Clark to make national address
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Clark to make national address
Helen Clark will be taking the election campaign stage in Auckland on Wednesday morning for a State of the Nation speech, less than a day after a similar speech by National Party leader John Key. The Prime Minister was unimpressed by Key's speech, saying it lacked ambition and was too narrow. The National Party leader outlined his solutions to stop youth crime. They included bootcamp for delinquents, child raising lessons for bad parents, and making 12 year-olds face court. Clark says youth will be a particular focus of her speech as well.
And that’s because youth are the new enemy, see you could attack brown people once upon a time and blame everything on them, but garden variety bigotry doesn’t really play to a wider audience than white people, so we moved onto prisoners being the enemy, they were to blame for everything and the harder you treated them, the higher your poll numbers, problem is that years of failed over crowding policies have turned our prisons into corrupt, violent and racist places where few get rehabilitated and most come out worse, so much so that even Politicians don’t bother crowing about locking up prisoners anymore as most accept the entire thing is a fiasco, so now we have youth to blame, and the solutions? Paramilitary bootcamps, enforced re-education and putting children in court and prison – what genius and inspired leadership, this isn’t ‘youth policy’ it’s law and order policy disguised as youth policy aimed at adult voters who are frightened by the latest media induced fear campaign – the majority of our youth are great, but no where did John Key mention that in his speech, where is the REAL youth policy John? What are you doing for the students graduating with $28 000 in debt? What are you doing for youth media, where is the Youth Radio Network, Christ how about just getting faster broadband, that would have a bigger and more positive effect on youth than forcing the military to create bootcamps. When society is frightened by the ramifications of their poor investment into the under class and the brewing violence that spawns, best to blame the kids.
posted by Bomber @ 6:51 am
5 comments
5 Comments:
On the flipside, I deal with military guys nearly every day. A lot of them have come from backgrounds where there was no expectation of education, in fact few expectations at all. They often come from areas well associated with gangs and criminality, and yet, going through the military training system has taught them to have pride in themselves, their appearance and uniform, to be part of a team, often taught them a trade and even basic stuff such as how to iron a shirt and brush their teeth. In addition for many it has probably raised them to the highest level of physical fitness they have ever enjoyed. Its hard to see how this can be a bad thing.
Bomber,
Why do you deliberately distort what people say? Why not actually rationally look at what Key is saying?
One of the reasons Barack Obama is refreshing is that he doesn't try to demonise his opponents.
You refer to 'para-military bootcamps'. Well, this was actually recommended by the 2002 Ministerial Taskforce on Youth Offending:
http://www.justice.govt.nz/pubs/reports/2002/youth-offending-strategy/ministerial-report/section-2.html
"Army Initiatives
The Taskforce wants the youth justice sector to be able to benefit more from the resources and programmes provided by the Army. It believes that the skills and disciplines promoted by the Army have the potential to have a beneficial impact on youth offending.
The Army has examined how its current programmes could be better targeted towards young offenders and has identified two programmes, the Limited Services Volunteer Scheme and Youth Life Skills, that could be developed further to meet the needs of at risk youth.
The Limited Service Volunteers (LSV) scheme was primarily designed as an employment programme, but is known to have positive effects on behaviour and offending patterns. This programme is run in conjunction with the Ministry of Social Development. Burnham Camp in Christchurch has the capacity to handle up to 1704 LSV trainees per year based on six residential courses, each of six weeks, with 284 trainees on each course.
Youth Life Skills (YLS) courses specifically target 14 to 18 year olds and provide training in skills designed to improve a persons integration with the community. The Army could provide 75 YLS residential courses per annum, each of five days duration with 20 students on each course for a total of 1500 students per annum. Fifty of these courses would be conducted in the North Island and 25 in the South Island."
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Could you explain why the military have said they don't want to run the bootcamps then? And with the military running them, arn't they in fact paramilitary bootcamps? How is describing boot camps that young people are forced to go to run by a military who don't want to run them suddenly anti-Obama? Isn't this law and order policy wrapped up as youth policy?
That carrot will be accompanied by a stick barring youths in this age group from receiving benefits unless they are genuinely too sick to take up training, education or work?
you can't blame the youth, you can't fool the youth
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