Greetings
Only two days until the vote on Wednesday 16.
Here is some URGENT reading for you which clarifies some of our concerns about Section 59. We can't trust the Police or CYFs as our Government plans to vote on the the world's most extreme anti-smacking law in the world.
1. Politicians will vote this week on the world's most extreme anti-smacking law in the world, according to Dr Robert E Larzelere, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at the Oklahoma State University, who was brought to New Zealand by Family First NZ as a scientific expert on child correction for the debate on Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill.
In a commentary written after his week in NZ earlier this month speaking with politicians and media, he says "...the imminent New Zealand smacking ban is more extreme than Sweden's ban in three ways. Using force to correct children will be subject to full criminal penalties .... Sweden's ban had no criminal penalty. In addition, New Zealand's bill bans the mildest use of force to correct children, not just smacking. This removes most disciplinary enforcements parents have used for generations, especially for the most defiant youngsters. Finally, the required change in disciplinary enforcements will be the biggest change ever imposed on parents." Read more here:
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/2007/05/13-may-2007-family-first-mps-to-vote-on.html
2. "However, this provision (the new amendment in Section 59) does not apply to Child Youth and Family Services (CYFs) who, like the police, have statutory powers and can remove your children, limit your access, and eventually in the interests of permanency, place them with a new family. Read more here:
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/2007/05/14-may-2007-united-future-nz-party.html
3. Investigate has been shown the names and specific allegations about a large number of current and former police officers alleged to have been involved in multiple rapes, drug deals, extortion, perversion of the course of justice, sexual misconduct, abuse of power, bringing the police into disrepute, abduction and kidnapping, fraud and a range of other crimes. Multiple police districts and National Headquarters are involved. There is far, far more than we have published in this major investigation.
The magazine is calling for an immediate, full Royal Commission of Inquiry into the performance of the New Zealand Police, with wide terms of reference and full powers to subpoena, compel and take evidence on oath. Our informants do not believe the police have sufficient integrity to investigate these allegations against senior officers, and no other independent law enforcement agency exists capable of investigating the police.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2007/05/media_release_f.html
Please do not grow weary during these last hours. Please contact your MPs URGENTLY. Thursday will be too late.
Regards
Craig and Barbara
PO Box 9064, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Phone: (06) 357-4399 or (06) 354-7699
Fax: (06) 357-4389
http://www.hef.org.nz
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/KiwiSmithFamily/
http://www.familyintegrity.org.nz
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/
http://www.cbworldview.cesbooks.co.nz
if Section59 is repealed - or replaced...
YOU CAN KISS YOUR CHILDREN GOODBYE.
http://www.storesonline.com/members/846699/uploaded/Brochure_-_Kiss_Children_Goodbye_7.pdf
1. Lobbying tools
We need to let the MPs know that we, the majority, do not agree with this re-written Section 59. If you have never written a letter or email to an MP before then now is the time to do it.
EMAIL: Consider sending an email to all the MPs using one of these links several times over the next 11 days:
http://starstuddedsuperstep.com/section59/htm/mp_vote.htm
or
http://www.familyintegrity.org.nz/page/588413
or
http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/files/MP%20Address%20List.xls
LETTER: A very effective way to lobby, no stamp required for your own MP. Address to: (First Name)(Last Name), c/- Parliament Buildings, Wellington
FAX: This costs a bit more and is time consuming but effective. http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/5858C8A5-ACDF-4B35-8D7A-3ABB7B19ACDB/40463/ListOfMembers1820096.pdf
PHONING: This is much easier to do than it would seem. You just ring the MP's office and say "Please add my name to the list of people you have who are against the Repeal or amendment of Section 59". You have to give your name of course and that is it. http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/5858C8A5-ACDF-4B35-8D7A-3ABB7B19ACDB/40463/ListOfMembers1820096.pdf
VISIT: This is by far the hardest to do for some people. But this is most certainly the most effective way to lobby. We are fast running out of time for visiting our MPs. Only one Saturdays before May 16. http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/5858C8A5-ACDF-4B35-8D7A-3ABB7B19ACDB/40463/ListOfMembers1820096.pdf
Write letters to editors, talk on talk back shows, get your friends, relations and neighbours involved
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2. You can read much commentary about Section 59 here:
Family Integrity newsletters: http://FamilyIntegrity.org.nz/page/908900
Press Releases: http://FamilyIntegrity.org.nz/page/910726
Family Integrity Blog: http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/
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3. "Re-written Section 59 -- Parental Control
(1) Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of --
(a) preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
(b) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
(c) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disruptive behaviour; or
(d) performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.
(2) Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
(3) Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
(4) To avoid doubt it is affirmed that police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against parents of any child, or those standing in place of any child, in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in pursuing a prosecution.
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Monday, 14 May 2007
14 May 2007 - United Future NZ Party - Turner to oppose Bradford Bill
14 May 2007 - United Future NZ Party - Turner to oppose Bradford Bill
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0705/S00321.htm Bill
Monday, 14 May 2007, 10:16 am
Press Release: United Future NZ Party
Monday, 14 May 2007
Turner to oppose Bradford Bill
United Future MP Judy Turner today announced she will be voting against the third and final reading of Green MP Sue Bradford's anti-smacking Bill when it next comes up for debate in Parliament.
"I do believe that the amendment passed last week to clarify the police discretion to not prosecute when it is not in the public interest to do so, was a definite improvement," says Mrs Turner.
"However, this provision does not apply to Child Youth and Family Services who, like the police, have statutory powers and can remove your children, limit your access, and eventually in the interests of permanency, place them with a new family.
"Some would say that it is pure hysteria to suggest that parents will lose their children into care if they lightly smack their children.
"Well I hope they are right. CYFS certainly don't have to meet the same burden of proof as the police do to make an arrest, so discretion is even harder to determine.
"Currently this agency has no robust complaints service and because this is lacking there is little feedback across the department about the need to change social work procedures.
"They do acknowledge that most complaints are about social work provision, but there is no break-down of this to identify if there are any common themes in these complaints.
"Parents I have dealt with fear making a complaint in case they further jeopardise their case. They feel powerless and understandably emotional, often lacking the skills needed to make calm representation to staff at the local branch office.
"To date, not enough has changed in this department to reassure me that good parents are safe, and for this reason… I am not supporting the third reading of this Bill.
ENDS
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0705/S00321.htm Bill
Monday, 14 May 2007, 10:16 am
Press Release: United Future NZ Party
Monday, 14 May 2007
Turner to oppose Bradford Bill
United Future MP Judy Turner today announced she will be voting against the third and final reading of Green MP Sue Bradford's anti-smacking Bill when it next comes up for debate in Parliament.
"I do believe that the amendment passed last week to clarify the police discretion to not prosecute when it is not in the public interest to do so, was a definite improvement," says Mrs Turner.
"However, this provision does not apply to Child Youth and Family Services who, like the police, have statutory powers and can remove your children, limit your access, and eventually in the interests of permanency, place them with a new family.
"Some would say that it is pure hysteria to suggest that parents will lose their children into care if they lightly smack their children.
"Well I hope they are right. CYFS certainly don't have to meet the same burden of proof as the police do to make an arrest, so discretion is even harder to determine.
"Currently this agency has no robust complaints service and because this is lacking there is little feedback across the department about the need to change social work procedures.
"They do acknowledge that most complaints are about social work provision, but there is no break-down of this to identify if there are any common themes in these complaints.
"Parents I have dealt with fear making a complaint in case they further jeopardise their case. They feel powerless and understandably emotional, often lacking the skills needed to make calm representation to staff at the local branch office.
"To date, not enough has changed in this department to reassure me that good parents are safe, and for this reason… I am not supporting the third reading of this Bill.
ENDS
13 MAY 2007 - Family First - MP’s to Vote on “Most Extreme Anti-Smacking Law in World” - Expert
MEDIA RELEASE
13 MAY 2007
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0705/S00223.htm
MP’s to Vote on “Most Extreme Anti-Smacking Law in World” - Expert
Politicians will vote this week on the world’s most extreme anti-smacking law in the world, according to Dr Robert E Larzelere, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at the Oklahoma State University, who was brought to New Zealand by Family First NZ as a scientific expert on child correction for the debate on Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill.
In a commentary written after his week in NZ earlier this month speaking with politicians and media, he says “…the imminent New Zealand smacking ban is more extreme than Sweden’s ban in three ways. Using force to correct children will be subject to full criminal penalties …. Sweden’s ban had no criminal penalty. In addition, New Zealand’s bill bans the mildest use of force to correct children, not just smacking. This removes most disciplinary enforcements parents have used for generations, especially for the most defiant youngsters. Finally, the required change in disciplinary enforcements will be the biggest change ever imposed on parents.”
Dr Larzelere also highlights concerns of immigrants to NZ with the law and says “The New Zealand bill’s proponents claim that missionaries were responsible for introducing smacking and bashing to the Maori and other South Pacific peoples. The irony is that they are doing the same thing they accuse missionaries of – imposing a European philosophy of child correction on native ethnic groups – this time enforced with criminal penalties.”
He warns that the law to be voted on this Wednesday by Parliament “…runs counter to scientific evidence, previous experiences with similar bans, and the wisdom of previous generations as far back as we can remember. It illustrates the world’s increasing inability to work out well-reasoned balanced positions rather than forcing people to choose between polarized extremes.”
Dr Larzelere compares our politicians’ efforts to ban smacking with US President George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and says Bush “…had an overly optimistic view about invading Iraq because they heard only one optimistic side of the scenarios. Now our country is in a quagmire with no good way out. For the sake of New Zealand’s children and future, I hope they have a better exit strategy than George Bush.”
Dr Larzelere’s full warning can be read at http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/Dr_Larzelere
ENDS
For More Information and Media Interviews, contact Family First:
Bob McCoskrie JP - National Director
Tel. 09 261 2426 | Mob. 027 55 555 42
13 MAY 2007
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0705/S00223.htm
MP’s to Vote on “Most Extreme Anti-Smacking Law in World” - Expert
Politicians will vote this week on the world’s most extreme anti-smacking law in the world, according to Dr Robert E Larzelere, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at the Oklahoma State University, who was brought to New Zealand by Family First NZ as a scientific expert on child correction for the debate on Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill.
In a commentary written after his week in NZ earlier this month speaking with politicians and media, he says “…the imminent New Zealand smacking ban is more extreme than Sweden’s ban in three ways. Using force to correct children will be subject to full criminal penalties …. Sweden’s ban had no criminal penalty. In addition, New Zealand’s bill bans the mildest use of force to correct children, not just smacking. This removes most disciplinary enforcements parents have used for generations, especially for the most defiant youngsters. Finally, the required change in disciplinary enforcements will be the biggest change ever imposed on parents.”
Dr Larzelere also highlights concerns of immigrants to NZ with the law and says “The New Zealand bill’s proponents claim that missionaries were responsible for introducing smacking and bashing to the Maori and other South Pacific peoples. The irony is that they are doing the same thing they accuse missionaries of – imposing a European philosophy of child correction on native ethnic groups – this time enforced with criminal penalties.”
He warns that the law to be voted on this Wednesday by Parliament “…runs counter to scientific evidence, previous experiences with similar bans, and the wisdom of previous generations as far back as we can remember. It illustrates the world’s increasing inability to work out well-reasoned balanced positions rather than forcing people to choose between polarized extremes.”
Dr Larzelere compares our politicians’ efforts to ban smacking with US President George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and says Bush “…had an overly optimistic view about invading Iraq because they heard only one optimistic side of the scenarios. Now our country is in a quagmire with no good way out. For the sake of New Zealand’s children and future, I hope they have a better exit strategy than George Bush.”
Dr Larzelere’s full warning can be read at http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/Dr_Larzelere
ENDS
For More Information and Media Interviews, contact Family First:
Bob McCoskrie JP - National Director
Tel. 09 261 2426 | Mob. 027 55 555 42
Saturday, 12 May 2007
Bull Allen - Youtube
Bull Allen speaks at Rally at Parliament against Bradford’s anti-correction anti-parental authority bill - 2 May 2007
12 May 2007 - Family Integrity#248 -- Two excellent video clips
Dear Friends,
Two excellent video clips on Section 59
Jason, 11, speaks out
Pator Peter Mortlock at Wellington Rally on Section 59: At last, some clear and rational words of truth!
Craig Smith
National Director
Family Integrity
PO Box 9064
Palmerston North
New Zealand
Ph: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
Family.Integrity@xtra.co.nz
http://www.FamilyIntegrity.org.nz
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/
Our Home....Our Castle
if Section59 is repealed - or replaced...
YOU CAN KISS YOUR CHILDREN GOODBYE.
http://www.storesonline.com/members/846699/uploaded/Brochure_-_Kiss_Children_Goodbye_7.pdf
Two excellent video clips on Section 59
Jason, 11, speaks out
Pator Peter Mortlock at Wellington Rally on Section 59: At last, some clear and rational words of truth!
Craig Smith
National Director
Family Integrity
PO Box 9064
Palmerston North
New Zealand
Ph: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
Family.Integrity@xtra.co.nz
http://www.FamilyIntegrity.org.nz
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/
Our Home....Our Castle
if Section59 is repealed - or replaced...
