Brown Peter: Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Brown Peter: Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:638;Page:8858] 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I rise with some delight I must say to tell the Committee that New Zealand First is once again united and will be supporting this amendment to clause 4 in the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill. That is not to say we will support the bill at the third reading and it is not to say we will not; it is simply to say that we think the bill will be better with the insertion of this clause. 
I have to say I have quite some admiration for the Prime Minister. She was obviously in an entrenched position and she had the fortitude to rethink that position. I also pay compliments to Sue Bradford because I do not believe from some of the utterances she made before that she would have swallowed this sort of amendment. I think this is quite new and that she has taken it well. But I reserve my highest praise indeed—I am speaking personally—for John Key. I have always been an admirer of a person who has stuck to his or her ground and not given in easily. That guy proved it to me over the last few weeks. He has been accused of politicking but he has stuck with it and we have got something that will be very very largely supported in this Chamber. My personal compliments go to John Key. I also compliment Peter Dunne. I do not quite know the role he played but because he has this amendment in his name he was obviously some sort of catalyst. 
But I point out that the last paragraph of the explanatory note states: “While under the common law there is no doubt that this discretion applies to minor complaints of assault” and it goes on a little bit further. So we could have the circumstance that was referred to in  
Close Up 
 last night on TV whereby Sue Bradford saw a young kiddie in the supermarket being smacked. She will not necessarily know the result of that smack and that smack might be harder than Chester Borrows provided for in his amendment. A kiddie could be hit harder than Chester Borrows provided for and because the police determine that it is inconsequential and because nobody else kicked up a fuss the kiddie might go home. The kiddie might be more obedient to its parents but might well be bruised and nobody will know. 
Some years ago—well before this bill was introduced and well before I was a politician—when my children were relatively young 3 or 4 at that stage I had some friends round to dinner. As I recall they had an 8-year-old. We were talking about bringing up children. I have never smacked my children. I cannot speak 100 percent for their mother. She has passed from this world so I cannot even ask her but I suspect that from time to time she did. But the children have a great deal of affection for their mother even now. It is possible she did smack them but it would certainly not have been assault. 
This young couple were telling us that they did not believe in smacking. Their young 8-year-old misbehaved so much that because they did not believe in smacking they put the kiddie in the car for half an hour or so. When they obviously wanted to depart and take the child home they found that she had opened the father’s briefcase torn up all the papers and ripped them to shreds. I think I would have been tempted at that stage if it had been my child to give it a smack on the backside. But they did not. They could not do it because it was not in their philosophy. So they verbally insulted and attacked that kiddie and made that kiddie cry. 
I do not know how that kiddie has grown up but I have seen in my earlier days at sea when I was a young officer young deck boys who clearly had been brought up in miserable circumstances. I have seen them with ability but no confidence to know they can go further than the positions of deck boy and able-bodied seaman. What I am really trying to tell the Committee is that reasonable smacking is not the big evil. It brings the situation to a very sharp conclusion. But verbally assaulting a kiddie damages it for life. 
I hear my colleague and certain people say that it was great to get rid of corporal punishment. In my days at school there was certainly corporal punishment but I cannot remember kids getting expelled. I cannot remember one—not one single one. I cannot even remember a kiddie getting expelled in my son’s days at school. But right now we are producing kids in this country who are too tough to handle in the schooling system. 
I welcome the amendment on behalf on New Zealand First and we will be supporting it.