Though many people are highly critical of the columns of Garth George, I often find that, past the general curmudgeonly nature of his columns, he often makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, he tends to couch his points in a fashion designed to bring out the worst in the blogosphere. It is not simply [...]

In September 2008 I wrote this:
Unfortunately, what this [the repeal of section 59] does to parents is place them in a position of having no clear idea what is an acceptable smack. Worse still, it allows children to threaten their parents, thereby seriously reducing their authority, even if the child has no intention of notifying [...]

I support strong measures to persuade people to stop smoking. It is a nasty habit with extremely serious health consequences. But I have to say that I find it impossible to approve of the current drive to ban smoking in most outdoor places.
Make no mistake, I hate it when I’m sitting at the beach, enjoying [...]

I see John Minto is up to his old tricks again. He has organised a “protest” of less than a dozen people to demonstrate outside of the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Only this was not a peaceful protest, this was a Minto special. Armed with megaphones, they proceeded to make unmitigated nuisances of themselves by [...]

At first glance the proposal by the World Health organization to ban all junk food advertising to children seems a reasonable thing to do. After all, we know that the ban on advertising tobacco has been shown to decrease the prevalence of smoking significantly. It would seem logical that banning junk food ads aimed at [...]

Today the police have blithely announced that 12 children were killed through abuse (9 murders 3 manslaughters) over the past two years (June 2007 – June 2009). This is unchanged from previous years with an average of five children a year dying from abuse and 45 seriously injured.
My immediate reaction to this was: The repeal [...]

The gay rights group Rainbow Wellington is taking the New Zealand Blood Service to the Human Rights Commission over the restrictions on sexually active homosexual men giving blood. Frankly, I think this is a stupid waste of the scarce resources of the New Zealand Blood Service, who can ill afford HRC lawyers. It is an [...]

If ever there was a good illustration of the parochial nature of New Zealand’s media, it is the furor over Bill English’s government limo parking on a dotted yellow line. In the grand scheme of things, I would rate this as a 0.5/10 – right up there with “cat gets stuck in tree” (Daring Rescue [...]

Fancy an emetic? The Herald is running a series of articles on child abuse today. Here is a nauseating recitation from a single article:

An average of eight children are killed each year, and many more end up battered in hospital at the hands of family members.
Children under two are especially vulnerable; each year 59 are admitted [...]

Has anybody noticed that the review of changes to section 59 of the Crimes Act has missed the point entirely? The review tries to make out that the police are not using the law to persecute parents who lightly smack their children. This is probably true (though I should add “at the moment” here because [...]