Warriors still

Houses on the Ford Block, a mainly state housing estate which was built in 1957-60 on a farm formerly owned by Henry P. Ford. Picture / Alan Gibson

Two Rotorua youngsters aged about 15 leave a party in Ford Rd one gloomy afternoon and swagger down Bellingham Crescent in the rain, each with a can of beer.

One of them, tall and slim, gratuitously kicks a waist-height letterbox as he walks past, knocking the box off its post.

Across the road, watching from her front doorstep with two Herald journalists, Paea Hohepa yells at the youth.

It has no impact. The boy gives her the fingers and walks on to his home a few doors away.

The next day she confronts him and makes him and his mate put the letterbox back up. But a few minutes later the same youth comes past and knocks it down again.

Hohepa, who lived for 10 years in nearby Ewert St, is not surprised. A few doors down from her is the Ford Rd liquor store, and she thinks its arrival a decade ago was a "big mistake". "It's like it's feeding the problem," she says.

She can tell which houses are having parties in the Ford Block each night when she sees their occupants walking past her door lugging "boxes" of grog.

"They drink all the time over there," she says, pointing to a particular house. "We have another house down here that has parties all the time, and the big state houses next-door.

"There are always parties, and they always end up in fighting. Usually Monday to Wednesday is pretty quiet, but from Thursday to Saturday it's pretty rowdy round here. We never have a boring weekend."

She sees the consequences the next day. "A lot of teenagers walk past. They leave bottles all over the place - I'm forever picking up broken glass, mainly beer bottles, and beer cans," she says.

A few weeks ago, when Hohepa was in bed at 3am, someone fired an airgun through her bedroom window. She screamed and whoever it was ran off. She believes it was a youth firing at random.

"It does remind me of Jake the Muss," she says. "It hasn't changed. The children are still running loose and there's still a lot of drinking."

Booze governed Jake "Da Muss" Heke in Once Were Warriors, the novel Alan Duff wrote in 1990 about Pine Block (Ford Block) where he grew up in Two Lakes (Rotorua). Heke drank at the pub, then invited his mates back to his house for drunken parties which often ended in violence.

A rash of tragedies in South Auckland suggests that the lifestyle that enraged Duff persists: baby twins Chris and Cru Kahui killed on June 18 in a Mangere house where the adult occupants were later found drunk; 18-year-old Kelly Lawrence stabbed to death outside a drunken party in Manurewa on July 9; 19-year-old Haruru Pekepo shot dead in a street fight in Otahuhu last Sunday.

About 240 children under 15 are hospitalised for assault every year, with the highest rates in the Counties-Manukau and Lakes (Rotorua-Taupo) districts. Around eight or nine children are killed each year.

Alcohol and drugs are a consistent factor in many studies of child abuse. Drug and alcohol problems affected 40 per cent of the families of children born in Christchurch in mid-1977 where the children later said they had been punished "too severely, harshly or abusively", compared with 16 per cent of families where the children were seldom or never physically punished.

Poverty is also typical in the child abuse story. In the Christchurch study, 46 per cent of parents who punished their children most harshly were amongst the poorest quarter of all families. The Christchurch study leader, Professor David Fergusson, says: "The families with problems have multiple difficulties - parenting, child abuse, interpersonal relationships, economics and related issues. So the debate needs to be extended to a focus on family functioning in general."

Over the next week, the Herald will examine some key elements in the mix: drink and drugs, welfare, gangs, domestic violence, "living for today", neglected children and loss of cultural identity. We will ask how people fall into this kind of living hell, and how the rest of us can help them out.

The Ford Block, a largely state housing estate built in 1957-60 on a farm formerly owned by one Henry P. Ford, is a lens through which to focus the camera. Today 2100 people live there in 481 homes, of which Housing New Zealand still owns 161.

The Rotorua council changed the block's name to a more genteel "Fordlands" in 1966, and residents are still sensitive about their Once Were Warriors reputation.

