So all women in hospital will now be pestered with questions that can not fail to generate horrendous statistics on “abuse”. Is there anyone, male or female, who has never been threatened nor been the object of unwelcome sexual interest? 

I hope hospital staff are “abused” in the original sense of that word, by women who tell them to mind their own business. All involved should revolt against being used. This policy inflicts indignity on everyone rather than face the failure of 40 years’ of  social policy.

Heather Roy’s comment yesterday unpicked the related episode that dominated the beginning of the week. “Maori” are blamed collectively for the predictable wickedness of individuals bred by welfare that will not discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Surely we must be reaching a nadir of some sort. Only two generations ago we were noted for stoic self reliance. Now every one in “the community” must bear the guilt and responsibility for individual viciousness. The collectivists will twist in any direction rather than enforce personal responsibility.

This week’s twist toward race responsibility is especially nasty.

Politicians have decided (Peter Dunne for example) that it is now OK to make a ‘race’ collectively to blame for the evil individuals who tortured their 3 year old child.  The “we-are-all-to-blame” crowd have long been idiots but at least sensible people have been able to ignore most of it as useless handwringing. It becomes more serious now that it has morphed into “they are all to blame”, and “they” are identified racially.

Of course the open racists, the Maori Party and their fellow travellers, can not defend themselves or ‘their people’. They can not appeal to the Enlightenment value of individual accountability that made eventually made racism taboo, because they have scorned it. They live off collective stereotyping and collective identity claims of differences that transcend individuality.

Lets hope this is the nadir. No country has found a costless way to recapture an unbottled official policy of racial blame.

There is no more important time for free speech than during elections. That is when people must be free to try to persuade others on who should represent them. That is when the people must be free to challenge, to remind each other about, to praise and to castigate the deeds, misdeeds, attitudes and attributes of candidates and parties. The election is the peoples’ only chance to control those who will thereafter be their masters.

The new Bill turns that on its head. It says that the election is a sport reserved for the masters, for the politicians and their incumbent parties.  Henceforth the election is the politicians’ arena. The people will be permitted to play there only as a patronising curtain raiser.

Effective communication costs money. So spending limits will ensure the outsiders’ voice can not be effective. $60,000 would not pay for the first day of the brand launch of a dog sausage.

The politicians responsible for this are suppressing challenges by pesky independent groups.  Groups like Sensible Sentencing, Greenpeace, Federated Farmers, Forest and Bird, Manufacturers Federation, the teacher unions, doctor organisations, the RSA must be stopped from developing policy and urging parties to endorse it, then urging voters to support or oppose parties accordingly.  Under the corrupt gang now drafting our law all those groups will be gagged at election time.

“But they are still free to speak” say the censors. ” It is only unauthorised leafletting and paid advertising they can’t do. They can be reported by the media”. And so we get to the nub of it. The media, so quick to trumpet their committment to freedom to report as they like from the House, have been suspiciously quiet on election spending.

Because when the people are not allowed to communicate in their own words, directly to their fellow citizens, they can only communicate through the media filter. And so the journalists decide what the election is fought on. They control how things are reported. The news editors of TV 1 and TV3 decide whether the election issues will be smacking, or GM corn, or Iraq or politicisation of the public service.

The current left wing thinks it will not matter that its allies are nominally muzzled. They are confident that the conscious or subconscious bias of their politically correct media “co-religionists” will control the agenda anyway.

They could be making a big mistake. Ceding control of our election agendas to the media could backfire on the left. While the current generation of journalists will safely downplay isues like political corruption, and the concerns of ‘nasty christians’ and rednecks, that may not last.

The next generation of journalists may share the view that the dumb punters and the “moneyed interests”  should not ‘interfere’ in the tournament restricted to the media and the professional politicians.

Though the media may choose different subjects, the people will still be spectators, not players.

The New Yorker has just reviewed an heretical piece from an economist I had not previously heard of. It appears he is saying that democracy is dumb, and we’d do better to have less of it. His prescription could lead to elite tyranny, but there is still an important warning in the message.

