The Language Of Those With Nothing Left To Say.

Running Wild: Three of the more than 100 young people who trashed and burned a Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, earlier this year. This degree of lawlessness, akin to, but a whole order of magnitude greater than, our own ram-raids, is indicative of a society that has lost all respect for itself. Societies that respect themselves produce citizens who respect their fellow citizens – and their property .

WHILE NEW ZEALANDERS RECOIL in shock from a seemingly endless series of ram-raids, the news from overseas is worse.

According to the UK internet magazine, Spiked: “a few weeks ago, about 100 young people ransacked a Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia. The mob stole merchandise, knocked over shelves and threw food and drinks around, leaving the store looking like a natural disaster had hit it. Many got their phones out to record the madness. As chaos reigned, a young woman twerked on a counter. Fighting spilled out into the parking lot.”

This degree of lawlessness, akin to, but a whole order of magnitude greater than, our own ram-raids, is indicative of a society that has lost all respect for itself. Societies that respect themselves do not produce young people who pillage convenience stores or drive stolen cars into neighbourhood dairies. Societies that respect themselves produce citizens who respect one another.

Those who recall the rioting that accompanied the “Black Lives Matter” protests against the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer back in 2020, may also recall the number of times journalists and politicians repeated the words of Martin Luther King:

“Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

What happened in Philadelphia, however, was not the spilling-over of rage at the death of yet another African-American at the hands of the Police. White America heard the rage of the BLM protesters – and the rioters. What happened inside that Wawa store is what happens when White America hears the rage – and ignores it.

Comfortable New Zealand needs to ask itself whether the ram-raids it finds so disturbing are the product of something similar.

Prime Minister Ardern and her Labour colleagues promised action against poverty and homelessness. A government, supposedly driven by “the politics of kindness”, pledged itself to fulfilling a “transformational” programme of social and economic change. Except, the only transformation visible from the mean streets of South and West Auckland was the transition from bad to worse.

The Covid-19 pandemic was undoubtedly a factor in the deterioration of young and marginalised citizens’ life-worlds. For many the habits of schooling were simply lost. That so many of them remained lost, however, owes a great deal to the fact that so few people came looking for them. An education system that does not crack down hard on truancy sends out a terrible message. It is saying: “We don’t care.” Young people seldom need to be sent that message twice.

Comfortable New Zealand is learning the hard way that its alienated and unwanted young people have some “messages” of their own to deliver.

Earlier this week it was reported that, in the past five years, the number of gang members in New Zealand has doubled from 4,000 to 8,000, and that the recruitment of 18-25 year-olds is up by 75 percent. When the state’s official places of learning breathe a huge sigh of relief that their most disruptive students are no longer in the classroom, does that mean that those truants have given up on being taught? Or, are they simply learning different lessons, from different teachers?

And these lessons are dreadful – made all the more so for having about them the unmistakeable ring of truth. Money is everything. No one cares where it comes from. The Courts can’t cope. If you’re under 17 you won’t go to jail. The Police are powerless. The Law is a joke. Stealing is easy. Don’t worry about getting caught. Always remember who your friends are. Violence works.

Think of the ram-raid as a kind of grim performance art. Like the trashing of the Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia, it offers a terrifying, fun-fair reflection of the hyper-consumerist society we all inhabit. Because, if money and things truly are what define us, then why should our alienated and unwanted youngsters be content to remain undefined, simply for want of cash? If, as they strongly suspect, Comfortable New Zealand has given up on them, then why shouldn’t they make New Zealand uncomfortable?

If rioting is the language of the unheard, then ram-raiding and the trashing of convenience stores is the language of those who no longer believe in talking.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 21 October 2022.

Labour’s Eyes Wide Shut To “Unruly Tenants”.

Not Seeing The Problem: They say there are none so blind as those who will not see. And, right now, Kāinga Ora is studiously not looking. It is clear to everyone that the Minister responsible, Poto Williams, has (like so many of her colleagues) been entirely captured by her officials. Their moral blindness appears to be highly infectious, and Williams has caught it. This is very much a case of ministerial eyes “wide shut”.

HOW LONG before Labour’s senior ministers realise how much damage Kāinga Ora is doing to their Government? Because it is difficult to overstate just how bad the optics of the Crown entity’s “unruly tenants” have become. As story after shocking story is picked up by the news media, public disbelief and disgust is growing exponentially. What’s preventing Labour from cauterising this self-inflicted political wound?

