Wrong Laws.

For those of you who are fans of my usual glib approach to life, the universe and everything - I apologise, because this isn't really one of those posts. Every now and then an article appears in a newspaper that not only infuriates me, but makes me physically ill that someone was paid to make racist, debased and dangerous remarks in a format that will be read and considered by hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. Michael Laws, former National MP, current mayor of Whanganui and all-round muppet, wrote an article in last weeks Sunday Star-Times that not only fits that previous description, but may have set a new low for gutter 'columnism' in any newspaper, ever.

The article was entitled 'The Liberal Shame' and if you want to read it, follow this link. But I'd strongly discourage you from reading it, because in reading it you would be giving his views a modicum of legitimacy that they not deserve. Laws's rants about the general inferiority of 'the brown underclass', declares that there were certain types of people who shouldn't breed (and if we cut through Laws's subtext, these people are generally brown and poor) and states, with all the hubris of a man who has spent three years in parliament AND got to be on Celebrity Treasure Island TWICE, that the 'liberal' approach to crime and raising families and building a society has failed. That he holds this opinion and deems fit to air it in the marketplace of ideas is bad enough, but in making his remarks through the prism of Nia Glassie's torture and murder, Laws shows a remarkably twisted propensity for cynical opportunism.

But I realise in making this criticism, particulary with the degree of vehemence, I will be amongst a very small minority of New Zealanders. The sad tale of 3-year old Nia Glassie, beaten, tortured, swung from the clothesline, put in the dryer has haunted and revulsed New Zealanders in a way that I have seen very few high-profile murder cases do. Many New Zealanders feel hatred and contempt for Nia's killers, and Laws in this respect was providing a summary of these views, albeit in a way that is spiteful, racist and socially poisonous.

I share this contempt for Nia's killers, I do not know how I could not. But I fail to see, as many of my fellow countrymen see, and as Michael Laws saw fit to publish, that the Nia Glassie case is proof that our society (or at least the poor, brown bits of it) has become more violent, and this 'extra violence' is the result of namby-pamby 'liberal' (say the word liberal with an extra helping of contempt for good measure) policy-makers, who have 'mollycoddled' violent youths and Maori society to the point where they share Nia's blood on their hands. Firstly, I maintain, but with an increasingly less secure conviction, that the recent spate of child abuse cases in the media are not inexorable proof of a society that is getting more violent. Of course there are more cases of such abuse appearing in the media in 2008 than in 1968, that's the inevitable result of a total increase in population. But a sudden spate of child abuse cases does not suggest to me that the underclass woke up one morning and decided to get more violent. It suggests that there have been a series of hideous coincidences throughout 2008. Or to be more cynical, it shows that media outlets -realising that stories about child abuse sell more papers - are getting more efficient at rooting these stories out.

But even if I am wrong with my previous point, and I'm not even certain myself as to whether I am correct, I'd argue that if society has 'broken down' in New Zealand's poorest, urban areas this definitely should not be seen as a failure of a system of 'liberal' policies. What seems more likely is that society is getting more violent not because the policies have been too liberal, because they have not been liberal enough. When you have a society that says that it is ok that people who are poor and the children of people who are poor can be denied opportunity because if they are poor, it is possibly a proxy for them being inferior (or worse, lazy) then of course you have widely disproportionate inequalities. And when you have a poorly educated 'underclass', with limited resources and no safety net provided by government to give them a competive go in life, and when you slash funding to groups that dispense advice and monitor first time parents then it follows that people who grew up in a culture of violence as a way of discipline will subject their children to the same abuse they suffered. When lobby groups call for the unfettered ability of parents to raise their children in whatever way they see fit, then it follows that more parents will see that what is unconcsionable abuse in our eyes as just showing loving and necessary discipline to their own children.

If a tendency towards 'more child abuse' in New Zealand society exists, and is not just the result of a few horrific coincidences then the people that have blood on their hands are not those who believe in 'education' and 'being politically correct'. The people who have blood on their hands are people like Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley, who slashed social welfare in New Zealand in the early 1990's, or people like Laws himself, who fail to see that screaming 'STERILISE THE POOR, AND DEATH PENALTY TO CHILD KILLERS' misses all sorts of points, most notably that you cannot solve a problem unless you are prepared to adress the underlying causes, rather than just create a media panic when the symptons of wider social failure appear in the cold, hard form of Nia Glassie's dead body.

It would be laughable, if it were not so reprehensible, that Laws attempts to play anthropologist, limiting the problem to that of a brown underclass, and littering his turgid dross of a column with overtones of racism - declaring that we have to stop getting all culturally sensitive and letting Maori think they can solve their own problems. It is true that almost all of the defendants in these cases have surnames like Kahui and Pailegutu, not Smith or Jones. And is true that in some Pacific Island cultures and maybe even in the Maori culture, a greater level of physical discipline is considered more culturally acceptable, which flies in the face of the rights of all children to be protected from harm. But what is not true is the brown parents are worse than white parents. It speaks volumes for the Anglosupremacist attitudes that pervades Laws peice that he begins by describing the underclass as a brown underclass and ends by describing it as feckless and stupid. It seems for Laws, and more sadly for numerous other New Zealand that 'brown' and 'stupid' and 'brown' and 'violent' are interchangeable adjectives. 'Poor' and 'uneducated' is perhaps more fitting, as this is a problem that needs to be solved with changing cultural norms in Pacific Island communities that child violence is not ok, and being willing to pump public resources into ensuring that at-risk families recieve government help.

Laws thinks the answer is forced sterilisation and the death penalty. For a man who spent much of 2008 declaring that the law that says you cannot smack your children for the purposes of correction, or that to save water resources showers were limited to 15 minutes was an overly invasive intrusion into private life by a nanny state , this is a quite remarkable turnaround. But it is a turnaround conducted with a nod to the inherent superiority of white people, and with a nod to the white and wealthy constitutents that elected him mayor of Whanganui. And it is a turnaround that while attempting to adress a very real and very worrying problem in New Zealand, arrives at almost the complete opposite to what is needed. He talks of the liberal shame, but he advocates a cynical, muddle-headed, disgraceful and illiberal sham. Shame on him.

Alex