Health professionals in Auckland have proposed that smoking be banned in all outdoor public places in the city. At least I think that’s what they’ve proposed. The front-page story in this morning’s Herald isn’t entirely clear on whether the ban is intended to be universal within the Auckland City boundaries or restricted to certain public spaces.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether banning smoking in any outdoor public space can be justified in what we like to call ‘a free society’, a limited ban (on virtually anything) invites public confusion and is therefore much more difficult to enforce. A total ban, on the other hand, leaves no room for confusion or the excuse, ‘I didn’t realise you couldn’t smoke here.’

As I write this, a poll on the Herald’s website reports:

Excellent and sensible idea – 43%

 Good in theory -  27%

Not a fan but would go along with it – 4%

Outrageous, a step too far – 26%

That’s 74% of respondents variously in favour and 26% adamantly against. An unscientific poll of course, but indicative at least of majority support for banning smoking outdoors as well as indoors in public spaces.

So yes, if there were such a law, you would essentially only be able to smoke in private indoor locations, including your home and garden, other people’s homes and gardens with their agreement, and (I’m guessing here) other privately owned indoor premises with the agreement of everyone who ever used the premises.

Put even more simply, you would not be able to smoke in any outdoor location where  you might come into contact with another  member of the general public – on the street, in the park, on the beach, in children’s playgrounds, tramping, climbing, jogging, playing or just plain walking. 

I think it’s an excellent and sensible idea.

Smokers talk of their ‘right to smoke’ and indeed no one wants to take that right away from them. There’s really no difference between a person’s right to fill their lungs with tar and die from lung cancer and a person’s right to live on a diet of  junk food and sugar drinks and die of a diabetes-related condition or a heart attack. Please feel free.

But there is no right to pollute the air that others breathe with your smoke, including, I would suggest, your own family’s air, whether in the home or in the car. Especially in the car!  

There is no such thing as a right to do harm.

Anyway, the suggested ban has brought the usual money-based objections from business and the hospitality industry:

Auckland Council member Cameron Brewer said the real epidemic the city faced was obesity, not smoking

‘Smokers’, he said, ‘have got to smoke somewhere and if you try to introduce an outdoor ban, all that will do is see more retreat inside, lighting up in the family home or car, which is much more damaging to non-smokers.’

Not a very convincing argument, since the addictive nature of smoking almost certainly means that those people light up in the family home or car now, in addition to smoking outside.

And smokers don’t have to smoke. They can beat their addiction and stop smoking as millions of others world-wide have done.

But at lease Mr Brewer acknowledges the damaging effect of smoking on non-smokers.

He was also admirably in favour of more public education on the dangers of smoking. ‘That’s what works,’ he said. ‘Municipal meddling over the years hasn’t made one bit of difference,’

Possibly not, but central government meddling certainly has made a huge difference.  The ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces is the most significant reason for the decline in smoking in New Zealand over the past decade. As Heart of the City CEO, Alex Swney,  observed, ‘When that was imposed people thought the world was going to end. But now it seems almost obscene that someone would light up in a restaurant. This would be the same as that – it’s just evolution.’

So there you have it – ‘Nanny State’ lurking in the wings again. I never had a nanny, but I’ve seen enough of them on telly to realise that they can be really annoying, always trying to stop you doing fun things like sticking your fork in the electric socket or swallowing a marble or shoving  a crayon up Rover’s bum. But when you become a big boy or girl and can think clearly, you come to understand that Nanny really had your best interests at heart and was right all along.

In this Radio New Zealand interview, broadcast on last night’s Checkpoint, New Zealand’s most consistently effective current-affairs  interviewer, Mary Wilson, makes mincemeat of Justice Minister Simon Power’s  unconvincing apologia for the government’s half-hearted, half-baked approach to solving New Zealand’s booze crisis. It’s great stuff. Look for Power’s warning that  next Thursday might not happen.

Photo: Paul Escourt

Yesterday the New Zealand Herald reprinted a letter which Dr Pollock had written earlier to the magazine New Zealand Doctor. In it he presents his arguments for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia in this country. It is well worth reading.

