No bread, all circuses. Allegedly, the cupboard is bare when it comes to putting extra money on the table to offer nurses, teachers and junior doctors the wages (and staffing relief) that they deserve, and which might stop some of them from leaving the country. Nope, no more money on the table for that kind of thing.
Yet hey presto, Christopher Luxon has magically found a spare $70 million down the back of the Cabinet sofa with which to subsidise concerts in the city of Auckland, a handout that will probably enable a couple of big shows to be staged there before Election 2026. Strange how an imminent election can focus the mind on the value of some types of government spending.
As the research tells us, these big events (and the stadiums in which they are held) do not generate wealth. They are not a “boost” to anyone except the fortunate few. These events drain the discretionary income out of other parts of the regional and national economy and channel it into a single metropolitan focal point. Even there, the economic benefits are captured by a relatively small number of hotels, bars, restaurants etc. Indeed, they do get a ‘boost”. But they do so at the expense of the hotels, bars and restaurants and retail spending crosstown, or in the other towns and cities where that same money would otherwise have been spent.
After the concert buzz has died, Auckland will return to being the same depressed place, at least until it gets the next hit on the concert subsidy pipe. Hate to kill the buzz. But maybe we should be investing in our teachers and nurses, rather on subsidising 50,000 boomers to go and see the Eagles, Stones or AC/DC, one last time before they die.
Children, First?
Treating the needs of the Phillips kids as the over-riding concern is easier said than done. No one will envy Oranga Tamariki the task they face in managing their care. True, the agency has experience in rescuing children from systematic abuse, yet these circumstances are unique. Mere professions of love and the provision of “wraparound” services are likely to be received with scepticism by the children, especially at first.
It is unclear how the trust of the children can best be built. For starters…it seems imperative to keep them together. Is Oranga Tamariki committed to that as a given? Somehow, OT will also have to find a way to manage the relationship between the children’s paternal and maternal families. In addition…before being taken into the bush by Tom Phillips, the children were being home schooled, so any integration of the children within the school system will have to be managed gradually (if done at all) over the years to come.
At this point, the public does not know who – if anyone –helped Phillips to subsist in the bush for as long as he did. If the children really are the priority, it is hard to see how their interests are being served by the Police going after the people who may have helped Phillips – and the children – to survive in the wilderness. Obviously, the routines that Phillips created were not desirable, but over the course of four years these routines became their reality, and the basis for what security they felt they had. For that reason alone, prosecuting the people who helped to sustain that fragile family eco-system is likely to be self-defeating.
Through Phillips’ own selfish and violent actions, the children have just lost their father. It is hard to see how the Police seeking out the other people whose kindness (however misguided) enabled them to survive is going to help make the children feel inclined to re-integrate back into the wider society, or feel positive about a system that is loudly claiming to be putting their needs first.
As mentioned, there are few (if any) precedents for bringing children back from such experiences, inflicted by a parent claiming to care for them. Regardless…even if outside help was provided at times, the children and their father did learn to subsist by their own wits for years, while being exposed to the elements and with only each other for company. That endurance has been a remarkable achievement. It will have left a mark, possibly for the rest of their lives. The aim now, surely, should be to recognise their skills, and allow them some agency in the reconstruction of their lives.
In contrast, institutional care – however well intentioned – is likely to be perceived at first as more of a prison than a refuge. One of the few, even vaguely similar precedents for the Maricopa kids are the European children abducted from their homes by Native American tribes in the 19th century. Over the course of months and years, those children who survived the initial abduction learned to live exposed to the elements out on the open prairies, and quickly came to embrace the tribal norms and patterns of subsistence.
As the historian Scott Zesch relates in his book Captured, some of these children thrived in their nomadic new life, and after they were “rescued” few of them re-adapted easily back into “civilisation.” The late Paulette Jiles drew on Zesch’s book for her best-selling novel News of the World, an account of such a “rescued” abductee and her experience of re-adjustment. In her earlier novel The Colour of Lighting, Jiles had vividly empathised with a captive European girl who had been ‘rescued’ from the life she had made with her Kiowa captors:
…[She] was not afraid of going hungry or of starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth, with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun…
In citing this example, I’m not trying to romanticise what life in the bush with their father would have been like. Yet for better and for worse (and at impressionable ages) these children had adapted more or less successfully to the hardships this lifestyle involved, and to the freedoms that it offered.