YOU CAN KISS YOUR CHILDREN GOODBYE.
http://www.storesonline.com/members/846699/uploaded/Brochure_-_Kiss_Children_Goodbye_7.pdf
Friday, 11 May 2007
Family first - John Key on Conscience vote
JOHN KEY SHOULD ALLOW CONSCIENCE VOTE ON FLAWED SMACKING BILL
John Key argued that National would allow a conscience vote on the "anti-smacking" bill - but he's changed his mind and all National MP's (like Labour MP's) have to vote for a flawed bill.
Please email him john.key@parliament.govt.nz and ask that he allow a conscience vote.
WATCH VIDEO (14 mb - required broadband to download - takes a few moments to download)
Please go to Family First to download the video:
http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/media_centre/audio___video
John Key argued that National would allow a conscience vote on the "anti-smacking" bill - but he's changed his mind and all National MP's (like Labour MP's) have to vote for a flawed bill.
Please email him john.key@parliament.govt.nz and ask that he allow a conscience vote.
WATCH VIDEO (14 mb - required broadband to download - takes a few moments to download)
Please go to Family First to download the video:
http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/media_centre/audio___video
Thursday, 10 May 2007
Excellent Letter to MPs from Kirsty
Subject: Please, for the sake of New Zealand families, do not allow the Child Discipline Bill to pass into law.
Dear National Party Members of Parliament
The following is an excellent article, and I would urge you to read it - it should take no more than ten minutes of your time - but it shows why the Bill to repeal Section 59 is so dangerous to families in this country and why we must not allow it to pass. The article exposes the ideology that is driving the Bill to repeal Section 59, with or without John Key's "Claytons" amendment (the amendment you have when you don't have an amendment).
The "amendment" that John Key supplied provides absolutely no protection or defence of a parent if they are accused, rightly or wrongly, of "smacking" their children. It is simply a tinkering with words. It was deeply disappointing to see the leader of the Opposition colluding with the Labour and Green parties in this matter. What hope does the electorate have of balanced government when there is no effective
opposition; when there is no alternative point of view given except that which the State dictates?
This bill is not about protecting children, or dealing with NZ's child abuse tragedy - it is about allowing government, through government agencies like CYFS, to control individual families and to threaten us with the removal of our children, should we not wish to follow their agendas.
The Bill to repeal Section 59 is of special threat to traditional families, where we seek to forge strong bonds of love, support and commitment within the individual family. We may never be prosecuted for "smacking" our children, but if we are accused of such action, we could well lose custody of our children to a government agency while we battle through the courts to regain our "right" to exist as a family. This is totalitarianism, as seen in Stalinist USSR, Maoist China and Nazi
Germany.
I urge you not to allow this travesty of justice to happen here in New Zealand. I urge you to vote with your conscience, not be directed by a party ideology, when the time comes to vote on the Child Discipline/Repeal of Section 59 Bill. Please, for the sake of New Zealand families, do not allow this Bill to pass into law.
Kirsty
Hamilton
How to control adults by means of 'children's rights'.
By Lynette Burrows
This article is published by The Human Life Foundation, Inc. New York, in the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring 1999, pages 65 - 73. The article is reproduced here with the kind consent of the author.
Lynette Burrows is a well-known English educator and journalist. Her latest book, The Fight for the Family, was published in 1998, revised and reprinted in March 1999 by the Family Education Trust, Family Publications, Oxford, England.
When you think about it, the fashionable crusade of 'children's rights' is bound to be anti-family. It is a movement which declares itself to be more interested in the welfare of children than are ordinary parents. It seeks rights and laws for children that neither they, nor their parents, want.
It promises to give children legal sanctions against their parents and, in so doing, pits the interests of children against their parents. The inescapable implication is that children are not in safe hands with their own parents and that a whole movement has had to be called into being in order to protect them. It is an innocent-sounding piece of subliminal, anti-family propaganda, advertising the fact that parents are, at best, inadequate and, at worst, hostile to the needs of their children.
Analysing the 'loaded' message of the title 'children's rights' one can see it attempts to pack the punch of an appeal to both parental feeling and the nobility of action implied by the word 'rights'. It is utterly bogus! A 'right is classically defined as 'the freedom to act without interference, according to one's conscience.' It means nothing unless the individual has the capacity to act upon their 'right' and children, by nature of their immaturity and inexperience, do not have that capacity.
So they have people who act for them, in the form of the people who created them and who love them more than anyone else. Those people, the adult parents, have a freedom to act according to their conscience, and within the law, with their children and it is that freedom that the children's rights activists seek to remove.
One can clearly map their intentions by what they have achieved so far and what they are signalling they want to do in the future. I don't know anything about the American scene but, in Great Britain, and several European countries, among their achievements has been securing the right of the state to allow under-age children to be given contraceptives and abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent. This remarkable right was not achieved via parliament, which still upholds an 'age of
consent' at sixteen years. Still less was it achieved by pressure from either parents or children. It was as achieved by the active collaboration of the industry that sells contraceptives, the people who are employed in promoting their use, and the 'children's rights' lobby who claimed that, since children had now decided to be sexually active - there was nothing parents could do about it.
The right for children to 'divorce' unsatisfactory parents has also been secured for them by children's rights lawyers; working on the usual pay-rates but with the bill settled by the taxpayer. So far parents have not been given the right to divorce unsatisfactory children - but that is consistent with the philosophy of children's rights. It is parents who are failing in their duty to give children the freedom they need. Children, the client group, are not to be criticised or restricted in any way.
Children have also been given the right to take themselves out of the care of their parents and put themselves instead, into the misnamed 'care' of the local authority. Just what this can mean was illustrated by a mother, Mrs Iverson, whose14 year old daughter went to live with a 33 year old drug-dealer from Jamaica. She appealed to the local authority to get her daughter back and they responded by getting a social worker to take the child to a contraceptive clinic. The anguished mother could do nothing whilst her daughter was first introduced to a life of prostitution and then, a month later, murdered. No-one in authority was criticised or prosecuted for their lack of action since they, and the police, were prevented from denying the child her 'right' to free association, by the Children Act, 1989.
Thus, one can see by their aims and achievements, that the right to behave badly is second only to the right to premature sexual activity, according to the children's rights agenda. Furtherance of this aim was massively enhanced by the successful campaign of one of the earliest children's rights groups to get corporal punishment, of even the mildest kind, outlawed in schools. An unwary parliament passed this law by one vote, against a background of generally unproblematic discipline in schools.
Certainly primary schools were little havens of tranquillity and learning for children in even the roughest areas. All this has gone now; together with thousands of good teachers who have fled a profession where harassment of them is the norm rather than the exception in many areas.
Children have, in other words, been given an amazing collection of liberties to behave badly, with absolutely no enforceable obligations to behave themselves or even to observe the law. On the other hand, their misdeeds are providing masses of highly paid work for the now enormous lobby of professionals who are parasitic on the new options available to children and the problems they bring. Any attempt to improve the behaviour of young people, is bound to run into opposition from these professionals since they are defending a financial interest that is dependent upon more of the same.
Another peculiarity of the rights, sought by activists for children, is how extremely limited and arbitrary they are. If these really were rights that any child could legitimately be supposed to need or to want, they would surely start with the right of a child to be born and not to be killed before birth. But all children's rights activists support abortion in principle and in practice as if, in any circumstances, it could be considered in the unborn child's best interest.
Then again, any child should surely have a right to enjoy a relationship with both their mother and their father; rather than being created by artificial insemination for the benefit of a lesbian couple. In all the arguments about this still highly contentious practice, and its rather more relevant, related topic, the ability of homosexuals to foster and adopt children, the children's rights people have been 'out to lunch'.
Another major area where a serious question of children's rights are involved, is surely the right of children not to be bullied at school.
Parents protest about it all the time, but little has been done to address their concerns because parents do not belong to well-funded organisations with direct access to the media. 70% of parents were found last year to want corporal punishment restored in school; and so too did 68% of schoolchildren.
The reason for this is, no doubt, because many children are in fact receiving punishment that is decidedly 'corporal' in school - but from bullying thugs rather than from lawful authority. The rights activists don't address this subject because they are so busy monitoring schools for signs of homophobia, sexism or racism that they seem to have overlooked the much larger number of children who are simply terrified of the big boys.
Other areas deserving attention from those who could support parents in wanting the best for their children, would be having a flexible school leaving age and having the right to do work outside of school hours. Even more important, amongst the list of glaring omissions in the children's rights agenda, is the care and protection of children who have been taken into council care.
The Social Services Inspectorate presented a report last year that pointed out just how badly children 'in care' are doing. Despite there being only 0.5% of children in local authority care, 22% of young men in prison and 39% of prisoners under 21 have been in care. One third of people sleeping rough in London have been in care and one quarter of children in care aged 14 or over, don't go to school regularly. For some reason, referred to in the report but not explained, many of those who abscond from children's homes, somehow disappear from local authority records thereafter.
When this report came out, there was much public discussion about this parlous state of affairs and many people commented on the lack of independent monitoring to safeguard vulnerable children. None that I saw, even thought to question the complete lack of involvement or interest in this scandal by the many, high-profile, publicly funded, children's rights organisations. There are many areas of pressing need in relation to disadvantaged children, where parents with the best will in the world, simply have no power to get things done. Well-funded organisations with
premises, facilities, telephones, full time staff and, above all, access to the media, could do so much of real value if they wanted to; but our current crop do not. So, one has to ask, what do they really want?
The answer to this must be that it is something ideological as well as something financial. The financial objective is fairly straight-forward.
It has provided a good many jobs and the children's rights activists have certainly found themselves a career. My book, The Fight for the Family, (a second edition of which came out in March) started life as a commissioned chapter in a book about social affairs. I was given a researcher (American) and told to find out about the principle children's rights groups; who formed them, who supported them and who paid for them.
Once we began, we found a scene so entirely different from what we had expected, that we became seriously interested and what had started out as a fairly hum-drum piece of research turned into a fascinating lesson in the modus operandi of pressure groups. It also ballooned into a small book.
For a start we discovered that all the principle groups concerned with this characteristically liberal/left version of children's rights, groups were founded or co-founded by one man, and his domestic 'partner', mostly as limited companies.
Their friends and colleagues over the years were spread amongst child care charities and government committees and one, or both, turned up on the boards of all eight of the principal organisations promoting their version of 'children's rights'. Their ideological orientation explained why the narrow agenda they pursued in every case
was so similar. It also explained why the basic assumption was always that children needed to be 'liberated' from their parents care and control.
Not
having chosen to get married themselves, despite having children, it is fair to say that they have some rooted objection to marriage as an institution or, at least, believe that it is not important.
These groups have played an important part in promoting all the rights referred to above relating to premature sexual activity and behaving badly. One of the organisations was exclusively devoted to securing the abolition of corporal punishment in schools and, that having been achieved, its funds were transferred to another organisation, End Physical Punishment of Children, (EPOCH) which is the principle driving force behind attempts to get parental smacking of children criminalised.
The part of my book which really enraged rights activists, however, was not the discussion of their ideological bent, which they did not seem to dispute. It was the fact that attention was drawn to the similarity of their aims to those of the paedophile organisations of the 1970's, which were prosecuted and suppressed in 1980.
As a matter of fact, the similarities are striking and, whilst I was not claiming that children's rights activists were all paedophiles, it is nevertheless evident that their campaigns have been useful to those who want greater sexual access to children. 'Unwitting' was the word I used to describe the direct help given to paedophiles by the de facto abolition of the age of consent for girls in the matter of providing them with contraceptives at school. Now it is proposed to apply the same age of consent law to boys for homosexual activity, we will no doubt see its de
facto abolition too.
However, it was after the book was sold out that the response to the publishers began to make another aspect of 'children's rights' clear. It was always obvious that the welfare of children was very low on most of the activists' agenda.
Otherwise they would have been doing honest research to discover whether the freedoms advocated by them for children, were actually beneficial. They would also have been much more interested in whether breaking up families was the best response to anything but clear law-breaking on the part of parents, not to mention whether local authority care was better for children than a normal, even strict, home.
Now, like a voice from beyond the grave, we suddenly heard that Sweden had, at long last, developed a protest movement against the things that were being done to them in the name of children's rights. I don't know if it is the same in America, but here and in Europe, Sweden has always been held up as a paragon of 'progressive' innovation. It is referred to in reverential tones by liberals everywhere and children's rights activists place particular emphasis on the beneficial effects of their 1979 law which forbade parents to smack their children. According to their
literature, no parents have ever been imprisoned or otherwise penalised for having laid a hand on their children and there is no cause for concern anywhere.
Well, it isn't true! An organisation of academics, lawyers, doctors and other professionals have formed 'The Nordic Committee for Human Rights', which is principally concerned with human rights abuses in Sweden, the most powerful and influential of the Nordic nations. They have a website (NKMR.org) where you can read all about it in English. They point out several crucial, historical factors. Notably that the Nazi's copied a good deal of their social policy from the Swedes; particularly that part of it which saw children as belonging to 'the parental state' rather than to its parents. The family too was viewed with dislike since it encouraged thoughts and actions that were not prescribed by the state.
Unmarried mothers had their babies automatically taken away from them and an organisation called 'Save the Children' was begun during the 1930's in Sweden, which was, contrary to expectation, profoundly anti-family. What children had to be
'saved' from, were the imperfections of their natural parents and the oppressive and un-enlightened atmosphere of a normal family. That has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?
They were also very enamoured of eugenics and the idea of a perfect racial type.
