The Stuff Of Nightmares.

Braking And Entering: The CCTV recording of the ram-raid against Auckland’s Ormiston Mall is so disturbing, so inspiring of dread and rage, that no amount of rational commentary will make the slightest difference. It confirms in the most powerful fashion the stories so many New Zealanders have been telling themselves: of societal breakdown; and a generation utterly unfazed by laws and rules and social expectations.

THE IMAGES were the stuff of nightmare. Cars being driven at speed – not on the streets, but inside a shopping mall. Jarring enough for most people, but what followed the cars was even more disturbing. Hooded figures moving swiftly and purposefully across the mall’s polished floor: a loose formation of young offenders heading for the shops. Unstoppable, for the very simple reason that no one was present to stem the larcenous tide.

Well-meaning experts – like Professor Ian Lambie – will implore New Zealanders to refrain from making their usual rush to judgement. They will be told that youth crime statistics are actually registering a drop in offending. That the individuals captured on the mall’s CCTV represent only a tiny minority – the product of the very worst instances of familial breakdown and dysfunction. Lambie, himself, in discussion with Q+A’s Jack Tame, suggests that the offenders are drawn from just 200 families nationwide, and all are likely well known to the authorities.

It will do no good.

The CCTV recording of the ram-raid against Auckland’s Ormiston Mall is so disturbing, so inspiring of dread and rage, that no amount of rational commentary will make the slightest difference. Brief and ill-defined though it may be, the recording confirms in the most powerful fashion the stories so many New Zealanders have been telling themselves. It speaks of societal breakdown: of a generation utterly unfazed by laws and rules and social expectations. More dangerously, it prompts questions that are all-too-likely to generate highly prejudicial answers.

The first and most obvious of these is: “What are these kids doing out late at night in the company of unabashed criminals?” Immediately followed by: “Where are their parents?” And then by: “Where are the Police?” A moment-or-two’s cogitation prompts the question: “Why aren’t these kids worried about the consequences of their actions?”

All of these questions are fair and reasonable. It is, however, unlikely that a great many of the public’s answers will be either reasonable or fair.

The idea that the youngsters involved in the ram-raid have parents waiting for them at home is almost certainly erroneous. Most of the individuals caught by the CCTV cameras are likely to have endured seriously dysfunctional relationships with one or both of their birth parents from a very early age. Almost certainly, neglect and abuse will have been constant features of their brief lives. Institutional care, most of it of indifferent quality, and some truly appalling, is their lot. For these kids, “home” is not a word with positive and/or comforting connotations. Nobody is waiting for them.

Such education as these children receive is almost entirely informal. The lessons delivered by their teachers: older kids, mostly, from more-or-less identical backgrounds, will be ruthlessly practical. How to drive a stolen motor vehicle. Which cars have the easiest security systems to circumvent. The most effective way to force a door and/or shatter a plate-glass window. The legal system’s helplessness when confronted with offenders under the age of 14. The importance of offering nothing to the Police. The deadly consequences of narking on your mates.

Certainly, the vast majority of these young offenders will not have seen the inside of a classroom for months, maybe years. The statistics compiled by Charter Schools advocate and private education provider, Alwyn Poole, paint a grim picture of widespread truancy in New Zealand’s poorest educational catchments – approaching 50 percent in some schools. These truants are seldom tracked down and returned to the classroom. A toxic mixture of scandalously under-funded enforcement, coupled with the learned helplessness of under-resourced institutions means that large numbers of children are entering adulthood lacking the wherewithal to pursue anything other than a criminal career.

These are the people referred to by worried politicians as “NEETs” (Not Engaged in Employment or Training). The best of them will be recruited by the gangs, the rest of them will end up as the gangsters’ clientele. To feed their drug habits, these latter unfortunates will be forced to put their criminal educations to more and more frequent use. If their drug of choice is methamphetamine, then the likelihood of extreme criminal violence is high.

