Wellington emergency medical specialist Paul Quigley talked on Radio NZ this morning about what it’s like to work there on a weekend when 70% of the admissions are drink related. It’s not new to most people that New Zealanders are crap drinkers; the ugliness of our booze culture makes A and E a bad place to be. I’ve heard Paul before – as well as talking with the complete authority of someone who deals with drunks every day and night, he has also carefully compiled statistics on the causes of admissions to the Wellington A and E.

Paul’s staff had noticed that parents bringing children into the A and E sometimes left before their kids were seen because the drunks made the place unsafe. So that’s kids who were presumably sick enough to warrant a night-time trip to emergency not getting medical attention. And he said how generally people had to wait longer – people sicker than I was, with diabetic complications perhaps or asthma – in an atmosphere where the drunks are the ones shouting violently for attenti0n because they’ve sprained an ankle or put their hand through a window.

It’s Wellington FFS. On a beautiful day – cloudless blue skies, it’s always a bit breezy – it’s a cute little pocket-size city. It really is quite cute. And at night-time on Friday and Saturday, it’s still miniature but squalid and pathetic. People fight on Courtenay Place. People get raped in dark side streets and parks. The antics of drunks have got to the point where they jeopardise the running of basic Wellington services.

Paul Quigley said that emergency departments aren’t funded to deal with the increasing alcohol-related admissions on the weekend.  That means staff are over-worked and have to deal constantly with drunken, violent fools and other people – you and me – who have to wait longer in pain.

Why do we think it’s okay that emergency staff have to put up with this?

I’m both pessimistic and optimistic. Pessimistic because when it comes to alcohol, even though people like Paul have been presenting us with the realities for a good few years, and even though the Law Commission has published a really good report on New Zealanders and drinking, it’s like we’re always stuck in the ‘public debate’ phase. Or maybe something will happen, but it will be mealy-mouthed and won’t move the stats or the experience much.

But why optimistic? Because Paul Quigley had some pretty straight-forward suggestions for dealing with the issue as it affects A and Es: increase taxes on alcohol and pour some of it directly into increased funding for emergency rooms, or make people pay personally for the cost of treating their very preventable accidents. I’m all for the latter frankly. Hand injuries, face injuries … if you could have prevented them by drinking less piss beer or metallic popsicle water, why does ACC have to cover the cost of you getting into a smack-down or stumbling on the steps back to your flat?

So ‘loser pays’ is one part of my optimism: the other part is that we don’t need to buy into the idea that because we’re largely Anglo-Saxon and Polynesian we’re incapable of drinking with Mediterranean civility. The Law Commission’s report, Alchohol In Our Lives, talks about the circularity of the debate in New Zealand, and I think this partly plays over the idea that nationally we just cannot come to grips with a civilised enjoyment of alchohol.

But over the past twenty years we’ve come a long with way food and drink. We produce great wines and beers, and there are a sickening number of people in New Zealand who will bore you to tears about their “passion for food”. I don’t think it’s unachieveable that we could learn to value good food and wine the way the French do, but in an unpretentious non-Gallic way. If that happens, then we can teach our kids and perhaps we’ll have a generation of teenagers that can see through the allure of RTDs.

And I’m not saying that drunkeness should be expurgated from our culture. Many of us remember drunken parties and stoopid antics as some of the best times in our lives. Drunkeness is a valid part of us, and it’s there on Attic black figure vases and prohibition legends. Unfortunately for us though, the product of our drunkeness culture isn’t exactly on a par with the reflections on human excess in The Bacchae. Nup, we’re still letting advertising firms associate getting bladdered with the nostalgic delights of back-yard cricket, towelling hats and those ever-ready supplies of teenage hotties who like to watch side-burned d-bags sail off the roof on mattresses.

Being drunk is great…to a point. And then it’s all nausea, black-outs, glassings, teens in the gutters, and shouting at the nurse in A and E. Growing up doesn’t have to be about sticking to your ALAC-approved units all the time (unless you’re driving obviously); it’s about being confident to stop at the point when you’re happy but not a danger to yourself or someone else. If you turn skeevy after two beers, that’s your point. If a six pack means you like to shoot the shit about the meaning of life, fine too, you’ll probably clear the room.

