Tommy Wilson: Crisis in our own borders

In Tauranga we have 144 people living a homeless lifestyle. Photo / File

When I first heard the name Jeremy Corbyn I immediately assumed the news item was about 7 Days, the TV3 comedy show that does a first class job of pointing the bone of blame at politicians and people in power who measure success by how much you have and not how much you can share or give.

However Jeremy Corbyn - not Corbett - is now the new leader of the British Labour Party and his platform promise that "poverty doesn't have to be inevitable" was a sweet sorbet for those of us who work with poverty every day.

This week we heard that Merivale Community Centre in Tauranga Moana was facing closure and if this were to happen then the overflow of poor people needing help would then walk down the road to Te Tuinga Whanau Support Services, the organisation I manage.

It's a hard gig to run a centre like Merivale and the five managers in six years is testament to this. You only take so much hardship and sadness that you are almost powerless to help before the burden is too heavy to carry.

All across the Bay that supposedly is blessed with plenty, we have community centres struggling to keep up with the tsunami of lost, lonely, impoverished and disconnected people, many or most of them Maori. And we look the other way when the Merivales of this country are denied the funding needed to keep their community centre going.

At a time when we are urging our government to allow 1000 refugees from Syria to see the silver lining in our long white cloud, we can't take care of the ones we have created from within our own borders.

In Tauranga we have 144 living a homeless lifestyle and I am sure Rotorua is no better, so we can safely assume there are 500 homeless refugees living in the Bay of Plenty today.

When community centres at the front line of poverty run out of steam like a poor performing forward pack - as happened on Saturday with the Steamers - the rest of the team collapses around it.

The answer, as always, can be found in the word mana and what it stands for. Mana is the ability to do good for the benefit of others and it can only be measured in deeds not dollars.

If we could start measuring the currency of success in mana and not money we would connect up those who need help most and not allow the ghettoisation of our Bay of Plenty communities and the inevitability of poverty that the new British Labour leaders spoke about which will most certainly happen if we penny pinch from the mouths of the most needy.

Man cannot live on koha alone and nor can community centres, especially the pohara (poor) ones such as Merivale. We, as a caring community, cannot allow Merivale Community Centre to collapse and close.

There is no belt to tighten with a budget that not even a Biafran could trim fat off in any of our community and social service centres.

I know in my own organisation we have a flawed funding system that forces us to go cap in hand to the private sector to keep our doors open.

How this can happen when we can spend half a billion on bringing up a Rena wreck or $11 million to fund research on why our harbour is polluted is beyond me.

Surely the answer to the inconvenient truth about the state of the inner and outer harbour and the solution is the same. Stop pouring poisonous crap into it.

I find it completely insane that we have spent many millions cleaning up the 30 tonnes of copper at the bottom of the reef yet we spend not a single dollar researching the facts or cleaning up the after effects of the 300 tonnes of pure copper sulphate contained in the agri-chemicals being poured on kiwifruit orchards every year to combat Psa.

Poverty comes in many forms be it social, educational or environmental. But the solution to them all is the same.

Mana over money or people before profit is the currency we will have to start measuring success by if this planet is to be here for our kids and moko to play on.

We may have more than seven days and we may need more than Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Corbett to lift the level of awareness but the poverty clock is ticking and the Merivale Community Centre is a crisis within our own borders that we should all be marching in solidarity for.

-Broblack@xtra.co.nz

Tommy Wilson is a bestselling local writer and author.