Media Statement
For immediate release Monday, 24 May, 2004

Turner: Family teams sound suspiciously familiar

The Government's plan to pilot family safety teams to ensure collaboration between the police, CYFS and other agencies is a direct pick-up from the United Future policy paper released last month, United Future's Judy Turner said today.

"And that is tremendous. It shouldn't matter where the ideas come from, but as we pointed out last month, the only solutions that can work here are radical because the problems are so huge," Mrs Turner said.

"United Future has been advocating for closer links between the police and CYFS, particularly in light of stories of child prostitution in Christchurch this year where CYFS basically said they would only get involved when the police asked them, and the Jetson-Aplin case where the police were called out 18 times on domestic violence matters, but no referral made to CYFS.

"If these situations become a thing of the past, then wherever the Government gets its ideas is fine by us," she said.

Ends.

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>