I support Dr Pollock in his bid to have assisted voluntary euthanasia made legal for terminally ill patients in New Zealand. My argument follows.   

This is an area where precise definitions are essential. The critical word in the euthanasia debate is voluntary.  I am talking about a situation where a person wants to die and seeks the assistance of others to commit suicide. I am not talking about killing someone who does not want to die, or is unsure, or is incapable of making a decision or expressing a wish. Those are separate and quite different issues. I am talking about a situation where a person wants to die and seeks the assistance of others to commit suicide. Voluntary euthanasia.

The next thing that has to be said is that this is not and must not be considered to be a religious issue. It is a legal issue, an issue for the state. Those whose religious beliefs preclude the idea of taking one’s own life are entitled to hold to those beliefs, but they are not entitled to impose them on others. Religious belief is personal, subjective and arbitrary. It cannot and should not be the basis of lawmaking. Voluntary euthanasia is a legal issue, an issue for the state.

Does the state have the right to tell a person whose life has become an intolerable burden to them that they cannot end it and cannot seek the assistance of others to end it? I would have thought not. I would have thought that was an intolerable intrusion on  the rights of responsible adults to determine their own destiny. 

At the heart of my personal philosophy is the simple belief that everything should be permitted that does not harm someone else. Where there is no victim there should be no crime.

If you apply this philosophy to euthanasia, killing someone who did not want to die, or was unsure, or incapable of making a decision or expressing a wish, would clearly constitute harm – involuntary rather than voluntary euthanasia.

And harm would include failing to ensure that that person was fixed in their resolve to die or that no reasonable alternative existed to helping them take their life.

So we need to have safeguards to ensure that no life is unnecessarily or prematurely ended.

It’s here that the opponents of voluntary euthanasia introduce the concept of the ‘slippery slope’ – legalise voluntary euthanasia today and we’ll be bumping off the old, the infirm and the handicapped tomorrow. And if we aren’t actually bumping them off, we’ll be putting pressure on them to do the job themselves.

It seems to me that this is an argument based on the premise that, as a society, we are incapable of self-regulation or control, that restraint must inevitably lead to excess. It’s an argument based on the idea that we cannot draw lines.

Yet all of our lawmaking is based on the drawing of lines, on the placing of limits. All of our laws say: this far and no further. The ‘slippery slope’ argument is, quite simply, a denial of the possibility of the rule of law. With voluntary euthanasia, as with anything else, we are capable of drawing lines, of setting limits, of imposing sanctions. If we are not, then we are less than human, less than civilised.

What to me is less than human, less than civilised, is the overweening arrogance that allows one human being to say to another: despite your pain, despite the fact that your life has become intolerable to you, despite your cry for help, despite your plea for mercy, I deny you the right to die, because your death would be an affront to my beliefs, my values, my conscience, my religion. That, to me, is as good an example of doing harm, as you might hope to find.

Photo: Brett Phibbs

The Pit Bull was originally developed in the United States. Its breeding characteristics were strength, aggression and the ability to fight. Not surprising really, since that was the purpose for which the dog was being bred – to fight other dogs.  

All of this was known 23 years ago, when an ad in the Herald offered New Zealanders imported Pit Bull puppies for sale. The Auckland SPCA opposed the importation of the breed, on the grounds that the dogs were dangerous and unpredictable. It was unsuccessful.     

Well, the Pit Bull and the Pit Bull cross remain dangerous and unpredictable. There is an international history now as long as your arm of attacks by Pit Bulls, invariably serious and sometimes fatal,  on strangers, on their owners, on old people, young people, children and babies.  

The Pit Bull’s enormous jaw-strength makes it almost impossible to shake off. In one case in the States, 16 shots were fired into a Pit Bull during an attack, but the dog’s jaws remained firmly clamped to its victim. Strength, aggression and unpredictability – these then are the Pit Bull’s and the Pit Bull cross’s inherited traits.  

So what sort of  person would  want to own a dog like this – an ugly, dangerous, unpredictable breed, with a history of sometimes fatal attacks, not only on other dogs, not only on other people, but on the very people who have raised and cared for it, and their families? Someone who isn’t very bright!  Every time a totally innocent person is scarred for life by a Pit Bull, owners of the breed, including the mothers and fathers of small children,  tell us that their dog  is affectionate and friendly, wonderful with the children,  ‘wouldn’t harm a hair on their heads’.  

