Once Were Warriors 25 years on: Gangs and being poor, then and now

Friday, 7 June 2019

Jarrod Gilbert, of Canterbury University, talks about how the gang scene has changed in the 25 years since Once Were Warriors came out.

Jake 'the Muss' Heke comes home with a mountain of seafood to soften the blow of the news he's just been laid off from work.

He cheerfully tells his wife, Beth, he's signed up for the benefit instead, which is only $17 less than his wage.

Beth says she wants the family to get a place of their own, but Jake is content to keep living in a state house: 'The rent's cheap.'

The opening scene of Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors is a far cry from the booming post-war years when New Zealand was one of the most equal countries in the developed world.

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Much of the film Once Were Warriors was filmed in south Auckland's Ōtara, where poverty is still an issue for many.

* Once Were Warriors 25 years on: Minimum wage 'not enough to sustain a family'**

In 1994, times were tough, prospects were reduced, and the mana and bargaining power of the worker was dwindling.

Auckland had just been hit with a recession and our image as an egalitarian paradise was shattered.

But in the quarter-century since the film graced our screens, not much has changed for Auckland's poor. In fact, it could be argued things have got worse.

While the country bounced back from the economic downturns of the early 1990s and 2008, by some measures the gap between the rich and the poor is wider.

To understand the issues faced by characters in the movie, it pays to mention the Lange Government's neoliberal economic reforms, often called 'Rogernomics,' in the late 1980s.

New Zealand experienced severe growing pains as it joined the global economy around this time. The country's productive sector was decimated, with tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost offshore.

The recession peaked about 1992, with around a quarter of Māori and Pacific people unemployed, according to Statistics New Zealand.

It was a perfect storm for the nation's disadvantaged: while the labour market was deteriorating, the Government reduced welfare payments in 1991 and then raised state house rents to market levels.

Today, the situation for an Aucklander on the breadline is far worse. A wide gap has opened up between super rich, home-owning Kiwis whose incomes have doubled in the past few decades, and an underclass of poor, perpetual renters whose incomes have stagnated.

A 2014 OECD report found that in the two decades from 1985 onwards, New Zealand had the biggest increase in income gaps of any developed country.

Meanwhile, median house prices in Auckland skyrocketed from less than $150,000 in 1994, to more than $800,000 in 2018.

It has meant the proportion of New Zealanders living in owner-occupied dwellings has continued to fall, dropping more than 15 per cent between 1986 and 2013, according to Statistics New Zealand.

The rates of home ownership decline were greater for Pacific people - down 34.8 percent - and Māori - down 20.0 percent. By contrast, the percentage of European home owners fell less than 10 percent.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

There's no hard and fast method of measuring inequality over time in New Zealand, but the Gini coefficient is one way of giving us an idea.

In essence, it takes all the income gaps in a country, all the gaps between how income is distributed and how it would be distributed in a perfectly even society, and adds them together.

New Zealand's Gini coefficient rose rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s as those economic reforms took effect. It then fell a little in the 2000s, which is sometimes credited to the then-Government's Working for Families package and a higher minimum wage. Since the global financial crisis it has started rising again.

Darryl Evans said the biggest poverty indicator of today was the struggle to provide food.

Māngere Budgeting Services chief executive Darryl Evans said although minimum wage had risen to $17.70, that wasn't enough to sustain a family living in Auckland.

He said struggling families often resort to desperate measures to keep themselves warm in winter.

When nights get colder, they move all their mattresses from the bedrooms and to the lounge, crowded around one small heater, so they can heat one space as opposed to the whole home.

Evans said he'd experienced first-hand how the gap between the rich and the poor has been getting wider. Not only that, he reckoned it was tougher being poor these days. Auckland's ballooning rental costs, he said, meant there's little money left over for basic necessities, and most families are saddled with more debt.

For nearly 20 years, Evans has been helping south Auckland's most needy families to figure out their finances.

'When I took over the service 18 years ago, the vast majority of clients came because they were struggling to pay their rent and they were struggling to manage their bills, and it's far more complex than that now,' he said.

'Food is the number one request every day of the week.'

This time last year, the average family Evans saw was spending $83 a week on food; this year it's $39. Evans believes increases in rent, petrol and power costs are to blame.

Evans, who has offices in Māngere, Ōtara and Tuakau, said these days, most of his clients were paying up to 65 per cent of their weekly income to a private landlord.

'There's just not enough left to put food on the table, petrol in the car, or turn the heating on.'

Another change Evans had observed was the increasing debt burden on families.

Once Were Warriors' Nig sought the recognition he failed to get from his father in a gang.

'When I first started here the average client had around $7000 of debt, now on average the beneficiary families have around $24,000 of debt,' he said.

Very few of the families own property, which is what Evans would call 'good debt'.

'Bad debt' is money borrowed to buy cars, pay the rent, or send money back to the islands: the Pasifika practice known as fa'alavelave, or cultural gifting.