"People always think the worst when I say Ford Block. They get scared straight away," says Eileen Uata, who moved in 27 years ago.

"We did have someone living next-door to us on P. He was a dealer," she says.

"But my children mixed with everyone. They went to Sunset Primary and Sunset Intermediate and then to [Rotorua] Girls' High and Boys' High. They never said they were worried about living in the Ford Block."

Fordlands is Rotorua's poorest suburb, with a median personal income in the 2001 census of just $11,223 against a national average of $18,600.

Rotorua itself is our fourth-poorest city after Gisborne, Whangarei and Wanganui on the official measures of "deprivation".

Maori make up 33 per cent of the population, more than in any other city bigger than Gisborne. In Fordlands, 71 per cent are Maori, 27 per cent European, 17 per cent Pacific and 2 per cent Asian - obviously quite a few are a mixture of at least two of these.

Although tourism has stayed strong, jobs in Rotorua's other major industry, forestry, have been decimated by the corporatisation of state forests in the late 1980s and low wood prices since then. The district's population fell in the five years to 2001 and has recovered only marginally this year. Numbers on the unemployment benefit stayed well above the national average until 2004.

In the past two years the dole queue has halved from 1717 to 810 as the district belatedly caught up with the country's debt-financed consumer boom, with cavernous new shopping blocks sprouting on what was once a railway.

But this fragile prosperity has not yet trickled down to Fordlands. In 2001, only 41 per cent of Fordlands people aged 15 and over were employed for an hour or more a week, compared with 62 per cent nationally.

Niels Rasmussen, principal of the local Sunset Rd Primary School, says 85 per cent of his pupils' parents are still on benefits. Most are solo parents on the domestic purposes benefit.

"There's not many who are actually employed, or they are employed in seasonal work. Most of my parents are employed in cleaning-type jobs, factory jobs, seasonal picking jobs," he says.

Perhaps because of the shift to sole parents with less money for drink, locals say the Ford Block is quieter now than in Duff's day.

"There's not much violence round here any more. There used to be back in the 80s. You might get the odd one or two but it's not as bad," says Summer Cohen, a young mother whose partner works at the Te Puke meatworks.

"People care about each other now. They get involved with domestic violence. They actually do something - call the cops.

"It's just the young ones causing trouble now, the ones that think they are gangsters."

Rachel Wilson, who has lived in the Ford Block all her life, agrees: "The fighting has all gone. It's more these young ones drinking. Kids are drinking younger."

But the liquor store is constantly busy, open longer hours than the dairy on the corner.

"People just drink too much on the weekends," says the liquor store manager, Pete Singh. "That's good for the business, as we say."

An old identity who grew up in the block in the 1960s, left the area for almost 40 years and came back a year ago, says there has been "a big change".

"This used to be a beautiful community. There was a community spirit - you had the old people, the middle-aged ones. You don't see that now, they're mostly young kids," he says.

"A lot of people worked in the Waipa mill. There were a lot of tradesmen. There was alcohol, but you didn't hear much about it."

Today some still work in forestry, he says, but: "The main ingredient is alcohol and drugs. On benefit day, this place is busy."

A woman speaks in anguish of her brother, 42, with a young family, who drinks "because there is nothing else better for them to think about".

"Friends come round all pissed," she says. "On Tuesday, which is their benefit day, they buy the alcohol. Others come on Thursday and it's their turn to buy the alcohol.

"One night there could be an argument, then on Thursday or Friday they are all back together again. None are employed."

She got her brother into anger management and counselling in the past, but he has met a new partner and slipped back into the old ways.

"If given the chance, they'll go and get the bottle and sit round waiting till next week, and asking for help for bread and milk. And because there are kids, I will give it, although I'm angry. My brother and them don't like what they are doing either."

Aza Smith, a fourth-generation Ford Block resident, feels sick when she asks kids: "Where's your mum?" and they say, "Drinking."

Smith used to be a sole parent and "a hard-out drinker" herself and became a compulsive gambler on the pokies.