This recital of the virtues of the Pit Bull is common to almost every tragic incident involving the breed. When the attack occurs, when the distraught or grieving parent or relative is interviewed, the mantra of denial emerges once again: ‘I can’t understand it. He was so affectionate and friendly, wonderful with the children, wouldn’t harm a hair on their heads.’  

Each time I hear these defences,  I feel a growing rage. I want to say: for god’s sake, don’t be so bloody stupid! Learn something from the past. Don’t dice with your own and your children’s lives in defence of a position that flies in the face of the all the evidence. And I cannot escape the conclusion that the ownership of a dangerous and unpredictable breed of dog, especially where there are children in a home, is an utterly stupid, irresponsible and uncaring act.  

But it doesn’t surprise me. To want to own a dog bred for its strength, aggression and ability to fight, suggests to me an essentially anti-social personality. The dog is merely an extension of its owner.  

If you doubt it, have look at the picture in yesterday’s Herald of the owner of the Pit Bull that had just mauled 8 year old AJ Maninoa.  Is he giving the fingers to the photographer or to society at large? I know my answer.  

So what is to be done? Under the current law, it is illegal to import any of the breeds I have referred to in this post.  Dogs classified as menacing, and that includes all of those breeds, must be muzzled in public places and may be required by the local council to be neutered.  

May be required.  There’s the problem. Those three words mean that we will continue to have Pit Bulls and related dangerous dogs in New Zealand. As a first step, we must urgently change those three words to must be required.  Sterilisation of the existing population must be mandatory with heavy penalties for failing to obey the law. And, once the breed has died out, the law must be further extended to make ownership of such a dog illegal.  

If you have doubts, talk to the parents of any of the children mauled or killed over the years by the pet that ‘wouldn’t harm a hair on their heads’.  

And don’t give me any libertarian crap about owners’ rights. You have no right to put the lives or safety of the rest of us at risk. End of story.

Photo: Dean Purcell

I was recently stopped at a police checkpoint in Ponsonby and breath-tested. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine with a meal and a small brandy with my coffee to follow. I didn’t expect to be over the limit or anywhere near the limit. And indeed I wasn’t.

If an experience I had many years ago, when we were somewhat less scrupulous about drinking and driving, is anything to go by, I could have had a great deal more to drink and still been under the limit.  

I’d had a rather fine dinner at Valerio’s in Parnell and been shouted to several grappa after the meal by our generous host. I was pissed as a newt. I would have asked Judy to drive, but she was  equally merry. It was 2am.

Halfway down Parnell Rise I was pulled over by a cop car. The cop asked me to step out of the vehicle onto the road, where I nervously and unsteadily blew into the breathalyser.  I knew I was a goner. I was on Top of the Morning at the time, and could look forward to my picture appearing on the front page of the Herald – RADIO HOST ON DRUNK DRIVING CHARGE.

‘That’s fine, sir,’ the cop said, ‘Have a nice evening.’

I couldn’t believe it. I have absolutely no doubt that I was unfit to drive, yet I was apparently under the limit. There’s was something wrong there. There still is.

What is wrong is the concept of having a limit at all. Because a limit allows the motorist to exercise his discretion as to whether he has had too much to drink to allow him to drive safely. He has to make a judgement. But the very fact that he has been drinking means that his judgement is impaired.

There are a number of areas where discretion is a dangerous thing. Allowing motorists to make up their own minds at what point they’ve had enough to drink is one.

Discretion in the enforcement of speed limits is another. It appears to be common knowledge that you can add at least 10% to the legal speed limit and not expect to be stopped or get a ticket. This means that the actual speed limit is 55K or 110K with many motorists using their discretion to round the figures up to ‘under 60′ in town or ‘under 120′ on the open road.

The corporal punishment of children is a third area. Section 59 of the Crimes Act allowed parents the discretion to decide what constituted ‘reasonable force’ when disciplining their offspring, with disastrous results. The law was amended to say that you can’t hit your children at all, other than to protect them from harm.