There will be no gain, and possible damage to be done, by trying to (a) deny or obliterate their life in the bush, or (b) to denigrate their father. In later life as adults, they will come to their own conclusions about him, and about the life to which he subjected them. Now is not the time. Nor is it a time for the would-be carers to be pushing their own needs and emotions to the forefront. Listening to the children might be a good start in what is likely to be a long process of earning trust.
On not mourning Charlie Kirk
Never one to miss an opportunity for a cheap stunt, ACT Party leader David Seymour tried on Friday to get Parliament to officially note the death of the US right wing extremist Charlie Kirk – a stunt put forward mainly so that Seymour could then attack the Greens and Labour for blocking the move.
The more salient question is why Seymour would want the House to officially note the death of a crusading Islamophobe, and avowed racist ( “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified”– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024). Even more to the point, Kirk peddled online the same Great Replacement Theory as the Christchurch mosque shooter, Brenton Tarrant. What other toxic views does the deputy Prime Minister share in common with Kirk and Tarrant?
Many people more worthy than Kirk of Parliament’s attention die every week. Other US political figures more worthy of Parliament’s sympathetic attention have been assassinated this year alone. Basic point being: one can condemn Kirk’s murder without feeling in any way compelled to mourn his passing. Amid the outpouring of Kirk-related commentary, these words (scroll down this link) by Gerald Bourguet, a Phoenix, Arizona sports reporter rang true to me:
“Political differences” are not the same thing as spewing hateful rhetoric on a daily basis, and refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence. Just so we’re 100% clear on that.
“He was a father” Half of y’all didn’t give a DAMN about doing anything to stop gun violence when the victims of mass shootings were LITERAL children. And those kids weren’t bigots spreading genocidal propaganda, or a mindset he directly fed into …
If you’re saddened by today’s “political violence,” horrified by the video, or repulsed by my response, ask yourself why your reaction was different when it came to school shootings, mass deportations or the HUNDREDS of videos of horrific murders in Gaza (which Kirk cheered on)
Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died. Too many of you are more concerned with being polite and *appearing* to be good people rather than showing some damn backbone and standing on principle to condemn hate.
Bourguet lost his job for making that comment online, one of at least 15 people fired across America because their exercise of free speech was deemed either to celebrate or to “rationalise” Kirk’s murder. Evidently, grief and anger are the only legitimate responses that Americans are being allowed to express, if they want to hold onto their jobs.
That’s the thing about free speech champions like Kirk and Seymour. They demand freedom of speech for their own views and those of the like-minded, but the speech of others? Not so much. “Prove me wrong” they say, while being the only person holding a microphone. They claim to abhor cancel culture, especially on campus – yet Kirk had set up and fostered a system by which students were being encouraged and enabled to inform on academics who said the “wrong” things in class (or elsewhere) about gender, race, or America’s colonial history. The aim being to have those teachers fired. No one enforces cancel culture like the people who claim to oppose it.
All of this is even before we get on to the evidence of Kirk’s Islamophobia, his transphobia, his support for white nationalism, his enthusiasm for banning abortion, birth control and counselling on gender identity. (Kirk called for gender–affirming clinic doctors to be subjected to “ Nuremberg-style trials”.) He told women (Taylor Swift in particular) to “submit”to their husbands (“You’re not in charge”) and to “have tons of children.”
On the extreme right though, it wasn’t all one way traffic. Kirk’s fervent support for Israel and its policies of genocide in Gaza created enemies for him among right wing anti-Semites – eg the supporters of Nick Fuentes – who used Kirk’s uncritical support for Israel to question the sincerity of his support for white nationalism. Right now, there is contradictory evidence as to whether the shooting suspect Tyler Robinson shares this ultra-right point of view.
As for Kirk‘s views on politically inspired violence..when Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s 82 year old husband, was attacked so severely in a home invasion by an intruder wielding a hammer that Paul Pelosi’s skull was fractured, Kirk urged “some amazing patriot” to step forward and post bail for the suspect.
No doubt, there are people close to Kirk – his wife, his children – who loved him. Nothing can justify his murder. Or the murders of many other people elsewhere in the world. At a rough count, the IDF murders 50 or so innocent Gaza citizens every 24 hours. And yet somehow…Charlie Kirk is the guy whose death has been singled out by his Kiwi fanboy David Seymour as being worthy of our Parliament to note, and to lament.
Still….in the spirit of healing our cultural divisions, Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick could offer to take part with Seymour in a joint Bible reading to commemorate Kirk’s passing. I think that Galatians 6:7 would be a highly appropriate place to start. Look it up.