Photo: Dorothea Lange

Today  the Herald published a story lamenting the extra cost of local, free-range and organic foods, the very foods we’re being encouraged to buy and eat.  They estimate that the clean, green Kiwi options cost us on average 25% more. For people on a limited budget, that isn’t an option at all.

The Taranaki Daily News got closer to the heart of the problem with a story headlined ‘Free food draws poor kids to class’.  It quotes principals from Taranaki schools who say that some of their students rely on their school to provide breakfast and even lunch, just to survive.

Poverty in New Zealand is a problem we often conveniently ignore, preferring to see our country as a land of milk and honey.  Unfortunately, milk and honey are off the menu for hundreds of thousands of Kiwis. More than 200,000 of our kids are living below the poverty line; over 48,000 of them go to school without breakfast.  

This is a disgrace. No child in this country should go hungry. No New Zealand child should be cold or ill-clothed or living in an unhealthy or overcrowded house.  No child should be denied an education just because learning is too hard when you arrive at school cold, wet and hungry – if you get there at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuff.co.nz

My comments had been largely triggered by a front-page report in the Sunday Star Times headlined Inside Hotchin’s Hawaiian Hideaway, in which Amanda was quoted as having said, “We don’t have to justify where we get our money from or what it is spent on to anyone. I don’t care what anyone says.”  

I concluded:  

It really is quite an extraordinary statement, exemplifying as it does all the characteristics of Level 1 moral development – absolute selfishness, lack of conscience and indifference to the welfare of others. I don’t doubt for a moment that these people love their children and are kind to animals. But the misery which their actions have brought to thousands of ‘mum and dad’ investors seems for them to fall into the category of ‘long-distance impersonal harm’, all the more distant from a lounger by the pool in Hawaii.    

I have nothing but contempt for most of the finance company shysters, whether on Wall Street or Queen Street, who have wreaked such havoc in the lives of those who put their trust in them. But really my contempt is wasted. They don’t care. And it is their not caring that is the unforgivable crime.   Read the rest of this entry »

Pic: Natalie Slade, NZ Herald

Seventeen-month-old Rebecca Jones has cerebral palsy and was to have two surgical procedures this Thursday to ease constant pain and sickness, and help her take solid food.

Parents Cara Porter-Jones and Gary Jones had been preparing for the operation for months after being given the go-ahead in March, and have taken leave from work.

But Mrs Porter-Jones says that with just days to go, she received a phonecall saying her daughter’s surgery had been cancelled because of strikes at Auckland City Hospital.

“I broke down in tears. I was devastated,” she said.

“To put it nicely, I’m very, very, very angry. We’ve been preparing ourselves for this for weeks. Now that we were getting so close to it – naturally we’re very scared – and to be told that it’s been cancelled because people are fighting over money …”

Now the family are in limbo, as they wait for another date to be set.

I can entirely understand Mrs Porter-Jones’ anger. If surgery for a suffering child or grandchild of mine had been postponed in this manner, I would be looking for someone’s blood.

BUT…

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I measured the front page of the NZ Herald this morning. Excluding the top and bottom margins, 25cm was taken up with advertising and glaring promos. Only 29cm was news content, and if you exclude the photos and headlines, there was precious little of that –  a mere 47.5 column centimetres of copy.

The front page of the Herald has become a travesty of journalism.  Today the headline screamed:  KIWI UMPIRES CAUGHT UP IN CRICKET SCANDAL.  The implication is clear: our umpires were in the thick of the match-fixing.

Squinting at the front page while I made the first cup of tea I wailed, “Oh no, not Billy Bowden!”  I’ve always been a fan of the outrageous Bowden and the concept of him being involved in match-fixing damn near curdled the milk.

So it was both a relief and an anticlimax to discover that Bowden’s  involvement in the “cricket scandal” amounted to umpiring the fourth test between England and Pakistan, and calling the staged no-balls  for what they were. Read the rest of this entry »

Shock! Horror! A disastrous earthquake!  

North Island? South Island? The big one’s finally hit Wellington? 

No.  It’s in VANUATU, for god’s sake!!  There apparently wasn’t much damage and no-one was hurt. 

So what does the Herald do? Puts a great, blazing, misleading headline up to sell a few papers on the street. 

This was once a serious newspaper. Now it’s just a tabloid rag. 

Bath tragedy: Mother’s fight to save baby This was the Herald’s front page headline yesterday. The subhead read: Twin dies after being left for ‘just minutes’.

From the story we learned that ‘a desperate young mother frantically tried to revive her baby daughter after finding the infant floating face down in the bath next to her twin sister.’

But the mother’s efforts were unsuccessful and the baby later died in Starship Hospital. The story continued:

‘Police are investigating the death but say it’s too early to know if charges will be laid…. It is understood the mother briefly left her daughters in the bath while she went to get something ready for them.

‘”It was just a matter of minutes,” Detective Michelle Shepherd, of the Waitakere child abuse team, said. “She immediately scooped her out of the bath. She phoned the ambulance who talked her through doing CPR.”‘

The remainder of the story highlighted the dangers of leaving small children unattended in the bath.

The story was back on the front page again this morning:

Mother of bath tragedy child on CYF list

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