Editorial: Referenda disservice to voters

The provisional result of the "smacking" referendum, announced on Friday evening, was nothing if not clear-cut. Almost 88 per cent of respondents took the view that "a smack as part of good parental correction should not be a criminal offence". The official figures won't be available until Tuesday, after votes mailed in the final days are counted, but the straggler ballots won't make any difference in percentage terms to the final tally.

Yet, perversely, the controversial poll has produced a result that is both unequivocal and inconclusive. The champions of the referendum will say that it constitutes an overwhelming and unambiguous demand that an almost universally detested law be repealed. But the figures behind the figures urge a more sophisticated reading.

For a start, barely half of eligible voters took part (by contrast, more than 80 per cent of ballot papers were returned in the 1997 referendum on compulsory superannuation).

That's not quite as poor as the typically inert public response to local body elections, but it does mean that only 47 per cent of eligible voters were sufficiently concerned about the so-called "anti-smacking" law to exercise their democratic right to vote against it. The demand for change may be unambiguous, but it is a long way from being overwhelming.

Second, the number of so-called informal votes is suggestive. In the last general election, the party-vote informal figure was one vote in 200. This included those spoiled in error - when a confused voter gave a tick to two parties, say - and those who had written messages on their ballot paper. In this referendum, the figure was 20 per cent higher than that - nearly 10,000 spoiled papers.

As the yes/no ballot paper is scarcely a complicated document, it seems likely that a good number of those informals were recording protests against the referendum's initiators, the wording of the question, or both.

The rights and wrongs of the substantive issue were widely canvassed in the run-up to the referendum. It is worth recording that, whatever the objections about the motives or the wording of the poll, the whole affair revealed a broad, if not necessarily deep, public unease and uncertainty about the law change. In part that was because the "no" vote lobby managed to depict the state as trying to tell us how to bring up our kids. But equally it was because of the law's complicated parentage - it was conceived by a Green MP passionate about social justice and adopted by a Government which only got it through the House with the support of the Opposition and the insertion of a diluting get-out-of-jail clause.

A One News-Colmar Brunton poll this month ran four to one against smacking being a criminal offence, but only 63 per cent said the new law wasn't working. Tellingly, three-quarters said the referendum was a waste of money.

The "no" vote lobby's claims of triumph, then, should be treated with caution. But there can be no dispute over the real loser in this affair: the Citizens' Initiated Referenda Act 1993.

The poll result illustrates nothing so clearly as the shortcomings of a law that allows lobby groups to demand publicly funded legitimacy. As we have remarked before, the CIR concept is fundamentally flawed: pressure groups get to waste millions of taxpayers' dollars asking loaded questions to gain predictable responses that will have no effect on policy that might not be achieved by other methods of public debate.

In the final analysis, the result is meaningless largely because the Government has signalled it will not change the law, but simply check that it is being administered correctly. That's as it should be. There is nothing wrong with letting politicians know that we don't like what they are doing, but we don't need to spend $9 million on fruitless exercises like this to do so. The question we should ask is: "Should a referendum, as part of good governance, be permitted in New Zealand?"