It is while Aaron Mason is talking about trying to keep a roof over his family, that he chokes up.
The 42-year-old labourer lives with his wife Rebecca and their two children, Crystal and Samantha, in a small wooden cottage in the East Otago township of Milton.
On Tuesday, he started a new season at the Finegand freezing works, southeast of Balclutha, and 25km from his home.
Except for a four-year break, it has been his main employment for the past two decades.
During the season, he puts in long hours, clocking up to 60-hour working weeks as a forklift driver and doing other manual work at the Silver Fern Farms processing plant.
If he meets weekly productivity goals, he can take home about $930.
Out of that, he has to pay for the mortgage, food for four, heating, clothing, education, health ... He also has to save enough to tide the family over during the few months between seasons, when his only sources of money are the unemployment benefit and any jobs he can get rotary-hoeing people’s vegetable gardens.
It is barely, and often simply not, possible to make ends meet, he says.
There is a plumber’s bill from several months back that is being "drip fed".
Swiping the credit card was the only way to pay for urgent bathroom repairs.
A bank declined the couple’s request to convert the debt to a personal loan, saying their income was too small to meet repayments, leaving them saddled with the much higher credit card interest rate.
School fees are being paid, just.
They cannot afford to visit doctors or dentists who charge "up front".
"Thank goodness for the Dental School, in Dunedin, or we’d be screwed," Mr Mason says.
But even there, a halt to payments during a lean patch saw the debt collectors called in.
Then, in March last year, rates arrears turned ugly. The family faced the threat of a mortgagee sale on their home, Mr Mason says.
He cannot keep speaking. He silently holds his head in his hands and, with his thumbs, wipes his eyes.
A week before Mr Mason started back at the freezing works, the finishing touches were being added to a press release by staff of Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Steven Joyce.
Titled "Higher wages and low inflation helping families", the release vaunted a 25% increase in the average annual wage since the Government took office.
"Delivering a stronger economy for Kiwi families remains front and centre of the Government’s busy work programme, and it is helping to drive up incomes across the country," Mr Joyce said.
"Under this Government, the annual average wage has increased by 25%, more than twice the rate of inflation."
It was also four times faster than under the previous government, at 2.2% per annum, he said.
It sounds great; in the implacable war between our incomes and the rising cost of living, we are winning, Mr Joyce says.
But, who is "we"?
The press release was part of a brief bombardment of political proclamations on income and employment unleashed last week.
It began on the Monday with Prime Minister John Key saying that while high immigration was putting a strain on the country’s infrastructure it was needed, in part because some New Zealanders were too lazy or drug-affected to fill job vacancies.
The next day, Mr Joyce, this time speaking as Acting Minister of Finance, said new data from Treasury showed a higher level of income redistribution.
The top 10% of households were now paying 37.2% of all the income tax; up 1.7% compared with nine years ago.
Thursday was the "Higher Wages" press release.
All three preceded Friday’s release of the annual Income Inequality report.
It presents a less rosy picture of life in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
"Household incomes in New Zealand: Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship", to give it its full title, is a thoroughly researched and well-respected annual report prepared by Bryan Perry for the Ministry of Social Development.
It is based on data from Statistics New Zealand’s latest household economic survey.
A key question in the report is not how much have wages been increasing, but have they been increasing faster or slower than inflation, as measured by the consumer price index?
What is people’s real income?
Are they actually getting ahead, or falling behind?
The other critical issue it examines is income inequality.
How are we faring in comparison with each other?
• This year’s report partially backs up Mr Joyce.
For each of the past five years, it says, median household incomes have been rising at a rate of about 3% above inflation, which has been averaging about 2% per annum.
And on the subject of income redistribution, it says about half of all households with dependent children are getting more through welfare benefits and Working For Families tax credits than they are paying in income tax.
The report, however, is much more than political spin.
It provides some illuminating insights that are at variance with the select slices dished up in press releases.
The average wage might be growing 3% faster than the cost of living.
But very few people are living the median life.
The picture that comes from this report, and its predecessors, is that since the global financial crisis the top half of earners have had an 8% to 12% increase in real incomes, the bottom half has had a 2% to 5% increase and the lowest third has had no real income gains.
Real income changes can also be sliced in other, telling, directions.
Last week’s report shows that one of the key reasons real median household incomes have grown during the past two decades is because more people within each household are working.
So, it is more hours being worked as much as increasing pay rates that are making things look better.
How much better or worse off a person is also depends on which sector they are employed in.
The Statistics New Zealand labour cost index for the five years to the middle of this year, reveals some sharp disparities.
