Kei nga pou tokomanawa, kei nga pou tahu o te whare korero o Te Hui, tena koutou katoa. Ko Mihingarangi tenei e mihi atu nei, nau mai, tahuti mai ra. Welcome to The Hui, Maori current affairs for all New Zealanders. E taro ake nei. They're addictive and legal, and they're tearing his community apart. The son of a gambler, Dr Lance O'Sullivan, is taking on the pokies. If New Zealand's keen to address child abuse, you've got to address the drivers for child abuse, and it's child poverty, and these machines down the road are contributing to that. We reveal the lengths people will go to to hit the jackpot. They used to urinate in those coin cups and crap in them. And from prison to personal trainer ` Here we go. just how a twist of fate saved Roimata Kenny from a life of crime. You can still see that, deep down inside, he had those basic fundamentals of manaaki tangata. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 Karahuihui mai. They say they're like taking candy from a baby. Our country's most well-known Maori doctor says pokie machines leave him feeling nothing but bitter. Dr Lance O'Sullivan says pokies are luring Maori into a life of crime, sickness, and poverty, and he believes it's our tamariki that are paying the ultimate price. Anei te ripoata a Billie Jo Ropiha. It's like a virus tearing apart this Northland community. If New Zealand's keen to address child abuse, you've got to address the drivers for child abuse, and it's child poverty, and these machines down the road are contributing to that. And Maori taking the bait. This isn't so much about problem people, but about problem machines. And it could be your loved one who's hooked. MAN: # I said, Saturday night, # and I ain't got nobody. # I got some money cos I just got paid. # From his medical clinic in the old Kaitaia pub, New Zealander of the year and medical expert Dr Lance O'Sullivan is working on a plan to rid his rohe of the pokies. It's not pills and potions and prescriptions that are the solution. It's how do you keep $150 more in the household budget of a child with a mum who's got five kids at home losing all her money and her hopes into a machine? Would that make a difference to the child's health or the future? Categorically, without any argument, yes. In the Far North, pokies pull up to $14 million annually, mostly from the pockets of the people who can least afford it, and the social and economic costs are huge. We are paying for the child who ends up in the Kaitaia hospital, gets helicoptered to Starship. We are paying for the kids who aren't going to succeed at school cos they're hungry and they're sick. We, as a society, are paying for that. And it's not just in his clinic where O'Sullivan sees the damage. His aversion to gambling goes back to when he was a boy; he saw his dad and uncle hustle $700 out of stranger playing dice. He got so sucked into the fact that he might win the big bundle of money they were showing him he went into a bank and withdrew his money. So he had 20 minutes to think about it and still came back in the hope that he was gonna get this money. I look back on it now. That man wasn't a fool; that man was desperate. And my father and uncle preyed on that desperation. Now he's desperate to find a solution, because he's convinced pokies are taking lives. I reckon we should be looking to see how many children... die because of problem gambling activities in New Zealand. So one of the things that we've been looking at is women's experiences of engaging with poker machines. Associate professor Samantha Thomas from Deakin University in Australia lectures about the harm caused by problem gambling. We know that they cause considerable harm. The rule of thumb with a poker machine is that if you sit there long enough, you will lose everything. Speaking at the International Gambling Conference in Auckland, she says New Zealand needs to wake up to the harm pokie machines are causing. These machines are located in some of our poorest areas. You don't see them in Remuera; you see them out in South Auckland, and there's a reason for that. The Problem Gambling Foundation says that in wealthy communities, there is one machine for every 475 residents, but in poorer communities, like the Far North, there's one machine for every 75. Maybe every venue in New Zealand should be required to display very clearly how many millions of dollars have been lost at that venue in the previous 12 months. There are 305 pokie machines in operation in the Far North, so we go inside one to see for ourselves. Was it a surprise to see the demographic in here? No, not at all. Ko te nuinga o tenei, ko te nuinga nga Maori. So not at all. And we know that, statistically, people in this room right now are who we know are using these facilities. Research shows pokies like these are the most harmful form of gambling. But herein lies the problem ` pokies are big business. Just last year, non-casino pokies made $870 million. That's equivalent to one pokie machine earning well above the average wage of $56,000 a year. Of that, a third went towards charitable grants. Knowing what it does, how does it make you feel? My position on it is I'm so strongly philosophically opposed to it that any work I'm involved in ` foundation I'm the chairman of or any of the fundraising I'm involved in ` I refuse to apply to gaming trusts. And it's not just the community groups that rely on pokies; it's also the venues that have come to depend on their profits. This here probably represents one-tenth of this business premise but probably contributes to half of its profit. Almost everyone in here refused to talk to us. MAN: Aww. To hear about what can happen inside a gaming venue, we went to see Vanessa. She worked in the industry for more than a decade. before quitting just over five years ago. You just get to see the real greed of what people are capable of when it comes to money, what they will do. Like, these selfless things