Small wonder, then, that in the light of a spate of ram-raids by young offenders, the Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, has announced, pre-Budget, his intention to take steps to improve school attendance rates:

“A regional response fund of $40 million over four years is being established to meet local education needs, with a strong initial focus on ensuring students are going to school and are engaged in their learning.”

Not that “Middle New Zealand” is likely to notice the difference $10 million per year will make to the truancy statistics, nor to evince a conspicuous willingness to investigate the social pathology and institutional inadequacies that gave rise to the shocking CCTV images of the Ormiston Mall Ram-Raid.

Not for nothing are social commentators referencing “the exhausted middle” and its growing disinclination to engage with a political system that itself appears to have become dysfunctional. The stories that New Zealand, as a nation, used to tell itself: that in spite of their differences Māori and Pakeha had contrived to become “one people”; that “fairness” was what counted most in the formulation of public policy; and that the state commanded sufficient loyalty and respect to arbitrate political and cultural conflicts; are attracting fewer and fewer adherents.

Almost certainly, a majority of the middle-class New Zealanders who watched the CCTV record of the ram-raid on Ormiston Mall understood that what they were witnessing was yet more dramatic and disturbing evidence of the crisis that has been gripping working-class Māori and Pasifika for decades. At the same time, however, those middle-class Pakeha would have told themselves that any attempt to identify and comment upon the ethnic components of the ram-raids, and the future they portended, would likely be met with a storm of criticism and angry charges of racism.

The upshot is the worst of both worlds. The images will sink deep into the electorate’s political consciousness, waiting there for a suitably mendacious politician to lift them to the surface. At the same time, the discussion and debate that such a jarring event would once have ignited will not take place. Consequently, the anxiety and anger will remain, unrelieved by the political and cultural engagement that offers the only effective remedy.

The great virtue of democracy is that when citizens are shocked and frightened by events which suggest a breakdown of law and order, they are always able to answer “we, the people” can fix it. Through free, frank, and often hurtful debate, the shape of a solution emerges and consensus develops over the next steps to be taken.

Facing the truth is never easy, but it is always better than the alternative. Because, no matter how diligently we weight it down; no matter how earnestly we hope it will remain sunk, Truth’s body always resurfaces. The challenge then is not simply to deal with it, but to understand how we could ever have considered it wiser to keep the truth hidden.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 2 May 2022.

Atavistic Urges.

Mob Psychology: Deep down inside us dwell all manner of dark and violent impulses. In times of social stress and/or crisis, these “atavistic” urges have a nasty habit of rising to the surface like an insufficiently weighted corpse – and unleashing mayhem.

ARE WE AS SAVAGE as our forebears? Would we still gather in our thousands to witness the public execution of a notorious felon? I’d like to think not, but something tells me that if the opportunity presented itself, far too many of us would be unable to resist the temptation to go and gawk at horror.

The word for this impulse is atavism. Deep down inside us dwell all manner of dark and violent impulses. In times of social stress and/or crisis, these “atavistic” urges have a nasty habit of rising to the surface like an insufficiently weighted corpse – and unleashing mayhem.

Our forebears understood this deep-seated human need to see horror answered with horror; pain with pain. In the crude mathematics of vengeance, it was necessary to balance the outrageousness of the crime with an appropriately severe degree of public retribution.

In this regard, the ancient authors of the Old Testament who demanded an eye for an eye understood their audience a lot better than the impossibly gentle Jesus. To love one’s enemies is the counsel of perfection. Human-beings just aren’t that good at being “kind” – especially to those who don’t deserve it.

Atavism was on my mind this past week, as the public’s fury with the persons responsible for returning Auckland to Covid-19 Alert Level 3 and the rest of New Zealand to Level 2 rose to a level where even Queen Jacinda the Kind felt obliged to echo it.

The gospel of Jesus just wasn’t cutting it anymore: New Zealanders had had enough of their Prime Minister’s kindness; what they wanted to know now was whether she also knew how to be cruel.

No problem.

