Creating a community

Having read John Coleman’s excellent letter ‘What makes a communist?’ (January 8), in response to David Fisher’s article about the desolation of Kaikohe (NZ Herald December 21), I want to commend some of Fisher’s writing and express my fury at the reported utterances of Northland MP Matt King.

On “... lifting young people from the quagmire which threatens to perpetuate the cycle,” Fisher quotes Mayor John Carter: “People are going to say, ‘What’s the cost?’ I’ll say, ‘You go find out what it costs to put them in Nga¯wha¯ (prison)’. And it’s more than the prison cost. It’s the opportunity cost.”

Fisher has the common decency to elaborate: “The cost of the human potential unrealised, the cost in meeting social needs, the cost to businesses in not having a stream of energised and engaged people working, I say spending too, the cost of taxes not paid”. David very ethically puts human potential first.

Northland MP Matt King really boils my blood though, not for the first time, and I know I’m not the only one. King believes it’s a “10-, 20-, 30-year-plan” to reverse the lives of Kaikohe’s “no hopers” – about the same time it took successive governments to forge them in the inhuman furnace of neoliberal economics by destroying their town. Hey, “no hopers”, this is your parliamentary representative speaking!

“King” Fisher reports, …“has recently met with and seen a tourism-focused training scheme which has brought in young people from Northland’s deprived communities. It requires those involved to live where the training is, which removes them from their communities so they don’t get dragged back down by their families”.

Think very carefully about those words. Take a long moment to ponder them. Ask yourself, did the young people leave willingly? If so, okay, I guess. But what happens to the “deprived communities” they leave behind?

Matt King might equally be describing and advocating a 21st Century version of the stolen children, which happened in both Australia and New Zealand, whereby children/youth were forcibly taken from their family homes “for their