Tough on crime, tough on rights

Not PC posts on the government's package of measures to get "tough on crime" and notes that Idiot Savant rightfully is worried about Judith Collins apparently being gleeful about the end of the burden of proof, obviously in relation to certain laws.

This all harks back to the political populism behind seeking to be tough on crime, something I happily support. What should this mean? Well it means you need to look at the whole process of resolving crime and dealing with criminals.

The first is to ensure the Police are focusing on crime according to its seriousness and crime that involves victims. This means crimes against the person are prioritised over property crimes, which are prioritised over crimes that are against no one.

The second is to ensure the Police have the tools available to do the job effectively but fairly. That does mean having access to records of all those convicted, it means having access to fingerprint records of convicts and DNA of convicts as well. It means being able to be issued with a search warrant or interception warrant if there are, on balance of probabilities, grounds to assume a serious crime is being carried out or planned by suspects. However, it also means disposing of evidence that proves nothing, and that includes the samples of those not convicted unless they wish to have it retained. The innocent should retain that status, rather than some murky halfway house of being "known to the Police".

Thirdly, the courts should have objective law behind them and fact finding processes so that juries and judges can make appropriate decisions based on legally obtained evidence. That means courts are not occupied by victimless crimes

Finally, sentencing should do what it is meant to do, protect the public and send a punitive message. Imprisonment exists to protect people from the perpetrator committing further crime, but must also be proportionate to the offence and the harm to the victim. Fines may be appropriate if the purpose is to punish someone who is unlikely to reoffend. Young offenders might be expected to be rehabilitated for a first time offence that is not a serious violent or sexual offence.

Debate around how best to manage the criminal justice system IS the primary area of public policy that would remain under a Libertarianz government.

Sadly, this government is seeking to use a sledgehammer to deal to crime, and it is doing so on the basis the Police like to do policy in this area - "let's get those bastards and give us the tools to do it, and you'll be right, you'll have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong".

Let's be clear what we are talking about in the government proposals:
- Seizure of assets if you can't prove you obtained them legally. Imagine right now the effort you'd need to go to in proving how you afforded your last major purchase? Imagine now how the most sophisticated gangs would establish shell companies and manufacture invoices, receipts and the likes to ensure that they could prove enough. Most of all, ask yourself why anyone should have to prove innocence?
- Wide ranging powers to enter properties, without warrant, if the Police suspect a person who has committed an imprisonable offence is on the premises;
- Wide ranging powers to stop a vehicle, without warrant, if the Police suspect a person in the vehicle has committed an imprisonable offence;
- Wide ranging powers to enter properties, without warrant, if the Police suspect a person is about to commit a drug offence;
- Wide ranging powers to stop and search people in public, without warrant, if the Police suspect a person is carrying a weapon, including knife or a "disabling substance" (yes women, that means you carrying mace or similar);
- Wide ranging powers to search any vehicle, without warrant, if there are reasonable grounds to believe stolen property is within it;
- Powers for the Police to enter your property lawfully (i.e. unchallenged) and snoop using their eyes, ears and recording what was seen and heard;
- Powers for the Police to require you to provide passwords to access your computer and any data you store.. and so on.

More here

What needs to be asked is why this is justified, and what are the specific problems that mean obtaining search warrants is proving too problematic for the Police?

Judith Collins thinks you are protected because of judicial review, but frankly this has little credibility. Parliament is sovereign, when it takes away your rights, the courts are not likely to overturn this. The Bill of Rights Act is only useful for challenging interpretation of general provisions, but the specificity of statute can override this. Beyond that she thinks the media and democracy save your rights, but frankly the NZ mainstream media is not up to the job, as you'll see below. Besides, when the Police Minister cheers the end of the presumption of innocence, then you should be afraid.

Bear in mind of course, guilt till proven innocent is what the tax system is about (and Idiot Savant probably isn't going to campaign to change that is he?)

Following on, it is highly ironic that the president of the Police union Greg O'Connor says this:

"New Zealanders have got to wake up. P has done for this country what the Prohibition did in the US – it's entrenched organised crime."

History delivered an answer to that. Perhaps Mr. O'Connor might be asked to comment on this?

Oh and while we're at it, notice how the Dominion Post article above looks essentially like a government press release with nothing but comment from those supportive of it? Notice how Britton Broun (who was graduating three years ago) did not approach any opposition parties, defence lawyers or anyone else who might be able to comment differently on his little piece of agitprop?

Is this the free media Judith Collins relies upon for robust and vigorous debate and defence of our rights?

Caveat emptor on Destiny Church surely

That's all there is worth saying about this case from the Taranaki Daily News.

If you enter a relationship with someone who is deeply religious, or as a couple enter a deeply fundamentalist religion, and you find the religion gets between you and your partner, why should you be surprised?

Unless the church or your partner forced you, you have a mind. Use it. If you fail to do so, then caveat emptor (and with Density Church you most certainly are "buying").

As much as I have no time for religion personally, the fact remains it is voluntary for adults. The state is not. If you think Destiny Church is a rip off, then don't go and warn others to not go if you wish. If you think the government is a rip off, then your only choice is to complain, or leave to experience another one, which rips you off in a different way.

Nats torture the disabled!

Well I'd think that if I got my NZ news from Idiot Savant, who says the Nats are cancelling the invalids benefit unless people work.

He said the invalids benefit "Its (sic) paid to terminal cancer patients, people with no limbs, and the totally blind." and a lot of others too of course, but no he wouldn't tell you that.

He says the Nats are forcing people off the benefit and "we will waste millions hounding these people, and millions more on pointless and humiliating medical tests to confirm that no, there haven't been any miracles, and that they still have cancer, motor neurone, paralysis, or whatever other condition robbed them of their career. As I said: sadism - and a particularly expensive and wasteful form of it."

What banal nonsense. It is propaganda hyperbole I'd expect to see from the North Koreans.

After all, he paints National as libertarian in a ruthless way, when it is nothing of the sort, in fact you can almost see the image he paints of cigar smoking cackling about how they are going to be mean to the common people today.

What was actually said by Bill English was "Effectively we have [more than] 80,000 people where officially the welfare system has said they won't work again. We think that's a waste of those people and of their potential so we want to look at how to encourage more people off those longer-term benefits"

Nothing radical there, but no Idiot Savant thinks they should be on welfare for life, and nothing should be done about it. He bends down and kisses the welfare state for being so generous and giving, and that means he personally washes himself from ever thinking about giving a rat's arse about the people who get welfare. The state does it - all is better, and don't even think about changing it.

Now if the Nats were talking about transforming the system so that people in future made provision for permanent disability through insurance, whilst ensuring those currently on invalids benefits retained those benefits and had no disadvantage from working, then I might get interested. As it goes, Bill English is doing a little more than just letting things be as they are.

However, it is too much for an old fashioned socialist worshipper of the welfare state to even THINK the state might encourage less dependency, by, for example, making invalids benefit abatement rates parallel with tax (i.e. for every dollar you earn, the benefit is abated by the tax paid on that dollar).

International welfare state logical if.....

you believe in the welfare state at all.

One of the latest little "hands in the air" scandals to hit Britain is the news about the 38,000 children in Poland receiving British child benefits because their parents are working in the UK.

The EU of course means that all European citizens are, well, European citizens. British, Irish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Romanian or French, you are all entitled to live, work and claim health, education and welfare in whatever country you are in. So if you live and work in the UK, you can claim benefits for children that may be located elsewhere in the EU, at the UK rate. Now the vice versa would apply as well, but good luck to a Brit working in Poland and getting Polish benefits for their children (if there are any), because they will, understandably, be much lower.

The welfare state concept is based on the idea that we are all our "brothers' keepers", so that people who are in need of income assistance (or income at all) get it from the state, paid for compulsorily by you. Of course take it further and it is based on there being an unwritten, unconscious and unagreed obligation. Your very existence means you must pay for others to survive, and their very existence and poverty means they are "entitled" to welfare.

So the question comes, if it is good enough within border, why not internationally? After all Polish children are far more needy than most British children. Why stop there, why not have a global welfare state where taxes are taken from those with the ability to each according to their needs (you know where THAT came from don't you?)?

Isn't anything else racist, xenophobic and morally wrong? After all, if the welfare state is moral, it must surely be moral internationally. Couldn't those on the left argue that such trans-border poverty is "racist"?

The answer of course is no. It isn't moral to maintain the welfare state. It isn't moral to force people to pay others to have an income. The answer to Britain's dilemma of paying the welfare state of others is to phase out its own.

It could start by telling the EU it is eliminating payments to other countries, and then all new migrants are told they will never have a claim on welfare, in exchange for exemption from the PAYGO tax otherwise known as "national insurance". From then starts the long weaning process off of the welfare state, which will see support for the poor move from compulsion to choice, from the state to the private voluntary sector. However, nobody dare even talk of such a thing in the UK today.

Have we not learnt from 1989?

Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph asks:

"Why do the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the anniversary of which we have been commemorating in a low-key way, and the collapse of communism which followed feature so little in the education curriculum and in the popular renditions of modern history?"

Indeed. She thinks those who had responsibility for curriculums and many commentators were shocked by the sudden implosion of the political system that had kept half of Europe under its jackboot for nearly half a century.

She notes that while Marxism expected capitalism to collapse, it collapsed instead, at least in its most hardened forcefully imposed form, but capitalism simply cannot:

This brings us to the delusion permitted by historical ignorance about the present economic crisis: capitalism, whatever the BBC says, has not collapsed. The banking system very nearly did, but that is a different thing: the banks are simply businesses through which capital flows. They were badly run and they failed due to mismanagement. Capitalism was badly served. But it has not – and cannot – collapse for the same reason that it cannot be overthrown: because it is not a structure that is imposed from above whose perpetrators can be forcibly dislodged.

Yes, you see capitalism is about individuals, about them applying their minds to the world around them and seeing how they can offer people goods or services in exchange for money (or goods and services), and then paying others to provide them services (with minds and hands) to assist in that production. Capitalism is simply human.

She says that if there was a greater observation of what 1989 was about (perhaps especially in Europe where far too many were enthralled by the eastern bloc as offering an "alternative way") it would teach us far more of the risks of rejecting capitalism and the human condition:

"If we had dared to look long enough at the events that followed 1989, as have many of those Eastern European countries which lived through them – if we had produced the plays and films and television documentaries and school texts that they had actually deserved – we might now have a fuller appreciation of the terror that follows from the need to extirpate individualistic impulses. An ideology that attempts to re-engineer human nature in the name of the collective good did not, as its founders had believed, require just a "temporary dictatorship" but a permanent one that bred corruption, victimisation and – most paradoxically of all – a bleak, inexorable poverty both of material goods and of aspiration which eventually became intolerable."

Indeed, nothing must frustrate the left more than the current recession NOT being a collapse of capitalism and not causing people to embrace the reality evasion of Marxism. However, it is timely at the end of this year to remind us all, and the young who knew not of what things were like in eastern Europe, of what the brave people of those lands were seeking to escape in that year.

The cold bleak crushing brutality of the steamroller of socialism.