New Zealand Placed First in Global Peace Index

Vision of Humanity's Global Peace Index (GPI) has put New Zealand in pole position in a league table of countries most at peace. The GPI's International Review Panel has as its chair Professor Kevin P. Clements, Director, of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. No conflict of interest there then.

New Zealand anything but peaceful over the last month
This news will come as little comfort for the Asian family subjected to a brutal home invasion in the peaceful, upmarket suburb of Epsom in the early hours of this morning.

The father of the family, aged 63 was badly beaten and suffered severe head injuries, a broken back and cuts to his wrists, his son was also attacked and taken to hospital after the attack.

Police described the sickening attack as "very concerning, gruesome and cowardly attack on two defenceless victims, who have been seriously harmed. The level of violence used by these cowards could have easily been fatal".

Epsom was, if you remember, the scene of an armed robbery outside a girls high school school 5 day ago. see link A robbery that was just the latest in a string of similar violent hold-ups in recent months.

The same day, in the quiet peaceful little town of Porirua another home invasion was taking place - a 19 year old migrant from Cambodia was bound up and assaulted in the early hours of the morning by two people who broke into his home.

Earlier in the month Scottish tourist Stuart Martin had recovered well enough from a street beating, which left him in a coma, to return home. Mr Martin had been enjoying a night out in peaceful Taradale with friends back in February when he was set upon by street thugs.

Peace has now returned to the quiet Napier Street where heavily armed Jan Molenaar shot dead a policeman and then himself after drawing the attention of the World's press as pictures of armoured vehicles thundering through the streets of Napier flashed around the TV screens across the globe.

The residents of View Road, Glenfield also enjoy the peacefulness of their surroundings after being shaken by the stabbing death of Paul Chong, the tenth murder victim in Auckland this year.

I wonder if Melissa Lee, will ever feel peace again after suffering post-traumatic stress when her home was invaded six months ago by two balaclava-wearing, armed creeps who held a gun to her head. She said in her maiden speech "I don't feel safe in my own home, let alone the streets".

During a radio interview in May she said she couldn't sleep for six months afterwards, had to keep the light on all night and was getting up every two minutes.

But perhaps the ultimate irony has to be the robbery of two altruistic American Peace Corp volunteers in Christchurch, proof perhaps that no good deed goes unpunished.

....and all this in the space of an average month.

Now if this is what the most peaceful nation on earth is supposed to be like, I shudder to think what it's like elsewhere in the world and what planet the Vision of Humanity really lives on.