Using police as arbiters of family disputes

Here's a familiar statement from today's NZ Herald:

Statistics show New Zealand has the highest rate of intimate partner violence in the OECD and on average police respond to a family violence incident every five minutes.

Do the maths. That's just over 105,000 'incidents' annually.

But here are some other stats to lay alongside.

Annual imprisonments for:

Acts intending to cause injury - 1,387
Sexual assault and related offences - 434
Dangerous or negligent acts endangering persons - 77
Homicide and related offences - 50
Abduction, harassment and other offences against the person - 189

All of the above might result from family violence incidents. I have purposefully gone to the other extreme ie the worst offences as demonstrated by an imprisonment outcome.

So a maximum of 2,137 men and women are imprisoned due to family violence incidents.

I understand that many many more will be charged and prosecuted and sentenced to lesser punishments but my thesis remains (as it does with child abuse and neglect statistics).

A good chunk of the calls to police represent individuals resorting to authority arbitration and administration of family disputes. As people have increasingly become dependent on the 'benevolent' welfare state so they have lost the initiative and intelligence to sort their own shit out.

High unemployment decides election outcomes?

Mike Hosking had a piece in the NZ Herald suggesting that National will be in trouble in 2017 if unemployment is over 6 percent.

He may be right. Below are the last four changes of government and what was happening with the unemployment rates at the time. Govt change happens when unemployment is 'relatively' high and trending up. The only exception on the trend was when National lost in 1999, but the downward trend was very slow and patchy through out the second half of the 1990s:



26 July 1984  (NA by current measurement but unemployment benefit numbers rising with a bullet)
2 November 1990    8%      trending up
10 December 1999  6.8%   trending down
19 November 2008  6.3%    trending up

"Won't someone please think of the childless?"

So said "libertarian" senator David Leyonhjelm from NSW supporting legislation to remove welfare from parents who won't immunise their children.

The central issue aside, what a difference to NZ discourse:

"To the childless people of Australia, I want to say, on behalf of this Parliament, thank you for being childless.
"You work for more years and become more productive than the rest of Australia. You pay thousands and thousands of dollars more tax than other Australians. You get next to no welfare ...
"But you pay when other people get pregnant, you pay when they give birth, you pay when they stay at home to look after their offspring ..." Senator Leyonhjelm said.
The Liberal Democrat said that he was sorry than instead of receiving thanks, Australians without children were "often ignored, pitied, considered strange, or even thought of as irresponsible".
"For your sake, I hope the children you are forced to support don't end up as juvenile delinquents, and I hope that they get immunised so that you don't end up getting sick. Because you'll pay then, too." 

I suppose the immediate objection is that a "libertarian" senator would not support the state forcing parents to immunise their children. But the state isn't. It is withdrawing other people's money from those who refuse to.

Further dumbing-down at RadioLive

The only remaining reason I listen to RadioLive is disappearing.

Veteran broadcaster Sean Plunket has been axed from RadioLive's morning talkback show – and it is believed he could be replaced by long-time colleague Mark Sainsbury.

When MediaWorks sacked John Tamihere they killed the intellectual bite from the afternoon show. Now they are going to purge the pithy wit and humour that is Plunket.

Just what sort of audience they are seeking is a mystery to me. That stands to reason though, because I'm not it.

I wish I'd never read this

Don't read this story of child abuse and murder if you don't want to start your day depressed.

Throughout I felt angry until the last line:

It is understood she has now had a baby with a new partner since her release from prison.

Then I just felt very sad.

Remember this one next time you hear some feminist bleeding-heart lecturing about the sanctity of female reproductive rights.