Leading from the front issuu

GROUNDHOG DAY FOR
SOCIAL JUSTICE?
by doug laing
Herein are some quotes from the Pilot City Trust’s submission
to the National Seminar on the Prevention of
Violence in 1992, when Pat Magill was already a wellseasoned
social campaigner both searching for and offering
answers.
The frightening thing is that three decades later the
fight continues — remarkably with our Pat still in the
trenches and determined that one day he will see that to
which he most aspires.
“We exist to develop Napier as a bicultural community
involved in an ongoing process of improving the quality
of life for all its citizens, by encouraging and supporting
innovative approaches for preventing or minimising
social problems,” the Mission Statement of the NPCT in
that submission.
The submission was close to 50 pages of individual
support for the kaupapa, from people including a gang
leader, a school principal, a barrister, a lecturer, a surgeon,
a former police officer, and workers, many of them
volunteers, across the spectrum of social and youth
work, and sports.
Among the supporting papers was that of a gang
leader and work trust boss who in answer to the question
of what needed to happen to make Napier free of
violence, said: “More jobs. People need to work, it gives
them a purpose.”
They were chopping firewood, hard all-day manual
work, stacking by hand, tonnes of it, but there was a sad
reality when asked if there were any ways in which systems
worked to benefit that mahi. “Not for us,” was the
response.
A voluntary community worker, with a background of
family gang affiliation, spoke of her main motivation for
why she was involved in community work thus: “I feel
that if we leave things as they are we leave our kids at a
disadvantage…”
The waters have since passed under many bridges,
but many would say those bridges have often been walls,
and the waters have not passed them at all — merely
backing up and reinforcing, creating and recreating the
issues as they exist in modern society.
Nothing, however, has lessened the commitment of
Pat Magill in trying to help his beloved Napier become
the city he believes it wants, without the inequalities of
poverty and hardship, where everyone cares about each
other, perhaps best now envisioned in his hopes for
the Napier City Council to declare its environs a Child
Friendly City.
It’s a UNICEF-led initiative that supports municipal
governments in realising the rights of children at the local
level using the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child as its foundation.
It would commit the council and its people incorporating
their vision for the future of its children in every
manner of planning, whether it be from the shape and
size of roads, footpaths and playgrounds, or the social
and educational conditions in which they will foster, as
individuals and a community.
It’s not only Pat’s 95th birthday this year, but also the
40th anniversary of the Napier Pilot City Trust, and it’s
worth harking back to page 2 of that submission, highlighting
a headline of that year, the Daily Telegraph,
November 21, 1992: “Napier’s crime increase tops national
figures.”
Hawke’s Bay Today, March 30, 2021: “Napier police
“stretched to limit.”
If these are accurate reflections of the times, then the
question has to be asked whether the city got what it
wanted, rather than what it needs.
The vision of the Trust, and the purposes of Pat Magill,
the trust’s arrow-headed protagonist, remain the ultimate
challenge.
Maraenui – by whānau for whānau, anything is possible 107