Last year we had a schoolboy robbing a dairy in Kaitaia at gunpoint, and the local courthouse is still populated by a never-ending stream of violent thugs who think nothing of beating their victims to a pulp on the flimsiest of pretexts.
As another flock of pigs soars over the Far North in bright autumnal sunshine, looking for a place to land, we can be forgiven for suspecting that supposedly plummeting crime rates have everything to do with politics and nothing to do with reality, that the dispensing of justice has been hamstrung beyond all recognition by broadening the weave of the net used to catch criminals, and even more to help them avoid meaningful consequences for their actions.
If law-abiding folk are offended by this they aren't saying much. Winston Peters remarked on our placid nature last week, saying Kaitaia's response to being abandoned by Air New Zealand was to invite Barrier Air to take its place, when the community should have refused to accept the decision. He was right. And we continue to accept an unacceptable level of crime as an inevitable outcome of social ills such as unemployment, poverty and drug abuse.
Whatever is behind this plague of criminality, the solution is hardly rocket science, if difficult to achieve. Crime rates really would fall if we had lower unemployment levels, if we had a genuine answer to drug and alcohol abuse, and if we could avoid the worst effects of the curse of social welfare.
Now we hear that Child, Youth and Family is to be reformed, in part to extend its ability to offer support to children who are taken into state care. This is a good thing. It has long seemed foolish to abandon often disturbed young people to their fate once they reach the ripe old age of 17, knowing, as we do, that they are almost certain to find themselves eking out an existence on welfare and getting to know the criminal justice system. It's taken a long time for some people to realise that the system isn't working, and it won't be fixed overnight, but at least we can hope for an improvement.
The extraordinary thing, the really offensive thing, however, is that we still have politicians who harp on about families offering the solution. One such politician, who's been around longer than most, noted last week that 25 per cent of children born in New Zealand in 1978 now have a criminal record. The figures rise to 33 per cent for males and 50 per cent for Maori and Pasifika.
Peter Dunne claims that many of those criminal careers were relatively short-lived, a view that would be supported by one of Kaitaia's most experienced police officers, who insists that the Youth Court process deals with the great majority of young offenders only once in their lifetimes.
Mr Dunne is also on solid ice when he says that family circumstances play a significant role in criminal offending, and that the significance of family violence leading to severe dysfunction cannot be under-estimated. Perhaps he means over-estimated. Whatever, he says the causes of family violence are complex (no they're not) and that its impact is profound (indeed it is). And then he says the answer lies in building strong, resilient families and communities.
This after a generation or more of politicians in this country have deliberately set about dismantling the nuclear family. And none of the current crop, Mr Dunne included, show any interest in putting it back together again.
Re-establishing Mum, Dad and the kids as the typical New Zealand family, ideally with grandparents in the mix too, won't solve every problem, but it would go a long way towards reducing the likes of family violence, drug and alcohol abuse and all the woes that stem from those. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, who described democracy as the worst system of government except for all the others, the nuclear family is the worst of all social structures, except for the one that is tearing us apart in the 21st century.
At the heart of that destruction is social welfare, specifically the domestic purposes benefit. The DPB has suited the political agenda over the last 30 years and more perfectly. None of us are responsible for our own actions, none of us are to blame for whatever goes wrong, and someone else will pay whatever needs paying. We have been encouraged to think of ourselves as individuals, and to ignore our obligations to those who depend upon us, whether that be family, community or country.
Initially intended as a means of supporting married women with children who had been deserted by their husbands, the DPB has morphed into a monstrous incentive to produce children. It is the perfect manifestation of the politically-sown belief that adults have rights and no responsibilities.
Quite frankly it is offensive for a politician to talk about building strong, resilient families and communities when decades of government policies have deliberately unpicked the stitching that once held families and communities together.
It's never too late to do something, but they won't. What needs to be done, today, is to restore the DPB to its original purpose, to teach those who need to learn that becoming a parent is a responsibility above all others, to the child and to the society of which they will be a member. Mr Dunne is right when he says strong, resilient families and communities are at the heart of resolving family violence and the severe dysfunction that it leads to, but unless he's prepared to do something about restoring strength and resilience to families and communities he's wasting his breath.
And, like those who tell us that crime rates are falling, he's insulting our intelligence.