Unbeknown to the rest of the world, the Swedish government pursued a policy of forced sterilisation of children it thought came from poor stock, until 1976. What a surprise for liberals everywhere when the fact came out, only last year, that more than 60,000 children had, in that way, been cleansed of their ability to procreate .
Few people had any idea that the Swedish government had the power to maintain such secrecy when it also had a relatively free press. One can hazard a guess that the truth only emerged finally because a couple of sad individuals, who had been deprived of their birthright by being sterilised when they were children in care, sued the government for compensation for what was done for them. Victims have now been promised the princely sum of £7,000 apiece.
The Nordic Committee, under its energetic and fearless chairman Ruby Harrold-Claesson, has at last broken open many of the other half-truths that the Swedish authorities are still putting about. She is a lawyer - incidentally, the only black one in Sweden - and has dredged up a lot of the figures relating to the seizure of children by the authorities. These are difficult to obtain because they are not recorded in the normal, criminal courts. Hence the ability of the children's rights people to claim that there have been no prosecutions under the 1979 law. Children
are taken away under the auspices of an administrative court which, in the public interest, of course, keeps the figures safely out of reach of most people.
To give you an idea of the scale of the tyranny over the family, it is necessary to describe the context. Sweden has a population of eight million; it is also extremely homogenous as to race and no people in Europe are more clearly identifiable by their appearance alone. It has virtually no poverty, wall to wall welfare and no large cities. The capital city has a population of less than two million and the second
city has one hundred and fifty thousand people. There should be, in fact, very few cases where children need to be taken from their parents. Yet, in 1981 the authorities seized 22,000 children; which represents a rate of seizure 86 times greater than that of West Germany. An equivalent figure for America would be, by that reckoning, more than 687 thousand - in one year!
No doubt the authorities had such a field day because of the number of children who had been smacked by their parents before the 1979 Act came in. The figure fell somewhat after that but, in 1995, it was 14,700 children removed from their homes. That is a rate 57 times that of Germany and, in American terms, would be nearly 500 thousand children. A mind-boggling number for the rest of the world to contemplate and a clear explanation why so few people in Sweden either get married or have
children.
Yet why is this so little known? From time to time there is brief publicity of the abuses of Sweden, before liberals return to their uncritical admiration of it.
Unfortunately for the oppressed everywhere, the liberal/left always treasures its heroes - even when they are murderous tyrants - so it will take some time, and a lot of repetition, for the truth to rise to the surface.
Another stalwart of the Nordic Committee, Siv Westerberg, has taken eight cases to the Court of Human rights at Strasborg, and has won seven times.
The Readers Digest featured one of her cases in 1993. It involved three children who were abducted by the authorities whilst they were at school.
They were sent to separate families 600 miles away and it took the parents 5 months even to find out where they were. No specific reason was ever given for why they had been taken; just that it was in their 'best interest'. It took seven years before the parents were able to get their case to the European Court, which found in their favour. The parents were awarded £33,000 compensation and the Swedish authorities were told to return the children to their parents. The eldest, who was then 17, was allowed home but the other two were not. This is the system that we are being asked to admire and follow!
By a striking coincidence, on the very day the organisation that published my book held a conference to discuss its findings, the BBC asked to do an interview with me about the smacking debate. Since I was tied up with the conference, they decided to interview me in a side room during the lunch break and, accordingly sent an interviewer and crew. I took the opportunity to introduce them to Ruby Harrold-Claesson, who was one of the principle speakers at the conference and she gave them a brief run-down of what she was saying about Sweden.
The team looked uncomfortable and, when I suggested that they include an interview with her to beef-up the debate, they said they already had been to Sweden and would be including an account of things there, as part of the programme.
When we watched the programme a few days later, sure enough, there they were in Sweden interviewing a handful of schoolchildren who confirmed that their parents were not allowed to smack them. They then asked a senior official about whether many children had been taken from their families as a result of the anti-smacking law. Laughing uproariously, she waved her hand around her, 'Can you see many children being taken?' she said. And that was supposed to be a sufficient answer.
After this, the missing brick fell into place! The question was always, why are the children's rights people so concerned to make the parental right to smack their children illegal? Most of their organisations have been more or less devoted to the subject despite the fact that 90% of good and caring parents say that it is necessary at times. Now the answer is clear.
It is a device which places most parents in the power of social workers.
They are, by training and tradition, Marxist, feminist, and anti-religious. They don't much care for the family and lend their weight on every possible occasion to arguments and devices that show it in a bad light. In this country, they are still opposed to the inclusion, in official statistics, of figures which show the precise nature of the relationship of abusers to the children they abuse. At present, they are simply called 'fathers', even though they are seldom genetic fathers and, even more seldom, genetic fathers actually married to the mother of their children. The traditional family is still the safest place for any child to be - but you would not know it from official literature on the subject.
Thus, anybody who wanted to further a Marxist, feminist agenda, could not do better than to have most families in thrall to social workers. The right to browbeat parents because they smack their children when they think it necessary, as the Bible tells them they must, would be all an officious bureaucracy needed to infantilise the majority of adults. It is not about the elevation of children's rights at all. It is about the crushing of adult ones.
It is a particularly crafty bandwagon to set on the road because it has drawn support from so many unpleasant but powerful allies.
Contraceptive-selling commerce has welcomed and supported them; paedophiles love them; and as for those government employees engaged in the job of directing, but not curbing, the rising tide of young people in trouble - they simply could not do without them.
Baby-snatching, as it has always been called, is almost bound to be due for a make-over in the years to come. There has been in increase in infertility amongst the young that would be considered alarming if we were not still so fixated with the idea of over-population; plus the fact that the 'wrong' sort of people are still having babies, particularly out of wedlock. This rise must be due, at least in part, to the powerful steroids being given to young girls to ensure their continuance as sexually active people. Also because of the extraordinary increase in the sexually
transmitted diseases which cause barrenness in women and sterility in men.
Evils have a habit of happening one upon the other and it is an ironic observation made by the Nordic Committee for Human rights, that one of the reasons it is so easy to find foster-carers for the thousands of 'snatched' children in Sweden, is a political one. Successive social policy makers have scorned the role of wife and mother for many years. A woman loses all child benefits if she refuses to place her children in a crèche and she would feel very vulnerable to having them taken away too. Unless of course she had a very well-paid job to do there - looking after other people's stolen children.
It is incongruous, isn't it? To build your home on the ruins of someone else's. No wonder Scandinavian dramatists at the turn of the century were always so gloomy; they must have sensed what was coming.
Dear National Party Members of Parliament
The following is an excellent article, and I would urge you to read it - it should take no more than ten minutes of your time - but it shows why the Bill to repeal Section 59 is so dangerous to families in this country and why we must not allow it to pass. The article exposes the ideology that is driving the Bill to repeal Section 59, with or without John Key's "Claytons" amendment (the amendment you have when you don't have an amendment).
The "amendment" that John Key supplied provides absolutely no protection or defence of a parent if they are accused, rightly or wrongly, of "smacking" their children. It is simply a tinkering with words. It was deeply disappointing to see the leader of the Opposition colluding with the Labour and Green parties in this matter. What hope does the electorate have of balanced government when there is no effective
opposition; when there is no alternative point of view given except that which the State dictates?
This bill is not about protecting children, or dealing with NZ's child abuse tragedy - it is about allowing government, through government agencies like CYFS, to control individual families and to threaten us with the removal of our children, should we not wish to follow their agendas.
The Bill to repeal Section 59 is of special threat to traditional families, where we seek to forge strong bonds of love, support and commitment within the individual family. We may never be prosecuted for "smacking" our children, but if we are accused of such action, we could well lose custody of our children to a government agency while we battle through the courts to regain our "right" to exist as a family. This is totalitarianism, as seen in Stalinist USSR, Maoist China and Nazi
Germany.
I urge you not to allow this travesty of justice to happen here in New Zealand. I urge you to vote with your conscience, not be directed by a party ideology, when the time comes to vote on the Child Discipline/Repeal of Section 59 Bill. Please, for the sake of New Zealand families, do not allow this Bill to pass into law.
Kirsty
Hamilton
How to control adults by means of 'children's rights'.
By Lynette Burrows
This article is published by The Human Life Foundation, Inc. New York, in the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring 1999, pages 65 - 73. The article is reproduced here with the kind consent of the author.
Lynette Burrows is a well-known English educator and journalist. Her latest book, The Fight for the Family, was published in 1998, revised and reprinted in March 1999 by the Family Education Trust, Family Publications, Oxford, England.
When you think about it, the fashionable crusade of 'children's rights' is bound to be anti-family. It is a movement which declares itself to be more interested in the welfare of children than are ordinary parents. It seeks rights and laws for children that neither they, nor their parents, want.
It promises to give children legal sanctions against their parents and, in so doing, pits the interests of children against their parents. The inescapable implication is that children are not in safe hands with their own parents and that a whole movement has had to be called into being in order to protect them. It is an innocent-sounding piece of subliminal, anti-family propaganda, advertising the fact that parents are, at best, inadequate and, at worst, hostile to the needs of their children.
Analysing the 'loaded' message of the title 'children's rights' one can see it attempts to pack the punch of an appeal to both parental feeling and the nobility of action implied by the word 'rights'. It is utterly bogus! A 'right is classically defined as 'the freedom to act without interference, according to one's conscience.' It means nothing unless the individual has the capacity to act upon their 'right' and children, by nature of their immaturity and inexperience, do not have that capacity.
So they have people who act for them, in the form of the people who created them and who love them more than anyone else. Those people, the adult parents, have a freedom to act according to their conscience, and within the law, with their children and it is that freedom that the children's rights activists seek to remove.
One can clearly map their intentions by what they have achieved so far and what they are signalling they want to do in the future. I don't know anything about the American scene but, in Great Britain, and several European countries, among their achievements has been securing the right of the state to allow under-age children to be given contraceptives and abortions without their parents' knowledge or consent. This remarkable right was not achieved via parliament, which still upholds an 'age of
consent' at sixteen years. Still less was it achieved by pressure from either parents or children. It was as achieved by the active collaboration of the industry that sells contraceptives, the people who are employed in promoting their use, and the 'children's rights' lobby who claimed that, since children had now decided to be sexually active - there was nothing parents could do about it.
The right for children to 'divorce' unsatisfactory parents has also been secured for them by children's rights lawyers; working on the usual pay-rates but with the bill settled by the taxpayer. So far parents have not been given the right to divorce unsatisfactory children - but that is consistent with the philosophy of children's rights. It is parents who are failing in their duty to give children the freedom they need. Children, the client group, are not to be criticised or restricted in any way.
Children have also been given the right to take themselves out of the care of their parents and put themselves instead, into the misnamed 'care' of the local authority. Just what this can mean was illustrated by a mother, Mrs Iverson, whose14 year old daughter went to live with a 33 year old drug-dealer from Jamaica. She appealed to the local authority to get her daughter back and they responded by getting a social worker to take the child to a contraceptive clinic. The anguished mother could do nothing whilst her daughter was first introduced to a life of prostitution and then, a month later, murdered. No-one in authority was criticised or prosecuted for their lack of action since they, and the police, were prevented from denying the child her 'right' to free association, by the Children Act, 1989.
Thus, one can see by their aims and achievements, that the right to behave badly is second only to the right to premature sexual activity, according to the children's rights agenda. Furtherance of this aim was massively enhanced by the successful campaign of one of the earliest children's rights groups to get corporal punishment, of even the mildest kind, outlawed in schools. An unwary parliament passed this law by one vote, against a background of generally unproblematic discipline in schools.
Certainly primary schools were little havens of tranquillity and learning for children in even the roughest areas. All this has gone now; together with thousands of good teachers who have fled a profession where harassment of them is the norm rather than the exception in many areas.
Children have, in other words, been given an amazing collection of liberties to behave badly, with absolutely no enforceable obligations to behave themselves or even to observe the law. On the other hand, their misdeeds are providing masses of highly paid work for the now enormous lobby of professionals who are parasitic on the new options available to children and the problems they bring. Any attempt to improve the behaviour of young people, is bound to run into opposition from these professionals since they are defending a financial interest that is dependent upon more of the same.
Another peculiarity of the rights, sought by activists for children, is how extremely limited and arbitrary they are. If these really were rights that any child could legitimately be supposed to need or to want, they would surely start with the right of a child to be born and not to be killed before birth. But all children's rights activists support abortion in principle and in practice as if, in any circumstances, it could be considered in the unborn child's best interest.
Then again, any child should surely have a right to enjoy a relationship with both their mother and their father; rather than being created by artificial insemination for the benefit of a lesbian couple. In all the arguments about this still highly contentious practice, and its rather more relevant, related topic, the ability of homosexuals to foster and adopt children, the children's rights people have been 'out to lunch'.
Another major area where a serious question of children's rights are involved, is surely the right of children not to be bullied at school.
Parents protest about it all the time, but little has been done to address their concerns because parents do not belong to well-funded organisations with direct access to the media. 70% of parents were found last year to want corporal punishment restored in school; and so too did 68% of schoolchildren.
The reason for this is, no doubt, because many children are in fact receiving punishment that is decidedly 'corporal' in school - but from bullying thugs rather than from lawful authority. The rights activists don't address this subject because they are so busy monitoring schools for signs of homophobia, sexism or racism that they seem to have overlooked the much larger number of children who are simply terrified of the big boys.
