Cole's+Opinion+Writing



__Gangs are the reason for the raising crime rate in New Zealand.__
I think gangs are the reason for the rising crime rate in New Zealand. The Gang population In New Zealand is huge, according to the book //Gangs// by Ross Kemp, New Zealand has more gangs per head then any other country in the world, with about seventy major gangs and over 4,000 patched members in a population of about 4 million people. Very few parts of NZ have no gang presence at all.

New Zealand has the largest gang population in the world per capita. Real Street gangs only arrived in New Zealand around the 1950s and youth gangs are much more recent, they came around about the same time that the crime rate in New Zealand started going up. Another type of gang on the increase with our crime rate is the newly formed ‘girl gangs’. These gangs are the girls that have been involved and probably abused by male gangs like: Black Power, Mongrel Mob and Hells Angels etc.

Gangs in New Zealand are larger in the poorer parts of the country where they make money from drugs robberies and other criminal activities. This starts a cycle in these areas. Crimes are committed to buy drugs and other illegal things, which leads to other crimes, children have lesser education and grow up looking up to the gang members as their role models creating the next generation of gang criminals.

On the other hand its strange to know that a study showed that in 1991 just under 80% of prison inmates had no gang history, and just over 90% had no current gang membership. Out of the prison population, 4% were members of the Mongrel Mob and 4.3% former members, while 3.6% were current and 3.2% former members of Black Power. No other gang had more than one percent of the prison population. A similar study in 2003 showed that 11.3% of prison inmates were gang members.

The gang culture in New Zealand has turned into complex business run operations. Gangs are trying more and more to blend in with the general society. Gangs are running huge money making operations like security company’s, real estate and property development. With lots of the major gangs being very successful in business they don’t need to take the risks by doing criminal activity and things against the law.

In conclusion, after looking at both sides of the argument I still think that gangs are the reason for the rising crime rate in New Zealand because gang numbers are huge and increasing everyday. The gangs are getting braver and more and more violent using weapons and bad drugs like P. All these things straight away add up to a higher crime rate. So I believe that gangs are the reason for the rising crime rate in New Zealand and what can we do about it? I don’t know.



__ Anti-Smacking Law __ “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?” I say no; I think parents should be able to choose whether or not they smack their children instead of being punished for punishing their children. When Sue Bradford (Green Party) made the anti-smacking law in June 2007 she said it would help the police convict the ‘child beaters’ but all I think it’s doing is just making kids behave worse. In the start of August 2009 the government put out a referendum to every household to vote on if they think the smacking law should stay, but the government say whatever the outcome of the referendum the law will probably stay.

I think that parents should be allowed to smack their children; it hardly even fits as abuse. Smacking your children is nothing compared beating a child. It is not hurting your child; it is just disciplining your child if they have done something wrong. If they kept the anti-smacking law your kids would never learn from doing bad things and they would just do it again. It is just targeting good disciplining parents and letting real child abusers get away easier. Labour party leader Phil Goff said that he won’t be voting on the referendum because “the question is so badly worded that I can’t express my position”. Prime Minister John Key said that “we won’t be changing the law whatever the outcome of the referendum” if he said that what is the point of the referendum. What is the point of the whole nation voting on a law that their not going to change whatever the outcome plus they have already spent nine million dollars on something that no one will really care about, why? I think it is just to rub it in the parent’s faces that the law will never change and the people will never get a choice in it.

Opponents of the anti-smacking law say it will just “criminalise the actions of many well meaning parents”. Beating children should most definitely stay banned for ever but like I said before smacking children is absolutely nothing compared to beating children. Smacking children is just a form of discipline but no one should ever beat a child ever because beating a child is just plain cruel. I think smacking is just a form of punishment that never hurt anybody. In conclusion smacking should have never been banned in the first place. Since it was banned did it stop the abuse on kids like Nia Glassie or the Kahui twins? No it didn’t and why would they bother spending around 9 million dollars on a referendum if their not going to change the law anyway.