Jobs in the armed forces are slashed, while the Freedom Party takes another hit. Retired workers hit back at a pension cut, the Dutch hit their children and a politician defends her garden from bulldozers. It’s all in today’s papers.

Armed forces face huge jobs cut
Both de Volkskrant and De Telegraaf lead with the massive job cuts announced by Defence Minister Hans Hillen yesterday. From the 48,000 soldiers and 21,000 civilians working for the armed forces, 10,000 jobs will go, many of them through dismissal.
 
“We knew that people would have to go, but not so many…” one air force officer complains in de Volkskrant. An army colleague warns that his unit was already doing too few exercises and lacked personnel.
 
The paper lists cuts outlined by the minister: a 20-percent decrease in military exercises, 11 percent fewer days at sea for naval vessels, 10 percent fewer flying hours…the list goes on. “Our formal goals as stated in the government programme – to be available and versatile – will not escape the rack,” says the minister. Presumably, he means that the goals are no longer attainable.
 
Meanwhile, military unions are making unpleasant noises. “We won’t accept forced job losses and will demand decent redundancy packages,” says one union man. Even though soldiers are not allowed to strike, they can still work to rule “or bomb the ministry with e-mails,” he says.
 
De Telegraaf says it’s still uncertain where the axe will fall and that Mr Hillen will announce his plans in the spring. However, the paper believes the ‘cheese slicer’ method of spending reduction, with every area of defence being equally slimmed down, is no longer an option. It is believed that the minister blames ‘cheese slicing’ of the past for leaving the armed forces overstretched and “creaking at the seams”.

Freedom Party takes another hit
Many of the papers pick up on the trouble inside Geert Wilders’ populist Freedom Party (PVV), which has formally agreed to support the right-wing minority government from the parliamentary benches on several key issues. One of the problems with this arrengement is that, even with the support of all PVV MPs, the ruling coalition only has the tiniest of majorities.
 
Yesterday, PVV MP James Sharpe resigned his seat after press reports that his company had been found guilty of misleading customers abroad. Another PVV MP got into similar difficulties last week, after various nasty allegations - including one concerning a criminal record - surfaced in the media, though unlike Sharpe, he seems to have held on to his job as MP.
 
Now, nrc.next tells us, two internal PVV memoranda were leaked in a television programme last night, indicating that all is not well within Mr Wilders’ party. One document was written by PVV MP Hero Brinkman, who has long been calling for more democracy in Mr Wilders’ one-man-band party.
 
In his note, Mr Brinkman says the PVV must break away from being a one-issue (anti-Islam) party and from being too dependant on Mr Wilders if it is to stand the test of time. The other leaked document authored by another PVV MP is diametrically opposed to this point of view, saying, among other things, that introducing democracy into the PVV would only foment “internal disunity”. PVV leader Geert Wilders may think he already has enough disunity to deal with.
 
Today’s AD puts the icing on the cake for Mr Wilders, pointing out that his party’s popularity is “plummeting”. Opinion polls indicate that the PVV has lost the equivalent of 5 seats in popularity since the last poll taken a fortnight ago. If an election were held today, however, the party would still gain one extra MP because of the surge in its popularity after the formation of the new minority government.

Pensioners fight payment cut
Protestant daily Trouw’s front page is largely taken up by a huge portrait of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and an article about how her “Political fight goes on”.
 
However, the paper finds space underneath to report on the fight of retired workers from Dutch dredging company Smit. They want money that was secretly taken out of the pension fund by the company in the 1990s to be repaid. They are demanding that a 13.2-percent cut to their pensions, scheduled to be introduced in 2011, be delayed and are pushing for the launch of an independent inquiry into what went on at Smit.
 
The parent company, Boskalis, which took over Smit in 2009, has offered to put 30 million euros back into the pension fund, but a spokesman for the pensioners says around 50 million would be a more realistic figure. “Smit didn’t just take money out of the pension fund, but also failed to pay premiums for years,” he says.

Widespread violence against children
“One in six adults claims to have been assaulted when young” reads a headline on page two of de Volkskrant. Research involving 2,200 people from age 18 to 74 indicates that over 16.5 percent of the population were physically mistreated by their parents or other adults while they were growing up. Nearly one in five claims to have been emotionally mistreated.
 
Researchers defined physical mistreatment as children being pushed and hit often or having things thrown at them. Nearly 10 percent of the respondents said they suffered bruises or wounds. Emotional mistreatment was defined as being frequently shouted at, belittled or humiliated. About 9 percent of those questioned said they feared being injured by their parents. More than 20 percent felt that no one in the family loved them or found them important.
 
“Even here in the well-to-do Netherlands. This is the most ‘commonplace’ and most extensive list of crimes we are aware of: it makes street violence pale into insignificance,” says one expert. Another complains: “We’re constantly warning [about the problem] but nobody does anything; nobody takes responsibility for these children”.

Bulldozers in the garden
Politicians are always fodder for the papers, especially when they seem to get special treatment, and that’s exactly the situation in De Telegraaf’s leading story: “Neighbours furious about Mayor Jorritsma”. Former minister Annemarie Jorritsma, now mayor of Almere, a new town north of Amsterdam, is being accused of receiving special treatment from the provincial authorities.
 
Her luxury villa was built with a heating system whereby water was pumped through a system of pipes deep underground to provide heating for the house in the winter and cooling in the summer. Three years ago, the provincial authority ordered Ms Jorritsma and two neighbours to remove the pipes on environmental grounds. While her neighbours were forced to go to the expense and mess of digging up the pipes, Ms Jorritsma simply sealed hers off.
 
The neighbours are furious that the authorities appear to have turned a blind eye to the former minister’s quick fix. They have started legal proceedings to force Ms Jorritsma to get the bulldozers into her garden.