I’ve always tried to give Rachel Smalley the benefit of the doubt. We have so few female voices in news and current affairs that you want to try and be supportive of the few we have in the hope that more can join them.
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt when she called women weighing over 72 kilograms ‘heifers’ and ‘lardos’.
But her latest column in support of boot camps finally sees her disappear up her own arse.
I’m just gong to be brutal now.
We’re talking about teens who’ve committed serious crimes here. Crimes at the top-end of the scale. The kids who’ve already inflicted significant damage to society in one way or another, and they’re on a fast-track towards a life of serious crime and probably a life sentence too. They’re time-bombs. Kids starved of nurturing and love. They’ve been dragged up and as they enter their teens they’ve got no concept of empathy of compassion, or anything really.
No. As I’ve pointed out. This won’t be ‘top-end-of-the-scale’ crimes. To be defined as a YSO (Young Serious Offenders) a 14,15, 16 or 17 year old needs to have committed the offence while at a youth residence and the crimes that are included are aggravated robbery or burglary. The final condition of being defined as a YSO is a ridiculously subjective and racially biased police test that includes things that are completely out of the control of the 14, 15, 16 and 17 year old.
How the fuck do you think putting 14, 15, 16 and 17 year olds into an adult court room using questionable thresholds is going to help these ticking time bombs who haven’t been nurtured and loved Rachel?
All you have done Rachel is swallow National Party propaganda hook line and sinker. You are being less a journalist here and just a press agent for the Government.
What would a boot camp give them? A lot. It would give them everything they haven’t had in the past. Structure. Boundaries. Discipline. A sense of purpose. Fitness. Good food. Direction. And most of all, daily accountability. You’ve got to get up. You’ve got to make your bed. You’ve got to get your hair cut. Shine your boots. You’re part of a team. You’ve got a job to do. Cooking, cleaning, you name it. Suddenly you’ve got a sense of purpose.
BUT IT DOESN’T WORK RACHEL! We have seen it didn’t work when National first tried it a couple of years ago and we saw the one in the 1980s led to terrible abuse inflicted upon the kids sent there.
All this delusional rubbish spouted by Rachel needs to be completely farcical is some bullshit middle class example to highlight just how utterly out of touch with the lives she is judging.
Oh wait, she actually does that…
Some years ago, when I was 18, I did Outward Bound for a month. I’d never been away from home and suddenly I was in the Marlborough Sounds being physically and mentally pushed beyond anything I’d ever done before. Sleeping rough in the hills in driving rain, woken at 2 o’clock in the morning, put on a boat, and thrown overboard into the sea. I was given 30 seconds of spotlight, and then I had to try and swim my way to the island with a backpack. And that was me for three days on my own.
…I’m sorry? WTF? A $4000 adventure course is her reference point for knowing how struggling kids must need s bit of discipline because she’s been there bro?!?
Fuck the fuck off Rachel.
You seem to have no idea whatsoever that the boot camp is a distraction to allow for a fundamental change to judge 14, 15, 16 and 17 year olds in adult courts using highly questionable thresholds. The fact the boot camps don’t work seems to be of no issue for you because you went on a $4000 adventure camp once?!?
You are a hollow disgrace Rachel. You’ve merely projected your middle class prejudices and ended up sounding like a joke who doesn’t seem to understand the policy being changed, which to be fair is the editorial policy that ZB is actually based upon.
The only response to Rachel is best summed up from one of our greatest academics…
The female version of NZ’s white trash media journalists
Poor misguided Smalley
The Kids she is writing about for the most part, have missed out on affection, on literacy, on personal esteem, on achievement.
Putting them into brootal camp will only compound those losses and screw the kids into further deprivation.
Unbeknown to Ms Smug Smalley, kids as well as adults need affection, fun, attention, tuition, tasks, encouragement, confidence and soul.
I would have thought the so called father of numerous children would have had a rough idea of the needs of kids.
What a fool I am to think that Billy English is worth even a shit. As for Smalley – why not care for a child as distinct from destroying one. ?
You have been too generous by at least half Martyn. With her rabid views on disadvantaged youth and support of state thuggery, Ms Smalley should have been left on her Outward Bound island for at least 14 years so she could make a properly informed judgement. God knows how she would have coped with living in a youth residence – probably, no differently to those who used to abscond from State institutions, then who stole vehicles and burgled properties for food and clothing so that they could go back to the less violent environments they had learned to survive in.
This Is How Relationships End
Read Here http://viahold.com/2lPe
That is appalling, Ranginui Walker says it all. It will be brutal that is what these kids and they are kids will get. There won’t be love and serious caring which is ultimately what they need and want. and frankly that dam woman bennet was on the radio saying before there is no reason for kids of 12 and 13 to be out at night.
Apparently she knows it all. Seems to me she has missed something, some of them will be safer being on the streets. But then Paula who couldn’t cope with her child, her studying and working, simply went back on the benefit back in day.
I find it quite tedious that these various jocks on radio also seem to have columns in the paper and some of them tv as well. There are other people who would like jobs I am sure, probably way more capable than the shock jobs. And while I am about it when are we going to have some ‘real’ people on ‘The Panel’…… Mora and co probably don’t know any he and his cohorts are all living privileged lives themselves.
