Protecting the 'good family': The child discipline debate in New Zealand
Anita Easton
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Contact Email:   anita.eastonmac.com

In 2005, after decades of campaigning, New Zealand started the legislative process to remove the explicit legal protection of parental physical discipline. The public debate that resulted was divisive and politically significant, as it crystallised the division between conservative Christian and socially liberal forces; as well as providing a focus for resistance to government intervention within the home.

This paper examines the hypothesis that the core of the debate was not parental discipline; instead it provided a forum to debate the nature and role of family, and the relationship between the state and the home. Layered approaches drawn from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as interviews with key campaigners, shed light on the construction of the family used by competing campaigns.

All campaigners on the surface argued that 'good' families should be protected from state intervention and intervention was required to protect children from abuse within 'bad' families. This obscured the deep divide between campaigners about the nature of a 'good' family; with a conservative model of the married heterosexual couple contrasting with a liberal model which ignored the form of the family and focused on liberal behaviours.

This poses the key question, how can policy processes address hidden cultural contention?

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