As a high-stakes international currency trader, John Key must have had nerves of steel. This quality may be hard to reconcile with his amiable, bloke-next-door image, but it’s undoubtedly there.
We are seeing this side of Key – the big risk-taker who backs his own judgment – in the way he has responded to the smacking referendum.
Key is resolute that Parliament won’t revisit the issue, even in the face of a vote that shows overwhelming support for a law change.
He clearly trusts his own instincts, as he must have learned to do in his days with Merrill Lynch. More timid politicians, unnerved by the display of public wrath, would have capitulated. But Key, clearly, has made the call that it’s a temporary irritation rather than a crisis. He will have assessed the risks, much as he did with currency movements during his trading days, and will be counting on his personal popularity to carry him through unscathed.
He has shown a similar proclivity for politically risky behaviour before – for example, when he ruled out a coalition deal with Winston Peters, and when he courted unpopularity by breaking the 2007 impasse over the Bradford Bill in the first place, a move that many found inexplicable.
You can see why he used to be known on the trading floor as the Smiling Assassin. The term implies callousness and ruthless ambition, but in Key’s case it may simply signify that he’s able to maintain that sunny demeanour even when he’s taking a punt that would turn lesser men’s bowels to liquid.
Showing posts with label Smacking bill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smacking bill. Show all posts
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
To heck with constitutional niceties, I say
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, Dominion Post, August 4.)
IT WAS unfortunate that media coverage of Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias’s recent speech about crime and punishment focused on the constitutional propriety of the country’s top judge straying into territory usually reserved for politicians.
To heck with constitutional niceties, I say. The issues raised in Dame Sian’s thoughtful speech to women lawyers were far more important than the fact that she trod on Justice Minister Simon Power’s toes. But that was the angle most of the media went with.
Regardless of whether you share Dame Sian’s contentious view that imprisonment doesn’t work, and more controversially that criminals are the victims of circumstance, there is an important debate to be had about crime and punishment. The views of the Chief Justice are surely worth hearing.
Having said that, it was a politically provocative speech and it’s hard to believe Dame Sian didn’t know she was stepping into a minefield.
It wasn’t just the fact that she was trespassing on his turf that rattled the usually affable Mr Power. Dame Sian wasn’t only out of step with public and political sentiment about the need to put offenders behind bars, but directly challenged the belief that criminals have power over their own lives.
Commenting on a 2001 government report about the need for targeted intervention to prevent socially and economically disadvantaged people turning into criminals, she noted that the report had languished – “partly, one suspects, because in a punitive climate which stresses individual responsibility and is intolerant of excuses, the idea that many offenders do not have much of chance is not a welcome thought.”
It was hard to see this as anything but a condemnation of government policy, which has responded to public anxiety about crime by putting more people behind bars.
What made Dame Sian’s speech even more pointed, politically, was that it was delivered in honour of the late Shirley Smith, a feisty left-wing barrister – the wife of Dr Bill Sutch – who championed the underprivileged, and for whom Dame Sian expressed unalloyed admiration.
Whoever said 1970s-style Wadestown (or in this case Remuera) liberalism was dead?
* * *
IN THEIR efforts to counter the unremitting barrage of anti-smacking propaganda from state-backed organisations such as Barnardos, the backers of the smacking referendum are mincing their words almost to the point of dishonesty.
Answering questions from a hostile Paul Holmes on TVNZ’s Q + A (we keenly await the Holmes Guide to Parenting), Sheryl Savill from Focus on the Family, who initiated the referendum, talked about giving children a “light smack” and was at pains to insist this was not something good parents do when they are angry.
Why pussyfoot around on this issue? Let’s be honest – a “light smack” is hardly more than a pat. It won’t deter a child who’s running amok.
And where’s the harm in admitting that parents smack kids when they’re angry? A child is less likely to be traumatised by a smack administered in exasperation than one given in a cold, ritualised punishment session of the type favoured by religious oddballs.
A sharp smack from a parent whose patience has run out is nature’s way of showing a child that there’s a price to pay for bad behaviour. As a perceptive correspondent recently wrote in this paper, evolution has come up with a very effective means by which animal species provide their offspring with a potent warning about consequences. “It’s called pain.”
