KEY POINTS:
My daughter texted me from McDonald's in Manhattan: she was having a great time, she said - except for the homeless people. They were everywhere, targeting her and her classmates. "Dilemma cos I don't know what to do," she wrote. "We met three on the way to McDonald's
and I didn't have any change. Feel bad."
Of course, feeling bad was not what she'd looked forward to doing in New York, and by the end of her week she'd done what everyone does. She'd put the homeless to the back of her mind, with questions about why a rich city like New York can't take care of its most vulnerable citizens.
It's surprising how little effort is required for the homeless, like the rest of the poor, to fade obligingly into the background, where they'll trouble our consciences only fleetingly. Besides, it was New York: what's a little collateral damage in the great capitalist dream?
That's not how we like to think of ourselves here in New Zealand. We take care of our own. We like to think we care. The idea that a sick woman died because her family couldn't afford to pay an overdue power bill is unthinkable. It challenges our view of who and what we are, and disturbs our comfortable existences.
Maybe that's why some people looked so hard for reasons not to care. It's so much easier to blame the victims for their plight. Yes, Folole Muliaga died, but we can suspend sympathy, and any need to look more deeply at the kind of society we've become, if she was, after all, just a very sick woman who should have paid her bills, should have been able to tell that she was gravely ill rather than just chronically sick; and who would have died anyway.
And if, as reported elsewhere, Mercury Energy disconnects up to 150 households a day, it's not hard to see why the contractor might have been suffering from compassion fatigue. Maybe he'd heard too many hard-luck stories.
A few days before the Muliaga tragedy, another Auckland family had their power disconnected. In their case, the contractor snipped their lines and left them dangling on the front lawn.
No disconnection notice had been sent because their power company, Contact Energy, thought they were stealing power.
They'd been disconnected and reconnected a couple of months earlier, but Contact Energy had no record of their reconnection (the family did), so summarily cut them off when it came to their attention that the household was still using power.
It was done on a Friday, as many disconnections are, to inflict the maximum damage, but after the family paid for the reconnection, a second contractor couldn't get the lines reconnected.
A third one, sent just before the office closed for the weekend, refused to do the job because it looked illegal, and the family was left without power for the night pending a visit from an inspector on the Saturday morning to authorise the reconnection.
When they rang the next morning to find out where the inspector was, they were told it was up to them to find one; the woman at the other end of the line wouldn't give them a phone number or even a company to call.
The Pacific Island family in this case had four children, one of whom was so ill that he needed a life-saving operation at Starship a few days later.
This happens more than we like to think. And while the guidelines requiring power companies to remember their social responsibilities is a move in the right direction, the problem is wider.
Too many families will continue to struggle to pay for other essential services - telephone and water - because they're simply not getting enough money to keep pace with rising costs.
The reality these days is that the working poor need two to three jobs just to stay afloat. We have replaced high unemployment with over-employment, and we're paying the social costs in stressed families and neglected and unsupervised children.
This goes on under the radar of most New Zealanders, who see the consequences but not the cause.
In the past 20 years, we've experienced the fastest growth in inequality in the OECD: the bottom 50 per cent of the population holds 5 per cent of the wealth, and the top 10 per cent holds 50 per cent.
Most of us buy into the myth that the rich deserve the lion's share of the country's wealth because they're cleverer and harder working, despite the system being heavily stacked in their favour.
We've been content to allow speculators to get away with writing off tax losses on properties which are sold for untaxed capital gain, for example; and barely notice how many employers escape their obligations to pay a living wage to our poorest workers, because the government subsidises them, making up the shortfall through accommodation supplements, Working for Families, and the complex In Work Tax Credit. But as we all ultimately pay, maybe it's time we noticed.
