Hard News: We'll find out where all the parties are
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I didn't mean this thread was silly, I wa sreferring to my first post halfway up/down page one.
however, this sort of idiocy only seems to take place in certain places - rural NZ, including Christchurch
Yes as Mr Higgins has indicated, rural youth are clearly allowed to run wild and unsupervised, possibly because their parents wanted time-off for key parties and other tawdry activities they didn't want their kids to see.
Just because someone hasn't been run over at a party in Auckland doesn't mean Auckland parties aren't similarly out of hand. I stand by my comments: I believe a key factor in this problem was the liberalisation of the drinking age. -
Basically, place matters. I am saying that Auckland doesn't have its own sources of violence, they are just different to those elsewhere.
This is why I always found it galling that the lower-the-drinking age brigade was apparently a bunch of provincial politicians trying to legislate for a problem that wasn't really a big deal where I lived my everyday life.
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Oops - that should have been "Raise the Drinking age"
And to continue, I also think the booze-violence link is being overstated by some people here. In my experience violence was a key part of a Rural NZ night out, independent from the drinking.
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however, this sort of idiocy only seems to take place in certain places - rural NZ, including Christchurch
Ummmm, I know I'm only going my that ever reliable source, the msm, but er, wasn't there a huge flap over the behaviour of teens on the shore a couple of years ago? Involving drinking, cars, and out-of-control partying?
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I was there and a participant in the alleged scene. There was certainly drinking, but not much mass violence.
Certain kids whose parents worked for TVNZ/the NZ culture industry also happened to be involved which may have led to it getting more publicity than it might have otherwise.
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The Closeup clip and the 'No Asians' reference to the text invitation can be viewed here:
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/497100/1106383
It is a depressing snapshot of mainstream youth culture - violence, racism and binge drinking all coalescing into one anti-social mess.
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Yes as Mr Higgins has indicated, rural youth are clearly allowed to run wild and unsupervised, possibly because their parents wanted time-off for key parties and other tawdry activities they didn't want their kids to see.
I think that's rather a silly angle on it. Rural and small-town kids in general are more free to roam from an early age - that's a big attraction for many parents in raising kids outside of the cities, the feeling of safety in allowing the kids freedom to move. The whole "I can find my child on a map inside five seconds" attitude is a rather urban one that I don't recall being a big part of my upbringing or that of my friends - and that goes both for NZ and for the various rural/small town parts of the UK where I grew up.
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Verily, I can vouch for the in-skirts of Christchurch oft being an eerie place to be at nights, during my Uni days of the early 90's. However, I did find that a) hanging out with a scrum of front-row-forwards and locks generally helped at keeping the angst at bay, and b) that rows of parked motorbikes made for most excellent dominos.
Ah, memories of good ol' Warners . . . and nights at The Loft, with everyone a-jig so merrily that the floor seemed to buckle with last Footwear Co. booted feet. Fortunately, the whole 'resonance' thing hadn't been invented then.
:)
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<irony> Christchurch is full of white people. White people are genetically prone to violence - this is shown by the way they managed to wipe out tens of millions of each other through war and genocide in the 20th century.
Consequently it's unsurprising that Christchurch is prone to bigger fights and Auckland, where the white population is diluted by brown and Chinese people, is less so. </irony>
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This is digging up memories...
Maybe policing strategy also had a part of it. I can also recall now that it was not unusual for a year or two during the late 90s to see convoys of Police vans going up and down the Northern Motorway on a Saturday night with the sirens going and the heavies presumably inside.
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Having watched the Close-Up clip I'm glad the policewoman made it clear she condemned the racist texts. Less impressed by Henry and the two young men, who seemed to gloss over it.
Of course the two deaths are a vastly bigger story, but to mention the texts and then ignore their meaning is pretty poor.
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Yes as Mr Higgins has indicated, rural youth are clearly allowed to run wild and unsupervised, possibly because their parents wanted time-off for key parties and other tawdry activities they didn't want their kids to see.
I see what you're saying, but I think that's a different issue.
Herne Bay is full of the latchkey children of self-obsessed parents, and I know one mum who's appalled at the way that her daughter's 16yo friends are expected to find their own way home from parties and other places.
But ... that scene's not accompanied by the kind of weird, arbitrary violence you'd see in Christchurch when I was young and, apparently, in the present day. In Auckland, I've never seen the kind of massive queues of kids outside meat-market pubs that we saw at midnight on the last Saturday night I spent in Christchurch. It's quite full-on.
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Very funny, Rich. It was with irony that I noted the A&E doctor interviewed by Closeup is evidently Chinese. It appears Asians are employed to patch up the victims of Christchurch's weekend violence. I guess they have to do something as they don't get invited to the parties.
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however, this sort of idiocy only seems to take place in certain places - rural NZ, including Christchurch.
I just don't buy into this whole "its a Christchurch thing". I spent my teenage years in Auckland and Uni years in Chch. Both cities I attended parties where there was always the potential for things to get out of hand and sometimes they did.
