Te Puna Tauranga Moana celebrating Easter at Ohakune at the Hui Aranga Festival. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
Just like a Joseph Parker fight, the Easter Bunny has been and gone quicker than a US President and we are all left wondering if it was more about the gift wrapping of fancy silver and sequined shorts for both the bunny and Parker.
There is no question Parker is a national hero but the sport of boxing seems to carry with it an element of gladiatorial conquest, with the crowd begging for blood as they did in Roman times, and from where I watched, inside a packed Ohakune ski resort bar, it was win at all costs with a draw being about as exciting as a warm bottle of beer at a barbecue for the fans.
Another sporting icon about to come in from the cold is Tiger Woods, who is looking to take on the best the golfing world has to offer and hopefully put on another green Masters jacket. He certainly looks the goods but then so did Parker and just like an Easter egg you never know what's going on inside the wrapping with Tiger. One thing is for sure, he seems to have tamed his prowling for the fairways and not the females and if he can keep his putter in the right bag we will see his name up there alongside the greatest of the game Jack Nicklaus, who is the all-time winner of major golfing events.
The challenge of sport, like life itself, comes in all shapes and sizes, and our Chiefs and Warriors keep bringing the bacon home. Keeping the faith – the catch cry of the Warriors - is easy to do when you are winning or even the odd draw as the Chiefs did last week. The same can be said for going the full 12 rounds. But is it enough to keep the customer fans satisfied? Perhaps so, at least until their heroes are patched up and wrapped back up in fancy, silver sequined shorts.
What cannot be dressed up as lamb is the mounting pile of prison mutton Sir Peter Gluckman has found in his damning report released last Thursday, on the state of our Maori prison population.
Perhaps we need to stop band-aiding the gaping wound Sir Peter is calling us as a country out on and start facing the reality that we are locking up more young Maori men than ever before.
In fact, the Prime Minister's chief science advisor is saying we in the media have played a part in sowing a misconception seed that 71 per cent of Kiwis believe crime is steadily rising in Aotearoa New Zealand, when in fact it is falling. It is the rate of incarceration that is rising. Headlines that focus on the crime and the time we send our young Maori males to prison have added fuel to the fire of sensible sentencing and until the good news stories of rehabilitation, restorative justice and reconnecting disconnected whanau back to their culture are given equal copy we could be in for a rough ride.
The challenge for all of us is to take the fancy wrapping off the reality that there are 5400 Maori in prison when, according to demographics and all being equal, there should only be 700. Until we can reconnect our young Maori men back to where they belong with their whanau and not in prison or gangs we will continue to see Sir Peter Gluckman's fears come to fruition.
Easter is a good time to reflect on the mistakes we have made as a society. It is much more than unwrapping the glamorous packaging and hype of a box of eggs or a boxing match. Here in Ohakune where we have 130 whanau - mostly young tamariki all enjoying their culture and their faith together at the annual Hui Aranga festival, you see first-hand the fruits of the solution Sir Peter is talking about.
Reconnecting our lost Maori males is, in my opinion, the pathway forward for our burgeoning prison population.
Like all of us, including Joseph Parker and Tiger Woods, we all need to know where we belong.
Sure it is somewhat of a sobering Easter subject, however, until we can engage in an honest and open conversation about the current status of prevention, retribution and sensible sentencing and align it to what restorative and marae justice can achieve alongside reconnecting the lost, we will continue to focus on the front page headlines of crime and time served.
Perhaps the lesson for this Easter is to focus on where our true heroes and local leaders are to be found and that could well be at the back of the marae peeling spuds and looking after the kids at a whanau Easter weekend, as it can be found today all wrapped up in fancy packaging like an Easter egg in the centre of a Cardiff Arms boxing ring or a Saint Augusta golfing green.
broblack@xtra.co.nz
Tommy Kapai Wilson is a local writer and best selling author