First Impressions By Brendan Horan

One of the paramount challenges for our community is the safety of our children.

New Zealand has a shocking record for child murders, abuse and suicide. It is to our great shame that the Bay of Plenty has some of the highest stats in New Zealand. It takes a village to raise a child (Confucius). But all too often in New Zealand parenting responsibilities are being abdicated and too many children are growing up in single parent families. Kiwi kids are our collective responsibility and it's great to see Sir Owen Glenn taking the initiative to invest in an independent inquiry into domestic violence, dysfunctional families and in particular child abuse. Sir Owen has gathered some of the country's top academics, doctors and psychological experts onto a panel to determine appropriate interventions and pathways forward.

The Minister of Health has made an attempt to understand issues facing our nation's children. A similar intervention to Sir Owen's initiative is the work of The Child and Youth Mortality Review Committee (CYMRC), a ministerial appointed group established to review deaths of children and young people aged 28 days to 24 years. The task of this committee is to find ways to prevent such deaths in the future.

Regional expert committees sponsored by local district health boards meet monthly to make a range of recommendations to a national committee. Regional recommendations are merged nationally to better understand the lives and deaths of our youth and inform efforts to prevent similar deaths in the future. Over the past two years the Bay of Plenty committee has studied in-depth suicide and sudden infant deaths and it has taken it upon itself to initiate critical and strategic interventions at the local level. May I applaud this local committee, a group of high level professionals who are freely giving their time and expertise to make our community a safer place.

The national chair Nick Baker issued a challenge in his fifth report where he notes there is a lack of or no ‘socket' for CYMRC to ‘plug' into, to provide information to activate a ‘machine' that will action and fine tune preventive interventions.

Where the Government has fallen down is in not following through on the experts' advice. Resources must be made available on experts' recommendations. Children are counting on us.

Brendan Horan is a Tauranga based independent list MP. He can be contacted at Facebook.com/Brendan.horan.336, twitter.com/brendanhoran or phone 07 574 0253.