I have lived in the Greater Wellington region since 1984. I’ve always liked Wellington city. It is a compact city with good nightlife, theatres, restaurants, bars and cafes and generally a very good vibe. When I was younger, I used to go into the city at night quite often and it was fun. We used to often go for dinner on Courtenay Place, go to a movie at the Reading centre and then finish off the evening with a coffee at Starbucks. But we haven’t done that for years. Nowadays, the drunkenness, the brawls, the street altercations and the piles of vomit mean that a night out in Wellington is not necessarily a particularly pleasant experience, and we tend to go to the boutique cinemas in the suburbs instead.
So when Nicola Willis announced in parliament last week that she felt unsafe walking around Wellington at night, I could not disagree. While it has never been completely safe for anyone, particularly women, to wander the streets of cities at night, Wellington has definitely got worse over the years. Like Willis, I wouldn’t walk the city streets late at night at any price.
People may agree or disagree. It is a debatable point. What I never expected, by way of a response, was for Nicola Willis to be accused of racism for saying she didn’t feel safe in Wellington at night. Cautious, possibly, although I tend to agree with her. But racist?
The subject is of world interest at the moment because of the tragic and unnecessary death of Sarah Everard, murdered while on her way home in London. It struck a chord with lots of women who are only too aware of the dangers of walking around cities alone at night.
Willis is also referring to the fact that the situation in Wellington central has become much worse recently, with homeless people, including patched gang members, being housed in emergency accommodation in the central city. Te Aro Park, in the centre of Wellington, has now become a place for such people to meet, sell drugs and generally exhibit anti-social behaviour. It is a problem that police acknowledge, but so far have been unable to solve.
The spat in parliament started when Willis asked Davidson, associate minister for homelessness why, in 5 months, she had not taken a paper to cabinet or even made any press releases on the subject, while the numbers of homeless people are skyrocketing.
We all know the answer to this, of course. Davidson is more interested in important matters such as reclaiming the ‘C’ word than actually doing a job that she is paid handsomely to do. She is also, in a parliament rife with dullards, shall we say, one of the dimmest lights in the box.
But she can be razor-sharp when it comes to using the race card. When in trouble, accuse someone of racism. That normally fixes the problem.
Except that it doesn’t. It just stops people talking about it. Like the Oprah interview with Meghan and Harry, like the British police not acting on the grooming gangs that drugged and raped countless young girls, an accusation of racism seems to outweigh everything. Now, ‘everything’ includes the safety of women in the cities at night.
Nicola Willis was not being racist when she said Wellington was an unsafe place at night. Te Aro Park is an unsavoury place during the day, let alone in the dark. It used to be a pleasant place to hang out in the central city. Not any more.
But once we go down the rabbit hole of racism trumping everything, there is no going back. The parliamentary rabble who jeered in support of Davidson, including the hopelessly biased speaker, Mallard, are proof of that.
In parliament last week, women’s safety didn’t matter. No one in the government had the insight to see how far they have fallen, not only as parliamentarians but also as decent human beings.
Are we going to have to have our own Sarah Everard before this rabid pack will sit up and take notice? And if that happens, is it likely that any one of them will feel even slightly guilty that maybe, if they had done something earlier about housing and homelessness, another murder might have been avoided?
I doubt it. Scoring points over the opposition is all that matters to this moronic bunch of people that govern our country. Improving people’s lives? Hell no.
At least Willis has brought the fact that Davidson has done nothing in the last 5 months to the attention of the media and the country. I’d like to say that Davidson’s use of the race card doesn’t matter, but it does. Once used, the focus of the conversation always switches to the race issue, away from the subject at hand. Think about the Oprah interview. Harry bleating that he had been cut off by the family financially when he only had his mother’s millions to fall back on is not the main topic under discussion. The fact that there might be a racist in the royal family is all we hear about.
Davidson calling for sympathy for gang members causing havoc in central Wellington is particularly misplaced. Nobody has to belong to a gang. No one has to do drugs. These are life choices that people, often Maori admittedly, make for themselves. Maybe if this government had implemented the major overhaul of mental health services that they promised in 2017, then the social problems would have been diminished by now. But they didn’t, and now they are doing little or nothing about the homelessness problem as well, and the blame for that can be laid squarely at the feet of Marama Davidson.
But hey. When in doubt, call someone a racist. There. Fixed.
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