TODAY I write about a topic that should grieve us: the mistreatment of children.
Not the poor, starving children of Africa, those prostituted on the streets of India or trafficked from places like Mexico for cheap labour, adoption or mail-order brides.
The children are in Tasmania - in Launceston and Burnie and Devonport and Hobart, and all the towns in between.
It is an undeniable tragedy the way children are commodified on the other side of the world, but our own children face a tragedy of their own.
Our children have no voice.
Yes, I've written about it before and, guaranteed, I will write about it again. Because children need advocates to speak for their interests - advocates without an agenda of state
budget or freedom of choice or gay rights. That's right, not even an agenda of religion.
We need advocates who look solely at the child and their needs.
Last week we read of budget cuts to Tasmania's child protection system at a time when figures paint a sad picture of children in state care. Report after costly report has been
commissioned by the government, each sounding alarm bells on a floundering system.
Children's Commissioner Aileen Ashford says about $40 million is needed to put the state's child protection system on the straight and narrow.
But what does this government do instead? Sharpens the axe.
Further, the raft of controversial social policy changes mooted in Tasmanian Parliament in the past few years have done nothing for the child.
To those who insist that this state be a "leader'' in areas like surrogacy and gay marriage, I say put selfish agendas aside.
Or would you demand that your interests be prioritised above the needs of a child? Who are you to decide that a child will never know his father? That a child will never be given
opportunity for a balanced parent unit?
In his book Why Satan Hates Our Children, former Compassion Australia CEO Paul O'Rourke gives a lucid analysis of contemporary Australia's attitude towards children.
"We are increasingly hypocritical and contradictory in our attitudes to children. We marvel at life-saving surgery performed on babies in the womb, and our ability to save premature babies, but also demand the right to abort children any time from conception to full term,'' he writes.
"We have reduced children to a commodity that can be discarded or made-to-order for artificial family constructs where children will be raised without access to their biological
parents.''
And that's why I grieve.
Surely we should be future-proofing the integrity of society, not severing its parts in some kind of live science experiment to see if they work in isolation.
An unstable child today equals a troubled adult tomorrow.
My baby boy has a book called Lost Sheep (by Caroline Jayne Church). It's about a shepherd who has a flock of 100 sheep and how when one goes missing he resolutely sets out
to find it, leaving the other 99 until he does.
It's based on the biblical parable of the lost sheep, found in Luke.
The shepherd knows that a sheep on its lonesome is vulnerable - to the elements and to wild animals.
Our children are a little like lost sheep and it's about time we forsake all else to ensure their care. No compromise.
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