Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Kiro's grand plan

First consider this. Children's Commissioner, Cindy Kiro has a grand plan;

Every child would be interviewed or assessed before age two and again at ages five, 13, and 17. The interviews would assess children's strengths and possible areas for intervention, including truancy.

"The key thing is that in that one-on-one time you're getting a picture of what's going on for that child and what the things that really drive and interest them are," Dr Kiro said.

State intervention was possible where there were "major care and protection issues".


Now consider this (it was published in yesterday's DomPost under "Risk repeating history"):

Dear Editor

In the late eighties New Zealand apparently experienced an epidemic of child sexual abuse. During 1988 an advertising campaign culminating in a telethon centred on the claim that one in four girls would be victims before they turned 18. Lynley Hood, in "A City Possessed", has demonstrated how figures had been gradually over-inflated and the whole issue hyped-up.

I fear we are in danger of repeating history with current claims of a child abuse epidemic. Murray Edridge, Barnados CE, wrote (July 22) that last year, "64,000 children were likely to have been abused or neglected". This is a misinterpretation of the CYF notification statistics.

Just over 16,000 children came to the attention of CYF in the past year. Only a quarter of the number above.

In truth there is no way of knowing how many children are abused or neglected. But if Mr Edridge wants to have the "informed" debate he calls for, this isn't the way.

As happened in the 70s and 80s, there is a risk suspicion is cast too widely and an atmosphere of fear and distrust develops. Especially amongst people with greater state-invested power than perfectly good parents.

Lindsay Mitchell


Today there is an Every Child Counts conference in Wellington where Murray Edridge and Cindy Kiro will speak. Another leftist get-together to talk about child poverty and abuse. I am not a conspiracy theorist but the way this business is developing is quite clear to me.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not a conspiracy theorist either, but I sometimes wonder whether there is a connection between the number of TV programmes where some super nanny moves in with a family to sort out their child caring problems and the current moves by the Government to become ever more involved in the bringing up of children. The Governemnt would prefer as many parents as possible to work and for their children to be placed in child care centers which can only be staffed by government trained teachers, social workers are becomming more common in schools and now we have the plan to interview all children.

The thinking seems to be the Government knows best and ordinary people can't be left alone to look after their own children.

Anonymous said...

Wont happen as it will be impossible to get sufficient staff to do the interviews. Based on 50,000 births a year (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0605/S00406.htm)that would be 50,000 interviews every year at an hour each. At 40 hours per interviewer per week that would require 1250 interviewer staff. Add supervisory staff of around 200, technical staff for the database software and mobile computer hardware required and you would end up with a government department of around 1600. At $45,000 each that would be an anual wages bill of $72 Million. Plus software and hardware, office, transportation costs, etc. Close to a billion dollars for the first year. Cant see Cullen agreeing to that. That is not to mention the privacy concerns people may have nor the fact that each kids family would need to have access to their kids information stored in the database. Dead duck, next socialist policy.

Libertyscott said...

She's scary, I blogged about her grand plans a few weeks ago. She wants a plan for every child - maybe she'll do field trips to Havana and Pyongyang to see how it's done.

Anonymous said...

Heh, gerrit me old mate, you beat me to the punch. (I like these thought experiments)

But it's worse than that. They want to interview at 5, 8, 13 and 17 years old (from memory), so multiply your interviewing requirements by four.

40 hours per interviewer per week assumes someone is constantly engaged in interviewing, isn't ill, doesn't take leave, doesn't have lunch and go to the bathroom, and doesn't need to do paperwork, attend meetings, and so on. My experience is that you get about 25 productive hours out of a 40 hour week with most salaried people once you take all the non-productive stuff out.

So, we're at four times 50,000 per year which is 200,000 hours, divided by 25 hours of productive interviewing time requires 8000 interviewers.

Don't know about management and administrative overhead, but 8000 people do need to have support staff as you suggest, and larger means less efficient, so lets add 2000 for good measure. A total of 10,000 people. (Anyone know how many are employed at the IRD? CYPFS? Work And Income?)

Now, salaries are only one part of the cost of employing people. There are overheads, depreciation, and so on. General rule of thumb is that you cost about twice as much as you're being paid. You know, rent, electricity, communications, those training courses, your share of the biscuits and coffee, the white board pens you keep leaving the tops off, and so on. Allowing for supervisory and support staff to skew the average salary to 50k, the actual cost would be closer to $100k per head. So that makes it 10,000 people at 100k - $1B a year in operating cost. (wow - you were right there after all, how did you leap from $72 to $1B like that? :-)

The real fun fact is that every child already has a full-time "wellness" manager, some even have two! The parents.

On a more serious note... children are already being observed independently as soon as they enter the schooling system. So if parents are failing, between the extended family, family doctor, the playcentre, kindergarten, school and college, how do so many people turn a blind eye that the child falls between the cracks?

Why is it that in "it takes a village to raise a child", the rest of the village is no longer concerned or too afraid to get involved?

KG said...

There's a strong totalitarian streak running through this government and people like Kiro are just plain dangerous.
Kiro+Kiwi apathy=Orwellian future.

Anonymous said...

belt,

Got confused just thinking about numbers. Is a billion 100 million or 1000 million? Did my numbers as a very rough calculation as I dont know exactly what the ongoing cost were going to be. Did it more to get people thinking about the practicalities and costs of the socialist agenda. Sometimes we get caught up in the histrionics of an idea. Pays at times to step back and work out costs and resources required to see if an idea is actually practical.

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Try this.

1 interview = 1 hour

237 interviewers x 5 hours per day x 5 days per week x 40 weeks per year = 237,000 hrs/interviews (there are currently around 237,000 children in those age bands)

237 x $45,000 = $10.7 million

peanuts to socialists

Anonymous said...

Lyndsay,

I must stop trying to do calculations in my head. Far to comfusing. You are quite right would require "just" 237 interviewers. Set up costs would still be astronomical.

Just as well I dont work in stats, get fired on my first day. Will stick to running machines, they only break tools if you calculate wrong!

Interestingly the article mentioned that schools, government agencies, etc . would have access to the kids database. No mention of parents. Guess we are no longer required.

I prefer the idea of teaching parental skills at the birth of each baby. A week in a birthing unit (not neccessarily a hospital)to make sure mother gets to bond with baby and is taught the rudimentaries of looking after baby, (maybe get Dad to stay for a few nights to look after baby as well - especially those 2 oclock night feeds). Followed up by 5 years of intensive plunket care once baby is home. Money would be far wiser spent doing this.

Libertyscott said...

What's the bet that families where abuse is rampant close ranks and it becomes hard to do interviews, or social workers are hard to find to go into problem areas - far easier to visit the kids in Remuera.