KEY POINTS:
I wonder if there will ever in this country be a return to the concept of personal responsibility. I wonder how long it will take enough of us to get sick of the blame game and take it upon ourselves to do what we can individually to put things right.
We certainly can't look to our political "leaders", simply because we don't have any. What we have is bosses and managers and administrators and they, too, are only too quick to point the finger at other people or circumstances for the messes they get themselves and the country into.
In fact the rot that is the lack of personal responsibility starts these days at the top, for no matter how many foul-ups Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats make, they no longer take the rap.
Sure, David Benson-Pope has disappeared into the backbenches, but I'll wager it wasn't voluntary. It's the time it took, considering the number of strikes against him, that makes my point.
And the senior bureaucrats who aided and abetted him in the matter of Madeleine Setchell are still in their jobs, including Environment Ministry chief Hugh Logan and the prince of all mandarins, the reclusive State Services Commissioner, Mark Prebble.
At the other end of the scale we have the sister of the Hastings 17-year-old, who died when his car, pursued by police, hit a bridge, saying the police must take some blame.
For what? The kid was on a restricted licence but was carrying a passenger and had failed to pull over when directed by a police patrol car.
The police need have no qualms about that pursuit, or about most of the others which have led to fatalities or injuries in the past six months or so, except for the one in which the cop car hit a lamp post which landed on a young man's head.
And it ill behoves this newspaper and others to be carping on about police pursuits in terms that lead us to infer that the cops are in the wrong. They're not; they're simply doing the job we pay them to do and we'd complain like hell if they let these stupid young speed freaks do as they please.
We are all - except for those who are mentally incapable - responsible for our own actions, and that applies as much to prime ministers as it does to child abusers and boy racers.
One reason we lack personal responsibility is that we lack leadership, and I wholeheartedly agree with Christine Rankin that New Zealanders don't understand leadership.
If we had genuine leadership in the areas it really matters - particularly in central and local government, the public services and business - we would not be facing many of the social problems that blight our lives day in and day out.
Because, as Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, "Leadership [is] the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he [or she] wants to do it".
We were given some wonderfully heart-warming examples of real leadership a few weeks ago in this newspaper's series "Schools battling back".
There we read of a number of low-decile schools pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and achieving outstanding results - and in each case the catalyst was the leadership of an individual.
* Lin Avery at Glen Taylor primary in Glen Innes (that school's third principal in nine months), who has substantially lowered staff turnover and mightily increased pupil performance.
* Shirley Maihi and school nurse Meri Ormsby at Finlayson Park in Manurewa, who have attacked glue ear and other hearing problems to make it easier for kids to learn.
* Phil Palfrey at Manurewa East, who leads from the front in his sports gear during compulsory organised lunchtime games which have, among other things, raised student self-esteem and done away with schoolyard bullying.
If there were ever an area in which real leadership is needed it is in education, for it is our children who will shape the future. It doesn't help, of course, that most teachers are in thrall to their reactionary unions, the NZEI and the PPTA, which continue to insist that all teachers are equal.
They remind me of a statement by the owner of one of the greatest minds in history, Albert Einstein, who said: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
If ever a nation needed leaders of vision it is this one at this time. For as the book of Proverbs says: "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
And the evidence is that we as a people are perishing.
