Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Instead they are cashing their chips in over a bill that may or may not change a hell of a lot and is just a small part of what should be a co-ordinated and well thought out strategy about child abuse in this country.
Somewhat. But it's also a private members bill, and the green party would I guess allow a fair bit of independence on what bills private members put forward. And it's taken out by ballot, so it could have turned up last year, this year, or next year.
Lots of minor issues get shoved through around 'big' issues. This minor issue has just ended up being a big issue through the contention over it.
My impression is that the greens haven't really been tagged with it much, that many more people have complained about 'the government' and Labour than about any Greens beyond Sue Bradford.
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But that's just not so Kyle. What you've seen is cases in which there's a prima facie case that a parent used unreasonable force (a conclusion that would never be close to being drawn in cases of what I or most other people would class as smacking). It then went to trial and the parent contested the charges and tried to maintain that the force was in fact reasonable. The jury didn't agree.
Umm, no.
It's illegal to speed in New Zealand. If I speed, and either 1. don't get caught, or 2. don't get a ticket/conviction because I have a good excuse (ie, hospital emergency! pregnant woman! chased by homicidal axe murderer! I'm actually a police officer doing my duty!), then speeding is still illegal. I still broke the law, I just got away with it or had good reason for doing so.
Hitting people is illegal. No where in the crimes act does it say that hitting kids is legal. It just says you have a defense for breaking the law.
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Say for example that I like singing Metallica to my kids when I put them to bed at night. Or that my wife enjoys my rendition of Walk this Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC when I'm in the shower (Word Up - My rapping is dope).
Man, you deserve to get fined for doing that to your kids. Guaranteed to cause nightmares!
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Any Calvin and Hobbes. I have Bill Watterson's genius lying around the house, readily available for reminding me about the pretentiousness of art, why tv sucks, why childhood is so precious and why imaginary friends rock.
I think Calvin and Hobbes provides all the answers that any parent needs. Or if not all the answers, at least something to read and go 'ah yes, my child did that'.
Plus Bill Watterson had a wonderful attitude to his art, cartoons, life, and the commercialisation of his work. He fought for years and years to prevent Calvin and Hobbes being 'disney-ised' on every product that would sell, and won, which is very unusual for a cartoonist, who typically sign over every right to their work when they get syndicated.
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Smacking your own child to correct them etc. is legalized now by s 59 of the Crimes Act just the way getting an abortion before the 20th week is legalized now by s 187(a)(1) of the Crimes Act.
I'm not going to go anywhere near touching any comparisons with abortion. I can't see any meaningful connection.
But to restate a point that I feel like I've made umpteen times over the past months. Smacking your child is already illegal in New Zealand, it's assault.
Section 59 of the crimes act provides a defense whereby parents can get off for using 'reasonable force'.
I can tell I'm right in this, because people can be, and ever so occasionally have been, convicted for smacking their children. If it was legal in New Zealand to do so, you could never be convicted for it.
The distinction is important in a number of ways, but primarily because this bill doesn't ban smacking. Smacking is already banned. It just makes it harder to get away with it.
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If it really was designed to only stop abuse (or, make it prosecutable), why the increadibly strong reluctance to define anything as reasonaable or non-criminal?
I would presume, that abuse is already reasonably well defined legally, particularly by case law.
The problem with section 59 (or, one of them) is that people have been getting away with abuse by using the section 59 defense. If it's been getting people off that clearly should have been convicted, then there's a problem.
Also, no where else in laws to do with assault do we say "you can't assault people, except for...". This lack of exceptions isn't a problem with assaults between adults that I'm aware of. I don't think it'll be a problem between parents and children to have the same system.
So what do you make of this?
The experience of one lawyer, prosecuting or defending, doesn't apply across the board.
As for her arguments that 'every reported smack will be investigated'. Currently smacking children is illegal. It's assault.
If this bill goes through, smacking children will still be illegal, and still assault. Are people going to report every smack to the police? Are the police going to wander around looking for smacking? No and no.
The law on assaulting your children is not changing. So currently if you see someone smack their child, it would be ethical to report that assault to the police. Almost no one does that now, and I can't imagine that everyone is going to rush forward and do it afterwards.
Yes there will be more investigations as a proportion of actual smacks out there - maybe it'll double from 1% to 2%. There will also be, I think, less smacking as people develop alternative parenting skills. I don't have a problem with the first, because I don't believe it will be over the top. The second sounds great to me.
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The US was stuck - as long as Saddam remained in power they needed to keep troops in Saudi Arabia which was inflaming Muslim opinion.
I suspect the fact that they were protecting a major source of oil had something to do with it as well.
And the US didn't have to stay there. This was a choice to dip their military might into the Middle East.
And, even if Saddam had some ability to invade another country, USA didn't need troops there to deal with that. The message "invade another country, GW1 will look like a picnic" would have seemed just as effective. I mean, we have plenty of evidence that Iraq invading its neighbours when the USA is going to strike back doesn't work well for Iraq.
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Thankfully the Big Chill has been a car repair or painting shop for about three years now.
I couldn't give you the exact details of what the DCC provided, but my understanding is that they give the Dunedin Stadium at low rent for X years (X is 4 or 5 I think). I believe they also contributed some money towards fixing the building up, improving the insulation etc.
The actual ice rinks and all that goes with them, was raised from elsewhere. The ice is very good - best in New Zealand.
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Personally I think it's fairly obvious that there is a disconnection between the stated aims of the bill's advocates and the language of the bill, and you don't need to be a member of "the right" to be concerned about that.
Yes, but also remember the bill's advocates, didn't write the language in the bill currently. It was re-written (badly I think) by the law commission and the select committee.
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Er. Umm.
Where I said 10-12 people there. That's 10-12 thousand. Yup.
(damn yee non-editing posts. we have been promised, and yet delivery has not been forthcoming!)