I view the proposal to feed children in decile one and two schools with a great deal of trepidation. While I am certainly not opposed to feed starving children, I suspect the proposed bill is more likely to be just another form of creeping welfare. Just providing blanket feeding for all these children produces one [...]

The police have finally made an arrest in the horrifying case of the depraved assault on the five-year-old child holidaying at a caravan park in Turangi. We know nothing about the accused except that he is local and aged 16. The moralising has now begun: Pre-show, Detective Inspector Mark Loper had a word. He had [...]

This is a graph (nicked from the Herald) plotting the presentations of non-accidental injury (child abuse) at Starship hospital. Normal people would almost certainly view this as good evidence that the problem is getting worse. Unfortunately, self-serving, butt-covering bureaucrats see things differently. Here’s one: “The way I interpret this is that the numbers are good [...]

This is Mellissa Anderson. She has been charged with assault for slapping a girl who did this to her daughter: The Herald is full of much pontificating about how parents must act like adults with bullies. Note that this lady merely slapped the 14-year-old who did this. She did not beat her up, attack her [...]

I confess that the MacDoctor was seriously thinking about chucking in this blogging lark. For the past week or so the news has been deeply uninspiring, with lackluster lists from Labour, gaggles of gays and a gormless Goff. Nothing new there, then. National found itself essentially nationalising another company. Nothing new there, either. For a [...]

The UN committee on the rights of the child are concerned that we have insufficient rights for children in New Zealand. They imply that this is the cause of our “staggeringly high” infant mortality statistics. This would be impressive if we actually had high infant mortality stats, but we don’t. New Zealand’s infant mortality rate [...]

As New Zealand added another child murder victim to it’s long list, over the past week, and the case of the tortured nine-year-old is still reverberating around the media, there have been many blog posts on the subject of child abuse on this blog and many others. For the most part, they have one thing [...]

A couple of days ago, I posed some questions about the responsibility of CYSF in the case of the nine-year-old girl who was tortured in her own home. I took the view that CYFS had made some bad calls and should have made more of an effort to monitor the child after they had returned [...]

You have to have a pretty strong stomach not to want to hurl when you read this story of two creatures who literally tortured a nine-year-old girl and kept her locked in a cupboard. When I read the article, I loudly proclaimed that these two “parents” were animals. My cat looked extremely affronted. The cat [...]

The Herald has a fascinating example of how statistics can be filtered through an agenda to say, more or less, what you want. The latest set of statistics from the Children’s Social Health Monitor have been interpreted by Prof Cindy Kiro and the current Children’s Commissioner, John Angus, to mean that the recession is having [...]