Other areas deserving attention from those who could support parents in wanting the best for their children, would be having a flexible school leaving age and having the right to do work outside of school hours. Even more important, amongst the list of glaring omissions in the children's rights agenda, is the care and protection of children who have been taken into council care.
The Social Services Inspectorate presented a report last year that pointed out just how badly children 'in care' are doing. Despite there being only 0.5% of children in local authority care, 22% of young men in prison and 39% of prisoners under 21 have been in care. One third of people sleeping rough in London have been in care and one quarter of children in care aged 14 or over, don't go to school regularly. For some reason, referred to in the report but not explained, many of those who abscond from children's homes, somehow disappear from local authority records thereafter.
When this report came out, there was much public discussion about this parlous state of affairs and many people commented on the lack of independent monitoring to safeguard vulnerable children. None that I saw, even thought to question the complete lack of involvement or interest in this scandal by the many, high-profile, publicly funded, children's rights organisations. There are many areas of pressing need in relation to disadvantaged children, where parents with the best will in the world, simply have no power to get things done. Well-funded organisations with
premises, facilities, telephones, full time staff and, above all, access to the media, could do so much of real value if they wanted to; but our current crop do not. So, one has to ask, what do they really want?
The answer to this must be that it is something ideological as well as something financial. The financial objective is fairly straight-forward.
It has provided a good many jobs and the children's rights activists have certainly found themselves a career. My book, The Fight for the Family, (a second edition of which came out in March) started life as a commissioned chapter in a book about social affairs. I was given a researcher (American) and told to find out about the principle children's rights groups; who formed them, who supported them and who paid for them.
Once we began, we found a scene so entirely different from what we had expected, that we became seriously interested and what had started out as a fairly hum-drum piece of research turned into a fascinating lesson in the modus operandi of pressure groups. It also ballooned into a small book.
For a start we discovered that all the principle groups concerned with this characteristically liberal/left version of children's rights, groups were founded or co-founded by one man, and his domestic 'partner', mostly as limited companies.
Their friends and colleagues over the years were spread amongst child care charities and government committees and one, or both, turned up on the boards of all eight of the principal organisations promoting their version of 'children's rights'. Their ideological orientation explained why the narrow agenda they pursued in every case
was so similar. It also explained why the basic assumption was always that children needed to be 'liberated' from their parents care and control.
Not
having chosen to get married themselves, despite having children, it is fair to say that they have some rooted objection to marriage as an institution or, at least, believe that it is not important.
These groups have played an important part in promoting all the rights referred to above relating to premature sexual activity and behaving badly. One of the organisations was exclusively devoted to securing the abolition of corporal punishment in schools and, that having been achieved, its funds were transferred to another organisation, End Physical Punishment of Children, (EPOCH) which is the principle driving force behind attempts to get parental smacking of children criminalised.
The part of my book which really enraged rights activists, however, was not the discussion of their ideological bent, which they did not seem to dispute. It was the fact that attention was drawn to the similarity of their aims to those of the paedophile organisations of the 1970's, which were prosecuted and suppressed in 1980.
As a matter of fact, the similarities are striking and, whilst I was not claiming that children's rights activists were all paedophiles, it is nevertheless evident that their campaigns have been useful to those who want greater sexual access to children. 'Unwitting' was the word I used to describe the direct help given to paedophiles by the de facto abolition of the age of consent for girls in the matter of providing them with contraceptives at school. Now it is proposed to apply the same age of consent law to boys for homosexual activity, we will no doubt see its de
facto abolition too.
However, it was after the book was sold out that the response to the publishers began to make another aspect of 'children's rights' clear. It was always obvious that the welfare of children was very low on most of the activists' agenda.
Otherwise they would have been doing honest research to discover whether the freedoms advocated by them for children, were actually beneficial. They would also have been much more interested in whether breaking up families was the best response to anything but clear law-breaking on the part of parents, not to mention whether local authority care was better for children than a normal, even strict, home.
Now, like a voice from beyond the grave, we suddenly heard that Sweden had, at long last, developed a protest movement against the things that were being done to them in the name of children's rights. I don't know if it is the same in America, but here and in Europe, Sweden has always been held up as a paragon of 'progressive' innovation. It is referred to in reverential tones by liberals everywhere and children's rights activists place particular emphasis on the beneficial effects of their 1979 law which forbade parents to smack their children. According to their
literature, no parents have ever been imprisoned or otherwise penalised for having laid a hand on their children and there is no cause for concern anywhere.
Well, it isn't true! An organisation of academics, lawyers, doctors and other professionals have formed 'The Nordic Committee for Human Rights', which is principally concerned with human rights abuses in Sweden, the most powerful and influential of the Nordic nations. They have a website (NKMR.org) where you can read all about it in English. They point out several crucial, historical factors. Notably that the Nazi's copied a good deal of their social policy from the Swedes; particularly that part of it which saw children as belonging to 'the parental state' rather than to its parents. The family too was viewed with dislike since it encouraged thoughts and actions that were not prescribed by the state.
Unmarried mothers had their babies automatically taken away from them and an organisation called 'Save the Children' was begun during the 1930's in Sweden, which was, contrary to expectation, profoundly anti-family. What children had to be
'saved' from, were the imperfections of their natural parents and the oppressive and un-enlightened atmosphere of a normal family. That has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?
They were also very enamoured of eugenics and the idea of a perfect racial type.
Unbeknown to the rest of the world, the Swedish government pursued a policy of forced sterilisation of children it thought came from poor stock, until 1976. What a surprise for liberals everywhere when the fact came out, only last year, that more than 60,000 children had, in that way, been cleansed of their ability to procreate .
Few people had any idea that the Swedish government had the power to maintain such secrecy when it also had a relatively free press. One can hazard a guess that the truth only emerged finally because a couple of sad individuals, who had been deprived of their birthright by being sterilised when they were children in care, sued the government for compensation for what was done for them. Victims have now been promised the princely sum of £7,000 apiece.
The Nordic Committee, under its energetic and fearless chairman Ruby Harrold-Claesson, has at last broken open many of the other half-truths that the Swedish authorities are still putting about. She is a lawyer - incidentally, the only black one in Sweden - and has dredged up a lot of the figures relating to the seizure of children by the authorities. These are difficult to obtain because they are not recorded in the normal, criminal courts. Hence the ability of the children's rights people to claim that there have been no prosecutions under the 1979 law. Children
are taken away under the auspices of an administrative court which, in the public interest, of course, keeps the figures safely out of reach of most people.
To give you an idea of the scale of the tyranny over the family, it is necessary to describe the context. Sweden has a population of eight million; it is also extremely homogenous as to race and no people in Europe are more clearly identifiable by their appearance alone. It has virtually no poverty, wall to wall welfare and no large cities. The capital city has a population of less than two million and the second
city has one hundred and fifty thousand people. There should be, in fact, very few cases where children need to be taken from their parents. Yet, in 1981 the authorities seized 22,000 children; which represents a rate of seizure 86 times greater than that of West Germany. An equivalent figure for America would be, by that reckoning, more than 687 thousand - in one year!
No doubt the authorities had such a field day because of the number of children who had been smacked by their parents before the 1979 Act came in. The figure fell somewhat after that but, in 1995, it was 14,700 children removed from their homes. That is a rate 57 times that of Germany and, in American terms, would be nearly 500 thousand children. A mind-boggling number for the rest of the world to contemplate and a clear explanation why so few people in Sweden either get married or have
children.
Yet why is this so little known? From time to time there is brief publicity of the abuses of Sweden, before liberals return to their uncritical admiration of it.
Unfortunately for the oppressed everywhere, the liberal/left always treasures its heroes - even when they are murderous tyrants - so it will take some time, and a lot of repetition, for the truth to rise to the surface.
Another stalwart of the Nordic Committee, Siv Westerberg, has taken eight cases to the Court of Human rights at Strasborg, and has won seven times.
The Readers Digest featured one of her cases in 1993. It involved three children who were abducted by the authorities whilst they were at school.
They were sent to separate families 600 miles away and it took the parents 5 months even to find out where they were. No specific reason was ever given for why they had been taken; just that it was in their 'best interest'. It took seven years before the parents were able to get their case to the European Court, which found in their favour. The parents were awarded £33,000 compensation and the Swedish authorities were told to return the children to their parents. The eldest, who was then 17, was allowed home but the other two were not. This is the system that we are being asked to admire and follow!
By a striking coincidence, on the very day the organisation that published my book held a conference to discuss its findings, the BBC asked to do an interview with me about the smacking debate. Since I was tied up with the conference, they decided to interview me in a side room during the lunch break and, accordingly sent an interviewer and crew. I took the opportunity to introduce them to Ruby Harrold-Claesson, who was one of the principle speakers at the conference and she gave them a brief run-down of what she was saying about Sweden.
The team looked uncomfortable and, when I suggested that they include an interview with her to beef-up the debate, they said they already had been to Sweden and would be including an account of things there, as part of the programme.
When we watched the programme a few days later, sure enough, there they were in Sweden interviewing a handful of schoolchildren who confirmed that their parents were not allowed to smack them. They then asked a senior official about whether many children had been taken from their families as a result of the anti-smacking law. Laughing uproariously, she waved her hand around her, 'Can you see many children being taken?' she said. And that was supposed to be a sufficient answer.
After this, the missing brick fell into place! The question was always, why are the children's rights people so concerned to make the parental right to smack their children illegal? Most of their organisations have been more or less devoted to the subject despite the fact that 90% of good and caring parents say that it is necessary at times. Now the answer is clear.
It is a device which places most parents in the power of social workers.
They are, by training and tradition, Marxist, feminist, and anti-religious. They don't much care for the family and lend their weight on every possible occasion to arguments and devices that show it in a bad light. In this country, they are still opposed to the inclusion, in official statistics, of figures which show the precise nature of the relationship of abusers to the children they abuse. At present, they are simply called 'fathers', even though they are seldom genetic fathers and, even more seldom, genetic fathers actually married to the mother of their children. The traditional family is still the safest place for any child to be - but you would not know it from official literature on the subject.
Thus, anybody who wanted to further a Marxist, feminist agenda, could not do better than to have most families in thrall to social workers. The right to browbeat parents because they smack their children when they think it necessary, as the Bible tells them they must, would be all an officious bureaucracy needed to infantilise the majority of adults. It is not about the elevation of children's rights at all. It is about the crushing of adult ones.
It is a particularly crafty bandwagon to set on the road because it has drawn support from so many unpleasant but powerful allies.
Contraceptive-selling commerce has welcomed and supported them; paedophiles love them; and as for those government employees engaged in the job of directing, but not curbing, the rising tide of young people in trouble - they simply could not do without them.
Baby-snatching, as it has always been called, is almost bound to be due for a make-over in the years to come. There has been in increase in infertility amongst the young that would be considered alarming if we were not still so fixated with the idea of over-population; plus the fact that the 'wrong' sort of people are still having babies, particularly out of wedlock. This rise must be due, at least in part, to the powerful steroids being given to young girls to ensure their continuance as sexually active people. Also because of the extraordinary increase in the sexually
transmitted diseases which cause barrenness in women and sterility in men.
Evils have a habit of happening one upon the other and it is an ironic observation made by the Nordic Committee for Human rights, that one of the reasons it is so easy to find foster-carers for the thousands of 'snatched' children in Sweden, is a political one. Successive social policy makers have scorned the role of wife and mother for many years. A woman loses all child benefits if she refuses to place her children in a crèche and she would feel very vulnerable to having them taken away too. Unless of course she had a very well-paid job to do there - looking after other people's stolen children.
It is incongruous, isn't it? To build your home on the ruins of someone else's. No wonder Scandinavian dramatists at the turn of the century were always so gloomy; they must have sensed what was coming.
Lindsay Mitchell's blog
Comments before and after Andy Moore: http://section59.blogspot.com/
Lindsay Mitchell delivers another fantastic, well thought out article. She here breaks down the UN Report which groups such as Save the Children, and people such as Bradford and Clark enjoy quoting from so much.
http://lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com/2007/05/save-your-outrage.html
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"More propaganda from left-wing organisations. Save The Children are deploring New Zealand's ranking of 20th of 44 developed countries in child status.
The report shows New Zealand has a long way to go in protecting children under five. Out of 43 more developed countries, New Zealand ranks 20th in child wellbeing. In fact, New Zealand falls well behind Malta and Slovenia.
New Zealand's under-5 mortality for 2005, the major factor in this rating, was 6 per 1,000 live births. Sharing this exact same statistic were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Malta and the United Kingdom.
Of course then comes the predictable reference to section 59 removal and what a difference that will make.
"Not only will the Bill better protect children, but it will also enable New Zealand to meet its international and moral responsibility to protect children from abuse. As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993 we have agreed to protect children from all types of mistreatment including physical punishment," says Save the Children New Zealand's Executive Director, John Bowis.
Of the countries with a mortality rate of 4 per 1,000 Finland, Sweden, Norway and Italy have banned smacking. Czech Republic, Japan and Slovenia have not. It's the same mixed picture across the countries with a mortality rate of 5.
Mortality rates don't equal deaths due to maltreatment alone but they are treated as such by people with leftist agendas."
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I'll just add another point. The left have chosen ridiculously small countries to quote from their report. Slovenia's population estimate at July 2006 was 2,010,347. And get this, Malta's population estimate at July 2006 was 400,214. One could assume that if Malta had a population the size of New Zealand's, it's child death rate would be 60 deaths per 1000 children under the age of five. What sort of standard is this Bradford? How dare you even compare New Zealand to Malta?
