If you only ever listen to anything news related as you drive into work in the morning between 8 and 8:30am with your dial tuned to NewsTalk ZB, you could be forgiven for thinking that National is quite happy to ban smacking. That is certainly the impression I'd get if I read or listened to nothing else. Katherine Rich, a National MP has been on-air, applauding the coming Repeal of Section 59 and letting the listeners know that those mothers whose children misbehave in supermarkets are going to have to find some other way of rebuking their off-spring rather than the time-honoured smack on the behind.
Ever since my comment on DPF's blog on farm girls growing up to be wannabe totalitarians (referring to Helen Clark and Cactus Kate), I wondered if Katherine Rich was a farm girl, too. Likely, she was as in her bio it says she grew up on the Taieri Plains.
Could it be that there's something about growing up on a farm that makes NZ girls a little socialist. Could that be why socialism has gained such acceptance here? A horrifying thought, really.
Now, before anyone asks me, I'm not a farm girl. I grew up in the suburbs of Miramar, close to the airport. Both my parents were foreign, coming from situations of the kind of hardship that most New Zealanders couldn't even imagine. My mother grew up in Communist occupied Poland. My Dad survived Soviet Gulags. When you grow up hearing about people starving to death because there just wasn't any food, anything that happens in NZ just cannot be considered anything approaching poverty.
Bad things happen to good people all the time, so Cactus Kate's opinion below seems to be on par with the type of stupidity that I thought only Katherine Rich, Sue Bradford, Helen Clark and Paul Holmes were capable of.
New Zealand's problem is not that we have lots of "poor and stupid" people. New Zealand's problem is an out of control loss of morality, where children are "oopps, how did that happen, our protection failed" by products, or specifically created to get the person onto a DPB lifestyle, so they can party courtesy of the taxpayer with various boyfriends. A child is most at risk from the boyfriend of his or her mother.
Now, these women are not on the DPB because they are poor or stupid, they are poor because they are on the DPB. Big difference.
Banning smacking will do nothing to discourage these boyfriends from back-handing their girlfriends' annoying offspring across the room. What would be far more successful is banning boyfriends. But no one in New Zealand wants to ban boyfriends, all the government stay out of the bedroom banshees would go bonkers at even the suggestion that the government could have any sort of a say on whether or not a girl could have a sexual relation with a boy who is not committed to her and any children they might have for as long as they both shall live. We'd probably have a revolution then.
No, far better to do something everyone know will fail anyway, and attempt the ban on smacking. After all, think of the children!
Ever since my comment on DPF's blog on farm girls growing up to be wannabe totalitarians (referring to Helen Clark and Cactus Kate), I wondered if Katherine Rich was a farm girl, too. Likely, she was as in her bio it says she grew up on the Taieri Plains.
Could it be that there's something about growing up on a farm that makes NZ girls a little socialist. Could that be why socialism has gained such acceptance here? A horrifying thought, really.
Now, before anyone asks me, I'm not a farm girl. I grew up in the suburbs of Miramar, close to the airport. Both my parents were foreign, coming from situations of the kind of hardship that most New Zealanders couldn't even imagine. My mother grew up in Communist occupied Poland. My Dad survived Soviet Gulags. When you grow up hearing about people starving to death because there just wasn't any food, anything that happens in NZ just cannot be considered anything approaching poverty.
Bad things happen to good people all the time, so Cactus Kate's opinion below seems to be on par with the type of stupidity that I thought only Katherine Rich, Sue Bradford, Helen Clark and Paul Holmes were capable of.
[...] most laws are an attempt to protect the stupid from themselves and unfortunately New Zealand's worst child abusers are the poor and stupid. This is a law aimed at the lowest forms of life in New Zealand that can't be trusted at all not to beat the be jesus out of their kids as they are not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a gentle smacking and a Jake The Muss beating. It can turn the middle and upper class gentle smackings into a criminal offence, yes, but you are just going to have to live with the changes for the sake of the offspring of the poor and stupid.Lots of poor and stupid people do not beat their children. I've known lots of poor (by NZ standards) people who do not beat their children.
New Zealand's problem is not that we have lots of "poor and stupid" people. New Zealand's problem is an out of control loss of morality, where children are "oopps, how did that happen, our protection failed" by products, or specifically created to get the person onto a DPB lifestyle, so they can party courtesy of the taxpayer with various boyfriends. A child is most at risk from the boyfriend of his or her mother.
Now, these women are not on the DPB because they are poor or stupid, they are poor because they are on the DPB. Big difference.
Banning smacking will do nothing to discourage these boyfriends from back-handing their girlfriends' annoying offspring across the room. What would be far more successful is banning boyfriends. But no one in New Zealand wants to ban boyfriends, all the government stay out of the bedroom banshees would go bonkers at even the suggestion that the government could have any sort of a say on whether or not a girl could have a sexual relation with a boy who is not committed to her and any children they might have for as long as they both shall live. We'd probably have a revolution then.
No, far better to do something everyone know will fail anyway, and attempt the ban on smacking. After all, think of the children!