The answer would seem to involve the peculiar moral blindness that afflicts so much of the state bureaucracy. Partly, the result of an unrelenting focus on the “challenges” faced by criminal and dysfunctional individuals – challenges that are permitted to obscure, almost entirely, the consequences of their criminality and dysfunction. Partly, the result of the impulse to offer protection to those deemed “beyond the pale” by the rest of society. And, partly, the result of an ingrained bureaucratic reluctance to have any state agency’s shortcomings exposed to public and political scrutiny. Bring all these together, and the chances of the responsible bureaucrats seeing either the bigger picture, or the even bigger problem, are slim.

From the perspective of Kāinga Ora, gang members harassing and intimidating their neighbours is seen as a symptom of a problem, rather than a problem in its own right. What it tells the caring bureaucrat is something very different from what it would tell just about everybody else – i.e. that it’s time to evict these tenants. On the contrary, such profoundly anti-social behaviour indicates clearly that these individuals are in need of more “wrap-around” assistance. Knee-jerk responses are simply inappropriate in situations of such “extreme complexity”.

Part of that complexity is likely to be the presence of children in the unruly tenants’ household. In the current bureaucratic playbook, the primary objective must be to keep children and their parents together. The object lesson of Oranga Tamariki is there for all state agencies to absorb: don’t allow the world to see Pakeha public servants ripping Māori children from the arms of their mums and dads. Just about anything is preferable to that – up to and including paying-off the unruly tenants’ aggrieved neighbours with large wads of taxpayer cash.

To the rest of the world, of course, the idea of allowing young children to remain in the custody of individuals who abuse and threaten their neighbours, is unthinkable. With that sort of parental example, they would argue, what chance do these kids have of growing into anything other than another generation of violent and uncaring thugs? “Get them out of there! Now!” Would be the immediate response of the average New Zealander. “And then evict their parents!”

In the eyes of the bureaucrats, however, this is exactly what must be avoided. Years of experience have taught them that breaking-up the family unit is only likely to make things worse. They insist that all these allegedly “common sense” solutions end up creating are more unruly citizens. Far from reducing the number of problematic individuals in state houses, you end up multiplying them. (Overlooked, or downplayed, is the fact that equally dire outcomes tend to flow from families in which unpunished violence, intimidation and harassment are part of everyday existence.)

Reflexively, the attention of the bureaucrats returns to the circumstances of the perpetrators. The complaints of the victims are not assessed on their merits, but in terms of how the incidents cited may have further contributed to the inappropriate behaviour of the offenders. Subtly and, all-to-often, not-so-subtly, it is inferred that the victims have contributed to their own misfortunes. That, somehow, the violence and intimidation experienced by the unruly tenants’ neighbours is their own fault. So fixated have the bureaucrats become with “managing” the perpetrators of what in many cases are criminal offences, that the harassed and terrified people on the receiving end of those offences are simply forgotten.

This is the moral blindness that drives the victims of such behaviour, and all who read about it, to utter distraction. They begin to feel like lab rats in some dark behavioural science experiment. Their terrible experiences are simply incidental to the pathology of the experimental subjects. The quality of the victims’ lives is not the point of the exercise. The agency’s only concern is how successful their interventions are at rendering unruly tenants less unruly.

Yes, of course they could evict these people. Indeed, the law requires their eviction. But evicting them would bring Kāinga Ora’s important social experiment to a premature close. With so much still to learn about how best to manage these criminal and dysfunctional individuals, that would be a tragedy. Hence the agency’s policy of not evicting even the most horrendous of its tenants.

They say there are none so blind as those who will not see. And, right now, Kāinga Ora is studiously not looking. The same cannot be said of the rest of New Zealand, which is looking at this unfolding scandal very hard, with rising incredulity – and fury. It is clear to everyone that the Minister responsible, Poto Williams, has (like so many of her colleagues) been entirely captured by her officials. Their moral blindness appears to be highly infectious, and Williams has caught it. This is very much a case of ministerial eyes “wide shut”.

Somebody needs to take charge of this debacle – and soon. The stories flooding into the news media feature the sort of copy editors die for. They’ll publish/broadcast everything they get for as long as they keep on getting it.

More ominously, the longer the Labour Government delays intervening decisively to end this scandal, the more credence voters are likely to give to Opposition claims that Labour’s Māori Caucus is responsible for allowing it to continue. The perception will be fed that Labour is “soft” on gangs, and perversely determined to foster one law for Pakeha and another for Māori. This racist narrative is already gaining traction in the wider electorate. Labour needs to shut it down – now.