So of course they are going to have lower child death statistics!
Do your research before swallowing everything they tell you people!
Lindsay Mitchell delivers another fantastic, well thought out article. She here breaks down the UN Report which groups such as Save the Children, and people such as Bradford and Clark enjoy quoting from so much.
http://lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com/2007/05/save-your-outrage.html
------------------------
"More propaganda from left-wing organisations. Save The Children are deploring New Zealand's ranking of 20th of 44 developed countries in child status.
The report shows New Zealand has a long way to go in protecting children under five. Out of 43 more developed countries, New Zealand ranks 20th in child wellbeing. In fact, New Zealand falls well behind Malta and Slovenia.
New Zealand's under-5 mortality for 2005, the major factor in this rating, was 6 per 1,000 live births. Sharing this exact same statistic were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Malta and the United Kingdom.
Of course then comes the predictable reference to section 59 removal and what a difference that will make.
"Not only will the Bill better protect children, but it will also enable New Zealand to meet its international and moral responsibility to protect children from abuse. As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993 we have agreed to protect children from all types of mistreatment including physical punishment," says Save the Children New Zealand's Executive Director, John Bowis.
Of the countries with a mortality rate of 4 per 1,000 Finland, Sweden, Norway and Italy have banned smacking. Czech Republic, Japan and Slovenia have not. It's the same mixed picture across the countries with a mortality rate of 5.
Mortality rates don't equal deaths due to maltreatment alone but they are treated as such by people with leftist agendas."
------------------------
I'll just add another point. The left have chosen ridiculously small countries to quote from their report. Slovenia's population estimate at July 2006 was 2,010,347. And get this, Malta's population estimate at July 2006 was 400,214. One could assume that if Malta had a population the size of New Zealand's, it's child death rate would be 60 deaths per 1000 children under the age of five. What sort of standard is this Bradford? How dare you even compare New Zealand to Malta?
So of course they are going to have lower child death statistics!
Do your research before swallowing everything they tell you people!
Wednesday, 9 May 2007
Letter to MPs from Saudi Arabia
Dear Prime Minister and Members of Parliament
I just receive a news that you may voting on May 16 for a Bill that will make illegal for parents to correct their children, this mean remove from the parents their duty of educated the children in the good behavior.
Please, do not make of New Zealand a country where the family will be debilitate, a country where children did not respects the elders. God has giving to the parents the authority to educate the children, not do try to go against God wills, this is not the smart decision.
I am afraid that if this re-written Section 59-Parental Control, becomes a law, I will never travel to your country, will be no more a save place to visit.
Please, Vote for the Families,
Blessings
P............
Telephone Saudi Arabia
Cellphone Todd
Address Saudi Arabia:
Al Khobar 31952, Saudi Arabia
I just receive a news that you may voting on May 16 for a Bill that will make illegal for parents to correct their children, this mean remove from the parents their duty of educated the children in the good behavior.
Please, do not make of New Zealand a country where the family will be debilitate, a country where children did not respects the elders. God has giving to the parents the authority to educate the children, not do try to go against God wills, this is not the smart decision.
I am afraid that if this re-written Section 59-Parental Control, becomes a law, I will never travel to your country, will be no more a save place to visit.
Please, Vote for the Families,
Blessings
P............
Telephone Saudi Arabia
Cellphone Todd
Address Saudi Arabia:
Al Khobar 31952, Saudi Arabia
9 MAY 2007 - Family First - Save the Children Report – Further Proof that Smacking Isn’t the Issue
Isn’t the Issue
MEDIA RELEASE
9 MAY 2007
Save the Children Report – Further Proof that Smacking Isn’t the Issue
The latest report from Save the Children “State of the World’s Mothers 2007 – Saving the Lives of Children Under 5” is further evidence that the proposed ban on smacking is a ‘feel-good’ policy which has been adopted by 17 countries now without any identifiable or tangible benefit.
For the child death rate in the developed world, NZ currently ranks 21st. Of the top 20 safest countries, less than half have banned smacking. And the worst country for child deaths, Romania, banned smacking 3 years ago.
“Save the Children in New Zealand have trumpeted this report as further evidence that section 59 should be repealed,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ, “yet this report is simply further proof that groups like Save the Children, Barnardos and EPOCH are barking up the wrong tree in relation to child abuse.”
“The report quite correctly identifies the health and well-being of the mother, the availability of skilled health personnel during births, education and poverty as key contributors to children being at risk.”
The report reiterates the issues that Family First is highlighting. It says “Factors such as single parenthood, low levels of maternal education, teenage motherhood, substandard housing, large family size and parental drug or alcohol abuse increase the risks that a child will not survive to age 5.”
Mr McCoskrie says it is time that groups like Save the Children, CYF and UNICEF in NZ started reading their own reports and started advocating for dealing with the actual causes of child abuse, rather than attacking good families.
ENDS
For More Information and Media Interviews, contact Family First:
Bob McCoskrie JP - National Director
Tel. 09 261 2426 | Mob. 027 55 555 42
MEDIA RELEASE
9 MAY 2007
Save the Children Report – Further Proof that Smacking Isn’t the Issue
The latest report from Save the Children “State of the World’s Mothers 2007 – Saving the Lives of Children Under 5” is further evidence that the proposed ban on smacking is a ‘feel-good’ policy which has been adopted by 17 countries now without any identifiable or tangible benefit.
For the child death rate in the developed world, NZ currently ranks 21st. Of the top 20 safest countries, less than half have banned smacking. And the worst country for child deaths, Romania, banned smacking 3 years ago.
“Save the Children in New Zealand have trumpeted this report as further evidence that section 59 should be repealed,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ, “yet this report is simply further proof that groups like Save the Children, Barnardos and EPOCH are barking up the wrong tree in relation to child abuse.”
“The report quite correctly identifies the health and well-being of the mother, the availability of skilled health personnel during births, education and poverty as key contributors to children being at risk.”
The report reiterates the issues that Family First is highlighting. It says “Factors such as single parenthood, low levels of maternal education, teenage motherhood, substandard housing, large family size and parental drug or alcohol abuse increase the risks that a child will not survive to age 5.”
Mr McCoskrie says it is time that groups like Save the Children, CYF and UNICEF in NZ started reading their own reports and started advocating for dealing with the actual causes of child abuse, rather than attacking good families.
ENDS
For More Information and Media Interviews, contact Family First:
Bob McCoskrie JP - National Director
Tel. 09 261 2426 | Mob. 027 55 555 42
OPEN LETTER TO MR JOHN KEY
----- Original Message -----
From: David Lane
To: emma.holmes@parliament.govt.nz
Cc: bill.english@parliament.govt.nz
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 8:53 AM
Subject: OPEN LETTER TO MR JOHN KEY
Urgent Attention
John Key
National Party Leader
OPEN LETTER:
CALLING ON ALL NATIONAL MEMBERS TO VOTE AGAINST SUE BRADFORD'S FLAWED BILL
Dear Mr John Key
The Eathorne's tragic case (see press release copied to all National MPs below) shows what can happen when police discretion is misapplied - charges (of assault on a child under 14 years s. 194 of Crimes Act) were pursued for inconsequential domestic force - and good parents were criminalised (convictions and heavy fines were issued).
Of course this (unsound use of discretion) can happen under the current Crimes Act relating to s. 194 but at least a s.59 defence is actually open to parents NOW if they find themselves facing charges for using "unreasonable force" in the correction of their children (assault) and they believe they have done nothing more than apply reasonable force for correction in the circumstances. Under s. 59 (2) "The reasonableness of the force used is A QUESTION OF FACT". Under Bradford's flawed bill, even with the new amendment, in Court cases where it can be established that some element of correction was involved the question of "reasonableness" is NOT a question of fact that can be examined by the Court.
If Bradford's flawed bill becomes law there is NO defence open to such a parent, IF police, following a misapplication of their discretion, lay charges for force used for correction. (We are assuming here that there are facts that provide compelling evidence contra the police. that in reality the incident was (1) "inconsequential" in terms of force used and (2) not in the "public interest" to pursue. The problem is that 1 & 2 remain undefined! and these facts CANNOT be tested in Court).
Under Bradford's legislation - once in place .......
A good and honest parent charged with assault for using what he/she genuinely believed at the time was only inconsequential force for correction, would be doing wrong not to plead guilty in Court of committing an "offence" under the Crimes Act. Why? Because the use of all force in such circumstances involving correction is defined as a criminal "offence" - an ILLEGAL act. There is NO defence open to them. They have no alternative if they wish to be dealt with leniantly by the Court. Like the Eathornes they face the full wrath of the Court Judge who made an example of them. All the police prosecutor has to do, goaded by CYFS, is to establish that the force had some sort of consequenes e.g. the child cried or felt aggrieved, so therefore the incident was NOT inconsequential.
Inconsequential means WITHOUT consequennces.
HOWEVER, a (disciplinary) smack is supposed to hurt and cause some minor discomfort. A smack with a wet bus ticket for wrongdoing does not constitute correction. The vast majority of NZ parents (> 80%) believe they should have a right in law - a justification - for using firm but fair corporal discipline where reasonable force is applied - eg a firm hard smack to the open hand or padded back-side. Bradford's bill would remove any and all such justification and brand all parents who use force for correction as those who commit illegal acts (crimes).
Just in case you think that a clever defence lawyer COULD argue that the force was "incosequential" therefore there should be no conviction.... THis is NOT an option. The questions of whether the force was "inconsequential" or in "the public interest" is NOT A QUESTION oF FACT; they are only matters that inform police discretion PRIOR to charging the offender. AGAIN THEY ARE NOT MATTERS OF FACT.
In the current law section 2 states: "THE REASONABLENESS OF THE FORCE USED IS A QUESTION OF FACT."
The Court decision CANNOT turn on either of these questions. Why? Because they NOT questions of fact. The police, by proceeding with the prosecution have passed over these issued and settled these matters. They cannot cannot be revisited in Court as a ground for concluding that no offence was committed.
The person charged, has nowhere to turn in law to secure a line of defence.
We CALL ON YOU AND ALL NATIONAL MEMBERS TO VOTE AGAINST SUE BRADFORD'S FLAWED BILL
PLEASE ENSURE THAT ALL NATIONAL MPS ARE ABLE TREAT THIS VOTE AS A CONSCIENCE VOTE
Yours sincerely
David Lane
Secretary
Society for Promotion of Community Standards Inc.
From: David Lane
To: emma.holmes@parliament.govt.nz
Cc: bill.english@parliament.govt.nz
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 8:53 AM
Subject: OPEN LETTER TO MR JOHN KEY
Urgent Attention
John Key
National Party Leader
OPEN LETTER:
CALLING ON ALL NATIONAL MEMBERS TO VOTE AGAINST SUE BRADFORD'S FLAWED BILL
Dear Mr John Key
The Eathorne's tragic case (see press release copied to all National MPs below) shows what can happen when police discretion is misapplied - charges (of assault on a child under 14 years s. 194 of Crimes Act) were pursued for inconsequential domestic force - and good parents were criminalised (convictions and heavy fines were issued).
Of course this (unsound use of discretion) can happen under the current Crimes Act relating to s. 194 but at least a s.59 defence is actually open to parents NOW if they find themselves facing charges for using "unreasonable force" in the correction of their children (assault) and they believe they have done nothing more than apply reasonable force for correction in the circumstances. Under s. 59 (2) "The reasonableness of the force used is A QUESTION OF FACT". Under Bradford's flawed bill, even with the new amendment, in Court cases where it can be established that some element of correction was involved the question of "reasonableness" is NOT a question of fact that can be examined by the Court.
If Bradford's flawed bill becomes law there is NO defence open to such a parent, IF police, following a misapplication of their discretion, lay charges for force used for correction. (We are assuming here that there are facts that provide compelling evidence contra the police. that in reality the incident was (1) "inconsequential" in terms of force used and (2) not in the "public interest" to pursue. The problem is that 1 & 2 remain undefined! and these facts CANNOT be tested in Court).
Under Bradford's legislation - once in place .......
A good and honest parent charged with assault for using what he/she genuinely believed at the time was only inconsequential force for correction, would be doing wrong not to plead guilty in Court of committing an "offence" under the Crimes Act. Why? Because the use of all force in such circumstances involving correction is defined as a criminal "offence" - an ILLEGAL act. There is NO defence open to them. They have no alternative if they wish to be dealt with leniantly by the Court. Like the Eathornes they face the full wrath of the Court Judge who made an example of them. All the police prosecutor has to do, goaded by CYFS, is to establish that the force had some sort of consequenes e.g. the child cried or felt aggrieved, so therefore the incident was NOT inconsequential.
Inconsequential means WITHOUT consequennces.
HOWEVER, a (disciplinary) smack is supposed to hurt and cause some minor discomfort. A smack with a wet bus ticket for wrongdoing does not constitute correction. The vast majority of NZ parents (> 80%) believe they should have a right in law - a justification - for using firm but fair corporal discipline where reasonable force is applied - eg a firm hard smack to the open hand or padded back-side. Bradford's bill would remove any and all such justification and brand all parents who use force for correction as those who commit illegal acts (crimes).
