A crucial freedom is under threat. This is from the NZ Herald:

Momentum is building for a law change to prevent families from stonewalling police when a child has been assaulted or killed.

Public outrage over cases such as the unsolved death of 3-month-old twins Chris and Cru Kahui [what public outrage? I certainly haven't seen any - have you?] has thrust the issue into the spotlight, and the Government will soon have a report from the Law Commission suggesting what should be done.

Meanwhile, a senior Christchurch policeman who has overseen child murder cases has put forward his own proposal.

This would see New Zealand follow in the footsteps of Britain, where parents and caregivers who withhold crucial information can be jailed.

On Wednesday, a coroner’s inquest in Christchurch heard that the shaking death of 7-month-old Staranise Waru in February 2006 remained unsolved as the child’s parents were no longer willing to co-operate with police.

The parents, Nyree Hopa and Robert Waru, repeatedly chose not to answer questions at the hearing into their daughter’s death on the basis that they could incriminate themselves.

Justice Minister Simon Power told the Weekend Herald he had asked the Law Commission to speed up a review of the law that dealt with assault, injury and homicide.

“I understand that the commission’s soon-to-be-released report includes a new provision to better address situations where it’s difficult to identify the responsible offender within the family context and ensure that those responsible for protecting vulnerable children are held to account.”

The proposal put forward by Inspector Malcolm Johnston, of Christchurch, is similar to the culpable parenting law in Britain.

The right to silence would be removed, and parents or caregivers would be forced to co-operate with authorities trying to determine how a child has been harmed, and who did it.

I believe that the right to silence and the right to avoid self-incrimination [1] are essential ways of protecting individuals from the overwhelming power of the state. When the state can compel you to talk under threat of imprisonment there is no privacy left, and the police are experts at twisting what you say. Quite simply, you are screwed. Watch this video and you’ll see what I mean.

If you’ve studied logic you will know that it is impossible to prove a universal negative, e.g. ‘there is no life on other planets’ [2]. It is extremely difficult or impossible for a defendant to prove a negative, i.e. ‘I didn’t do it’. Positives can be tested and proven or disproven, e.g. if I claim that there is a copy of the Eiffel Tower on the moon it is perfectly reasonable for you to ask me to produce evidence to support my claim. Similarly, if the state is claiming that someone committed a crime (a positive) then the onus should be upon the state to prove that its claim is correct.

Removing the right to silence and the right to avoid self-incrimination simply makes it easier for the state to prove its claim that you committed a crime. When the state already has overwhelming power, an unlimited budget, and the individuals involved in prosecuting you have a personal vested interest in proving you guilty (it’s good for their careers), then removing those rights is dangerous in the extreme.

Already there are limited circumstances in which people have no right to silence and must produce documents on demand, but child abuse is the first instance of this erosion of rights which will affect the wider public. The state is using child abuse to erode your rights because beaten children attract public sympathy, and anyone who opposes the removal of the right to silence can be portrayed as protecting child abusers (boo, hiss go the politicians and the media).

Watch for a removal of the right to silence in other situations. Removing the right to silence in cases of alleged child abuse is simply a way of putting the frog into cold water before turning up the heat.

~~~~~~~~~~

1. As far as I know NZ does not have a legally protected right to avoid self-incimination. Here I am taking it as an implied right that is subsequent to the right to silence.

2. For a variety of reasons I believe that there is no sentient life on other planets, but I never claim that this is proven or provable.

~~~~~~~~~~

Today Bob McCoskrie of Family First has sent out a letter titled “A personal note from Bob McCoskrie“, where he states why he is going on The March For Democracy this Saturday (the background to all this is explained in my earlier post).

In his letter Bob shows how governments have repeatedly ignored the results of citizen-initiated referenda, including the latest one on the anti-smacking law. 1.57 million people voted against that law, while Peter Dunne (who voted for the anti-smacking law) says that a petition signed by 45,000 people who wanted daylight saving extended is ‘overwhelming support’. If 45,000 is overwhelming support, what on earth is 1,570,000?

