Blumsky Mark: Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Blumsky Mark: Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:638;Page:8460] 
MARK BLUMSKY (National) 
: 
 I appreciate the opportunity to speak on clause 3 of the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill. If there has been an upside to the whole fiasco surrounding this debate and this bill it is that I now know how many Kiwis have email addresses. I suggest to the Committee members that they damn near all do; I believe I have had an email from just about every New Zealander who exists. Even just in the last half-hour I have had 42 emails on this subject come through to my BlackBerry. 
I suggest that one of the problems with those emails is that one sees yet again how rude many Kiwis can be. Is that not sad? I hope we do not as a culture totally lose the ability to respect each other and each other’s arguments and the right to have a different opinion. Sometimes I think some people forget that we actually have the right to a different opinion. 
I take this chance to thank the many people who have come to see me and those who have sent reasonable arguments through by email. I made an effort to read a heck of a lot of them. There are a lot of people who really do care and who have a real concern. Is that not fantastic? One has to be thrilled to bits with that because I think at the end of the day that we all want the same thing. 
I suppose the debate is about whether this bill is delivering on what we hope to deliver. I suggest to Sue Bradford that it is not. I always had it in my mind that Parliament’s role should be to provide leadership for New Zealand. Sometimes leadership gets a bit difficult because one sometimes has to make decisions that fly in the face of public opinion. I ask the member to trust me because I know about that. I sold the electricity company and I can tell members that did not go down very well. I was involved with variations to the waterfront plan and I can assure members that they did not go down very well. 
Sometimes leadership is very difficult because one believes that one is making decisions with more information and more facts than the public have and that one is privy to certain things the public is not privy to. That is when one has to make difficult decisions; that is called leadership. Leaders should not make difficult decisions with the belief that the public are dumb. I sense that this bill suggests to members of the public that maybe they are not as smart as they think they are. I think that is wrong. 
I do not believe that Parliament is showing leadership by having this debate. I cannot figure out why we are having a debate on this bill. Surely Parliament has bigger things to debate—things that would make New Zealand a heck of a lot of a better place than it is—than whether we should make it a criminal offence to smack our children because we believe that that will lead to thrashing and bashing and everything else. 
If people were looking from the outside at this debate and they saw the level of hysteria in this Committee they would actually think we were having a debate on capital punishment. Maybe a debate on that would have the same level of hysteria we are seeing in this argument. 
I cannot believe that this Parliament has managed to alienate so many Kiwis. Parliament is sending Kiwis a message and it is not the sort of message I honestly believe we want to send them. It is a message that says: “Hey we don’t really care what you say. We believe we can enter your family home. We believe we can enter that sacrosanct area and do a better job than you can of making decisions on how you develop your family.” 
I say to Sue Bradford that I still do not understand why we are having this debate. When I read the many many emails that had come through I saw that thousands and thousands of people did not understand the issue. This debate does not seem to make one bit of difference in getting us to where we all want to go. We all want to stop child abuse and bad parenting. I do not see this bill making a difference in that area. 
There are too many Kiwis being disenfranchised at the moment because of the decisions being made and the debate we are having. This is not happening just in New Zealand. Some of the emails I received were very relevant. I want to draw attention to one I received on 7 March from Jeremy and Alison Coleman. It reads: “Dear New Zealand MP. We are expats considering returning to New Zealand with a significant interest and investment in the well-being of our children. We are watching the passage of Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill with great interest. It is evident if mood can be read from the New Zealand media that the majority of New Zealanders are also opposed. The passage or failure of this bill will certainly influence our decision to return to New Zealand.” So we are seeing messages not just from New Zealand but also from overseas.