Onward Christian Soldier: The Salvation Army’s Ronji Tanielu talks to The AM Show’s
Duncan Garner about “The State of Our Communities” 2018 report.
THE LATEST “State of Our Communities” report from the
Salvation Army exposes a worrying fragility in New Zealand’s social
relationships. Behind the happy multicultural façade so beloved of politicians
and bureaucrats, racial animosities fester and tensions between competing ethnic
communities multiply.
The report (based on hundreds of face-to-face interviews in
Kaitaia, Whangarei, Manurewa in Auckland, New Plymouth, Hornby in Christchurch
and Timaru) describes rising resentment at the manifest economic inequalities afflicting
the Maori population of Northland; tensions between old and new immigrant
communities in Auckland; and a South Island Pakeha monoculture struggling to
comprehend the meaning and purpose of diversity.
That this racial dimension to the state of our communities
has been explicitly recognised in the Army’s report is itself exceptional. The preferred
response of New Zealand’s core institutions is to insist that, thankfully, inter-ethnic
conflict is a phenomenon alien to our society.
The wonder is, however, that an explosion of racial violence
has not already torn Northland apart. Immigrants from South Africa marvel at the
province’s apparently effortless separation of the races. What the apartheid
system struggled to effect in their homeland, Pakeha Northlanders have achieved
without recourse to anything so crude as Pass Laws. Kaikohe is poor and brown.
Kerikeri is rich and white. And never the twain shall meet.
What the Army’s interviews reveal, however, is an
unwillingness on the part of younger Maori to accept this state of voluntary
apartheid. After all, the nation’s official ideology attributes huge value to New
Zealand’s indigenous heritage. Unsurprising, then, that the impoverished Maori
communities of the North are requiring these Wellington-based bi-culturalists to
back their positive rhetoric with tangible resources. Upon the speed and
fulsomeness of their response, the maintenance of racial harmony in Northland largely
depends.
The arrival of new immigrants from East and South Asia in
Auckland suburbs hitherto the preserve of immigrants from the Pacific Islands
is similarly testing New Zealand’s multicultural assumptions. Cook Islanders, Niueans,
Samoans and Tongans were brought to New Zealand as factory workers and
labourers. The entrepreneurial traditions of immigrants arriving from India and
China have not always fitted easily into communities hitherto dominated by wage
workers.
Compounding these economic divergences are the sharp
religious differences between the devoutly Christian Pasifika and the followers
of the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions. The rigorous secularism
of official New Zealand is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the strong
feelings that arise when different religious communities are required to practice
their faiths in close proximity.
Pakeha living in the South Island are often bemused at North
Islanders’ preoccupation with bi- and multiculturalism. In communities of overwhelmingly
pale complexion, which most South Island towns and cities tend to be, it all
comes across as vaguely obsessional. The racial homogeneity of provincial centres
like Timaru encourages all manner of easy assumptions about what constitutes a
“real” New Zealander – along with some potentially dangerous misapprehensions
about how easy it is (or should be) for outsiders to “fit in”.
Southern Man’s obtuseness on matters cultural largely
explains his preoccupation with the malign effects of inadequate and/or
unaffordable housing in his community. There is no clearer manifestation of
poverty than homelessness, and nothing breeds fear, anger and resentment faster
than the obvious sufferings of the poor.
Overlay that economic distress with the even more terrifying
effects of drug-dealing, and the addictions upon which the drug suppliers’
business model depends, and you have a sure-fire recipe for continuously
escalating social anxieties revealing themselves in periodic outbreaks of moral
panic.
The severity of these panics is accentuated by the tendency
of racially and/or economically homogenous middle-class communities (in both
islands) to give the manufacture, distribution and sale of illegal drugs a
luridly racial cast. If it’s not the shadowy members of Chinese triads and
Mexican drug cartels, it’s the scary bros from Black Power and the Mongrel Mob
doing the business. That the organised criminals controlling the New Zealand
drug trade – especially the scourge of methamphetamine – are, overwhelmingly, wealthy
Pakeha, is a fact too frightening for their middle-class neighbours to
acknowledge.
In its essence, the Salvation Army’s report contributes yet
another collection of personal testimonies to the multitude already enumerating
the unrelenting social cruelties of capitalism. Not that the Army couches its
analysis in such godlessly Marxist terms. This is, after all, a Christian denomination
determined to demonstrate the redemptive power of faith in action. “Thy Kingdom
come”, enjoins the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in
Heaven.” The Sallies try to do good one family, one person, one soul, at a
time.
Yet even these Good Samaritans in uniform cannot ignore
entirely the systemic character of the sins they are pledged to wage war
against. The correlation of high numbers of Maori with high levels of poverty;
of high levels of poverty with high levels of homelessness and drug abuse; is difficult
to miss.
The hardest test for any Christian is to locate the source
of human wickedness. Attributing the ills of society to the moral weakness of
their victims is always easier than fighting those who made the wrong too
strong to resist. Though they call themselves an army, the Sallies have,
historically, tended to go to war against the symptoms of sin. Vanquishing the
causes of human distress: imperialism, racism, economic exploitation; poverty
and social despair; they prefer to leave to God.
To date, not a conspicuously successful strategy for
replicating Heaven on Earth.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 14 December 2018.
