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Scott Kuggeleijn plays for the New Zealand Black Caps against India on February 06, 2019. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Scott Kuggeleijn plays for the New Zealand Black Caps against India on February 06, 2019. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

SocietyFebruary 12, 2019

I adore NZ cricket. But I won’t watch until the silence on Kuggeleijn is broken

Contributing writer
Scott Kuggeleijn plays for the New Zealand Black Caps against India on February 06, 2019. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
Scott Kuggeleijn plays for the New Zealand Black Caps against India on February 06, 2019. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Until New Zealand Cricket addresses the Scott Kuggeleijn situation, Black Caps superfan Michelle Langstone will no longer be watching her beloved team. Here she explains why.

A letter to New Zealand Cricket chair Debbie Hockley, and to the board of NZ Cricket –

You don’t know me at all, but I’m one of the biggest fans of cricket you’d ever meet. I’ve loved the Black Caps since I was a kid; I’m 40 now, and there’s no sign of that love letting up. I can’t tell you the joy I get from watching our team play.

When I was 13 my mum introduced me to the game she loved. Her brothers had played to a high level and her knowledge and passion for the sport was passed on to me. That was the summer of 1992, when the New Zealand team made their heroic run to the World Cup semi final on home soil. There was no turning back.

I live and breathe cricket, but I need to talk to you about something because I feel uncomfortable, and the only way I know how to work through it is to address it head-on.

There’s an elephant in the changing rooms and his name is Scott Kuggeleijn. As New Zealand Cricket’s governing body you are well aware of the charge of rape that Kuggeleijn faced in court in 2016, and then again in 2017. Kuggeleijn was found not guilty after the second trial. A few months after that, he was selected to tour internationally with the Black Caps.

I have no choice but to accept the outcome of that second trial, and the verdict handed down by the jury, but I do not have to like it. Kuggeleijn admitted the woman in question said no to his advances a number of times. He also texted her the next day and apologised for the mental harm he caused her. His lawyers did everything they could to discredit her, including alluding to her clothing, her behaviour and the amount she had to drink as reasons why she was actually consenting, even if she did say no.

So your silence on Kuggeleign’s history over the weeks since he has played on home soil for the Black Caps has been disturbing, particularly because the issue has been raised fairly frequently, and there’s been ample opportunity for NZ Cricket to publicly respond. As time goes on, your silence has becoming deafening.

My question to the NZC board is this: why has nobody from NZC stepped forward to formally address the public concern around his selection in the team? Why has that silence extended even to squashing dissent? In both the Wellington and Auckland T20 matches last week, women holding signs that mentioned consent had them removed.

You might not realise this, but your silence speaks volumes. It looks like you are hoping that a considerable period of time spent with your head buried in the sand will make this situation go away.

It’s not going to go away.

I’d direct you to the page in the NZ Cricket Players Association’s handbook that was updated last year, specifically the page headed GOOD DECISION-MAKING. The focus of this page of the handbook centres around consent in sexual relations, and there’s a highlighted box to the side that lists some important guidelines including:

IF THEY SAY NO, IT MEANS NO

IF THEY CHANGE THEIR MIND HALFWAY THROUGH YOU MUST STOP

DO NOT PRESSURE THEM OR TRY TO TALK THEM INTO IT.

These changes were made after Scott Kuggeleijn, by his own testimony, was in breach of at least two of the first three guidelines. But New Zealand Cricket isn’t willing to publicly acknowledge why these changes were made, why they’re important, and the culture that requires such guidelines.

The NZCPA Players’ Handbook (Image: Twitter).

I’m not suggesting Scott Kuggeleijn doesn’t deserve a chance at his dreams of being an international cricketer. I’m not even suggesting he be stepped down. I personally believe people can make mistakes and learn from them. I’m an advocate for restorative justice. I believe strongly in rehabilitation. Given Kuggeleijn apologised, I would hazard a guess he didn’t feel that great about his behaviour at the time.

That’s why it matters so much that NZC at least acknowledges the very recent history of this player. We hold our sportsmen and women to an incredibly high standard in New Zealand. We’ve seen players across codes stood down for much less than this. This is not about relitigating the case in the court of public opinion, it’s about recognising that this was not a minor incident. You’ve made changes to the player handbook around consent — why can’t we have a healthy discussion about that in relation to this incident?

Just because Kuggeleijn’s actions weren’t deemed illegal, it doesn’t mean they were OK. It doesn’t wave a wand and render his behaviour harmless. The seriousness of two court trials on the count of rape isn’t just going to disappear by you never mentioning it again. Why can’t you, as a governing body, come forward and speak to this? Why can’t Scott Kuggeleijn? A dialogue around this would actually go some way toward understanding and healing.

The Black Caps are the heroes of our youth. Kids look up to them for leadership. They are idolised by boys all over New Zealand. Heck – they’re idolised by men of all ages. They’re also idolised by women. What message do you want women who love cricket to receive from your silence? Because what I’m getting is that coercion is OK and women don’t matter. Your silence supports a culture that allows sexual predation to go unnoticed, or worse, ignored outright.

