Paul Holmes: Dead-end destinies

That was one hell of a cock-up at Housing New Zealand this week. Acting on complaints from neighbours about members of the Pairama family, Housing NZ hands the paperwork to the intimidating low-life tenants.

Anthony Pairama is a former Mongrel Mob president so these people are steeped in the stench of the Mob. Unfortunately, in the paperwork are the names of both the complainant and the Housing NZ woman who booted them out.

If you need one shocking sign of the continuing power of the Mob you can see it in the seriousness with which Housing NZ is taking the threats of violence and retribution and the speed with which they put their official under police protection.

As I write, it is not clear what protections are being offered to the fed-up neighbours who made the complaint about the family's behaviour. The Mob members evicted will be assisted to find some alternative accommodation but, says Housing NZ, the ghastly swine will not be placed in Housing NZ properties.

However, Housing NZ says it feels a responsibility for the woman and children involved so they must be assisted into housing. I guess, but I hope the public body doesn't spend too much time on the task.

Ask yourself: What kind of women are these? What kind of children are they going to produce? And what landlord would take them after this?

And, gee, it's a small question and a pointless one I know, and call me old-fashioned, but why do their men not arrange this?

Most of us - well, we old-fashioned ones - consider providing a roof to be a very serious part of a man's job in life.

It can be a woman's job too, but I assume these fellows have nothing much to do all day except delude themselves and intimidate other people. It might just be possible for them to do a bit of house-hunting that does not involve the assumption that the taxpayer should put them up.

It is a diabolical liberty to rent a house the state provides - that is to say, a house we provide - trash it, then behave in a way that threatens neighbours.

And it is a similar liberty to object with self-righteous fury and indignation when they boot you out. That is how silly we have become with our welfare system, this is how far down we let it be pulled, this is how far from necessarily human self-responsibility we have let things drift for some who seem bloody-mindedly and deliberately blind to decency and self-provision.

I do not mock the poor, the strugglers, the people who find work, the kind of person I see cleaning the offices on a weekend or after people have left at night, people who try to do what normal people do which is to provide for their families.

Again, it's old-fashioned, but if you have kids, for God's sake have a place for them that's warm and dry and an income with which to support them.

And while it is easy to condemn the Mongrel Mob and groups like them, they are complex organisations. In the Mongrel Mob at least, I have met the occasional decent type. I have met former Mobsters who saw the error of their ways and learned the error through hard stints in prison.

Who knows what kind of family dysfunction, or what is in a kid's own head, that makes a kid feel more comfortable in the company of gangs and criminals who are, of course, one and the same. In a country packed with opportunity, such as this one is, why would you choose the dead-end option of an idle and criminal life in the Mongrel Mob?

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Meanwhile, after nine years - nine years, for God's sake - the Independent Police Conduct Authority has determined that the shooting of Steven Wallace by Constable A in Waitara that fateful Sunday morning so long ago was reasonable and justified.

I think most people will agree. Justice Lowell Goddard is no apologist for the police and she is no fool. I remember covering the case intently.

The main thing not emphasised enough in discussions at the time was the sheer strength of Wallace's violence, the rampaging destructive strength Wallace was demonstrating in that horror period, and the terror he must have induced in the officers who happened to be there.

The fact is, if you behave as Wallace did that night, and advance with a softball bat on lone police officers in the middle of the night, you are likely to get shot.

Just as the tedious, poor loser Diagnostic Medlab should cut its losses and shut up and move on and begin helping the transition to a new lab-testing regime for the people of Auckland, so should the Wallace family start to try to move on, despite the pain which will never leave them. They are at the end of the line on this one.

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At last I am reading the sensationally good Michael Wolff book about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns The News, which focuses on his legendary, impossible, acquisition 18 months ago of Dow Jones and the bastion of the establishment the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch, always the outsider, the man vilified by the British and American establishments, the man who has contempt for elites, the man who nevertheless loves newspapers so much he keeps a couple of them going that cost him millions a year, remains a brilliant mystery. Michael Wolff gets him better than anyone else I ever saw try.