When I sat on the Justice and Electoral Select Committee I asked officials for evidence that low voter turnouts were bad for democracy. They could never produce any.

In Switzerland and the United States, two of the world’s most vigorous and genuine democracies, typically fewer than 50% of the voters turn out. Our turn out is still high by international comparison.

Other parties meekly supported Labour/Green grabs for more tax money to get their voters to vote. They thought my query was odd, and very brave, telling me it was obvious that we should be embarrassed if lots of people did not vote.

I think it’s just politicians’ vanity. I had that view recorded in a Select Committee report. Most MPs think what they do is so important that it’s self evident that everyone should be paying attention, and itching to vote. Other MPs thought it outrageous when I said that voter apathy is a sign of contentment.

I urged: “Leave them alone. Political junkies can try to win their attention. They’ll get out and vote soon enough when they get sick of a government”. 

This was to them a very risky thing to say. No one else was prepared to be quoted publicly doubting the value of spending to get recalcitrant voters to the polls.

Democracy is a brilliant way to get rid of people past their use-by date, but very poor at most other political functions. For other purposes (like selecting worthwhile leaders) systems must work in spite of democracy not because of it.

The key thing is to preserve those elements of our democracy that ensure the people can “toss the bastards out” no questions asked, in the courts or anywhere else, when they’ve had enough.

Chief Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft’s extravagant attack  on Ron Mark’s Bill to lower the age of criminal responsibility reminded me of Theodore Dalrymple’s sad reflection after his visit to New Zealand last year. Becroft’s non sequiturs illustrate Dalrymple’s judgment on NZ judges – “Their own reputation for generosity of spirit and lack of vengefulness was more important to them than protection of the public“.  

When a judge steps into politics, with state funded propagandist Dr Cindy Kiro, he should do so with great circumspection. To claim credit for our discredited Family Group Conference system and the Youth Courts, because only 80% of offenders who go through the system do not reoffend, he invites a suspension of the constitutional convention against political scorn for judges.

If he is saying that it is good that only 20% reoffend of the kids who come to Police attention (the usual measure of youth offending) he is trivialising a terrible statistic. We should expect a far lower proportion of kids to repeat their first ‘criminal’ mistake. Most apprehended kids are dealt with informally by the Police.

20% could be as many as 10,000 a year reoffending. There are around 7000 Family Group conferences per year, and between 2000 to 3000 Youth Court charges. So a huge proportion of these farcical proceedings must be ‘failing’.

The judge comes from what Dalrymple described as Mailer’s world (drawing on Mailer’s enthusiasm for a murderer with literary skills and tastes, who murdered another innocent after being lionised by Mailer and his New York friends):

“Mailer lived in a world (that of radical politics protected by a bourgeois order) in which words never really meant what they said or said what they really meant, in which moral exhibitionism was the highest good and the sine qua non of the regard of one‘s peers. So safe were they in their literary enclave that reality didn’t matter much; what counted was the ability to use words in the approved fashion, and truth was nowhere.  

Ten years later, Mailer indirectly recognised his mistake, saying that the Abbott episode was not one of which he was proud.

But it seems that the disregard of reality that he displayed has now entered the New Zealand criminal justice system.  You probably think of New Zealand as an empty land of beautiful landscapes: and so it is. It is tolerably prosperous, it is egalitarian in ethos, it is uncrowded, even its fauna and flora are gentle. It has no native carnivores and no snakes. Its climate is temperate and in places among the most pleasant in the world. It should be peaceful.  

And so it once was. In 1950, when it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it had almost no crime whatever, or at least an irreducible minimum of crime. Now it has one of the highest crime rates in the western world, including crimes of violence.

It is very puzzling.  While I was in New Zealand, I learned of two cases that seemed emblematic of the Mailerian developments in the new Zealand criminal justice system.

