Race: The way ahead: Solutions found with the right connections

Community projects set up in the unemployment blackspot of Waitara may point the way forward for Maori and Pakeha. SIMON COLLINS reports


In the pre-dawn chill of our wintry summer, a small white van glides around the deserted streets of the Taranaki town of Waitara. At 14 houses, George Rapana, a short, fit man still playing rugby league at 35, collects intermediate school students and takes them for a 6am swim in the unheated outdoor pool.

They have to run or swim five lengths, then go home, make a proper breakfast and make their beds. "The pool is quite warm in the morning," he insists, but then adds: "By the time they get to school they are wide awake."

After school, the group goes to an old commercial building which Rapana has turned into a youth centre, with a big space for table tennis and other sports.

They are fed fruit and go through a structured six-month course, including how to manage their time and anger, education about drugs and alcohol, and goal-setting.

When he started five years ago, Rapana and his Waitara Project Trust worked with high-school-aged kids, but that was too late. Last year three girls who were then 14 were found guilty of gruesomely bashing truck driver Kenneth Pigott to death with a hammer and throwing him into the Waitara River so they could have a joyride in his four-wheel drive.

"Now I have 11- to 14-year-olds from Manukorihi Intermediate," Rapana says. "We just try to support our youth in Waitara. It's more of a prevention - preventing them from making wrong choices."

Two years after the Pigott murder, four years after architecture school dropout Steve Wallace was shot dead by police in the town's main street, this and other projects in Waitara may point the way forward for New Zealand's fraught race relations.

Here, where 36 per cent of the students at the high school are Maori, ethnic issues are concrete and personal. Jonathan Marshall, a Canadian-born father of six who chairs the intermediate school board, can point to the homes around him and describe each family - Maori and Pakeha.

"We look after each other and serve each other in Waitara," he says. "I can go round my block here and say who everyone is and the last time we had a meal together and the last time we did something together."

Yet Waitara, too, is struggling to come to grips with the stark divide in public attitudes revealed since Don Brash brought long-simmering resentments to the surface in his Orewa speech in January, calling for an end to special treatment for Maori.

In Herald-DigiPoll surveys in the past two weeks, 77 per cent of Maori thought local iwi should be specially consulted by local bodies. But 52 per cent of Pakeha disagreed.

Seventy per cent of Maori wanted the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi enshrined in law. But most Pakeha supported Brash's call to take treaty references out of the law.

Brash's vision of "one people, living under one set of laws" has resonated among Pakeha partly because, as 62-year-old Anna Meeks told the Weekend Herald two weeks ago, "They want payouts all the time but what they do with it is piss it up against the wall".

Many Pakeha see Maori as stuck in a "handout mentality". And from the Maori point of view, handouts are exactly what they are trying to get away from. Despite a Pakeha unemployment rate at a 17-year low of 3.2 per cent, the Maori rate is 10 per cent - still 2 per cent higher than the Pakeha rate peaked at in 1993.

If race relations are to improve, the first step must be to change this - to somehow connect Maori and other disadvantaged groups with the jobs that are available. But Waitara also offers a history lesson.

Here, the British confiscations of Maori land 140 years ago are still a live sore. Some 770 leased homes and businesses - a third of the town's 2200 properties - sit on land taken in the 1860s for harbour board and borough works, now inherited by the New Plymouth District Council.

Last August, the council voted in principle to return the land to the Maori. Donna Eriwata, manager of the Otaraua hapu of Te Atiawa, one of several groups claiming the land, says it was "a very brave decision".

But this week a group of 230 leaseholders, chaired by Jonathan Marshall, gave the council a 179-page submission against its plan, listing promises made by previous councils to let them freehold their properties, and detailing the Waikato invasion of Taranaki which drove Te Atiawa off their land just before British settlers arrived in the 1840s. The council will begin hearing 366 submissions on the issue on Wednesday.

In Waitara, these historical grievances matter more than in most places because money has been scarce ever since the town's major employer, the meatworks, began downsizing more than a decade ago. It finally closed in 1998.

The number of unemployment benefits paid in the town dropped by a fifth from 663 to 536 in the two years up to January, thanks to a buoyant regional economy boosted by the filming of The Last Samurai. But 536 dole payments to 2200 households is still a lot - and that's not counting domestic purposes, sickness and invalid benefits or national super.

Whai-Tara Arts, a small artists' shop run by Donna Eriwata's Otaraua hapu, struggles to attract customers - although it sells a lot of "Tino Rangatiratanga" (Maori self-determination) flags bought in from Auckland. "If we get the land back, it's going to be a boost for our economy as Maori," says Eriwata. "In turn, that will only benefit the economy in Waitara."

