The Twins

The death of the Mangere Twins is tragic, with one suffering head injuries and another a broken thighbone. I’ve avoided blogging on the issue to date, awaiting some facts to be revealed before commenting.

But this has not stopped Labour’s Tony Milne. He posted this morning that NZ’s high level of violent child deaths is linked to Section 59. He explicitly rejects “appropriate smacking” and links this also to the violent murder of children, saying “there is no middle path”.

But it gets even better. In the comments on his post Aaron Bhatnagar points out that it is nonsense to say a law against smacking will stop children being killed when laws against murder and abuse are not deterring it. Aaron points to the prevalence of drugs, alcohol and lack of parenting responsibility, rather than “smacking”.

Tony hits back claiming the lowering of moral standards which leads to children being murdered is:

– having a large gap between the rich and poor
– illegal wars where over 30,000 innocent people are killed
– people puting accumulation of individual capital ahead of community responsibility
– current generations to rape and shit in our environment
– tax no longer used used for the common good

And he sums up by saying “The problem is the conservative worldview has become too dominant”

So hey lets not have the coroners reports or a police investigation. Tony has worked out who to blame – George Bush for the war on Iraq and National supporters for their “conservative worldview”

Silly old me thought that maybe the individuals were bashed the twins up might be to blame. But no it’s all those people who voted National!!

UPDATE: Family First (PR not online yet) point out that when it comes to child abuse the major associated factors are domestic abuse, poverty, stress and substance abuse – not smacking! They also point out research shows that abuse is twice as likely in single parent families over two parent families.

FF also pont out that of the five countries with the lowest UNICEF child abuse stats, three allow smacking.

UPDATE2: Tony has responded.