This is the kind of story that feeds into one of our latest public debate memes – that New Zealanders are haters. Too many of us stew in our juices in our cold, damp houses, get a shot of battery acid from listening to talkback and then put pen to paper.

I doubt that really we are any more hateful than other nations – I’m not sure there’s a league table that covers it, but I would just say that I’d probably rather deal with a daily mail box of badly spelled “fuck off, you uglie trol” letters than suffer the fate of so many woman in the Congo or Liberia.

Having said that though, for fuck’s sake angry people, the weather is gorgeous right now. Go outside and read a novel, run up a hill, take the kids to the market.

Just switch off the talkback, because honestly the only thing I have ever learnt from listening to an hour or two is that a lot of New Zealanders can’t deal with the complexity of most issues or even string a coherent sentence together. Many callers seem drunk or a little insane even. I can’t listen to it any more, because why would you let such ugly, unintelligent people take up house in your mind?

Judith Ablett-Kerr and the Weatherston trial defence strategy: a complex issue. There are discussions to be had, and they have been had on non-talkback stations, about what, if any, limitations there should be on defence tactics when they include blaming the victim. She is one person who could help explain these and the wider responsibilities of defence lawyers to their clients. Unfortunately most New Zealanders don’t want a bar of that: they leapt, like a Victorian bush-fire, from the issues of the provocation defence to hating a middle-aged, well-spoken woman who defends the likes of Weatherston. It’s pure woman-hating.

Greg King was there too, you know. King has defended unjustly imprisoned Peter Ellis, but also the likes of Bruce Howse, one of the few people in this country who would give Weatherston a run for his money in a scum-off. And he has pursued provocation as a defense for people such as Janine Rongonui. Where’s the hate mail? Or the bile that could be directed at Chris Comesky, whose defence of Nai Yin Xue basically consisted of painting his murdered wife as a sex-hongray deviant?

So to recap, Alex had an amazing, improbable perm in series 1

Unfortunately, by series 2 Alex has transmetamorphosensationalised into a soccer mom

BBC has had a look under the couch and come up with the spare change to make series 3 of A2A. Please just buy Alex the best perm wig money can buy. I will donate my kid’s hair … anything but the wing tips again.

Basically he was arguing that there are far too many charities in New Zealand, that every new charity looking for its market segment means more charity funds go into administration and infrastructure costs, and that many of these orgs are far from transparent about how much of their donated funds actually go to the causes.

As much as I loathe Laws and the ugly, spiteful, pathetic people who call into his show, he’s got a point on this one. It’s not that I agree with him that we shouldn’t donate to charities that try to make up for the shittiness of so many New Zealand parents because yeah, we are talking about little children who never asked to be born into loser families. But seriously, there’s a charity devoted solely to providing underprivileged NZ kids with raincoats, shoes and school lunches?

Firstly, I don’t yet accept that there really are parents in this country – given the State support provided in New Zealand – who are soooo poor that they can’t ship their arses down to the Sallies, St Vincent De Paul or any other op shops to buy their kids shoes or coats. I op shop, and there’s no shame in it.

Secondly, KidsCan wants you to know that thousands of kids in New Zealand “can never be sure of receiving three meals a day, often filling their tummies on what they get out of the school water fountain.” Yeah and KidsCan knows what you’re thinking, you haterz, because they counter with “We are sure you will agree all kids deserve to have full tummies, regardless of whether their parents are good people struggling to make ends meet or those who waste money and neglect their responsibilities.”

They then want you to know that no, providing free food at schools isn’t about trying to pour water into a bucket with a hole in it: “Schools have reported that due to the issue being more openly talked about the numbers of children coming to school without food is reducing.” So basically, the stupid-ass parents finally get shamed into buying one less carton of fags a week so they can provide the necessities of life for their kids. I’m mildly surprised that these parents are shameable frankly.

