Tearing NZ Families Apart

Smacking Law Has Caused Decline In Discipline – Poll

Media Release 15 January 2020

Family First

A nationwide poll has found that half of New Zealanders believe that the 2007 anti-smacking law has caused a decline in discipline (with a further 16% unsure – 33% said it hadn’t), and that they would continue to smack their child to correct their behaviour if they believed it was reasonable to do so. Almost 40% of mothers of young children say they have smacked despite the law change. Opposition to the law is still significantly higher amongst National and NZ First voters.

The Curia Market Research poll of 1,000 respondents surveyed at the beginning of December also found:

Low income families (63%), those living in rural areas and National & NZ First supporters were far more likely to flout the law

70% said they would not report a parent who they saw smacking their child on the backside or hand (including two out of three Green & Labor voters), while 20% would

Comprehensive Failure

Police 'Discretion' Failing on Smacking Law Despite Promises


Media Release 10 October 2018
Family First


Family First says that despite political promises and assurances, good parents are being criminalised for non-abusive smacking, and that police discretion is not being used appropriately. Police are also referring cases through to the court to decide, rather than applying the discretion available because of the sensitivity around ‘family violence’. The comments are made after a father was dragged through the lengthy court process for a bottom smack with no physical marks, and the judge having to apply common sense and grant an appropriate discharge without conviction.

“This is as we predicted – good parents being criminalised, despite vacuous promises from politicians that this would not happen. Lawyer Mai Chen also highlighted these concerns around police discretion in her legal opinion on the law earlier this year,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

Referring specifically to police discretion, Mai Chen’s legal analysis of the 2007 anti-smacking law said, “Subsection (4) is a significant aspect of s 59, yet there is little to no guidance available as to how the Police should exercise its discretion, nor information available as to how it has and does.”

A Notorious Piece of Legislation

Legal Firm Chen Palmer Skewers the NZ Anti-Smacking Law

Media Release 12 February 2018
Family First

Smacking law fails to balance long term effect on parent-child relationship: Chen Palmer

A legal analysis of the 2007 anti-smacking law says that the law is confusing to parents, police and the legal profession; that statements and guarantees made by politicians were misleading; and that a comprehensive analysis of the effects of the law on families is impossible because of the difficulty in obtaining copies of judgements, and the absence of key data from the police.

The analysis provided to Family First NZ in January by public law specialists Chen Palmer is an update of an earlier Opinion in 2014, but reviews other cases which have become relevant since that time.

“It is just over 10 years since the hugely unpopular anti-smacking law was rammed through Parliament against the better judgement and will of the New Zealand people. This legal Opinion by Mai Chen will sound further warning bells to families and is a rebuke to all the politicians who thought they knew better than the public,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

In one of the most concerning comments made in the Opinion, it says:

Mad Max in New Zealand

The Inter-Generational Tsunami of Violence and Dysfunction

We often hear claims about the breakdown of the nuclear family and the allegedly devastating effect it is having upon society.  No fault divorce has meant that husband and wife, father and mother are fluid relationships.  The state has intruded more and more upon families and family structures.  Parents have been told that if they discipline their children with an open-handed smack on  the child's hand or bottom they will be prosecuted by the State and have their children removed.  

This extremist measure--known as the Anti-Smacking Act--was passed with the objective of reducing family violence.  What it has actually done is help build a tsunami of violence that will roll over and engulf New Zealand society in about fifteen years time.  The problem is now inter-generational and self-perpetuating.  The state is incompetent to parent children for the simple reason that the state and its organs are not parents--a rather obvious reality which the state refuses to acknowledge.  Politicians and organs of state still assert with religious fervour that the government is indeed competent--all it needs is more taxpayers' money and it will morph into a genuine uber-parent.

What's it like on the front line?  The truth is starting to emerge in state schools.

NZ Public Wiser Than Dumb Elites

Idiotic Revolutionaries and Overreaching Zealots

Just on ten years ago, New Zealand passed an anti-smacking law.  Parents were thereafter committing a criminal act if they used corporal correction upon a child.  This egregious piece of legislation has not just resulted in the state removing children from their parents without just cause.  It has produced a climate of fear amongst many parents.

The law was rammed down the throat of NZ parents by an elite who believe they understood better than parents how to raise their own children.  When it passed, the new law was wildly unpopular.  Time has not changed that view.  But the elites knew better than ordinary, dumb parents--or so they claimed.

NZ's Anti-Family Madness

A Huge Failure Born of State Overreach

In 2007 the NZ Parliament passed a law which made the parental smack of a child a crime.  It represented at the time a gargantuan sledgehammer to crush a nut.  But the do-gooders meant well. They were convinced that violence against children perpetrated by adults was endemic in New Zealand.  In this they were right.  They were convinced that passing the law would set a bright line in societal consciousness--violence against children was never to be tolerated.  In this they were completely wrong.

But politicians exist to make laws.  For the vast majority, if not all, of them making laws, rules, and regulations are they only tools they have to "change things".  Adult violence against children was endemic in New Zealand; passing a law would fix things up.  Three politicians stand out (there were many others) as believing most passionately that the anti-smacking law would stop violence against children.

Serial protester, Sue Bradford had increased her sense of self-righteousness and self-worth over many years campaigning to make the parental smack of children for purposes of training and disciplining them a crime.  In Parliament at the time, she seized the opportunity to introduce just such a bill to the House.  She promised, she vowed, she gave solemn oaths that if her bill became law, the tidal wave of abuse against children in this country would begin to recede.  She misled the nation.

Advocates Posing as Academics

Propaganda and The Anti-Smacking Shills

The fallacy of false cause is pretty much universal amongst academics these days--which is to say they cannot think straight.  We have had presented to us one of the more hyper-ventilated examples recently.  In the NZ Herald an Australian academic breathlessly informs us that parental smacking of children to discipline them is utterly terrible.  The academic in question, Bernadette Saunders is introduced to us as follows:

Bernadette Saunders is a Senior Lecturer Social Work at Monash University. She has received two separate funding grants from the Australian Research Council and the Legal Services Board Grants Program to pursue research on the physical punishment /lawful correction of children.

Our academic expert has received money to "pursue research" into the "physical punishment/lawful correction of children".  This is a thorough misdirection.  Mz Saunders is an ideological advocate, a shill, not an objective researcher.  She is being funded for purposes of propaganda.  She is not an honest trader.  How do we know this?

Firstly, the piece published in the NZ Herald was based upon an article by Saunders published in The Conversation  otherwise known as The Diatribe.

Family Concerns

When the Bogeyman Comes

New Zealand has one of the silliest and most draconian anti-smacking laws on the planet.  It is opposed by over eighty percent of New Zealanders.  But our politicians know what's best for us, and the law remains on the statute books. 

The only saving grace is not in the law, but in the discretion exercised by the police in prosecuting proceedings under the law.  But this is not sure nor certain to continue.  All it will take is a future Jacobin prime minister to insist that the police apply the law rigorously, without minimal discretion.    A couple of notorious and terrible child abuse cases should prove sufficient grounds for the change in operational police policy.  The fact remains that under the present draconian law, any parent who smacks a child for disobedience commits a criminal offence. 

A notorious corollary of the legislation is that the state child welfare agency, CYFS has a policy of shooting first and asking questions afterwards.  Under no obligation to have a standard of proof that would required in a court of law, CYFS has operated in the past on a "where there's smoke, there's fire" policy. [See here,  here p.40]   Any hint of a parent smacking a child can result in the child or children being removed from the parents.  The struggle to get them back can be both herculean and devastating.