Major Milestone passed!

Major Milestone passed!

Larry Baldock
Petition Organiser
Co Leader, Future NZ
Contact Larry Baldock: 021 864 833 or (07) 543 0600

A quarter of a million signatures means that New Zealander’s will finally get to have their say on the smacking debate!!

The Citizens Initiated Referendum petition to ask the question:
“Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in NZ” has now passed the 250,000 mark.

It is now well on its way to the approx 300,000 signatures required by March to force a referendum at next election.

This is a message to Sue Bradford and Helen Clark and all those who thought they could ignore good decent Mum’s and Dad’s in this country who are trying to do their best with the most important job in the world. No Helen, it’s not being Prime Minister, it is raising good kids.

We are going to have a referendum at the next election so that the 84% of New Zealander’s who said they opposed this legislation can vent their frustration at being ignored. Sue Bradford has accused us of lying and scaremongering, claiming that the police report on the first three months since her bill became law shows that nothing has changed.

We refute that. While we can agree that her bill has done nothing to reduce child abuse as we predicted, there has in fact been a change already in police procedure.
The record shows that at least 15 good parents were subjected to the indignity and embarrassment of having the police turn up at their homes with warnings and threats of prosecution if they did not stop breaking the new Bradford law.

The police have never been put in this insidious position before.

They should have been issuing encouragement and congratulations to those parents who love their kids enough to do the hard yards by occasionally using a smack to teach their children respect for authority, and the difference between right and wrong.
We know that those 15 parents are only the first of many who will become the objects of Helen and Sue’s plans to alter our culture and way of life.

When they accuse us of lying and spreading misinformation their fingers should be pointed at themselves. Helen Clark said on a Radio interview prior to the last election that she did not want to ban smacking and then went on to say, “that many don’t want to see stressed and harassed parents called in by the police because they smack a child.”

Well Prime Minister that is exactly what is now happening across this country.
Repeatedly Sue Bradford and supporters said the law had to be changed so that those who hit and beat their children could be prosecuted. Now she openly admits that her bill has failed already. As recently as Dec 21 on National Radio she said “The epidemic of child abuse and child violence in this country continues – sadly. My bill was never intended to solve that problem.”

So what was her bill intended to do? We suspect that the real intention was to undermine the authority of parents in the home.

The referendum is coming which will allow every New Zealander to have their say. If the PM, Sue Bradford and all the MP’s who supported it had any respect for democracy they would have called for the referendum themselves.