The Investigator is back with a special report on child poverty, and We Shall Remain ends at Wounded Knee.
TV
Inside New Zealand: Inside Child Poverty – A Special Report
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Inside New Zealand: Inside Child Poverty – A Special Report (TV3, 7.30pm). With the election almost on our doorstep, Bryan Bruce (The Investigator) goes into battle for the kids with this special Inside New Zealand report. And with an estimated 230,000 children – the populations of Wellington and Dunedin cities combined – living in beneficiary-based households, it’s a fight worth having. Our record on child health is appalling. We rank 28th out of 30 countries in the developed world, behind Italy, Ireland and the Czech Republic. More than 25,000 children were admitted to hospital last year for respiratory infections, most caused by overcrowded living conditions. Doctors are seeing such diseases as rheumatic fever and scabies, which have largely been eliminated from European countries. Bruce visits one of the country’s poorest and sickest areas, East Porirua, where a decile one school provides 1000 breakfasts a week. But this is charity work, and when sponsors pulled out, principal Sose Annandale had to find the $70-$100 needed each week to give her pupils a full belly in the morning: “Children will not be ready to learn if they are hungry,” she says. “I feel like I don’t have any choice.” He finds families living in mouldy, cold homes they cannot afford to heat. To keep warm at night, it is standard practice to all sleep in one room, a recipe for the spread of disease. Overcrowding, says Michael Baker, Associate Professor of Health at Otago Medical School, is the main risk factor for meningitis, rheumatic fever and tuberculosis. Just to rub it in, Bruce visits Sweden, where health services have been integrated into the school system, where healthcare is free up to age 18 and where scabies haven’t been seen since the 70s. Bruce blames political decisions made in the past 30 years for the poor state of child health today. We’re at a “moral crossroads”, he says, and with those statistics coming out of our land of plenty, it’s difficult to disagree.
NCIS (TV3, 8.30pm). The make-up department were very busy for this episode, which flashes back 10 years to the first meeting between Tony (Michael Weatherly) and Gibbs (Mark Harmon). Cue de-lined faces and dark wigs.
We Shall Remain (Maori, 8.30pm). The PBS documentary about Native American history finishes with the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an action by the Oglala Lakota designed to bring attention to grievances. The site was, of course, chosen for its symbolic reference to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. The occupation lasted 71 days, and was given a huge boost by Marlon Brando, who asked Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather to speak on his behalf at the Oscars that year (he won for The Godfather).
FILM
Hating Alison Ashley (Four, 8.30pm). This Aussie coming-of-age comedy has pop star Delta Goodrem as the perfect, hated girl of the title and Saskia Burmeister as the ugly duckling out of Melbourne. Watch if you want to see Craig McLachlan making a prat of himself. (2005) 6 – Diana Balham
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