Pay now, regret later

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 17

Pay now, regret later

The New Zealand Government has a very special talent for throwing its cheque book at problems and then bleating about being ripped off afterward. Hopetown was a prime example of giving the money first and asking questions later ... $60,000 later.

If one is in need of funds and the banks won’t oblige, one could merely follow the example of the Hopetown director and be quids in. First you approach the Department of Justice and say you want $60,000 to set up a centre for rehabilitating street kids. Then you produce (verbally) some qualifications. Make them as good as you will, apparently no check is made until the trouble starts.

Finally you gather a few kids together, sing, chat, and cavort on the beach and voila ... you’ve done it.

Hopetown has now been closed. It won’t be getting any more funds. But then the funds it did get won’t be repaid either. To my mind the only

mistake the director, Ashaya Daysha, made was draw attention to herself. Up to then she was doing fine.

It was only complaints by locals which triggered an investigation that showed none of the people running Hopetown had qualifications to do so. Which is a bit late in the day. Of course, schemes like this have a much better chance of working if you choose a cause which the Government feels terribly guilty about, but doesn’t want, or know how, to fix. Throwing money at it is much better, and afterward we all get to boo and hiss the bad guy (in

this case the Hopetown director) instead of the real culprit (a Government department that didn’t check its facts). While dedicated to the art of living far beyond my income, I feel I could still do a better job of dispensing public funds than the Government has recently. For example, we spend thousands looking into a separate legal and justice system for the Maori. Which is great if you’ve got the money to spare, but since the Maori can understand English and follow the proceedings of our existing system, perhaps the money would be better spent on people

who cannot ... like the deaf.

We have just two interpreters for the deaf in the entire country. One is in Christchurch, and the other in Wellington. Now, when a deaf person comes into the legal system, he or she relies entirely on an interpreter to give him or her a running commentary on what’s going on. This is in addition to interpreting the deaf person’s comments to the court.

If that same deaf person happens to be residing in jail for the length of the trial then one can safely assume that any time he or she is doing is done in a sort of silent,

solitary confinement. This is unlikely to change because we haven’t the money to train and then pay more interpreters ... well we have, but it’s been “re-prior-itised.”

The Government is also considering buying a couple of big boats to keep us safe from international harm. Couldn’t fault that, except that international harm is beginning to look pretty good when you compare it to the harm you can come to on the city streets. City streets, incidentally, which will become even more dangerous because we have just chopped our police, force off at the knees ... because we don't have enough money. But don’t worry. At least victims of vicious attacks won’t have to undergo the trauma of extensive surgery and hospitalisation ... because chances are they’ll be dead before the ambulance finds a hospital that’s open to take them. Hospitals haven’t got any money either. Once upon a time we were all New Zealanders. Now we’re pakehas, Maori, and women with separate government departments set up to “look after our individual interests.”

As a New Zealander I think we were doing better when we looked after the interests of everyone equally. So do a lot of other people ... but then, we just pay the taxes.