You hadn’t the nerve to say this out loud — but you implied gang members should be disqualified from pensions.
This would be unfair. The reasons so many young Māori men join gangs cannot be disconnected from this country’s deep-seated social wrongs. Gangs are one more part of the fallout from colonialism, Te Tiriti injustices, and racism.
Name not supplied.
Your subject is always confronting.
One of the better analysts of our gang problem did his Master’s thesis while serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at Paremoremo maximum security prison — he’s Greg Newbold, the recently retired Canterbury criminology professor and author.
Newbold says society’s woke attitudes make it hard to acknowledge the most direct cause of growing gang membership is bad parenting in many Māori families.
"Too many Māori children grow up in badly dysfunctional families plagued by violence, alcoholism, disappeared fathers, neglect, and poverty. It’s not surprising many discover that a gang brings them a closer, friendlier family than they had in their childhood home," he says.
"It’s a silly mistake to try and transfer responsibility for bad parenting to Waitangi or abstract reasons like colonialism. I can’t see any link between Treaty breaches and bad parenting."
Gang profiles differ country to country. America’s bikie gangs are notoriously White Supremacist — which created "interesting" moments when a US Hell’s Angels group flew in for a New Zealand chapter event. Oddly, they’d have admired each other’s racist swastikas.
Australian gangs too are typically European, but the Comancheros — our neighbour’s most feared gang — is strongly Middle Eastern with many members flaunting contempt for their infidel host country.
What most differentiates New Zealand is the sheer depth of gang penetration. Population adjusted we already have nearly nine times as many patched gangsters as Australia. Repeat that slowly — not double, not triple, but NINE times.
Last year’s "official count" of New Zealand patched members was 8061. But nobody knows what that number would become if it included the gangs’ surrounding groups — the "prospects" who are proving themselves, the friend and family associates, and the young teen wannabes ram-raiding and sticking up corner dairies.
With Auckland’s gunfire incidents now seemingly daily, it’s no huge surprise that last year’s violent crime statistic for Auckland was up 49%.
Legislation born of moral panic seems as useful as pimple cream. We have 1990s laws prohibiting habitual association between violence or drugs offenders. This fearsome dragnet has resulted in two arrests in 22 years — one not a gang member.
Much local government law would allow the destruction of gang HQs because of flagrant zoning breaches — but this doesn’t, and won’t, happen for as long as mayors wear brass chains.
We can count on gangs becoming a race-to-get-tough 2023 election issue. But with what result? There’s little "get tough" space left in prisons, where gang inmates — now a third of the jail population — are already the main cause of overcrowding.
Which returns us to dealing with cause, and to Professor Newbold’s parenting concerns.
Amongst today’s hardest public sector jobs must be family welfare work inside Oranga Tamariki. These folk are the ambulance drivers at the bottom of the family welfare cliff. Too often their reward is finding themselves despised by the community they serve.
Uncle Norm knows decent conversation must range from the sublime to the fruitcake. Accordingly:
Dear Uncle Norm,
We were recently visited at St Clair by my Sydney great uncle, and his wizened wife, Joan.
Warren ("Wozza") owns a champion beer gut that swims daily with the Bondi Icebreakers, then waddles home for its after-surf spa bath.
He surf’n’spa-d with us for a fortnight, and each night hung out the brown Speedos he lovingly called "Wozza’s (henk-henk) budgie smugglers" We soon came to understand why Joan, raised on a cattle farm, dismissed them as his "tick togs".
Three weeks after they left, I noticed our laundry smelt. The culprit was Wozza’s budgie smugglers which he’d left mouldering in a corner. Inside his togs I found an insect infestation. Not of ticks, but dead moths. These honest Kiwis had died attempting the job of digesting Wozza’s Speedos.
My point (sorry, eventually reached) is that the used swimming togs of old men need a name that suggests our disgust. Perhaps Worm Farms or Bathing Plods? Your thoughts?
Terri Tinling
You aren’t the first to raise the sexist-ageist question of timeworn togs.
The late Fred Allen, an American comedian, found a male visitor had inconsiderately left his mangy swimmers dangling on the Allen clothes-line.
Allen’s scathing letter (offering conditional return of the togs), variously described them as: loin wares, Neptune drawers, kelp knickers, a woollen jockstrap, a swamp leotard, a chastity band, and a navel awning.
Joan did well with "tick-togs". I can offer no advance on that. Readers?
- John Lapsley lives in Arrowtown