After showing how the various referenda with strong results have been ignored, Bob says

I want NZ to be a place of DEMOCRACY not DICTATORSHIP

I do not wish to criticise Bob in any way, but apparently he, like 99.99% of people, does not realise that democracy is dictatorship by the majority. Allow me to explain.

87.4% of a representative sample of the population have voted against the anti-smacking law. If they have their way and the anti-smacking law is repealed (or amended) then that 87.4% of the population will be imposing their will upon the 12.6% of the population who want the anti-smacking law retained as it is. That is dictatorship by the majority.

Presently the government is in favour of retaining the anti-smacking law without changes, so it is ignoring what is commonly called the will of the people. That is dictatorship by the minority, i.e. the 122 politicians in parliament who think that they know best.

My point is this: democracy is always a dictatorship. The real question today is this: which dictator will decide what happens to the anti-smacking law? Presently Mr Minority (the government) is deciding. I believe that it is a lesser evil when Mr Majority (the 87.4%) decides what happens to the anti-smacking law, and that is why I will be marching on Saturday.

~~~~~

Have you ever wondered why this country is a mess and why we always have dishonest politicians? When you realise which majority is ruling NZ and appointing the politicians it will all make sense. The answers are in my post The problem with democracy – Part One.

~~~~~~~~~~

The NZ Herald is reporting that

Child abuse alerts are to be placed on a national health database, so that doctors will know if there are past concerns about a family.

The little-known Medical Warning System, run by the Ministry of Health, has been traditionally used by doctors to check for patients’ allergies to drugs. But as part of an upgrade, doctors and officials plan to add notes about any record of child abuse.

So, you take little Jonny to the doctor for an ear infection and the doctor sees an alert, therefore he takes a close look at your child for signs of abuse. This is simply a means of turning doctors into unpaid policemen, if they aren’t that already: Big Brother is watching you. To put it another way, your family doctor is the eyes of Big Brother. This is a classic example of what civil rights activists call ‘function creep’, i.e. something helpful is turned into something harmful. This database plan shows that the government will take any opportunity that allows it to increase its control of citizens.

What’s the definition of abuse, the threshold for putting a child on this database? No one is sure yet, but the NZ Herald says

Starship hospital paediatrician Dr Patrick Kelly said a working group was still discussing the criteria to be used. He believed the minimum threshold would have to be a notification (a complaint about abuse or neglect) to Child Youth and Family.

If the definition of abuse is a complaint then thousands of children will be on the database without good reason, because many complaints are made when no abuse has occurred. Even if the definition of abuse was a so-called proven case of abuse we would have a major problem. Why so?  Because we live in a country where smacking ‘for the purposes of correction’ is illegal, and therefore constitutes child abuse in the state’s twisted view of the world.

So, if you give little Jonny a swat on the rump steak to teach him that flushing the cat down the toilet is a naughty deed and then Child, Youth & Family find out about it, your family doctor will be told that you’re a child abuser.

Do you, Joe Public, get any say in any of this? Of course not.

Less government, more freedom I say.

The government ignored overwhelming public opposition to the anti-smacking law.