You can make this better. You can act with integrity and come forward and address this. You can begin a conversation about consent and about mistakes made that is honourable. You can allow the woman at the heart of this incident more dignity than she has previously been afforded, while also keeping her safe. You can respect the players in your team, and you can respect the fans.

I can’t watch the Black Caps play again until you do that. It breaks my heart to say it, but I can’t. I do not support New Zealand Cricket at this time. It’s not OK for a sporting body with a national platform to remain mute about something so serious.

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I appeal to you from the bottom of my cricket-loving heart — please say something. I don’t want to boycott, but you don’t leave me any choice. I will not support my team when there is enablement occuring in the form of silence.

Yours faithfully,

Michelle Langstone

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SocietyFebruary 12, 2019

With NZ housing still utterly borked, some are taking matters into their own hands

Guest writer
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As government and business lag behind, the fledgling community-driven housing sector is pursuing alternatives to bypass an unjust system, writes Thomas Nash

Is there any hope for the future of housing in New Zealand?

Our tax law encourages wealthy landowners to enrich themselves through untaxed revenue (also known as capital gains). The government faces scrutiny over its Kiwibuild policy, which even if successful would mainly just increase the supply of largely unaffordable homes, while rental prices skyrocket. Our (Australian-owned) banks stoke this extractive system by creating more and more money through mortgage debt as they effortlessly accumulate billion-dollar profits.

There’s more. Our building code encourages developers to operate on a minimum standard, maximum profit rationale. Our building materials are controlled by a cartel supplying us timber treated with a toxic copper, chromium and arsenic preservative that is banned in many countries. Meanwhile we export our raw pine logs to companies in Europe that turn them into high value wonder products, including through sustainable timber modification processes pioneered by our own New Zealand forest research scientists.

It’s grim. And it doesn’t look like changing much because those that benefit from this set up have a firm grip on power and are not about to relinquish it. Some may even have convinced themselves that this is actually the optimal system.

How could this system change so that housing might once again be based on provision of homes for the many, rather than extraction of wealth for the few? One way is for government to enact laws and regulations that genuinely transform the incentive structure for ownership of land, development of property and construction of housing (simply taxing wealth would help). The government’s hotly anticipated “wellbeing budget” should actually require such a transformational shift, but it doesn’t appear to be on the agenda – yet.

The other way is for communities to develop our own parallel systems of ownership, development and building that are driven by a desire not for some people to get mega-rich, but to make sure everyone has a good place to live that they can afford through to retirement. The values underpinning this sort of system have deep roots in Aotearoa. Concepts of collective ownership and kaitiakitanga are deeply rooted in te ao Māori. More recently communities developed local building societies and credit unions – member-owned financial institutions that pooled people’s savings and helped them build homes.

Happily, as government and business lag behind, the fledgling community-driven housing sector is getting on with building projects and taking steps to coalesce as a movement. This week at Victoria University of Wellington the CoHoHui marks the first nationwide conference on collective urban housing to be held in New Zealand. Participants will include builders, designers, engineers and architects; lawyers, bankers and developers; community housing, papakāinga and co-housing groups; representatives of iwi, councils and central government; and others working on collective urban housing.

It’s a promising sector because it’s self-driven, can be self-funded and is not dependent on government and business. It could of course be greatly supported by government and business and the specifics of that will be a big part of the discussions this week.

Cities overseas have seen a flourishing in recent decades of community-driven and collectively-owned housing. In Norway the cooperative building association OBOS is owned by its 435,000 members and has built about a quarter of Oslo’s housing stock. It’s basically a housing and savings organisation – you become a member, contribute to the cooperative with your savings and own the right to occupy your home. Cities like Vienna, Berlin and Zurich are all deep into housing cooperatives. Across the Tasman in Melbourne, Nightingale Housing has been swamped with demand for homes built through their collective urban housing model.

There are encouraging examples emerging in New Zealand too. Jade Kake has written about the resurgence of papakāinga in her BWB Text “Rebuilding the Kāinga” and there’s a dynamic housing innovation eco-system being driven by hapu and iwi across the country.

Community housing providers (property developers that instead of extracting profit for their investors put all profits back into building and maintaining homes) are rare in New Zealand. One good example is the New Zealand Housing Foundation. It gets lower income families into affordable rental and then shared ownership homes and as those homes are paid off it recycles the money into building more homes. With $10m of finance over eight years it has built over $300m worth of housing assets, including at Waimahia Inlet in Auckland.

On the co-housing side (projects where future residents pool their resources and decide together the community they want to build) Earthsong has been going strong for years in Ranui, Auckland. Amongst a raft of new-entrants, the Buckley Road project is in the planning stages in Wellington, High Street Cohousing is underway in Dunedin and Cohaus has just been consented in Auckland. There’s even a collectively-owned commercial building you can help crowdfund – Collette’s Corner in Lyttelton.

In the end it’ll take a genuinely transformational government to put in place the rules for a fair system of housing in Aotearoa New Zealand. But we can’t wait for that, so in the meantime we should build our own alternatives to bypass the grossly unjust system currently locking people out of good housing.

Thomas Nash is social entrepreneur in residence at Massey University

Society