Brain Rudman has a good column in the Herald today about the so called March for Democracy this Saturday.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10609888
How humiliating to live in a country where $500,000 is being spent encouraging people to march up the main street of our biggest city demanding the right to beat their kids.
It could only happen in a country with one of the worst child murder rates in the developed world.
Instead of parading up Queen St this Saturday, waving their wooden spoons and looking for bottoms to belt, Colin Craig, the organiser and bankroller of this crassly named March for Democracy, and his supporters should be holding a candle for each abused child.
It is quite amazing that what is being dubed as the biggest protest march ever is about the right to smack a child. It just goes to show how sad a society we have become when the biggest issue facing us is the right to abuse and hit defenseless kids.
Despite this horrendous culture of abuse, Mr Craig will process up Queen St with his merry marchers to demand that their ancient right to smack their children be restored. Will the penny never drop that he’d be doing more for democracy – and the kids of New Zealand – if his $500,000 went into something as simple as parenting lessons – or support services – for at-risk young parents.
Exactly. If you want to really fight child abuse then put the money into programs that will sort the root cause of the issue. Not provocative and factually wrong tv ads.
The organiser of the ambiguously worded anti-smacking referendum of earlier this year, Larry Baldock, set the benchmark for hyperbole in September when he announced plans for yet another referendum, this one on whether or not such votes should be binding.
“If we do not seriously address these constitutional issues now, our children and grandchildren may be governed in a way our forebears never imagined possible when they resisted oppression on foreign battlefields to protect our liberty.”
This despite the fact that binding referendums have never been a part of the Westminster system of democracy our forebears fought to defend.
Also lurking in the wings is Steve Baron, who since 2003 – first under Voters’ Voice and now Better Democracy – has been campaigning for binding citizens-initiated referendums as a form of direct democracy.
He says he is marching on Saturday and “I hope others will join me and become the 6-8 per cent of society who become politically active, the political gladiators, the select few who get off their backsides to make a difference.”
Bob McCoskrie, national director of Family First, warns that the march is “not a one-off – it is part of a long term strategy to bring representative democracy back to New Zealand”. Like Mr Baldock, he’s got his political science confused. Binding citizens-initiated referendums, which is what this motley right-wing band are demanding, are anathema to the principles of representative democracy.
This form of government dates back to the 18th-century principle, advocated by Edmund Burke, that an MP is not in Parliament to act as his constituents’ delegate, but is elected to represent them, using his skills and best judgment to do what he thinks is best, for both country and the electors.
The development of disciplined political parties has somewhat watered this principle of MP independence down, but the system we have inherited and developed is still a far cry from the principle of mob rule that governance by binding citizens-initiated referendums promises.
The Royal Commission on the Electoral System 1986 decided that “in general, initiatives and referendums are blunt and crude devices … [that] would blur the lines of accountability and responsibility of Governments”.
They threaten the rights of minorities. In Switzerland, the land of cheese and binding referendums, binding referendums enabled a majority of men to deny women the basic right to vote until 1971.
Paradoxically, they also allow minorities to push their own hobby horses. Baron, of Better Democracy, in his rallying call for this Saturday’s march, appealed for “political gladiators … the select few who get off their backsides to make a difference”.
He puts this minority at 6-8 per cent.
6 – 8 percent is nothing more than mob rule. The rich elite with their ability to ensalve the working class. It sounds like the past. The past that the vast majority of New Zealanders do not want to go back to.