Those who oppose the amendment want the government to reinstate the parents’ discretion to decide what constitutes ‘a smack’, which would  be legal, and anything more than a smack, which would  not.  If they are successful, doubt  about the corporal punishment of children will be introduced where there is now no doubt.

The law which says it is illegal in New Zealand to hit your children  provides an excellent model for sensible legislation on drink-driving and speeding:  It should be illegal to drink and drive; it should be illegal to exceed the speed limit at all – no ifs, no buts, no discretion, no doubt.

It is madness to allow motorists the discretion to decide whether they are fit to drive after drinking; it is madness to informally allow motorists the discretion to go faster than the legal speed limits. In both cases the result is mayhem.  

Let’s make it illegal to drink and drive. Let’s maKe it illegal to exceed the speed limit by 1K. Let’s keep it illegal to hit kids.  No ifs, no buts, no discretion, no doubt.

I know – ‘Nanny State’.  Get a better argument!

There’s general agreement that Lockwood Smith has been an excellent Speaker. His quiet, natural authority has allowed him to control the House without getting to his feet every few seconds to call for order. He has refused to allow Ministers to get away with non-answers to questions. If any party is unhappy with him, it is considerably more likely to be the National Party than anyone in opposition, perhaps the ultimate tribute to his impartiality.

But yesterday the Speaker seemed to lose the plot when he warned the media that their coverage of MPs’ expenses bordered on lobbying and that, if it continued, he would treat them as lobbyists. The media, he said, should ‘stop parroting a view’.

He then issues this threat:

‘If the newspapers do want to have a view and want to lobby on it, I’m very happy to issue them with a lobbyist card and relieve them of their [Press Gallery] offices here, and if they want to be lobbyists – fine.’

This somewhat petulant outburst had all the hallmarks of an attack on the freedom of the press to rigorously examine and question the judgement, decision-making and personal behaviour of our lawmakers, including the Speaker himself. Dr Smith seemed to be confusing best practice  journalism with lobbying. And he seems piqued at the suggestion that the rules which govern MPs’ expenses, which only he can administer,  might be flawed or in need of change. His personal integrity, he seems to feel,  is being called into question:

‘You’ve seen how principled I’ve been in the chamber. I’ll take the same approach of other things as well.’

To which one might reply, ‘And if you do, Mr Speaker, we’ll all be delighted to pat you on the back.’

In the meantime, the media are not only within their rights to question every alleged example of ministerial double-dipping on expenses, particularly when the person concerned is the Deputy Speaker, who ought to know better, but also to actively campaign for an overhaul of the parliamentary rules and regulations that have made such scandals, in Britain and here in New Zealand, possible.

As Pete Hodgson observed, ‘When questions of a presiding officer of Parliament are raised, they must be followed through. The integrity of Parliament deserves that.’

The integrity of Parliament probably also requires the Speaker not to abuse his power by threatening to ‘relieve’ Press Gallery journalists of their offices when he perceives some criticism of himself or his job in their investigations.

My opposition to allowing gay couples to adopt is rooted in my own early experience as the only child of a solo parent, my mother. I never knew my father.  I described the  lifelong effect of that situation in my memoir Daddy was a German Spy:

Having lived for 70 years, I still have no idea what it means to be a man, what you’re supposed to feel, how you’re supposed to behave, what you’re supposed to do. I’m going to get into trouble for staring at men in buses. My defence will be that I was wondering whether the person opposite me met the criteria of ‘manness’. According to my wife, the ones I think might meet the criteria are ‘knitting pattern models’ – good-looking guys with lantern jaws, strong arms and Aran sweaters. I don’t know. It’s the not-knowing that’s the problem, because it robs you of confidence. I don’t particularly want to know how to be a good man, but how to be any sort of man, how to be comfortable in my man’s skin…. I’ve come to the conclusion that, with the exception of violence or abuse, a poor model would have been preferable to no model at all.

Of course lots of boys end up with one parent these days, most often their mother. It’s commonplace. It wasn’t commonplace when I was kid. I didn’t know anyone, either at school or in the town where we lived,  who didn’t have two parents – one of either sex.  I was unusual, different. I didn’t want to be unusual or different. Most kids don’t. I wanted to be ‘normal’.