If law-abiding citizens’ faith in the state’s willingness to protect its citizens from violence, intimidation and harassment is not rewarded with swift and decisive action, then people will look elsewhere, and to others, for protection.

Official inertia and vigilantism are not unrelated.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 25 November 2021.

A Very Special Sort of New Zealander.

Deaf Ears: In vain do those seeking to radically curtail high-speed Police chases point out to those very special New Zealanders who insist that "The Law" must be enforced - at any cost - that the offences for which drivers are pursued by the Police are more often than not quite trivial. Violations of the road code and petty thievery are crimes punishable by fines, or a short spell in prison – not death.

WHENEVER A POLICE CHASE ends in tragedy, a very special sort of New Zealander steps forward into the spotlight. The contribution offered by this kind of Kiwi never varies. What happened is all about “The Law”. The offenders, otherwise known as the dead and horribly injured, are solely to blame for the tragic outcome of their offending. They chose not to stop when ordered to do so by the Police – a crime. As law-breakers, they simply had to be apprehended and punished. Any other course of action is unthinkable. The Law is The Law.

When, as so often happens, high-speed Police chases ending in high-speed collisions leave not only the offenders, but also entirely innocent citizens, dead and injured, this very special sort of New Zealander does not blink.

They understand that even the slightest acknowledgement of the right of innocent road-users not to be put in danger unnecessarily can only end in some form of limitation being placed upon the obligation of the Police to pursue and apprehend law-breakers. That cannot be allowed to happen. Innocent road-users are, therefore, straightforward collateral damage: unavoidable casualties in the brutal but absolutely necessary war against disobedience and disorder.

In vain do those seeking to radically curtail high-speed Police chases point out to these very special New Zealanders that the offences for which drivers are pursued by the Police are more often than not quite trivial. Violations of the road code and petty thievery are crimes punishable by fines, or a short spell in prison – not death.

For these special Kiwis, the original justification for the Police pursuit is irrelevant: it is the offenders’ open defiance of authority that constitutes the real crime. Allow people – especially young people – to defy authority and the entire social structure is put at risk. Hounding these miscreant drivers to their deaths, and even to the deaths of innocent road-users, is a small price to pay for the maintenance of law and order.

The mindset of these special New Zealanders is very similar to the mindset of those conservative white Americans who refuse to condemn local law enforcement for killing unarmed black Americans. Even when there is clear video evidence of a police officer emptying his firearm into a defenceless African-American who is running away, white juries have refused to convict the accused. In the eyes of these conservative American whites, law enforcement’s “thin blue line” is all that stands between them and an America in which the rights of “Real Americans” are no longer respected.

The rigid character structure of this particular type of human-being has for long been the special study of psychologists and sociologists. Taken in its entirety, it is referred to as “The Authoritarian Personality” and is distinguishable by the presentation of some, or all, of the following behaviours:

Conventionalism: Adherence to conventional values.

Authoritarian Submission: Towards in-group authority figures.

Authoritarian Aggression: Against people who violate conventional values.

Anti-Intraception: Opposition to subjectivity and imagination.

Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in individual fate; thinking in rigid categories.

Power and Toughness: Concerned with submission and domination; assertion of strength.

Destructiveness and Cynicism: Hostility against human nature.

Projectivity: Perception of the world as dangerous; tendency to project unconscious impulses.

Sex: Overly concerned with modern sexual practices.

At the core of the Authoritarian Personality lies a deep-seated and all-pervasive fear of complexity. The simpler the world can be made to appear, the more these authoritarians like it. Clear boundaries and strict rules are crucial to easing their manifold anxieties. The idea that the world might best be rendered in a multitude of shades and colours – as opposed to black and white – both incenses and terrifies them.

It’s why these very special New Zealanders are so willing to countenance the death of youngsters whose only real crime is being stupid – and even the death of people who have done nothing wrong at all – rather than offer the slightest challenge to the authority of the Police. When all that’s holding you up psychically is the rigid and unforgiving structures of patriarchal hierarchy and laissez-faire capitalism, letting go is not an option.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 March 2018.

Potentially A Game Changer: Some Further Thoughts On The People’s Party.

A Candidate From Bollywood Central Casting: What if the small business-owners of Auckland’s immigrant communities passed the hat around enough times to fill a respectable war chest? What if they secured the services of someone who knows how to run an effective election campaign. Finally, what if they conjured-up a first-rate candidate? Someone with the good looks of a Bollywood movie star; the eloquence of a top-flight barrister; and the devil-may-care daring of a successful entrepreneur? What might happen then to Labour's grip on Mt Roskill?

 

IT’S A GOOD NAME – “The People’s Party” – could be Left, could be Right. It could be the party of every citizen – the whole people. Or, with a shift of the apostrophe, it could be the party of all the peoples who make up New Zealand: Europeans, Maori, Pasifika, Chinese, Indian. It’s clever and, potentially, a game-changer.

 

But only if it gets a whole lot more professional – and fast. Because, at the moment, the NZ People’s Party looks like something thrown together over a few beers by a bunch of very angry dairy and liquor-store owners. Entirely understandable if your wine shop has been robbed three times in as many weeks and your staff hospitalised. Entirely justifiable when a table leg or a hockey stick turns out to be more reliable than the Police.

 

Desperate times have called forth desperate measures. If the politicians won’t respond to the pleas of their immigrant communities, then perhaps they’ll react to some good old-fashioned competition.

 

But they need to get smart about it. Curwen Ares Rolinson is absolutely right when he says: “Every electoral cycle, a bold group of political newcomers gather the gumption to put their money and mana where their collective mouth is, and attempt to set up a successful political party in an attempt to break into Parliament. They rarely experience significant success, and almost inevitably flame-out shortly after their first General Election.”

 

The three principal reasons for the near universal lack of success experienced by newly-formed parties are: their wildly unrealistic expectations of success; insufficient resources; and their refusal to seek out and follow professional advice.

 

Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s millionaire father) is supposed to have told his sons that to become President of the United States they would need only three things. The first is money. The second is money. And the third is, money.

 

He was right – sort of. Money alone won’t win you an election, but all the advice and paraphernalia which money allows you to buy, will most certainly help. Not least because the very fact that you have money proves that you’re serious, and seriousness of intent is crucial to attracting the interest of credible candidates.

 

These are the questions that the People’s Party has to ask itself before it goes any further. First. “Can we lay our hands on enough money to purchase both the advice and the resources we need to make a political difference?” Second. “Can we find a candidate with the requisite strength to take that advice and deploy those resources to winning effect?” Third. “Does our party have the strength to withstand the shit-storm that any successful intervention into the political process inevitably attracts?”

 

Until it can give a confident “Yes!” to all three of those questions, the People’s Party ain’t going anywhere.

 

But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the small business-owners of Auckland’s immigrant communities (whom Rolinson quite rightly classified as “petit bourgeois”) passed the hat around enough times to fill a respectable war chest. Let us further suppose that they were able to secure the services of someone who knows how to run an effective election campaign. Finally, let us allow them to conjure-up a first-rate candidate. Someone with the good looks of a Bollywood movie star; the eloquence of a top-flight barrister; and the devil-may-care daring of a successful entrepreneur. Someone raised by hard-working immigrant parents who worked tirelessly behind the counter of their small family business to make sure that their sons and daughters would grow up to be successful New Zealand citizens. Someone who even born-and-bred Kiwis could admire – and vote for.

 

Now put this candidate up against Labour’s Michael Wood and National’s Parmjeet Parmar in the forthcoming Mt Roskill by-election and instruct him to bring down a plague on both their houses. Let him exploit the fact that there is hardly a family in either the Chinese or Indian communities of the electorate who hasn’t experienced, or knows somebody who has experienced, an assault, a robbery or a break-in in the past year. Gently chide Mt Roskill’s European voters for putting up with politicians who care more about the rights of criminals than they do about the rights of their victims. Invite Kiwis to be guided by the values of cultures that still know how to deal with those who attack innocent people in their homes, and rob hard-working families of their property. Suggest that the time might be ripe to liberate the Police, and police the liberals.

 

And see what happens.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 1 September 2016.

Labour vs The People's Party: Mt Roskill Up For Grabs?

The Successor: The man the Labour Party has chosen to replace Goff is young, intelligent, hard-working, and has already proved his ability to attract the votes of his neighbours by being twice elected to his local community board. As Goff’s electorate chair, he worked tirelessly to keep the Mt Roskill seat in his party’s hands. But, this otherwise ideal candidate does have one important factor working against him – his ethnicity. Michael Wood is a Pakeha New Zealander.

