Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  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 in 2000; and twins Chris and Cru Kahui, who died in hospital last year after being severely beaten. Not again, after a finding that the highest rate of homicide victims in New Zealand are infants under two. Kiro provided more figures. There are an average of eleven or twelve child killings a year, New Zealand ranks fifth worst out of twenty-seven OECD countries for child murder, and worst out of twenty-five countries for child injury.

  For the first but not the only time I asked her if she ever felt a sense of the office’s futility. No, never, she said. ‘There is a sense of matter-of-factness.’

  Is the office powerless? ‘It has no real authority, but we have influence. And clearly my ability to speak out publicly is an important part of that influence.’

  Who’s listening? ‘I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me.’

  I said that I doubted the people allegedly involved in Nia’s abuse were among those listening. She said, ‘The family were clearly listening. I’ve had phone calls from them, emails from them; they made the contact.’ Did she mean Nia’s mother? ‘No. Other family members. And I think that’s a good sign. I think community leaders were listening. I think politicians were listening. I think heads of government agencies were listening.’

  I had no doubt these leaders in the child abuse industry were listening and listening and listening.

  Since it became news why Nia Glassie had been hospitalised, Kiro said, her office had been ‘inundated’ with calls from concerned individuals. How many is an inundation? She said seventy calls were received in two days. ‘People are willing to help in any way to raise awareness. I think it’s a wonderful thing. It shows the good nature of New Zealanders, and the generosity of spirit that I think still exists out there, and makes the nation a community. And it’s right that they should respond to child abuse. Because the fundamental duty of society is to protect and nurture our children.’

  I asked her just how much more awareness of a national disgrace could possibly be raised. She said, ‘It’s my intention that we will try and take people up on their offers as much as possible. The desire to do something is what will make the difference … It’s about what I call the public discourse, the public conversation, that relies on people taking responsibility, and using lots of different opportunities to have the conversation. What I’m trying to move away from – and this has particularly been the case in the last week – is finger-pointing. I don’t want us to keep a blame culture going. I want to talk about what things are like out there, because there’s a hell of a lot of really good work going on.’

  And of course that was absolutely true. People are working, doing something. It was vital, said Kiro, to continue with that good work – which included one of her essential beliefs: education about child abuse. But to borrow a phrase from New Zealand Herald columnist Garth George, a fulminating critic of Kiro, are some people uneducable? ‘I think everyone can be educated about how to treat children,’ she said. She launched into a long explanation of the dangers of shaking a baby. When she finished, I asked her who the hell she thought didn’t understand that it was dangerous?

  She said, ‘Well Steve, if everyone did understand that, then why would we have so many cases of shaken babies in New Zealand?’

  I said maybe it was because some trash parents don’t give a shit. ‘Maybe they don’t,’ she said. ‘And maybe they simply don’t comprehend what they’re doing. I think people have actually no clue.’

  Are there any explanations for tying a child to a clothes-line, and putting her in a tumble-drier? ‘The obvious answer is no. I mean, that’s completely moronic behaviour. Who in their right mind would do that?’

  I asked if Nia’s alleged torturers fitted a profile of child-abusers. Yes, she said: ‘Impulsive young males. Poverty. Drug and alcohol background. What I call the normalisation of violence within the family. A tolerance for really quite aberrant behaviour, for thinking that it’s okay.’

  Did that profile include being Maori? ‘There is a particular issue for the Maori community,’ she said. ‘It is true that Maori disproportionately hurt children. But out of eighty-eight children killed between 2002 and 2006, forty-eight were Pakeha. Maori were twenty-eight. The remainder were Pacific Island and a few Asian. So I think people need to get a little bit careful when they start this business.�
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  I asked whether she could comprehend that some trash parents would rather get smashed on booze and drugs, and have what they call a good time. ‘I’m sure there are some people who do that,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t excuse them. I’d be the first to say that if you have children, that’s your prime responsibility. Your job is to raise your children as best you can.’

