Page 6001 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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What is the answer? Is the answer to spend more money on the problem? Is the answer to hire more welfare staff? Is the answer to hire more psychologists? Is the answer to have more refuges of one form or another where children can go when they leave home? I do not believe that the answer is any of those things. We hear about early intervention and what children are being taught. It is clear that children are being taught every moment of their lives. The point is: What are they being taught and how are they being taught it?
I think it has been well recorded that the average child watches some 23 hours of television a week. One in five children watch over 40 hours of television. After an education, a normal education, of some 11,500 hours, the average child has watched 15,000 hours of television. So, the question we would ask is: Does this have an effect on children's behaviour? The answer to that, of course, must be yes. What effect? Who can know? But look at the sorts of things that are being shown on television during that time. When I was a lad we used to have Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, the Brady Bunch and so on. I felt that these shows presented some decent values for our kids to watch and to learn from.
We have heard that the so-called autocratic method of controlling children has been replaced by a more social democratic system. I would debate that. I wonder whether children are benefiting from the changes that are being presented on television, whether they are benefiting from the changes that are being presented in our schools.
I find that what children are being taught in life is rights to the exclusion of their responsibilities. I think that if you teach someone that they have this right, and this right, and this right, and do not ever let them know the vital point that they have a responsibility, the idea that a child has a right to a job could be debated. Every time we say that a child or anybody has a right to a job we have to point to someone else and say, "You have an obligation to supply that person with a job".
I would wonder whether many people in business feel that they have that obligation. They may feel some responsibility in life to further the benefits in this country and so on. But is that a divine obligation they have or is that something they take on in a free society to benefit all of us, including themselves and their own families? I would think it is. They do not have an obligation that someone then has a right to.
In Australia the Federal Government last year introduced the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Clauses 12 to 16 of that UN convention were taken almost directly word for word from another UN convention pertaining to adults. What has happened is that the children, we are told by our Government, have to be given adult rights under clauses 12 to 16. What is the result of telling children that they
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