 

LESS THAN TWO-MINUTES’ WALK from my front doorstep is a wine shop. On Saturday, 13 August, it was robbed by four masked teenagers wielding clubs. The two retail workers on duty were beaten badly enough to require treatment in hospital. It was not an isolated incident. The same business had been robbed three times in as many weeks. The retailer and his staff are Chinese New Zealanders. The wine shop is located in the Mt Roskill electorate.

 

Barring something politically cataclysmic overwhelming his campaign, the current Member of Parliament for Mt Roskill, Phil Goff, will be Auckland City’s next mayor. A by-election will, therefore, be needed to fill the vacancy created by Goff’s departure for the Town Hall.

 

The man the Labour Party has chosen to replace Goff is young, intelligent, hard-working, and has already proved his ability to attract the votes of his neighbours by being twice elected to his local community board. As Goff’s electorate chair, he worked tirelessly to keep the Mt Roskill seat in his party’s hands. But, this otherwise ideal candidate does have one important factor working against him – his ethnicity. Michael Wood is a Pakeha New Zealander.

 

“So is Phil Goff”, you rightfully object, “but it didn’t prevent him from taking 56 percent of the Electorate Vote in the 2014 General Election.” No, it didn’t, but then Goff has held the seat for all but three of the last 35 years. Incumbency and name recognition confer enormous advantages upon a candidate, and Goff has made the most of them in ten out of the last twelve general elections.

 

Unfortunately for Michael Wood, while Goff has been winning, Mt Roskill has been changing. As the local political fiefdom of the long-time Deputy-Mayor of Auckland, Keith Hay, Mt Roskill was a notorious bastion of evangelical Christian social-conservatism. Some Labour wags even referred to it as the “Bible Belt”.  Not anymore. Today, Mt Roskill’s 25,000 Christians share their electorate with more than 3,000 Muslims and nearly 6,000 Hindus. This religious diversity reflects the fact that “Asians” comprise nearly 40 percent of the electorate. More than 45 percent of today’s Mt Roskillites were born overseas.

 

Michael Wood has always known he would face a tough race to secure this new Mt Roskill for Labour. Boundary changes have shaved an uncomfortably large slice off Goff’s winning margin, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, in 2014 National’s Party Vote tally exceeded Labour’s by more than 2,000 votes. In other words, Mt Roskill should no longer be classed as a safe Labour seat.

 

Even so, by securing his selection early and setting in motion an impressive canvassing effort, Wood has made himself the one to beat.

 

On Monday night, however, the formation of the New Zealand People’s Party changed everything. Aimed squarely at winning the votes of Mt Roskill’s large immigrant community, the People’s Party has the potential to draw enough votes away from Labour to deny Wood the seat. (By-elections are fought under the rules of First-Past-The-Post.) Indeed, if National decided not to field a candidate, and steered its voters towards the People’s Party, the seat might even change hands.

 

Much will depend on the quantum of money and expertise the people behind the People’s Party are willing to invest in contesting the by-election – and what cause they choose to make their own.

 

Which takes us back neatly to the wine shop and the multiple attacks it has sustained. For far too many immigrant families such victimisation has become almost routine. Their anger at the apparent impotence of the authorities grows daily, even as their patience wears thin. A charismatic candidate, chosen from either the Indian or Chinese communities, running on an uncompromising promise to restore law and order to the Streets of Mt Roskill could easily attract thousands of immigrant votes. Add to them the votes cast strategically by National supporters raring to deny Labour the seat, and the race could get very close indeed.

 

Fortunately, that veteran of closely-fought by-election contests, Matt McCarten, has just announced his imminent return to Auckland. Andrew Little’s erstwhile chief-of-staff knows that if Labour doesn’t win Auckland, then it doesn’t win at all. Mt Roskill looks set to provide McCarten with his first organisational test. One can only assume that, for Michael Wood’s campaign team, the Wellington cavalry cannot arrive too soon.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 September 2016.

Brutal Realities

Just who is brutalising who? Justice Minister Simon Power appears willing to do violence to his own (surprisingly liberal) principles rather than forswear the support of the Sensible Sentencing Trust and its right-wing authoritarian advisers.

"RE-BRUTALISATION" – It’s a word you’ll be hearing again and again over the next few months.

The literal meaning of "re-brutalisation" is simple and straightforward. Someone is re-brutalised if they are repeatedly subjected to brutal treatment.

If an Islamic leader fell victim of one of the CIA’s "Special Renditions", for example, and was spirited away to Morocco, "waterboarded" and then released, only to be abducted, waterboarded and released all over again; then I think it would be fair to say that he’d experienced "re-brutalisation".

