OPINION
I’d call it a cry for help. Last month in Christchurch and then in Auckland, a group of teenage boys climbed on to the roof of the youth justice facility where they were being held as “residents”.
At Korowai Manaaki, the Auckland facility, it soon emerged that staff had been filming some of the boys fighting and, it is alleged, they even organised the fights. Whānau members came forward to talk about how little the boys were cared for and how bored they were.
Eleven Oranga Tamariki staff have now been stood down pending an inquiry.
Chief Children’s Commissioner Frances Eivers says places like Korowai Manaaki “are not therapeutic environments focused on rehabilitation”. They are, instead, “prison-like”, characterised by violence, harsh punishments, a lack of support programmes, unaddressed mental health issues and undertrained, overstretched staff.
In both instances, the boys were enticed off the roof with promises of KFC, which prompted howls of outrage. Soft on crime!
I hesitate to ask what the outragees think should have happened. Tear gas? A police Swat team with grappling hooks and Tasers?
Those residences are not “soft on crime”. And those kids behaved as a lot of people would if they were locked up and given the clear message society is abandoning them.
We should know what a cry for help looks like. And we should know we have a stark choice. We can help, and if we do, those kids might find a place inside society. Or we can cheer on the brutality, almost inevitably condemning them to lives as criminals.
Criminals who will attack us back.
Meanwhile, in case you think nothing can be done, there’s Kura Wairoa, a school in Tauranga dedicated to helping “off the rails” young people.
It’s far from alone: good work with alienated and angry young people happens all over this country, wherever social workers, teachers and other carers are not too under-resourced and exhausted to keep going.
We have some really big choices this election. How to manage young offenders is one of them, as Act leader David Seymour has just reminded us. On Sunday he announced his party’s new Stupid About Crime policy, which includes putting 17-year-olds into the adult justice system. That means prison.
Stupid about crime? It’s a policy likely to turn damaged youths into hardened criminals. Ram-raiders into adults with knives and guns. What else would you call it?
Also over the weekend, the Greens held their annual general meeting. Party co-leader Marama Davidson was furious when asked about Seymour’s new policy. “They know the damage it will do and they know perfectly well it doesn’t work,” she said.
Sociologist Jarrod Gilbert has also explained this, patiently and insightfully, over and over, in his column in this newspaper.
The Act policy breaches our UN commitments on human rights. In 2016, in line with that commitment, Seymour voted with the National Government to raise the prison age to 18.
He’s changed. If you think a National-Act Government later this year would be a return to the benign old days of John Key, think again.
At their AGM, the Greens released their election “manifesto”: a 44-page policy document. The cost of living was high on the agenda. “For many people,” Davidson said right at the start of her speech, “the struggle to put food on the table and to pay the bills is the concern that rises above all others. And understandably so.”
It’s why the Greens have called for a wealth tax and an income guarantee with significant family tax credits.
The focus on household budgets also recognises two important things about climate change. One is that it’s hard to worry about collapsing ice sheets when it’s a struggle to put food on the table. Climate action and a functioning economy have to go hand in hand.
The other is that the climate crisis, as a general rule, hits hardest those who can least afford to withstand it.
This is plain to see in Auckland, where postwar working-class suburbs were built on swampy ground in places like Māngere and New Lynn, with scandalously inadequate drainage.
And while most of the leafy suburbs that ring the city centre enjoy excellent public transport, many of the cheaper suburbs further out do not.
Some of the reaction to the Greens’ new wealth tax package has been hilarious. It’s “almost acceptable to the majority of voters”, one perpetual critic of the Greens complained on Sunday. She seemed to be angry the Greens had become a sensible party that she couldn’t complain about any more.
It rained again in Auckland yesterday. We’ve already had our usual year’s worth, although we’re only halfway through and we haven’t got to spring yet. Spring, you may remember, is when it rains most often.
The city is waterlogged and the next floods are but a downpour away.
Yet as Newsroom reported last week, an IPSOS poll has found that 31 per cent of New Zealanders believe “now is not the right time to be investing in measures to reduce climate change, given the tough economic conditions”.
The same poll revealed 23 per cent of us think there’s no point doing anything because it won’t make a difference, while 19 per cent think it’s “too late to do anything about it” and 18 per cent think just the opposite, that the crisis is too far off to worry about.
All these ideas add up to the same thing: do nothing.
Climate denialists who have shifted their ground to adopt any (or sometimes all) of these arguments will perhaps feel pleased with themselves.
But those figures still mean about two-thirds of the population does believe we should be doing more about climate change. That’s a healthy mandate for Government action, especially as it seems clear from studies here and overseas that a very high proportion of the do-nothing voices belong to a single demographic. Mine. Older men.
The Greens, like National, are road-testing a campaign slogan, and, again like National, they’re riffing on the concept of time. For the Greens, it’s the urgency of “The time is now”. For National, it’s the nostalgia of “Back on Track”.
“The time is now” means that after six years with ministers outside the Cabinet, the Greens want to be in the room. Getting more votes and therefore more MPs is the way to get ministers in the Cabinet.
The slogan also means that this election could be decisive. Will we embrace the chance to go further and faster on climate action, poverty reduction, social equity and environmental regeneration? Or will we decide to turn around and go back the other way?
Party co-leader James Shaw said on Saturday that what stopped faster progress these last three years “was not an absence of ideas, or ambition, or fight but a majority government that had other priorities”.
And the time is now because, as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us with increasing desperation, this decade may be our last chance to slow global warming and start building our resilience to the ever-wilder weather. We’ve had, surely, all the warnings we need.
And yet, it’s argued, inflation and the cost of living make this not a good time. As if there’s a better one coming along soon.
I keep thinking about those kids at Korowai Manaaki. We don’t know their personal circumstances, but we do know the statistics. Some will have grown up with family violence, will suffer from foetal alcohol syndrome, will have other mental health and substance abuse issues, will have struggled with poverty and racism and will probably have been so badly failed by the school system they are functionally illiterate.
I don’t want to excuse the wrongs they might have done, but I do want to say: we could help them.
And I also want to say, those kids are not the biggest threat to us all right now. As the climate crisis turns the world to chaos, the demographic with that distinction is my own.
Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Children's Minster Karen Chhour weighs in on the incident at a South Auckland YJ facility.