Editorial: How do we turn around lives?

Kiran Mistry's dairy has been robbed several times.

You have to admire the guts of people such as Kiran Mistry.

There are not many people who would front up each day to a job where the next person to walk in could rob them, assault them or at worst, kill them.

Danger is inevitable in some jobs. If you enter the army, the police or compete in extreme sports, you take on risk. But standing behind a counter selling milk and bread?

Mr Mistry, the owner of Sunset Super Seven dairy, was this week hit with a golf club when two men tried to rob his store. It's the "sixth or seventh" time his dairy has been targeted and follows an incident last year in which he was left bleeding after being hit in the head with a wooden bedpost.

Yet he and other dairy owners we speak to today say they are not giving up their livelihoods.

They have called for tougher penalties for people that carry out these types of offences, to try and deter this type of offending.

The problem is the young men - because most of the time they are young and male - who rob a dairy in the hope of getting a few hundred dollars or a pack of cigarettes will rarely have given the possible consequences much thought.

Tougher penalties, more police and more security measures may prove useful. In the longer term we as a community and country need to get to grips with why these young men, and sometimes women, have so little regard for their fellow humans and feel such a sense of entitlement or desperation, that they are willing to walk into a dairy and hit an innocent man with a golf club. For a handful of notes, or, as in this case, nothing. Then, the biggie, how can their lives be turned in a different direction?

There are people and organisations working hard in Rotorua to do just that. Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but more time and resources need to be directed to efforts such as those.

An ambulance at the bottom of the cliff is not enough.