Because "brutal" is a very strong word – meaning "savagely or coarsely cruel"; "harsh"; and "merciless".

To discover that New Zealand children were being repeatedly subjected to savage, coarse, cruel, harsh and merciless treatment at the hands of our judicial officers would, therefore, be utterly shocking, unbelievable, and – if true – cause for the utmost concern.

But this is precisely what the Minister of Justice, Simon Power, is accusing judicial officers of doing to New Zealand children. According to Mr Power, the nation’s judges are sitting back and allowing taxpayer-funded defence lawyers to savagely, coarsely, cruelly, harshly and mercilessly "re-brutalise" child victims.

I must say that I was deeply shocked to learn that this sort of behaviour was being allowed in our courts. Media reports over the past twenty or so years had conveyed an entirely different picture of how New Zealand’s courts were obtaining and testing the testimony of children – especially those involved in cases of alleged child abuse.

I’d read about testimony being given by video-link so that children would not be required to physically confront their alleged abusers. I’d heard about social workers and psychologists being present to ensure that the child witnesses were not placed under undue pressure during cross-examination. Indeed, the clear impression I’d received from all of these media reports was that in this country our judicial system did everything within its power to make sure that child witnesses were treated kindly, delicately, compassionately, gently and sympathetically.

Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently, the same news media that has consistently misinformed me concerning the measures taken to ensure that child witnesses are not harmed by our legal processes, has also systematically suppressed the fact that, year after year, child witnesses were being savagely cross-examined by merciless defence lawyers, while judges and prosecutors looked on impassively – lifting not one finger to prevent these unfortunate youngsters’ "re-brutalisation".

All nonsense, of course. No such "re-brutalisation" has occurred, or is occurring, in New Zealand’s courtrooms. New Zealand does, indeed, enjoy a very good reputation for the way it handles the testimony of children.

So, why is the Minister of Justice using such extravagant and prejudicial language to convince us that our courtrooms have been transformed into veritable torture-chambers?

The answer to that question is, I’m afraid, as sinister as it is alarming.

Politically-speaking, the Minister has determined that there is more to be gained by aligning himself with the so-called "Victim’s Rights" movement, than there is by defending the core principles of Anglo-American jurisprudence.

The movement behind this politicisation of victimhood has a very specific and very sinister purpose: to roll-back the rights of the citizen, and reinforce what they see as the dangerously weakened powers of the State. Arising in the mid-1970s as a reaction to what many persons in authority around the world regarded as "an excess of democracy", this movement’s ultimate purpose is to stuff the genie of "permissiveness" back inside its bottle.

Were it to announce these purposes openly and honestly, however, such a profoundly authoritarian project would almost certainly be rejected by the electorate. But, when it masks its ultimate objectives behind the carefully manufactured perception that our courts have become places where criminals, awash with rights and flush with taxpayers’ cash, are outrageously protected by weak judges and venal defence lawyers; and where the victims of crime, their rights denied and their voices stifled, are callously "re-brutalised" over and over again; then the clamour for reducing the rights of accused citizens and brutally punishing convicted criminals becomes politically irresistible.

In the 2008 election campaign, the political scientist Jack Vowles noted that: "Hard-line law and order policies seem to have provided the strongest substantive National Party appeal, despite Labour’s considerable concessions to that point of view since 1999."

As a person, Mr Power is an intelligent, compassionate and surprisingly liberal man. As a politician, however, he can’t afford to become the National Minister who turned his back on the suite of policies which persuaded more former Labour voters to switch sides than any other. That is not the sort of legacy someone hoping to succeed John Key as National’s leader wants to have hanging around his neck. Which is why he’s prepared to ally himself with some very cruel, very coarse and very savage ideological beasts.

If anyone’s been "brutalised", it’s the Minister.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 31st August 2010.

Got a smoke, mate?

The solipsism of smoke. The ritual of smoking (and who did it better than Humphrey Bogart?) restores the smoker to the calm centre of his self. With a cigarette in his hand, even the most battered and broken criminal once again becomes the hero of his own story. It is this restorative power that Corrections Minister, Judith Collins (channelling Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is so determined to stub out.

NOTHING PROTECTS like a cigarette.

It’s why we gave them away by the carton to young soldiers heading for the front-lines.

It’s why two-thirds of prison inmates smoke.

