The Government's refusal to take part in a conference on child abuse last week - because it was organised by the National Party - continues to disappoint people in the field.
The subject was raised again at an Auckland mayoral forum on Monday, where successive Governments were blamed for a lack of leadership, funds and communication between agencies concerned with child abuse.
The Coalition's no-show was also a setback to hopes for a more consensual style of politics that were raised by the adoption of MMP. If ever there was a subject suited to bipartisan solutions, it is child abuse.
The public has read and heard of sufficient cases in recent years to know it happens in all sections of society, town and country, rich and poor, Maori and Pakeha.
No party, and no branch of the public service, seems to have much idea of how to tackle the problem. Yet the Minister of Social Welfare would not even allow his senior social worker to present a paper to the gathering at Parliament last Saturday.
The official's attendance was inappropriate, said Steve Maharey, because the conference appeared to be part of the National Party's policy development process.
Let us hope that is exactly what the conference was about. We have not seen an Opposition take an initiative like this in a long time.
The reason it rarely happens no doubt is that any good ideas an Opposition develops can easily be taken over by the Government and dressed up as its own.
Labour and the Alliance have ample time to do that with any proposals they heard last weekend.
But the worst part of Mr Maharey's response was that, in regard to public servants, it was strictly true. Public servants are obliged to serve the Government and constitutionally they have been unable to offer advice to another party.
Nevertheless, under MMP that convention has already been relaxed in at least one respect to allow public servants to brief prospective coalition partners, and it would seem possible to allow them to present a paper to a public conference, no matter who organised it.
They would, of course, need their minister's approval and they would probably feel unable to contribute anything that did not accord with the Government's view.
But within those constraints, they could offer something useful and it is high time the rules of the public service were updated to allow that.
It ought to be possible under MMP to develop a degree of consensus in many areas of social policy. Superannuation is an obvious example.
The public has been pleading for an end to political tampering with arrangements that need to be stable and certain for a working lifetime. In education and healthcare, too, we have seen policies come and go with each change of Government.
Labour and Alliance came to power promising the minimum of upheaval, recognising that the public service was traumatised by constant reform and the public was deeply disaffected by it.
Yet the Government seems to be pushing on with a redesign of school examinations that is deeply flawed. And in health, it set about refashioning the system just as practitioners were beginning to settle into workable arrangements distilled from the previous Government's half-baked reform.
See-saw policy in areas that cry out for long-term planning does the nation no good. If the major parties replaced their point-scoring attitudes with a consensus approach to core principles they might be surprised by the public reaction. And coalition government might take on a new maturity.
Herald Online feature: Violence at home
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