  I thought about the trash individuals who have been arrested for abusing Nia, and said the response of people like that to Kiro’s advice might be to just give her the finger. She said, ‘I don’t care what they give me. Look, as regards Nia – I find the behaviour completely, completely incomprehensible. I do not understand. I couldn’t do what they – I couldn’t be cruel to a dog, basically. I’d never be cruel to a dog, let alone to a child, or a baby. You’ve got to really lack remorse and empathy to get to that place. You’ve got to really be an inadequate individual. Because how could you ever do that? But it happens.

  ‘But I don’t want people to wallow in a sense of it’s all too big. The hope that I take from the last week is that people aren’t doing that. We’re not finger-pointing, we’re not looking for the quick easy solution of just lock them up and throw away the key. People want to know what to do. They’re willing to take some action and responsibility. They want to know how we can prevent this. And that is good. That is good. That’s the public dialogue, the public conversation that I want us to have. That’s a hopeful sign.’

  When the interview was over, she walked me past the hopeful signs in reception (‘THIS IS A NO HITTING PLACE’) to the door, shook my hand, and said, ‘We’re not a bureaucracy.’

  [August 5]

  10

  Ryan Nelsen

  Eight Million Dollar Man

  The dream is England. The dream is a summer’s day in August, twenty-one pleasant degrees, driving from Cheshire to report for duty at ten in the morning at a training ground in Lancashire. The dream is breakfast and lunch all laid on, valet service for your car, the nice ladies in the office, talking in Coronation Street accents, who say: ‘Ryan? Phone for you, love.’

  But this is merely the outskirts of the dream that Ryan Nelsen is living. What he truly wanted when growing up in Cashmere in Christchurch is the real thing that he will experience this weekend – playing a game of football in the English Premier League, ninety minutes of the best life. The press are wont to call him Admiral Nelsen. He is captain of Blackburn Rovers, who are about to play Middlesbrough in the opening game of the 2007–2008 season. Next weekend, Blackburn host Arsenal; September is away to Chelsea; November is consecutive games against Liverpool and Manchester United – football at the very highest level, all the time, the dream fulfilled.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘can’t complain.’

  We spoke on Thursday. He had just arrived at the club’s training ground. The drive in from his nice home in Wilmslow, Cheshire (‘There’s quite a few footballers wandering around the area’), the good weather, the excitement and anticipation of a new season about to kick off. It was strange to hear his obvious New Zealand voice coming down the phone; he sounded so casual, so relaxed, all the usual national characteristics, like a guy who might have been passing the time of day in an office anywhere in New Zealand.

  Nelsen, twenty-nine, was surely confirmed as New Zealand’s highest-paid athlete – much more than any All Black; more, calculated one newspaper economist, than the entire Black Caps squad – when he signed a new five-year contract with Blackburn, earning him an estimated 60,000 quid a week, or about eight million New Zealand dollars a year. Impossible to get a grasp on such figures. Impossible, too, to entertain the notion that he plays against world-class footballers such as Ronaldo, Berbatov, Drogba, Fàbregas, Torres, and even a few players with English names.

  Fact: Nelsen’s achievement is the fantasy of every New Zealander who has played football as boy or man. He said, ‘It’s fantastic. Sometimes when you have a bad day, you kind of have to take a couple of steps back, and go, “Oh, hang on, this is pretty good what I’ve got here.” I’m extremely lucky. It’s something I always dreamed of as a kid. So I’m loving bloody every minute of it.’

  Nelsen was regarded as a good all-round sportsman at school, at St Thomas College – he played rugby, cricket, tennis, basketball. On his mother Christine’s side of the family, though, were a tribe of footballers, the Smiths, who played for New Zealand. ‘When I was about four or five, they came and threw me on the field where the other guys were playing, so I just sort of joined in. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d probably have gone into rugby if my old man had anything to say about it. Just as well he didn’t.’

  He took out a subscription to Shoot! magazine; he remembers watching the 1986 World Cup on TV. But there was hardly any televised football back then, almost no exposure to the beautiful game.

  ‘You’re right, there wasn’t much going on. But for some reason it just stuck with me. All my friends went off to play rugby, but I stayed playing soccer. I just loved the game.’