I guess my problem is that if this country contains thousands of parents so shit that they don’t buy shoes or food, then we really need to shut down the likes of KidsCan and just hand over welfare payments to agencies that have the ability to go deeper, faster, farther… everywhere.

These families don’t need the kind lady from the North Shore who hands out juice boxes and Adidas gear at school assembly – they need mother-fucking drill sergeants who suplex dad if he doesn’t want to get out of bed to go to work training. They need the kind of wrap-around support that takes to the television with a softball bat and checks in the bedroom drawers for the family weed stash. They need the ability to frog-march mum out of the pokies parlour and into the super-market to buy bread, olivio and the other magical ingredients that can be combined to make children’s lunches.

This is an issue that anybody who knows me fears being brought up because I can rant about it for hours until your eyes bleed. I mean, seriously, a whole bunch of New Zealand parents are either too effing lazy socio-economically deprived to go to the doctor for free jabs, or are convinced they know better than the medical establishment in New Zealand because they spent a night googling immunisation and autism.

I listen to anti-immunisation people spread their organic pixie dust over the media, like this super-mom who was on RadioNZ this afternoon (about three minutes in). Aside from her side attempt to re-litigate the heavily disproven link between the MMR vaccine and autism, her basic point was that she preferred to pump her kids full of vegetables and let them get measles. And that was her choice. (I’d love to know whether or not she immunised her kids against whooping cough when they were babies; in my opinion, if you made that “informed choice” not to and you turn up with a baby struggling to breathe at A and E, you are pond scum).

Except, as Dr Nikki Turner pointed out in the same interview, it’s not just a choice she’s making for her own children. All the people like her, and all the parents who probably think this kid’s dad is aces, lessen the herd immunity in this country. That means putting at risk kids who have been vaccinated but who aren’t immunised (apparently that’s ten percent of vaccinated kids) and all the babies who aren’t old enough to be vaccinated (my baby for instance) and all the poor children out there whose immune systems are weak and who can’t be vaccinated (such as child cancer sufferers).

The RadioNZ host stresses that he doesn’t want to demonise informed anti-immunisation parents, but I will. Their ridiculous collective hubris (I can scan the summary of a research report, therefore I am an equal authority to an immunologist) is muddying the public debate around immunisation to the extent that I suspect a lot of parents can’t see the wood for the trees: the wood is the past, where children got diseases such as polio that blighted their lives, and the trees are the ongoing demands of anti-immunisation parents that vaccinations should be infallible and never have side effects.

Dr Nikki Turner admitted that health agencies haven’t done a good job of explaining the science around vaccinations. I don’t know about that, although I can only imagine how people like her feel when people with the mana of Tariana Turia reject their efforts. Perhaps Dr Turner was suggesting that health agencies needed to “dialogue better” with the anti-vaccination people. Me, I think they should bring the hammer down publicly on these freaks at every opportunity.

Here’s the real thing: these parents, if they were to admit the truth to themselves, love vaccinations. They love vaccinations when it’s other people’s kids getting the jabs and taking whatever risk there is of a reaction. Do you think they’d truly want a world where, if a vaccination couldn’t be proved 100% safe and effective, then it couldn’t be administered? No way. They want to free-ride off the immunity provided by other people’s vaccinated kids that lessens the chances of their own kids getting diseases, and they also want you to ignore the fact that when there are outbreaks of diseases such as measles, it’s because of them and their selfish choices. As this spiffy radio documentary shows, these people ruin it for the rest of us.

I took my baby girl to the doctor yesterday and she was given her third course of jabs for diseases such as whooping cough, meningococcal B and diptheria. The nurse who jabbed her twice, once in each cute pudgy little leg, told me that she was now seeing young adults who had never been vaccinated by their parents and who now want to go on their overseas adventures. Guess how many needles they had to have.

I can’t decipher this video. It’s like a video production company gave her a menu of items and she ticked a combo of doves, bad dreams, shit-house “special effects” and scary moppet.

At one point, she looks at a dove that’s kept in a bamboo cage prepared earlier – then *gasp* she’s in the bamboo cage (hey skinny bitch, you can fit through the bars).

