Deborah Coddington: Calling a fatty a fatty is best way to beat obesity

In most people's language, "not succeeding" has the same meaning as "failing". Except Education Minister Steve Maharey, that is, who speaks his own special dialect with etymology from Planet Bureaucrat.

The Education Review Office, the last bastion of accountability in educational officialdom, reports one in five children are not succeeding. That's no surprise to thousands of parents who have corrected misplaced apostrophes, spelling mistakes and atrocious grammar - and that's just in the school reports written by teachers.

Nonetheless, the education select committee will conduct an investigation to tell us what we already know and Maharey has directed the head of the ERO not to interpret his finding as "one in five kids failing".

We're not allowed to mention the F word any more. Telling someone they've failed an exam might hurt their feelings, so we brought in the NCEA, and now kids leave school not having failed anything. Ever. They can trot off to a professional CV writer who'll type up a resume, run it through the spell-check and, on paper, we have thousands of perfect little graduates.

Until employers actually take them on and discover they think accommodation is spelled with one m; Hugo Chavez is the latest brand of menswear; paying no interest for 12 months on a purchase saves money; and the word "like" must be used at least six times in every spoken sentence.

The rude shock awaiting them is crueller than if someone had taken them aside years earlier and taught them failure is not a dirty word, but something to be used as a learning tool. Nobody succeeds without overcoming failure.

But anti-discrimination laws are coming back to bite us on our big fat bottoms - or at least those of more than half the nation. The Health Ministry says more than a third of New Zealanders over 15 are overweight and another fifth are obese. Health Minister Pete Hodgson, who warns of lives crippled by diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and crumbling hip and knee joints, will throw $76 million at "fighting obesity".

But hang on. For more than a decade, calling someone "fatty" has been viewed as emotional abuse. Employees' personal grievance cases have flourished. Since the Human Rights Act was passed in 1993, it's been illegal to discriminate on the grounds of "physical disability or impairment".

Parents, especially guilt-ridden mothers like me, have been told not to caution their children against over-eating lest they turn anorexic. In fact, we don't eat any more junk food these days than we did 50 years ago, it's just that we don't exercise as much - especially the kids.

This nation's ridiculous obsession for eliminating all risk from children's lives must take the blame for their decrease in physical activity.

Don't believe me? Take a look at a kids' playground these days, it's all soft landings, curving slides - nothing with any excitement, that's for sure.

Where once every kid at school had to do the cross-country, athletic sports or learn to swim, now they're excused if they have a sniffle, are getting their period, or just fat and lazy. One school north of Auckland decided, in order to be fair, the girl who won the cross-country actually came last, while the slow girl who panted in at the rear of the field was declared the winner.

In Otago, a rural school was visited by officials and told it must remove playground trees because children might fall out and break an arm and bad people might lurk behind them waiting to snatch children.

If you believe the ads, good mothers allow no germs near their children. They put antibiotics in the laundry, gel-wash little hands that pat dogs, and sterilise highchairs and benchtops to hospital standards. And then we wonder why kids can't build up their natural immunity.

Take risk away from kids and they'll invent their own. When our family moved from carefree Russell to live in Auckland, two of my bored-with-the-city children (I was horrified to discover years later) would sneak into the Newmarket train tunnel and flatten themselves against the wall when a train went through. I hereby apologise profusely to the justifiably furious train drivers.

A study is being launched on whether teenagers who play "chicken" on the motorway will move on to dice with death in souped-up fast cars.

Could it be they're unchallenged watching telly, playing spacies and skateboarding in OSH-approved parks? Or maybe, like success and failure, they don't know about cause and effect.

I'm not advocating we all go round being gratuitously nasty to each other - there's enough of that on the internet and National Radio. But isn't it time to be more honest? Isn't a little hurt now - telling Mum her kids are too fat - better than a big hurt later when obese young adults with no self-confidence console themselves with more pies and chips?

Steve Maharey can fudge the language as much as he likes but antonyms and synonyms will always be with us. Just like success and failure.