The first concerned a man with 102 convictions, many for violence including rape. (I should point out that 102 convictions means many more offences, since the conviction rate is never 100 per cent of the offending rate, and is sometimes only 5 or 10 per cent of it.)  This man nevertheless became eligible for parole. As conditions of parole, the board told him he must not drink, smoke cannabis or frequent certain places. The man told the board that he would abide by none of these conditions, but he was released on parole anyway. Within a short time, he had killed three people and so maimed a fourth that she will never recover.  

The second case was of a man with many previous convictions, some for violence, who abducted and murdered a young woman aged 24. He was imprisoned and applied for bail. Three times he was turned down, but a fourth judge granted him bail. He was sent to live at a certain address, where he befriended his neighbours, who did not know that he was accused of murder. Eight months later, while babysitting their children, he killed one of them.  

Perhaps the most extraordinary twist of this terrible tale is that the parents of the murdered child then had another baby, which the social services then removed from them on the grounds that they had previously entrusted a child to the care of a murderer and were therefore irresponsible parents. The state blames its citizens for the mistakes – if that is what they are – that it makes.  

What lies behind this terrible, wilful incompetence? I suppose some people might say that anecdotes mean nothing; that it is statistics we have to look at, and the majority of people sent out on parole, or on bail for murder, do not kill again. The questions we should be asking are what proportion of people who say in advance that they have no intention of abiding by parole conditions go on to commit serious crimes if granted parole anyway, and what proportion of accused murderers granted bail kill again while on bail. In the light of these questions, the decisions taken in the two cases I have cited might appear slightly less absurd.  

This is dust in our eyes, however. The presumption must be against someone who has been convicted of 102 previous offences, many of them violent, or someone who has been convicted of many previous offences and is suspected on the strongest possible grounds of having killed. It is morally frivolous to suggest otherwise.  

In other words, the moral frivolity of the New Zealand criminal justice system could not have been more plainly demonstrated than in these two cases. (On the day before my departure from the country, a young man, also with a long record, who attacked an old woman in her eighties, and fractured her facial bones in two places, having first given her what he called ‘a king hit’ – that is to say a single punch that felled her – was sentences to a year’s imprisonment, which, with remission, will mean he will be at liberty in less than six months.)

The question arises, Where does this moral frivolity come from?  The judges in New Zealand are not entirely to blame, since they have to sentence according to guidelines laid down for them. They cannot impose any sentence that they happen to think is just. But they do not protest against guidelines that are patently absurd. Nor was there any reason why the fourth judge should have granted bail in the first case I described. Therefore the judges cannot absolve themselves entirely of responsibility. 

Lying behind the frivolity of the New Zealand criminal justice system (which also infects the British system) is a willingness to ignore, or an unwillingness to take seriously, the most obvious prognostic signs, or even to take considerations of justice into account. Just as Mailer failed completely to recognise the significance of the passage in Abbott’s book, which after all was composed of letters to himself, that I have quoted above, so the judges and others in New Zealand ignored the most obvious considerations in their dealings with the criminals before them. Their own reputation for generosity of spirit and lack of vengefulness was more important to them than protection of the public.  

Lying in a layer of the mind yet deeper than this desire for approbation is the baleful influence of Rousseau’s idea that Man is or would be good but for the influence of society upon him. If this is the case, then the murderers in the cases I have cited were as much victims as their victims, and the society which has thus victimised them has no moral right to treat them harshly. Rather, it must reform, indeed perfect, itself. Until it does so, it ought to expect cases of the kind I have described.  

This, of course, was precisely Abbott’s [Mailer’s protege murderer, who murdered again while being feted by the literary set] point in his letters to Mailer. He said that society had made him the way he was, and thus had no right to point the finger at him; throughout the book, he alluded in a moral fashion only to what had been done to him, never what he had done.  There is no doubt, of course, that most criminals come from a very bad background (though it does not follow, thank God, that everybody from a bad background is a criminal, else we should none of us be safe in our beds).

