Shut Up And Cure Something

As the News.com.au intro to this story read:

A CHILD welfare group plans to push for laws to ban parents from smacking their children after a survey found 70 per cent of adults support it as a method of discipline.

When a huge majority of the population supports something and an elitist minority calls for it to be banned, it must be led by doctors.

Yep:

Foundation chief executive officer... Dr (Joe) Tucci said the time had come to repeal the outdated legal defences allowing parents to physically punish their children. "Enough is enough. This is going to be the biggest-ever push to have these laws repealed."

The laws are:

In Australia, parents are able to smack their children under the legal defence of "lawful correction" or "reasonable chastisement". This defence is limited in New South Wales, where it is illegal to hit a child above the shoulders. In 2004, a Sydney mother was convicted of assault for smacking her three-year-old son about the head after he threw a tantrum in a supermarket.

Tucci intends to get his way the same way other elitist minorities have socially engineered us in the past - by nagging and stamping their feet and demanding what they want and just wearing us down like tired parents until they get their way:

"The Commonwealth needs to put it on the agenda as a national issue and work with the states to get a uniform approach."

There was evidence of changing community attitudes, with support for smacking among Australian adults now 69 per cent compared with 75 per cent in 2002, Dr Tucci said.

"I think we are more willing to entertain the possibility as a community to outlaw it. In a generation, we could change the way we discipline our children."

Yes, because all the other more recent changes to the way we raise and discipline our children have been so effective:

...local police are struggling to cope with the rising, not falling, levels of crime — so much for feeling free of fear and having the right to live in safe communities. I now turn to comments of people who live in various towns and villages on the South Coast regarding how safe and how free of fear they feel. A lady from Glebe wrote on behalf of her 87-year-old mother who lives at Culburra Beach. She wrote before to Mr Costa but got an unsatisfactory reply. She wrote again to the Minister for Police and is still awaiting a reply. She said that despite any assurances about what would happen in Culburra Beach:

"...the same behaviour is still continuing, mostly on a Friday or Saturday night as it has been for the past 5 years. Large gangs of young boys and girls some apparently as young as 14 or 15 are holding the town to ransom. They are drunk, possibly some also on drugs, they congregate at the beach front near the surf clubhouse or in public spaces, parks, anywhere really: they brawl, play unacceptably loud music, ride wheelie bins, tip rubbish everywhere, use foul language and destroy property. Just last Saturday night in a drunken spree they damaged my mother's letter box, (for probably the 6th time), invaded the yards of residences where they sat drinking, tore down a fence, attacked each other with palings, threw a brick through the window of another elderly woman's home, threw a letter box through another window, broke bottles, damaged road signs and other public notices."

So much for people feeling safe and secure in their communities. And this is the beautiful, quiet Culburra Beach we are talking about. This sort of behaviour has been going on for five years — that is, for five years people at Culburra Beach have been frightened to go outside at night.

-- Nick