Join the March For Democracy on November 21.

~~~~~~~~~~

The police state has slain another freedom: now talking on a hand held cellphone whilst driving is illegal [1]. This is from the NZ Herald:

For frontline road police such as Sergeant Ashley Gore, the ban on using hand-held phones while driving could not have come soon enough.

“We have been waiting for the cellphone ban to come in because we have seen a lot of bad driving and so many near-misses,”

Naturally the policeman and the NZ Herald trumpet the party line, whilst ignoring the fact that talking on a hands free phone while driving is about as dangerous as talking on a hand held one.

The NZ Herald goes on to say

Even before the ban, police were able to charge motorists caught driving erratically while on the phone with careless use of a motor vehicle.

Great, so now if you drive erratically whilst talking on a hand held cellphone you can be prosecuted for two offences instead of just one [2]. That’s like having state executions where they shoot people twice in the head despite the fact that once would suffice.

The cop’s statement typifies the attitude of those people who rule this country:

We have been waiting for the cellphone ban to come in because we have seen a lot of bad driving and so many near-misses

The key phrase there is “near misses”. Most of the time people manage to talk on a cellphone without causing any problems, but the state punishes the majority in order to ‘protect’ them from the minority [3]. Again and again our masters see something that causes occasional problems and they decide that it must be made illegal in order to maintain social order and justify their parasitic careers. It Is Important To Be Seen To Be Doing Something is their motto. It’s the same with the anti-smacking law: a tiny minority of people beat their children to a pulp so giving a swat on the rump steak was made illegal for everyone [4].

Here’s a better way. Talking on a cellphone while driving doesn’t violate the non-aggression axiom, so make it legal. At the same time, bring in restorative justice so that those who damage person and/or property as a result of driving whilst talking on a cellphone bear the full cost of the consequences of their actions, including medical care for the injured [5]. At present the cost of medical care for the injured is borne by every taxpayer, so offenders are shielded from the consequences of their actions. When people see what the potential cost of driving whilst talking on a cellphone is – far, far greater than a $80 fine – the sensible ones will stop the practice. The foolish ones will continue their habits no matter what system is in place, but at least with my plan they will receive a huge and just self-inflicted punishment rather than a paltry $80 fine from the state.

Making people bear the full cost of the consequences of their actions is a fair and just way of reducing the dangerous practice of driving whilst talking on a cellphone. It is also consistent with the laws of nature: when a child puts his hand on a hot stove the pain teaches him to stay away from hot stoves.

~~~~~~~~~~

Related posts:

The NZ Herald delivers state propaganda

What is a “social contract”?

Referendum on anti-smacking law: John Key gives the finger

1. Arguably it’s not a slaying of a freedom, but rather a removal of a permission. Experience shows that any ‘freedom’ we have only exists because the state allows it to exist. If you have trouble believing this, consider the fact that the state can take your house and property at any time, it can take your children if abuse is even suspected, it can force medical treatment upon you and your children, it controls what you put into your body, and it can take as much of your money as it wants to. New Zealanders have no legal means with which to to control the government, therefore the government is the de facto absolute ruler over them. You are a vassal, a pawn controlled by the state.

2. You can also be prosecuted if the phone is not ’secured in a mounting fixed to the vehicle’. That’s right, you can’t put the phone on the seat beside you and use a hands free kit. For the full details see clause 23 here (PDF 96KB). The plain-English version (it’s as close to plain English as a bureaucrat can get) is here.

3. Who needs enemies when they have friends like that? The ban on using cellphones whilst driving is fundamentally a violation of property rights, i.e. it violates your right to do whatever you like with your property unless you violate the non-aggression axiom in the process. Think about it: Nanny State (Big Brother’s sister) is sitting in the back seat of your car and telling you that you cannot pick up the cellphone that you own.

4. That was one of the publicly stated motivations for the anti-smacking law. Here’s my version: our masters believe that smacking is wrong so they force everyone to parent as they do. This action arises from their conviction that every child is the dominion of that state not the dominion of their parents (as shown by the fact that parents must get permission from the state before they can home school their children). See footnote 1.

5. If someone is killed the offender should provide for that person’s dependents, providing what the deceased would have otherwise provided. At present every taxpayer bears the cost of providing for the dependents (via the welfare system) and therefore the offender is shielded from the consequences of his actions.

~~~~~~~~~~

The NZ Herald has an interesting article about a new way of monitoring people who have congestive heart failure.

Basically a set of scales and a blood pressure monitor are wirelessly connected to a cellphone: that’s the Bluetooth mentioned in the article, which sends data between gadgets via radio waves. The cellphone then sends the data to the hospital each day. If people forget to take their readings the hospital is supposed to chase them up.

One of the symptoms of heart failure is fluid accumulation in the body. People are supposed to weigh themselves daily and phone the hospital if they gain more than 2 kg overnight. Of course people do forget to weigh themselves, and the hospital won’t know if they’ve forgotten. A sudden worsening of congestive heart failure often leads to hospitalisation and/or death, but close monitoring and a rapid response to problems reduces the likelihood of these outcomes. That’s why this system has people weighing themselves.

Most people with heart failure are elderly, and it will be necessary to make the gadgets user-friendly and reliable in order to overcome unfamiliarity with and resistance to technology. Those patients who aren’t able to manage this form of self-monitoring are likely to have carers who can do it for them.

No system is foolproof (at the patient end or the staff end), but this looks like a simple and effective way of improving the management this condition.

