Dialogue: Starship's appeal hardly the way to make it better

By JOHN ROUGHAN

When the collection comes around at Sky City's Starlight Symphony tonight I will drop something in the bucket. It will be a token of gratitude for the event, not of confidence in the cause.

The cause this time - to combat child abuse - could not be more worthy. It is the recipient of the money that worries me.

The appeal, we read, is to complete the refurbishment of a building at the Starship children's hospital where, it is hoped, social workers, police and hospital staff will get together and compare notes.

That seems to be something they singularly failed to do in the case of little James Whakaruru, the victim of quasi-parental violence whose death galvanised us more than any other to do something, anything. But what?

If you were Lucy Lawless, you could lend your name and face to whatever project the experts proposed. Should it take the form of family guidance messages on television, you would have been ideal for it. If it was just an appeal for money, well, you could draw attention to that.

She was pictured this week visiting the Starship, taking an interest in the progress of the child abuse building and urging us again to "get off our backsides and show these kids that they have a decent chance to get through these abhorrent situations".

Her commitment is admirable. It has proved durable and it is quite brave, considering the fate of another television performer who tried to help. Liz Gunn came to grief not so much because she lined up with a campaign that turned out to feature a previous offender but because she seemed to think she could control the spin. We can't have that.

Lucy Lawless should be fine. She has attached herself to a much more media-savvy organisation. That is what worries me.

The Starship is a creature of paediatric promotion. Its very construction was a triumph of political pressure over public health priorities.

It has sustained itself with the help of a dedicated fundraising foundation and an eye for the emotional appeal. Since it deals with children, it is practically immune to criticism.

Sometimes it seems to have more fundraising energy than it knows what to do with. Its last public appeal was for money to equip the Starship with a neurosurgery unit so that children would not have to be wheeled through a tunnel to the adjacent Auckland Hospital.

There's nothing much wrong with duplicating services and investing in buildings and equipment rather than, say, radiologists and psychologists, if you are a business obliged to survive by satisfying paying customers.

But when you are a state hospital and your service is free, you really should be obliged to justify your investments against all other claims on the public purse.

No doubt the Starship is genuine in its desire to do something about child abuse. And as a children's hospital, it is well placed to do so. It is the bottom of the cliff, but if coordination of the concerned agencies is the solution, the hospital is possibly a place to start.

It would start, you might suppose, by agreement between the agencies. Instead, we read, the Starship's child abuse unit, as yet unnamed (open to bids?), has been pushed along by "ground-level, grassroots staff" without financial help from the other agencies supposedly involved.

Even the Ministry of Health has baulked. Dr Patrick Kelly, clinical director of the Starship child abuse team, said: "We repeatedly got a clear message from the ministry that there was no money for this kind of service." I wonder why.

There are three possible explanations. One, that the Starship is a lonely and brilliant beacon of hope for children in a health system run by heartless, penny-pinching curmudgeons who would short-change sick kids. That's the popular version, which the Starship publicists do not go out of their way to correct.

Another explanation could be that the ministry knows the capacity of children's health to attract voluntary donations and figures it will keep tax money for less fortunate purposes. I hope that is the reason but, if it was, you might expect at least a token of the ministry's faith in this project.

The third and more likely theory is that the mandarins took a look at the Starship's latest enterprise, found the benefits dubious beside the costs, and washed their hands of it. That is what it sounds like. Dr Kelly says his people were finally given verbal approval to go ahead on condition it was a "zero-cost option".

Zero cost to the taxpayer, he means, although nobody can guarantee that. Whatever the Starship builds, the public must keep running.

It is a curious thing that when money is forcibly taken from us in the form of taxation we take a fairly close interest in how well it will be spent. Yet when people ask politely for a voluntary donation, we don't question them too closely.

It's hard to believe a building at the Starship is going to make a difference. If the various social agencies are inclined to coordinate their efforts better, they don't need a purpose-built suite to meet in.

The standard explanation for failures in social services is that somebody has "fallen through the cracks". It can give the most fearful problems a tidy, mechanistic solution, which is always more coordination, more meetings.

The solution probably lies in outlawing all parental violence but the Government is ducking that.

Lying in the Domain with a hundred thousand people, the wine cool, the night warm, feeling lucky, you must put something in the bucket. It seems all anyone can do.