Social justice warrior
Social justice warrior
Around a century ago a baby was left on the doorstep of a Salvation Army children’s home, bundled in newspapers. Taken in by the Sallies, that child grew up to become Alf Roberts, father of Major Campbell Roberts.
‘‘His parenting was really done by the Salvation Army,’’ Campbell Roberts says, sitting at the desk in his South Auckland office.
His dad wasn’t the only one supported by the Sallies. Before his mother met Alf, she too had turned to the organisation for help. She ‘‘became an unmarried mother, and went to a Salvation Army hospital in Dunedin, and had her baby, and the baby [girl] was adopted out.
‘‘Both sides of my family were assisted by the Salvation Army in one way or another, so it’s part of my heritage and parentage, really.’’
Roberts has spent the better part of his life fighting injustice in New Zealand. He was the founding director of the Salvation Army’s social policy and parliamentary unit, and is a trusted voice advocating for those in need.
‘‘I think as a society we often want to blame people because they’re poor,’’ he says. ‘‘I always find it really difficult to sit down in our reception room and talk to some of these families, and see the difficulties they go through.’’
Roberts himself did not have a privileged upbringing. ‘‘My father was a carpenter, and my mother was a seamstress in a shirt factory, so they came from fairly humble beginnings,’’ he says.
‘‘But I was fortunate to have a happy childhood with two sisters, and it was a very loving family.’’
He was born in February 1947 in Arrowtown, Central Otago. After stints in Invercargill and Hamilton, the family ended up in Christchurch, where Roberts left school and began working in accounting for a grocery wholesale company in the mid-1960s.
‘‘But within me,’’ he says, ‘‘there had always been that desire to do something greater than just make money.’’
By the age of about 20, he was drawn to the Salvation Army training college in Wellington.
There, he vividly remembers the events of one Saturday morning. Several houses behind the college were filled with alcoholics; their landlord was a ‘‘prominent Wellington identity’’ who collected their benefits and in return provided them with shelter and just enough money for daily liquor, ‘‘effectively shortening their lives’’.
Roberts was mowing the lawns when an ambulance medic rushed up and asked for his help.
‘‘This guy in the house was very sick,’’ he says. ‘‘We went up and put him on to the stretcher, and as we were carrying him down he died.’’
It was a pivotal moment for Roberts. ‘‘I was angry to feel that somebody could be so careless of another person’s life,’’ he says.
‘‘What that inspired for me was a belief that there was structural wrong in society. Things needed to change, and I needed to be part of bringing about those changes.’’
After several small-town roles with the Salvation Army, Roberts became an industrial chaplain in Dunedin, supporting workers at factories such as Whitcoulls and Cadbury.
Roberts recounts: ‘‘I remember on one occasion a manager ringing me and saying ‘we’ve got to make 50 people redundant, could you come in and help us to do that in a Christian way?’
‘‘I sat down with the management team over half a day or so, and they came to the conclusion that they needed to fight the redundancy.’’
The jobs were saved.
During his time in Dunedin Roberts was ‘‘very involved’’ in standing against the 1981 Springbok tour.
‘‘I went to the first of the protests and the leader said ‘oh, you’re just who we’re looking for. We’re going to break into Carisbrook today, and we’ve got a pair of bolt cutters’,’’ says Roberts with a grin.
‘‘I was wearing my Salvation Army uniform, so he said ‘you could put them up your jacket, nobody would know that you had them’. And so that’s what we did!’’
Roberts also fought against the price freeze and Think Big policies of the Muldoon government, before moving to support those struggling in South Auckland later in the 1980s.
‘‘In the early days, when there wasn’t really any tenancy legislation, people in these communities would be just thrown out of their rental house if they didn’t pay their rent,’’ he says. ‘‘We would often turn up to the same houses, and as the landlord was moving things out on to the footpath, we were moving them back in.’’
Roberts believes housing is a fundamental provision.
‘‘We’ve failed to look at the proper supply of housing, and make sure it’s affordable,’’ he says.
‘‘If a child’s not well housed, that’s going to frustrate their education, it’s going to frustrate their healthcare, and other social provisions are just going to slide off the table.’’
He says it’s ludicrous that we’re using motels as emergency housing, and is delighted with Labour’s plan to build 10,000 new homes a year.
‘‘It’s a big ask, but I’m hopeful the present Government will bring about change that impacts things like housing and child poverty.’’
Like other communities, the Salvation Army has learned to change with the times, he says.
‘‘Having a just society is really important, and I think the church has not necessarily been very good at keeping that justice thing together.’’
He reflects on the ‘‘enormous pressure’’ historically faced by unwed pregnant women such as his mother, who was forced to give up her newborn daughter.
‘‘It was a fairly tough response really,’’ he says, and it ‘‘certainly wasn’t good’’.
‘‘It wasn’t until my mother died, at her funeral, that I found out I had this other sister.’’
The adopted child had been trying to find her birth mother, but was just days too late, ‘‘so she actually only saw her in her coffin’’. ‘‘It was quite sad.’’
The Salvation Army later came to support open adoptions, and now works to ‘‘provide other alternatives for people keeping their babies’’.
Roberts has started to pull back from army leadership because he’s ‘‘getting on in terms of age’’, but intends to stick around as a consultant.
He chuckles when asked if he would describe himself as a social justice warrior. ‘‘I’m not sure whether those terms are …’’ His voice trails off.
‘‘Look, I’ve got a passion for social justice, and I love New Zealand. I’m trying to find different ways to build a better society, and that’s something I think I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.’’
‘‘As a society we often want to blame people because they’re poor.’’