By NEIL REID – Sunday News
Anti-smacking campaigner Sue Bradford has received chilling death threats and been warned she could be New Zealand’s “first political assassination”.
Police are looking at stepping up her personal security after the vile warnings on Twitter. The Green MP said: “There has been a whole lot of stuff. Some of it is pretty nasty.”
She told Sunday News: “I was on Twitter and someone sent a tweet saying, ‘Sue Bradford should be the first candidate for a political assassination’.
“There is another email that was really ugly a few weeks ago that we referred to police.”
Bradford, the architect of the anti-smacking legislation, added: “I have become the iconic symbol for the opponents, for the people who want to change the law back.”
Voters have been bitterly divided over the issue. Opponents argue that the law prevents parents from disciplining their kids and prosecutions can rip families apart.
Bradford, an MP for 10 years, received a backlash of threats and abuse after the bill was passed on May 16, 2007.
She told Sunday News this week: “I have been copping it for four years. I copped it for many years earlier on for standing up for unemployed people and beneficiaries and being a street protestor. It is what happens when you stand up for what you believe.”
She has moved house several times to protect her privacy. She also has special dispensation from Parliament to leave her name and address off the electoral roll.
The issue still rumbles on despite the $9 million referendum when 87.6 per cent voted ‘No’ to “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?”
Bradford said that as well as being abused and intimidated, her office had been flooded with letters and emails from parents telling her they would go on whacking their children.
She is worried that she will again be forced to live in a climate of fear. In 2007, she was targeted with menacing taunts on the CYFS Watch website.
One hateful opponent threatened to make a sawn-off shotgun to take out Bradford and any MPs who supported her.
Another nutter, intent on teaching her the difference between a smack and a serious assault, threatened to punch her, “hopefully breaking her nose or jaw”.
There were also threats to publish her home address unless she backed down.
She said at the time: “I think it’s indicative of some of the people that are campaigning against me.
“I think it’s disgraceful that they would threaten a member of Parliament in this way.
“It’s [the website] got a horrible description of graphic physical violence against me, this sort of stuff is quite scary.”
Bradford was in Palmerston North on Thursday to receive the New Zealand Psychological Society’s prestigious Public Interest Award for her work. She also got a $500 donation for the Child Poverty Action Group her chosen charity.
Bradford, married to devoted Bill, spokesman for the National Distribution Union, vowed to carry on her work. “It is nice, after four years on the frontline.
“The award is an honour but I would like to stress that I stand beside 112 other MPs who passed this landmark law,” she said.
“The timing was amazing and odd from our point of view. The Psychological Society certainly understands the benefit of what we have achieved.”
She accused her opponents of double-standards. Bradford said the same people who were saying it was okay to assault a child, would be horrified at the prospect of a law allowing anyone to use physical force against their wife.
“I don’t know if people really do think about that, that it (should be) okay to do that to children but not to adults,” she said.
“There are a lot of people that are absolutely dedicated to getting my law overturned; they want the right to beat their kids, they want the right even to beat them with implements. The true agenda here is to able to beat their kids again legally.”
She said the question asked in the referendum was “flawed”.
“There are any number of questions they could have asked. It could have been … ‘Do you think that there should be a defence of reasonable force for the force of correction?’ or ‘Do you think it should be legal for parents to use force as part of physical discipline?”‘
PM John Key has rejected a law change in the wake of the referendum. Police and CYFS will instead review their guidelines to ensure that parents aren’t criminalised for a light smack.
OH MY GOD, is she STILL making out she is the victim? Its funny how that “death threat” she got a few days ago sound VERY similar to the one this site published a few years back, I think Sue is crying wolf for the attention.
For starters, I can assure EVERYONE, that this site has not made ANY death threats against Sue, but I can understand why people would make them!
This site has shot down ALL her arguments for keeping her stupid law on the books, AND pointed out the lies she has used against those that supported the referendum against her stupid law …. in fact, she is doing EXACTLY the same thing now that she did a few years ago… playing the vicitm to get public support on her side FOR her stupid law.
Sue Bradford LIED then, to the people of New Zealand AND to those in Parliament to get her law passed, and now the heat is getting too much for her, ESPECIALLY since this site, among others, has been demanding all polticans to support the repeal of her law by the ACT party.
She is losing the fight, so now, she plays the victim to get the sympathy vote.
That photo at the top of this story is a classic politican’s trick, dark background so the camera will focus on her, eyes averted to give the impression she is contemplating God… and in the foreground, her hands are clasped to convey the image she is angelic, a Godly person, above reproach. George W. Bush tried that as well and it failed, its such an old trick that everyone is aware of it.
Sue Bradford is so dishonest that I for one will demand to see the evidence of all these death threats. Personbally, I advise those making the threats, if they exist, not to bother, its a waste of a bullet AND shit splatters.
What Sue should REALLY be saying, and the Greens had better take note of it, is that “I have cost you guys the next election, Greens, National, John Key, I am sorry.”
As for the rest of the bullshit she is saying, this site, and others have already covered it, in fact, we have moved on, rather than waste our time picking on a stupid woman full of her own self importance, we are attacking the REAL problem behind the anti smacking law.
That is this;
Sue Bradford came FOURTH in her electaorate in the last election, and she is ONLY in Parliament now by virtue of our half democratic, half communist system, where no one elected Sue, her party did, so she does not answer to the people… how fair is that? And why should anyone that came fourth even be allowed to think up stupid laws when she can ignore the voters because they did not elect her… That is backed up be the referendum, her electorate had one of the HIGHEST “no” votes in the nation, but since she does not answer to the people, she can ignore them.