There will always be kids without gender models – boys without fathers and (fewer) girls without mothers.  Those, if you like, are the breaks. But that is very different from setting out,  planning to deny a child the experience of having both a father and a mother.

It already happens of course. A  woman in a relationship with another woman, wanting children, impregnates herself  with the sperm of a male friend. The child is born into what may well be a loving home, but without a present father. If the child is a boy, I believe he will experience not only the social difference of being a kid with two mothers, but in all probability the confusion and lack of confidence I describe in my book. I would prefer to avoid being judgmental, but I cannot see this sort of arrangement as anything other than self-interested and selfish.  Boys need fathers; girls need mothers; kids need both.

It’s the premeditated nature of the arrangement,  in which the child has of course no say,  that offends me.  It’s entirely different from the increasingly common situation where one partner in a marriage comes out, his/her lover moves in and the kid ends up living with two mums or two dads. If everyone’s agreeable, I don’t object at all to the new partner adopting the child. That, after all,  is merely a recognition of a de facto situation. And the biological mum or dad will probably still be around and accessible to the child.

But that, it seems to me, is very different from sanctioning an arrangement where neither partner is the biological parent of the child, and which condemns the child in advance to be raised without a father or, less frequently, a mother. 

This is what Paul von Dadelszen, the acting head judge of the Family Court has called for. His argument seems to have two prongs – that gay adoptions are legal in several other countries and that the present Adoption Act is  unjustly discriminatory and breaches the Bill of Rights Act, the Human Rights Act and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I find neither argument persuasive. Central to any child’s rights, it seems to me, is the right to have a mother and father.  And that right must take precedence over the right, if indeed there is such a right, of gay couples to adopt.

Finally, if no suitable heterosexual couples were available to adopt children, would allowing suitable gay couples to adopt be preferable to having no adoptions at all? Of course. But that is not the situation in New Zealand.

A party to celebrate the possible return of legislation allowing parents to use ‘reasonable force’ to discipline their children! A celebration of the fact that 4 out of 5 New Zealanders want to regain the right to hit their kids!  Are these ‘no’ voters going to bring their own children along to the celebrations? And, if they are, just what will the children be celebrating?

I’ve had some harsh words to say about these people in the past. But none harsh enough. What sickos you are.

I can’t be sure whether James Louis Mason punched his 4-year-old son in the face. I wasn’t there. But people who were there and who gave evidence at Mason’s trial were convinced that he had assaulted the boy and, more importantly, so was the jury.

Mason has had a fair trial and that ought to be the end of the matter. It won’t be. Mason is likely to become the poster boy for the pro-smacking lobby. If  his performance last night on Sunday is anything to go by, he fits the bill perfectly.

Mason doesn’t deny hitting one of his boys. But he’s added to the smacking lobby’s lexicon of  ‘hitting’ euphemisms by defining what he did as ‘a flick’, which he demonstrated with considerable enthusiasm on the programme. It’s a drumming move apparently.

Nor was he at all embarrassed to admit that shouting and four-letter verbal abuse were part of his child-rearing repertoire. If you were going to keep your kids safe in this hostile world, they had to get the message loud and clear. The proof of the pudding was in the eating. His children, he told us, were still alive.

And if you were in any doubt that the Mason family were actually the Waltons reincarnated, there were all those pictures of dad kissing and cuddling his kids. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe I’ve been in the industry too long not to suspect staged performances from people on the telly.

It was perhaps no accident that the item was fronted by Simon Mercep. It had all the feel of a Fair Go story, with Mason in the role of the victim, the wronged party. Uncharacteristically weak journalism, I thought. 

And there’s one quite curious thing here. If the pro-smacking lobby is right and the vast majority of New Zealanders oppose the new law, you might have expected an entirely different verdict.  Juries are quite capable of ignoring laws they consider  silly or unjust and bringing in what they consider sensible and fair verdicts. Either this jury was firmly convinced that Mason was guilty as charged or he was bloody unlucky to have struck 12 proponents of the nanny state.

