It was never just about smacking, you know [update 4]

The primary focus of the anti-smacking brigade is not smacking.  Once you understand that, you will understand their reaction to the weekend’s poll.  The primary focus of the anti-smacking brigade is not smacking, and it was never about child abuse. It was always about control.  They have used reasonable misgivings about smacking and widespread outrage at child abuse to advance an agenda of state control that has been enabled  by politicians too dim to realise they’re being used.

This morning’s cabinet meeting would be a good time for John Boy to realise that.

In case you hadn’t noticed, statists like Cindy Kiro and Sue Bradford want the state to be part of your family. The original intention of Sue Bradford’s private member’s bill: to ban smacking outright, was entirely consistent with her Marxist philosophy of state control in all facets of life – it was the Trojan Horse  by which she and Cindy hoped to get the state into the family. That’s the agenda here, a much wider one than the way you discipline your children – and an important one to realise when “compromise” is on the cards, as it will be again at this morning’s cabinet meeting.

You can see that wider agenda at work in 'Surveillance Cindy’s' plan for clipboard-wielding Stasis examining every family in the country against criteria set by Cindy Kiro and her children's commissariat.  Don’t raise your kids like Cindy tells you, and you’ll feel the wrath of the apparatchiks.

You can see  it in  Sue Bradford’s long-standing support for Stalinist Cindy’s scheme, and in her and Catherine Delahunty’s Marxist training school Kotare – what Delahunty describes in this speech outlining the Kotare School's aims as "a centre for radical and liberating education for social change."  (Part 2 is here.)

You can see it in Sue Bradford’s announcement in the wake of her anti-smacking amendment being passed that "This [was] very much the end of the beginning."

You can see it too in her utter disregard for the effect of the anti-smacking amendment on good parents, and in their lack of interest in those parents who are still killing their kids, which outrages happen each time without a word from primary sponsor of the amendment that was (it was alleged) intended to stop these violent assaults.

But this was never about smacking, not really.  It always has been about control – control not of bad parents but of good ones. The tragedy still is that only one side seems to understand that.

UPDATE 1: MacDoctor takes on the statistical “confusion” about the result exhibited by the control freaks.

UPDATE 2:  Danyl at Dim Post beautifully satirises some of the likely changes to the anti-smacking law, including :

• Alter font of Section 59 amendment from Courier12 to Times New Roman.
• Initiate second non-binding referendum to ask voters if they understood question in previous referendum.
• Key to address Families First meeting, stand at podium with shit-eating grin and demand to know who the fuck else they’re going to vote for.

UPDATE 3:  It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t just John Key who turned tail on his original opposition to Bradford’s Bill, and who emailers, commenters, Twitterers and Facebookers should now be pressuring to reconsider his first instincts.  What about all those National Party turncoats who stood up on the steps of Parliament in April 2007 swearing total opposition to the anti-smacking amendment, and then in May 2007 filed obediently into the lobbies to vote for it. I’m talking about National Socialist sell-outs Chester Borrows, Shane Ardern, Toe-rag Henare, Maurice Wimpianson and Judith ‘Don’t-Believe-A-Word-I-Say’ Collins.

Get onto them and tell them now to have the courage of whatever convictions they pretended to have back in April 2007.

mailto:chester.borrows@parliament.govt.nz
mailto:shane.ardern@parliament.govt.nz
mailto:tau.henare@parliament.govt.nz
mailto:m.williamson@ministers.govt.nz
mailto:j.collins@ministers.govt.nz

(And if you’re super-keen, then as a commenter advises send the buggers a letter. "MP name, parliament" is all that it needs. No stamp required. Emails are much much easier to delete than letters, which will all be delivered physically to the MP’s office.)

UPDATE 4:  Interesting that the Reds’ Red Alert blog hasn’t mentioned a thing on the referendum. Seems their beloved democracy gave them a good smacking on this occasion.

And interesting too that the Reds’ luminary, Braying Oddwords, chose to mention it on Saturday only with a photo of Larry Baldock punching the air in celebration and the caption “A Picture Worth a Thousand Words.”  (FWIW, I left the comment “You do spin well here, don’t you,” but Oddwords wasn’t interested in my comment and it never made the main page.