Today we're talking about a tragedy in suburban Christchurch. Last year it could have easily been an out of control North Shore kids beach party or a South Auckland boy racer street party.
When things happen in Christchurch they happen in Christchurch but if they happen in Auckland its considered localised. "Oh thats a shore thing" or "yeah that sort of thing happens in South Auckland".
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When things happen in Christchurch they happen in Christchurch but if they happen in Auckland its considered localised. "Oh thats a shore thing" or "yeah that sort of thing happens in South Auckland".
Yes.
Presumably that ancient Metro piece advocating that Auckland secede from the great Southern unwashed (I believe it was Owen McShane plugging a Singapore-style fantasy) assumed that the border would be a little north of Mangere Bridge. -
Because young people do need a 'training' period to learn to drink responsibly (well, semi-responsibly, even adults can't seem to manage it). Of course we all drank stupidly when we were young but that happened in our late teens because alcohol was only available by law to 21 y.o.'s.
Nobody Important, I've never really found that argument terribly convincing, either logically or empirically. There are people - raises hand, waggles fingers in a friendly manner - who don't, can't "drink responsibly" at any age. My memory might be rather fuzzy, but wasn't there a case a few years back when some little charmer wiped out three people while driving loaded on vodka purchased for him by his mother? You're right, when a culture is that f**ked up something does have to change, but I don't think turning the drinking age into a political ping pong ball is going to do a damn thing about it. And at the risk of sounding glib, it's also pretty hard to legislate against cretins doing incredibly stupid things for reasons that defy reason.
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Good point about the localisation within Auckland - but the points remains that 1) not all yoof parties are the same and 2) violence in youth socialising situations is not an evenly-distributed phenomenon.
As someone who experienced yoof parties in North, Central, and West Auckland, and provinical NZ in the late 90s I can say that the presence of violence varied from place to place - and particuarly I found the commonplaceness of violence through my experience and the anecdotes of others seemed to be greater outside of Auckland, in the Hawkes Bay, Taranaki, and Bay of Plenty.
As a note, I strongly think that the Shore party scene in the 1990s was heavily beaten up by the media due to certain personal connections. This also entailed a greater Police response than might have otherwise been expected.
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Certain kids whose parents worked for TVNZ/the NZ culture industry also happened to be involved which may have led to it getting more publicity than it might have otherwise.
Just as (I believe) the relationship between a TV3 freelancer and 'Mullet' led to lead stories on TV3 about 'innocent' youth in ChCh OD'ing on party pills.
Finn, fair enough, I was being flippant but perhaps we're both making the same point: unsupervised youth will source and consume alcohol. I think rural parents presume there's not much damage a kid can do to themselves in a rural environment. This point was disproved a few years back when a young girl also drove thru a crowd (outside a rural hall) and killed someone.
[I've tried googling that story for 15 minutes but couldn't find it - maybe the MSM have had the same problem]
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My cousin worked in the Team Policing Unit during the 90s, when the out-of-control-Shore-Kids thing was at its height.
Based on his anecdotes, there wasn't much teen-on-teen violence; the aggression mostly got directed at the Police. And they couldn't direct much back; they were routinely dealing with well-informed kids with forgiving parents, who knew exactly how much they could get away with.
I think that the push to get some of the boy racer-related powers Police now have, with things like confiscating cars for "sustained loss of traction", grew out of the feeling of impotence Police had back at those Shore parties.
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Che "i was purchasing and drinking alcohol at 16. the drinking age itself had no effect on my decision to purchase, or my ability to."
True enough (assuming you looked old enough to get served - not so in my case), as far as I can see, the importance of the drinking age is as much to do with determining or influencing where and how young people drink, as to 'if' they drink at all. Imperfect as it is, the pub environment does offer an element of control.
From my own experiences anyway it seems kind of shocking looking back at some of the uncontrolled things 15-20 year olds would do in that twilight zone between wanting/learning how to drink, and being legally allowed to drink. Maybe there are some regional differences around NZ, but I tend to think that the only real differences are in the availability of pre-drinking age entertainment.
That said, I agree that the drinking age is not the primary issue here, were it not for the rage fuelled actions of an angry young man, this would be have been just another crazy gate-crashed party.
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I should clarify that: the Police couldn't get away with directing much back.
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You're right, when a culture is that f**ked up something does have to change, but I don't think turning the drinking age into a political ping pong ball is going to do a damn thing about it. And at the risk of sounding glib, it's also pretty hard to legislate against cretins doing incredibly stupid things for reasons that defy reason.
I think we're agreed on this Craig (with the small exception of me thinking the legal drinking age is a factor!!)
Herne Bay is full of the latchkey children of self-obsessed parents
has RB been peeking behind the curtains of my non-de-plume?
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Just because someone hasn't been run over at a party in Auckland doesn't mean Auckland parties aren't similarly out of hand. I stand by my comments: I believe a key factor in this problem was the liberalisation of the drinking age.
Didn't the same thing happen at a party in Papatoe last year where a girl was killed?
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And in Whangarei a couple of years ago.
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Sorry, Papatoetoe
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