Loss of Freedom

It is very likely that sometime in the next eight weeks I will find it necessary to begin a militant protest against two of the many factors that make communal life difficult to initiate or maintain in our New Zealand towns.

I am referring to the lack of availability of cheap and commodious housing for people who wish to help one another in the context of an urban community. I am referring also to our laws regarding vagabondage.

There are many old empty houses in and around Wellington. The building of the new motorway has left a number of houses empty but still undemolished. What would happen if a group of people, at present lacking accommodation, moved into one of these houses and set up an urban community?

I think I know what would happen. We would be arrested and charged with trespass.

I hope it is not necessary for me to break the law. Yet it will be necessary unless the Wellington City Council or some other competent local body is prepared to offer cheap houses to myself and others to set up a community. In the country I have been careful to keep the peace. Even if I break the law in town it will be in a peaceable way.

But I cannot sit in comfort and watch those friends whom I had with me at Jerusalem, and other friends who meet me in Wellington daily, hauled off to jail because they have no jobs and no place to stay.

They need houses to live in. The houses can be old, as long as they have water and electricity and keep the rain out. Those who live in them will be capable of paying rent, as long as the rent is not too high.

If no houses are provided for them to live in, then I will feel bound in conscience to break the law by taking over some empty and unused house.

I trust it will not be necessary for me to break the law. I believe that the townspeople of Wellington have a conscience like my own, and are horrified to see their adult sons and daughters wandering the streets without lodging. But it is time that this sleeping conscience woke up and showed itself by public action.

Even if we find adequate housing for an urban community the unwelcome fact will remain that under our present laws of vagabondage any members of the community who do not have jobs can be arrested and put in jail simply for not having jobs.

This is the evil crux of the matter. It is against the laws regarding vagabondage that I find it necessary to make a militant protest.

Those laws were fixed in Tudor times as a measure by which the rich landowners could intimidate and control the poor people whom they had robbed of their land by way of enclosures.

I remember talking to two young Maori lads alongside the fountain that stands opposite the Auckland University campus. For two weeks they page 352 had been hunting assiduously for jobs. There were no jobs available. They expected therefore to be picked up by the police any day or night and to be convicted and put in jail under the Idle and Disorderly Act. Naturally they were explosively and intensely bitter.

It may well have been that the grandparents or great-grandparents of either of them had a share in Maori communal lands. But the Land Wars of the last century stripped the Maori people of their lands. And the descendants of the robbers were still engaged in persecuting the descendants of the robbed by a legal process which bears little if any resemblance to justice.

Across the road in the varsity cafeteria students were sitting and talking together. Some of them may have come to varsity more for the social life than for academic reasons. I wouldn’t blame them for that. Yet if they spent three years in comparative idleness, sorting things out by talk among friends, no policeman would dream of hauling them up in Court on an I. and D. charge.

Why not?

The answer is simple enough. The students are, in the main, the children of the affluent middle class. The process of the law begins always in their favour. Among them idleness can be considered as creative leisure. But the children of the less affluent are harassed if they do not have jobs.

Our conservative MPs and businessmen are always quick to say that there are plenty of jobs available in New Zealand for anyone who wants work. I agree with them entirely. If I shaved my beard off and put shoes on my feet I could probably get a job script-writing for the N.Z.B.C.

But if I spend my time trying to start an urban or rural community, I am technically a vagrant and only the fact that I am a well-known pakeha prevents me from receiving a jail sentence for having the effrontery to live in voluntary poverty in a nation where the dollar note is king.

There is always plenty of work available. My friend Charles can get a job shovelling coke in the rain. The job is always available because no sane person would stay in it for more than four days.

A girl I know can get a job as a waitress in a milk bar whose proprietor has the curious notion that because he pays his female staff to carry trays he has also bought the right to maul them whenever they are within grabbing distance. Only the more feeblewilled girls remain in his establishment for more than a fortnight. The girl I know would not be feeblewilled enough or subservient enough to take the job on in the first place.

The worst jobs are always available. And there are many other reasons why people may not want to work. A girl who is quite happy cooking meals and sweeping out rooms for no pay at all in a house where her friends call her by her first name may become depressed beyond measure at a factory bench where she feels indistinguishable from the machine she is feeding with pieces of paper, Or in an office where she feels she is turning into a gigantic animated typewriter.

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A young man who wants to become a good Buddhist may think it necessary to sit for a month in his room and meditate. In Thailand or Burma his behaviour would be regarded as normal. In New Zealand he would automatically become a criminal because he is not working at a money earning job.

As long as the I. and D. laws are applied it is impossible to get an urban community under way. There may be fifteen people living in one house, with mutual love and respect and honesty, and five of them are working to pay the rent and bring food into the house, and ten of them are engaged in other non-paying activities. One by one the ten non-workers are put in jail for not having jobs.

Perhaps among the non-workers are included some of the wisest and best members of the community – the young man whose recovery from schizophrenia has left him with many valuable insights and an understanding of the deepest problems of other people but for whom a month’s labour in a factory or office would mean a rapid return to the mental hospital.

Or perhaps the girl who is most of all the heart of the community, the Mary to whom the Marthas turn whenever they are in trouble. When these have been put in jail, because their role is that of Mary, not that of Martha, the community itself begins to fall apart.

The law of my country does not recognise communal ownership. I found this out when I gave evidence in an Auckland Magistrate’s Court on behalf of four friends who had been hauled up on I. and D. charges. They had plenty of money in common. They had common use of a truck worth four hundred dollars. They wanted to get a new community going in the Hokianga area.

But the law did not recognise communal ownership. Therefore they had already spent terms in jail on remand. Several of them were convicted of the crime of being poor and jobless. It shattered the idealist hope which had grown among them in the course of several months of communal living at Jerusalem. One of them returned to the habits of cop-dodging and petty larceny in which he had been engaged before he came to Jerusalem.

It broke my heart to see it happen. He was a Maori. He had been attacked and insulted in racist terms. And he said to me, as we walked down the street together – ‘Hemi, I need drugs. In the town we need drugs as a shield.’

On account of these matters I intend to begin, in the course of the next eight weeks, some kind of militant protest against the lack of houses for communal use and equally against the existence and enforcement of the barbaric I. and D. laws.

When a man recognises that he does not live in a free country there are two things he can do about it. He can move into the safest shelter he can find, and try by the acquisition of money and status to protect himself and his immediate family – or he can join the persecuted and try to improve their morale by acting as a free man among them.

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I must do the second thing. I cannot sleep at night with an easy conscience while so many of my friends are being put in jail for the multiple crime of being poor, having no job, having long hair, and being of Polynesian or Melanesian extraction. I think I will have to join them very soon.

Militancy is necessary when the rich are persecuting the poor and the laws are taking from us our proper social freedom – to make money or do without money, to work or not to work, to sit down and pray or get up and sweep a floor, to wear old clothes or new clothes, to have one’s hair long or have one’s hair short, to follow the customs of one’s own racial or cultural group, to embrace a friend in the street or refrain from embracing, to swear on occasion without the aim of offending people or to refrain from swearing, to clean one’s house out today or leave it till tomorrow.

Many of our present laws are codified intolerance. And even the ratepayers, some of whom may value their bank accounts more than they value their relation to God or man, might consider that the people they have to support in the jails would cost them less money if they left them free to look after one another.

I am in fact more hopeful than these words imply. I believe that a social conscience, though sluggish, does exist in this country.

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