"Yesterday I attended the Wellington People's Centre symposium on the DPB," says Lindsay Mitchell, Petitioner for a Parliamentary review of the DPB. " I heard a great deal about beneficiaries freedom to choose to stay home with their children for as long as their children needed them there. No consideration was given to the taxpayer's freedom of choice to stay home with their children or indeed start their own families. I heard a great deal about the right to be heard yet I was denied the right to speak."

"Speakers expressed agitation that the rights of lesbian single mothers to co-habit are about to be withdrawn. Heterosexual single mothers on the other hand have always been denied this ' right.' "

"It was the opinion of one who was invited to speak that New Zealand is not replacing it's population therefore we must pay people to breed. I wonder if it crossed this person's mind that many working families are limiting the number of children they have because the tax they are paying to fund, amongst other things the DPB, is severely limiting their own resources?".

"The viewpoint that questions why one person should be made to pay for another's 'tastes' in having children was dismissed as a very poor view. I put it to this group", concludes Lindsay Mitchell,"that if we keep up this forced state funding of single parent families, which are non-viable economic units yet outgrowing nuclear families, we will all be very poor."

Lindsay Mitchell
DPB Petitioner

ph/fx 04 562 7944
e-mail dandl.mitchell@clear.net.nz

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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>>