Gangs are the result of many problems - being Māori is not one of them

Monday, 19 June 2023

National leader Christopher Luxon has outlined his party’s ideas for fighting the gang problem. (file)

Joel Maxwell is a senior writer with Stuff's Pou Tiaki team.

OPINION: It was about five years ago when I was woken by the sound of a ghost choir outside my bedroom window. A gentle, insistent - ethereal - hum that drifted round the backyard.

Ghosts may not exist, but I discovered later that meth-dealing gang members with the cash to buy surveillance drones absolutely do. Yep, that noise was a drone buzzing the neighbourhood, piloted by a gang member in a nearby meth house. Or it could have been a police drone spying on the meth drone. Either way, I read about it all after the meth house was raided, and cops poured into our street, which was home to mostly Māori people, and migrant families setting up their first homes.

I had dealt with the neighbourhood gang by keeping my head down and in particular avoiding the gaze of the guy in red who stood permanently on his front lawn who always - always! - stared at me with shanks in his eyes.

Our ongoing obsession with gangs shows that we as a nation are trying to figure out how we live with them, too. Politicians say we are trying too hard to rehabilitate, or not hard enough, or are disrespectful of particular iwi in the debate.

* National's Christopher Luxon grandstands on grandstanding

* National's Christopher Luxon officially rules out working with Māori Party

Timaru mayor Nigel Bowen speaks about the council's decision to buy and demolish the long-time gang headquarters at Washdyke.

To all the above, and especially the potential conflation of being Māori and being a gangster, I would like to share my thoughts as the least cool Māori in Aotearoa, and thus the world.

There are Māori gang members, and gangs of Māori, but let’s be clear, gangs and Māorihood are not entwined.

Gangs and poverty are entwined. Gangs and colonisation are entwined. Gangs and abuse in state care are entwined. Gangs and sky-high incarceration rates are entwined. To reject gangs is to fight the worst effects of inequality.

Joel Maxwell: “I’m not going to cry or anything, but hearing the video did cause me visceral pain.”

So f… gangs, I say to any young Māori reading this.

Your Māoritanga and value has nothing to do with wearing a patch. Perhaps you will have to fight to regain your culture and your reo, but that’s a fight worth undertaking. It is the truest battle - the one where the fighting undoes violence. It is a battle that will only enhance the mana of your hapū and your iwi.

I know, you ain't going to get much help from mainstream Aotearoa, from Pākehā politicians who say you’re getting special treatment while you’re being forced to choose between everything you’ve known - the iconography, the hierarchy, the history, the indecent coercion of expectation - and the alternative, a moral life.

Those mainstream people live in a cosy world where the hardest-hitting decision they made this year was whether to float or fix on their third house.

And believe me, you don’t have to do it to please those same people, or impress them with how amazing you are for overcoming the odds. Let’s face it, if it wasn’t gangs, some of them would simply find some other aspect of your life and community to vilify or hate or fear.

Do it for yourself. We, Māori, are found nowhere else in this entire world, and there’s not even that many of us here, really. You are a rare taonga.

And for the rest of us: The fact is almost none of the people reading this will experience gang violence, despite being entranced and outraged by the coverage. Could I ask that we don’t live our life in terror. We’re pretty safe.

And don’t use the gangs as an excuse to avoid our own introspection. The most commonplace crimes are those of the heart - the cold failure of sufficient empathy. The many little chills of majority indifference are what snowballed into the gang problem in the first place.