It shows that, at the top of the leader board, salaries and wages in the transport equipment, machinery and equipment manufacturing sector rose 12%.
Bringing up the rear were three sectors: information media and telecommunications; central government administration, defence and public safety; and, public administration and safety.
Each had salary and wage increases of about 6.4% during those five years.
When inflation is added in, they are doing no more than treading water.
Worse off, it appears, are those in the meat processing industry.
For more than four decades, Bruce Graham, of Balclutha, has compiled wage figures for chamber hands at the Finegand works and matched them against inflation.
Between 1972 and 2005, their wages dropped 35% in real terms, Mr Graham says.
And in the decade to 2014, their real incomes declined a further 1.26%.
On the subject of income inequality in New Zealand, Mr Perry’s report details the size of the gap between those on the highest incomes and those on the lowest.
After growing rapidly in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, income inequality has remained at that level for the past 20 years — under both centre-left and centre-right governments — and has even increased a little during the past four years.
The top 1% of earners continue to get up to 9% of the total income.
After housing costs are taken into account, the households that receive the top 10% of incomes, earn four times as much as the lowest 10%.
• The report reveals that when housing costs are factored in, 600,000 to 800,000 New Zealanders are in income poverty, not having enough to meet the minimum acceptable standard.
According to Max Rashbrooke, who is a leading figure in inequality research, Bill Rosenberg, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions economist, is an authority on real incomes.
Bill Rosenberg, who is based in Wellington, disputes some of Mr Joyce’s figures and says the Government has nothing to boast about when it comes to real incomes.
He says Mr Joyce’s claim the average annual wage is now $58,000 seems to rely on using a wage figure based on not just full-time workers but also half of the part-timers.
"This gives a much higher annualised figure for ordinary time work than the actual average ordinary time weekly wage over all employees, which was $50,000, $8000 less," Mr Rosenberg says.
He also says wages rose faster under the previous government (1.3% compared with 1%), even after higher inflation is taken into account.
What the current Government has done, is bring in tax changes in 2010 that have helped higher income earners increase their real net pay faster, Mr Rosenberg says.
What is happening to real incomes is an important topic, he says.
"It’s about what is commonly called inequality. There’s more and more evidence that when people are treated in ways that are unfair, that is quite disruptive to social cohesion and to economic growth. It’s a damaging, corrosive thing."
Mr Joyce does not dispute Mr Rosenberg’s assertion about how the average annual wage has been calculated.
It is the standard measure used to caluculate New Zealand Superannuation, he says.
Asked whether talk of a 25% increase and a $58,000 average wage did not reflect the real incomes many people were having to survive on, Mr Joyce agreed the average wage increase did not take into account individual occupations.
These would be variable across and within industries, he said.
Mr Rashbrooke, whose most recent book is Wealth and New Zealand, says having at least a fifth of the population in income poverty is "appalling" for a first-world country.
"There are a lot of people who have not had a pay increase and whose housing costs are much, much higher than they were 10 years ago. So, all those people are struggling," he says.
"The number of people in poverty might not be increasing, but the depth of that poverty, the desperation people are experiencing, is increasing."
Mr Rashbrooke says the Government does not appear to have a plan to tackle poverty.
"Just saying, well, it’s not getting worse, is not a plan."
He believes the economy needs to be reoriented towards delivering more rewards to those who are struggling to make ends meet.
"At the moment if a company is doing well, a lot of that goes into the chief executive’s pay, rather than the pay of ordinary workers ... Half of the country’s wealthiest people are not even paying the top tax rate."
His recipe for tackling poverty in New Zealand would involve "taxing wealth properly"; a higher minimum wage; linking benefits to average wage increases (as is done with New Zealand Superannuation) "on the basis that we are all in this together"; and finding an effective solution to the housing crisis.
In the homely lounge of their cottage, as Mr Mason collects himself, his wife Rebecca steps briefly into the breach.
"Talking about our debt and how we nearly lost everything last year, that’s what upsets Aaron," she says.
At the time, they did not tell anyone what was going on.
Mr Mason worked even longer hours and they eventually got things sufficiently back on track to keep the house.
"We are really struggling to get ahead," Mrs Mason says.
"When it comes to food in your tummy or paying a bill, which do you choose?
"It just stinks that you can’t provide the basics for your kids."
Mr Mason is back. Dried-eyed, sombre, determined.
Does he have any dreams for the next 10 years?
To have the mortgage paid off, he says.
"But I highly doubt that," he adds.
He goes quiet.
The eyes are filling again.
