13 August 2013
Gulag New Zealand just keeps getting better, with Guantanamo Bay options soon to be available through the law.
The idea of innocence until proven guilty is the cornerstone of our law.
That stone has already been eroded by legislation that allows governments to turn a blind eye to human rights in the name of terrorism, and now that right to a presumption of innocence is about to blown away by the National government.
Paula Bennett has been trumpeting a new law - which will surely pass, along with the spy legislation - that will allow orders to be placed stopping people who have been accused or suspected of crimes against children to be barred from access to children for indefinite periods. Details here.
This is the worst attack on our freedom that could be imagined.
I am as disgusted by child abuse as any other parent, but we cannot let our disgust remove human rights. There have already been many, many cases of fathers accused of incest by unhinged mothers determined to make the father's life a misery, and right now there are some of those fathers fighting to clear their names and be allowed to have access to their own children.
Imagine the case in the future. If a woman can convince some judge that her children are at threat, the father can be banned from contacting his own kids for ten years! And you can bet your last dollar that there will be women who try it - the expression :Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is not at all recent.
The plan is outrageous, but will be ignored by those who are unable to see through the lying sack of shit we have as Prime Minister. In the past month, laws have been proposed that will allow the government to spy on us, and now, a law that will allow the cardinal law of presumption of innocence to be ignored.
You can bet this is the thin edge of the wedge. What's next? People suspected of drug dealing? People suspected of anti-government activities? People who say rude things about the police?
What is to stop this outrageously Stalinist government keeping removing our freedoms that remain?
Almost 100 years ago, my grandfather was sent to France to fight against Germany. A generation later, my father and an uncle were sent to fight Germany again, to preserve our freedom of association and politics, and most of all, to preserve our way of insisting on legal processes. My uncle died in WWII, while my father was decorated for bravery, risking his own life to save others.
And this is what it got us - a world where the freedoms the Nazis took away are now being taken away by majority governments.
I think a history lesson would go down well here. The irony in John Key's mother being Jewish enough to have been liquidated in Nazi Germany is obviously lost on him, but it sure isn't on me.
Copyright © Alan Charman