going out the window all for the mighty dollar. She doesn't want to be identified, but she's witnessed first-hand the harm pokies cause. Saw a lot of heartache. You saw people crying outside that their husbands on are on the inside, gambling, lost the house, lost the business, and you're just to carry on walking and return the next day to do another day's work. There was nothing much that you could do. She says the disturbing actions people took to gamble at length in the early days were shocking. So they used to urinate in those coin cups and crap in them and then had the cheek to put them on top of the machines, and when the staff comes to clean, it was in there. Because of the desperation of customers ` or gamblers ` to stay on that machine? Yeah. We've had pregnant women stay there for long periods of time, falling off their chairs. It's because they haven't looked after themselves while they're there ` forgot to drink, haven't eaten for a while, been there way longer than what they should have. It's incredibly addictive. They are well known as one of the most addictive forms of gambling in the world. That's why we need such rigorous policy and community leadership to start to look at these just like we looked at tobacco control and alcohol misuse and the harm caused from those products in our communities. For Dr O'Sullivan, he just wants to see urgent change. If New Zealand is keen to address child abuse, you've got to address the drivers for child abuse, and it's child poverty, and these machines down the road contributing to that. So what's the solution? What I want to see is I wanna see these machines out of Kaitaia, out of Northland, because they're making my job hard. The government plans to announce changes to the current pokies policy, and Dr O'Sullivan has this wero for them. Well, put your $2 where your mouth is. Show us what you're going to do to get these out of my community. Ka tahi te wero pai tera. Na Billie Jo Ropiha tera korero. He korero whakapiki wairua e taro ake nei. After the break ` a story of redemption. Noreira kia mau tonu mai ra. just how a twist of fate saved Roimata Kenny from a life of crime. Hoki mai ano. The statistics are grim. Over half of Maori inmates will be re-imprisoned within four years of being released. But there's one guy who's determined not to go back. Today Roimata Kenny is a free man, but he's not free from his past, and he wants people to understand the importance of giving former inmates like himself a second chance. When I'm training, I feel free. When I first got out, I'd run and run and run because it gives me a time to clear my head. And being able to see the world and just be amongst everything of life again. Ex-prisoner Roimata Kenny is on a mission to turn his life around. Prison gave me that opportunity for true solitude. It definitely gave me time to reflect on life and just myself and who I was and what I wanna be. At primary school, Roimata was a good boy, an A student with parents who loved him. But at the age of 11, the good boy started to turn. Just disruptive and playing up all the time, really. CHUCKLES: One word would just be wild. Roi says it was clear from then on he was on a collision course with crime. You told me you were also pretty violent and pretty angry as a kid. Yeah. When I was going through intermediate, I was named a bully in the school. I didn't like that so much. I tried to change and tried to stay away from it. Now I look back, and I notice I couldn't deal with my emotions and I'd just act out on how I was feeling and not really care about who I was affecting or what the consequences were afterwards. But Roimata would soon face the consequences. At just 21, he was sent to prison for five years on charges of cannabis distribution, possession of weapons, and violence. I thought I was tough and scary and you know, and I was far from it. I was just a little fish going into a shark pool, really, with just sharks. Everyone was just sharks in there. But it was one of those sharks, a gangster, who would make a lasting impression on Roimata. There was this one guy. He was a lifer, and he'd done 20-odd years in prison. And he was always pushing me ` like, 'You're too young for this, bro. 'Is this the life you wanna live?' ` and was always on my case about trying to educate myself or do some courses inside. Roimata picked up some personal training papers while in prison and began to change his attitude. As a result of his good behaviour, Roimata was released after serving three and a half years of his sentence. But with next to no money and unable to access help from WINZ for three months, keeping on the straight and narrow would be his greatest challenge. One of the first days I was out of prison, I had a friend. He turned up to my house and said, 'Get in the car. Let's go make some money'. And that was a big thing. I had no money, but I was being offered to have everything I wanted again. That was very hard to turn down and walk away from, but I knew if I wanted to move on and change my life, I couldn't do that, so I didn't. Roimata, desperate to stay out of prison, enrolled in a level 4 fitness course. But when he turned up for the first day, there was a problem. Everything was good, and I disclosed that I'd just got out of prison a few weeks prior. They said, 'Sweet as. Turn up.' I turned up on the day. They sort of ushered me aside and had a meeting with one of the guys that was running the class, and he pretty much said, 'You're not smart enough, 'and because you've gotten out of prison, you can't follow a routine.' Roimata believes it was actually his criminal history that got him kicked off the course. And he admits his past was a violent one, committing two serious assaults against women ` biting a woman's breast and strangling another. If your victims were watching right now, what would you say to them? I would say I'm sorry and I regret that it happened. I wish I could take it back, but it's just something I can't take back. So I'm trying to do right by... by giving as much as I can out to the community and out to other people. I'm deeply sorry about what had happened. Rejected from the course and feeling down and out. Roimata almost lost his way again. He decided to go to the pub to drown his sorrows. And when I got there, I thought, 'I'm gonna ring my mate up, 'and we're gonna go do some business and go back to the good old days.' But when I got to the pub, there wasn't no pub. LAUGHS: It was closed down. And I was like, 'What the hell?' I started getting really angry, but then I looked down, further past where the pub is, and there was the wananga. So I thought, 'I'll give it a try. Like, what's the harm in trying? 