Brian Rudman: Facing the facts of life in a centre of Westie commerce

Henderson Intermediate School's desire to protect its pupils from the facts of life has backfired rather spectacularly.

By rushing off to the media to complain about a new "massage" parlour across the road, principal Bruce Dale and school chairman Ron Crawford have ensured every kid in the school will now be asking awkward questions about the house that has got the adults so worked up.

How different it was in my intermediate school days. Then, the forbidden house of sin was the immoral fish and chips and pie shop that beckoned from just beyond the school gates. Prefects and teachers were rostered on guard duty at lunchtime to catch any of us who tried to stray. That ban had less to do with morals, I suspect, and more to do with protecting the monopoly enjoyed by the school tuckshop.

The other thing I recall was that the last place we wanted to hang around after school was near the school.

No doubt in a perfect world, the ideal school would be sited in some sylvan grove, full of trees bearing ripe mangoes and peaches, with libraries and art galleries, and little carriages, pulled by white ponies, to take the innocent pupils to and fro. The real world would not intrude.

But despite Mayor Bob Harvey's best efforts, Waitakere City has a way to go to achieve that state of nirvana.

In the meantime, Henderson Intermediate lives alongside an exceedingly busy and noisy arterial highway. Lincoln Rd is a centre of Westie commerce and the home to every conceivable trade. The house of ill-fame, a dreary red-brick structure which modestly identifies itself with a large red on white sign saying "Massage", was until recently a used- car yard. On one side of it is a dentist. For most pre-teens, that, I suspect, would be the place to fixate on. On the other side is an acupuncturist.

Next to the school is a physiotherapist. Nearby, you can get your legs waxed and any part of the body you choose tattooed and pierced. That done, there are bottle shops galore to get you through the rest of the day.

Young kids have to wander past these places of raw commerce each day. They seem to survive.

Perhaps if the ladies of the night - and, it seems, day - were to parade themselves in French knickers and net stockings waving iced lollies in a suggestive manner to try to gain their attention, the school would have some sort of case.

But the opposite seems to be the case. The business needs discretion to survive. Indeed, Mayor Harvey predicts in the local paper that it won't survive long on a main road. "Its clients won't be able to remain anonymous."

Mr Crawford is beating up on the council, calling on it to take "leadership", by which he means drive the prostitutes away.

But as deputy mayor Penny Hulse has pointed out, since the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, "prostitution is a lawful activity ... and I wouldn't want to change that".

To the demand that Waitakere ban brothels near schools, Ms Hulse says that where councils elsewhere have introduced proximity controls, courts have found they were acting unlawfully. Either that, or councils aren't enforcing the bylaws they passed for fear of having them overturned by the court.

That was certainly the case when in 2006, Auckland City was ordered to pay costs by Justice Paul Heath when an Epsom bawdy house challenged the city's anti-brothel bylaws. Auckland had tried to ban brothels, with any other manifestation of the sex industry, from anywhere within a 250-metre circle centred on any place of education, any suburban church and, for some weird discrimination against public transport users, important traffic interchanges.

There was even a ban on brothels at street levels which raised the ire of a body called the Older People's Network Forum, which claimed it discriminated against the elderly and disabled.

Justice Heath ruled Auckland's bylaw ultra vires - in plain talk, outside the law.

Instead of basing a bylaw on moral grounds, he said "the location of brothels must be guided by the need to address policy considerations such as public nuisances, offensive behaviour in public places, public health, public safety and compatibility with existing character and use of surrounding land".

The new massage parlour seems innocent of all the above sins. Henderson Intermediate's teachers should get back to what they know best. Teaching.