Voting Yes

I’ve got a cold. It is stupid.
Voted today on the citizen’s referendum about the parental right to smack children.
To the question “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand”, I voted Yes. I won’t explain my rationale, because the estimable BK Drinkwater has already given his and he puts it better than I could.

10 thoughts on “Voting Yes”

  1. Honestly, I could over-intellectualise this pointless waste of taxpayer money, this worthless crap to support Larry Baldock’s ego.
    But why spend time justifying it?
    My reason for voting yes is simple: people like Baldock, like Copeland, like the child-bashing religio-fundamentalist nutters, want me to vote no. Why do anything else but vote yes?

  3. I reckon these sorts of referendums should be required to be very specific about specific points of law. E.g. “Should the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007 be repealed?” [yes/no]
    If not, then they should be allowed to be about anything at all. E.g. “Are fish & chips better with tomato sauce or tartar sauce?” [tomato/tartar]

  4. I reckon these sorts of referendums should be required to be very specific about specific points of law. E.g. “Should the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007 be repealed?” [yes/no]
    If not, then they should be allowed to be about anything at all. E.g. “Are fish & chips better with tomato sauce or tartar sauce?” [tomato/tartar]
    I voted ‘yes’ but probably for different reasons than other people. I’m deeply cynical about this law change in the first place, I think it’s a typical politician’s trick: to be seen to be doing something about a problem (in this case NZ’s shameful child abuse rate) while not actually doing anything about why we have such a high child abuse rate in the first rate.
    I think it’s a similar situation to things like “three strikes” laws: being ‘tough on crime’ while not actually doing anything about the root causes of crime.
    So basically, I just want the result to come in as “YES” and the government to say “well the people have spoken, end of story” so that we don’t end up wasting time arguing about it all over again.

  7. Doesn’t it depend on the quality of the tartare (tartar = something different)? The quality of tomato sauce is not so important.

  9. Neither. Sauce corrupts the innate purity of the chip.
    Binned my referendum form in protest at the poorly worded question and pointlessness and waste of money of the whole exercise.

  10. Oh samm, you can’t do that. Even if it is badly worded and pointless, it will be used to make a point anyway. If the vote ends up being 90% no, then the referendum pushers are going to use that as support to argue the law should be changed back. I thought about not voting as well, but a badly worded question is not going to stop other people from voting, so it shoudn’t stop you.

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