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THE NAPIER SEIGE
Last year I was in the United States at a conference and there was a team of drivers always on hand to whizz attendees to various destinations. I used the service once — the driver was a mild sort of fellow, in that bland, too-polite sort of way that many Americans have.
I chatted to him and was amazed that he lived in Texas, while we were in Los Angeles.
He was on vacation from his Real Job, making little extra money on the side. His Real Job was “delivering court documents”, but he’d spent the previous 20 years as a lawman — a police officer.
He was a George W Bush supporter — “I like the man”, he said, without the slightest touch of embarrassment.
We talked of the American way of enforcing the law — how every “suspect” is immediately handcuffed, hands behind the back, regardless of how minor the alleged offence.
Not long before this conversation, I’d risked brain damage by watching ten minutes of one of those American cop TV reality shows. The driver of a car had been pulled over for having a taillight malfunction and the cop had discovered he’d been drinking, handcuffed him and was shovelling him into the rear of the Police cruiser when the man’s wife got out of the car and wanted to talk to her husband. She hadn’t been drinking — which raises the question of why she wasn’t driving — but the arresting cop ordered her back into the car. She insisted she wanted to see her husband. The cop insisted she get back into her car and the situation escalated until the woman was screaming and crying — so she too got arrested, cuffed and shovelled into the rear of the cruiser — her offence? Refusing to obey a police officer.
I told my Texan driver of that TV show and he said — “That’s the way it is here, the police tell you to do something, you do it, or get arrested.”
And the immediate handcuffing, regardless of how minor the offence?
”That ‘s to protect our officers, because you never know what’s going to happen.”
Which is why American police also bristle with firepower.
I told my Texan driver of how it was in New Zealand — how you can question police authority, how our police aren’t armed as a matter of course. He was disbelieving.
The United States is an incredibly violent, disciplinary society. You get involved in it from the moment you book an airline ticket there. Immediately begins the “do it our way” demands.
I’m glad I live here, rather than there. And I’m never in a hurry to go back.
The siege at Napier was always going to end the way that it did — with the gunman shooting himself. In the United States it would have ended much more quickly — and violently. Armed and armoured police would have stormed the house and there would have been mayhem and destruction.
Here, the police simply played a waiting game and I’m glad they did,
Not everyone did though. There were people who wanted the police to act like they do in the USA. There were calls to burn the house down, to use armoured army vehicles to rush the house and kill the gunman.
I’m aware of this, not because I listened to talkback, but because someone directed me to a website called Kiwiblog.
Here I read some of the vilest stuff I’ve ever read.
It wasn’t just the outrageous, totally offensive red-neck, hang-‘em-high stuff; it was the personal and obscene abuse being directed at senior police officers, the former labour government and anyone who didn’t agree with the bloggers.
Words like “gutless”, “cowards” and “spineless” peppered the descriptions of the people who wouldn’t order the police to storm the Napier house in a hail of gunfire and mortar attack.
It was truly awful. The ugly under-belly of New Zealand society. Pure white trash.
The really offensive part was that these people who used words like “cowardly” and “spineless” were, themselves, lacking in the internal fortitude to use their names. Instead, the hid behind noms-de-plume.
WHERE’S WATERVIEW?
Winter’s arrived over the country in the past couple of days. Auckland’s wet, lawns and grassed areas have quickly become their usual mid-winter bogs and so I’m getting away for a day or two to see what the Far South is like.
I leave with the media in a frenzy over two issues that we’re going to hear about for a long time. The first is the appointment of Christine Rankin to a position the vast majority of us didn’t know existed — Families Commissioner. I suspect this may be one of the first mistakes of the National government and something that John Key will later regret.
It’s difficult to have too much respect for the spotlight hogging Rankin.
The second issue is going to drag on like untreated toothache. I suspect that most of New Zealand hadn’t heard of Waterview before the past couple of days and furthermore I suspect that the same “most of New Zealand” don’t care if there’s a tunnel at Waterview, or a motorway. Or anything. But, it’s important in Auckland and thus it becomes national news.
It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for people who are going to lose their houses because of the completion of the motorway. Apart from the emotional tug of losing your home and castle, there is the plain hard yakker and disruption that goes with “moving”.
I have just moved office after six or seven years and I was surprised at how many roots I had put down — and how much stuff I had collected.
But, if you chose to live in a city where there is the largest single concentration of human beings in New Zealand, there will always be demands placed on your environment to service the people.
Auckland is a very attractive city. It’s a vibrant, interesting place but there are three things about it I don’t like.
The first is the insular nature of many people — the Bombay Hills syndrome — the second is the ugly suburban sprawl and the third is the traffic.
It’s the latter that will eventually drive me away from Auckland. I time my working day to avoid peak-hour traffic. If I am not working from home, I like to get to the office by either 6:30am or I stay at home until 9:30 when the traffic clears.
At the other end of the day, I invariably stay at the office until 6:30pm as I cannot abide sitting in traffic, wasting time. Wasting my life.
Somewhere in the pile of banana boxes still waiting to be unpacked after my office move, I have a report made into traffic around Auckland that was compiled in the early 1960s. It looked forty years ahead and it got the number of vehicles that would be on Auckland roads in 2005 dead right. But we fell far, far short of the motorway system that was needed for that number of cars.
So, basically the storm of motorway construction that’s going on around Auckland right now is much more about “catching-up” than in paying homage to the mighty automobile, as the anti-car, pro-public transport lobby would have it.
If I lived in the path of the Waterview connection and my house was going to be needed I am sure that I would be upset. The level of that upset would depend on several things — how long I had lived there, the sense of total establishment I felt, how much part of the community I felt — but also how much they were going to pay me for my house and if they were going to send round a team of people to help me pack up the banana boxes.
Progress always has a cost. Despite the impression that we’re going to get from media coverage over the next six months, the Waterview connection isn’t the first piece of roading in Auckland that’s caused the loss of homes. Nor will it be the last.
Most of Auckland’s motorway system is built where there were once houses — just like those at Waterview. And I’ll bet the people in Waterview are glad of those motorways, use them on a daily basis and never think of the home owners who had to move.
There’s an awful lot of Not in My Back Yard and Only When it Happens to Me about this.
None of which is meant to detract was the sense of loss Waterview residents will feel.
Now, I’m off to catch my plane to the south — flying into Timaru and driving through the Mackenzie Country to eventually end up in Dunedin to fly back to Auckland again where, I know, the Waterview story will just be getting into full stride.