A common theme

Deborah Coddington (a former ACT MP) and Michael Laws (a former National MP) both weigh in on the Nia Glassie-child abuse issue. As with every other problem he’s ever encountered, Laws concludes that child abuse is caused by political correctness gone mad. But wait, there’s more:

Laws:

. . . let’s admit that most of the underclass cannot be trusted with children. Ever. They may have the ability to procreate, but possess no sensibility to accept the responsibility. They are the underclass for a reason. And their idea of best parenting is to create someone like them – uneducated, pig ignorant, welfare-dependent, addicted and violent. And we want a new generation of such people. Why?

Raising children is a privilege, not a right. Child, Youth and Family is starting to station staff in delivery rooms but not enough and not often enough. No person connected with the Kahui, Glassie or Pailegutu cases should ever have been allowed to breed. They forfeited those rights, the moment they conducted or condoned such abuse. Their children will be just like them – malignant and feral.

Coddington:

But who has the guts to stand up and say that? Just two mayors – Wanganui’s Michael Laws and Bob Harvey from Waitakere. At the opening of the Every Child Counts conference in Wellington this year, Harvey said: “Enough is enough. We have to toughen up and say some people right now are just not fit to be parents … some children should not actually be allowed to go home. Doctors, nurses and midwives can tell, they know as soon as that baby is taken out the door it will go into a home of neglect and dysfunction.”

We ban from business company directors who repeatedly display reckless disregard for financial management, but we won’t implement the obvious – if violent parents insist on breeding, their babies should be removed and raised far, far away from their influence.

Well thank god we’ve gotten rid of that horrible nanny state Labour party and the government can get on with the real work of confiscating people’s children off them at birth.

Its also worth pointing out that much of ‘the underclass’ is Maori, and so a program preventing ‘the underclass’ from breeding will also look suspiciously like an eugenics program of racial extermination which is probably not the spirit in which Maori and Pakeha want to enter the 21st century together. Coddington’s post-natal confiscation policy sounds awfully similar to the ‘Aborigine Protection Acts’ in Australia, which didn’t pan out well for anyone.

It’s not actually that hard to imagine a solution for the child abuse problem: a national parental support program in which parents and children under five attended yearly or bi-yearly appointments with a government agency, with warning signs or failure to attend red-flagged and followed up by an investigation by social workers would probably be more successful than telling unprivileged Maori that ‘they cannot be allowed to breed’ or swiping their children at birth.

However, all parents would have to be subject to such a body and therein lies the problem. While Laws has no problem with suggesting ‘other’ people be subjected to incredibly harsh sanctions, the notion that he or people like him should have to front up to some nurse or social worker once a year, and be investigated if they fail to do so would surely be met with an epic temper tantrum. Increasing the size of the MSD to rival that of the school system, and the subsequent tax increases required to pay for it would – one suspects – also be an insurmountable obstacle.

When people like Laws and Coddington say we need to do something about child abuse, what they inevitably mean is that someone else needs to do something and someone else needs to pay for it.