Here, as elsewhere, Maori made up many of the workers in the meatworks, in forestry, on the railways and in protected industries that cut back drastically when New Zealand's economy was opened to competition in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today 60 per cent of the 54 school-leavers who have registered with Taranaki Connections, a new agency aiming to help school-leavers to find work or training, are Maori.

Most Pakeha youngsters can make it without extra help, using their parents' connections. But many of those on Taranaki Connections' books are from families where the adults have little or no paid work.

Pakeha ex-nurse Caroline Winstanley, who took care of 15 young cadets (14 of them Maori) employed by the New Plymouth District Council last year, says dealing with the youngsters' personal problems was a fulltime task.

"I have four sons, but I tell you, I knew nothing," she says. "Some of these kids are third-generation unemployed. They have no role models, and they don't have the family support."

Like Rapana, Winstanley had to knock on doors to get some of the cadets up in the mornings because no one else in their households was up in time.

The council cadet scheme - also adopted by Manukau City Council and by Work and Income New Zealand - is one of many efforts being made to break the cycle. The Mayors' Taskforce for Jobs, supported by the Tindall Foundation and several state agencies, sponsors a Youthworks project which has placed 122 long-term unemployed young people into six-month jobs in non-profit groups in Taranaki since September 2000.

"It is often kids who have been unemployed since leaving school, who are now 21 or 22," says Elaine Gill, a district councillor who chairs the Taranaki Employment Support Foundation which runs the scheme. "It's a huge culture shock to a lot of young people who have been unemployed.

"The community organisations are a good first step because they are a lot more understanding of the problem of even just getting people up in the morning and turning up to work. A private employer wouldn't put up with it."

Another foundation scheme, Suited Employment, provides free business clothes to anyone going for a job interview and lets the person keep the clothes if they get the job. Of the first 35 people who hired clothes, 28 got the jobs they went for.

The foundation also runs a mature employment service, a free computer access centre, a volunteer-agency matching centre and a transport fund for carless unemployed. Last year the fund helped people to travel to pick strawberries in South Taranaki.

Taranaki Connections, the foundation project funded as a pilot by the Social Development Ministry, helps all school-leavers, regardless of ability, to prepare CVs, choose courses, get student loans, write letters and prepare for interviews. It even drives them to job interviews if necessary.

Gina MacDonald, deputy head girl at Waitara High School last year, planned to go to polytechnic until the Connections team suggested work experience. Now she is working for Waitara Travel, which gives her paid time to work on her national certificate qualification.

Jermaine Te Wake, also 18, was referred by Connections to a training co-ordinator, Noel Bishop, who found him work experience as an electrician with electricians Payne and Barlow.

Now he earns good money packing meat at Riverlands, a Japanese-owned company which is creating 70 new jobs in the old Waitara meatworks, making hamburger patties, salami and other processed meat.

Eric Waitere, 16, joined a farm training course at Kairau Marae "because I had nothing to do, because I needed a future. I'll do any work, farming work," he says.

But his cousin Rangi Waitere, also 16, is already on his second farm training course even though he does not want to work on a farm. "I want to be a taxi driver," he says. Michael Webby, 16, the only Pakeha on the course, hopes to join the Army.

Connections is now recruiting adult "coaches" from supporting agencies such as the district council. Each coach commits to standing by a youngster for five years. Manager Wendy Wright says the school-leavers' parents do not feel threatened, and some have asked for a coach for their child.

"A lot of these young people are living with aunties and grandparents. They are struggling," she says. "They often don't have a significant other adult. Waitara is acknowledged to be short of strong male role models."

Vivian Hutchinson, a New Plymouth-based adviser to the Mayors' Taskforce for Jobs, sees Connections as a model for the rest of the country because it aims to help all school-leavers, not just those "in need".

As he sees it, the Pakeha backlash against special treatment for Maori is just "the logical conclusion of a targeted welfare culture. Since the 1980s, everything has been targeted," he says. The universal family benefit, universal free education and health care have been replaced by income-tested family support payments, student allowances and community services cards.

"Then they set their targeting on Maori, Pacific Islanders, woman, rural," Hutchinson says. "This is the end result of what I think is a failed system. Instead of saying we should be doing this because it's your right to have good opportunities and good work, we are saying we are doing this because you stuffed up in some way.

