In the last year or so, New Zealand parliamentarians have introduced two absurd laws for quite wrong reasons. And have had to argue themselves out of corners again and again to "prove" that their reasons have any validity.
First there was the law that all dogs should have chips inserted in them. The reason? Not so they could be found if lost, but because - and here's how logic falls over in a heap - because some dogs in the country had attacked children.
In spite of arguments by all those with level heads that putting chips in dogs wouldn't stop them attacking anybody, the law went through. Only the farmers managed to slip out of its net, because they argued successfully as a lobby that farm dogs don't bite or attack people - quite apart from the fact that mostly they never move off their farms.
And now Sue Bradford is trying to bring in another law with equal absurdity in its "reasons."
Called the anti-smacking bill in general parlance, its intention is to make criminals of all parents who smack children. Supposedly it's to stop people who abuse children getting off in court by claiming that their abuse of their children was within the grounds of legal force.
In fact, the bill is really aimed at stopping people abusing children. But smacking is not abuse; nine times out of ten it's discipline.
The people who abuse children won't give two hoots if there's a law against it. They don't care now, even though, if caught, they can be imprisoned for what they do to children anyway.
The problem is that the PC Brigade is too afraid to come out and say that the majority of children who are abused in the country have Maori names. Bradford can't bring a bill that in any way deals with this issue, because it's not a legal issue but a societal one. So she's lumping all parents together, in the usual fashion of laws to cover all bases, and making everyone to blame. Quite apart from interfering with basic family structures.
The children who are "famous" for having been abused, and in most cases have died of the abuse, are not children of ordinary parents who get on with their lives and discipline their children as best they can. They are invariably children from dysfunctional families - if "family" is a word to call these mixed-up groups of people - and these children suffer because the parents and other adults haven't a clue how to look after children or care for them. They have children, but don't really want them.
So, in one case, we blame all dogs for attacking children, and do something useless to prevent it. In the other case, we blame all parents for abusing children, and do something equally useless to prevent it.