This doesn’t mean parents are free to fly into a homicidal rage and start bashing their children around the head with a piece of four by two. The irony, of course, is that the type of parent who does this isn’t going to be deterred for a moment by what the law says. The 13 children who have been killed since the Bradford Bill passed are proof of that.
* * *
IT’S A MEASURE of how public emotion overcame reason in the Clayton Weatherston case that many people seemed to transfer their revulsion from the defendant to his lawyers.
Lead defence counsel Judith Ablett-Kerr QC has been reviled for the way she conducted the case. People seemed to assume that because she defended Weatherston, Mrs Ablett-Kerr condoned his behaviour. But isn’t a barrister professionally obliged to do his or her utmost, within ethical limits, to get an acquittal (or in this case, a manslaughter verdict)?
It’s a fundamental principle of our justice system that even the most contemptible criminal is entitled to a defence. Dirty work, but someone has to do it.
The same applies to the defence’s use of Sophie Elliott’s intimate diary entries, which provoked public outrage. People should get real: courtrooms can be brutal places. Defence lawyers wouldn’t get very far if they fretted about offending people’s sensibilities.
I’m not sure that Mrs Ablett-Kerr is the sort of person I would want to go on holiday with. But if I were accused of murder, I’d probably feel reassured to have her as my barrister.
IT WAS unfortunate that media coverage of Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias’s recent speech about crime and punishment focused on the constitutional propriety of the country’s top judge straying into territory usually reserved for politicians.
To heck with constitutional niceties, I say. The issues raised in Dame Sian’s thoughtful speech to women lawyers were far more important than the fact that she trod on Justice Minister Simon Power’s toes. But that was the angle most of the media went with.
Regardless of whether you share Dame Sian’s contentious view that imprisonment doesn’t work, and more controversially that criminals are the victims of circumstance, there is an important debate to be had about crime and punishment. The views of the Chief Justice are surely worth hearing.
Having said that, it was a politically provocative speech and it’s hard to believe Dame Sian didn’t know she was stepping into a minefield.
It wasn’t just the fact that she was trespassing on his turf that rattled the usually affable Mr Power. Dame Sian wasn’t only out of step with public and political sentiment about the need to put offenders behind bars, but directly challenged the belief that criminals have power over their own lives.
Commenting on a 2001 government report about the need for targeted intervention to prevent socially and economically disadvantaged people turning into criminals, she noted that the report had languished – “partly, one suspects, because in a punitive climate which stresses individual responsibility and is intolerant of excuses, the idea that many offenders do not have much of chance is not a welcome thought.”
It was hard to see this as anything but a condemnation of government policy, which has responded to public anxiety about crime by putting more people behind bars.
What made Dame Sian’s speech even more pointed, politically, was that it was delivered in honour of the late Shirley Smith, a feisty left-wing barrister – the wife of Dr Bill Sutch – who championed the underprivileged, and for whom Dame Sian expressed unalloyed admiration.
Whoever said 1970s-style Wadestown (or in this case Remuera) liberalism was dead?
* * *
IN THEIR efforts to counter the unremitting barrage of anti-smacking propaganda from state-backed organisations such as Barnardos, the backers of the smacking referendum are mincing their words almost to the point of dishonesty.
Answering questions from a hostile Paul Holmes on TVNZ’s Q + A (we keenly await the Holmes Guide to Parenting), Sheryl Savill from Focus on the Family, who initiated the referendum, talked about giving children a “light smack” and was at pains to insist this was not something good parents do when they are angry.
Why pussyfoot around on this issue? Let’s be honest – a “light smack” is hardly more than a pat. It won’t deter a child who’s running amok.
And where’s the harm in admitting that parents smack kids when they’re angry? A child is less likely to be traumatised by a smack administered in exasperation than one given in a cold, ritualised punishment session of the type favoured by religious oddballs.
A sharp smack from a parent whose patience has run out is nature’s way of showing a child that there’s a price to pay for bad behaviour. As a perceptive correspondent recently wrote in this paper, evolution has come up with a very effective means by which animal species provide their offspring with a potent warning about consequences. “It’s called pain.”
This doesn’t mean parents are free to fly into a homicidal rage and start bashing their children around the head with a piece of four by two. The irony, of course, is that the type of parent who does this isn’t going to be deterred for a moment by what the law says. The 13 children who have been killed since the Bradford Bill passed are proof of that.
