KEY POINTS:
What a strange world we live in. We proudly create elite military squads to charge around the world trying to save failed states like Afghanistan and East Timor.
But when neighbourhood warfare breaks on the streets of Mt Albert, there's no Social Assistance Squad to the rescue, and certainly no Victoria Cross in the offing for anyone trying to restore the peace.
Far from restoring peace, state landlord Housing New Zealand and the politicians seem set on turning the sorry saga of the Salt family and the bid to oust them from their state house into some sort of blame-and-shame, reality-television spectacle, a sort of modern-day witch-burning.
The only person to emerge with any credit is Tenancy Tribunal adjudicator Amanda Elliott, who shot holes in the landlord's case for eviction and gave the Salt family a reprieve. From the uproar this decision has caused, I doubt Ms Elliott will be featuring in any immediate honours list.
To paraphrase the decision, Ms Elliott is saying that if the Salts were the neighbours from hell, then Housing New Zealand and the Police did a very incompetent job in presenting their evidence.
In one droll aside, she notes: "I would have expected there to have been evidence of recent incidents, and not accounts of events that did not even take place this century."
She points out that the only breach of tenancy notice served during the 12-year tenancy was on January 18 this year and referred to excessive noise from loud music.
Yet no evidence was given at the hearing of noise abatement orders being issued by the city council. Indeed, the landlord conceded that loud noise was not the real issue.
Elsewhere in the decision, Ms Elliott said Mrs Salt could not be held accountable for one alleged disruption of the peace, when any commotion was exacerbated by the presence of up to 29 police officers confronting 20 youths.
What is disappointing is that in this, Year 8 of the era of Compassionate Labour, no mechanisms exist to deal with such incidents of social eruption. Instead, Prime Minister Helen Clark seems to be leaning on Housing New Zealand to evict the family.
Such a move would certainly pacify several, if not all, of the neighbours, who say they've been terrorised over the years by the three oldest boys - none now living at home - and their youth gang mates. But what sort of solution is it to just pack the problem family off to another suburb and a new set of neighbours?
Obviously we're not talking of a family of angels. But if only for the sake of people who will be encountering the kids in future years, wouldn't we be acting smarter as a society if we stopped rejecting them now and tried to bring them into the community. Call it an act of self-preservation on society's part.
Helen Clark's Labour allies in Britain seem to have the right idea with the Respect Action Plan (www.respect.gov.uk), which is a multi-disciplinary, carrot-and-stick programme started last year "to tackle anti-social behaviour and reclaim communities for the law-abiding majority."
Three months ago, 53 family intervention projects were started to work with 1500 of England's "most difficult and anti-social families."
Respect co-ordinator Louise Casey said these families could cause "untold misery to those who live alongside them with their frightening and disruptive behaviour".
"These are the families who may have been written off by agencies as 'lost causes' but will now be offered the right help and incentive to become decent members of their community and give their children the opportunity to grow up with a chance in life," she said.
The argument is: Help these families and you help the whole community. Pilot projects have produced impressive results. For 85 per cent of participating families, complaints about anti-social behaviour ceased or reduced and in 92 per cent of cases the risk to local communities was assessed as having either reduced or ceased completely by the time the problem families completed the programmes.
Perhaps I'm going soft in my dotage, but surely something like that is better than booting an obviously stressed mother, with six school-age kids - to say nothing of the three troubled older ones - out into the night.
