Dangerous Precedents

The Lasting Legacy of John Key Is Being Written

One imagines that constitutional and legal experts will be somewhat alarmed at the Prime Minister's wheeling and dealing over the law.

The review on the how the Police and Child, Youth and Family have been applying the anti-smacking law has just been published. The full report can be read here.

The recommendations amount to a cluster of protections and "helps" for people who are being investigated for smacking their children. No doubt they will go a long way to preventing over zealous officials running amok--although the report also assures us that such things have not been happening. Nevertheless, safeguards are deemed to be necessary--and John Key has promised that he will ensure that all the recommendations are acted upon.

What a mess. We have a situation where the law says unequivocally that using smacking to discipline a child is a crime. But a bureaucratic edifice is being built to ensure that the law is not applied. The Prime Minister is now happily chirping away telling people it is perfectly acceptable to break the law. The headline in the NZ Herald says it all: "PM: It's okay to give light smacks"

This, we believe, is a far more serious failing of the Prime Minister than his stubborn refusal to change the law. His disrespect of the rule of law, his preference for bureaucratic management of the law so that it can be disregarded, his public declarations on how the law is to be understood and applied are disgraceful. He is quoted as saying:

Lightly smacking a child will be in the course of parenting for some parents and I think that's acceptable. It is up to individual parents to decide how they're going to parent their children ... Some people will continue to lightly smack their child for correction, some will not. It is up to them to decide.

Good on you, mate. Another political deal all stitched up.

Can you think of any other law, any other crime, where Key's advice might be acceptable. Take road law, for example. It is now an offence to use a hand held phone in a car. But, using the "Key doctrine" we are entitled to believe that whether you use a hand-held phone or not is a matter of personal choice. Some will continue to do it--and that's acceptable. But because some people who really want to use their phones in cars will be intimidated by the law, we also need a bureaucratic entity to help them. Free 24/7 advice lines need to be set up, explaining how the law need not really be observed, what our rights are, the processes which the police might use when they apprehend cell phone users in cars. Pamphlets setting all these things out must be printed and given out by the police when they pull someone over for using a phone. At the top of the brochure, we need to have John Key's attitude towards the law printed in large font: "It's OK to break the law." Wonderful.

Someone in caucus needs to find the mana to stand up and tell the Prime Minister to his face that his stance is simply wrong. The damage he is doing to one of the fundamental tenets of justice--the rule of law--is inappropriate and unacceptable and that it must stop. Clearly the Prime Minister has lost whatever perspective on this issue he once may have had. He appears to be blithely ignorant of the damage he is doing and of the wider dangers of his foolish position.