~~~~~~~~~~

Garth George’s column this week has the nauseating title “We Should All Salute Our Wonderful PM“, and it goes downhill from there. It’s what is known as a hagiography, a biography of a saint.

Go and fetch a bucket, then read this extract:

He is a man of the people, as yet unspoiled by the poisonous atmosphere of power politics, and in spite of his position and spectacular wealth remains one of us.

He is every bit at home in the company of a class of primary schoolkids as he is with the man and woman in the street, or in the company of the world’s high and mighty. He is amiable, engaging, good-natured, highly intelligent, humorous and, most of all, unaffected.

Now for a dose of reality. Recently we had a referendum where 87.4% of a representative sample of the population showed their opposition to the anti-smacking law. As I said in my earlier post, John Key’s response was thus:

I don’t care how amiable, engaging, good-natured, highly intelligent, humorous and unaffected John Key appears to be: what I do care about are his actions, and his actions show that he is not a man of the people. His actions show that he is a man who wants to rule the people.

Sociopaths are some of the most dangerous people around, and they can be engaging, good-natured, unaffected, and humorous when they want to be – that’s part of what makes them so dangerous. I’m not saying that John Key is a sociopath, but I am saying don’t judge a book by its cover.

~~~~~~~~~~

The NZ Herald is reporting that Bill English, Minister of Finance Fraud wants to change property tax laws (translation: the government wants to steal more money). The article says in part…

[English said] “We haven’t had those put to us yet, but I think the evidence that investment patterns in New Zealand could be more productive I think is pretty strong.”
[...]
Those advocating change argue that investment is being funnelled into unproductive parts of the economy, such as investment properties. [Is anyone other than the government saying this? Beware of unsubstantiated statements like this one]

What arrogant nonsense. People only funnel money into “unproductive parts of the economy” when the government forces them to: if people make a poor investment their diminishing wealth tells them that they’ve done so and they quit. That’s one of the signals that people receive in a free market.

What’s really happening here is that the state doesn’t like people putting money into investment properties, so it’s going to slap on extra taxes and make that part of the economy ”unproductive”. That is how the state interferes with the free market and fouls up the signals.

If we had a true free market (i.e. zero state interference) we’d know which parts of the economy were truly unproductive: they’d be the parts that everyone was pulling their money out of. Snap quiz: how many people would throw money at the government if they didn’t have to?

It’s more than a bit rich when the government, the parasite that sucks away more than 45% of your wealth, starts blathering on about unproductive parts of the economy. Pot, meet Kettle.

~~~~~~~~~~

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

This is from the NZ Herald:

Prime Minister John Key said today the Government was “now effectively in negotiation”.

“There’s an ETS on the books, it’s a very expensive one under Labour, it would mean that quite a number of business in our view would close down. There would be a high price for consumers to pay.

“We want to amend that. Our preferred option is an ETS,”

So, according to Key, an ETS is a good thing if he thinks that it is affordable.

I find the notion of an emissions trading scheme quite bizarre: the government wants to create a tradable commodity out of thin air, based on the false premise of anthropogenic (man-created) climate change. Who wins out of this? The state of course, because there will be GST on every trade. Also, the International Monetary Fund has admitted that carbon trading is a tax and will take money away from wealthy countries, giving it to poor ones.

