The protective embrace of the in-group

It seems obvious, but it’s worth stating for the record that if Sam Uffindell, the National Party MP who gang-bashed a third former while he was a fifth form boarder at Auckland’s King’s College, was a Māori student with a violent temperament, he never would have had the opportunity to quietly depart his prestigious school, enter university two years later, and enjoy a lucrative career in finance.

Yet Uffindell, who by his own admission is unsure how many other people he may have bullied and hit, seems to have enjoyed a life failing upwards. If it weren’t for his own self-sabotage, apologising to his victim in an apparent attempt at risk management, we may have never found out about his shocking past.

But what strikes me about Uffindell isn’t so much the violence itself – although bashing a younger man is horrific – so much as it is the absence of any material consequences. Uffindell had the opportunity to quietly enrol at St Paul’s Collegiate School.

The headmaster at King’s never made a referral to police. Youth justice were never involved. Oranga Tamariki never made inquiries into the nature of Uffindell’s family life, scrutinising his parents for any evidence of a violent lifestyle.

And yet if he were Māori, attending a decile one school in a poor suburb, community leaders like the headmaster, police, and government officials would read gang-bashing a sleeping third former rather differently. They would read it, in short, as criminal.

Professor Tracey McIntosh, who co-heads Te Wānanga o Waipapa at the University of Auckland as well as delivering educational programmes at Auckland Regional Women’s Correction Facility over the last 10 years, found in her work with incarcerated women that ‘‘with very few exceptions all the young women who I have met over the last decade have been excluded from the compulsory education system by 13’’.

Most of those women are Māori, and almost all are sure to have found themselves on what sociologists sometimes call the school-toprison pipeline for far less than the beating Uffindell administered.

What, then, explains the difference between his treatment and the treatment of the mostly Māori who are imprisoned for the same violence or less? Ethnicity, obviously. In 2020 JustSpeak found that police were almost twice as likely to charge a Māori offender as they were a Pākehā offender apprehended for the same crime.

In this sense, Uffindell benefits from an accident of birth. He happens to be Pākehā. But equally important is Uffindell’s class. He’s obviously a wealthy man, and he comes from a family with the means to educate their children privately.

When upper middle-class people commit violence, the consequences are either non-existent or so minor as to amount to a mere inconvenience. For Uffindell, the consequences appeared to amount to inconvenience, quietly shifting schools and continuing life more or less as normal.

Perhaps we should treat all violence with that degree of leniency. Circumstances matter. Of course, this isn’t to minimise Uffindell’s violence with an appeal to mitigating factors. Instead, it’s to point out that leniency is often granted only to people who are the right colour and with sufficient means.

But if leniency is to exist it should apply as widely and as fairly as possible. The trouble for Uffindell is that even on the most generous assessment, gang-bashing a sleeping third former is at the extreme end of violence. The young man had no opportunity to defend himself – he was literally in bed – and he was outnumbered. This is shocking in its cowardice, let alone its brutality.

According to Frank Wilhoit ‘‘Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect.’’

No-one demonstrates this aphorism more ably than Uffindell. In his maiden speech to Parliament the Tauranga MP attacked ‘‘gangs’’ and a ‘‘growing culture of lawlessness, lack of accountability, a sense of impunity, and significant underlying generational social problems’’.

It takes an impressive cognitive dissonance to make these claims, calling for a tough on crime approach without taking even a moment to self-reflect on whether that makes one a hypocrite. But Uffindell is in the in-group whom the law protects but does not bind. Gangs are an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect.

Unintentionally, Uffindell is now the case study for who society privileges and who it doesn’t. If he has any honour and self-respect left, he’d resign.