have borne fruit during his career in public health.
“We didn’t have much, not many books. We first had the radio when I was 10, electricity wasn’t a regular thing, so it was a pretty basic existence.
“You didn’t expect much for yourself – you didn’t think about whether you had the latest flashy clothes or shoes.
“You helped in the plantation, going fishing, it was all centred around contributing to the family and helping in the village.
“I guess that’s where I got my sense of social justice – your talents are not just for yourself.”
At the age of 15, Sir Collin’s fate was shaped by gaining a scholarship to study medicine.
“I was lucky I had a decent brain and I got one of two New Zealand government scholarships to go to university in Fiji.
“I had always been interested in helping people, so medicine was a natural selection, but the availability of the scholarship was a big factor.
“My family would not have been able to send me to university – I would have been a fisherman,” he says.
Leaving behind his “charmed life” in Niue, where he had been pampered by three sisters and surrounded by cousins, was a huge step, but Fiji still offered the simple pleasures of island life.
Sir Collin graduated as a junior doctor in 1979 and worked as a “real doctor” in family medicine for about 15 years.
He returned to Niue to offer his skills to his island community, before being appointed to teach public health at the Fiji School of Medicine in 1987. A military coup later that year raised fears for the safety of his first wife and their young children, so they fled to New Zealand – a place Sir Collin has called home ever since.
In the late 1980s, he was a key figure involved in setting up a Pacific healthcare clinic in West Auckland, which is now called The Fono.
Having mainly Pasifika staff and low fees has helped make healthcare more accessible for many Pacific people.
While working as a GP in West Auckland, he saw patterns of hardship and poor health that made him determined to help change the health system.
“It was predominantly families with young children and you saw the same things over and over again – chesty coughs, skin infections, those kinds of things, which if you’re a thinking person, you have to say, ‘there has to be a better way than waiting for them to come back to the clinic with the same thing’.
“Those things were to do with cold, damp, overcrowded housing, poor nutrition and delayed access to health care.
“I thought if I was involved in public health, you could theoretically prevent those problems.”
He became Director of Public Health at the New Zealand Ministry of Health in 2001.
In this role, he contributed to programmes designed to reduce smoking harm in Pacific communities. Over the past 30 years, smoking rates have halved, though about twice as many Māori and Pacific people still smoke, compared to Pakeha New Zealanders.
“Smoking in young people in New Zealand is now 4.2 percent, compared to 27 percent of adults smoking in 1993. So that’s a significant achievement for New Zealand and I helped contribute to that.”
Sir Collin helped introduce a vaccine for meningitis B, during an epidemic of the disease in the early 2000s.
“We had high mortality rates among young Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand and the vaccine led to a significant drop in occurrence of the disease, so I was pleased to help that along.”
His overseas roles have included three years at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, and seven years in New Caledonia, where he was director-general of the Pacific Community.
More recently, he played an important role in advising the New Zealand government and communicating with Pacific communities during the Covid pandemic.
However, in December 2023, he resigned from his role as chairperson of Te Whatu Ora Pacific Senate and spoke out regarding his concerns about the new government’s direction.
“I was really incensed when they repealed our smoke-free legislation. I know that by undoing that world-leading legislation, Māori and Pacific people are going to be the worst affected – and all for the purpose of them meeting their commitment to their friends to make tax cuts.
“I couldn’t continue on the advisory committees when clearly they were not interested in anything apart from what was on their agenda.”
The roots of Pacific people having higher rates of health problems, ranging from cancer to measles, lie in deeper disadvantages, says Sir Collin.
“Health is a symptom of underlying social conditions. It’s an extension of disparities in education, income, housing and diet.
“We can’t just deal with it in the health sector, we have to deal with those issues – and they’re difficult issues.”
Through the hard times, Sir Collin has been buoyed up by Pacific people thanking him for looking out for their wellbeing and speaking up for them.
These days, the 67-year-old father of five is enjoying mentoring and supporting young people at the University, while much of his spare time is spent developing and planting native trees on his family’s lifestyle block near Pakiri.
“There’s no set retirement age these days and I love working with my many clever colleagues at the university.
“My friends say that when you retire and you don’t use your brain, it rots. I’m terrified of that possibility,” he laughs.