Still, it’s only a matter of time before the “Let’s get Physical” Olivia Neutron Bomb (tee hee) hair cut comes back. Find me some curtain tie rope – I’m weaving myself a head-band.

Today, it’s Masterton solo mother Karen Bock who sends her son to Rathkeale College, an integrated Anglican secondary school for boys. Apparently, integrated means that Rathkeale used to be private, but now receives the same funding from the Ministry of Education as State schools. State schools also request donations, but not in the order of $1000 a term plus a compulsory $2000 a year.

Karen put up the hand a while back so she owes Rathkeale $13k. She ain’t gonna pay … unless it’s for a geography trip to Australia, in which case her folks apparently stumped up a cool $3,200. I actually had a little sympathy for this battling struggler from striver street until I read that bit. (Seriously, my parents would still be laughing today about me asking them to spring for a $3k trip anywhere back in the day. They’d be “can your fat arse work after school and on weekends? Yes? Problem solved.”)

Rathkeale has shot itself in the groin area, public relations-wise, in contriving to get Karen to pay up her “donation” by extending her mortgage. Duh. And cue ensuing headline in the paper.

Most of the debate swings from “how dare the school harass parents for “voluntary fees” to “why don’t you send your son to a state school because you obviously can’t afford Rathkeale?” to “WTF with that late-model 4WD in your drive-way?”

But sadly, how about a bit of actual digging from the media: why can’t the story on Stuff tell us crucial facts and opinions such as:

1. what the Rathkeale parents who do pay the voluntary fees think about Karen, and
2. what activities or teaching resources would the school have to drop if it didn’t demand such (admittedly pretty gob-smacking) fees?

I get that people are outraged that an integrated school, now bludging off the State, is trying to get sumo dollars off parents, but the reality is that parents send kids to schools like Rathkeale because it offers a classier education than say Wairarapa College.  They don’t want to pay private school fees, but they don’t want the quasi-private school standards to drop either.

I’d really love to know what the activities are that cost $1000k a term. The article mentions the student-teacher ratio and upgrades to classrooms that wasn’t covered by Ministry money. And I checked out Rathkeale’s website – the pretty white building in the background indicates that it’s not a state school. It looks way too posh.

So, what about the other parents at Rathkeale? Would they prefer, instead of paying the donations, that the school cut back the teaching and other services or activities? I’m sure not a one of them is happy to keep subsidising Karen’s son, especially when she does get a spare three thou and pays for her son’s trip to Oz instead of contributing something towards her voluntary donation debt. The whole “my parents are paying for it” excuse is like a business refusing to pay a bill because they’ve set up another company to hold all their money.

She wants that Rathkeale, classier education than most State schools offer, but she doesn’t want to pay any more than State school parents. And she only wants the selective parts of a Rathkeale education that suit her: it’s an Anglican school and don’t Anglican virtues include thrift, hard work and modesty? In other words, explain to your son that he’s not going to Australia because you have a moral obligation to pay as much of the voluntary donations – for school services he benefits from – as $3k will buy.

The school admits that the situation has got pretty emotional: she’s outraged that they told her to call Remax for a quick sale on her house. And the school principal and chairman’s pissed-off-ness is palpable: their only ability to extract the donations is to deny extras to the children of recalcitrant parents, yet presumably to spare the son’s feelings, they agreed he could go on the “extra” trip to Australia.

They’re fucked, basically, until the Ministry of Education and government fesses up that New Zealand education isn’t free. The “twenty free hours” for under fives isn’t free (unless you live in Putaruru and $4.50 an hour covers childcare) and secondary school “voluntary fees” aren’t going away. And the current situation leaves schools in the position of having to get heavy over “voluntary donations” and parents with the wriggle room to fight the school, rather than face the reality that they can’t afford this a Rathkeale kind of education.

Update: the school is now claiming it’s okay if parents can’t pay the donation fees, but it’s got the shits with Karen sending her kid to Australia to look at rocks. That’s a stupid backdown, in my opinion. The school needs to stick to the real issue: you either pay the donations or you can’t afford to send your son here. Period.