Just in case you think that a clever defence lawyer COULD argue that the force was "incosequential" therefore there should be no conviction.... THis is NOT an option. The questions of whether the force was "inconsequential" or in "the public interest" is NOT A QUESTION oF FACT; they are only matters that inform police discretion PRIOR to charging the offender. AGAIN THEY ARE NOT MATTERS OF FACT.
In the current law section 2 states: "THE REASONABLENESS OF THE FORCE USED IS A QUESTION OF FACT."
The Court decision CANNOT turn on either of these questions. Why? Because they NOT questions of fact. The police, by proceeding with the prosecution have passed over these issued and settled these matters. They cannot cannot be revisited in Court as a ground for concluding that no offence was committed.
The person charged, has nowhere to turn in law to secure a line of defence.
We CALL ON YOU AND ALL NATIONAL MEMBERS TO VOTE AGAINST SUE BRADFORD'S FLAWED BILL
PLEASE ENSURE THAT ALL NATIONAL MPS ARE ABLE TREAT THIS VOTE AS A CONSCIENCE VOTE
Yours sincerely
David Lane
Secretary
Society for Promotion of Community Standards Inc.
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
Larry Baldock's travel plans
Travel plans
Barbara and I will be in Christchurch from the 11th-15th and would like to meet those of you from the area at 7.00pm Monday night at Grace Vineyard. 150 Ferry Rd, Christchurch for a discussion on how we complete the task and other ideas.
If we can be of any help at any other meetings over the weekend or if you can arrange any speaking opportunities, please contact me.
Auckland 16th-18th and because we postponed going to Gisborne last weekend we will be there May 27th.
Barbara and I will be in Christchurch from the 11th-15th and would like to meet those of you from the area at 7.00pm Monday night at Grace Vineyard. 150 Ferry Rd, Christchurch for a discussion on how we complete the task and other ideas.
If we can be of any help at any other meetings over the weekend or if you can arrange any speaking opportunities, please contact me.
Auckland 16th-18th and because we postponed going to Gisborne last weekend we will be there May 27th.
Letter to MPs
Dear Prime Minister and Members of Parliament
Ms Bradford said she was ''over the moon'' with the development and said it was a tribute to MMP that all parties were able to work out a compromise.
"The children of New Zealand will be safe."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4045584a10.html
The children of New Zealand will NOT be safe:
1. This will make no difference to the children who are savagely beaten and violently abused every day. Most of their parents have not been listening to this debate. Mostly they don't listen to or watch the news. They mostly watch videos and pornography. This kind of abuse is already illegal.
2. It will make no difference to the nearly 18,000 babies that are violently pulled apart in the womb every day in New Zealand. Why do the people who are so concerned about amending Section 59 do nothing about these defenceless babies?
3. Some children of good parents will be torn from their loving parents and put into CYFs care where they will be abused. Will that be an MPs children? Some parents will be criminalized. Or will an MP volunteer to be the first family to go to court as a test case for lightly smacking their children or putting their children in "Time Out" against their will. I think not.
Blessings
Barbara Smith
Palmerston North
Ms Bradford said she was ''over the moon'' with the development and said it was a tribute to MMP that all parties were able to work out a compromise.
"The children of New Zealand will be safe."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4045584a10.html
The children of New Zealand will NOT be safe:
1. This will make no difference to the children who are savagely beaten and violently abused every day. Most of their parents have not been listening to this debate. Mostly they don't listen to or watch the news. They mostly watch videos and pornography. This kind of abuse is already illegal.
2. It will make no difference to the nearly 18,000 babies that are violently pulled apart in the womb every day in New Zealand. Why do the people who are so concerned about amending Section 59 do nothing about these defenceless babies?
3. Some children of good parents will be torn from their loving parents and put into CYFs care where they will be abused. Will that be an MPs children? Some parents will be criminalized. Or will an MP volunteer to be the first family to go to court as a test case for lightly smacking their children or putting their children in "Time Out" against their will. I think not.
Blessings
Barbara Smith
Palmerston North
The Anti-Smacking Amendment
The Anti-Smacking Amendment
http://cimba7200.blogspot.com/2007/05/anti-smacking-amendment-this-week-nz.html
This week the NZ Government tried to finalise the passing of legislation to prevent parents or guardians from disciplining their children by smacking them if the need arose.
The legislation originated from the NZ Greens Party 'Children's Issues' Spokesperson who wanted to repeal the part of the act that enabled parents or guardians to use reasonable force when disciplining their children.
See: http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/other8780.html
As the Labour Government presently rules without a majority and depends on the good will of some of the minor parties to help them stay in power, they owed it to the Green Party to help them pass this, a Green party bill, through the house - no matter what - to keep their loyalty.
During earlier readings of the bill in parliament it became apparent that this was an exceptionally unpopular piece of legislation among New Zealanders, and as the day for the final reading approached about 80% of the population was against it.
So what to do? The Labour Government was between a rock and a hard place. If the bill wasn't passed they would have failed the loyalty to the Greens. If it passed the people of NZ would never forgive them.
But a knight in shining armor, in the form of the major opposition National Party leader stepped into the gap with an amendment that effectively softened the legislation, and in my mind repealed the proposed legislation.
What a farce? The Labour Government and the Green Party now have huge lashings of egg not just over their faces but all over their clothes as well!! Metaphorically speaking that is!
Government has no place interfering in the lives of good law abiding and loving families. Sometimes a smack is the last resort to reinforce discipline of children, so long as it is carried out with an open hand and no other device. Let us all be conscious of how we discipline our children, so that no harm comes to them. Such loving parents must not be made into criminals.
And let these protests prevent any further government intrusion into good parenting homes.
http://cimba7200.blogspot.com/2007/05/anti-smacking-amendment-this-week-nz.html
This week the NZ Government tried to finalise the passing of legislation to prevent parents or guardians from disciplining their children by smacking them if the need arose.
The legislation originated from the NZ Greens Party 'Children's Issues' Spokesperson who wanted to repeal the part of the act that enabled parents or guardians to use reasonable force when disciplining their children.
See: http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/other8780.html
As the Labour Government presently rules without a majority and depends on the good will of some of the minor parties to help them stay in power, they owed it to the Green Party to help them pass this, a Green party bill, through the house - no matter what - to keep their loyalty.
During earlier readings of the bill in parliament it became apparent that this was an exceptionally unpopular piece of legislation among New Zealanders, and as the day for the final reading approached about 80% of the population was against it.
So what to do? The Labour Government was between a rock and a hard place. If the bill wasn't passed they would have failed the loyalty to the Greens. If it passed the people of NZ would never forgive them.
But a knight in shining armor, in the form of the major opposition National Party leader stepped into the gap with an amendment that effectively softened the legislation, and in my mind repealed the proposed legislation.
What a farce? The Labour Government and the Green Party now have huge lashings of egg not just over their faces but all over their clothes as well!! Metaphorically speaking that is!
Government has no place interfering in the lives of good law abiding and loving families. Sometimes a smack is the last resort to reinforce discipline of children, so long as it is carried out with an open hand and no other device. Let us all be conscious of how we discipline our children, so that no harm comes to them. Such loving parents must not be made into criminals.
And let these protests prevent any further government intrusion into good parenting homes.
Monday, 7 May 2007
Section 59
Gidday,
In my opinion, until they define "correction" and declare whether it includes concepts such as "discipline", "training", "chastisement" and "punishment". We simply cannot know what is in store for us. In addition, "force" is generally understood to be physical force, but the definition of "assault" in the Crimes Act includes even the threat of force and even a gesture on the part of person B where person C interpret's B's gesture to be a threat, even though person B had not
that intention!!
In addition to all of this, is it not true, do you not read it so, that given the bill to be voted on soon now reads:
Parental Control
(1) Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of --
(a) preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
(b) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
(c) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disuptive behaviour; or
(d) performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.
(2) Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
(3) Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
(4) To avoid doubt it is affirmed that police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against parents of any child, or those standing in place of any child, in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in pursuing a prosecution.
given that since subsection 2 condemns the action of parental correction, and given that subsection 3 says subsection 2 must prevail over subsection 1; is it not logical to say that should a jury be undecided as to whether the force used was for this new "evil" called "correction" of an offensive behaviour or whether is was just to "prevent" an offensive behaviour (a la subsection 1c), does not subsection 3 REQUIRE the jury to settle on the "correction" interpretation and therefore find the parent guilty of correction? That is, does not this bill say that when reasonable doubt exists, the jury is required to find the parent guilty, even though in all the rest of our law system, juries cannot find you guilty unless it is proven BEYOND
all reasonable doubt?
It seems this bill is totally and completely unworkable, except, just as Police Commissioner Broad has said, they will work it out with the help of the courts and the police complaints authority....meaning, family after family will be ground up through the system so that they can work out the required definitions and settle on some useful precedents.
Very scary.
Regards,
Craig Smith
In my opinion, until they define "correction" and declare whether it includes concepts such as "discipline", "training", "chastisement" and "punishment". We simply cannot know what is in store for us. In addition, "force" is generally understood to be physical force, but the definition of "assault" in the Crimes Act includes even the threat of force and even a gesture on the part of person B where person C interpret's B's gesture to be a threat, even though person B had not
that intention!!
In addition to all of this, is it not true, do you not read it so, that given the bill to be voted on soon now reads:
Parental Control
(1) Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of --
(a) preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
(b) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
(c) preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disuptive behaviour; or
(d) performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.
(2) Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
(3) Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
(4) To avoid doubt it is affirmed that police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against parents of any child, or those standing in place of any child, in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in pursuing a prosecution.
given that since subsection 2 condemns the action of parental correction, and given that subsection 3 says subsection 2 must prevail over subsection 1; is it not logical to say that should a jury be undecided as to whether the force used was for this new "evil" called "correction" of an offensive behaviour or whether is was just to "prevent" an offensive behaviour (a la subsection 1c), does not subsection 3 REQUIRE the jury to settle on the "correction" interpretation and therefore find the parent guilty of correction? That is, does not this bill say that when reasonable doubt exists, the jury is required to find the parent guilty, even though in all the rest of our law system, juries cannot find you guilty unless it is proven BEYOND
all reasonable doubt?
It seems this bill is totally and completely unworkable, except, just as Police Commissioner Broad has said, they will work it out with the help of the courts and the police complaints authority....meaning, family after family will be ground up through the system so that they can work out the required definitions and settle on some useful precedents.
Very scary.
Regards,
Craig Smith
6 May 07 - NZCPR Forum - Opinion piece by Peter Shirtcliffe
NZCPR Forum http://www.nzcpr.com
Opinion piece by Peter Shirtcliffe
6 May 07
The Nonsense of the List MP
Snippet from Opinion piece by Peter Shirtcliffe:
The Anti-Smacking Bill is promoted and driven by a List MP, whose party has no Electorate credibility, who owes no allegiance to an Electorate herself, is fixated on her agenda, and will use whatever political machinations are available to achieve her social end. Given the mockery she and her colleagues are making of the community, one would hope that it will also lead to her political end. More importantly, perhaps the whole episode will focus peoples' minds on the crazy situation where nearly half the Parliament are sent there by Party bosses, a system which automatically reduces the improved sensitivity to the community we were led to expect.
Opinion piece by Peter Shirtcliffe
6 May 07
The Nonsense of the List MP
Snippet from Opinion piece by Peter Shirtcliffe:
The Anti-Smacking Bill is promoted and driven by a List MP, whose party has no Electorate credibility, who owes no allegiance to an Electorate herself, is fixated on her agenda, and will use whatever political machinations are available to achieve her social end. Given the mockery she and her colleagues are making of the community, one would hope that it will also lead to her political end. More importantly, perhaps the whole episode will focus peoples' minds on the crazy situation where nearly half the Parliament are sent there by Party bosses, a system which automatically reduces the improved sensitivity to the community we were led to expect.
6 May 2007 - Family First - ANTI-SMACKING BILL
06 May 2007
Hi Barbara,
ANTI-SMACKING BILL
Can Parents Have Confidence in the Proposed Anti-Smacking Law?
But Clark said the proposed change was a "breakthrough" in that it provided assurance to good parents who were concerned they could be prosecuted for lightly smacking their children under the bill. She said the bill as it stood would have never done that, but inserting police guidelines into the legislation made that clear. - Helen Clark (NZPA 2 May 2007)
" National Party Leader John Key is pleased Labour will adopt a version of his amendment to the anti-smacking bill which he thinks will give parents confidence they will not be criminalised for lightly smacking their children ." - John Key (Media Release 2 May 2007)
BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE LAW SAYS!
The amendment simply says they may not be PROSECUTED for smacking their children - if the police thinks the force is "inconsequential" (whatever that means) and "not in the public interest" (but there is HUGE public interest by anti-smacking groups to ban all force.)
In response to an email from Family First to the Police Association, where we put a couple of scenarios of how a harrassed mother may deal with a child who is being defiant and a member of the public or even the child complains to the police, they said
"The important thing to remember is that in both cases, a complaint has been made and police have an obligation to investigate. A file will be created and it will be assigned to an officer to investigate. They will interview witnesses, etc, as we always do, to establish the facts to the extent they can. It is then that a decision will be made.
Had Section 59 been repealed, under police policy, if there was evidence of an offence, the offender would have to be arrested. Now there will be a test applied as to whether the force was inconsequential or not which essentially means police can and will exercise some discretion.
