Category: Social Issues
The next few months will be critical for the new government. It’s a time when the expectations of change must be honoured.
New Zealand is now emerging from nine years of creeping socialism. During those nine years, we have been told that the state knows best how to run our lives - and our country. Whether it is what we eat, how we bring up our children, or what sort of light bulbs we can use in our homes, laws have been developed to control our behaviour.
Nia Glassie’s crime was two-fold. Firstly, and tragically, she lived in the same dysfunctional household as a bunch of boozing, dope smoking, layabout no-hopers who got a kick out of torturing her when they were bored. Secondly, she had a woman as a mother who brings total shame on the honoured tradition of motherhood. Rather than being prepared to protect and defend her child to the death, she stood by and allowed her to be killed.
In the wake of the Nia Glassie case, New Zealanders across the country are asking “How on earth did this happen?” The death of the gorgeous three year old and the details that have emerged during the trial have left us, as a nation, shaken to the core and in a state of disbelief.
Congratulations to our new Prime Minister, National Party Leader John Key, and his support parties Rodney Hide’s ACT New Zealand and Peter Dunne’s United Party, on a successful election outcome. In his victory speech, John Key stated that the election result showed that New Zealanders had voted for a safer, more prosperous and more ambitious country: “They voted for hope, they voted for action and they voted for results. They voted for a better life for all New Zealanders.”
Recently I wrote an opinion piece with Jeremy Sammut criticising an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ).[1] We argued that health is ultimately an issue of personal responsibility and that there is a link between welfare dependence and bad health, which is caused in part by lifestyle choices. Sinking yet more taxpayer money into public prevention campaigns, for example to warn people of the dangers of not exercising, seems foolish and wasteful. It does not address the underlying problems.
Last week's designation of a Select Committee room of Parliament as the Rainbow Room shows just how far the human rights movement in New Zealand has marched over the last sixty years. Standing alongside other Select Committee rooms dedicated to Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians and women, the Rainbow Room was dedicated by the Speaker to recognise gay, lesbian and trans-gender New Zealanders and the paths they have taken to full citizenship with equal rights.[1]
National sovereignty remains a vexed issue across the world. In the contemporary climate sympathetic to the ambiguity which gives rise to such a contradictory notion as the international community the very notion of national sovereignty is ironic.
On Saturday November 8th Helen Clark will be asking voters for their support as she attempts to win an election that would elevate her to the rarefied ranks of four-term New Zealand Prime Ministers alongside Richard Seddon, William Massey and Keith Holyoake. During the address in which she announced the election date, Helen Clark explained that the 2008 general election will be about “trust” - whether the public can trust a Labour Government led by her, or a National Government led by John Key.
Many years ago when I first joined the staff of a teacher’s college, education practice in the primary sector was dominated by the notion of ‘open-plan’. No more single-cell classrooms. Instead, there would be large, well-resourced, open spaces with several teachers offering their different expertise to a much larger, broadly structured group of students. At a Board of Studies meeting, early in my time at the college, someone (not me) asked ‘what were the supposed benefits of the model’, since there were some obvious disadvantages in terms of order and the quality of the learning environment. A couple of senior colleagues undertook to do the research. They reported at a subsequent meeting that there was little evidence that open-plan was better and (as the questioners had supposed) substantial evidence of disadvantage.
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