"If you target, people reorganise their lives so that they fit within the target group, or they get really pissed off because they are not within the target group and see that it's not fair. Well of course it's not fair!

"The targeted approach to welfare stigmatises everyone who gets it. The alternative is a universal approach: we are doing it because you are a human being and we don't want to have a New Zealand society that has young unemployed people."

Already the connections idea is spreading. In South Auckland, the City of Manukau Education Trust has hired three "youth transition brokers" to contact students who left at the end of last year from five schools: Aorere, Edgewater, Mangere and Tangaroa Colleges and Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate.

The brokers will help school-leavers into jobs or further training. In one case, a girl from Tangaroa did not realise she was eligible for a scholarship to Massey University until the broker rang her, got her application together, organised transport for her from Otara to Albany and eventually arranged accommodation.

The six-month, $90,000 Manukau pilot is funded by the Social Development Ministry, the Tertiary Education Commission and the Community Employment Group. Trust chief executive Bernardine Vester hopes the agencies will realise that help needs to be available for all school-leavers.

"We believe this is a cost that Government should pick up because it's an investment," she says. "The whole point of this is that we want to prevent these people from enrolling for the unemployment benefit."

Papakura District aims to place 50 young people in a scheme based on Taranaki's Youthworks. Similar initiatives are starting in Waitakere and Rodney.

In most regions, Work and Income NZ now contracts out training and job placement of the long-term unemployed to Maori, Pacific and other specialist agencies, such as National Road Carriers, which aims to train 170 long-term jobless people as truck drivers this year.

Henderson-based In-Work NZ, founded by former computer industry recruitment agent Adrian Roberts, has a Winz contract to place more than 300 long-term unemployed into jobs this year, and to support them in work for six months. It also has contracts in Hamilton and Christchurch.

It operates a 24-hour tollfree number for workers and employers who need help. In one case, a worker used it when his car broke down in Opotiki and he needed to let his boss know he would be late to work the next day.

In the Far North, Kaitaia-based ex-soldier Shane Harrison takes unemployed youngsters and lifts their fitness, literacy and other skills to get them into the armed forces.

In the Hokianga, Winz work brokers Mike McCarthy and Max Cochrane called a hui at remote Opononi to discuss hiring a bus to take unemployed workers to seasonal work on mandarin orchards at Kerikeri this summer.

It was a two-hour trip each way, and many workers were suspicious because they had been promised orchard work in past years which had come to nothing if it rained or fell over for other reasons.

"The key thing was gaining their trust," McCarthy says. He gave his word that they would get the daily equivalent of the dole for each day work was rained off, that they could keep getting the dole for the first week of the seasonal work until their first pay came through, and that their benefits would start again as soon as the work ended.

He gave everyone his work and home phone numbers. It worked. Forty-five people caught the bus that left Waimamaku at 6 each morning, worked in Kerikeri from 8am to 5pm and got home at 7pm.

"There was one woman who lived in an isolated area who had to leave home at 5am because it was an hour's walk to get to the bus, and an hour home at night. She turned up every day," McCarthy says.

A man in his 40s who had been out of work for years had tears in his eyes when he told McCarthy what it meant to get his first pay packet. "He had taken his kids shopping to the Warehouse because school was starting. It was the first time ever he'd been able to say yes instead of no," McCarthy says.

"Can I have a new school bag?" a child asked. "Yes."

"Can I have a new shirt?" "Yes."

For the price of a bus, a community has been transformed. Eight of the 45 workers have now found fulltime work in other fields. Four are working fulltime in horticulture.

"It opened the floodgates," McCarthy says. "We've had a lot of them coming in saying, 'Get us off the benefit, we want a fulltime job'."

Winz Northland Regional Commissioner Debbie Power says Work and Income paid for the bus to show growers that good workers were available if transport was provided. "The employers have indicated their willingness to make a contribution from the harvesting season [next month]."

With general unemployment so low and labour therefore hard to find, all employers have a greater than usual incentive to help to bring marginalised workers into the workforce now.

If they can succeed in employing Maori, in particular, the social dividends could be huge. When Renee Kara O'Brien, then 15, was being sentenced for the murder of Kenneth Pigott in Waitara last year, Crown solicitor Tim Brewer told the High Court she was just one of many children being raised without conscience or morals.

"There are literally thousands of children and young people who are being raised in unstable and lax environments. Ms O'Brien is part of a lost generation that will increasingly trouble society," Brewer said.

Bringing Maori people into work, in Waitara and throughout the country, would go a long way towards avoiding that fate.