Gordon McLauchlan: Family values nirvana a myth

COMMENT

The big public argument all week has been conducted by too many people who carry in their minds pictures of an air-brushed world: families with loving parents, one a benign father, employed and at peace with the world, the other an endlessly patient, all-wise mother.

Together parents and children indulge in a mythology called "family values" which makes them all immune to the pressure and stresses of life's vicissitudes.

In tough times, such as the Great Depression, they buckled down together and stood firm against the slings and arrows. Husbands never rioted in Queen St, or joined the Communist Party, or showed anger at what was happening, or got drunk with precious dole money and beat their wives in frustration.

When they came back from World War II, none of the men who had suffered the terror of battle and the warmth of comradeship got drunk so often that welfare agencies had to support their families. And the rampant violence inflicted in schools and which was an epidemic in the suburbs at night didn't happen.

People living in this air-brushed world can't possibly cope in a sensible way with such devastating social trauma as murdered children because their mind slips on to a sort of audio-tape loop of violin music that takes over and controls their emotions and thoughts. They won't let reality in.

Even former academic and cabinet minister Michael Bassett, a luminary with a dimmer switch, has a tape-loop that takes over his mind, leading him to platitudinous, cliche-ridden laments on the destructiveness of benefits. He talks like so many others of these mystical "family values", pretending they objectively exist and he could enunciate them.

The first time I came into close contact with this sort of tape-loop mind was 20 years ago when I was on contract for a year as public affairs consultant to Dominion Breweries, reporting directly to Sir Henry Kelliher.

He was in his 80s but still firmly holding the company's reins. He was a businesslike, abstemious and charming man, but also vain (he touched up facial blemishes with makeup) and manipulative.

He was feared by his senior staff but I got on well with him because I had no career aims within the company and he knew that he had limited power over me.

In most respects he was a normal, rational and shrewd man but, no matter what you were talking about to start with at a meeting or at lunch, something would trigger a device in his head, his eyes would glaze, the audio-loop would take over and he would explain in the most tedious detail what was wrong with the monetary system. And pretty well word for word every time.

He "bought" acolytes with hospitality and fees (and I soon realised I was one of them) so he could bore the brains out of us indulging his obsession. All he asked of us was to pretend to agree with him. I recall him defending 6 o'clock closing with: "All right, they may have got drunk but at least they went home." It was a long year.

I thought of old Sir Henry as I heard ad nauseam this week the idealisation of mum-and-dad families sheltered in the nirvana of family values. Once having projected this picture inside their heads, these people can't tell you how to attain their air-brushed world.

How do you stop men and women having affairs? How do you stop divorce? Do you outlaw alcohol? How do you stop single women having babies? By stopping the DPB even though our society is saturated in commercially sponsored sexual titillation?

Think of this: if we added up the number of sex workers and multiplied by the number of weekly clients, we would probably be amazed at how many pillars of the middle class leave their so-called family values tucked up at home.

How do you stop despair and poverty and frustration among those at the bottom of our society who feel excommunicated from it by unemployment or by degradingly low pay in an affluent society? Has all this something to do with the rampant spread of clinical depression and the burgeoning use of escapist drugs?

Don Brash has a touch of the Sir Henrys. Benefits are to blame for our lack of economic growth, he will tell you endlessly. What happens when you withdraw them? It's no longer valid to say the lazy slobs will have an incentive to get jobs. You have only to visit Brazil or the Philippines or a range of desperately disorganised countries to work that out. In those places child murder is organised.

I don't know the answer to these problems but at least I don't pretend to and can thus at least try to see the issues clearly.

It may be a start for all New Zealanders on turning 18 to be called up for six months' service in social services, prisons, mental hospitals, detoxification centres, Child, Youth and Family, the courts, food banks - a range of institutions where they would come into contact with society and its problems.

They would have less chance of accommodating unreal, tape-loop visions of the world. Won't happen, though, in our time when one's only duty is to oneself.

CYF is an easy, pot-shot target, even for some parents who are guilty of gross dereliction of responsibility to their children, but unless the "family values" dreamers can come up with some of the answers we should give the service the money, the skilled people and support it needs to prevent, where possible, the awful, extreme violence that afflicts us.