  Children’s soccer on Saturdays in New Zealand, a few parents on the sidelines, a cold wind beating a path through the bare poplars, a gasping dad running around as referee, while the bigger boys and the bigger posts and the bigger sense of occasion are at the nearby rugby fields – the distance from here to the professional game in England can seem ridiculous.

  He said, ‘Even now, a lot of people in New Zealand will look at the Premier League, see the level of football there, and think that it’s another planet. But in reality it’s not. You’ve just got to work hard and do the right things. It’s very achievable, very attainable for any young kid in New Zealand.’

  His morning newspaper of choice is The Times, he met his wife Monica in Minnesota, he said things like, ‘I know a lot of people who take their holidays in Lithuania.’ He hunts down Central Otago pinot noir when he can, and the club’s chef serves New Zealand lamb. Was there much of a New Zealand presence in Blackburn? ‘Besides me, no.’ Last year, he described his adopted city thus: ‘It’s a low-income area. The majority work long hours for not much money, they live in rows of houses with no back lawn, it’s raining all the time, they’ve got no beach, no mountains, no river running through.’ On Thursday, his vision of Blackburn had mellowed: ‘It’s beautiful up here, actually. Rolling green hills, stereotypical English farmland …’

  Nelsen signed on with Blackburn at twenty-seven. He’d left New Zealand at eighteen to take up a scholarship in North Carolina, and later attended Stanford University, graduating in political science. He played for American club D.C. United and won the Major League Soccer title. His views on the spectacular arrival of David Beckham in the US: ‘The exposure he’s given to MLS has just been incredible. He’s worth all the money they pay him … Everybody in England, and it’s the same in New Zealand, underestimates the level of MLS. It’s a very good league. It’s a very tough league. You play in extreme conditions – extreme heat, hard surfaces. So as to how Beckham will actually go on the field … I’ll just say, wait and see. It’s very demanding on the body.’

  Nelsen’s form in the US got him the deal at Blackburn. They’re a solid team, finished tenth in the 2006–2007 season and made the semi-final of the FA Cup. A win would have made Nelsen the first New Zealander to play in an FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium, but he was skinned alive twice, allowing Chelsea to score twice and win 2–1. Consistently, though, Nelsen rates as among the very best defenders in the Premier League. Watching him is like a lesson in the defensive arts: his sense of timing, his expert positioning, his smooth passing. Blackburn are not especially pretty – they go by the nickname Blackeye Rovers – but when it comes to homicidal rage, Nelsen leaves it out. He’s a calm figure, poised, steady.

  You might get away with saying that he plays with a New Zealand attitude. Does he view that kind of temperament as an advantage in the Premier League? ‘I’d like to think so, yeah,’ he said. ‘Most New Zealanders are laid-back, but we’re hard workers, and don’t let things sta
nd in our way, and what will be, will be. A lot of players are daunted when they get to this level, but being from New Zealand, I just see it as a challenge and go for it. I don’t know any other way.’

  His club are confident of a top ten finish in the league, with maybe a good run in Europe’s UEFA Cup – next week, they play in Finland. Nelsen is just one of a dozen or so nationalities in the team. They include immense American goalkeeper Brad Friedel, new eight-million-quid signing Roque Santa Cruz from Paraguay (Nelsen: ‘Great guy. Speaks about six languages’), black South African striker Benni McCarthy, Brett Emerton from Australia, Morten Gamst Pederson from Norway, and rising star David Bentley (‘He’s still got a lot of learn, but he’s a great kid’) who, remarkably, is English.

  Nelsen’s dream also includes the physical regime of ice baths after every game (‘Horrible. One of the worst things you can possibly do’), the ‘dogfight’ of thirty-eight games in the Premier League season. ‘It’s a business here. It’s a business of winning football games, and whatever it takes to win football games. Every stone will get unturned to find out how to win football games. It’s full on. Switch off for a second and you’ll be punished. You can get beaten by any team, whether they’re first or last. It’s just non-stop. Every game is just an absolute grind’ – he said all of this with such pleasure, such relish.

  [August 12]

  11

  Wayne Idour

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold