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The Year of the Pig

T. Simpson

This is the year of the pig - a circumstance which might lead some of my friends to suggest that now if ever is the time for learned discourse on the New Zealand police force. I cannot agree. According to no less an authority than Winston Churchill, 'the pig is a gay animal and delightfully given to reproduction.' To the best of my knowledge the New Zealand policeman has been described as many things but never as 'gay'. Of his reproductive habits I have no statistics, nor do I feel the need to gather any.

And yet I am constrained to write of our policeman because of the horror expressed by Alister Taylor in his little pamphlet: The Whole World's Watching, which dealt at some length with his disgust at his treatment at the hands of the police force after his arrest for taking part in a demonstration. Come, come Mr. Taylor. You are an acknowledged leader of our radical movement, an able publisher, a chosen baiter of Muldoon, an intellectual qualified in political science, and yet you seem to be suffering from the liberal misapprehension that we are operating a Bible class camp in New Zealand and not a political society.

I agree that the actions of our politicians sometimes lead to the conclusion that we are operating a badly appointed and ventilated lunatic asylum, but let's give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and assume that we're operating a political democracy. That means immediately that the police are required to fulfill two functions. One of these is directing traffic and helping old ladies across the road, and that part of their function stands or falls on its merits. To my mind it stands and I need make no more of it. It is the other part of their function which concerns me and Mr. Taylor, and that is the maintenance of law and order. In the excellent words of Sir John Coke: The law is such a fellow that will have no master', and the court of law where the right is established is ultimately parliament, the policy making body of the community operating in the field of public decision making. Parliament is the supreme fount of law and if, as Sir Ivor Jennings once said, barely able to control his laughter at such a proposition, parliament were to decree that all fairhaired, blue-eyed babies were to be shot, then that is within its power.

But it is not, and Sir Ivor, overcome with mirth does not go on to say this, within its authority to do so, because its right to act is based upon a consensus, tested very crudely in an election every three years. Consensus means, broadly, that there are things the population will put up with and things it will not. In New Zealand the people will put up with a great deal, but I do not think that a second and more selective Slaughter of the Innocents is one of them. The lawmaking function of parliament therefore becomes the translation of the mainstream of the prejudices of the community into legislation, and from time to time doing away with those prejudices which are no longer strongly held. The role of ensuring that those of minority opinion, such as burglars, are constrained to behave as majority opinion decides rests with the police force. Indeed, so strong is majority pressure in New Zealand that the mere sight of a policeman at the door is enough to strike a New Zealander with an agonising terror that he has unwittingly transgressed the sacred rules of the tribe, and he is inclined to begin to confess before he has even been accused.

But not all New Zealanders are conformists and nonconformity too is such a fellow that will have no master, particularly that political nonconformity which is not prepared to accept the political system as it stands in all its myriad manifestations. So much so that it is prepared to express its approbrium by waving a placard. And there the political system finds itself in the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand there is a commitment in this country to a free society and the free expression of opinions, no matter how unorthodox. On the other hand there is a commitment to a conformity so great that anyone found poking his head up above the ramparts is liable to have it cut off by the terrible swift sword of his neighbours. What was the government to do when it came to deciding where to draw the line between what I might legitimately do in a public place and what I might not do? As is usual in such cases, the government did not decide, it left that to the individual policeman on the spot.

Now a policeman of the lower echelons of the force, as overseas studies have indicated, is in no way remarkable for his intelligence, his imagination or his individuality. In short, he is representative, and in some ways a grotesque caricature, of the majority of the good citizens of this country. When obliged to decide whether a certain behaviour is offensive or not within the confines of a law which leaves sufficient room to manouvere a team of bullocks, the policeman docs what any other solid citizen would do. He arrests Mr. Taylor.

It may however come as no great surprise to Mr. Taylor to learn that he has not been singled out for persecution. His views just happen to be mildly eccentric, which is to say not widely held in the community. He is in good company. Let's look at two historical examples. The first concerns a Maori prophet named Rua.

