Why??

For the same reason that nearly every country except ours has one – a check and balance on the first chamber to stop them passing bad law and stop governments from trampling over people in a cavalier manner.

As for BeaB – are you for real or taking the piss?!

We don’t need a separate head of state. Just make the PM our head of state as s/he is in all but name. We don’t need the courts with any more powers either. Parliament should be paramount and it’s up to us to keep them honest!

Yes, let’s just have a fucking dictator with no constitutional restraints. Works so well in Turkmenistan – maybe we’ll get our own solid gold statue of Helen Clark? Wouldn’t that be awesome?!

Please no upper house. We don’t need more of the sods. One house is enough, plenty of public scrutiny eg fully televised select committees, house sittings etc and our chance to boot them out every four years if we don’t want to vote for them.

An upper house would not necessarily mean more politicians. You could reduce the size of the House of Representatives to under 100 MPs and have two dozen senators – about the same number of politicians as we have now. There is no way that there is enough scrutiny of laws in NZ when parliament has absolute power to pass one in three minutes. No other democracy in the world does that.

No written constitution either. We don’t need any dead hands stifling change when the modern world demands nimble thinking and action.

Yup who needs all those silly things like property rights, self defence, free speech. Gotta get rid of those to adapt to a changing world!

And fewer MPs – perhaps half the number we have now. Perhaps then the overall quality would improve as, at the moment, we have some very good MP’s and a long tail of nonentities. After all, it’s no more than a big city council with such a small population to serve.

Fewer MPs make it easier to control a caucus and easier to push through bad law and decisions. Not saying I want more MPs, but that is the consequence of less of them.

I generally have no problem with people using a pseudonym. People often have good reasons. However, find it cowardly for people who use pseudonyms to attack other people or make blatantly racist or sexist attacks.

It is good to see that sensible right thinking women like you and Muriel Newman support fathers against unjustified attacks from man hating militant left wing feminists.

Far worse than teenagers being allowed their privacy (wonderful euphemism, BeaB, btw) is the fact the State offers to murder their unborn babies for them in order to fix the problem. Any state that does this is on borrowed time.

Teenagers are entitled, as I have said before, to their privacy. We as parents do not own our children. They quickly grow up and will deal in their own ways with how we have treated them when they were children.

And men have left teaching mainly because they can do better elsewhere, just like our brightest young women who used to teach because their choices were narrow. The gender of teachers is far less important than their expertise, intelligence and dedication.

Even this is a false figure. In fact the whole edifice of government, as it exists now, grows more unsustainable every day. They’ve been spending money they haven’t had for years. Now its time to pay off the credit card and there is no money to do so.

The first thing we need to do is drop all of the TOW Maori/ Pakeha stuff completely. That one part of NZ owes another part financial redress for past wrong doings is a ridiculous myth. It is also an unaffordable scam. The country is bankrupt and not enough is being done to lessen the impact of the serious downturn that is on its way. These self serving clowns in Wellington are fiddling while Rome burns. They all deserve the arse.

Your sweeping claims about male sexual abuse within the family (“Believe me, I know.”) cast an unwarranted slur on all decent men. And patently decent men make up an overwhelming majority in our society, despite your suggestion to the contrary. Your comments echo the kind of feminist distortions that have driven many fine men from teaching in our schools, to the overall detriment of our education.

Yes there are scumbags of fathers, uncles and brothers who abuse young females in their own households. In reality, that is not the norm. It needs to be recognised also that intra-household sexual abuse seems to occur disproportionately within certain ethnic groups and in so-called “families” that include the mothers’ current boyfriends. Why such situations should be used to justify good parents being kept in the dark about their daughter’s abortion is beyond me.

BeaB, I use my real name on blogs and talkback. I am not ashamed or embarrassed about my opinions.

I hope you are not blond by any chance because you give blonds with a logical brain a bad name.

Think about this deeply if possible.

In the rare case a father commits incest with his underage daughter and she tells a school counselor she is pregnate.

If the counselor investigates properly who the father of the child is and finds it is the girls father they will immediately appley to the family court for an abortion without parental consent and at the same time notify the police. The will stop re-offending against the girl of any sisters.

With the law as it is the girl just has to say she does not know who the father is and she and/or any sisters will be at risk.

It appears more the case of you being a bitter and twisted woman than me being an angry bloke. Why do you hide you name? is it because you do not want any bloke you may be involved with to know what you think of men and fathers in particular?

And we are promised a referendum.

This can be translated as “we will bombard you with propaganda to ensure you vote the way we want you to”.

Never trust a politician when they want to tinker with your Constitution, the bastards just want more power.

You also overlooked that this is designed to muffle those who want National to return to a policy of removing the maori seats.

I remember some years age during a Telethon an advert in the Herald pictured 4 baby girls with caption under stating, “one in four of these girls will be sexually abused by the time they are 18, one half by their fathers”.

After the campaign it was acknowledged that this claim was utter rubbish but not before much damage was done. Further damage has been done by false claims of sexual abuse to obtain an advantage in custodial disputes.

I am not claiming incest does not occur but not in numbers that feminists like you claim or at least imply. Far more abuse – sexual and physical – of children occurs from mother’s boyfriends than from the real fathers.

Every case of underage pregnancy involves a criminal act. That may be minor where the boy is about the same age as the girl or much more serious where it may involve incest or a much older man.

No one is lobbying for parental notification without some safeguard like referring the matter to the family court where the girl is genuinely concerned about her safety.

If they has been sexual abuse by the real father (rare) or more likely by the mother’s boyfriend this more likely to be detected and stopped from reoccurring with a parental notification laws than the present school cover ups.

will require either broad cross-party agreement or the majority support of voters at a referendum,” Mr English says.

Weasley worded statement of the week?

“Broad cross-party agreement”. Translation: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum parties carving things up for their own benefit. Again.