Jacinda’s fury is the opposite of a raging fire. It’s a cold front straight from the Antarctic. When she enunciates the word “frustrated” it has the sound of an icicle being snapped into little pieces. Her controlled rage is thrilling, but it’s not enough. The Team of Five Million wants more.

A year ago, when the Global Pandemic was just getting its eye in, we huddled together around the bright fire of Jacinda’s leadership like Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers. In times of crisis, there are few atavistic urges more compelling than the terrified tribe’s desire to surrender its will to a strong and trusted chief. Jacinda’s call for “kindness” answered to perfection the nation’s hunger for unity and reassurance. Social divisions dissolved; ideological quarrels ceased; we were all in this together: of course we could be kind!

And how we rewarded her! There was a point on Election Night 2020 (right about the time Rangitata fell to Labour) when I just threw back my head and laughed. The deep roar of that massive red wave sweeping the country was compounded of pride in the tribe, fears overcome, and that huge surge of relief that comes from dodging a bullet. “We” had done it! Kindness Rules!

Or, does it?

Human-beings are good in a crisis – even a long one. Just think of our parents and grandparents, bearing-up under six years of total war. What we’re less good at, however, is going in and out of crises. What Judith Collins, with uncharacteristic verbal felicity, calls “yo-yoing”.

Our rational faculties tell us that with Covid-19 still raging across the planet, and the poor Americans burying more than half-a-million victims; the virus’s occasional leakage into our own communities has to be expected and accepted. Every time we go back into Lockdown, however, our capacity for kindness diminishes.

And when we discover that through either stupidity, sheer selfishness, or both, a member, or members, of the Team of Five Million have upended the lives of their fellow citizens and cost the country hundreds-of-millions of dollars by not following the rules of the game, well, our kindness evaporates altogether.

In those circumstances, the atavistic impulses rising from our psychic depths will be especially dark and dangerous. Having established that somebody has broken faith with the tribe, the tribe will seek retribution – public retribution. It will need to be satisfied that the guilty party’s transgression has received the appropriate punishment.

If we still had stocks, then these malefactors would be in them.

Should the transgressions of these fools lead to unnecessary deaths, however, just watch the public mood turn even darker.

The atavistic cry, then, will be: String the bastards up!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 March 2021.

On Prisons.

"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." Prisons are places of unceasing emotional and physical violence, unrelieved despair and unforgivable human waste.

IT WAS NATIONAL’S Bill English who accurately described New Zealand’s prisons as “fiscal and moral failures”. On the same subject, Labour’s Dr Martyn Findlay memorably suggested that no prison should be “escape proof”. Such an institution, he said, would crush all hope, and with it the inmate’s soul. English’s and Findlay’s words are important. They show that, on both sides of the political divide, there have always been politicians who understood the sheer awfulness of prisons. They are places of unceasing emotional and physical violence, unrelieved despair and unforgivable human waste.

And yet, New Zealanders cannot seem to get enough of these places. Politically, it is extremely dangerous to follow the lead of English and Findlay. Voters will punish those who speak up on behalf of prisoners with an eagerness matched only by their readiness to torment the prisoners themselves. Like so many of the English-speaking peoples, New Zealanders are a brutally punitive bunch. Their parliamentary representatives might pay lip-service to the idea of rehabilitation, but the vicious legislation they have passed testifies strongly against the sincerity of such protestations. What the people want, the people get: and what the people want is for convicted felons to be punished – long and hard.

Other nations with which we like to compare ourselves approach the whole question of crime and punishment from a very different perspective. In Scandinavia, particularly, people seem to have little difficulty grasping the fact that the number of people who constitute a constant, clear and unacceptable danger to society is actually extremely small. That these individuals must be kept away from their fellow human-beings in secure facilities is accepted as an inescapable, if regrettable, social reality. But, aside from this hardcore of incorrigible sociopaths and psychopaths, most criminals are regarded as victims of circumstances over which they have never exercised very much control. These are people to be healed – not further harmed.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when New Zealanders stopped understanding that the bad things that people do to one another cannot be undone. Restitution can be made, compensation can be paid, but time cannot be put into reverse.

