Peter Calder: Uprooted tenants on the march
Protests are about the experience of being uprooted and kicked out. Photo / Sarah Ivey
They turn up in dribs and drabs for the meeting of the Tamaki Housing Action Group. It's meant to have started at 6 but it's closer to 20 past before all two dozen have arrived.
As they wait, they swap stories - not just of the battle they are here to wage - but of hardscrabble lives on the shady side of the hill: finding transport to clinic appointments at hospitals, the price of petrol, of getting the kids fed before they could come.
So it takes a while before everyone's found a seat around the wall of the staffroom at the Glen Innes School.
Most are women; at least half - the more talkative ones - are brown. With two conspicuous exceptions, you'll never have heard of these people. They liked it that way; they had no aspiration to be in the public eye. But they're out this Tuesday evening because the very ground they walk on is shifting under them.
Housing New Zealand calls it the Tamaki Transformation project; the developers characterise it in a letter as "improving substandard housing in Glen Innes"; the people here see it as being booted out of their homes and uprooted from their community.
It looks different according to your angle of view but the fact is that 156 state houses are being renovated or removed to make way for redevelopment that will include 140 privately owned homes.
Houses that have been homes since the 1950s are being hoisted and trucked out of the neighbourhood: Thursday nights are popular because on Friday it's hard to get a police escort to hold back the line of protest.
It soon becomes plain that what's taking place in the engine room of the resistance is as much a community-building exercise as it is a political meeting. Yvonne Dainty holds aloft an order of service for a funeral. She wants to note the passing of Reginald Edward Minter, Regiment 610068, 24 Battalion. They had his funeral today - at the Panmure RSA, naturally.
"He wasn't part of what we're doing here," Dainty explains, "but he was one of us. When I was 10 years of age, he used to wipe my snotty nose."
If there was any plan to discuss new guerrilla strategies for protests on the street tonight it seems to have been shelved. Those present are not exactly wary of my presence - indeed, they're very hospitable; they ask me if I want a cup of tea and when I say I do they point at the kettle - but they're not about to risk their battle tactics ending up in the paper.
Instead, they're handing around a copy of the morning's Herald and relishing political editor Audrey Young's report card on ministers. They're loving the bit in which Housing Minister Phil Heatley gets a special caning for "letting the Opposition and activists set the agenda on state housing".
"In other words," says Tere Campbell, who is plainly one of the group's leading lights, "it's time to move on."
Much of the discussion is about the march on Parliament of the previous week. There's excited talk of "all the stroppy women" and "all the politicians who had to shut up and wait and hear us talk". Money donated is meticulously accounted for. Amounts like $200 are spoken of in hushed tones.
Those who made the jam and ran the flea market that financed the trip to the capital are warmly acknowledged. ("We took your spirit down there," reports one of the team, "and the spirits of those who are not affected by what's going on in GI, but who support us anyway.") Veteran campaigners Penny Bright and John Minto are in attendance. The former has been combing through Housing NZ's empowering legislation and wonders pointedly how what's going on chimes with its statutory duty to "have regard to the interests of the community in which it operates". She's full of suggestions and talks a lot better than she listens, but she's tolerated well enough. So are the grizzled unionists of British origin who speak fondly of 1951 and urge those present to "look at it from a class perspective" .
Before 8 it's all over. Arrangements have been made for the next action; tactics discussed; strategies sharpened. Yvonne Dainty sends everyone off with a battle cry, "Whatever we do, we do collectively." There's fire in her eyes, and I detect a little fear too. But it would be a foolhardy man who would bet that this fight will end any time soon.
If we truly want the lower socioeconomic parts of society to take responsibility for themselves and those in their community we need to encourage the building of strong communities (not what we see in middle NZ where we barely talk to our Neighbours or know the other people that live on out street), communities like those that so many of us grew up in until some time in the 90's when we all became to busy to care.
This nation needs strong communities that know each other, that look out for each other and take pride in each other. Only then can the confidence and realisation come for these people that they have all they need to improve their lives.
Once those bonds are built and initiatives grown from the ground up by these communities will we see real change in these areas, if we keep tearing them down and breaking them up they will never have a chance to improve the lives of themselves and their families, but maybe that's exactly what those in power want.
The truth is that they are being relocated from taxpayer-funded housing to other taxpayer-funded housing. This is NZ, not India.
It seems they've occupied these properties for so many years that they think they own them and can pass them on to future generations. They've been looked after for so long by the government that they no longer feel grateful that other people's money pays for a roof over their heads.