Ongoing travesty symptom of apathy

Our fellow citizens are living in unhealthy, uncomfortable, unsafe conditions in Christchurch. How patient they are and how apathetic we are who sit by and tuttut.

How can we allow the Government and insurance companies to get away with an ongoing travesty? It was possible to rustle up and issue almost overnight $1.7 billion to bail out people chasing risky or, even worse, risk-free government-guaranteed investment returns, yet we have had people living in squalor for more than 1300 days.

What is stopping the erection of prefab houses that could be fabricated in areas of the country crying out for employment; think of the Far North and Gisborne. We have the raw materials and manpower in this country.

Where is the spirit that enabled countries in wartime to respond resolutely and quickly? The difference is one of leadership, or lack of it, and the fact that there is no burning platform for most of us, just the poor sods in Christchurch. From my own experience as an England rugby fan, I can relate quite vividly to your correspondent Judi Dooling’s experience of the treatment of her English husband by All Blacks supporters at Eden Park on Saturday night.

I tried calmly to tell the closest abuser behind me that he was letting his fellowsupporters down and to think about what it would be like if the roles were reversed. But I was ignorantly dismissed and the expletives continued.

This is not just a light-hearted “we hate the English” issue. I have also read and heard first-hand accounts of similar experiences from Irish and Australian fans at games at Eden Park.

Some All Blacks fans have no idea what it is like to be a minority fan in an overseas stadium. If they get an opportunity, they will, hopefully, find out that the treatment they dish out back home is not reciprocated in anything close to the same vein at Twickenham or elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. More education will not make people lose weight, and nor will more education keep overseas drivers to the left.

Overseas drivers have an imprint of the “normal” street view etched in their subconscious minds: verge or kerb on the right, centre-line to the left, asphalt beyond that. Conforming to this view is why they tend to drift on to the wrong side of the road, particularly in light traffic.

A label on the dashboard would not change that, but something else will. Take a bit of red electrical tape and, in the upper half of the driver’s windscreen, fashion a left-pointing arrow.

As long as the driver has his eyes on the road, the red arrow will override his old “normal” picture of the road, and remind him every second to drive on the left. approach to politics. He now says he would like to be an MP.

At the same time, having lost his final bid to gain access to the evidence the United States Government holds in its case to extradite him to face charges in regard to the activities of Megaupload, he is offering $5 million to anyone who can help him prove unlawful or corrupt conduct by US and New Zealand government agencies in regard to his case.

He also commented in the context of John Banks’ trial that a $50,000 donation was not a big deal because he could earn that much in six hours through his internet activity.

Mr Dotcom is clearly very wealthy, and keen to be a New Zealand citizen and participate in our national affairs. But where do the Dotcom business activities have their commercial base and where do they pay income tax?

Is it here, or a tax haven where the norm is no tax at all? Does the role he wants to play here include having his companies and himself pay their fair share of tax for the common good? Clearly, the NCEA is popular in many schools. Dedicated teachers work hard to adapt to it, and those with strong academic traditions and well-motivated pupils have nothing to hide. They do well whatever the system.

However, not all schools are so favoured. Many teachers with poor pupils from disadvantaged homes are sufficiently concerned about their reputations to feel tempted to game the system.

Pupils’ socio-economic circumstances are the main influence on achievement levels. This is well documented. Next in line, the assessment system is a strong influence on pupils’ efforts in the senior school.

The NCEA, with its high-stakes standards-based assessments, has numerous loopholes that can be exploited. Many teachers spoon-feed their pupils, drilling them on predictable questions, resulting in much low-level thinking.

Their internally assessed outcomes are frequently inflated at the expense of a broader curriculum and higher-level thinking that might have been developed.

If the NCEA is so “robust”, as claimed, why are our pupils and those in the other six nations using standards-based assessments in the senior school, declining steadily, with larger tails of under-achievement in all three Pisa subjects, while Western nations that resist this system continue to thrive? A big construction project has begun at Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.

The council has made a $3 million grant to the cathedral’s Selwyn Vision project, which involves building a new $4 million multifunctional Bishop Selwyn Chapel, $4.5 million restorations of the cathedral and St Mary’s Church organs, and a $1 million contingency for other buildings.

Similarly, in 2005, the Auckland City Council made a $30,000 grant towards the $13 million upgrade of St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral. It also spent $9.2 million upgrading the city-owned St Patrick’s Square.

Communities need focus buildings. How these multimillion-dollar, cavernous mock Gothic buildings with booming organs and picturesque windows fit into the message of the original founder, an itinerant preacher-prophet proclaiming the giving up of all wealth, a focus on justice and the disadvantaged within an anti-materialistic vision of alternative values, is quite another question.

As congregations plummet, these sentimental post-colonial palaces get bigger and more expensive.

Churches accept positions of privilege and secular support, opt out of secular values framed within human rights, and from positions of comfortable morality, power and wealth sell out the gritty original message in the process. The Greens are right to claim that our abortion legislation is dishonest.

In theory, abortion is against the law but any woman can get an abortion if she claims a mental-health issue and is willing to submit to some mild questioning from a couple of avuncular consultant physicians.

The Greens’ answer to this dishonesty is to make abortion on demand legal to 20 weeks. Presumably they have done research which shows that at 20 weeks the mere fetus transforms magically into a human. Any parent knows that children do not actually become human until they are 17, so this is a bold statement by the Greens.

We have seen what legalising drugs does to ramp demand but, of course, there is no reason to suspect this would have the same affect on abortion. To do so is an outrageous supposition.

At the moment, however, the taxpayer picks up the several hundred million dollar bill for abortion because it is a mental-health issue. But when it becomes a simple matter of choice, doesn’t that mean the woman herself would have to cough up the $2000 to $3000?

Or will we have a new dishonesty, where choice remains somehow dressed up as ‘‘health’’? Just when the Greens’ message to mainstream party voters is coming through — that they care about humanity as much as the environment — Jan Logie has dealt a body blow to swinging voters.

She proposes that volitional termination of life in the womb at 20 weeks could be on their agenda. If taken up by her peers and co-leaders, this would be a sad revelation of the moral underbelly of the party.

Absolute right or absolute wrong is out of favour in our relativist society, admittedly one facing more complex societal issues. Attitudes have changed, including in relation to adoptions, which have fallen from about 2500 a year in the mid-1960s to about 100 now. One reason for that is the escalation of abortions, thankfully now decreasing from a 17,000-a-year peak.

A mother who had to surrender her unborn baby at 20 weeks for herself to live spoke of the little girl being perfectly formed in every way. Taking the life of a half-term baby just as a choice does not invite a shades of grey response.

In black and white, this suggestion is an appalling affront to our humanity.