Kahui Twins Killing
Much research has been driven by the goal of identifying the risk factors for predicting the occurrence of child abuse. Unfortunately, the findings have been inconclusive. Long-term studies have shown that it is usually the accumulation of multiple stresses over time that causes families to become dysfunctional.
The boys’ deaths are a tragedy that the Kahui whanau will have to live with, and their pain and grief can barely be imagined. However, it is important to see the boys’ deaths as part of the larger picture for our communities and country. In September 2003 Unicef reported on child maltreatment deaths in rich nations. New Zealand was among the countries with the worst records, 22 out of 27 (Innocenti Report Card No 5). Something good can come of this tragedy if we avoid blame and seek to understand what changes can be made to help prevent such tragedies in the future.
The situations in which children are abused are complex and messy. There are no quick fixes. What is needed is calm reflection and action to develop services and supports for families, whanau and parents who are facing multiple stresses.
—Shiona Frengley (Nelson)
Is another working group the best legacy we can offer for the lives of the three month-old Kahui twins, another paper-shuffling exercise with the inevitable recommendations for wider control? Are we not just plugging the gaps?
Where are the wise men in our society? The holy ones? And the religions, how are they helping our society come to grips with the horror of this crime? Are we able to accept this, shake the head and return it to the sand?
We need help. It may take more than another committee to restore basic human values into our society.
—Jeanette O’Shea (West Coast)
I met Helen Clark at an awards evening three years ago; I asked her what she was going to do about the appalling level of domestic violence in this country, and said that it felt like an epidemic of violence with seven children a week taken into care and a woman dying on average every six weeks – and that the violence seemed worse than ever. I grew up in Mangere so I know what I’m talking about. It was shocking to return, having been away many years, to a country run largely by women, to find a society that isn’t kind or careful or nurturing of its most defenceless.
—Michelle Hancock (Stanley Point, Auckland)
We need a government that will follow the British example whereby the family could be arrested for suspicion of murder and held separately for questioning for a defined period of time. That a family could close ranks like this is unacceptable – allegedly grieving or not.
—Adrian Wilson (Northcote, Auckland)
Our Elusive Diaspora
Bruce Ansley discusses (“Far-flung whanau”, July 1) the perception of Kiwi expats as an untapped resource but gives no real examples of how such a resource can be used other than the general aim to “network the diaspora”.
While living in the UK I was contacted by an expat association and attended one of their networking events in London. The formal presentations described excitedly how New Zealand companies were going into partnership with some of the leading (ie, mildly inept, old-boy-network-led) UK software companies, and this was followed by much “networking”, ie, standing around talking rugby and drinking beer. The analogy I took away was that of the dog chasing the car: they had had found its expats but weren’t sure now what to do with them.
Let’s face it: the world makes a good training ground. If a key to growth is the utilisation of its expatriate expertise, let’s encourage that overseas experience.
The expat community is coveted by the article: “… we’re not taking advantage of it”; “We can ‘use’ these people.” A large number of expats don’t want to be used or taken advantage of. They left the country to explore new opportunities for themselves. Give them the climate to create new opportunities here (not political hot air or slick websites) and they’ll return.
—David Hirst (Papakura, Auckland)
World-Class Health
I cannot recall a media story on health of the good news variety, just bad ones: waiting lists culled; refusal to fund some life-saving drug; DHBs over budget; flying patients to Australia for radiation therapy; GPs giving up; misdiagnosed meningococcal disease; discharged pat-ient kills; and so on and on. Then there’s the ever-negative opposition (who, in the 1990s, turned hospitals into CHEs and patients into RGUs: revenue-generating units; I kid you not.) It’s the nature of the beasts, media and politicians, to do so.
Well, my wife and I want to thank the public health system for being there for our week-old granddaughter. She was fine, then a rare heart condition threatened her life. Somehow what is portrayed as a mish-mash of bureaucratic incompetence provided immediate, high-cost, world-class treatment. We are bloody grateful and do not believe it would have been better to use the money giving tax breaks.
