Garth George: Courage needed to dig us out of worsening mire

Auckland city. Photo / Richard Robinson

If you don't believe that we are living in a topsy-turvy country that would make Alice's Wonderland look sane, and if you don't believe that we as a nation are deeply in the shit and digging ourselves deeper, then you haven't been reading, watching or listening to the news.

For years the media have been sounding increasingly strident alarms, but save for a few of us no one is listening, let alone devising answers to all the things, social and economic, that are driving us towards destruction.

Let's take a look at just three newspapers published over the past 10 days - this one, the Herald on Sunday and the Sunday Star-Times.

On March 28 the Herald informed us on its front page that children as young as 9 are among hundreds of girls and boys under 16 being treated by specialist clinics for alcohol and drug addiction, an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year. And that's just in Auckland.

On the same day we are informed that Auckland City's debt is $4 billion, the equivalent of $8000 per ratepayer, yet more borrowing is planned, and that ratepayers are paying $56 million for two new city (super?) computer systems.

Further in we learned that Kiwi doctors are hopping across the Tasman for the weekend and earning $8000 or more for just two days' work.

And in the same paper: nearly one-third of patients with bowel cancer have to wait too long for treatment in Auckland because of delays in diagnostic tests.

The next day a survey reports that 60 per cent of workers either hate their jobs or couldn't care less about them as long as they are paid and simply go through the motions, giving a level of productivity far below their abilities.

That, unfortunately, says as much about our employers as it does of our underperforming workers. For the last 30 years of my fulltime working life, my job was simply a means of obtaining the wherewithal to do other things. But I gave it my best shot because I was appreciated, well-paid and well-looked after.

That same day we are reminded that the Rugby World Cup is costing Auckland ratepayers $100 million and the next day that another $3.2 million is required to cater for games transferred from Christchurch.

That money, which will never be recovered no matter what the optimists say, should be found by the promoters of this trivial event.

The sentence of a non-parole period of only 11 years for the multimillionaire murderer Greg Meads, who shotgunned his wife in the throat, was met by most of us with jaw-dropping amazement.

Did the judge lower the sentence because Meads is paying $65,000 compensation? Is that all a human life is worth?

The Herald on Sunday thoroughly spoiled our breakfasts with the front-page screamer "Starving boy eats roach" telling of an 8-year-old lad who, with his three siblings, was living in abject poverty and eating "crunchy and juicy" cockroaches.

As we munched on our bacon and eggs, hotcakes, porridge with brown sugar and cream, toast or, heaven forbid, muesli, most of us gave only a passing thought to the tens of thousands of Kiwi families who live in abject poverty and didn't that day even have a tin of baked beans between them.

The Sunday Star-Times informed us that Chief Families Commissioner Carl Davidson reckoned family violence incidents looked to have "turned the corner" in spite of a 1.2 per cent increase in recorded family violence assaults in a year.

I don't know what fairyland this guy lives in. Does he not read the newspapers which, day by day, record horrific examples of violence in families, in schools, in shopping malls and in the streets? Anti-violence campaigns are working, he says. Tell me another one.

And so it goes on: Violence involving teenage girls is on the rise. Prostitutes as young as 12 are still parading the streets of South Auckland; 827 children aged 10 to 13 and 64 under-9s were apprehended for assault last year and a Government adviser says they're only the tip of a very big iceberg, that up to 47,000 in the school system have significant behavioural problems.

The Government is borrowing at the rate of $300 million a week which, even to an economic illiterate like me, is obviously unsustainable. The Government bailout of South Canterbury Finance is heading for an astronomical $1.2 billion. The aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake is soaking up vast amounts of money - most of it borrowed - and poor Bill English is trying to write a Budget that doesn't let the world know we're bankrupt.

There are solutions to all these festering problems. The trouble is that those solutions would require courage, commitment and sacrifice on the part of us all.

And I don't think those virtues exist any more in the vocabulary of many New Zealanders.

garth.george@hotmail.com