Mallard’s Violence in Parliament
Helen Clark has publicly described Mallard’s assault as “defending a woman’s honour” and on that basis has largely excused him for punching another parliamentarian. She believed that Mallard had already suffered enough consequences, although in fact he hasn’t suffered any of note.
The tens of thousands of fathers who have had their paternal role relegated to supervised access for 90 minutes a fortnight at Barnados will have cause to feel pretty annoyed with Clark’s hypocrisy when it comes to her own colleague. Even among the proportion of those men who had done anything whatsoever to deserve such institutionalized torture, many had shown no more than a moment’s loss of self-control under provocation and many had done a lot less than punching someone.
The “woman’s honour” comments show just how dangerous this feminist government is. The only thing that matters to Clark is whether actions serve women or not. You can bet she wouldn’t minmize Mallard’s crime on the basis that it was in defence of a man’s honour. But why would gender make any difference?
In the context of the current, expensive “It’s not OK” anti-violence advertising campaign funded by government, Clark’s self-serving duplicity deserves to be highlighted frequently as the next election approaches.
It may well be reasonable to show understanding and mercy about Mallard’s circumstances and to give him a chance to change his ways before ruining his life and abusing his children by separating them from him. If only such fairness were shown to other men. Instead, the Clark government provides extensive funding to women’s groups including Women’s Refuge who arbitrarily pressure all clients to leave (usually that means kick out) their male partners, regardless of circumstances, without any attempt to verify allegations made about those partners, and in callous disregard of the impact on children of trashing their family units.
What’s happened to this pussy country of ours? Two blokes have a donnybrook and you’d thing it was the end of the world. They fought voluntarily, so what? Are we all so brainwashed now that we are shocked by this? Does it really require ritual public humiliation of the combatants when a punch is thrown? It’s not as though a woman was hit here. Have we all become so damn feminized that we think there’s a problem?
Comment by maxx — Sat 3rd November 2007 @ 3:59 pm
I agree Hanz, and I still cannot figure out where that one came from. They are about to send women into armed combat with a bill at their backs. What on earth is she talking about? Should the blokes scream at the enemy in the heat of conflict “don’t shoot her, she’s already bleeding”.
What has a woman’s honour got to do with anything at all? And what’s more I don’t think he was defending a woman’s honour, from what I read he was defending his pride. He wasn’t partnered to the woman in question. He didn’t like Tau being rude about him.
To my mind, and after watching today’s Agenda on TV1 where the PM was laregely grilled on tax cuts and the conditioning of the policy to the election’s predictability the administration is falling backwards and quickly toward the ropes.
Her appeal, when replying not to Guyon Espiner’s for his question but to the camera in full face determination saying “what is the alternative”?
There was no call for this kind of electioneering so early, when we are likely one year away from this kind of demanding behaviour. The imminent Australian election is no excuse to think that NZ has to shuffle so furiously, and so quickly into the direct contest of popularity.
Yet: what she thinks is that National do not have the ability to meet the public’s demands as consistent to the public’s aspirations and bring about reasonable changes with sensible and humane policy. And, so far I think she is right.
I think she is right (in one of other available examples) in the law and order issue, Simon Power overrides the corrections staff decision labelling a low risk, released to outside walls duties offender as naturally for the offence “an axe murderer” – and a tomahawk by blugeoning to death his wife, brutal and callous murderer he may well be.
Havng done time with murderers who are on the streets now, working their way back into the community, struggling through and against what must be the hardest of public opinions, I find his otherwise developing as seemingly balanced approach to some problems to be scuttled with his own excitment to wound the lunbering red machine. This is to say that Helen predicts that people mean very little to National – money means more and Simon Power’s sudden rush to capitalise on the recent events in political point scoring exclaims, in my view that this is exactly the case. They want the cheque book.
Unfortunately, and presently, what Labour describes when holding the cheque book is that they are prepared to continue fiddling those books and that only those prepared to accept that women and unconditional mean one in the same thing will get to see the conditions of those strings.
Trevor Mallard got off lightly. So did Tau. These people run the country. If they haven’t figured out how to avoid violence when working with the public demand to accord justice, then they haven’t figured out anything. That means we all have a problem and it really is quite serious.
Comment by Benjamin Easton — Sun 4th November 2007 @ 3:03 pm