Yeah Martyn Smalley , Hosking and others who spout this we know best approach think that sending theses kids to camps is great because it shifts the problem to the military and improves the crime figures and appeals to the get tough hit em hard brigade.
Their response just shows how incompetent and out of touch they really are on complex issues like this, they simply don’t and won’t ever understand the lives of these kids.
On another note Gareth Morgan has attacked Hosking for spewing bullshit on his morning programme , well somebody had to !!!
Its worth a read.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1708/S00278/gareth-morgan-open-letter-to-nzme.htm
I hear her and mike hoskings are going to have a baby. Auckland zoo is on standby.
Haha brilliant Countryboy!
“Crappy days, New Zealand.”
Welcome to little America. Facist government and corrupt press. Times have changed. Unfortunately there is nowhere better to go or I would be there.
At this stage I’m pretty sure the introduction of public floggings would be met with rapturous applause by the majority our fellow countrymen. Indeed, I’m confident a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty would also pass. You continue to underestimate how far we have fallen from anything resembling a nation that celebrates forgiveness and empathy.
I strongly suspect you’re right on that, Nitrium. All it would take is for another mass-shooting such as we had in the 1990s, or a brutal murder, a month out before election day – and a certain populist politician would make maximum capital from it. He’d be calling for a referendum on the issue.
The broader topic here should be: why does anyone think newsreaders are knowledgeable enough on any topic to be competent social commentators?
Hillary Barry, Mike Hosking, Jack Tame, Ali Mau etc – all of them regularly contribute to written media because they somehow have become experts on any topic through mostly reading the news? Complete and utter rubbish.
Having watched and listened to more ‘news’ on TV and radio over many years, I agree, there seems to be a strange belief by some, that newsreaders actually know about what they blabber on about.
Most have no clue about what they read out, they get the stuff put in front of them, off the online services that dominate global and local news, it has all been pre censored kind of, and some do not even know how to correctly pronounce foreign names of localities or persons.
Appearance seems more important than what they have between their ears.
mattk said: ‘The broader topic here should be: why does anyone think newsreaders are knowledgeable enough on any topic to be competent social commentators?’
aye..!..they are fucken auto-cue readers..nothing more..
most of the words they use not even their own..
Smalley seems to thing that the lives of Young Offenders is somehow akin to Outward Bound and “being physically and mentally pushed beyond anything I’d ever done before”?
The is so damned hilariously stupid.
No, there is no comparison. At the end of her three days at OB, she got to go back to her comfortable, secure, middle class existence.
Young Offenders get to go back to the damaged domestic environments that created their lives in the first place.
What a sick joke.
The courses run just a few years rack had one instructor running around being obscene in front of teenage girls and boys. The military did not deal appropriately with the instructor regarding his running naked around the kids. The military promoted him.
They are not kids- they are brutal. You left of left idiots would cross the street if you were approached by them. They are hard nosed criminals who need different options and choices. The military offers – a family environment a brotherhood culture, which is more appealing than gang culture. Military will help to shape hearts and minds and build a culture where they care about community and will care about society. The military is about war, but it’s about safety and aid in times of disasters and turmoil. These kids have an opportunity to change their lives through discipline and nurturing they will get in an environment they will be tough – and one they will respect. If it’s too easy they won’t care.
Dumb shit – gangs and the army have very similar cultures – only difference is that the gangs have a flatter management structure.
What a load of Bullshit. AOM
Gee that is unusual someone in the army who knows that the military are about war and killing people, that’s a first.
I bloody agree. What would you wankers suggest? Leaving this evils little c**ts to their own devices? Throwing them in jail? I’m tired of the little shits. Like military man said, we’re not talking about kids, we’re talking about loose units who would roll you idiots without a second glance.
the result of nearly 200 years of colonial boot on their throats… whats the solution? more boot..
Go back to the 17th century with your bourgeois ultracrepidarianism.
White, middle class, affluent – the predominant traits of the media elite who vilified Metiria Turei. They have as much in common with the poor, the struggling, the homeless, the powerless, as we do with a bacteria.
No wonder they attacked and destroyed her, she was an alien to them. A very threatening alien.
All you people who have the answers please tell us what they are instead of rubbishing others efforts.
Army the problem and aroha and sport the solution:
I once interviewed a Rangatira of Blackpower . He was born, an East Coast maori living in poverty, booted out for bad behavior from his strict family, as a boy. After early years in borstal horror he found himself in burnham military camp where he learnt the discipline and tactics of warfare.
He was iscolated and lonely as a north island maori and found family in a group of friends he visited in Christchurch in weekends.
Soon his army training made him king pin and he became their leader. Blackpower was then a ruthless Motorbike gang whanau with big business in drug dealing. His life was equally powerful in and out of prison until finally in old age he had enough.
He decided to stop the cycle.
When I met him he had studied psychology at canterbury university as a mature student, was training potential gang kids to play rugby instead and keep away from drugs. He was a family man who loved his mokapuna and worked parttime for a laundromat when he needed some money. He was a true Rangatira in the best sense, and particularly lovely to me.
Comments are closed.