We cannot unmake the misery inflicted upon us by our fellow human-beings. All we can hope to do is gain some understanding of why such deeds were done, and to do our utmost to ensure that they are not repeated – especially by the same offender/s.

A thousand years ago, much of Anglo-Saxon justice was devoted to assessing the proper quantum of “Wergild” – the amount to be paid out in compensation for a man’s life. Certainly, our ancestors believed that truly terrible crimes merited truly terrible punishments – usually violent death. But crimes of passion, crimes of pride, unpremeditated and instantly regretted: these were treated with much greater understanding. (It helped that those meting out justice had grown up alongside the accused.)

In contemporary New Zealand, however, there is a worrying and growing incapacity on the part of ordinary Kiwis to come to terms with the sad, bad, deeds of their fellow citizens. How can we “come to terms” with what the media insists on describing as the “evil” of the offender/s? If the victims of crime must endure “a life sentence” then so, too, must the perpetrator/s. Anything less can only result in the guilty “getting away with it”. Better by far to “lock ‘em up and throw away the key”.

Except, of course, locking them up and throwing away the key leads inevitability to the disgraceful situation at Waikato’s Waikeria Prison. With New Zealanders demanding better treatment for this country’s chickens and pigs than they demand for its prison inmates, is it really any wonder that human-beings, locked-up in fetid, filthy cells, and denied even a shred of dignity by guards no less persuaded than the rest of the community that their charges are “evil”, will, if they still possess an ounce of self-respect, rise up in protest?

And what does it say about the ubiquity of the very “evil” we claim to be locking away, that those responsible for bringing the Waikeria crisis to an end deliberately denied the protesting inmates fresh water – as the most effective means of forcing a “resolution”?

When will we all, like the British poet’s, W. H. Auden’s, schoolchildren, finally learn:

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 January 2021.

A Powerful Political Metaphor.

Lost Opportunity: The powerful political metaphor of the Maori Party leading the despised and marginalised from danger to safety, is one Labour could have pre-empted by taking the uprising at Waikeria Prison much more seriously.

AS WORD OF Rawiri Waititi’s successful intervention in the Waikeria Prison stand-off spreads, the Maori Party’s mana will grow significantly. It is difficult to think of a better metaphor with which to illustrate the party’s political mission than its co-leader, under the disdainful gaze of the authorities, leading 16 parched, burned, bleeding but unbroken prisoners out of danger and into safety. Surely, somewhere in New Zealand, a young Maori musician is already composing a song to celebrate Waititi’s success. He’s earned one.

It is difficult to imagine anyone bothering to write a song for the Corrections Minister, Kelvin Davis. Throughout the six days of the crisis at Waikeria, the Minister maintained an obdurate silence. The resolution of this crisis, New Zealanders were given to understand, was an “operational matter” – something best left to the public servants and corrections officers on the spot. The very same public servants and corrections officers whose actions – and failure to take action – were responsible for sparking the uprising in the first place.

The Ombudsman’s report of August 2020 made it very clear that conditions at Waikeria Prison left a great deal to be desired. Had the authorities responded to that report swiftly and decisively, then it is highly unlikely the uprising would have occurred.

It is very difficult for those who know nothing of life behind bars to fathom the degree of degradation required to make prisoners risk an extension of their sentences by violating the rules of their confinement. When you’re in jail, all you want to be is out. You’ll suffer an awful lot in silence before raising your voice in protest. That’s why any form of prison protest is a sure and certain sign that something very rotten is festering within its walls.

How rotten may, perhaps, be gleaned from the following passage, taken from the media release sent out by the protesting prisoners’ to (among others) Action Station and Hone Harawira:

Our drinking water in prison is brown. We have used our towels for three straight weeks now. Some of us have not had our bedding changed in five months. We have not received clean uniforms to wear for three months – we wear the same dirty clothes day in and day out. We have to wash our clothes in our dirty shower water and dry them on the concrete floor. We have no toilet seats: we eat our kai out of paper bags right next to our open, shared toilets.

