Let's Do A Little Smack

Helen Clark made an interesting observation (honest) the other day in relation to Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill. She said that those whom police were already arresting for assaults on children would continue to be arrested. Given that, why then do we need a law that seemingly embraces everybody else? Furthermore, when we have a plethora of laws covering assaults on any person, regardless of age, where is the gap that needs to be filled by the Bradford bill? Where is the problem this bill is meant to solve? Where is the evidence that suggests smacking of children has a lasting traumatic effect on those children? Or that society is somehow indicted and diminished because a child is smacked in the home or class-room? Where is the evidence to suggest that outlawing spanking will deliver a better society with more stable contributory young people—indeed, there appears to a body of anecdotal evidence that the reverse is true. And finally, where is the police force or other body with the resources and the zeal to enforce such a law?

I ask these questions because if one takes this anti-smacking bill at face value it becomes very unsettling. The bill is not aimed at those who do great mental and physical harm to children (they according to the Prime Minister are already being arrested under existing laws), nor is it aimed at curbing acts of great or even minor brutality—again, those are covered by existing laws. Technically, even a mild-smacking is covered by those same laws.

So, I am driven to the conclusion that this proposed and already redundant law has no purpose other than to issue a series of statements. They are:

• Sue Bradford has little else to do.
• A bill such as this taxes, but just squeaks into, the limits of the Greens’ collective IQ.
• The Kahui twins unfairly focussed on Maori.
• The white middle-class hasn’t been picked on for awhile.
• Regardless of how often it is humiliated, Political Correctness refuses to give up the ghost.
• Somebody somewhere always knows what’s best for us.
  
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