On ya Todd

I was skimming over the Whakatane Beacon on Wednesday and came across this:

A building and construction scheme providing job training and education for Kawerau youth will reopen this year. The scheme was originally run by Kawerau College but closed at the end of 2010. Kawerau mayor Malcolm Campbell, Kawerau Enterprise Agency head Helen Stewart and Rotorua MP Todd McClay campaigned to the Tertiary Education Commission to bring it back.

“This is an excellent result for Kawerau and I am grateful to all those who have put time and effort into making sure that the programme can continue” Mr McClay said.

“Through the continuation of this scheme many more young people in Kawerau will be given the chance to gain a qualification and get a foot on the job ladder.”

The point I want to make is that Todd McClay is a decent electorate MP. I like Steve Chadwick and she was, by all accounts anyway, an excellent MP for the Rotorua electorate. However, and I am surprised to be thinking this, Todd McClay is just as good and possibly better. McClay has a Kawerau electorate office (Chadwick did not) and he makes a genuine effort to get out in the community. I am not aware of many other tangible gains McClay has made on behalf of the Kawerau community, but the perception that he cares about the community may be enough to pull him through this election. Kawerau is a solid Labour town, probably one of the most Labour friendly towns in New Zealand, so I didn’t expect McClay to give the town any attention at all. However, it appears that McClay actually understands what it means to be an electorate MP. Of course this isn’t enough to make me vote for him, but I appreciate his efforts.  

Problem gambling in Kawerau

I do not expect people who trade in human misery to have any sense of civic duty, but this is morally contemptible. From the Whakatane Beacon:

The owners of the Kawerau Hotel want to open at 7.30am seven days a week so parents can play pokies after dropping their children off at school.

In an application for a full liquor licence in December, the McCowns said opening at 7.30am would not promote excessive drinking. Instead it would allow parents to use gaming machines after dropping their children at school at 8am.

“If we do not open early we will not get them servicing our machines, parents will just go straight home, have a coffee, do housework and will not come back out until it is time for them to pick kids up from school at 3pm.”

Clearly McCown has spent no time on planet Earth. In most cases gambling does not exist in isolation. Alcohol and cigarettes are often used to cope with the anxiety and depression that gambling, particularly problem gambling, triggers. A 2003 study found that 74% of regular pokie players drank while gambling.

Opening at 7.30am is a sure way to promote problem gambling. It is a form of predation. If the opportunity to gamble in the small hours of the morning exists, then problem gamblers will take that opportunity.

The above quote from McCown says it all really. This is a blatant attempt to increase revenue by exploiting human frailty. Sick. 

Mr McCown did not think longer opening hours would encourage problem gambling, nor would having more gaming machines in Kawerau.  

Mr McCown said the more money that went into the machines, the more would go back into the community through The Lion Foundation – though his own returns were capped.

Longer opening hours will increase accessibility. A restriction on opening hours is one of the few barriers to excessive gambling. In 2008 Kawerau residents spent more money on the pokies than any other town/city in New Zealand. I find this extremely sad given that the median income in Kawerau is just over $17,000 – the lowest in the country. The pokies wreck havoc in Kawerau. Crime, family violence, ill health, family breakdown, poverty and suicidal behaviour can be linked to problem gambling. Kawerau is lucky in one respect though. The Council has adopted a “sinking lid” policy i.e. a cap on the number of gaming machines in the town.

I hate the argument that the more money gaming machines make the more money that “would go back into the community”. This is sick logic. Pokie machines are like a cruel tax on the poorest in society. Where money is sucked from the poorest and then redistributed to pay for some middle class kids new soccer field. The amount of money actually repatriated is minimal as well.   

At peak hours most days he has up to 38 people waiting in the gaming room for a machine. More machines would “reduce the aggro” from people waiting.

More machines will mean more people get a go at pissing away their livelihoods, their childrens wellbeing and the wellbeing of the community.

He would continue to advocate to be allowed more machines, and said if the council continued to block him he would start using machines that supported trusts of no benefit to Kawerau.

Blackmail. Classy.

