Hopkins to Hodgson and Maharey

Jim Hopkins writes a serious open letter to Pete Hodgson and Steve Maharey:

The truly amazing thing is not the silliness of the idea – that’s probably par for the bureaucratic course – but rather the breathless enthusiasm with which you have announced it.

If you’ll permit the discourtesy, Hodgson, we’ve got a problem. And this is it. Some people treat their children in a revolting and disgusting way. That is the problem. Some people inflict pain on their children. Pain that makes us weak – and weep – when we imagine it.

Some people beat their children; with fists, wood, tools, jug cords, or all of the above. Some people torture their children. Some people see fit to punish their children by putting them in a clothesdryer.

When we hear that, sirs, our reaction is simple. And so is our solution. We would put anyone who does that into a clothesdryer themselves. And we would leave them there for a month.

Please understand this, Mr Hodgson – and you too, Mr Maharey. We want such cruelty to be punished. Yes, gentlemen. Punished. Look, we know that “punish” is not a word that comes easily to the ministerial tongue but that is what we want. And we want you to want it too.

More to the point, we want an immediate end to all the inducements and all the incentives that are available to those who visit hideous harm on children.

We want all the well-intentioned but shamefully administered unconditional taxpayer-funded assistance stopped! Immediately.

Gentlemen, you can do this. You needn’t wait for the Mayor of Rotorua to suggest that some conditions might possibly apply to the payment of benefits before saying, “Gosh, that’s a good idea!”

So be brave, gentlemen. Tell your 25-year-old senior policy analysts that asking an 80-year-old lady who’s spent two years waiting for a hip replacement if she feels “controlled or always criticised” won’t fix the problem. Tell them that asking a nun admitted with a heart murmur if she’s been “asked to do anything sexual that you didn’t want to do” won’t save the life of a single child. Tell them, if they want to spend $11 million preventing domestic violence, not to waste it on questionnaires, but post it as rewards for any information that might spare a child and convict its abuser.

 

You see, sirs, when all’s said and nothing’s done, the national scandal described in this week’s headlines is not that adults are beating children. That is a personal disgrace.

The national scandal is that your government, our government, is all too often a party to the outrage. But it’s not doing an effective thing about it.

So here are your three questions, gentlemen: Do you care? Will you do anything worthwhile? When?

Now that didn’t cost $11 million, did it?

Ouch.  My fingers almost got burnt blogging that.