If even half of these complaints are true, then New Zealand should hang its head in shame. Conditions such as these are what we associate with the hellholes of Central and South America – prisons wracked by riots, uprisings and mass escapes, and quelled by tear-gas, rubber bullets and (all too frequently) live rounds.

The pall of black smoke which, at the time of writing, still hung above Waikeria is a signal. A signal that we’re not doing it right. That we’ve got it wrong. That we have to stop listening to the people who have presided over these institutional failures for far too long. Most of all, however, it is signalling the importance of ceasing to react to the vicious messaging from our nation’s amygdala.

Crime and punishment are not issues that can be resolved successfully by our instinctive “flight or fight” reaction. They are matters for the national cerebellum, the seat of reason in the human brain. We must not leave them to the violent reptilian lunges of the Kiwi limbic system.

At times like these, however, the first political responders are almost always reptilian. Why are the authorities waiting? Where are the Police? Why aren’t we seeing the deployment of armed tactical units? Is there no pepper spray? No tear gas? No long batons? Are there no automatic weapons?

When a human-being is convicted of a crime, he or she does not cease to be a human-being. Imprisonment does not, contrary to the punitive expectations of many New Zealanders, permit the extinguishment of all the rights to which human-beings are entitled. This country is a signatory to a raft of international treaties and covenants affirming the fundamental human right to be treated decently.

These documents should have made it unthinkable for servants of the New Zealand state (which, presumably, includes the authorities at Waikeria Prison!) to refuse water and food to protesting inmates. If our soldiers refused to give prisoners water they would be guilty of a war crime.

What does it say about us as a people, that we are willing to treat the soldiers of a foreign foe with more respect than our own citizens? What does it say about our Minister of Corrections that he did not publicly repudiate the inhumane tactics of the Waikeria authorities?

More importantly, what does it say about the government of Jacinda Ardern? Why is her Cabinet so unaware, seemingly, of the acutely dangerous politics of the Waikeria Prison uprising? Yes, it’s holiday-time. And yes, Kiwis are taking full advantage of their success in defeating Covid-19. Very few people (including most of the mainstream news media) are paying much attention to events at Waikeria. But that does not excuse the Prime Minister for not noticing just how big a “win” her government has gifted the Maori Party.

Because that metaphor: the Maori Party leading the victims of the system out of danger and into safety; will speak with great force to the thousands of New Zealanders who cannot afford an expensive holiday in Queenstown. Those paying extortionate rent for substandard accommodation. Those parents working two jobs but still not making enough to keep their families fit and healthy. The New Zealanders who hear their leader talking about “kindness” and a “Team of Five Million”, but who just can’t see any evidence of it at work in their lives and neighbourhoods.

Dylan Asafo, a lecturer at Auckland Law School, put it like this:

Contrary to popular belief, the ‘centre’ isn’t a place for reasonable, measured minds who can see valid points on both sides and find a just and fair compromise. The ‘centre’ doesn’t actually exist. It’s an imagined safe space for people who are deeply invested in inequality in a settler-colonial, capitalist state but still want to be perceived as kind and decent people.

A left-wing Labour government would have reacted very differently to the uprising at Waikeria. It would have reassured all those members of the Maori working-class with fathers, brothers and sons locked away in hellholes like Waikeria, that Labour was committed unequivocally to their fair and humane treatment. Under a left-wing Labour government, it would have been the Corrections Minister leading those prisoners out of danger and into safety – and making sure every one of the Ombudsman’s recommendations was implemented.

By preferring to put their faith in an illusory political centre, Labour has ceded a crucial swathe of electoral territory to a Maori Party unafraid of placing itself at the head of an uprising much bigger than the one Rawiri Waititi just helped to end at Waikeria.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 January 2021