And so it passes without a whimper. National’s new law criminalizing Greenpeace and protests on the water for corporate big oil passed through Parliament last night as part of National’s blitzkrieg against civil liberties.
And what a blitzkrieg it has been.
National started by retrospectively legitimizing the NZ Police illegally spying on NZers with vast new search and surveillance powers that allow them to break into our homes and plant spy cameras with the barest of judicial oversights.
It continued with slick willy Simon ‘big-oil-have-rights-too’ Bridges and his law to allow the military to arrest NZers protesting against petroleum speculation and it will end with Key passing law to let the GCSB spy on NZ citizens.
It is no wonder that the National Party have stacked the Human Rights commission with cronies so that when the inevitable complaints that civil liberties are being breached, National have the numbers to rule in their favour.
Every day that passes under this Government we become less democratic and for National voters, that’s the way they like it. They have no interest in sharing power with other sections of society, as Nationals stealing of water rights in Christchurch can attest.
Better for National Party supporters to lock those segments wanting more from society up in the newly privatized prisons where they can slave away in forced labour camps.
Thankfully for National, with the threshold of public journalism being Seven Sharp, these issues can be quickly ignored before the next advert break.
New Zealand under Key has quickly become the land of the wrong uptight crowd.
Let’s hope history will be damning in its judgement of these pro corporate laws against protest. I hope Greenpeace live up to their promise to expect resistance.
Slick Willy Simon Bridges should never be allowed to live down what he’s done this week.
Well can you imagine Bridges ever ever having protested either for or against anything… it is a bloody disgrace
A pity Bridges didn’t manage to put as much effort into explaining how we were going to invest in the resources to deal with a deep sea well rupture and still come out ahead financially.
The following document shows how industry standard agreements on non-renewable resource royalties tend to work. The cautionary statements section is where you get the ‘reveal’ on how this can easily go: http://www.aussieoil.com/site/pdf/ACOR%20Terra%20Nova%20%20Holloman%20Press%20Release%20May%2023%202012.pdf
This is why Bridges wants protests to be kept onshore, and why he wants a polemical debate focused on out of date caricatures and childish shit-slinging. The devil that lurks in these details should be of concern even for those on the political right who are more concerned with the economic factors than the environmental ones (or who try to pretend they aren’t intrinsic in an economy like ours). We will pay through the nose if we invest in the necessary maritime resources to deal with a deep sea well rupture.
We couldn’t even sort out the fucking Rena, and the fuel in those tanks are pretty much a minnow’s wankstain compared to what we will have to deal with if a deep sea well ruptures. No wonder he wants the debate to focus on out of date polemics about chardonnay socialists and defending foreign oil companies via straw man references to ‘business people in this country’.
What is worse is that I’m not aware of anyone from the parliamentary left offering any such rebuttal to his childish, deceptive, and really very easily refuted Randroid bullshitting.
When False Flags dont Fly anymore
I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s got a point – terrorism or, in the case of Dunnokeyo the claim of terrorism, only benefits the people already in power.
Time to shift the power from the “elite” and back to the people.
I always said the covert fascists would morph into overt fascists.
No brown-shirts or black-shirts on the streets just yet. But spying on everyone and arbitrary arrest without charge are a better, less noticeable, ways of ‘boing frogs’.
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