Flavell Te Ururoa: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — Third Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:646;Page:15747] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
:  
Tena koe Madam Assistant Speaker; kia ora tatou; kia ora Mr Blumsky. I te tuatahi me whai atu au i nga korero i te ahiahi nei mo te hunga kua ngaro atu i te tirohanga kanohi ara nga tamariki tokoono me to ratou kaiako. Ko nga korero i puta inapo mo taua hikoi i te awa o Mangatepopo i Tongariro he mea ohorere tonu a kua pa mai te aroha me te mamae ki a tatou katoa i te rangi nei. No reira moe mai koutou. Apiti hono tatai hono ko te hunga mate ki te hunga mate apiti hono tatai hono ko te hunga ora ki te hunga ora tena ano tatou katoa. 
[An interpretation in English was given to the House.] 
[ 
Greetings to you Madam Assistant Speaker and to us all including you Mr Blumsky. In the first instance I want to follow up the tributes this afternoon in respect of those who are no longer before us namely the six young people and their teacher. News about that trek in the Mangatepopo Stream at Tongariro last night was catastrophic and has caused us all such sympathy and pain today. Therefore to you the departed rest there. Remain bonded and united in death. To us the living bound here in life greetings once again to us all. 
] 
I say from the outset that I enjoyed Mr Rodney Hide’s speech tonight. It was quite to the point and direct about where he was coming from and I have to say that he had some really valid points to make. I also say that the Maori Party can understand the motivation for having such a bill as the Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill. We can understand the feelings of people as they see their homes paths and maybe walls painted but like the Greens and ACT we do not believe that this bill will deal with the problem. 
The focus of the bill is on putting in place a harsh punishment regime to deal with offenders—measures that will increase the surveillance capacities available to the police and to the Manukau City Council. When all else fails there will be other options including increasingly intrusive opportunities to arrest and fine offenders. In its entirety this bill targets young people. It prohibits the sale of spray-paint to minors under 18 years of age and requires evidence of age to be revealed which are measures the Government has willingly picked up in its tagging and graffiti vandalism bill. 
It would hardly be news to anyone in this House that tangata whenua will be disproportionately more likely to experience the new suite of options meted out to address youth crime. Let us look at the facts. The report  
Youth Justice Statistics in New Zealand: 1992 to 2006  
shows that Maori youth arrests were more than three times those of Pakeha and twice those of Pacific peoples. Is there likely to be a different situation in Manukau? Hell no! 
Throughout the duration of this debate around graffiti some brave people have actually dared to raise another view and to look beyond the hysteria and the hype around graffiti to ask what is happening and why. These people have dared to ask questions about the causes for creating graffiti in the first place and about the motivation that results in the reactions we see displayed on city walls. Why do our young people bother to leave behind these embellished autographs? Why do they want to make their mark in order to stake out their turf? 
The Children’s Commissioner was one of the people who dared to speak out and to demonstrate courage in asking the House to look at the widest possible range of processes and policies to manage tagging and graffiti. She encouraged Parliament to think beyond what she called “punitive and restrictive measures” that appear both in the tagging and we would suggest in this bill. But what happened? Dr Kiro was immediately censured with some at the more extreme end of reason even protesting that by taking a broad-brush approach towards understanding graffiti she may well have signed an arrest warrant for thousands more young people. 
Two years ago this House erupted in anger over a similar debate about whether legislation was promoting the punishment of children. At the time of the debate on section 59 of the Crimes Act the Social Justice Commission of the Anglican Church called for a more just society in which all members were treated equally respected and cared for. Its submission made the case passionately “for a legal framework that is clear consistent passionate and caring especially towards the most vulnerable in our society”. This House passed legislation to create a better society as we outlawed the use of physical force against children as a defence in any court yet today with this bill we have new legislation to authorise entering private property and removing graffiti to establish a fine of $2500 to create an offence of carrying a paintbrush—a graffiti implement—and to put in place a path whereby punishment can lead to jail if fines are not paid. 
It could have all been quite different. The Local Government and Environment Committee report gave an indication of other options that could have been available. It described the work of the Manukau Beautification Charitable Trust the 24/7 graffiti clean-up programme of the Christchurch City Council and the voluntary memoranda of understanding between councils and retailers regarding the display and storage of spray-cans. Just last week we heard about the initiative being pioneered by a Christchurch primary school Te Rito o te Harakeke in fighting graffiti with graffiti. The deputy principal of the kura Ruawhitu Pokaia described the need for taking a different approach to dissuade young people from tagging and bombing their site. The school went out and commissioned artists to bomb its school fence with Mr Pokaia concluding not only that the exercise was useful in brightening up the school but also that the eventual product of the art became a teaching resource in itself. The fence now inspires questions about the birthplace of our nation Waitangi about the manu whenua and about Otakaro which is known to some as the Avon River. The very name that the kura goes by reminds us of a holistic approach towards our young people. The name is derived of course from the well-known waiata “Hutia te rito o te harakeke kei whea te komako e ko?” 
[ 
Draw out the centre shoot of the flax and where is the bellbird now young one? 
]  
It is a waiata that reminds us that just as the centre of the stem of the flax bush is nurtured and supported by the older leaves so too our children must be nurtured and supported by their whanau—their siblings parents and grandparents. 
We have argued consistently throughout this debate and in more recent debates on tagging that punishment is not the only answer. We have raised concerns about the vigilante action that has taken place as people have sorted out their own punishments for property crime and we have laid down the challenge that a restorative justice approach would look at a comprehensive campaign that included those offending being given the responsibility of eradicating their own graffiti and indeed of facing the people who had suffered because of their actions. The greatest fear that we have with legislation like this is that it sets up a scenario by which the world can sit back and let the heavy hand of the law intervene. There is in fact no call for people to do anything themselves—to get involved in their communities to empower themselves or to make a difference to the future. Our co-leader Tariana Turia spoke up for a restorative justice approach and the thought police exploded into righteous fury condemning her for her comment that we needed to think about the social commentary that graffiti represents and respond to the underlying concerns around the alienation of young people. 
We have been told that another woman who has dared to try a different approach is an unsung community hero—Minnie of Manukau. She gets up very early in the morning at 5 a.m. we are told to look over her local park in order to care for the environment “for the sake of the little children” in her words. She has become the official guardian of the community park in Otara. She tries to stop the boys from tagging runs over to catch offenders in the act and marches them off to their parents. As one of the neighbours described her: “Minnie brings good to the hood.” She tells the parents to care for their children and in doing so she encourages us all to care for our environment and for each other. 
We can all be like Minnie of Manukau engaging positively with our young people rather than always persisting with legislation and approaches that punish and condemn and that impose fines and take the approach of “Lock ’em up and destroy all hope.” especially if all we are doing is being done for Manukau. We in the Maori Party will never agree to knee-jerk - reaction legislation that seeks to criminalise antisocial behaviour when we all have the opportunities to support our alienated young people and encourage them to find positive ways of participating in and contributing to our communities. We do not need this overreaction and this continually critical hostile attack on our young. We need to engage with our young. We need to seek solutions. We need to restore hope that we can all nurture our young to grow into the leaders who will help to shape our tomorrow.