Dialogue: When Maori anger took aim at the wrong target

By DANIEL JACKSON in Northland

I felt sorry for the officials and witnesses sitting at the front of the room.

The collection of Department of Corrections staff, Northland Regional Council staff, archaeologists and engineers had gone to the Kaikohe Golf Club building expecting to give and receive evidence in a resource consent hearing for the 350-bed medium security prison planned for construction at nearby Ngawha.

But instead of having to struggle to keep awake while listening to facts about earthworks and stream diversion, the group were made to shuffle uncomfortably in their seats as person after person from the mainly Maori crowd facing them shouted opposition to the prison.

I can understand the emotions of the crowd and the resentment they feel at a process to build a prison they do not want.

In my home town of Wanganui there is still a lot of resentment about the medium-security prison at Kaitoke, which was built more than 20 years ago and more than 15km from the heart of the city.

From small beginnings, Kaitoke prison has grown into a sprawling facility which at times houses some of the nation's worst offenders at various stages in their sentences.

Depending on who you speak to in Wanganui the prison has had both good and bad effects - it provides jobs and employment in the region but many also attribute the town's high crime rate to former inmates who have settled in the area.

The prison at Ngawha is expected to cost $100 million to build and will provide employment. It will also provide a steady stream of former criminals and for a town as small as Kaikohe that must be a scary prospect.

But while I understand the feelings of the locals of Kaikohe, I do not agree with the way they delivered their message at the hearing.

Meeting chairman and commissioner Mark Farnsworth bore the brunt of the crowd's anger since it was his job to try to restore order to the hearing, which lacked the protocol of a hui on a marae or the formality required of the judicial hearing it was supposed to be.

Each time Mr Farnsworth stood he was shouted down as the crowd mistook him for an agent of the prison and his attempts at bringing order to the meeting went unheeded.

"Show respect, do not forget on whose land you stand," shouted one audience member at him. From another came: "You may think you are talking to Maori without influence but we can also talk to your masters in Wellington and tell them how their puppy dogs have been misbehaving."

I could have understood the anger of the crowd if the people they were shouting at could have influenced the decision on where the prison was to go.

But the hearing was being held by the regional council, which has no power to say whether a prison should be built on the site - that was decided by the Far North District Council when it granted the Corrections Department the land-use consent.

All the regional council can do is make sure the department heeds the Resource Management Act while building the facility.

Powerless, too, were the Corrections Department staff at the hearing. They were only there doing their jobs by representing the department's interests.

Among those in the crowd were undoubtedly people who had legitimate points, but these were lost in the rhetoric of others simply seeking to make themselves heard or pushing the barrows of Maori sovereignty and Treaty of Waitangi issues.

The hearing eventually and inevitably continued on its prescribed course as it had to do and the commissioners are now considering the evidence.

And even after the commissioners deliver their decisions, they do not have the final word because an appeal of the district council's land-use consent has to go before the Environment Court before any real start on construction of the facility can be made.

If there had been a Government MP at the hearing, or even senior staff from Corrections, the crowd's anger could have been directed at the right people. But they weren't, and there was no need for the not-so-thinly veiled threats and abuse heaped on the people at the front of the room.