I say that there should be no Emissions Taxation Scam.

~~~~~~~~~~

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

This is from the NZ Herald:

A proposal to license tobacco retailers and turn cigarette packs into plain packages bearing only health warnings has found strong support.

In planning for the “end game” of widespread tobacco use, researchers canvassed public health physicians, policy officials in the Ministry of Health and other departments, and journalists.

They floated five proposals:

[1] Creating a Smokefree Commission that could require licensing of retailers, ban sales near schools, take over wholesaling, and end the glossy branding of tobacco and cigarette packets, turning them into generic, plainly packaged products displaying only health warnings.

[2] A weaker form of the commission, with licensing, but keeping existing links between suppliers and retailers.

[3] Progressively reducing tobacco import quotas, which would probably force prices up.

[4] Changing the law to make it easier to sue tobacco firms successfully.

[5] Making the tobacco industry responsible for reducing smoking, with stiff penalties if it failed to meet targets.

There is so much wrong with this insane and evil plan that it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s a partial list:

• I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so naive as to think that this would actually reduce the consumption of cigarettes. Illegal drugs almost always come in plain packaging and as far as I know no one has said “I don’t like buying marijuana when it’s wrapped in tin foil so I’ll quit right now”.
• this is yet another example of state employees trying to tell everyone else what’s good for them
• this scheme would also be a violation of property rights, i.e. it would control what cigarette companies do with the packaging that they own (as do the current regulations)
• “take over wholesaling” – sounds like Communism to me
• banning sales near schools would be a violation of property rights that would effectively be stealing money from shop owners (by reducing their profits)
• a Commission would be yet another waste of taxpayer’s money
• licensing would be yet another compliance cost for businesses that are being bled dry by the government
• when it comes to suing tobacco companies I have no sympathy for the claimants because nowadays everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. I understand that there was a time when tobacco companies told lies and hid the truth, but even then common sense would have told people (if they’d listened) that inhaling smoke that makes you cough is bad for you. Making it easier to sue tobacco companies is a Marxist notion based on the belief that big business is bad
• making the tobacco industry responsible for reducing smoking? Have these people been smoking something that isn’t tobacco?

Where do these totalitarian nanny-state ideas come from? From a bunch of university academics of course. It’s no coincidence that these people – who are state employees – almost always come up with ideas that further the state’s plans. All around the world we see that academics are hand in glove with the state, history shows that most of the leftist ideas come from academic circles, and a great many politicians come from academic backgrounds. Why do people teach in universities (or any school)? Because they want to control what future generations think, and people who want to control other people are attracted to politics, so a move from academia to politics is perfectly natural. Just think about Helen Clark’s career.

The bottom line is this: the state has no right to control what people put into their bodies. Furthermore, it is unjust to penalise shop owners and tobacco companies when attempting to control what people put into their bodies. The state should butt out and mind its own business, because it has no business taking an interest in tobacco in any way whatsoever (no pun intended).

I hope to see a free world where shops can sell whatever they like to whoever wants to buy it and each smoker bears the cost of their decisions, rather than having taxpayers bear the cost when they are dying of emphysema. The cost of health insurance would be a true and just disincentive for smokers.

What do you think about this proposal and the points that I have raised?

~~~~~~~~~~

Related posts:

The pointless death of an undercover policeman

The minimum drinking age

Sue Kedgely can’t force people to live healthy lives

~~~~~~~~~~

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

Would you want to send you children to school in an era where schools are a combat zone and respect for teachers is nil? Yes, there have been school fights as long as we’ve had schools, but events like this were virtually unheard of when I was at high school.

How the children really view the teacher is clear in this video, and I think that he did very well in a situation where he could never prevail and faced a real risk of injury.

Was this a riot? Consider this definition from S87 of the Crimes Act and decide for yourself:

A riot is a group of 6 or more persons who, acting together, are using violence against persons or property to the alarm of persons in the neighbourhood of that group.

~~~~~~~~~~

Related posts:

Thinking about state schools

New Zealand has changed a lot in 20 years, thanks to the liberal left agenda

A biblical perspective on home schooling and state schooling

~~~~~~~~~~