Paula Bennett almost makes me long for her former Nat counterpart Roger Sowry.
Well, maybe not. I have never forgotten the desperation on his face when I bailed him up once by a coffee pot at a meeting in the Manawatu, regaling him about the endangered species of voluntary workers and the perils of governments taking them for granted.
Poor old Roge. Surely he was not bored with my diatribe. He was probably just dehydrated and longing for a drink. It was a hot day, after all.
I am unlikely to have a similar experience at any gathering with Paula. I doubt I would get a word in edgewise and she is so familiar with arguing black is white, what would be the point?
Her breath-taking ability to defend the indefensible - the futility of boot camps for young criminals the latest example of that - would mean my best course would be to sail silently past the coffee pot, relieving my frustration with some demented dunking of a calming camomile tea bag.
She has put out a green paper on children for us to respond to by the end of February.
Such opportunities may make us feel aglow with our own importance, but haven't we been down this track before?
In Roge's time in the late 1990s we were all sent the Towards A Code of Social and Family Responsibility, a document which traversed much of the same territory, it seems to me.
It attracted 94,303 responses which were duly pored over and analysed to some degree by a team of 80 (State Services Minister Tony Ryall would hyperventilate about such a backroom workforce ) and put in a report.
Ten concepts were identified for the Government to develop, but I don't recall hearing anything more about it.
The concepts were mostly nebulous researching better ways of housing extended families, for instance. Other ideas included looking at giving the courts powers to make parents set curfews and attend parenting courses, improving child health services by taking the services to disadvantaged children and their families and getting health, welfare, housing and education agencies working together, more early intervention, improving life skills education for teenagers and better information for parents about shared parenting after relationships broke down.
In today's document, Paula talks endlessly about vulnerable children rather than the disadvantaged of yesteryear.
The term vulnerable child suggests a lip-trembling beautiful creature, eyes about to fill with tears whom we would all want to hug, much more appealing than the vision of a disadvantaged child who might possibly be grubby and, worse, poor.
Strangely, poverty is not something which gets much space in Paula's paper beyond acknowledgement that nearly 20% of New Zealand children live in it and that this can affect learning ability.
Instead of a code, we are now being asked about a Vulnerable Children's Action Plan and going over stuff we seem to have been over ad nauseam, such as how much monitoring (tracking) of those considered vulnerable should be allowed?
Are we to believe there is not already plenty of opportunity to identify children at risk?
And while sharing of relevant information by professionals always sounds good, what comeback will hapless families have if they are hounded as a result of incorrect or incomplete information?
Again we are rehashing the complex question of mandatory reporting of child abuse by doctors and others. What constitutes child abuse? Giving your kids bruises by hitting them? How about washing their mouths out with soap because they've been swearing? Feeding them nothing but junk food as they sit in front of television for hours and virtually guaranteeing they will be obese ?
In a country which cannot agree about whether hitting your kids to discipline them is OK, what hope is there that responses to the green paper will clarify anything?
People already doing sensible things to improve the lot of children at risk should be known to the Government. Can't Paula get together with Sir Peter Gluckman and work out what stacks up and what doesn't and tell us before the election?
I am sure he could have told her about the stupidity of boot camps before she started.
If she's merely after wild and wacky ideas she could save time by going back to the code's response paper - it's all there, including outing absent fathers by publishing their names on the sides of milk cartons (milk was possibly cheaper then), public flogging and castration for sex offenders, taxing people according to their body weight, licensing of parents and punishing of those deemed bad, mandatory bedtimes for children and imprisoning or publicly humiliating parents of truants.
It even has that old favourite, compulsory military training.
Boot camps writ large. Paula will know they have to be good for us.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
