Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro wants section 59 of the Crimes Act repealed immediately.

The Children’s Commissioner wants every responsible parents legal licence to discipline removed on the basis of the outcome of a court case. This is the sort of emotional knee-jerk reaction upon which bad decisions are made – The domestic violence act would be another good example.

If this section is repealed then the responsibility for discipline falls to the state and not within the family. You cannot make effective law based on the lowest denominator.

If this court case does tell us something – it is not that our law is failing, but that our community and our social services are in need of repair.

When we encounter any sort of failure in society, we normally ask ourselves -how did this happen? – and how do we stop it happening again? It is all to easy for high paid academics to be judgemental about people for whom life is often an endless struggle.
That is where the commissioners attention should be focused. How to help at risk families.

Children are not silly – and their awareness of such a law change will not only make parenting more difficult, it will not help the likes of the child or the parent in such cases as the one Ms Kiro would use as a basis for a change in our law.

Bringing such cases to court is negative intervention and ineffective. Either help the parent or remove the child as a last resort.

We don’t need another attack on the family by socialist law mongers with hidden agendas. They didn’t fool NZ with the smacking debate, so they thought they could sacrifice one more family to achieve their end.