How row over childcare could have been avoided
KATHERINE ZAPPONE has come under fire for her childcare plan because it fails to make provision for the squeezed middle.
The anger is justified because hardworking families who are saddled with a boom-time mortgage have little disposable income once they hand over what’s essentially a second mortgage for childcare.
They are arguably more deserving of a financial break than low-income groups, many of whom are unemployed and depend on social welfare to get by. But Ms Zappone could have avoided the row had she called her plan an anti-poverty initiative rather than childcare.
By targeting poorer families, the minister is trying to do something for disadvantaged children, to give them a better start in life. Research shows that the cycle of deprivation, underachievement and petty criminality is self-perpetuating unless action is taken with children at risk as early as possible.
Even waiting until the age of five when children start school can be too late. The Deis schools report that often their junior infants have no pre-learning skills and even less vocabulary.
Helping poor families with the costs of childcare is one way of ensuring that children are properly fed, socialised and encouraged to play in a chaos-free environment.
Given that child benefit payments have failed to lift children out of poverty, it’s time for the State to take a more hands-on approach to the problem.
ON HEARING about the genetic engineering miracle in Mexico where a baby, pictured below with Dr John Zhang, was born from three parents and with a vastly diminished risk from the medical condition that killed both its siblings, watchdog organisation Human Genetics Alert hit out. Branding the US medical team ‘unethical and irresponsible’, it said it was outrageous to ignore cautious US regulators and go to lawless Mexico. While there is no harm in warning against ‘designer babies’, it’s a stretch to describe the US fertility industr,y which treated headcase Nadya Suleman aka Octomom, as ‘cautious’.