There are nearly 500 family violence callouts a day in New Zealand. Why isn't this a national emergency?
OPINION
Here’s an election prediction: The cost of living will not be the biggest issue.
One reason is that globally, according to the International Monetary Fund, inflation is easing. The IMF reports that the economies of both the US and the Europe Union, faced with inflationary pressures from Covid and the Ukraine war, have been more resilient than expected. China’s borders have reopened, and its economy along with them.
All the experts warn that we might still have a recession, here and internationally, but most say if we do it will be brief and shallow.
Another reason is that the last few years have taught us that we don’t know what to expect anymore. The pandemic changed the whole world, including the art of economic forecasting. Whether it’s property prices or unemployment, growth rates or corporate profitability, the shamans of the markets have been wrong and wrong and wrong again.
Great shocks now come along all the time. We did not think it possible for a mass shooting to occur here, but it did. We thought, faced with a global climate crisis, that we were one of the most immune countries on the planet.
Turns out there’s no such thing. Climate scientists did repeatedly warn that our “weather events” would become more frequent and more extreme in the coming decades, but few people grasped what that would mean right now. The storm system that ravaged Auckland 10 days ago reached Nelson over the weekend, bringing more slips and flooding to that wretchedly unlucky city. Just three summers ago, the North Island was gripped by a fierce and seemingly endless drought.
If there’s a part of the country that hasn’t been turned upside down by extreme weather in recent times, sit tight: you’re probably next.
Will it impact the election and if so, how? Who would know?
The cost of living will remain important. But I don’t think it’s a sure thing it will be top of the list. About the only thing I’d be inclined to bet on is that between now and then, something big and new will rise up to preoccupy us. And it will influence how we vote.
It probably won’t be Three Waters or co-governance, either. That controversy will get a massive hose-down and Chris Hipkins would have to be a very incompetent Prime Minister not to find a way to do it.
It’s common for people to say “co-governance” hasn’t been explained well and it’s too complicated to understand anyway. I think that’s nonsense. It’s an attack line used by co-governance opponents in the hope it would come true, and it succeeded.
Hipkins will drop the word and perhaps go back to basics. He can argue that health, economic and social statistics almost all reveal outcomes worse for Māori than for everyone else. He can add that it makes sense to empower Māori to take the lead in addressing this, instead of always thinking the Government knows best and should be in charge of everything.
This is a powerful idea and it’s pan-political. On the right, you can see it through the lens of “taking responsibility”. On the left, you can call it a “post-colonial” approach. In the middle, you can call it “common sense”.
Given that it was actively promoted by the John Key government, through Whanau Ora, the Crown-Tuhoe arrangement and many other partnerships, it should be utterly mainstream in Parliament by now.
Tragically, it is not. National, post-Key and Bill English, and Act have seen to that.
Dropping the word and relaunching the principle should help quieten the controversy. But it won’t appease co-governance’s loudest opponents.
That’s because they’re not worried about the word. They’re against the idea they believe lies behind it.
“Co-governance” occupies the same space in political debates once reserved for “separatism”. Before that, it was “sovereignty” and, perhaps most famously, “closing the gaps”. In 2004, National leader Don Brash stirred up such strong antagonism to the policy with that name, Helen Clark’s government felt obliged largely to abandon it.
The common theme: fear that Māori are getting something they don’t deserve.
It’s disappointing that some of our supposedly credible politicians are once again pandering to that idea. It’s also just plain weird. As I’ve said before, Christopher Luxon’s attempts to “support Whanau Ora” while “opposing separate structures for public services” make no sense at all.
Another prediction: By mid-year, the electorate and perhaps his own party will have persuaded him to get a grip. But I doubt David Seymour or Winston Peters will agree.
If neither the cost of living nor co-governance completely pre-occupy us this election, then what?
Crime? Perhaps. There was a terrible surge in ram raids in the middle of 2021, but it peaked in April last year and appears to have been subsiding ever since. It’s still a very big issue, but there aren’t many people who think there are easy solutions.
Or cheap ones. National’s proposal for “modern” boot camps, remember, is buttressed by a high commitment to wraparound social services as well. But National has not suggested it will significantly bump up budgets so more counsellors and social workers can be trained and employed.
The focus on ram raids obscures two of the big realities with crime. One is that most crime rates are falling. The other is that most police callouts are for violence in the family home.
Police responded to 175,573 family violence callouts last year. That’s nearly 500 a day.
“Responding to family harm,” the police reported last year, “remains police’s single largest demand activity for frontline staff.”
The police use the term “family harm”, although others working in the sector prefer “family violence”, because that is more accurately what it is.
Despite all the attention given to ram raids and stranger violence in robberies and on the streets, two-thirds of all serious assaults are related to family incidents.
Doesn’t this qualify as a national emergency? Shouldn’t it be an election issue?
In late 2021 the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Minister Marama Davidson launched Te Aorerekura: a 25-year national strategy to address the root causes of family violence.
“We’re building a far more effective system,” she said. “The infrastructure is in place, it’s going to take time, we’ve given ourselves a generation to do that.”
It’s called long-term planning and almost nothing about it will be easy.
One thing might be, though. As Women’s Refuge chief executive Ang Jury said last year, the factors that contribute to family violence include “extreme poverty, drug use, particularly methamphetamine, a real struggle around getting mental health services for our clients, and good rehab services”.
Rather wonderfully, there is wide political support for Te Ara Oranga, the Northland programme jointly run by the police and health services which treats meth use as a health issue. The crime-fighting focus stays on those who import, manufacture and sell the drug.
Te Aorerekura, Te Ara Oranga: Let’s hear it for long-term planning.
We’ve got used to governments not doing much of this, and you can hardly blame them: as the current lot have discovered, they get in trouble when they try.
Family violence is like light rail, public broadcasting, health services, fair pay agreements, corrections, resource management, tertiary education, everything to do with climate action and, yes, water. All are now the focus of desperately needed long-term reforms and, in all cases, progress has been far harder than probably anyone realised.
Long-term planning is supposed to be a core role of the Crown. But these proposed reforms, slow and unsteady as they are, represent the first major attempt to fulfil that role in at least a generation.
Perhaps it’s fanciful that will matter much come election time, but they deserve credit for trying.
As for family violence, why isn’t it an election issue? If not now, when?
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.