Watch Part 1 of Sunday

And Part 2

Some explanation of the mindset of the more high-profile apologists for a change in the current law is to be found in their connection with, and in some cases membership of the ACT party, the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First, the Destiny Church and other conservative political and religious groups. These are people who cannot see beyond punishment as a response to unacceptable behaviour whether in the family or society at large. Their field of vision ranges from hitting naughty children to locking up violent offenders and throwing away the key.  Neither response has ever been effective in improving children’s behaviour or in deterring violent crime. Quite the reverse. 

Equally concerning is the willingness of these groups to dishonestly manipulate public opinion. The 1999 Law and Order Referendum, initiated by the Sensible Sentencing Trust, provided a striking example of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ style of survey and was deliberately designed to offer respondents Hobson’s choice. It read:

 Should there be a reform of the justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?

Three questions but only one available answer – either Yes or No. So if you were in favour of ‘greater emphasis on the needs of victims’ and ‘providing restitution and compensation for them’ – as I am – you also had to be in favour of ‘minimum sentences’ and the brutal Victorian concept of ‘hard labour’ for all serious violent offences’.  Which, needless to say,  I am not in favour of.   

Ninety-two percent of respondents apparently were. But most thinking people would have realised that the referendum presented impossibly conflicting options within the one question and would not have responded at all.

In an interview I did with the Sensible Sentencing founder on Radio Live a couple of years ago, Garth McVicar agreed that the Law and Order Referendum question was so flawed as to be meaningless. One might have thought the advocates of smacking - essentially the same people -  would have taken care to ensure that the same mistake would not be repeated.

But the ‘Anti-Smacking Referendum’ has again  been deliberately phrased to bamboozle respondents. It reads:

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

This is the equivalent of asking: ‘Should doctors recommend an exclusive diet of McDonalds and KFC as part of a healthy weight loss programme?’  McDonalds and KFC cannot be part of a healthy weight loss programme. And it is open to serious doubt whether smacking can be part of ‘good parental correction’.

If they are to have any validity at all, the language of referenda questions must be neutral. To make the ‘Anti-Smacking Referendum’ neutral, the word ‘good’ has to be deleted from the question. Even its title is misleading since there is no reference at all to ‘smacking’ in the Act. The word simply does not appear.

Bradford’s bill  was designed to prevent abusive parents using Section 59 of the Crimes Act to escape penalty.  Its purpose was clear:

To abolish the use of reasonable force by parents as justification for disciplining children.

The wording of the current Act reflects this:

Nothing in the Act or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.

And it includes the following clarification:

To avoid doubt it is affirmed that police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child, or person in the place of a parent of a child, in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.

That is precisely what the police have done.

Well, in the end it comes down to whether or not you think it should be legal to hit children. ‘Smack’ is such an innocuous word. But you cannot ‘smack’ a child without ‘hitting’ or ‘striking’ the child. And the word includes a range of possibilities – from the ‘tap on the bum’ which the proponents of the referendum would have us believe a smack means, to the volley of frenzied thumps which most of us have observed from frazzled parents on the street, in supermarkets and on buses.  Indeed, one of the best arguments against smacking is watching a parent smack a child. Generally the child is squirming or struggling to get free. The parent restrains the child by holding onto its arm with one hand, while using the other hand  to paddle its bottom.  Usually the child is crying or screaming. It is not an edifying sight.

But it is instructive. Smacking invariably means that the parent has lost control. Reasoning and constructive communication have been abandoned in favour of physical force.

I suspect most parents feel bad after they have hit their child. And, as a parent of five children and grandfather of ten, I understand very well the stresses that can impel the most loving father or mother to strike out.  We should be careful, as the Act allows,  not to prosecute the parent who on a rare occasion lightly smacks a misbehaving child.

But that is very different from the state legitimising or sanctioning the smacking, hitting, striking, corporal punishment – whatever synonym you prefer -  of children by their parents. That is a very slippery slope. Proponents of a change to the law want a ‘light slap’ to be legal, but the term defies definition and the police and the courts will be faced with the same impossible task they faced in defining ‘reasonable force’.

At present children are protected in law from all corporal punishment in 24 countries. They include Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Israel,  Norway, Finland, Sweden – and New Zealand.

We should be proud to be on that list.