"I was only 17. I was drinking. That is all there was available," she says.

"I used to sit round, watch TV and do nothing. I was fat. My kids were stressed."

Finally she ran out of food to feed her children and realised she had to change. She became a Christian and now runs the Ford Rd fish and chip shop with her husband.

Another woman remembers her own childhood of being dragged along to the pub and told by her parents, "You sit in the car, we won't be long."

"One time we went to play on the beach and they had gone and left us there - just completely forgot about us," she says.

"That was just normal. They both worked, but once they started [drinking] they would go for days and take a day off."

Tanked up on booze, her father would often bash her mother. Eventually her mother died and her father became paralysed with alcohol-induced meningitis and diabetes. Alcohol killed two of his sisters, one through blood poisoning and one who got burnt in a bar and died.

Rimaha Wiringi, now a pastor in the Charisma Church, drank and smoked pot for years until one Christmas holiday when he drank solidly for a month and started coughing blood. He turned to God.

Today he sees some of his extended family hooked on an even more devastating drug, P, or methamphetamine.

"My brother-in-law is looking like a skeleton," he says.

"My nieces and nephews in their mid-20s just live for that. They sell anything off. I guess they trade stuff. They will swap their car for stuff and hope to make money on top of that.

"It becomes a priority - who cares about the kids, the Government will look after them, we'll go and have a good time.

"My family are still bound up in alcohol. They drink all the time. I came out of that scene 15 years ago but when I look back now my family are still in that scene. I call it a curse."

Paea Hohepa, who "grew up around booze" and remained a heavy drinker until she had children, says, "People drink to get rid of their frustrations, but do they know that they are making their frustrations worse, trying to cover it up with alcohol? It doesn't work."

For the next generation, it may be the only life they know. "Young kids are smoking dak at the age of 6 or 8. There's a lot walking round with cans and beer bottles," Hohepa says.

When she caught the liquor store selling alcohol to her son when he was under 18, "I blew them up." Pete Singh says the store requires ID for anyone who looks young, but it can't refuse to serve older people who buy booze for youngsters.

"If people are talking about taking the age to 20, the same thing will happen - their parents are going to buy for them. They buy for them right now," he says.

Even P is readily available. Social work student Nicky Klomp says dealers offer free tastes in the carparks outside city nightclubs to get young people hooked.

So far, at least, Donna Blair of Rotorua's addiction service Te Utuhina Manaakitanga Trust says very few people have sought help with P, and alcohol and cannabis are still the main problems.

Although researchers have found genes which may predispose people to alcoholism or drug addiction, Blair says many people who get help with alcohol or drug use also have underlying issues such as trauma, stress, relationship issues and grief.

"It's often used as a coping mechanism for people who have trauma issues," she says. "You don't get people who come in and say, 'I have a drug problem because I like using drugs.' They started somewhere, often due to not wanting to face the way they were feeling. It's often used as an excuse: 'He was drunk when he beat his wife'."

So when someone presents with a drinking or drug problem, the trust aims to bring out the underlying issues and then work with the client on a plan to deal with those issues.

"We might suggest meetings external to our service. We might call in budgeting, anti-violence, housing or other services."

Max Lloyd, an Auckland counsellor who runs a free online addiction service helps people to work out the pluses and minuses of their addictions and make plans to achieve "what they would like to have happen in their lives".

"You can get out of it [addiction] with determination," he says.

He estimates that about 8 per cent of New Zealanders have a major problem with alcohol or drugs. "We are in danger of developing a kind of dependence culture amongst some groups in our society, but there are huge factors in there," he says. "There are factors about disempowerment of certain parts of the community. There are factors that would go back to the fourth Labour Government's major restructuring that put thousands of people out of work."

Ngaire Whata, who heads Rotorua Maori health service Korowai Aroha, says health services have fought for years for restrictions on smoking, but alcohol has become freely available to anyone aged 18 or over at any corner store. "That, to me, is destroying our people," she says. "So I keep saying and will always say: money is the power for what happens here in our country. As long as there is money coming into this country, no way will any Government stop it."

