Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Sam and John and national morality

While we were at Beyond the Borders over the weekend someone broke into our parked and locked car. Sam, I will call him, in defiance of the flashing alarm, smashed up the ignition barrel. The engine immoboliser defeated him so he satisfied himself with stealing some items carefully stored under a seat and covered with some coats artlessly tossed on the floor. (We have done our time in Community Patrol and do make an effort when we are forced to leave stuff in the car!).

Naturally, this event, probably born of Sam's boredom and mischief rather than malice or greed, led many of our friends to sermonise briefly on the deplorable moral attitude of many of our (young!) people. But the news of the terrible shooting of two social welfare workers in Ashburton has directed my thinking down a different path.

Reading the background of the story does not provide a simple explanation. "John" is obviously a very complex character with profound and distressing medical problems. The appropriate agencies seem to have tried hard to assist him. His behaviour had already involved them and him with the Police. Perhaps the whole situation was irretrievable when he first returned to this country without work.

But what this awful situation brings to my mind is a different age in state social services. I think back to the Woodhouse report of 1971 and the subsequent attempts to set Government support at a level which would enable beneficiaries to live something like a normal NZ lifestyle. I remember the years when the state actually delivered an extra two weeks' income for all beneficiaries at Christmas.

Where has that country gone? What has brought about the conditions in which we, as a nation, have accepted systemic failure to deliver proper care and protection to unfortunates like John and the two public servants he callously shot. What led us to accede to the Benefit Cuts of the 1990s?

At the Beyond the Borders we were reminded that the measure of a country is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable members. For me, that will be a primary issue as I cast my votes in this month's elections.

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