The DomPost headline suggests more than one Wellington City councillor has attacked Constable Gommans’ initiative in dressing taggers in pink. But the story mentions only Iona Pannett, and it does not explain how the Constable ensures his offenders accept the ‘punishment’.
It is probably a condition of diversion or otherwise dropping formal charges. We need to know more, because progressive mayors all over the country are seeking effective powers for their local police, so that these experiments do not depend on the leadership of a few brave community constables. TV 3’s “Make or Break” programme on Monday evening about the Wairoa ‘boot camp’ left the same unanswered question.
I’ll follow this up, but let’s consider Iona Pannett for the moment.
She demeans the Nazis’ victims. She equates their uninvited and undeserved suffering before horrible deaths, to minor embarassments for ferals who deliberately set out to make our city uglier and more crime inducing. I’m familiar with that Labour/Green technique in Parliament. Instead of arguing the merits they accuse their opponents of moral leprosy. For years it worked, to scare off support for their opponents.
On this issue it has ceased to work. Those of us who support Constable Gommans’ initiative need not and will not apologise.
On the collapse of civility the left have no answers, and no moral compass to look for answers. Ordinary people are fed up with the results of our 30 year criminal justice experiment in apologising to feral people. Shame is the first and most effective and mildest defence of every culture against those tempted to take instead of making. Cheats and bullies are routinely discouraged in healthy societies by the shame they bring on themselves and their families. With name suppression and secret youth courts we’ve abandoned that first level restraint. So of course we’re now forced into debating more formal and harsh punishments in an attempt to restore respect for others as the prevailing norm.
Still, the insults will work for Pannett. She defeated the hard-working and sensible Alex Shaw by remorseless attention to name recognition. Enough voters will remember at the next election only that they’ve heard of her.
I wonder, nevertheless about her values. I’d hoped more of her. Many leftists consciously or unconsciously shrilly accuse others of their own fault (authoritarianism) to drown their self doubt as well as their opponents’ arguments. Their contempt for ordinary values is camouflaged by upping the rhetorical stakes, with a technique that simultaneously avoids engagement with the argument. Wasn’t it the national socialists who raised to an art the strategy of turning their opponents into moral lepers before eliminating them? She’s working in that fine leftist tradition though I’m sure she’s hoping for no more than an electoral elimination of her targets.
[For a sustained thread on this topic see Kiwiblog’s post and comments. I should have looked there first]
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Stephen you refer to ferals and to their punishment, is tougher penalties the entire scope of your justice policy.
I think the Councillors did seriously mispeak, and it’s wrong to equate this situation with Nazi Germany, but you might also want to reconisder dismissing people as “ferals”.
When will you be in a position to do more than venture personal views on the news and instead reveal policy? And perhaps you might elaborate on your “collapse of civility” claim? It seems a little over-wrought to me.