'The worst that's gonna happen is they're gonna say no.' So I walked in there, and I said, 'I want to do a fitness course. Do youse do fitness courses?' They were like, 'Yeah. Hold on a second. You can talk to someone.' And that's when I met Mark Waitai. MAN: Of course, he had that time away, but you could still see that deep down inside, he had those basic fundamentals of manaaki tangata,... kanohi ki te kanohi, and I think that set a platform for his passion, for his interest and everything else that he's done. You're just lay down here. When I say 'go', jump up, 10 punches, back down. In 2016, Roimata graduated with a qualification in personal training. While studying, he met his partner, Vicky Harbottle. Are we ready for round two? Nice and technical, nice and clean. One thing I do like about Roi is that he's really honest. And he was straight-up to me from the get-go about his past and everything. He told me, 'I've been to jail.' I thought he was just... amazing ` someone who was so real. If you're moving, keep your hands up and move. They now run Huntly Kickboxing, offering classes for women and tamariki. Then the last 30 seconds, you're gonna grab the bag, and you're gonna do knees. We want the same thing. We're both striving for the same goal; we wanna help people. He's such a positive person, and my family love him. See, he's just trying to come over the guard altogether there. Vicky's father comes from a similar background to Roimata, so he recognised the need to give him a second chance. When you heard about Roi's history, were you worried at all? No because I could see... by how he looked after Vicky and how he was reacting with the family. And he also knew that if anything did happen, she had three big brothers. Plus she's a kickboxer herself. Yes. She's very good, actually. Now the pair work tirelessly to support their community, Roi speaking at schools to discourage kids from a life of crime. When I actually got out of prison, I went to try and get jobs. What happens when I go get a job? They're like, 'Yup. Sweet. Start tomorrow, bro. All good. 'Oh, actually, hold on a second. We need to do a police check.' 'Oh, OK, sweet as. Do a police check.' Then what happens? No job. Roimata and Vicky also offer boot camps and free PT sessions for troubled youth. Focus on that breathing, keeping that breathing under control. Do you see yourself in some of the kids that you train? Yeah, definitely. It's like looking at a younger, miniature version of myself. We've all sorta grown up the same and lived that same lifestyle with the violence at home, on the streets, with the substance abuse and the drinking and all that sorta life. Does it make it easier to work with them? Yes and no. It makes it easier, cos I can relate to them and they can relate to me, and they can realise I'm a real human, but at the same time, it makes it hard, because I can see where they're going, but they just can't see what is happening to them, so it makes it hard in that sense. Despite the challenges, Roi is hopeful that he can influence a change for some of the rangatahi in Huntly so they don't have to learn the hard way, like he did. If prisoners and ex-prisoners don't get a second chance, what do you think the dangers are to society? If you call someone an idiot enough times, he's gonna always think he's an idiot. So it's the same with the prisoner; if you just hold him out and you exclude him, he's just gonna feel excluded and become that outcast, that scumbag that you think that he is. Here we go. Today Roimata Kenny is grateful for his second chance. I wouldn't say I'm living the dream, but I'm getting closer to living the dream and living that life. If I can be humble all the time and if I can show love to everyone around me, I can lay my head at rest peacefully every night. Ka pai, kia kaha, Roimata. Na Raiha Paki tera purongo. A ko ake nei, ka tahuri te aroaro ki nga take torangapu o te wa. We chew the political fat with Marama Fox and Shanan Halbert. Auraki mai ano. Well, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has returned from the sunny Pacific to a political firestorm, following allegations four youths were sexually assaulted at a Labour Party summer camp. Meanwhile, National leader Simon Bridges has reshuffled his cabinet, but is he playing with the same old deck? To discuss this and more, I'm joined by former Maori Party MP Marama Fox and aspiring Labour MP Shanan Halbert. Tena korua. Kia ora. Morena. Morena. So, the first story we had on today was with the good doctor in the Far North, telling the government to put its money where its mouth is in terms of pokie machines. When you were in parliament, was this a priority for you? Absolutely. Te Ururoa had made it a priority that there would be some set sort of a clause on pokies ` that you couldn't get any new ones, that they had to die out, right? And so that was as far as he could push it through our confidence and supply arrangement with National. But definitely now that Labour is in here and has constantly talked about gambling and gambling harm, then they have the opportunity now to really do something about it. Have either of you ever received any funding from