The Police Minister knows that the most effective means of breaking the gangs’ power would be to remove the criminal stigma from unwise drug use. But, like all Police Ministers, Paula Bennett knows that the drug laws are not there to end the misuse of drugs. They are there to create a nether world of criminality and addiction against which the situation of “normal” people may be favourably compared.
It is now certain that any decisions on the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) minus the US will take place after the election. Last week’s meeting of the negotiators from the remaining 11 TPPA countries rebuffed the National government’s wish to proceed with the agreement basically unchanged aside from new provisions for its entry into force.
One of the things I’ve tried to work on over the last decade is getting Labour+Green Party over 51% without the need of including Winston and NZ First so that a genuinely left wing Government could actually implement the kind of truely progressive policy we desperately need.
Two days after two hikoi of 579 pairs of shoes (each) set off simultaneously from Cape Reinga and Bluff, bound for Parliament’s hallowed steps, the Chief Coroner announced the latest suicide figures for the 2017 financial year: 606.
Bill English and Paula Bennett admitted the new powers would stretch human rights laws, but would only apply to serious criminals who had ‘fewer human rights than others’ anyway, clearly misunderstanding human rights. We should be wary when the Prime Minister and his Deputy are prepared to trade off these rights as a pawn in desperate election politics.
Seven years on, Environment Canterbury (Ecan) is yet to return to full democracy but surely its chief executive Bill Bayfield can at least pretend democracy matters by not rejecting an artistic expression of a legitimate protest.
Labour need to continue the momentum but the biggest story is that with Maori Party and MANA still in this game, NZ First could lose their Kingmaker status.
National’s boast today that they wish to implement new powers against gangs that will ‘stretch’ human rights is another ghastly attack on the common good by floating ill thought out laws and using them to bait petty hates.
The mostly white male privileged broadcasters cried out that we have been tricked into a no policy debate. Tim Watkins, Barry Soper, Mark Jennings and Toby Manhire, names no one should know, have all clambered aboard tsk tsking with the lack of real debate.
It seems to me that the elite media opinion that the first debate’s civility was boring are just more out of touch comments by pundits lost by Jacinda’s rise and frantically flailing around for a narrative their cynicism doesn’t understand.