Well a few stories caught my eye this week.

Firstly yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima and it’s come out that the whole thing was even more serious than I thought.

The former Japanese Prime Minister came out this week and said that they were days and in fact possibly just hours away from evacuating Tokyo.  To put that into perspective that would have meant asking 50 million people to leave their homes.  It’s unimaginable.  Where would they have gone.  How would panic have been averted. To be honest, they didn’t even know. 

The PM pointed out that Chernobyl was 1 meltdown while Fukushima had 3 reactors meltdown and another 2 were within moments of following suit. This week we heard that only 10 per cent of the damage has been cleaned up.  We heard that the plant is leaking radiation into the Pacific Ocean.  And we heard that the robots that are cleaining up the flooded reactors have stopped working because basically they’ve melted.  It’s extraordinary.  The only bright spot is that since the disaster all 50 of Japan’s nuclear reactors have been shut down and guess what.  Japan is surviving just fine.  Let that be a warning to all nuclear power advocates particularly in earthquake prone countries.  New Zealand for example.

Now I cannot tell you how profoundly moving Martin Crowe’s funeral was.  I knew it would be eventful because his career was so eventful and Ian Smith’s eulogy captured the mercurial cricketing genius that Martin was.  But it was the close friend’s and family’s eulogies that were so enlightening.  In particular Lorraine Down’s.  You could hear a pin drop as she whispered into the microphone. Remarkably she said the cancer killed him but it also saved him.  She said it made him stop and look at himself and see in himself the things that his nearest and dearest loved in him that he’d been blind to. Read his book Raw and you get some idea of the transformation in his later years.  Death comes to us all and it’s sad and tragic but Martin showed that you can make it a journey with rewards beyond anything else in life.  His family, blended as it is, showed the meaning of love and it was awe inspiring.

And finally on the topic of families this week I discovered that the laws regarding adoption in this country haven’t been changed in 61 years. The Adoption Act dates to 1955.  The Human Rights tribunal came out this week with a report pointing out how ridiculous that is. They said it was discriminatory.  It prevents civil union or same sex or de facto couples from adopting. It also prevents people under 25 years of age from adopting, and placed limits on single men adopting female children. The Act allows for kids to be taken away from disabled parents.  It also fails to recognise the rights of birth fathers.  All this is against the Bill of Rights

The act looks at life in New Zealand through fossilised eyes from the 50s and it seems amazing to me that no-one has bothered to look at it for 60 years.  What do we pay these politicians to do all day. However as we all know the issues around families and families under stress that results in adoption are very delicate. And a lot of people don’t agree with the changes in society that has made the current act discrimatory

For instance. Conservative lobby group Family First rejected calls for reform.

Spokesman Bob McCoskrie said gender and age restrictions were appropriate safeguards, and that single parent and same-sex adoption led to "fatherless and motherless families".

So let’s talk adoption.

Should same sex couples be able to adopt in your book.  Should single men.  Should anyone under 25.