There’s something immensely comforting about the smoking ritual: tap out the cigarette from the pack; seize the dry filter-tip between your lips; snap a flame from match or lighter; suck back that first stream of nicotine-laden smoke and let it go deep into your lungs; feel the body’s instant response to the drug.

Lighting-up is something you do: not the guy sitting next to you; not the girl waiting outside; but you. Over all the pain, anger and confusion tearing your guts to shreds, the cigarette has the power to calm, to focus, to reassure. At the heart of this totally screwed-up scene there is still a hero: and that hero is you … having a smoke.

It’s why lighting-up a cigarette is still such an effective punctuation device in the making of a movie. Forget all about the indisputable scientific evidence of cigarette-smoking’s fatal effects. That Promethean moment, when the human mastery of fire and smoke is demonstrated for all to see, cannot help but signal and reinforce the smoker’s heroic status.

And that, of course, is why we want to ban cigarette-smoking in our prisons. It’s got nothing to do with the dangers of second-hand smoke (though dangers there are) and even less to do with the health and safety of prisoners and guards (though both would be better off without cigarettes). We, in the person of the Minister of Corrections, Judith Collins, are banning cigarettes from prisons because, deep down, we know that in depriving inmates of this last display of individual autonomy; this last precious means of remaining the hero of their own stories; we’re going to really hurt them.

Our need to hurt the criminal classes is as potent as their craving for nicotine, alcohol and other drugs. Two hundred years of humanitarian reform have unreasonably deprived us of the pleasure and we mean to make up for lost time.

We’ve had enough of all the scientific explanations of criminal offending. Why? Because, somehow, the research always seems to come back to us. Somehow, the social scientists always contrive to locate the causes of criminality in the wider society. It’s the way we respond to poverty and its effects, they say. It’s about how we apportion social praise and blame. Material and/or cultural wealth, and the way we distribute it, insist the experts, lies at the root of criminal behaviour.

We’re sick to death of hearing this sort of stuff. How can the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of this country possibly be to blame for the actions of its criminal class? We don’t rob dairies at the point of a gun. We don’t break into our neighbours’ houses and steal their property? We don’t abduct and rape young women on their way home from work. We don’t shake our toddlers to death.

No, we don’t. But neither are we willing to vote for a political party which promises to spend the money required to address the problems of the people who do. We’re not ready to pay the taxes necessary to solve the housing crisis afflicting poor communities. We’re unwilling to properly resource the mental health sector, or fund the groups looking after drug addicts. And when a Minister of Corrections presents blueprints for new prisons: designs which acknowledge the best practice of correctional facilities overseas; we mutter darkly about "five-star hotels".

We’re always ready to get tough of crime; but we balk at getting tough on the causes of crime.

A psychiatrist would recognise this country’s punitive corrections policy for what it is: a massive exercise in projection. To keep our own moral complexion spotless we are driven to make the criminal’s ever more hideous.

The cheapest and most politically expedient way of doing this is by incarcerating offenders in grim establishments more or less guaranteed to produce ugly behaviour. Herd them into overcrowded and understaffed prisons – and when these inevitably overflow – shove the surplus criminal population into converted shipping containers.

Our prison system has become the institutional equivalent of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray: a monstrous proxy representation of New Zealanders’ collective refusal to confront their own selfishness and cruelty.

Got a smoke, mate?

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 2 July 2010.

Political Victims

"Crusher Collins": Trapped in her persona of the "tough" Corrections Minister, Judith Collins cannot now step back from the deeply flawed law and order policies of the National-led Government.

CAN JUDITH COLLINS be rehabilitated? Or is the Minister of Corrections an incorrigible ideological recidivist who should be locked away forever?

The questions are, of course, facetious. Collins is an intelligent and caring woman, whose private face bears scant resemblance to the fierce political mask of "Crusher Collins" – that steely-eyed, thin-lipped avatar of conservative New Zealand’s growing preoccupation with victims’ rights.

"The public expects the system – first and foremost – to punish those who have broken the law", writes Collins in a think-piece published last Wednesday in The New Zealand Herald. "Punishment for serious crime in the majority of cases should be harsh, because anything less fails to acknowledge that victims of crime are never truly released from their sentence."

Rhetorical red meat of this sort has become standard fare for Collins. Like the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s Garth McVicar, and ACT’s David Garrett, she long ago mastered the art of lubricating the man-eating machinery of the New Zealand prison system with the tears of its inhabitants’ victims.

