Turner: Family problems defined, but short on solutions

The Business Roundtable’s foray into families with the book Family Matters is strong on diagnosis but short on treatment, United Future family affairs spokeswoman Judy Turner said today.

“The book provides a very thorough pathology of New Zealand family breakdown. However, it doesn’t really take the next step,” Mrs Turner said.

She welcomed the laying down of the challenge to create policy that supports intact families, saying that United Future had moved the whole parliamentary process in that direction in this term of Parliament, most notably in the creation of the Families Commission.

“In fact, the focus of the book parallels the early priorities set by the Families Commission,” she said.

In stating that the ‘family is the necessary engine to stimulate human capital in the next generation’, the author, Patricia Morgan, touches on thinking that is at the very heart of United Future’s belief that the family context has been overlooked by successive governments.

“And again, having the Families Commission means we now have a body specifically charged with bringing family interests into centre-stage of government thinking.

United Future’s income-splitting tax policy was also hugely consistent with putting families first, Mrs Turner said.

Ends.

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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>>