Auckland Expands Racial Faultines
15th May 2010

Twenty brown faces turn to me as I walk into the classroom. They see my name tag and the greetings tumble out.
“Hi Peter!”
“Hello Peter!”
“Hello! Hello!”
Miss Fai’alofa is kneeling on the floor with a reading group. She stands and greets me shyly then shushes the children back to their work. I squat by a table where half a dozen six year olds are drawing pictures of volcanoes on computers. An older student helps them to master the drawing programme. They sketch cones and billowing clouds of smoke and select colours from the programme’s palette.
One little girl turns to me and brushes her hand against my hair. “You’ve got grey.”
This excites their interest.
“Where you from?” inquires a boy.
I tell them I’m from the South Island and ask if any of them have been there. A few heads nod excitedly.
“I been there,” offers one boy.
“Which part did you visit?”
“Aw, the Cook Islands,” he demurs.
This is Point England School in Tamaki, Auckland. Five hundred children attend this school, every one of them Maori or Pacific Islander. This is a tough corner of town, with the school graded decile 1A, which in edu-speak means the bottom of the heap.
“You have to realise,” said Russell the school principal, “nobody in this community is employed, and it goes back 4 or 5 generations for some. The definition of success in Tamaki is getting out.”
Tamaki was the product of post-war social engineering on a grand scale. A framed photo from 1948 shows rows of new-built state houses, freshly formed kerbs and streets cutting into open paddocks. Some of the first residents were members of the Maori Battalion, soldier heroes returning from Europe who found they had outgrown their country kaiks and were drawn to the big smoke.
Auckland was the dream of opportunity but somewhere the dream went wrong and today 20,000 of our least affluent citizens are wedged into an area as big as Allenton. It costs the taxpayers $150 million a year to sustain this community.
In this landscape of poverty Point England school is a beacon. Russell and his staff build hope and aspiration among their students: better still, they build achievement. These children are learning at or above the levels of any kids in Mid-Canterbury. Russell has flooded the school with digital technology, including a student-driven television station that broadcasts daily into all classrooms and weekly into the community. He has multiple programmes in art, sports and music to stimulate children’s interest in learning. Nothing is wasted, every intervention is weighed for its usefulness and everything rests on a foundation of excellent teaching and total commitment to the community.
Twenty kilometres away on the southern boundary of Auckland is Flatbush. Here the bulldozers are again busy, carving into farmland to build a community that will house 40,000 people within a decade. In Flatbush row upon row of grey tiled rooves and double garages mount the slopes and disappear over the ridge. A small remnant of native forest crouches in a gully. This is urban growth on a scale unknown in the South Island.
The brand new Mission Heights School towers over the rooftops of Flatbush. It is intended as a flagship of 21st century school design - the fact that it looks like a cruise ship run aground seems to have gone unnoticed. Its glass and steel galleries are abuzz with innovation, classrooms resemble high street boutiques with a confetti of computers.
But in this place of wonders it is the students that are the greatest curiosity. Almost every one of the 700 children at this school is Asian.
Flatbush, you see, is 21st century Tamaki. Like Tamaki it captures migrants, only this time the migrants are not from the Waikato but from India, China and Korea. Flatbush is becoming an ethnic enclave just as Tamaki did. No doubt this is accidental; to the town planners Flatbush is about roads and houses. In reality it is another social experiment, one that begins with a shiny new school and a thousand dreams of opportunity. We hope it will not end up 50 years from now as a ghetto.