She advocates a parallel governance system that, for example, would let Maori health services operate independently of mainstream primary health organisations. "Mainstream doesn't suit us in today's environment. Why? Look at them [Maori people] - they are gangs, they are dysfunctional," she says.

"I don't blame my people for the way they have ended up. I blame the system. I blame the rulers of the day making decisions. Maori need to start thinking and doing things for themselves. Maori need to be making decisions. We cannot have the white man doing it for us all the time because they have got it wrong."

Knight Riders

"You can tell the ones on P," says Mike Fournier as he leans with his cigarette against his big, black four-wheel drive outside Western Heights Primary School at 10.30pm on a Friday. "If you look at them, they glare back. They're 10ft tall and built of steel and walk straight ahead like they mean it."

But the figure that shuffles out of the drizzle on the other side of Clayton Rd has nothing like a purposeful stride. At first it looks like an elderly drunk, weaving from one side of the footpath to the other.

When the figure comes under a street light opposite us, his pace quickens. It is a young man. Fournier relaxes; he knows him. "He's one of the Smith brothers [name changed]. A quid or two short of a sandwich."

That was about as exciting as it got during Fournier's three-hour stint on the "Western Knights" community patrol that night.

The wet, chilly streets of Rotorua's modest western suburbs were almost totally deserted. If there was anything happening in town, it wasn't here.

And that's exactly how the Western Knights want it. They believe that simply being seen trawling the streets deters potential troublemakers.

In the past 18 months, since new community constable Wayne Harper gave the Knights new impetus, Western Heights' share of Rotorua's crimes has dropped from 28 per cent to 8 per cent.

Harper now plans to extend the patrols to daylight hours, using retired people and other volunteers. He hopes that will reduce the area's crime by a further 20 to 25 per cent.

Fournier, 40, repairs computers by day and had to get a babysitter in on Friday night because his wife was away with an under-18 sports trip to Wellington and left him in charge of their children, aged 13 and 10.

He volunteered for the Knights after a casual conversation in the street with Harper. "I no longer enjoyed going out on the town and I thought it would be something different," he said. "I often felt that I wanted to do something for the community. I'm not into clubs like Lions or Rotary. Wayne suggested this."

He was the oldest of six Knights on duty that night. The others were mostly in their 20s, attracted partly by a chance to keep fit on the group's eight red and black mountainbikes which they use in pairs to check the local parks on fine nights.

"I've booked out tomorrow night, too," said one young man, drawing raucous laughter at his need to get his partner's permission for a night on the streets.

As well as the bikes, they have two patrol cars, one sponsored by State Insurance and one passed on from the Howick-Pakuranga patrol group.

The Mobil station on Clayton Rd gives them a monthly donation and they get grants from the Rotorua District Council and charitable trusts.

Fournier prefers to use his own vehicle and reckons it costs him $20 in petrol every night he is out, usually once or twice a week.

On two wheels or four, the Knights are equipped with radios and call the police if they spot anything suspicious. The police give them a weekly list of "vehicles of interest" to watch for. One night last December, they heard on the police radio of another stolen car, spotted it in Sunset Rd, summoned police, then watched it until police surrounded it.

Last October, while scouting on their bikes around the Pleasant Heights shops, they found two youths walking away. Both were the subject of arrest warrants for burglary. The patrollers kept them talking until police got there. Another time, they found a youth spray-painting a wall and they "bamboozled" him with talk until police arrived.

Sometimes when they see people staggering from the pubs or lying intoxicated in the streets they will give them a lift home.

"Some young ladies walk home by themselves. If we have Pauline [the only female patroller that night] with us, we pick them up," Fournier says.

The Knights patrol from Sunset Rd north to Ngongotaha, where another group called the Ngongotaha Moreporks takes over. In total, New Zealand has more than 80 groups with 4000 volunteers.