Rua Kenana Hepetipa was a Tuhoe, inheritor of the mantle of that remarkable Maori prophet Te Kooti Rikirangi. His agrarian community carved from virgin bush, flourished in the depths of the Ureweras at Maungapohatu between about 1900 and 1916, and at its height supported over a thousand people. But Rua had his troubles and the main one was the activities of the pakeha sly groggers who sold whisky to his people, a commodity strictly forbidden to the Maori. Rua felt, probably correctly, that the only way to control this trade was through his own licence which the government was not inclined to grant him, and when he fell afoul of the authorities by defying them and selling liquor, they fined him. But the government was not unduely concerned. Maungapohatu was a long way from the nearest, police station and it was not many years since the government had connived at Maori drunkenness as a short way to relieving them of their land. The government winked and Rua sold his liquor. Then came war. It was Rua's feeling that this war, a quarrel between Europeans, was no concern of his, and he discouraged his young men from enlisting. In time of pace New Zealanders treat the armed forces as the last refuge of incompetents and scoundrels. In time of war they flood the recruiting depots and expect everyone else to do the same. To many, Rua's quite legal stand was intolerable. The police force couldn't arrest him for it, but they could step up their activities against his liquor sales. Early in 1916 he was accosted at Te Whaiti by two constables and provoked into utterances which might have been seditious. Consequently a party of sixty armed police set out for Maungapohatu in April 1916 to arrest one man who was by no means unwilling to come down to the count if handled properly. After a sharp exchange of shots, in which Rua's oldest son Toko, and Toko's uncle Te Maipi died in curious circumstances, Rua was brought to Auckland continuously handcuffed to another of his sons for three days, and committed for trial. Despite the fact that he was found not guilty of all but a charge of resisting arrest, and only morally guilty' of that, he was sentenced to eighteen months hard labour, and two years reformative detention. In fact he was released from gaol after only nine months, thanks to the intervention of Sir Apirana Ngata, who is said to have arranged this in return for a promise from Rua not to oppose conscription. Whatever the truth of this Rua subsequently did all in his power to encourage conscription. The only real long term result of the punitive police expedition was the collapse of the Maungapohatu community and the further demoralisation of the Tuhoe.

The second example is a little more up to date, and concerns a man called Carey. Carey was a truck driver and a militant union member during the 1951 Waterfront lockout. Not long after the resolution of the conflict he was arrested as he came out of a Christchurch hotel for being drunk in charge of a vehicle. Presumably he'd taken his truck into the bar with him. He was refused bail and committed to prison over the weekend and subsequent week when his trial would come on. It seems fairly clear that Carey was in reasonable health when he went into prison. Two days later, according to his fellow prisoners, he appeared in the exercise yard. He didn't walk, he was carried by two warders', he was dropped in the yard and left lying in a bitterly cold wind, obviously unconcious. He was not seen again by his fellow prisoners, but when the prison doctor made his round about two days later he was asked to visit a cell where a man was 'sick'. The doctor took one look at Carey, lying on the floor of the cell and pronounced him dead. Friends of Carey's, informed of this, visited the morgue and discovered that he was extensively bruised, and it was revealed at the subsequent inquest that he had died of pneumonia.

It's fairly obvious that Carey had been knocked around in the gaol, and had been left outside in a weakened condition, so that he contracted pneumonia. I don't think that it's usual for drunken drivers, particularly when they're not driving, to be beaten up in gaol. It has been known to happen to militant unionists after the resolution of industrial troubles which were extraordinarily bitter and which resulted in many grudges between police and unionists. Whether Carey died for this reason or not is not clear, but it was obvious at the subsequent inquest that the warders were badly frightened and were not telling the whole truth.

What do these two incidents tell us? It might be argued that they happened a long time ago and that they are therefore irrelevant. This would only be the case if they were isolated and that just isn't so. They are simply two of the more dramatic of a series of police and judicial actions which stretch from the Maritime strike of 1890, through a range of times and political movements to the present day. I could equally have chosen the death of Fred Evans at Waihi in 1912, the food riots of 1932, the suppression of pacifists and Germans in both world wars, or the events outside the Hotel Intercontinental during the visit of Spiro Agnew.

What the incidents seem to show is the use of the police as agents of suppression of movements which might be within the law, but which', by their ideology, reject the mainstream of the New Zealand political system and offend the sensibilities of the majority of citizens. Where the law is vague then the police can go as far as the popular will, represented by the government, will allow them to.

If the police were to break up a particularly rowdy meeting of farmers in Taranaki, and there have been some rowdy farmers' meetings there lately, there would be an outcry. There are a lot of farmers in New Zealand, and our economy is partly, and rightly so, geared to their needs. They are a major element in our social system and they know it. But if the police, break up a procession of anti-tour protestors then they can be assured of some measure of popular support, because these are people who are by and large alienated from their society.

The lesson to learn from this is plain. If you are alienated by some aspects of your society and say so in public, if you gather about you those of like mind and go out into the streets, and if you look as if you are succeeding in your endeavours, then for you, in New Zealand, every year is the year of the pig.