So all women in hospital will now be pestered with questions that can not fail to generate horrendous statistics on “abuse”. Is there anyone, male or female, who has never been threatened nor been the object of unwelcome sexual interest? 

I hope hospital staff are “abused” in the original sense of that word, by women who tell them to mind their own business. All involved should revolt against being used. This policy inflicts indignity on everyone rather than face the failure of 40 years’ of  social policy.

Heather Roy’s comment yesterday unpicked the related episode that dominated the beginning of the week. “Maori” are blamed collectively for the predictable wickedness of individuals bred by welfare that will not discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Surely we must be reaching a nadir of some sort. Only two generations ago we were noted for stoic self reliance. Now every one in “the community” must bear the guilt and responsibility for individual viciousness. The collectivists will twist in any direction rather than enforce personal responsibility.

This week’s twist toward race responsibility is especially nasty.

Politicians have decided (Peter Dunne for example) that it is now OK to make a ‘race’ collectively to blame for the evil individuals who tortured their 3 year old child.  The “we-are-all-to-blame” crowd have long been idiots but at least sensible people have been able to ignore most of it as useless handwringing. It becomes more serious now that it has morphed into “they are all to blame”, and “they” are identified racially.

Of course the open racists, the Maori Party and their fellow travellers, can not defend themselves or ‘their people’. They can not appeal to the Enlightenment value of individual accountability that made eventually made racism taboo, because they have scorned it. They live off collective stereotyping and collective identity claims of differences that transcend individuality.

Lets hope this is the nadir. No country has found a costless way to recapture an unbottled official policy of racial blame.