We live in a society utterly confused about parenthood and the role of fathers.
The last Labour government made fathers increasingly irrelevant.
In 2020 a law change repealing section 70a of the Social Security Act meant mothers applying for a sole parent benefit no longer had to name the father of their child for the purposes of collecting child support from him.
Men became decreasingly responsible for children they fathered.
Former Social Development Minister Paula Bennett told RNZ at the time: "These are women who are choosing not to name the father, that means he doesn't have financial obligations to the state, to actually be paying child support, so it's actually quite a big thing to be dropping that." For context there are over 100,000 sole parents currently collecting a benefit.
If a father is no longer legally required to financially provide for his child, it is difficult to justify attendant obligations.
Yet a court report in today's NZ Herald explaining why a judge commuted the sentence of a sole mother convicted of killing her 4-week-old baby, says:
The Court of Appeal allowed a starting point of five and a half years’ imprisonment, nine months shorter than was determined by the High Court. The appellate justices then allowed further discounts for her youth, prospects for rehabilitation and “to reflect that tragic background which resulted in her being inadequately prepared for motherhood”. The discounts should also reflect that she was “effectively abandoned” by the children’s fathers, the justices said.“
We pause here to emphasise the need to condemn what appears, at least on the evidence before us, to have been the failure of both fathers to perform their obligations as parents,” the appellate panel said as an aside. “[The deceased child’s] father had some involvement but seems to have taken no steps to respond to the appellant’s clear signals that she was not coping and that she feared what she might do.
What "obligations as parents"? There are none that, if neglected, are punishable by law.
Sixty years ago, the courts fined - and occasionally imprisoned - men who failed to provide maintenance. Harsh but clear.
Today we stumble about vainly trying to reconcile a plethora of human rights and fail miserably.
Of course it is mainly female rights that are catered to. Fertility rights, custody rights, benefit rights ... the enforcement of which can and do culminate in an abysmal failure to uphold children's rights (which exist under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.)
In this case, an older brother had suffered a "non-fatal assault" earlier but the youngest was killed. Not even the most basic right to "life, survival and development" was upheld.
The court concluded:
“The appellant is the only parent held accountable for the manslaughter and assaults ... yet there were two other adults who must be considered as sharing some responsibility.”
Do they or don't they? The messages young men receive are badly mixed. On one hand the state says they can impregnate at will and bear no responsibility. On the other, an Appeal Court judge, mopping up after the too-common horrible aftermath, claims there is responsibility. But it's not one enforceable by law.
Legality and morality are not hand-in-glove.
The basis of social security law is now amoral. The failure to hold fathers financially accountable is just one of the many perversions of its original strongly moral basis. What did Michael Joseph Savage call social security? Applied Christianity.
I don't know what he would call it today.
Lindsay Mitchell blogs here