War on gang families destined to fail

The memory of Australia’s stolen generation must surely taunt the government’s new plan to tackle problem gang families.

It’s an initiative destined to chill with kindness, bound to either fail or make no difference at all.

Fiddling with indigenous cultures’ families from a position of moral and cultural superiority has had disastrous results wherever it’s been tried.

Our own history of girls’ and boys’ homes, both state-run and charity-run, where problem children were parked away from presumably lousy parents, is an embarrassment.

Sexual and violent abuse from socalled carers only added to the children’s misfortune.

They were probably better off in their dysfunctional homes.

Money seems to be a driving force behind the new gang intelligence unit. Someone has come up with the figure of $714 million that will be paid in welfare for cycles of violence over the lifetimes of gang members – and could be saved if only we knew more about how gang families tick. Break the cycle of abuse and you save the children is the theory.

There has to be a question mark over the maths.

We hate paying welfare to gangs, because we believe they make good money out of crime, and we’re told 90 per cent of gang members have received it.

If they’re doing so well why do their families live in poverty? Where does the money go?

The Ministry of Social Development tells us 60 per cent of children born to gangs are abused or neglected, and Police and Corrections minister Judith Collins says gangs are a ‘‘huge driver’’ of child deaths and family violence.

If we knew more we could do something about it, apparently, but how much of this is new, and what successes have been claimed anywhere in colonised countries?

Yes, 30 pre cent of prisoners (disproportionately Maori) have gang affiliations, and 90 per cent of prisoners have been abused. But the only thing that seems to be novel is that gangs are being credited with being smarter than they were in the past, and are said to working together to achieve their goals.

In this and much else gangs live a parody of the European model, working hard to found businesses wherever opportunity arises.

Excluded by lack of education, the effects of abusive childhoods, and their own violent behaviour from the mainstream they do what gangs do everywhere, which is run their own world in which advanced education is not useful, and violence is an advantage.

Police Association President Greg O’Connor rightly says that intelligence is not evidence – and evidence would be the only legal ground for interfering in gang culture.

Laws were passed in Australia to make it legal to remove aboriginal children from their families, and I hope we don’t have some equally clever idea in mind here.

Far from being saved, ‘‘stolen children’’ were three times more likely to have a police record than others, and twice as likely to use illegal drugs. Underscoring the Australian experiment was a belief that European culture was superior, and that by taking mixed-race children away from aboriginal mothers a process of whitening would evolve, so that within a few generations their descendants would neither look aboriginal, nor identify with that culture.

While we may not be as overtly racist as that, we have held the belief that Maori culture should be sidelined in favour of being more like ours.

That’s changing, but in the meantime the loss of connection with land and heritage has had a predictable result. That we would quantify this in dollars says a lot about Pakeha that isn’t flattering.

Gangs represent one serious form of lawlessness. There are others, to which we’re more indulgent. An example is university students, mainly Pakeha, who are tolerated by the cities who depend on their presence for their local economy. Dunedin is a prime example.

Students’ burning of sofas and drunken, loutish misbehaviour is indulged by that community as mere idle naughtiness from future tax-paying professionals.

But if Maori gang members were doing the same thing they’d be prosecuted. Imagine if Black Power or the Mongrel Mob organised an impromptu rock concert in a densely populated residential area, as happened in Dunedin last week. Imagine if their members pelted the crowd with bottles and ignored police instructions while dozens of people were injured, some seriously, by an overloaded balcony tumbling into the crowd. Reporting on the incident, and police handling of it, would likely have been very different.

There, in a nutshell, is a miniature model for the relatively indulgent treatment of white-collar offenders, usually Pakeha, compared with the harsh treatment of Maori offenders. Gangs notice these things.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR