Crime
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
by Chris
The governments proposed amendments to the Criminal Investigations Act are, quite simply, chilling.
The police already have powers to store your DNA but under very strict circumstances – under Judicial allowance or after being convicted of serious offences (rape, murder and some other). The Government wishes to change that so the police will have the authority to extract and store your DNA for simply being suspected of a crime.
This idea is at ends with the New Zealand Bill Of Rights Act (BORA). The governments Attorney General, Chris Finlayson, has reported back to the government this fact and it’s looking like it’s going to be ignored, and National will ram through more legislation under urgency totally bypassing the select committee submission process once again.
This is ridiculously scary stuff. Especially since similar movements to allow police fishing expedition in the UK are now under investigation for breaching the European Bill of Rights.
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
by Chris
As with any tragedy, it seems the usual media commentators almost have pieces pre-written to whip up their usual brand of hysteria. And no different is the tragedy of Nia Glassie, a recent case of terrible child abuse.
Here’s a recap:
Garth George blames New Zealands horrific child abuse record on abortion. Then he seems to get confused, takes some medicine and switches tack to blame kiwi bloke acting out his frustration, for he has been emasculated by the feminist movement. Riiiiight.
Michael Laws seems to hop off his “PC gone mad” and nanny state bandwagon and instead seems to briefly understand what those shrieked buzzwords actually stand for, going to the extent of saying “At such times you can appreciate the sensibilities that drove Sue Bradford to intrude on family life.” before he suddenly reverts back to form and begins to advocate the death penalty.
Deborah Coddington takes it a step further, recommending that the state abduct children at birth from the people deemed not fit to parent. This is a big step from an ex-ACT MP, but she appears to miss the mark.
Danyl from the Dim Post hits the nail on the head:
Well thank god we’ve gotten rid of that horrible nanny state Labour party and the government can get on with the real work of confiscating people’s children off them at birth.
He goes on to assert that Laws et al. dreaming up these policies is all well and good, until someone decides it should apply to them as well (Sue Bradford, anyone?) and then we’ll barely be able to breathe but drown in the moral outrage.
I look forward to reading Bob Jones’ opinion piece on it, but hopefully he’s crawled back under his rock now his crusade against Labour and the Greens has suspended as they’re relegated to opposition.
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
by Chris
The Fundy Post, in a confused state, writes:
Oh dear. In an effort to make everyone, but especially members of our Asian population, feel better about crime, I decided to do some research. So I googled. And sure enough, we score really low on the World murder rankings, just above the Scandinavians, Hong Kong and Japan (which has few murders but interesting ones).
Then I took a look at the total crimes per capita and found, to my horror that we are second from the top, just ahead of the Scandinavians.
Whoops! Above the USA? Above South Africa? Above Zimbabwe?!?
The clue, of course, is at the bottom of the page…
Note: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
New Zealand has the second highest reported crime rate of countries surveyed. Obviously not something to be hugely proud of, but you can not even start to track and fight crime without having accurate reporting. Take a look at the comments section for an interesting view on the actual crime rate, not the hugely inflated “spree” being run by the mainstream media.
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
by Chris
Don’t be fooled by the Kiwi Party, they are in fact just the Destiny Party in rather poor drag. Which is blatently obvious by the fact that they’re next to Family Fist – right behind the attempt to repeal the anti-smacking law.
They’ve managed to scrounge up enough signatures to submit it again, mostly I hear by picketing events like rugby games. Fair enough, nothing wrong with a bit of democracy! It’s also likely the referendum will happen at the same time as the election, although I imagine that the Labour party will fight tooth and nail to postpone it – possibly to make it Nationals problem to deal with this shitfight.
First things first, remember that this bill wasn’t scraped through parliament with opposition, both major parties and a few minor ones voted for with a very small minority against. Do we not live in a representative democracy?
What I don’t get is why the religious fundies persist with their “Save the fetus, thrash the child” policy? Why is it the Family Fist’s and the Kiwi Parties that get behind this kind of stuff?
Anyway, Stuff has a look at things:
Kiwi Party Leader Larry Baldock handed over more than 390,000 signatures backing the call for a referendum on the question: “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand”.
No surprises here. Why not “Should ‘reasonable force’ be a valid defence in child abuse cases?”. We all know why, because they’re interested in pushing agendas, throwing weight around and “I told you so’s”. Unfortunately that has very little to do with actual justice.
Also some very interesting statistics in the article.
Material provided by the Government showed over the six months between September and April police attended 288 child assault incidents.
In the three months prior to this 111 incidents were attended.
Of the 288 incidents, 13 involved “smacking”,
This was up from three in the previous period.
None of the incidents resulted in a prosecution.
Of the 288 incidents, 69 involved “minor acts of physical discipline.
Of those only four resulted in prosecution, one did not proceed and was treated through diversion.
Obviously, statistics coming from the Government aren’t to be trusted. They don’t count the people who’s houses were invaded by armor clad stormtroopers and dragged off with bags over their heads.
From what I can divine out of those statistics, it says that 13 cases were attended by police that involved smacking. No prosecutions made for parents giving their child a “loving smack”. However, 69 incidents “minor acts of physical discipline”, i.e. low level child abuse, resulted in four prosecutions. Four prosecutions of child abuse that won’t be able to use the “reasonable force” get-out-of-jail free card. Sounds like it’s working to me.
Friday, June 20th, 2008
by Chris
New Zealands most prestigious, respected and widely circulated news outlet gets its grubby little hands on a copy the lost corrections dossier. Bad News. Even worse is they decide to continue their plunge into tabloid-isim by shirking journalistic responsibility and printing some of the sensitive information contained within.
Corrections Minister Phil Goff was alarmed by the dossier incident. He said the information could be misused.
Really? You mean like published in the nations largest newspaper?
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
by Chris
Remember a little while ago, Family Fist were crowing about a poll that showed “Almost half of parents with children under 12 have smacked them in the past year”. Don’t remember? Here’s their press release.
What you might not know is that, before the law was passed, a whopping 78% of people said they would not comply with the law. Now it shows that 52% of parents have actually complied with the law.
In their press release it discloses that the poll was commissioned by Family First. Good. Know that polls exist to prove a point for whoever commissioned it.
What you might not know is that Family First employed Curia Market Research to conduct the poll. Ring any bells?
What you might not know is that Curia Market Research is run by our very own David Farrar, author of Kiwiblog. The Kiwiblog comments section being home to some of the worst right-wing, conservative and religious wing-nuts our society has to offer. Although I don’t lump DPF in with some of the scum that lurks at his site, he’s a vocal opponent of the government.
What you might not know is that Curia Market Research is allegedly run out of National Headquarters in Wellington.
The amount of spin applied to that poll result is simply ridiculous… Statistics can prove almost anything you want when you bend them the right way.
Family Fist like to tell everyone that they’ve missed the point. In fact, it’s they who have missed the point. Nobody has been dragged off to prison for stopping their child from performing digital electrical socket investigation. Innocent parents are still innocent. Parents who abuse their children now have one less defense and I would think that anybody who actually puts Family First would get behind that.
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
by Chris
The movie industry (and music industry as well) have recently become obsessed with filthy, freeloading, artist-livelihood-destroying, rum-drinking, organised crime-funding internet pirates. These enemies of freedom sail the seven ISP’s cutting profits of the honest middlemen with their cutlasses.
An interesting thing popped up today with regards to movie studios trying to discourage pirates. It seems that they are trying out a method to watermark the films – because this idea to make the film undesirable to copyright infringes is quite simply ridiculous for some very obvious reasons…
Their brilliant idea was this:
“Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in order to deter and track piracy.”
Deter piracy with a few gaps in the soundtrack? Have any of these people actually seen what a movie looks and sounds like recorded by a consumer-level camera in the theaters? You’d be lucky if the only thing wrong was a few gaps in the soundtrack! People that are willing to watch a movie recorded by a hand held camera in a theater are simply not going to be bothered by this – they already put up with coughs, splutters, shhush’s, hairdos, moving people and a camera man who appears to be afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. In fact, the only people that it’s going to upset are the poor suckers that just paid $15 to watch your crippled movie in the theater.
Seriously bad idea. My idea would be to throw an infrared floodlight against the theater screen. Invisible to the human eye but you can be sure the camera’s CCD will pick it up 
In other copyright news it seems the New Zealand Government has been invited to discussions regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement. This treaty, in negotiation with UK, US and Canada, has been drawn up in secret and has only just come to light. You can read the discussion paper here and it seems to be just a thinly veiled assault on privacy in the name of Intellectual Property Rights protection.
I can only hope the New Zealand government is not involved with this, as the paper is full of very scary provisions…
“Cooperation†is the “key component†to ACTA, which means governments agree to exchange information with each other about their citizens in order to protect the IPR industry (although the data exchange won’t be limited to that goal)
The big problem I have with this is the fact it was negotiated completely in secret with no transparency. It’s also misleading all the way up to the title. Since when did counterfeiting have anything to do with Intellectual Property Rights (I hate that saying…)? It seems what they can’t put into international law they enforce in trade treaties. For instance an FTA with the USA is almost always conditional on adopting their broken patent system and their draconian DMCA-like laws. Copyright enforcement should be a purely civil matter, not criminal.
This is seriously bad news and can spell major issues for both consumers and other parties such as ISPs and public services should they have to comply. I hope NZ doesn’t touch it with a 10-foot barge pole.
Update: Ars Technica has a very well written analysis of the problems to be had with ACTA. Go Ars!
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
by Chris
Family Fist have fallen short on their petition to force a referendum on repealing the amendment to Section 59 of the Crimes Act. Under the law, a petition requires 10% of the eligible electorate to force a referendum for an issue. Family Fist had around 269,500 signatures that were allowable, many discarded due to fake names or multiple signatures. They now require around 15.5k signatures within 2 months to allow this to go ahead.
However, as mentioned elsewhere, this may jepordise their chance to have this referendum alongside the general election – something they would definitely prefer as to try and influence the votes for the general election.
“The passing of the anti-smacking law by most of our politicians last year was an act of breathtaking arrogance which ignored the wishes of the very people who elected them to represent them in the making of our laws.”
– Bob McCroskie
It should be noted that a citizen initiated referendum is non-binding, it’s an official poll on public opinion but politicians are not required to act on it. Considering that the law was passed in the house 113:8 with members from both the left and the right voting on it, one wonders how effective it will be should it go ahead.
