Tired boot camp plan is one from the Dark Ages

The Greens aren’t alone in recycling old favourites for this year’s election, replacing bland with former bland as their slogan.

It has been hard for them to accept that telling alternative facts to welfare is not universally admired, but they’re marching on, stepping over the twitching body of Metiria.

Meanwhile, National is recycling an old favourite, from back when its staunch supporters begged to bring back the birch, (ie, corporal punishment for naughty youth).

Nowadays we are less naive about such scenarios, and raise an eyebrow at any older male volunteering to do the whacking. But the idea bubbles away among devotees like a stew for ever on the back burner.

They reckon a darn good hiding never did anyone any harm, and know it’s what today’s young tearaways are crying out for when they rob dairies, kill pizza delivery men, rape old women, and generally spit on the public.

Yes, all they need is official abuse, as opposed to the ad hoc abuse and neglect they have experienced in their own families.

We used to have borstals, junior jails where delinquents were sent to learn new tricks from each other, and despise authority even more.

Sadly – how their advocates must pine for them - they were closed. Since then there has been a series of boot camp experiments, run along military lines, all of which have been touted as the solution to young male offending, and all of which have ended by achieving nothing more than the borstals that went before.

It turned out that humiliating teenage boys and barking orders at them was lots of fun for those doing the barking, though, and now National says it wants to start boot camps again. They will be at Waiouru Military Camp, this country’s answer to Siberia, training beside our soldiers. I doubt that either the army or the Corrections Department is enthralled by the plan.

‘‘There is a small group … for whom our youth justice system in its current form just doesn’t work,’’ Prime Minister Bill English tells us.

He has in mind about 150 males aged between 14 and 17 who have committed serious crimes. I’d like to see a snapshot of them, suspecting that the majority will not be fair-skinned.

That opens up a subject we avoid discussing, just why so many of these young males are disaffected, why their families fail to provide them with safe and nurturing homes, and why they continue to fail in our education system.

Could it have something to do with the violence of colonisation, the attempted destruction of a culture and language, and its lasting effects? Never mind. You make yourself unpopular suggesting things like that.

There is money for boot camps, $60 million in fact, even if there’s none for decent housing for lowincome families forced to live in the market economy. But that’s another topic the government doesn’t address head-on, preferring to a) pretend it’s not that serious or b) write it off to the market economy, whereby some people end up on the streets, but it doesn’t matter terribly much.

What does matter, says National, is that negligent parents who produce young criminals aren’t punished enough. They’ll be fined in future if their young children, aged under 14, are out on the streets unsupervised between 12am and 5am.

That would be interesting, because I doubt very much that they’ll have the money to pay up. In any case, by then it’s way too late. The damage is done.

Some people, I suspect the Greens among them, believe that what dysfunctional families need is more money. That would be great if the extra money didn’t immediately go on drugs and alcohol, but in the real world they prove embarrassingly appealing to the poor, who have nothing to look forward to but more poverty either way.

Labour’s justice spokesman, Andrew Little, misses the point when he says the young offenders problem is one that National has created through underfunding the police. He redeems himself by adding that, rather than punishing parents, we need new ways of intervening early on with problem families.

I think it goes back further than that, to when we abandoned all ideas of an egalitarian society, which we once prided ourselves on, and decided that rich people would be a beacon of sophistication dragging us all up to a new and better world where money matters more than principle, and if there are beggars on our streets, that’s a small price to pay.

We could call them local colour. Tourists would go for it.