For the mayoral campaign, he will refuse to door-knock: ‘It’s intrusive.’ He said, ‘Banks and Hubbard are both out to garner popularity, and I genuinely don’t care.’ He will also refuse to advertise his mug on hoardings: ‘I’m not particularly pleasant to look at.’ Well, he was no oil painting, but beneath his naked head was a nice, soft, quite vulnerable face. He said, ‘I’m a touchy-feeling person. I hold hands with my wife at restaurants.’ I asked about his mother. ‘I love mum to bits. She’s very disappointed with what I do for a living.’ He grew up in Inglewood. I tried to picture him as a young man, and saw him with long fair hair. ‘No, I had long brown hair with a slight auburn-red tinge,’ he said.
I tried to picture him as Auckland’s mayor. I could not. Gently, I said to him that voters would want a man who has a firm hand on the tiller. ‘Oh, you’ll have that,’ he said. Less gently, I said to him that he didn’t have a clue where the tiller was located. ‘I’ll find it quick,’ he said. ‘And I’ll move it into where I want it to be. Put it this way: I’m not interested in being mayor of Auckland under the current system. Unless there is a mechanism, or a legislative way for me to make some serious changes, I don’t want to be involved. Because it’s a hiding to nothing. The current mayor is just a figurehead. He has very little power.’
I asked him if he would like to be a dictator and he said, ‘For a short period of time, the answer to that is yes. Sadly, there is a serious need for a little bit of dictatorial behaviour.’
The interview had started out as a nonsense. It continued that way right on through. But he struck me as a harmless sort of rooster. We said goodbye on cordial terms. I walked back out into the wet dreary Auckland day, and left Steve Crow to his stiff knee and his various assorted fantasies.
[July 29]
9 Cindy Kiro
Oh My Goodness
Nia Glassie is dead. What to say, and what to do? Because of what happened to the doomed three-year-old girl, who was subjected to stupendous acts of cruelty at her home in Rotorua, a parade of talking heads – including the prime minister, the mayors of Rotorua and Wanganui, police, community workers, concerned citizens, columnists, a bunch of MPs, the CEO of something called Child Protection Studies, and a Dunedin psychologist called Nigel – talked and talked and talked all this past week about child abuse. Many said the time for talking was over. But child abuse is an industry, a bureaucracy working long and hard and meaningfully, and its only means of transport is language. It sounds like this: ‘We need investment in education and better health outcomes for children and boosting the ability of community organisations to work with government to deliver services.’
That was from a press release sent out by Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro. I met her on a Friday morning in Wellington at her Lambton Quay office – a bright shiny toy-box in reception, kids’ artwork on the walls, little optimistic pamphlets (‘Hey! We Don’t Hit Anybody Here’) freely available. She had a round sensitive face, wore a big greenstone pendant around her neck; her manner was serene and rather soothing, and she spoke quietly.
We didn’t get on very well. She disliked my attitude; what did my head in was her remorseless use of the very thing that will apparently, hopefully, improve New Zealand’s appalling rate of child abuse – language. It was the flat inhuman code of social policy documents stretching into infinity. ‘Implementing strategies,’ said Kiro. ‘Integrated frameworks … Positive initiatives … Developing skills … Coordinated strategies.’ It felt like the kind of talk that came out of international conferences (Perth, in July: ‘The Children & Young People are Key Stakeholders conference) and ended back in international conferences (Kiro’s cheerful editorial in her office magazine: ‘I have just returned from visiting Greece and Sweden, and the US, where I attended the United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children’).
How could any of that talk have prevented what happened to Nia Glassie? Her treatment – allegedly swung around on a clothes-line until she flew through the air, trapped inside a tumble-drier, placed in a bath of freezing water – is the latest headline case of child abuse, that national disease and insane pastime. Is there a crisis? Kiro said, ‘Yes.’
Our interview was held on the morning of the day Nia died. I asked Kiro for her personal response when she first heard about Nia’s torture. She said, ‘It was, take a deep breath. I’m very aware in every one of these cases of the immensity of what’s involved, what children have suffered. Because it’s not the event itself. That’s what I keep telling people. It’s all the time leading up to that event. The fact that babies and children suffer such terrible torture. I was looking at some autopsy photos yesterday of another child … To recognise the huge amount of pain and suffering they go through is terrible. So, yeah, to be honest, there’s a sense of take a deep breath, and oh my goodness, not again.’
Not again. Not again, after James Whakaruru, beaten to death by his stepfather in 1999; Lillybing, abused to death by her family