* * *
IT’S A MEASURE of how public emotion overcame reason in the Clayton Weatherston case that many people seemed to transfer their revulsion from the defendant to his lawyers.
Lead defence counsel Judith Ablett-Kerr QC has been reviled for the way she conducted the case. People seemed to assume that because she defended Weatherston, Mrs Ablett-Kerr condoned his behaviour. But isn’t a barrister professionally obliged to do his or her utmost, within ethical limits, to get an acquittal (or in this case, a manslaughter verdict)?
It’s a fundamental principle of our justice system that even the most contemptible criminal is entitled to a defence. Dirty work, but someone has to do it.
The same applies to the defence’s use of Sophie Elliott’s intimate diary entries, which provoked public outrage. People should get real: courtrooms can be brutal places. Defence lawyers wouldn’t get very far if they fretted about offending people’s sensibilities.
I’m not sure that Mrs Ablett-Kerr is the sort of person I would want to go on holiday with. But if I were accused of murder, I’d probably feel reassured to have her as my barrister.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Democracy would be fine if it wasn't for the voters
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, June 23.)
UNTIL last week, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the child smacking referendum had turned out to be a bit of a non-event. Nanny State issues lost much of their potency with the change of government. The political mood of the country has changed and people have moved on.
All of that remains true. Yet the politicians, in trying to talk down the referendum, may have cack-handedly succeeded in rarking up the public all over again.
They try to muddy the water by suggesting the referendum question is confusing and ambiguous (it’s not, though it could have been more elegantly worded), and they huff and puff about the referendum being a waste of $9 million. This conveniently overlooks the fact that it wouldn’t have been necessary if Parliament had heeded public opinion about the Bradford Bill in the first place.
Then Sue Bradford wades back into the debate and deftly applies a match to the touchpaper by proposing another Bill that would give an unelected parliamentary official the right to determine what, if any, wording would be acceptable in future referendum questions.
This is rich. Referendums give the public their only opportunity to have a say between elections. Of course it’s only a token opportunity, because Parliament can – and routinely does – ignore the results.
But even this minimal right is too much for Ms Bradford – and, it seems, for most of her parliamentary colleagues, including prime minister John Key. An already impotent public is likely to be further emasculated by being denied the right to choose the wording of referendum questions – all on the spurious basis that the smacking referendum is “confusing” and “ambiguous”, when most New Zealanders have no difficulty grasping what the question means.
What makes it richer is that Ms Bradford is a member of a party that likes to take the moral high ground and makes a great show of conducting its affairs more democratically than the major parties.
And what makes it richer still is that Ms Bradford herself was put into Parliament via the party list, with no direct mandate from the voters whose rights she now seeks to curtail. The irony of this seems completely lost on her.
Parliament’s response to the referendum reinforces the impression that politicians pay lip service to democracy at election time but are not terribly interested in hearing from the public in between. Worse still, it suggests they fear and distrust public opinion.
Basil Fawlty reckoned running a hotel would be a breeze if it weren’t for the guests. It seems democracy would be fine too, if only the people could be kept well out of it.
* * *
WELL, fancy that – a film called Antichrist, featuring graphic scenes of genital mutilation, has been chosen as the closing night highlight of the NZ International Film Festival.
Of course it wouldn’t have been chosen for its shock value. No, it will be a film that makes a profound statement about the human condition. They all do.
The Danish director, Lars von Trier, is reported as saying the film provided him with therapy after a two-year bout of depression. It obviously worked, because at the recent Cannes Film Festival he proclaimed himself the greatest director in the world.
Let me stick my neck out and predict that the film will attract the usual superlatives. It will be hailed as enigmatic and a great work of art.
It is almost axiomatic in the arts world that if a painting, film or book is enigmatic it must be good. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that it might simply be the product of a tortured, disturbed mind.
* * *
I WAS INTRIGUED by the media’s use of the euphemistic term “romantic favours” to describe what disgraced politician Richard Worth wanted from the women who were the subjects of his supposedly unsolicited attention.
To me the word “romantic” implies an equal two-way relationship, willingly entered into by both parties. Assuming that what has been reported is correct, “romantic favour” is almost oxymoronic in the context of the Worth affair, because there is very little that is romantic about a situation in which a man puts pressure on a clearly reluctant (or so we assume) woman.