Problem Gambling Foundation chief executive Graeme Ramsey said the extended hours idea was “crazy”, though not without precedent in New Zealand. Mr Ramsey said 40 per cent of revenue from pokies came from problem gamblers. 

Extended opening hours would only increase accessibility to the machines. Kawerau is consistently among districts with the highest gambling spend per head of population, according to Department of Internal Affairs statistics.

That’s right.

Mr McCown did not think Kawerau had gambling issues and the district’s leaders should focus on “bigger problems” such as fighting and domestic violence.

Yup, McCown is obviously braindead. I wonder if he knows that a woman whose partner is a problem gamber is 10.5 times more likely to be a victim of violence from her partner than partners of a non-problem gambler. Problem gambling and domestic violence tend to go hand in hand. I guess he missed the memo. I wonder if McCown also knows that Kawerau actually does have a gambling problem. Consider this:

In just three months, between April and June this year the 72 pokies in the Kawerau district took in $111 for each of the district's 6921 people: men, women and children — so if you take babies and children and all those who don't gamble out of the equation, just imagine how much some people are pouring into the machines.

And this:

From April, when the monitoring system was installed, to December last year, Kawerau residents put $2,388,710 into the town's 72 gaming machines. That means Kawerau's 7000 people spends on average about $455 each a year on pokies.

And this:

Kawerau is still ranking in the national top four, for poker machine losses. The town's spending dropped by $25,000 in 2009. But it still notched up well over $600,000 dollars. Kawerau was once rated the area with the most gambling problems and losses.

Kawerau has a massive problem with the pokies. If I had my way I would ban them all. This probably won't happen though. So the next best thing is to obstruct McCown and his ilk - tell him he and his machines have no place in Kawerau. The sooner he fucks off the better.

Local content

Yesterday I drove past a protest group calling for local jobs for local people, in particular tangata whenua. I do not want to go into the details of local exclusion from the job market I just want to say too often in Kawerau people identify the symptoms rather than the problems. Kawerau as a community needs to define the problem rather than look towards the symptoms. For example many people will cite unemployment as the problem when in reality it is merely a symptom of wider economic and social factors that are preventing business growth and upskilling respectively. What's more, the problem, or in most cases the symptoms, are more often than not examined in isolation. This leads to tunnel vision, a focus on limited range of solutions and outcomes.

If the Kawerau District Council and wider community do not do something to arrest the slide in social and economic indicators then the town is doomed. The current problems the town faces are a result of decades of trends that will take years to reverse. The council needs to stand up and take leadership on this issue. Show a little vision, a little bit of guts, take the risk. Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen. In my opinion the council lacks the vision, the expertise or even any awareness that they are presiding over a dying domain. If Kawerau cannot get its act together central government, and I am 100% sure of this, will force the district to amalgamate with Whakatane. And nobody wants that.      

FU Whakatane District Council

There is deep dissatisfaction among some residents within the Whakatane District. Disgruntled residents from the Rangitaiki Ward, which includes the towns of Edgecumbe, Matata, Te Teko and Awakeri, have renewed calls to cut ties with the Whakatane District Council (WDC) and move under the governance of the nearby Kawerau District Council. You can read some background here. I’m interested in the issue because I think it demonstrates the perennial problem peripheral wards face.

Peripheral wards are often neglected by major interests in the centre of the district and there is almost always conflict between the interests of rural residents and the interests of urban residents. Under the ward voting system residents only have a set number of representatives who are electorally accountable to them so inevitably those residents residing in the urban centre have substantially more representatives as a result of the ward system compared to those in the less populous rural wards. Therefore, the urban representatives rule Council by majority. The interests of urban electors are at the forefront of the Council agenda at the expense of the less powerful rural electors. The ward system also tends to produce voting blocs so when the urban bloc enforces policy that is detrimental to or ignores rural constituencies they do so without fear of electoral consequence. Essentially they act with impunity as they are only accountable to their ward as opposed to the entire electorate.

I hope the residents of the Rangitaiki ward are successful in their attempts to break away from the WDC. The WDC is a joke. Run by incompetent, narrow minded, uninspired small town hicks with atmospheric notions of self importance. The Rangitaiki ward is the WDC cash cow so they will pay a very heavy price for the neglect they have shown the ward.