A leaked ministerial document from the Children’s Minister shows an admission that giving military-style academy providers the power to use force against children may be seen as “increasing the potential risk of abuse in custody”.
The Green Party’s Tamatha Paul, who obtained the document about the Government’s military-style academy legislation, is raising the alarm, saying the Government’s proposal is “scary” and should be stopped.
Paul says it’s “extremely disingenuous” of the minister’s document to acknowledge concerns about the use-of-force powers and still push forward with the military-style academy programme.
Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad also wants more details about the powers as they need “to be given extremely careful and well-thought-through consideration from a children’s rights perspective”.
She’s “disappointed” her office wasn’t consulted on the proposed legislation and has had to resort to asking Oranga Tamariki for information about what’s being proposed.
The Military Boot Camps don’t work.
This Government is spending $5million on them as a bullshit virtue signal to their reactionary redneck supporters who love to bash teen criminals.
This love of making criminal teenagers suffer has transitioned to the legal right to use force against those teenagers.
The fact no one in the Government will acknowledge that allowing the State to physically harm teenagers is the EXACT SAME powers used in the past by the State to cause vast swathes of abuse over generations shows that we have learnt nothing.
80% of gang members were abused in State Care.
All we are doing is building the next generation of gang members.
This is who we are now, this is what we have become.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
The two most disgusting ministers are once again making head lines for being fucken usless .For christ sake NZ WAKE UP .
Foot note to my previous comment .One sells death by smoking the other allows violence to be used against children in care which in turn creates another gang member .
Green Tamatha Paul can be “ extremely disingenuous “ herself, IMO, and that’s putting it mildly. Her generalisations about New Zealand’s history IMO, are sloppy and racially damaging, whether deliberate or otherwise.
“ Boot camps” may be an unfortunate misnomer leading to time-expired generalisations, but they ‘re not catering for choir boys here. The potential for physical altercations will exist, and anybody who thinks that teenagers will necessarily respond to reason, or logic, or even cuddles, needs to think again.
These actions have consequences for the young gang members of the future. If this is the best we can do in this day and age then we are screwed.
Down the line we will discover the damage done by many of these CoC ideas. The CoC may even realise this, but they don’t care because they are not looking for real solutions. Instead, their policies are a bold and emphatic declaration that the status quo (i.e. how the economy and society function after a 40 year-long right-wing experiment) is great and constitutes the natural, inevitable and best possible order of things. And any problems we see are just due to defective individuals whose behaviour we need to correct. Billy English’s ‘social investment’ boondoggle is driven by the same thing.
‘It’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it’ is a song line and the message should be borne in mind as being generally right. They look as if they’re enjoying themselves and life could be like that, even inside a boot camp if run in a positive and tolerant sort of way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOHfn2m9nlU Bananarama
Positive and tolerant is not part of the neolib efficiency, monetarist, profit-grabbing and keeping lifestyle. So let’s get another style!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The camps could be good if the governance was good. Leslie Thomas RIP 6 May 2014 at 83, popular author and intrepid traveller and enjoyer of life, shows what caring coaching and guidance can result in, when he talks about his life as an orphan in a Barnados Home
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2635578/Flying-bombs-stolen-sausages-tough-nut-happy-orphan-LESLIE-THOMAS-died-month-famous-The-Virgin-Soldiers-But-account-Barnardos-childhood-enthralling.html
…But then, in 1943, my father’s ship had been torpedoed in the South Atlantic, drowning all the men on it.
Some months later, my mother became ill with cancer. My younger brother, Roy, and I were sent to a Barnardo’s home in Devon while she was in hospital. Some time later, I was told that she had died.
From Devon I was sent to Dickies — as the Barnardo’s home in Kingston was known. Roy was sent to a different home. It was 18 months before I saw him again….
There grew from this ugly old place, with its dripping rooms, hollow dormitories and riotous boys, a sense of warmth, of familiarity, of fun; of fellowship that was strong and real.
Dickies’ boys were a rollicking, war-like tribe, united by their bond and the constant adventure of keeping one move ahead of the Gaffer, as Mr Gardner, the home’s superintendent was known.
He was not a man you could love, the Gaffer, but he was a good man in his narrow way. He was growling and grey, thin, and with a slight stoop. If the stoop was slight, his cynicism was large. He was entitled to it. Forty of his 60-odd years he had occupied with boys, and he had an all-embracing distrust of anything in short trousers..
.
Further on in the war:
The bombs flew every day and night. The Gaffer, ancient and brave, used to come tearing through the shrapnel and the hideous noises, fall down the entrance to the shelter and make sure we were all accounted for.
Then out he would go into the danger and run on his elderly legs to another shelter. He was a hard old bastard, but he would have perished willingly rather than have had any harm come to the roughest, rowdiest young criminal of the 150 boys in his care.
A final comment: ,,,Every childhood is a meadow. Ours was stubbly and had weeds and stony places. But there was sweet grass, too, in patches, and days of sun and freedom and happiness. * Leslie Thomas, This Time Next Week, first published in 1964 by Constable & Company.
.
Greywarbler. Good read, thank you. A younger colleague said that being sent on an Outward Bound Course was his saving, after appearing in court for the second time as a teenager, on a wilful damage charge. Got off on diversion the first time. I don’t know if Outward Bound still exists; it seemed to be a similar concept to Boot Camps.
I think boot camps is a nomenclature what? that covers a raft of possibilities. Maybe these could be good ones but we can’t assume that under present amoral politics. How did we get these smiling assassins claiming some sort of purity or justification ruling us, of our little country that could?
I see us in a similar position to Germany in the 1930’s as the civilised polish was stripped off, either forcibly or with propaganda and memes, to reveal the rough, pitted interior. Yet all the Germans I meet now are fine people. General question – how can people who have evolved prevent the rise of reverting uprisings of barbarism and tyranny?
How we run boot camps may be an indication of where we are on the scales.
We are subjugating these kids to mental and physical torture for a few fucking trinkets. Congratulations, we have evolved to a place where dignity has been relegated to nothing more than a commodity – humanity is fucked.
500k per kid they had better all end up in the top 1% in every thing they do .
Comments are closed.