Air ambulance to Starship Children’s Hospital; a surgeon who, in a seven-hour operation on her heart, the size of a walnut, to repair the left ventricle; the associated critical care. No doubt luck, or whatever you believe in, played a part. There was enough there for a rebuild; her heart restarted and kept going. Entre-preneurs, medical insurers and the market played no part, nor was this procedure in web pages available from the US. The surgeon is probably modest, but someone called her “the best in the world”.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
—R N and G A Robins (Christchurch)
Old Bridges
I was cheered to see Bruce Ansley’s timely reminder (How It’s Going, June 24) of why we should cherish our vanishing one-way road-rail bridges while we can. We’re quick to destroy heritage structures like bridges when they have reached the end of their “useful” lives, forgetting that our cultural history crosses the rivers they straddle. Legions of bridge carpenters struggled to erect them in trying and dangerous conditions, and the locals valued them for the life-changing artefacts that they were. When the Blackball Bridge was opened in 1903, even Dick Seddon turned up, such was the significance of the occasion.
Now that great edifice is gone, de-stroyed by the Grey River it straddled, and the beautiful curved wooden rail bridge at Greymouth is about to be dismantled and scattered after being replaced by a modern concrete youngster, I wonder when we will ever start to put a value on these historic bridges? They managed to leave the Fox River bridge standing, just past Punakaiki, when a newer one replaced it.
—Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (St Albans, Christchurch)
You can see the underside of a passenger train from many rail bridges over roads, and some years ago someone in an open sports car below the Main Trunk bridge at the bottom of the Ngauranga Gorge was unfortunately under a train when someone pulled the chain in a toilet.
—John Wilson (Wellington)
John Galbraith
Brian Easton has collected several quotations from the writings of J K Galbraith under the heading “Galbraith’s wit” (Economy, June 17).
I’m sorry, but I find them neither witty nor wise, confirming my view that most economists are neither strong on advice nor in the business of cheering us up. Galbraith always had plenty to say, delivering himself, in The Affluent Society (1967) of the comment: “The singular feature of the future is that it cannot be known”, and in the same place he reminds us that governments go on spending at much the same rate, whether they have the money or not.
It is the desperate task of the average Kiwi to struggle to save a little throughout his productive years. Come retirement, he will receive a small indexed pension, and stand helplessly by while inflation slashes the value of his income-yielding assets by a half within 10 years.
Easton regrets that so many good economists didn’t get a Nobel Prize. One who did was Milton Friedman, the Chicago-school monetarist who, in his book, Free to Choose (1979), warned us about the inflation that strikes us all.
One of the differences between these two famous men is that Milton Friedman is highly readable and entertaining, and J K Galbraith is not.
—R M Ridley-Smith (Khandallah, Wellington)
Easton’s quotes from J K Galbraith made good reading, but there is one Galbraith quote that should be placed in front of every writer or would-be writer: “Effortless prose requires five drafts at least.”
—Roger Hall (Takapuna)
Saving Kathryn Ryan
Chris Laurenson’s letter (June 17) had me baffled on a few levels.
First, the idea that I would turf anyone off my programme because they pronounce a word – yes, even women – wrongly is more than silly. Besides, there’d be no one left to talk to.
Second, the irony of Laurenson’s position is that he then claims to turf me off his radio whenever I pronounce the word “film” in a manner not to his liking.
And finally, if he really does believe that language changes and it’s best to accept it, why doesn’t he?
—Kim Hill (Wellington)
Debunking de Botton
When Douglas Lloyd Jenkins chose to write about Alain de Botton’s visit to New Zealand, it was an opportunity to test his ideas against the visitor’s. So why didn’t he? The exercise in tall poppy-lopping and critiquing Kiwi culture that he did deliver (“There’s a thought”, July 1) was riddled with claims that cannot go unchallenged.
De Botton has a Master’s degree in philosophy and writes with some expertise from that perspective, rather than as a “gifted amateur”. His book The Architecture of Happiness is less about “style and/or architecture” than the ways we respond to and participate in our built environment. Surely this subject should not be the exclusive preserve of the “expert on architecture” and the “architectural thinker”. It’s hardly surprising that de Botton’s “confidence appears to come from reading a prepared script” given that he writes the scripts based on his own research and thinking. And wouldn’t he have been asked about the Beehive because of that building’s well-known ability to disorientate newcomers to its office levels?
There may be a case for criticising our media for engaging sycophantically with international writers on promotional tours at the expense of local authors, but the generalisations Lloyd Jenkins extrapolates about our culture are confused. First, we are “sports- and celebrity-obsessed”, then we are “passionate, awkward and real”. At least this revelation of our diversity was more believable than the news that Martha Wainwright “is the brother of … Rufus Wainwright”.
—Michael Smythe (Northcote, North Shore)
