KEY POINTS:
Prime Minister Helen Clark has a simple way of finessing the slap-happy Christians campaigning for the right to beat children. Instead of trying to delay the referendum until after the upcoming general election, she should not just agree to it, but encourage every one of us to vote
for both the clauses.
After all, shed of all the emotion, both the propositions are broad enough in meaning to fit within the current legislation anyway.
And without the oxygen of an all-out battle, the new Christian Party which the referendum organisers are trying desperately to promote will die from lack of publicity and public interest.
The first and potentially most inflammatory proposition: "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?" is diffuse enough to accommodate most of us.
Defining what "a smack" is will, on its own, keep a glass tower full of QCs busy for a lifetime. And if, by chance, they ever get round to solving that one, there's always "good parental correction" to get around. So why don't we all just vote for it and get on with life and leave the petitioners to scourge themselves in impotent frustration.
As for the second proposition: "Should the Government give urgent priority to understanding and addressing the wider causes of family breakdown, family violence and child abuse in New Zealand?" who could disagree with that? That the petitioners claim to have collected 390,000 signatures supporting their call for a referendum is proof of that. I wouldn't have supported part one because of its ambiguity, but if anyone had shoved the form under my face, I couldn't have objected to the second part.
Hopefully, such a probe would have highlighted the under-culture of violence in this land which stretches in a continuum from the light smack to the thrashing of children and on to such aberrations as the taping up of an old lady's mouth in a rest home.
Getting back to the smack referendum, the law, as amended following a compromise hammered out between Ms Clark and National leader John Key, gives police the discretion not to prosecute a parent for the use of force against a child "if the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution".