Criticism Of Leadership In The Community
'Sinking Feeling Leaves Us All At Sea' The Courier-Mail 13/11/1999

YOU MAY find the connection slightly adrift, but I see a great parallel between sinking social values and sinking America's Cup yachts like the Young America which almost broke in two off Auckland this week.

Society's progress under the direction of bleeding-heart minorities is reflecting modern yacht design in which proven traditional values such the core strength of a hull are being sacrificed for the best guesses of free-thinking dreamers whose god is whizz-bang technology. Not even past failures can alter this mad course.

You would reckon that after one of our own America's Cup yachts broke in two and sank in 90 seconds flat off San Diego in 1995 that common sense would once again become a yardstick in yacht design — that hull strength is the be-all and end-all of a ship if it is to stay afloat. The full story has yet to emerge but I liked the initial reason given for the $6.4 million American hull that bent like a banana.... It had "reared upon a 1.5m wave and come down hard into a second wave".

A multimillion-dollar yacht, featuring the most advanced technology bends in two and almost sinks after sailing through a couple of 1.5 metre waves, eh? Thank God my surfboard isn't a product of the same high-tech material and design.

A similar sinking is taking place in society and the proof lies in the spiralling rate of homelessness, crime, drug addiction and suicide of Australian youth. But, like the sacrifices of hull strength in yacht design, society's architects continue to erode traditional family values for what can only be misguided dreams of a New Order. The latest stupidity was a move by politically correct bleeding hearts to ban religious instructors and Bible classes in state schools.

As one reader put it this week:

"Certainly we are a multicultural society. Certainly parents should continue to have the option of withdrawing their children from religious education classes if they so desire. But why should we, in the name of tolerance or political correctness, deny our children their Christian heritage?"

Exactly my sentiments.

This week a reader, a Year 7 teacher and deserted mother of three, alerted me to the amazing fact that in this once sane state parents lose legal authority when their children reach the age of 14 years and eight months. She found out when she approached Family Services Department for help in controlling her 14-year-old son, only to be officially told he was now old enough to do what he pleased.

She wrote:

"These rights include for kids as young as 14 years eight months the unilateral decision to refuse to go to school, to leave home and taste the 'freedoms' offered by living on the streets."

There is, indeed, a loony fringe of do-gooders who claim to genuinely care about the youth of today but whose actions put children into danger. Maybe they are just incompetents, but having met some of these people, even in government departments such as Family Services, I find the reality just does not match their propaganda. It is true there are some really sad, sick people who abuse their kids; but the majority of parents do not. We love and (want to) cherish our kids. But it seems we parents are all being punished for the sins of the very few.

When we are told that children have rights at the tender age of 14 years to make decisions that could only be made in the light of a lot of experience I wonder if we have become a society of lemmings?

Why do kids suicide? Because they get depressed. Why do they get depressed? Because the pressure to make decisions about their own lives in tender, green, teenage years can make them so.

How long before society wakes up to the fact that lunatics are running our asylum, frantically designing a sinking, politically correct society to go with our sinking high-tech ships?