Our fight now is to have M.M.P. removed from our electoral system because thats probably the ONLY way we can get morons like her out of Parliament.
Tau Henare, another list MP, summed it up perfectly….
“I was elected by the National Party…”
Yes, like Sue, you owe no loyalty to the voters, only the party.
M.M.P must go.
Sue Bradford, you have my Email address, please provide me proof of these death threats, because even if you said the world was round, I’d still think it was a lie because of the mouth it came out of.
Lastly, Sue Bradford has a new nickname. “Chicken Little”…
The sky is falling…. the sky is falling…. death threats… this law will save children’s lives……
Yeah right… all lies!
From Michael Laws Today:
OPINION: IS JOHN Key thick? Or does the prime minister think that we are? These are the only two possible explanations, after a week in which the National Party leader exposed a hubris that has taken him only nine months to acquire. By contrast, Helen Clark took nine years.
The pro-smacking referendum result of nine days ago was the most significant defeat of Wellington liberalism since McDonald’s ended the reign of “nouvelle cuisine”. And yet Key keeps finding new ways to forestall and frustrate democracy.
His latest effort has been his unilateral declaration that National will not support Act MP John Boscawen’s private member’s bill that seeks to enact the public will on the smacking issue. Why? Because the law is working properly, replied the PM.
Which is a nonsense. Because it is not working at all.
Exhibit one: the 16 dead children killed by their family/whanau since the passage of Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill. Those 16 children are a roll-call of shame and not one of them was saved by parliament’s good intentions. They will, inevitably, be joined by more child fatalities. From the same predominant ethnic group, and the same appalling underclass. Toxic whanau who will never reference their behaviour by what parliament says or does.
Of the 16 kiddies killed since the passage of this hated legislation, 11 were of Maori background, two Asian, one of Arab extraction and two are unknown at the time of writing.
And yet this was an act of parliament intended to arrest the onward march of child cruelty. It was supposed to “change the culture” although change it by stopping the majority of good parents from lightly disciplining their children.
Exhibit two: the law itself. And this is where the prime minister is not simply wrong but deliberately misleading the country.
The law is explicit. Section 59 of the Crimes Act (1961) states that “nothing justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction”. And if anyone is in doubt on that and Section 59 delineates occasions when parental force might be warranted in protecting a child the above imperative trumps those exceptions.
Indeed the law is so inadequately and poorly drafted that it now includes the Key/Clark amendment that the prime minister seems determined to protect.
“To avoid doubt,” it states, “it is affirmed that the police have the discretion not to prosecute.”
Frankly, this is no concession. Police always have that discretion. The section simply recognises existing police practice. That the police have created their own operating procedures with regard to Section 59 is accepted. But Child Youth and Family do not have that discretion. They simply applied the law as it was written. And who could blame them?
The best solution then is to change the law; not to retain a section that categorically states that, if I smack my child on the bottom or hand for corrective reasons, I am guilty of assault. This was always the intent of the Bradford bill and remains the intent of the “Yes” lobby.
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Little wonder that Key is being lauded by Bradford, Bagust, the Children’s Commission and the like. In fact, this in itself should cause the National caucus to pause. The anti-smacking zealots back the prime minister, the rest of the country does not.
In fact, it must be doubly embarrassing for Key that the best argument against his supine sophistry was advanced by himself in originally opposing the Bradford bill. Why, he asked parliament in 2007, would you allow a law that you have no intention of applying? Why indeed, prime minister.
Key attempted an answer last week by suggesting that he didn’t want to waste parliament’s time. Except private member’s bills are inherently not the prime minister’s to dismiss. They are the private bills of individual MPs and used to address outstanding moral issues or to remedy quirks of fate or law. In this case, both imperatives apply.
And what could be more important to any ordinary family than parliament interfering with a parent’s right to correct their child? Such is, surely, as important as parliament gets? Especially when your party ran its “anti-nanny state” line so vigorously at the last election.
Which leads one to the only possible conclusion. Key, secretly, thinks parents should be banned from lightly disciplining their children. Key is, we now discover, actually one the state’s nannies. A petty fascist.
This means this is the end of the honeymoon. As the anti-smacking legislation came to define all that was wrong with Labour, so it has worked its revelatory magic with National. It has proven there is no real difference between the parties: that they both think they know best and the public is stupid. Tomorrow it will still be illegal to smack your child. The law states so. And it is also illegal for the prime minister to tell the police and CYF they can practically ignore this law. He simply does not have that authority as any number of public law precedents prove.
Meanwhile, kiddies are being killed. The culture of violence that produces those deaths continues to spiral out of control. And we refuse to target those groups that we know are the most abusive and the most feral.
No wonder US TV host David Letterman wants the prime minister on his late-night talk show. He could not have written a script so surreal.
mlaws@radiolive.co.nz
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/opinion/2814873/Smacking-debate-proves-both-parties-want-to-play-nanny
Your Captn says:
Sue, what gives you the right to feel aggrieved? You have never been elected by the people. When you forced the original legislation through your party had barely passed the 5% threshh0ld (5.3%)That euates to 94.7% of those who votes did not want you or your rag tag friends.
This is not even a minority, its a schism. If you had been honestly elected My comments would be more muted. List MP’s have no loyalty to voters, only the party machine! Where is yours based? China? North Korea? or the United Nations.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. You have choices, resign, or ……..
Like the man says… If’n ya caint stand the heat, get outa the kitchen…
And if you are stoopid enough to believe that ANY of want to kill you… What and lose a perfectly good whipping post????