All of which reminds me of another oddly coy euphemism that has taken root. Why the media insist on saying someone slept with someone, when what’s really meant is that they had sex, is a mystery. It’s a phrase that dates back to a prudish time when proper people couldn’t bring themselves to mention sex explicitly.
A couple of years ago I read that former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, famously the most carnally active member of that debauched rock band, claimed to have slept with 265 women in three months.
Good grief. They must have been short naps. He would have had to set the alarm clock to go off in 10 minutes so he could move on to the next one.
UNTIL last week, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the child smacking referendum had turned out to be a bit of a non-event. Nanny State issues lost much of their potency with the change of government. The political mood of the country has changed and people have moved on.
All of that remains true. Yet the politicians, in trying to talk down the referendum, may have cack-handedly succeeded in rarking up the public all over again.
They try to muddy the water by suggesting the referendum question is confusing and ambiguous (it’s not, though it could have been more elegantly worded), and they huff and puff about the referendum being a waste of $9 million. This conveniently overlooks the fact that it wouldn’t have been necessary if Parliament had heeded public opinion about the Bradford Bill in the first place.
Then Sue Bradford wades back into the debate and deftly applies a match to the touchpaper by proposing another Bill that would give an unelected parliamentary official the right to determine what, if any, wording would be acceptable in future referendum questions.
This is rich. Referendums give the public their only opportunity to have a say between elections. Of course it’s only a token opportunity, because Parliament can – and routinely does – ignore the results.
But even this minimal right is too much for Ms Bradford – and, it seems, for most of her parliamentary colleagues, including prime minister John Key. An already impotent public is likely to be further emasculated by being denied the right to choose the wording of referendum questions – all on the spurious basis that the smacking referendum is “confusing” and “ambiguous”, when most New Zealanders have no difficulty grasping what the question means.
What makes it richer is that Ms Bradford is a member of a party that likes to take the moral high ground and makes a great show of conducting its affairs more democratically than the major parties.
And what makes it richer still is that Ms Bradford herself was put into Parliament via the party list, with no direct mandate from the voters whose rights she now seeks to curtail. The irony of this seems completely lost on her.
Parliament’s response to the referendum reinforces the impression that politicians pay lip service to democracy at election time but are not terribly interested in hearing from the public in between. Worse still, it suggests they fear and distrust public opinion.
Basil Fawlty reckoned running a hotel would be a breeze if it weren’t for the guests. It seems democracy would be fine too, if only the people could be kept well out of it.
* * *
WELL, fancy that – a film called Antichrist, featuring graphic scenes of genital mutilation, has been chosen as the closing night highlight of the NZ International Film Festival.
Of course it wouldn’t have been chosen for its shock value. No, it will be a film that makes a profound statement about the human condition. They all do.
The Danish director, Lars von Trier, is reported as saying the film provided him with therapy after a two-year bout of depression. It obviously worked, because at the recent Cannes Film Festival he proclaimed himself the greatest director in the world.
Let me stick my neck out and predict that the film will attract the usual superlatives. It will be hailed as enigmatic and a great work of art.
It is almost axiomatic in the arts world that if a painting, film or book is enigmatic it must be good. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that it might simply be the product of a tortured, disturbed mind.
* * *
I WAS INTRIGUED by the media’s use of the euphemistic term “romantic favours” to describe what disgraced politician Richard Worth wanted from the women who were the subjects of his supposedly unsolicited attention.
To me the word “romantic” implies an equal two-way relationship, willingly entered into by both parties. Assuming that what has been reported is correct, “romantic favour” is almost oxymoronic in the context of the Worth affair, because there is very little that is romantic about a situation in which a man puts pressure on a clearly reluctant (or so we assume) woman.
All of which reminds me of another oddly coy euphemism that has taken root. Why the media insist on saying someone slept with someone, when what’s really meant is that they had sex, is a mystery. It’s a phrase that dates back to a prudish time when proper people couldn’t bring themselves to mention sex explicitly.
A couple of years ago I read that former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, famously the most carnally active member of that debauched rock band, claimed to have slept with 265 women in three months.
Good grief. They must have been short naps. He would have had to set the alarm clock to go off in 10 minutes so he could move on to the next one.
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