Opinion Monday, August 19, 2013
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Children deserve protection
Ashburton Guardian 11
POLL RESULT Yesterday’s result Q: Are you viewing the upcoming elections as a waste of time?
Nick Lindo
EYE ON POLITICS
F
resh from the still almost euphoric atmosphere of National’s annual conference, held this year in Nelson - for the first time outside a “main” centre - Social Development Minister, Paula Bennett’s “hard-hitting” proposals to protect “our threatened and abused children” have gone down well. As well, indeed, they should. What we do to our children - and have been doing for decades now - often defies belief. The cruelty and neglect from which so many habitually suffer - and some die - brings the country nothing but critical astonishment and justifiable disrepute. Advanced. How could an “advanced” Western country, famous for its fighting spirit, its clean - now slightly tarnished - green image, and its world-beating rugby team, allow its children to be so poorly treated? Despair over this issue has been constant. Well-intentioned Ministers-past, children’s charities and local communities, despite huge effort and commitment, have sadly failed to do much more than scratch the proverbial surface. So if Ms Bennett’s solutions seem “draconian” then so be it. If it’s the all-embracing - often cloying - “Human Rights” versus “The Safety of the Child” one need be neither a sentimental old fogey nor even a “redneck” to cast one’s vote in favour of the child. Vulnerable. “Vulnerable Children” is how Ms Bennett refers to these under-age victims in her new Act; it’s hard to describe them in any better way. If they are so obviously
Today’s online poll question Q: Whitebait season has started. Is it on your menu?
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Happy children at Mt Somers Springburn school.
vulnerable the State has to do more again to make them less so. Thus awareness of such vulnerability and its undesirable sources need to be identified while there is still time to make the child safe. So often the murdered, abused or maltreated victim has been passed from one agency to the next until it is too late. Any change that breaks such a horror cycle is to be welcomed, whatever the socalled “social cost”. If there are known predators “out there” then watch them, name them and forestall their evil intentions. They have long
since forfeited their “human right”. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the political firmament, can be seen re-emerging from temporary, technical exile that well known bow tie beneath the equally famous shock of “golden” grey hair. Yes, Peter Dunne - he of the crucial vote and weighty word - is back. He has re-discovered the lost members of his United Future Party to the point where he can now once more be known officially as their leader and not, merely, as an Independent MP. The Electoral Commission has given him the sought-
after “green light”. He has convinced that august body his members are real people with needs, families, ambitions and, significantly, votes, and not simply electronic creations. His relieved smile tells all; and he’s not alone. Comforted. A certain, Mr John Key is also greatly comforted by the outcome of Mr Dunne’s campaign for re-recognition. The PM can now rely, for the next year or so, at least, on Mr Dunne’s famous “casting” vote when he needs it. The way the colours of the political picture are constantly changing that could be often.
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Alan Neum Neumann anns T yres