Let's Not Play that Game

Hand Wringing Charades

Social "Development" Minister, Paula Bennett has made an impassioned appeal for our help.  Writing an op-ed piece in the Sunday Star Times, entitled "Help Me Save Our Kids", she asks for ideas on how to stop our notorious national trait of child abuse. 

She is clearly at the end of her tether.  We are familiar with the syndrome.  Well-meaning, enthusiastic Minister gets appointed to the Social "Development" portfolio.  Promises to stamp out child abuse.  Acknowledges that insufficient progress has been made by dilatory previous administration.  Experiences uplift in public support, since everyone is both angry and guilty at the way children are abused and killed in New Zealand.  Calls for Ministry to come up with creative new solutions to the problem.  New measures put in place.  Increased budgets, taxpayer's funds allocated.  Everyone experiences a "feel-good" fillip.  Child abuse continues unabated.  Minister becomes frustrated and annoyed.
In desperation, goes to the public and asks for more ideas.  Throws out a few radical ideas--acknowledges that they would require much more intrusive state intervention in peoples' lives--but challenges everyone to make the trade off. 

Let's not pussyfoot around here – we know which babies are most at risk, we know which adults are most likely to put them at risk. Often those adults are on Work and Income's books. This isn't a race issue or a class issue, it's just the reality we live in.

So, how about this for a radical idea – how about we take over the money management for at-risk teen parents and make sure their money's spent on their children, paying the rent and power bills?

How about we make it an obligation of receiving the benefit that they take their children for Wellchild checks? How about we make every effort to support those parents and make sure those babies are well cared for? Should we track every baby from birth? Should there be mandatory reporting of child abuse?

Or is that too much state intervention for your liking? You tell me. Isn't it time we started debating how we collectively protect our children?

Well, actually the whole thing is a bit deceptive and misleading.  Minister Bennett wants to debate only within a certain narrow frame of reference.  When the state faces intractable social problems the only options allowed on the table for debate and discussion are how much more state intervention and what forms it ought to take. 

Since that is the case, we respectfully decline to engage.  We know what the outcome will be from the get-go.  The inevitable "solutions" will be more public money to protect "our" children with new twists to old government programmes, followed by continuing comprehensive failure.  Whereupon the whole charade will be repeated in another couple of years.  There is no point or nor can there be a positive outcome to such a biased, one-eyed national discussion. 

They say that necessity or desperation is the mother of invention.  Clearly, the Minister is not yet desperate because the only inventions she will have any regard for are those which tweak the already failed policy directions of the past forty years.  Neither she, nor the country we suspect, is ready for a real debate where nothing is off the table. 

So, let's just conclude by asking a few questions and leave it at that:

1. Why the presumption to speak of "our" children?  Why would you persist in describing the children of abusive parents "our" children?  Is the intent to make us all responsible for those children in some way, shape, or form?  We would appreciate you not using such language until you make a successful case for it--not an emotive outburst, but a well argued legal, constitutional, ideological, principled case. 

2. Would you please explain why, on the one hand, your government (along with predecessor administrations) has relentlessly driven marriage and the nuclear family into virtual non-existence in law and policy, championing civil unions, no-fault divorce, blended "families", whanau first ideology, and recognition of homosexuality as a human right--and subsidising and incentivizing all these permutations of living arrangements with copious dollops of the public's money--whilst, on the other, professing outrage and frustration when random live-in adults fail to regard random appendage-children living in the same house as "their" children?

3. Do you believe that the state is to function as the uber-parent in our society?

4. Would you regard a proposal to re-introduce the death penalty for adults who abuse and kill children legitimate for discussion or debate--or would this be a solution which is off the table? 

5.  Do you think there might be a connection--a linkage--between a society which practises abortion on demand and high rates of child abuse?  Even the teeniest, longest-bow connection?  If not, would you please explain very clearly why your government believes it is perfectly lawful, moral, good, and righteous to kill an infant in his mother's womb, but somehow terribly wrong and evil to do the same thing one second after the baby has emerged from that same womb.  If society cannot champion the protection and sanctity of a child in the womb, how can it credibly do so after birth?  If an adult's "rights" trump the rights and liberties of the child in the womb, how come they cease to do so after birth?  No doubt those who abuse children and kill them believe those children are an impediment to their adult rights to a certain quality of life.  A state which recognises a woman's right to kill her unborn child in defence of her right to a certain quality of life can hardly remove that right in any credible or believable sense once the child is born. 

Can any government of the day be regarded as credible when it expresses moral outrage over a dozen or so murdered children per year in this country, when that same government sanctions and facilitates the murder of twenty-thousand children annually in this country on the grounds that the yet-to-be-born child's life can legitimately be sacrificed on the alter of the adult mother's right to a self-determined quality of life? 

No Minister, we will not play your game.  At least not until you have the gumption and the courage to include these issues as part of the public debate.  In the meantime, we don't find your game of charades edifying at all.