gaming machine trusts? I guess that's what those trusts are ` you know, the licensing trusts that operate in our countries. They get their money from alcohol and from those pokie machines. Do you think you have been a recipient of? Well, everybody applies for them. Every school, every community group` Not Lance O'Sullivan, who refuses. Well, I don't even think that these guys should have such a monopoly on it now, because, actually, some of them have been proven to be backhanding themselves. I have to go to Shanan now. So, with would this opportunity to do something with the pokies policy, what do you think? How far should they go? Yeah, I think let's be clear that the underlying issue of pokie addiction is poverty, and that's what the government needs to focus on. They need to ensure that people are in our warm, dry homes, that they've got good money on the table. Lance O'Sullivan says it's actually the machines, not the people, so what do we do about the machines? We need to incrementally reduce them. We've got other examples in the country, like smoking, where we've incrementally reduced the amount of smokers in New Zealand over time. So reduce the machines? Reduce the numbers? How quickly? How quickly? How quickly would you like to see it? I would like to see it yesterday, but that's not the reality. We need to measure our people,... Five years? ...measure the responses, and ideally, yup, over five years, that would be great. OK. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, arrived home to handle this Waihi youth camp. How do you think she performed? I think she did the right thing by 1) making it public, 2) taking control of it, because those people who were responsible for supplying alcohol to 16-year-olds illegally should be sacked, absolutely. And those people who then went to cover it up and did not inform parents that their children had been sexually abused while they were supplied alcohol on a Labour Party camp should be sacked. It is that important. We have a sexual abuse inquiry in our country that looks at what happened in state care, and all of these things, if we ignore them and don't act on them, perpetuate this behaviour to continue. How could Labour Party secretary Andrew Kirton have handled it better? I think the prime minister's stepped up and taken leadership on this, as has the party. But what should he have done? He's the secretary for the party. They've run a full investigation. Andrew put in the support that he understood was right at the time. Do you think he was quick enough? We have acknowledged that that wasn't quick enough. It wasn't quick enough, Mihi, and Jacinda's responded to that. What's important now is that we've extended the support, we've put a full investigation in place, and that support to those young people is important. What we will see is that many organisations will now respond to the duty of care when young people are with them, and that's what we want to see ` the change in policies of organisations, including our own. I'm sorry, I think that's just a complete cover-up. That is absolute rubbish. What, 'We didn't know that supplying alcohol to minors was illegal 'before the cap'? I mean, you can't backpedal now and say, 'We've done the right thing now.' There's no backpedalling here. The party's acknowledged the issue. In your experience in the Labour Party, have you ever been to one of those camps when alcohol was served to people under the age of 20? I haven't. I came into the party much later, in my later life. OK, I'm going to move on from there. You have basically endorsed Simon Bridges as the new National Party leader. Does that mean to say that the Maori Party's still comfortable right? No, not at all. I think what that means is I saw in Simon as I was there somebody who was playing the long game ` a younger man who was part of, like, a new guard coming through, and that Simon Bridges, yes, he's Maori, yes, he's from Maniapoto, and his whakapapa links him to that. And he wanted to mine your rohe. I don't agree with his politics. If you watch every speech I did in the house, I hounded him for the entire three years, but he stood up to it. I don't agree with his politics. I'm gonna ask you, he's got more Maori in the top 10 than Labour. What does that say to you? We can have all the Maori we like, but the issues are important here. What we also see is health and education still isn't on the National Party agenda. With Coleman retaining Health, who was a failure of a minister, he didn't respond to the needs of those in our mental health care and underfunded DHBs when they were over capacity. That's critical if National Party is going to move forward. And Labour still want to mine and drill in our rohe as well. We have to leave it there. Tena korua. Thank you for your time this morning. Hei tera wiki i runga i a Te Hui. A Kiwi teenager locked up in a children's detention centre in Western Australia described by some as the stuff of nightmares. I didn't know children's prisons existed. I just didn't know. Kylie Douglas's son, Jason Rewiti, has been in Banksia Hill's isolation unit for more than 300 days. Solitary confinement is more than 22 hours a day in a cell without meaningful human contact. Where that confinement is prolonged for 15 or more consecutive days, it's considered to be torture. One whanau's Aussie dream shattered. Australia is my children's home, but Australia has also shown me that nightmares aren't just when you're sleeping; they can happen for three years right in front of your eyes. Kua hikina Te Hui mo tenei ra. We'll post links to the show on our Facebook page and on Twitter at The Hui NZ, and you'll find all our stories on the Newshub website. Newshub Nation is next. Pai marire ki a tatou katoa. Captions by Madison Batten. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 ALL: He mea tautoko na Te Mangai Paho. The Hui was made with funding from the New Zealand On Air Platinum Fund.