VOTE YES

As a culture we devalue our children. Case in point: when a farmer sticks his 4yr old daughter (let me repeat that: four-year-old) in the driver's seat of an ATV that was a death trap even for an adult and lets her ride off while he turns his back to talk on a cellphone, and she is killed as a result - the police decide not to prosecute this idiot for manslaughter on the grounds that the poor man has already suffered enough. While the four year old is the one who has her life crushed from her by a decrepit farm bike that she should have been protected from, we turn the farmer into the victim. Had the child instead been a farm worker, there is no doubt that the farmer would have been prosecuted under OSH regulations.

I have more examples - but my claim is self evident isn't it? As a culture we devalue our children. We have appalling child abuse statistics. We have appalling child sexual abuse statistics. We have worse than appalling child accident statistics - most of the "accidents" are caused by inadequate or incompetent parental supervision in an environment where inadequate parents, supported by the specious research of some academics, keep thrashing about trying to find anything to blame other than their own inadequacy. As a culture we are also often not very adept at taking responsibility for our own behaviour. The statistics to which I refer have not improved since my becoming involved in child safety issues in 1984 and are worse than some so called "3rd world" countries. As a so called "first world" country, as far as the care and protection of our children are concerned, we often struggle to reach the level of being a total embarrassment!

In 2007, by an overwhelming majority of 113 to 8 votes, our parliament went some way towards redeeming our reputation by enacting a law that protected our children from physical assault. And although that law might not have been the most perfect law ever enacted, it was certainly in the top ten given some of the knee jerk single policy utter bollocks that storms through our parliament and into the statues unimpeded by either prudence or intelligent debate.

After this law, imperfect as it may or may not be, has been working pretty much perfectly as intended for the past TWO YEARS, an incompetent and arguably corrupt government official, wearing his partisan position pinned to his chest, at a cost of $9 million to the NZ taxpayer, has signed off on an ambiguous and misleading fiasco that threatens to remove this protection from our children by means of stealth and deception.

The upcoming referendum is a deplorable act the intent of which is to confuse people into supporting the rabid ideology of defective thinkers who are prepared to march, threaten and scream abuse for the right to beat their children. While our $9 million is being squandered on this referendum, are the individuals behind this asking themselves what that money could achieve were it to be spent on child protection instead of an adult ego trip? My question to these individuals is: if YOU support our right as a culture to beat our children, tell me, what EFFECTIVE steps have YOU taken recently to protect our children? Or is this all about adult rights and the children be damned?

When you are exercising your right to vote on this referendum ask yourself this. Do the rights of our children - our future - really matter to us? And if they do - where, in the circumstances, is the evidence of this?