As to whether CYFS will be notified, the answer as I understand it to be, bearing in mind I speak on behalf of the Association not Police, is that there is likely to be a notification if it is established some force has been used. This is the practice where a complaint involving a child is made. "
ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE FACT THAT LIGHT SMACKS WILL STILL BE A CRIME
AND THAT ANY COMPLAINT AGAINST A PARENT WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE REFERRED TO CYF??
- despite the supposed compromise reached by Clark, Key and Bradford???
We believe that John Key and Helen Clark should make good their promise that parents will not be criminalised for lightly smacking their children. This should be explicitly spelt out in the legislation - not left to the Police. This would avoid good parents coming under the weight and stress of an investigation by the police and CYF if a malicious or unecessary complaint is made against them.
GOOD PARENTS DESERVE THE PROTECTION OF THE LAW
There are 3 things we'd like you to consider doing - if you agree with our concerns:
1. Email all NATIONAL MP's and ask that John Key's promise to parents is stated explicitly in the law - that parents will not be criminalised for light smacks. Also ask for a Conscience Vote on the issue
shane.ardern@parliament.govt.nz; chris.auchinvole@parliament.govt.nz ; david.bennett@parliament.govt.nz ; paula.bennett@parliament.govt.nz ; jackie.blue@parliament.govt.nz ; mark.blumsky@parliament.govt.nz ; chester.borrows@parliament.govt.nz ; natalie.roberts@parliament.govt.nz ; david.carter@parliament.govt.nz ; john.carter@parliament.govt.nz ;
bob.clarkson@parliament.govt.nz ; jonathan.coleman@parliament.govt.nz ; judith.collins@parliament.govt.nz ; brian.connell@national.org.nz ; jacqui.dean@parliament.govt.nz ;
lorraine.jones@parliament.govt.nz ; christopher.finlayson@parliament.govt.nz ; craig.foss@parliament.govt.nz ; jo.goodhew@parliament.govt.nz ; sandra.goudie@national.org.nz ;
tim.groser@parliament.govt.nz ; sue.reid@parliament.govt.nz ; john.hayes@parliament.govt.nz ; phil.heatley@parliament.govt.nz ; tau.henare@parliament.govt.nz ; alwyn.black@parliament.govt.nz ;
emma.holmes@parliament.govt.nz ; colin.king@parliament.govt.nz ; wayne.mapp@parliament.govt.nz ; murray.mccully@parliament.govt.nz ; allan.peachey@parliament.govt.nz ;
simon.power@parliament.govt.nz ; katherine.rich@national.org.nz ; eric.roy@parliament.govt.nz ; tony.ryall@parliament.govt.nz ; katrina.shanks@national.org.nz ;
clem.simich@parliament.govt.nz ; lockwood.smith@parliament.govt.nz ; nick.smith@parliament.govt.nz ; meg.dowrick@parliament.govt.nz ; lindsay.tisch@parliament.govt.nz ;
anne.tolley@parliament.govt.nz ; chris.tremain@national.org.nz ; nicky.wagner@parliament.govt.nz ; kate.wilkinson@parliament.govt.nz ; maurice.williamson@parliament.govt.nz ;
pansy.wong@parliament.govt.nz ; richard.worth@parliament.govt.nz ;
(simply copy these signatures and paste onto email)
2. Email all LABOUR MP's and remind them that if the new amendment is as good as they say, allow a Conscience Vote for their MP's
rbarker@ministers.govt.nz ; tim.barnett@parliament.govt.nz ; dbenson-pope@ministers.govt.nz ; mburton@ministers.govt.nz ; ccarter@ministers.govt.nz ; steve.chadwick@parliament.govt.nz ;
ritchie.wards@parliament.govt.nz ; ritchie.wards@parliament.govt.nz ; pm@ministers.govt.nz ; clayton.cosgrove@parliament.govt.nz ; mcullen@ministers.govt.nz ; dcunliffe@ministers.govt.nz ;
ldalziel@ministers.govt.nz ; hduynhoven@ministers.govt.nz ; rdyson@ministers.govt.nz ; russell.fairbrother@parliament.govt.nz ; darien.fenton@parliament.govt.nz ;
jan.gribben@parliament.govt.nz ; pgoff@ministers.govt.nz ; mark.gosche@parliament.govt.nz ; ann.hartley@parliament.govt.nz ; george.hawkins@parliament.govt.nz ;
dave.hereora@parliament.govt.nz ; marian.hobbs@parliament.govt.nz ; phodgson@ministers.govt.nz ; phoromia@ministers.govt.nz ; darren.hughes@parliament.govt.nz ;
shane.jones@parliament.govt.nz ; aking@ministers.govt.nz ; wlaban@ministers.govt.nz ; moana.mackey@labour.org.nz ; smaharey@ministers.govt.nz ; nmahuta@ministers.govt.nz ;
tmallard@ministers.govt.nz ; sue.moroney@parliament.govt.nz ; doconnor@ministers.govt.nz ; mahara.okeroa@parliament.govt.nz ; dparker@ministers.govt.nz ;
jill.pettis@parliament.govt.nz ; lynne.pillay@parliament.govt.nz ; mririnui@ministers.govt.nz ; ross.robertson@parliament.govt.nz ; dsamuels@ministers.govt.nz ; lesley.soper@parliament.govt.nz ;
maryan.street@parliament.govt.nz ; paul.swain@parliament.govt.nz ; jtizard@ministers.govt.nz ; margaret.wilson@parliament.govt.nz ; dianne.yates@parliament.govt.nz ;
(simply copy these signatures and paste onto email)
3. Continue to gain signatures for the Referendum.
There are already over 160,000 signatures on this petition demanding a Referendum on this exact issue "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a Criminal Offence in NZ"
You can download forms here http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/sign_the_petitions.html
Finally....
Please feel free to email us with your feedback and opinion on this issue. Email bob@familyfirst.org.nz
Have a good week
Kind regards
Bob McCoskrie
NATIONAL DIRECTOR
www.familyfirst.org.nz | About us | Media Centre | Contact Us | Support Us |
Hi Barbara,
ANTI-SMACKING BILL
Can Parents Have Confidence in the Proposed Anti-Smacking Law?
But Clark said the proposed change was a "breakthrough" in that it provided assurance to good parents who were concerned they could be prosecuted for lightly smacking their children under the bill. She said the bill as it stood would have never done that, but inserting police guidelines into the legislation made that clear. - Helen Clark (NZPA 2 May 2007)
" National Party Leader John Key is pleased Labour will adopt a version of his amendment to the anti-smacking bill which he thinks will give parents confidence they will not be criminalised for lightly smacking their children ." - John Key (Media Release 2 May 2007)
BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE LAW SAYS!
The amendment simply says they may not be PROSECUTED for smacking their children - if the police thinks the force is "inconsequential" (whatever that means) and "not in the public interest" (but there is HUGE public interest by anti-smacking groups to ban all force.)
In response to an email from Family First to the Police Association, where we put a couple of scenarios of how a harrassed mother may deal with a child who is being defiant and a member of the public or even the child complains to the police, they said
"The important thing to remember is that in both cases, a complaint has been made and police have an obligation to investigate. A file will be created and it will be assigned to an officer to investigate. They will interview witnesses, etc, as we always do, to establish the facts to the extent they can. It is then that a decision will be made.
Had Section 59 been repealed, under police policy, if there was evidence of an offence, the offender would have to be arrested. Now there will be a test applied as to whether the force was inconsequential or not which essentially means police can and will exercise some discretion.
As to whether CYFS will be notified, the answer as I understand it to be, bearing in mind I speak on behalf of the Association not Police, is that there is likely to be a notification if it is established some force has been used. This is the practice where a complaint involving a child is made. "
ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE FACT THAT LIGHT SMACKS WILL STILL BE A CRIME
AND THAT ANY COMPLAINT AGAINST A PARENT WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE REFERRED TO CYF??
- despite the supposed compromise reached by Clark, Key and Bradford???
We believe that John Key and Helen Clark should make good their promise that parents will not be criminalised for lightly smacking their children. This should be explicitly spelt out in the legislation - not left to the Police. This would avoid good parents coming under the weight and stress of an investigation by the police and CYF if a malicious or unecessary complaint is made against them.
GOOD PARENTS DESERVE THE PROTECTION OF THE LAW
There are 3 things we'd like you to consider doing - if you agree with our concerns:
1. Email all NATIONAL MP's and ask that John Key's promise to parents is stated explicitly in the law - that parents will not be criminalised for light smacks. Also ask for a Conscience Vote on the issue
shane.ardern@parliament.govt.nz; chris.auchinvole@parliament.govt.nz ; david.bennett@parliament.govt.nz ; paula.bennett@parliament.govt.nz ; jackie.blue@parliament.govt.nz ; mark.blumsky@parliament.govt.nz ; chester.borrows@parliament.govt.nz ; natalie.roberts@parliament.govt.nz ; david.carter@parliament.govt.nz ; john.carter@parliament.govt.nz ;
bob.clarkson@parliament.govt.nz ; jonathan.coleman@parliament.govt.nz ; judith.collins@parliament.govt.nz ; brian.connell@national.org.nz ; jacqui.dean@parliament.govt.nz ;
lorraine.jones@parliament.govt.nz ; christopher.finlayson@parliament.govt.nz ; craig.foss@parliament.govt.nz ; jo.goodhew@parliament.govt.nz ; sandra.goudie@national.org.nz ;
tim.groser@parliament.govt.nz ; sue.reid@parliament.govt.nz ; john.hayes@parliament.govt.nz ; phil.heatley@parliament.govt.nz ; tau.henare@parliament.govt.nz ; alwyn.black@parliament.govt.nz ;
emma.holmes@parliament.govt.nz ; colin.king@parliament.govt.nz ; wayne.mapp@parliament.govt.nz ; murray.mccully@parliament.govt.nz ; allan.peachey@parliament.govt.nz ;
simon.power@parliament.govt.nz ; katherine.rich@national.org.nz ; eric.roy@parliament.govt.nz ; tony.ryall@parliament.govt.nz ; katrina.shanks@national.org.nz ;
clem.simich@parliament.govt.nz ; lockwood.smith@parliament.govt.nz ; nick.smith@parliament.govt.nz ; meg.dowrick@parliament.govt.nz ; lindsay.tisch@parliament.govt.nz ;
anne.tolley@parliament.govt.nz ; chris.tremain@national.org.nz ; nicky.wagner@parliament.govt.nz ; kate.wilkinson@parliament.govt.nz ; maurice.williamson@parliament.govt.nz ;
pansy.wong@parliament.govt.nz ; richard.worth@parliament.govt.nz ;
(simply copy these signatures and paste onto email)
2. Email all LABOUR MP's and remind them that if the new amendment is as good as they say, allow a Conscience Vote for their MP's
rbarker@ministers.govt.nz ; tim.barnett@parliament.govt.nz ; dbenson-pope@ministers.govt.nz ; mburton@ministers.govt.nz ; ccarter@ministers.govt.nz ; steve.chadwick@parliament.govt.nz ;
ritchie.wards@parliament.govt.nz ; ritchie.wards@parliament.govt.nz ; pm@ministers.govt.nz ; clayton.cosgrove@parliament.govt.nz ; mcullen@ministers.govt.nz ; dcunliffe@ministers.govt.nz ;
ldalziel@ministers.govt.nz ; hduynhoven@ministers.govt.nz ; rdyson@ministers.govt.nz ; russell.fairbrother@parliament.govt.nz ; darien.fenton@parliament.govt.nz ;
jan.gribben@parliament.govt.nz ; pgoff@ministers.govt.nz ; mark.gosche@parliament.govt.nz ; ann.hartley@parliament.govt.nz ; george.hawkins@parliament.govt.nz ;
dave.hereora@parliament.govt.nz ; marian.hobbs@parliament.govt.nz ; phodgson@ministers.govt.nz ; phoromia@ministers.govt.nz ; darren.hughes@parliament.govt.nz ;
shane.jones@parliament.govt.nz ; aking@ministers.govt.nz ; wlaban@ministers.govt.nz ; moana.mackey@labour.org.nz ; smaharey@ministers.govt.nz ; nmahuta@ministers.govt.nz ;
tmallard@ministers.govt.nz ; sue.moroney@parliament.govt.nz ; doconnor@ministers.govt.nz ; mahara.okeroa@parliament.govt.nz ; dparker@ministers.govt.nz ;
jill.pettis@parliament.govt.nz ; lynne.pillay@parliament.govt.nz ; mririnui@ministers.govt.nz ; ross.robertson@parliament.govt.nz ; dsamuels@ministers.govt.nz ; lesley.soper@parliament.govt.nz ;
maryan.street@parliament.govt.nz ; paul.swain@parliament.govt.nz ; jtizard@ministers.govt.nz ; margaret.wilson@parliament.govt.nz ; dianne.yates@parliament.govt.nz ;
(simply copy these signatures and paste onto email)
3. Continue to gain signatures for the Referendum.
There are already over 160,000 signatures on this petition demanding a Referendum on this exact issue "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a Criminal Offence in NZ"
You can download forms here http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/sign_the_petitions.html
Finally....
