23 March 2007 - halfdone.wordpress - Sue Bradford Panicking

http://halfdone.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/sue-bradford-panicking/

Sue Bradford Panicking

23Mar07
Sue Bradford was on Morning Report, and she was clearly panicked. She was talking about a mile a minute, and didn’t even pull out her usual bull about the bill not banning smacking.

They also played a clip of Dr Cullen in the house, who fell over his own words owing, presumably, to his nervousness.

DPF makes some excellent points:

The Government looks to be panicking over the damage being done to it by the smacking ban bill. Nothing else can explain the extraordinary, possibly unprecedented, plan to progress the bill through its remaining stages under urgency.

…

As a sure sign this is political panic, not a legislative logjam, No Right Turn points out the already thin legislative agenda has become anorexic. Yes the Government has run out of bills, which makes any urgency a total abuse of the legislative process.

… When Rod Donald was alive the Greens were renown for not supporting urgency motions, even on bills they supported, unless it was really necessary such as with tax legislation. Instead their reputation as a party of integrity now is reduced to Bradford saying “It would be great to finish it.”

Bradford is also lying when she says that without urgency the debate could stretch on for months. As I have posted previously there are well known guidelines for how long each clause of a bill can be debated during committee stage. This is merely an attempt to ram it through, despite a majority of the public and of MPs being against it.

My message for opponents of the bill is that your campaign is obviously working, why else would the Government be panicking. The focus for the campaign needs to be on giving Labour MPs a conscience vote on the issue.

It most certainly is. Read these comments from one moral campaigner:

I have had people lining up to sign, begging to sign, telling friends and people standing nearby to sign, having animated conversations about the stupidity of not smacking… I’ve never seen NZ’ers so worked up about anything in my life, or found it so easy to get signatures. People WANT to sign this….

Hm. Given the concerns with CYFS in the media lately, and the government doing the exact opposite of fixing those (i.e. attacking the messenger), perhaps people are waking up the possibility that this bill will open them up to CYFS “attention”.

I’m beginning to think this will affect the re-election of the government.

But why the rush? I can think of several reasons:

Not letting the debate drag out that bit closer to an election
Not letting the protests (which are reported as popping up all over the place) get traction
Is the re-selection of electorate candidates for Labour close? That could explain something.
There are now reported as 15 Labour members wavering. More time means more chances to change position.