EDITORIAL: Cindy Kiro's `remedy' is a bitter pill

Why can't Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro seize the sword by the hilt in her fight against child abuse?
The motivation seems decent enough - to stop the sorry roll of battered children. But the method - subjecting every family to state scrutiny - is not only tragically inefficient and woundingly presumptuous but it also sidesteps the causes.
In a scheme estimated to cost $5million-a-year, Commissioner Kiro wants every newborn's parents or caregivers to nominate an authorised provider to assess the family's progress through home visits.
Those who refuse will be referred to welfare. Briefing papers for the plan are being written for presentation to the Government's task force for action on family violence, which last week launched a $14million campaign to fight domestic violence.
Dr Kiro's proposal is based on the findings of a 2005 report written by Auckland University researcher Janet Fanslow, who says home visits are one of the only proven methods to reduce the child abuse rate.
Those in the commissioner's corner would point out that there is a compelling need to be resolute when so few straightforward solutions are available. In such a helpless vacuum, anything looks better than babies being tortured to death by ignorant or nasty people, many of whom are not much more than children themselves.
The reason so many young and otherwise appallingly ill-equipped people are having babies needs more thorough diagnosis. So, too, the policies that conspire to perpetuate the problem need closer examination.
However, the doctor's prescription is not for the potent medicine that child abuse sorely needs but for bureaucratic sheep-dipping on the basis that all young families could do with a dose, just to be on the safe side. Little wonder, then, that widespread irritation has greeted her plans for aggressive, blanket state intervention, when targeting is paramount.
Plunket, that highly effective and much-admired Kiwi institution, but which has been abandoned by the Government, could have been the key to ensuring future generations of healthy, happy babies. Instead, Dr Kiro's plan requires the suspension of disbelief that state agencies know best how to raise children. And she intends to do that by treating parents as infants. The coercive threat means all will come to dread the knock of the government official. State remedies, thus applied, themselves become a kind of disease.
What makes the plan particularly odious is that it is sustained by the view that all are equally to blame for society's faults. The individual is submerged into the collective "we". The collectivist view not only lets wrongdoers off the hook but it also means the charge of incompetence or cruelty by the few can be levied at everyone.
Sadly, Dr Kiro's idea for stopping the abuse of babies is as clumsy, brutish and offensive as the child-rearing methods it expects to correct.