Her defence of the Government’s new "Three Strikes" policy, for example, relies for its impact not on solid research or sound reasoning, but on "a letter from a very courageous woman" whose 15-year-old daughter was murdered in "a brutal attack". The awful experiences of Collins’ correspondent, and the outrage and horror they evoke, effectively forestall any serious criticism of the Minister’s argument. Who would be insensitive enough to chop logic with someone acting on behalf of a mother whose daughter had been stabbed, strangled and sexually violated?

But, when did it become acceptable for a Minister of the Crown to use the victims of crime as human-shields against the critical scrutiny of government policy? And how did it become "okay" for politicians to render any dispassionate assessment of that policy impossible by admitting to the discussion all the overwhelming emotions associated with violent death and inconsolable human loss? What sort of politics is this?

The very worst kind. Because conservative politicians compound their cynical exploitation of human grief by directing the intense emotion it inevitably evokes against their ideological opponents.

"In this country we have many people who have made a thriving industry out of making excuses for criminals", writes Collins. "In the past decade these people have overwhelmed the debate on law and order with their views on the rights of offenders."

A thriving industry? To what and to whom is the Minister referring? The legal profession? The probation service? University departments conducting research into the causes and consequences of criminal offending? NGOs and religious organisations helping offenders make the transition from "inside" to "outside"? Who are these thriving industrialists?

And what is Collins suggesting? That citizens accused of a crime should not be entitled to legal representation? That no one should ever be encouraged (let alone funded) to ask why young men murder young women? Is she seriously suggesting that all attempts to ease offenders safely back into society are misguided?

Unfortunately, the Minister doesn’t say – so let us examine the one specific claim that she does make: that for the past ten years the advocates of "the rights of offenders" have "overwhelmed" the law and order debate.

Is this a true statement? No, it isn’t. In fact, the situation in New Zealand is the exact opposite of what the Minister is claiming. Over the course of the past ten years – no, let’s be honest, over the past thirty years – the trend in all the English-speaking countries has been towards harsher penalties, longer sentences and diminished legal protections for those accused of serious crimes.

This is particularly true of New Zealand, where, for most of the past decade, both of the major political parties have engaged in a bidding war to determine who could come up with the most draconian responses to violent crime. It began with Norm Withers’ "Law & Order" Citizens Initiated Referendum" – carried overwhelmingly at the General Election of 2002. Mr Withers’ success put paid to what little remained of the liberal Minister of Corrections, Matt Robson’s, doomed attempt to align New Zealand’s penal policies with international best practice.

And, on every dismal, descending step of this new law-and-order staircase our politicians were shadowed by the "if it bleeds it leads" news media. So potent (and profitable) has the depiction of serious criminal offending become, that our journalists see little merit in alerting their readers, listeners or viewers to the statistical facts of New Zealand’s declining crime-rate. Instead, reporters and politicians became inextricably entwined in a dangerously symbiotic double-act: the former whipping the voters into a vengeful frenzy; the latter doing their best to appease the resulting bloodlust.

The true flowering of liberal penology actually came in the 1960s and 70s when, at the height of the "historic compromise" between capital and labour, and the social revolution it precipitated, English-speaking politicians, inspired by the compassionate social-democracies of Northern Europe, attempted to shift the policy focus away from primitive retribution (the Old Testament’s "eye-for-an-eye") towards a more humane emphasis on offender rehabilitation and a getting-to-grips with the socio-economic and cultural generators of criminal behaviour.

Not surprisingly, Collins is unwilling to acknowledge any of this. To do so would be to place the artificially induced clamour for a more punitive corrections regime in the broader historical context of the New Right’s counter-offensive against the redistributive welfare state and all its works.

In this context, not even Tony Blair’s rhetorically brilliant "tough on crime – tough on the causes of crime" is acceptable. But, if the second part of Blair’s slogan must be jettisoned, conservative politicians must have something else to mask the unrelenting bleakness of their ultimate "solution": constantly rising levels of incarceration in a privatised prison system.

The answer, of course, is to shift the political focus from the perpetrators to the victims of crime. No matter that this policy effectively reverses the centuries-old tradition of treating crime as an act against the State. No matter that it makes the calm and impartial administration of justice increasingly problematic. The relentless focus on victims, by making rationality redundant, and turning evidence-driven humanitarians into criminal enablers, provides a perfect cover.

"Time and again," writes Collins, "victims of crime have told me they feel let down by a system that seems to put greater emphasis on the rights of offenders than victims."

Not any more.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 4 February 2010.