I told you so—again

Not for the first time, a law has been shown to not have the dire consequences its opponents claimed.

This time, it's the so-called “anti-smacking” bill. The bill, which came into force on June 22, removed the legal defence of “reasonable force” from parents who smacked (or, more accurately, beat) their children. The far right campaigned vigourously against the bill, declaring that ordinary, “loving” parents would be hauled into court in the hundreds or thousands.

Well, they were wrong. Of course.

The New Zealand Police have just released a three month review of the legislation. The review found that there were 15 cases investigated in those first three months, resulting in nine warnings being given, and no prosecutions. Police Commissioner Rob Pope said, "While this is only a three month snapshot I am confident that police are taking the same common sense approach to these events as we always have, with officers using their discretion to ensure the appropriate action is taken."

Predictably, the far-right christianist group that opposed the law in the first place have a different view, calling the review misleading. In the double-speak that's typical for them, they claim that there are far more than an average of roughly one case per week being investigated, implying that many more than that are being “targeted” and filled with “trauma and fear of police investigation”.

Then they switch gears and say that if it was only 15 cases in three months, why did the government enact the changes? So they claim the changes unleashed hordes of police preying on “good parents or grandparents,” but if it didn't, well, then it's useless because it's resluted in so few investigations. Clearly it both can't be true.

The group is promoting a petition “demanding Referendums [sic] on smacking and addressing the real causes of child abuse.” And we all know what that is, don't we? Those bloody homos demanding the right to marry!

Okay, so it's not just that, to them it's abortion and other things that the far right christianists hate, too. But they don't talk about their far right religious agenda when they talk about public issues, probably because they know that few New Zealanders agree with them. And part of the evidence for that is that I had to go out of my way to read their comedy writing press release about the police review: The mainstream print media didn't cover it in the initial stories I saw.

The passage of the amendment was a sign of progress in New Zealand. If the mainstream news media are starting to ignore the bleating of the far right extremists, then that confirms progress is happening. And all without a smack in sight.