The number one thing that impacts heavily on families today is the rising cost of private rentals, said Evans.

A three-bedroom rental in Māngere - a suburb once known for its affordability, now becoming gentrified as homebuyers migrate south – could cost as much as $700 a week and still not be fit for purpose.

The tide of gentrification was sending the poor ever further south, looking for more affordable housing, Evans said.

He has watched families follow a clear path out of Auckland, from Māngare to Papakura, then down to the Waikato towns of Tuakau, Huntly and Ngaruawahia.

Black Power life member Denis O'Reilly says the gangs of today are much different to those of the past who helped build infrastructure projects and rubbed shoulders with politicians.

That's a problem, said Evans, because with every move to a new town there's the disruption of schooling, family and social networks, and the regions inherit Auckland's poor.

GANGS: HOW THEY'VE CHANGED

Once Were Warrior's Nig Heke is passed from one gang member to another, brutally beaten as part of his initiation into an Auckland street gang.

The son of Jake 'the Muss' despises his father and joins the motley group to make up for the lack of family connection in his life, although he discovers it's just as violent as Jake himself.

The gang Nig joins was modelled on the Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs, which didn't always carry the societal stigma they do today.

Denis O'Reilly remembers the days when gangs were a benign force of workers that helped build infrastructure projects and rubbed shoulders with politicians, such as Rob Muldoon.

The life member of Black Power first joined the gang in 1972. In those days, it was simply a peer group of people in similar circumstances; a substitute for the tribal links and communities urban Māori had left behind in the provinces.

'You had that big translocation of rural Māori to urban settings. You had a peer group, that had employment; we were building the motorways or working in the factories and freezing works,' O'Reilly said.

'Those assemblies were a replacement for the whānau and hapu back home. The crime tended to be alcohol-related and it was generally petty crime.'

But as Rogernomics took hold and employment dried up, so too did the work schemes that mobilised gangs such as Black Power and the Storm Troopers into employment. There was a belief, said O'Reilly, that 'good' New Zealanders should have first crack at dwindling job opportunities, while 'bad' ones - the gang members - should not.

'They deconstructed all those work schemes and then that's when you got purposeful crime, which was, at that stage, selling tinnies and things like that,' he said.

Gang expert and academic Jarrod Gilbert, says Once Were Warriors' Nig may have joined the Crips and wore a bandanna instead of a patch today.

With increased criminality came a focus on turf protection, with gang members fighting gruesome battles through the 80s and early 90s to protect their whānau and illicit markets.

Some politicians saw the need to empower gangs by steering them away from crime and into employment – an unlikely-seeming advocate was former prime minister Rob Muldoon, a friend of O'Reilly's, who famously invited Black Power members up to his office. Patched Black Power members later performed a haka at his funeral.

The Government set up the Group Employment Liaison Service in 1981 to get gang members into work, with O'Reilly as its chief executive.

But as the years passed, the public looked on gangs with increasing fear and scorn and it became political suicide to engage with them.

In recent years, Kiwi deportees from Australia have brought a more criminally-motivated gang ethos across the Tasman, O'Reilly said.

While Black Power has matured, becoming more interested in social justice and community development, gangs arriving from Australia such as the Comanchero Motorcycle Club are all-out criminal enterprises that have a concerning allure for our youth.

Gangs expert Jarrod Gilbert said the gang scene in New Zealand had become more subdued since the battle-worn days of the 80s, as memberships have aged.

'Those gang members in Once Were Warriors were all fairly young men,' the senior lecturer at Canterbury University said.

'Nowadays if you took a snapshot of a gang, you would see guys aged in their 50s and 60s – sometimes their 70s.'

Crime data shows older men are much less likely to commit violent crime and to be recidivist offenders.

'They've slowed down a bit. They don't have the overt violence; they are looking to create better lives for their members and families rather than just be hardcore, all-out violent and antisocial as they used to be in the past.'

It's evident in the growing involvement of New Zealand's traditional street gangs in community initiatives, and their willingness to set aside old rivalries and co-operate with each other.

In the wake of the Christchurch mosque terror attacks, the Mongrel Mob Kingdom opted to drop its Nazi 'sieg heil' rallying cry, chosen decades earlier for its antisocial shock effect.

O'Reilly has a theory that the first mobsters chose 'sieg heil' as an act of defiance against prior generations who fought in World War II.

'Taking on the swastika and the helmet was really saying, 'F… you granddad – you beat my mum and you beat me – take your bloody battalion and shove it up your a…''

A new phenomena that has only gained traction in the gang scene in recent years, said Gilbert, is Los Angeles-style street gangs, which are typically made up of adolescents.

'When Once Were Warriors was made, the only gangs in New Zealand, really, wore patches on their backs,' he said. 'Nowadays they may just as likely wear a bandanna or use a colour, tattoo or hand signal. Those gangs tend to be more violent and to create more problems.'

If Once Were Warriors had been made today, Nig may have joined the Crips and wore a bandanna instead of a patch, Gilbert said.