Social justice is the Minto way

What made John Minto famous is now history. Today's battleground is education ... and he knows what needs to be done. PETER CALDER reports.

The face was etched on the memories of a whole generation - either as national hero or as Public Enemy No 1, depending on your point of view.

That craggy countenance was always pictured grim with resolve or, mouth agape, bellowing into a bullhorn as he marshalled protesters, or cowering in fright after a disgruntled Hamilton rugby fan had just split his head open.

But, posing for the photographer last month at a gathering to mark the 20th anniversary of the rugby tour that almost tore apart a nation, John Minto was smiling.

It was a smile hard to read: shy? wistful? triumphant?

None of the above, as it turns out. Minto's attitude to the anniversary is tinged with regret - as he wrote in a piece on the Herald's Dialogue page that week - that "apartheid crumbled, but the edifice it hid from view is as effective in maintaining power and privilege in the hands of a small minority of the population".

"I saw [the gathering to mark the anniversary] as a chance to move things on a bit," he says, sitting in his Sandringham home.

"The anti-tour movement was important and it gained political rights for blacks but economic and social conditions are worse now than they were before."

If the present reality of South Africa recalls the lessons of Orwell's Animal Farm ("All blacks are equal, but some are more equal than others") it doesn't make him regret a day's effort; campaigners for freedom were never responsible for the corruptibility of the human spirit.

His detractors remain, and include the writers of letters to editors who suggest that he "should have been tried for treason and shot". But the man who was the face of opposition to sporting contact with the old South Africa gets little abuse these days.

"I get a lot more people who say, 'I was on the terraces in Hamilton [where protest action prompted the cancellation of the game] and, to be frank, we were wrong'.

"Rugby people started to wake up when they saw Nelson Mandela get out of jail and saw he wasn't a terrorist."

The tour is history now, as ancient for Minto as it is for the country. Were it not for the anniversary, we might not have talked about it. Certainly he is more interested in discussing what consumes most of his waking hours: the quality of our public education system.

It is an interest as much personal as professional: as the father of two boisterous boys, Joseph, 10, and Patrick, 8, he wants what's best for them.

Minto is - always has been apart from "a couple of years off doing Hart stuff" - a teacher.

These days he's the head of the science department at Tangaroa College in East Tamaki, a social world away from the largely middle-class Western Springs College where he taught for eight years in the '90s. But as he speaks about his students, it is plain he doesn't see it as a step down.

"[Tangaroa] is a bloody good school," he says, "with some bloody bright kids. There are eight kids in my seventh form physics class and I expect every one of them to go to university next year."

Tangaroa was one of several South Auckland schools eviscerated by negative Education Review Office reports during that decade when, as Minto puts it, "support structures provided by the old Department of Education were ripped away overnight".

"Schools were told to sink or swim and, of course, a lot of them sank. And ERO came in and picked at the warts."

It's a spectacularly mixed metaphor - Minto is, after all, a physics teacher - but it underlines his passionate belief that the reforms of "Tomorrow's Schools" have been a disaster.

That's why he's a founder member (and the senior vice chair) of QPEC - the Quality Public Education Coalition - a lobby group started in 1997 by Professor Ivan Snook of Massey University. The conference that launched it pledged that it would "lobby in education with a vigour equal to the Business Roundtable's" and Minto says it has "picked up issues as they come along." Among its pet subjects are the explosion of privately funded tertiary education courses "of dubious quality" and the funding of special education, which is so poorly targeted that schools with two special needs student are getting the same grants as those with 20.

QPEC is assisting some affected parents in preparing a case against the Government which goes to the High Court in November.

B UT another major concern is the state funding of private schools which, he says, increased 220 per cent between 1994 and last year.

"That's through the roof," he says. "I'm teaching in a really poor community and just across the way is King's College, which gets $2 million a year from the Government. Their income per student would be double Tangaroa's. If they want Government money they should open their doors and drop their fees like every other school but what they're doing is using that money to enhance their exclusivity."

For Minto, education is, like the fight against apartheid, an issue of social justice. One of 10 children, he grew up in a three-bedroom house in working-class South Dunedin, raised by parents whose ideas and aspirations were shaped by the Depression.

"They would have both liked to go to university but that wasn't an option. So they they and their generation made sure they voted in Governments for 50 years who provided free high-quality education for everyone.

"What the baby-boomers have done is turned their back on that and said, 'We're not giving that to the next generation coming through and what's more we're going to take that money in tax cuts'.

"We gave the last Government $1.3 billion in tax cuts when [an Alliance costing suggested] it would have only cost $360 million to have free tertiary education for everyone."

It's an index of how far we have come in the two decades since the word "Rogernomics" entered our vocabulary that such thinking sounds almost quaint. But Minto refuses to accept that the horse has bolted from the stable whose door he is seeking to lock.

"It's never bolted," he says. "Any country can make decisions. It just means having the guts to take on the rich and powerful.

"We see the first wave of kids coming through secondary schools now who come from homes where no one has ever had a fulltime job. What does it say about their part in this community that 28 per cent of kids live in homes that are benefit-dependent. It's happened because of the way certain people in positions of power restructured the economy.

"I don't want my kids growing up in a country where they have barbed wire round their houses."

The energy and passion in his voice prompt one to wonder what drives a man who won one battle to apply himself so vigorously to another. Minto smiles tiredly at the question.

"I think anger's part of it. I get angry about this. I grew up in a family that believed in social equity. My parents both believed in a fair go for everyone, the old Kiwi notion."

He cites the writing of the late Bruce Jesson in explaining why that notion now sounds corny.

"Bruce said it was because we were a hollow society. We thought those values were pretty well entrenched but within the space of two years the free market went from being a dry economic concept to an article of faith and the welfare state became a dirty word. All that's been cemented in now."

Asked if he sometimes feels like he's beating his head against a wall, he bellows "No" before the question's even out.

"I think things turn round when you least expect them. I didn't believe in the late '80s that I would have seen free elections in South Africa in 1993.

"I wouldn't have believed that would happen. But it did."