Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

General

Families Commission Reports & Newsletter

In the last few days I received in the mail a couple of things from the Families Commission – Komihana a Whanau. One is a summary of their Focus on Families report which is a “study set out to improve understanding of successful outcomes for families with dependent children and the things that help and hinder family wellbeing, as described by the families themselves.” Both summary and full report are available at the link above and from skimming the summary looks to have some useful information in it (including what sort of things they think are relevant to the discussion). Media release here.

I’ll be interested to see whether the report gets used by Christian groups. The setting up of the Families Commission was claimed as a big win by the United Future party prior to the election and UF was one of the parties conservative Christians were “encouraged” to vote for. Whether those same conservatives bother to use the results of the commission, or see them as “tainted” by the State, will be interesting to see.

Also in the mail was their new newsletter “Family Voice” available here (as a PDF file). Apparently you can subscribe to getting it electronically but the web site isn’t clear on how to do that. I guess send them an email and ask how to do it.

Whether or not you agree with the government and its various bodies I figure its always a good idea to read things like this. Sometimes you see things to support and other times things to disagree with, but you’ll be informed. Also pretty much everyone will send you multiple copies for free and often there are “discussion” documents.

A few years back we got a whole lot of stuff from the then National government on their “Code of Social and Family Responsibility” (1998) which we discussed in house group and then made our own submission. Excellent material for working out some of our perceptions of the gospel and its outworking in the real world (as well as how to maintain unity in the face of internal disagreement).