Please feel free to email us with your feedback and opinion on this issue. Email bob@familyfirst.org.nz
Have a good week
Kind regards
Bob McCoskrie
NATIONAL DIRECTOR
www.familyfirst.org.nz | About us | Media Centre | Contact Us | Support Us |
nzcpr - The Tail is Wagging the Dog
nzcpr - The Tail is Wagging the Dog
New Zealand Centre for Political Research - http://www.nzcpr.com
The Tail is Wagging the Dog
The ramming through Parliament of the deeply unpopular anti-smacking bill is the clearest sign yet that under MMP the ‘tail is wagging the dog’. As Iain Gillies wrote in an editorial in the Gisborne Herald last month: “Widespread antipathy to Sue Bradford’s bill on parental smacking could unwittingly provoke renewed calls for a review of the MMP voting system. The motion does not figure much – yet - in either public discussion or the parliamentary debate, but may well get traction when voters consider to whom their MPs are beholden; their party hierarchy or the electorate (To read the article click here http://www.nzcpd.com/research.htm).
MMP was sold to New Zealanders as a system that would improve representative democracy in this country so that the views of the voters would hold more weight. Surely, no-one could have envisioned the situation we now find ourselves in whereby, in spite of overwhelming public opposition, a list-only minority party is being allowed to foist onto New Zealanders the sort of anti-family legislation that would make Karl Marx proud.
The anti-smacking bill is the brainchild of Green Party MP Sue Bradford. In a 2005 article entitled Vote Labour Now to Smash Capitalism Later, the Communist Workers’ Group states: “A Labour government may need the backing of the Greens. Commentator Chris Trotter said that the New Zealand Greens are probably the most left-wing Green party in the world that has made it into political office. On the face of it there seems to be some truth in this with people like ex-Socialist Action League member Keith Locke and ex-Workers Communist League member Sue Bradford”. (See Aotearoa Independent Media Centre http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/37062/index.php)
So unbelievably, because of the support of the Prime Minister, a former Workers Communist League member is now set to impose her ideology onto New Zealand. British journalist Lynette Burrows in an article How to control adults by means of ‘children’s rights’ explains what’s behind the ideology:
“The question was always, why are the children’s rights people so concerned to make the parental right to smack their children illegal? Most of their organisations have been more or less devoted to the subject despite the fact that 90% of good and caring parents say that it is necessary at times. Now the answer is clear.
“It is a device which places most parents in the power of social workers. They are by training and tradition, marxist, feminist and anti-religious. They don’t much care for the family and lend their weight on every possible occasion to arguments and devices that show it in a bad light… The traditional family is still the safest place for any child to be – but you wouldn’t know it from official literature on the subject.
“Thus, anybody who wanted to further a marxist, feminist agenda could not do better than to have most families in thrall to social workers. It is not about the elevation of children’s rights at all. It is all about the crushing of adult ones”. (To read the article click here http://www.nzcpd.com/research.htm)
Complicit in this attack on parents is Helen Clark who, badly needing Green Party support after the abdication of Philip Field, has done everything in her power to get this anti-smacking law passed: she has prevented her MPs from exercising a conscience vote, she attempted to get the bill passed under urgency, she tried to adopt it as a government bill, and now, in what must be one of the greatest political coups in New Zealand’s history, she has duped the National Party, United and New Zealand First into supporting a Claytons amendment.
The new amendment provided by the Law Commission - under instruction from the Prime Minister - and tabled in Parliament by the Leader of the United Party, changes nothing. As the law now stands if a complaint is laid about a parent smacking a child, the police are required to investigate and to notify the Department of Child Youth and Family. As a result of such an investigation the Police already have the discretion over whether or not to prosecute: if the matter is minor and of no public interest then there will be no prosecution. The much-heralded new clause – which astonishingly gained the support of even those MPs who were vehemently opposed to Bradford’s bill – simply re-states the law as it stands. (To read the original Police advice to the Select Committee click here http://www.nzcpr.com/policeadvice.pdf).
What this whole exercise has shown, is that under MMP calculated cunning is the name of the game. As long as the ruling party can cobble together sufficient support in the House - using whatever trickery it can dream up - any sort of radical new law can now be imposed in New Zealand without public mandate. Nothing is sacred, not even our right to run our own families as we see fit.
Democracy is meant to be government for the people, by the people and of the people. It is meant to respect the rights and freedoms of each and every citizen. What we have under MMP is government by political unions – the political parties - which collude to seek electoral advantage so they can push their ideology into law in order to satisfy the special interest groups that provide their support. All that matters is whether they have the numbers: the question of whether a proposed public policy change will serve the common interest and the public good appears to have been subsumed by the desire to be seen to be winning a victory in Parliament.
Most of the time they get away with it, but this time, with public opinion polls showing that the views of over 80% of New Zealanders are being ignored by our MMP parliamentarians - who look set to pass the anti-smacking bill into law - then surely it is time to question the electoral system itself.
Peter Shirtcliffe has always held serious doubts about the suitability of MMP for New Zealand. He is the NZ Centre for Political Research guest commentator this week. In an article entitled The Nonsense of the List MP he explains:
“One of the most heavily-promoted arguments in favour of MMP was that its introduction would transform for the better the way in which Parliament worked. We were promised… greater sensitivity to the wishes of the Electorate”.
Peter goes on to say: “The signs of politically-driven control agendas are starting to show and objective common-sense solutions will not readily emerge from arrogant, unelected MPs who are at the same time seeking ways to use more taxpayers’ (your) money to fund their own organisations”.
Peter is not alone in believing that a further referendum on MMP is now warranted - although he does note that it is extremely unlikely that such an initiative would be generated by this Parliament. I suspect that a good many of the 1,032,919 voters who supported MMP in the 1993 referendum did so believing that if it didn’t work out, they were going to be given another chance to change it in a later referendum.
With the vexed question of how to best to safeguard ourselves from hasty, unwise or ill-considered legislation uppermost in our mind, maybe the time is now right for that long-awaited binding referendum on whether MMP has delivered to New Zealand a system of government that ensures that not only do our elected representatives reflect the will of the people, but they are also committed to protecting their rights and their liberties.
The poll this week asks whether you would support New Zealand holding a binding referendum on MMP.
To vote click here http://www.nzcpr.com/
Last week's poll asked: Do you you support government funded legal aid for environmental activists driving a political agenda? The result: 3% voted Yes, 97% voted No! Hundreds of the comments submitted on this issue can be seen here http://www.nzcpd.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=179.
HOUSEKEEPING:
Please feel free to send this newsletter on to others who you think would be interested and encourage them to visit the website and register for the newsletter.
Don't forget that we are always keen to consider publication of opinion pieces for the website Soapbox Series http://www.nzcpr.com/soapbox.htm- why not visit the page and send in your submission.
To contact Muriel about this week’s column please click here muriel@nzcpd.com
NZCPR Weekly is a free weekly newsletter by Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, a web-based forum at http://www.nzcpd.com/ for the lively and dynamic exchange of political ideas. You can reach Muriel by phone on 09-434-3836, 021-800-111 or by post at PO Box 984 Whangarei.
New Zealand Centre for Political Research - http://www.nzcpr.com
The Tail is Wagging the Dog
The ramming through Parliament of the deeply unpopular anti-smacking bill is the clearest sign yet that under MMP the ‘tail is wagging the dog’. As Iain Gillies wrote in an editorial in the Gisborne Herald last month: “Widespread antipathy to Sue Bradford’s bill on parental smacking could unwittingly provoke renewed calls for a review of the MMP voting system. The motion does not figure much – yet - in either public discussion or the parliamentary debate, but may well get traction when voters consider to whom their MPs are beholden; their party hierarchy or the electorate (To read the article click here http://www.nzcpd.com/research.htm).
MMP was sold to New Zealanders as a system that would improve representative democracy in this country so that the views of the voters would hold more weight. Surely, no-one could have envisioned the situation we now find ourselves in whereby, in spite of overwhelming public opposition, a list-only minority party is being allowed to foist onto New Zealanders the sort of anti-family legislation that would make Karl Marx proud.
The anti-smacking bill is the brainchild of Green Party MP Sue Bradford. In a 2005 article entitled Vote Labour Now to Smash Capitalism Later, the Communist Workers’ Group states: “A Labour government may need the backing of the Greens. Commentator Chris Trotter said that the New Zealand Greens are probably the most left-wing Green party in the world that has made it into political office. On the face of it there seems to be some truth in this with people like ex-Socialist Action League member Keith Locke and ex-Workers Communist League member Sue Bradford”. (See Aotearoa Independent Media Centre http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/37062/index.php)
So unbelievably, because of the support of the Prime Minister, a former Workers Communist League member is now set to impose her ideology onto New Zealand. British journalist Lynette Burrows in an article How to control adults by means of ‘children’s rights’ explains what’s behind the ideology:
“The question was always, why are the children’s rights people so concerned to make the parental right to smack their children illegal? Most of their organisations have been more or less devoted to the subject despite the fact that 90% of good and caring parents say that it is necessary at times. Now the answer is clear.
“It is a device which places most parents in the power of social workers. They are by training and tradition, marxist, feminist and anti-religious. They don’t much care for the family and lend their weight on every possible occasion to arguments and devices that show it in a bad light… The traditional family is still the safest place for any child to be – but you wouldn’t know it from official literature on the subject.
“Thus, anybody who wanted to further a marxist, feminist agenda could not do better than to have most families in thrall to social workers. It is not about the elevation of children’s rights at all. It is all about the crushing of adult ones”. (To read the article click here http://www.nzcpd.com/research.htm)
Complicit in this attack on parents is Helen Clark who, badly needing Green Party support after the abdication of Philip Field, has done everything in her power to get this anti-smacking law passed: she has prevented her MPs from exercising a conscience vote, she attempted to get the bill passed under urgency, she tried to adopt it as a government bill, and now, in what must be one of the greatest political coups in New Zealand’s history, she has duped the National Party, United and New Zealand First into supporting a Claytons amendment.
The new amendment provided by the Law Commission - under instruction from the Prime Minister - and tabled in Parliament by the Leader of the United Party, changes nothing. As the law now stands if a complaint is laid about a parent smacking a child, the police are required to investigate and to notify the Department of Child Youth and Family. As a result of such an investigation the Police already have the discretion over whether or not to prosecute: if the matter is minor and of no public interest then there will be no prosecution. The much-heralded new clause – which astonishingly gained the support of even those MPs who were vehemently opposed to Bradford’s bill – simply re-states the law as it stands. (To read the original Police advice to the Select Committee click here http://www.nzcpr.com/policeadvice.pdf).
What this whole exercise has shown, is that under MMP calculated cunning is the name of the game. As long as the ruling party can cobble together sufficient support in the House - using whatever trickery it can dream up - any sort of radical new law can now be imposed in New Zealand without public mandate. Nothing is sacred, not even our right to run our own families as we see fit.
Democracy is meant to be government for the people, by the people and of the people. It is meant to respect the rights and freedoms of each and every citizen. What we have under MMP is government by political unions – the political parties - which collude to seek electoral advantage so they can push their ideology into law in order to satisfy the special interest groups that provide their support. All that matters is whether they have the numbers: the question of whether a proposed public policy change will serve the common interest and the public good appears to have been subsumed by the desire to be seen to be winning a victory in Parliament.
Most of the time they get away with it, but this time, with public opinion polls showing that the views of over 80% of New Zealanders are being ignored by our MMP parliamentarians - who look set to pass the anti-smacking bill into law - then surely it is time to question the electoral system itself.
Peter Shirtcliffe has always held serious doubts about the suitability of MMP for New Zealand. He is the NZ Centre for Political Research guest commentator this week. In an article entitled The Nonsense of the List MP he explains:
“One of the most heavily-promoted arguments in favour of MMP was that its introduction would transform for the better the way in which Parliament worked. We were promised… greater sensitivity to the wishes of the Electorate”.
Peter goes on to say: “The signs of politically-driven control agendas are starting to show and objective common-sense solutions will not readily emerge from arrogant, unelected MPs who are at the same time seeking ways to use more taxpayers’ (your) money to fund their own organisations”.
Peter is not alone in believing that a further referendum on MMP is now warranted - although he does note that it is extremely unlikely that such an initiative would be generated by this Parliament. I suspect that a good many of the 1,032,919 voters who supported MMP in the 1993 referendum did so believing that if it didn’t work out, they were going to be given another chance to change it in a later referendum.
With the vexed question of how to best to safeguard ourselves from hasty, unwise or ill-considered legislation uppermost in our mind, maybe the time is now right for that long-awaited binding referendum on whether MMP has delivered to New Zealand a system of government that ensures that not only do our elected representatives reflect the will of the people, but they are also committed to protecting their rights and their liberties.
The poll this week asks whether you would support New Zealand holding a binding referendum on MMP.
To vote click here http://www.nzcpr.com/
Last week's poll asked: Do you you support government funded legal aid for environmental activists driving a political agenda? The result: 3% voted Yes, 97% voted No! Hundreds of the comments submitted on this issue can be seen here http://www.nzcpd.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=179.
HOUSEKEEPING:
Please feel free to send this newsletter on to others who you think would be interested and encourage them to visit the website and register for the newsletter.
Don't forget that we are always keen to consider publication of opinion pieces for the website Soapbox Series http://www.nzcpr.com/soapbox.htm- why not visit the page and send in your submission.
To contact Muriel about this week’s column please click here muriel@nzcpd.com
NZCPR Weekly is a free weekly newsletter by Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, a web-based forum at http://www.nzcpd.com/ for the lively and dynamic exchange of political ideas. You can reach Muriel by phone on 09-434-3836, 021-800-111 or by post at PO Box 984 Whangarei.
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