The appointment of Carl Davidson raises some problematic questions about the future of the Families and Children's Commissions

No sooner had news arrived that a new Chief Families Commissioner had been appointed yesterday than I started receiving calls from people saying, ‘Who on earth is Carl Davidson?’

Despite having worked in this area for many years, I had no idea, so I did a bit of hasty investigation.

He is the well respected director of a private Christchurch research company, Research First.

The promo for Mr Davidson on the company's website has a long list of his experience in things like independent market research contracting, his teaching at the Christchurch College of Education’s School of Business, and his publications including Knowledge Management and Creating Competitive Advantage from Intellectual Capital.

Nowhere on this lengthy list is there any mention of work in the area of families and children.

So why has Paula Bennett appointed him as the new Commissioner?

This is a politically fraught role. The last Commissioner, Dr Jan Pryor, resigned suddenly in March this year, apparently for family reasons, although there was concern at the time that there may have been a little more to it than that.

I don’t know how Dr Pryor felt about the appointment in 2009 of Christine Rankin as a Families Commissioner, or the 2010 direction of National’s policy on welfare reform, but I can imagine that for someone of her experience and integrity, she found herself in quite a difficult place.

There is also the underlying subtext that National has never really supported the Families Commission, and has talked in the past about melding it with the Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

This would be a disastrous move. Children need their own focus and voice in the political and policy world, and the OCC do a great job on a very low budget of doing just that.

For example, Children’s Commissioner John Angus made an interesting presentation at the Welfare Working Group forum in June, urging caution around the current Government assumption that getting parents on the DPB into paid work was actually – and automatically - the best outcome for their children.

Mr Angus’s appointment runs out in December this year.

My fear is that Ms Bennett is working on a subterranean strategy aimed either at melding the two offices (which almost every group working on children’s issues in this country would totally oppose) or of restructuring the Families Commission so that its focus is simply on ‘knowledge production’ without any real sense of involvement or advocacy on the most edgy and difficult issues facing families today.

The appointment of a Chief Commissioner almost unknown to the sector and with a background in private sector research fits the bill nicely for either of these scenarios.

And as Bennett is reported as saying yesterday "the Government was continually assessing the commission’s make-up and direction".

The two biggest issues confronting families and children in 2010 are violence and poverty. If the Families Commission is to be taken seriously it has a duty to constructively advance work in both these areas.

I would like to give Carl Davidson the benefit of the doubt.

I challenge him to utilise the resources newly at his disposal to do his utmost to strengthen government support for family violence prevention strategies and to do some serious investigation of the government’s ‘work first’ policies for sole parents.

He could make a good start on the latter by picking up on the questions raised by the Child Poverty Action Group’s latest report What work counts? Work incentives and sole parent families.

It is very odd that a complete unknown has been given such a significant role.

I do hope that Davidson will take his role on behalf of families seriously, and that he hasn’t been appointed simply because he was a teacher at Massey when Bennett was a student there, or because an outsider will be better placed to lead a difficult restructuring process.

We’ll see.