Tongan tackles

youth crisis

If you visit the seamy nightclub strip of Sydney’s King’s Cross you will be struck by the high number of Pacific Islander teenagers among the kids hanging around in the street.

It is the visible side of a crisis that is making the transition to adult hood for Pacific Islanders in Australia’s largest city, a dangerous busi ness.

The school drop-out rate has reached alarming levels and kids are getting sucked into drug running and other crimes. That, in turn, is resulting in a rapid increase in the number of Pacific Island teenagers getting into trouble with the law and ending up in juvenile detention centres.

One man who saw this problem coming and is doing something about it is Inoke Hua’akau, a teacher who works with the Multi-cul tural Unit of the New South Wales Department of School Education.

For the past decade one of the passions of his life has been to stop the downward spiral for Pacific Island kids by finding ways of keeping them at school.

Perhaps his most effective weapon is the homework centre.

Through the Tongan community organisation. The Tongan Association, Mr Hua’akau has established two homework centres, staffed by experienced teachers completing post-graduate degrees at the University of Sydney. These centres operate once a week, in the afternoon or evening after school, and provide a place for kids to come and get the sort of help they may not be able to get at home.

When PIM visited the Mr Hua’akau’s homework centre at the Croyden Park Primary School in Sydney’s inner western suburbs, it was a hive of activity. Before the doors opened, the younger kids were shrieking and laughing as they kicked a soccer ball around the playground. Parents sat around in small groups chatting while the teenagers exchanged gossip at a safe distance. Tongans from all over Sydney come to the centre which has become something of a com munity event. Although the homework centre caters for kids from kindergarten right through to University entrance, Inoke Hua’akau says it is the transition to high school which is the most critical. It is at that stage, often well before kids are legally allowed to leave school, that the worst of the drop-out problem occurs. A number of

factors come together to make the transition to high school difficult.

High school is more impersonal and it is harder to form the strong bonds with teachers at that often occur at primary school. It is at about this stage, that kids find their parents can no longer help them with their school work.

At age twelve or thirteen, kids also want to start asserting their independence but Inoke Hua’akau believes firmly that parents under estimate the amount of support these kids need as they enter high school - especially when the schools themselves tend to take an approach to discipline which does not work well with Pacific Islanders. As the kids get older and bigger, teachers start to get intim idated and meet any sort of confrontation with a confrontational, get tough, approach rather than with the sort of quiet discussion that would earn their students respect.

For Inoke Hua’akau the road to his now flourishing homework centres, has not always been easy. At first, he found the students who turned up, although very welcome, were not the ones he was aiming to attract. In fact, it took two years of promoting his centres on his Tongan radio program and in the community, before Tongans over took Anglo and Indo-Chinese Australians as the biggest group among his students.

Even now, with the Samoan community also running homework centres and others for Pacific Islanders established at places like Granville Boys High School, Mr Hua’akau feels there is a lack of understanding in the community about the effort that needs to be put into getting kids a good education.

He points the finger especially at the Churches which, he says, are doing nothing to help young kids with problems at school and expect such a substantial time commitment from adults that it is exacerbat ing the lack of support at home. Among graduates from the Tongan Association’s homework centres are young men and women who have gone on to study demanding courses at University such as Engineering and Law, but they are still a minority.

For kids who drop out in early high school the future is bleak.

Legal paid employment is almost impossible to obtain, making courier work for drug dealers one of the few places these kids can earn some money of their own. Fortunately, it appears that while many are turning to this sort of work, far fewer are actually using the drugs. Inevitably this lifestyle leads to problems with the police. New figures produced another Tongan community organisation, PETTA (Promoting Education and training for Pacific Islanders) shows that the number of Pacific Islanders locked up in Juvenile Detention Centres has increased threefold since 1991.

PETTA claims Pacific Islanders are now make up 12 per cent of the inmates on remand in juvenile detention centres making them the biggest ethnic group in detention, well ahead of the Indo-Chinese at 6 per cent. Other evidence from the Judicial Commission of New south Wales suggests there is also a problem with discrimination against young Pacific Islanders within the legal system. Pacific Islanders are twice as likely as Anglo-Australians to be given a period of impris onment and often received harsher sentences.

There is obviously no shortage of work for Mr Hua’akau’s Tongan law graduates. ■

Jemima Garrett