Bradford Sue: General Debate 
Bradford Sue: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:16912] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The law and order parties in this House were given a tremendous bonus a couple of weeks ago when the sequence of four tragic murders in South Auckland sparked a ferocious law and order reaction around the country in the media and in this Parliament. Knee-jerk reaction has come from all sides. The Green Party understands the sorrow anger and despair felt by all those affected by the recent deaths. There is no denying the sense of personal insecurity and fear that comes from living in an area where violent crime seems insidious and apparently unstoppable. 
However what we do not need more of is simplistic solutions about building more prisons or shutting down some liquor outlets desirable though the latter might be. Neither of these measures will in the end solve the underlying causes of individual irresponsibility and social dislocation. Rather we should be listening to people like Manurewa Community Board member Alan Johnson and Pacific Island journalist Tapu Misa who have rather different ideas about the causes of what is going on in South Auckland and about the solutions. They both talk about the indifference that communities in places like Manurewa have faced over the last 30 years—on a number of levels; not just about the indifference shown by the thugs who killed their fellow citizens. 
The reality is that some people are the living embodiment of the impact of two and a half decades of Government policies that deliberately caused unemployment and poverty and then neglected those who copped it the worst. In the 1980s Rogernomics saw hundreds of thousands of people deliberately made unemployed in the name of our joining the brave new world of the globalised economy. In the early 1990s National deepened the crisis by slashing benefits and bringing in the Employment Contracts Act. The fact that Labour came in 8½ years ago and began to try to compensate for all of that aligned with much lower unemployment has not been enough to make up for all that was lost in the 1980s and 1990s. Many people in communities like some of those in South Auckland and elsewhere have lost their connection to the workforce to a living income and to any sense of belonging to what some of us would call mainstream society. 
The result is as we see it now—a cross-generational pattern of crime addictions physical and mental illness and injury anger and disconnection. On top of this another generation of children and young people are coming through in the same mode and the Bible will not necessarily save them. I think the most telling figures in this debate have been those presented by Alan Johnson in the  
New Zealand Herald  
last week. He said that in Manurewa there are places for only 36 percent of local preschoolers compared with the national average of 64 percent. In Randwick Park the site of the liquor store murder there are early childhood places for only 20 percent of preschoolers there. As I asked the Prime Minister yesterday what commitment is there from the Government to working as fast as possible to remedy these gaps? 
At the same time we have Government policies that on the income side of things deliberately discriminate against the children of the poor by giving a special extra in-work payment to families where at least one parent is in paid work but denying that payment to beneficiary families. I cannot fathom why politicians and political parties do not seem to understand the unmistakable connections between ongoing poverty and alienation and one of its key outcomes violence. We would have a much happier and more personally secure society for all of us if we had a whole lot more equity—if we shared what we had on a much fairer basis than we do at present. To put it simply children who grow up in financially secure households with access to quality education from preschool onwards are a lot less likely to go out randomly killing people when they reach adulthood. There is a lot more that could be said about the causes of recent events and about solutions and I do not want to pretend that the answers are simple but the Green Party would welcome a far more thoughtful debate on this as we go into the election than the one that is currently taking place. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.