The Plans to Ban Parenting.

The Bill by the Green's Sue Bradford to repeal Section 59 of the Crimes Act is emphatically NOT about smacking.

It is about repealing parental authority.

We must understand this. The Police Commissioner has already written to me saying a smack would become an assault, worth as much as two years in jail, if Section 59 is repealed. But he also wrote: "If Section 59 was repealed in its entirety, parents would not be authorised to use reasonable force by way of correction." Parents would lose the legal authority to use force to correct their own children. What this means is that if Section 59 is ever repealed, parents could well be committing assault against their own children if they force them to conform to family and cultural requirements. Or if they force them to stop doing those things the family or the culture prohibit.

I wrote to the Police Commissioner again to ask, should Section 59 be repealed, if he could "assure the parents of New Zealand that they will not be charged with assault should they subsequently require a child, against the child's will, to be confined to a room for three minutes as an enforced period of 'time out'?"

He responded: "I am not in a position to give you definitive advice about whether or not Police would prosecute in the circumstances you described."

If the Police Commissioner himself can give us no assurance that even "time out" will not constitute assault, then clearly parents will be constantly exposed to being charged with criminal assault for simply going about their normal parenting tasks.

But in fact, this has been Bradford's design all along. She says in the explanatory notes of the bill itself: "The effect of this amendment is that the statutory protection for use of force by parents and guardians will be removed. They will now be in the same position as everyone else so far as the use of force against children is concerned." It is Sue Bradford's stated intention to reduce the authority parents have over their own children down to that of total strangers!

This bill is without doubt the most destructive instrument the government has ever considered using against the parents of New Zealand. Parents will be almost totally disempowered.

Bradford and the Greens have promoted prostitution. Now they want to prohibit parenting. They are unfit to be in Parliament, let alone to govern.

Craig Smith National Director Family Integrity

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