Of course, where the bad background itself comes from is another question, and much disputed. I think in large part it comes from the intellectual and moral zeitgeist that intellectuals have created. But the undoubted fact cited above has confused us utterly, and caused us to confute two questions: first, how do we prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place, and second, how do we prevent those who have become recidivist criminals from committing further crimes? The two questions have different answers, and there is not a single answer to them both. When, however, we mistake the first question for the second, and the second for the first, we end up making Mailer’s, and the New Zealand criminal justice system’s, mistakes, over and over again.  

One thing is evident, however: those who make the mistakes do not pay the price for them. They feel the warmth of generosity without feeling the cool current of responsibility.”    

In an extraordinary move this afternoon Parliament cut out of the Criminal Justice Reform Bill changes that would have removed victims‘ rights to be heard by the Parole Board. At the request of Sensible Sentencing Heather Roy of ACT moved the deletion of those clauses, and Ron Mark of NZ First made sure the government accepted it.

It is very rare for a Bill to be amended in the House, on an opposition motion. This is a credit to Sensible Sentencing, and to the consistency of two MPs from minor parties.

When the Select Committee reported on the Bill no member even bothered to comment on the Sensible Sentencing Trust submissions begging them on behalf of victims not to remove this right. Labour, National and Green committee members spent pages worrying about confidentiality of evidence of prisoners’ wrongdoing and criminals rights.

They did not spare even a comma of apology for the biggest impact of the Bill on victims, the provisions to shut victims out of the Parole Board hearings.

The Committee  managed to find a paragraph to endorse meaningless weasel words that pretend that parole is a privilege, not a right, but did not even note that the Bill made attendance of victims at hearings a privilege, not a right.

The Parole Board would have been allowed to grant the privilege only to victims who confined themselves to discussing ” the risks to the community..” posed by the criminal’s release, and “ways of managing the risk”. No hearing for them if instead they wanted to protest about the simple injustice of early release, and the hurt it does to them.

At present the Parole Board is not supposed to hear about anything other than the safety of the community. Indeed many of the amendments I tried to get to that law in 2002 were designed to ensure that they could consider other things, like the purposes of sentencing, outrage to the victims, deterrence etc. All failed.But of course victims refuse to be silenced. They talk about justice. The Parole Board is supposed to take no notice of those justice submissions. All decisions must be dressed up as related to “undue risk to the safety of the community”.

Now, thanks to Sensible Sentencing, the Board can’t lock the door. Their delicate ears will still hear demands that a meaningful part of a sentence be served. They‘ll still have to endure protests against parole’s conversion of a sentence into an insultingly trivial price for vicious crime.

Parliament has pulled back from colluding with those in the justice establishment who are contemptuous of the public demand for real penalties for crime. The scandalous parole process will not go behind doors firmly closed to the victims.

The PC crowd on the Select Committee were quietly patronising about the victim worries in this area when I gave my submission.

I’m delighted now. Parliament will sometimes listen to the people.

Funding for tertiary courses in prostitution could be considered under changes aimed at boosting quality and relevance in the sector, education officials say.

This outcome was neither unforeseen, nor (in my opinion) unintended. I Chaired the Select Committee that considered Tim Barnett's Bill on prostitution. At my insistence the committee explored the risk that the removal of criminality would be converted by anti-discrimination law, to a duty to favour prostitution.
I drafted amendments to provide that absence of criminality did not interfere with individuals' freedom to criticise prostitution and to discourage it. The position of the State was more problematic. It is risky to allow the State complete freedom to discriminate against a lawful activity, though that does not stop the socialists from using the law to attack anything they do not like, including smoking. The Prostitutes Collective hostility to any provision guarding the freedom to criticise prostitution was strongly supported by Sue Bradford and Tim Barnett. She did not even want officials to advise on the risks of mandatory positive discrimination. She said it was scaremongering when we asked officials to advise how school career guidance counsellors could avoid being forced to steer kids toward prostitution as a career if the industry alleged prejudice or discrimination in a refusal to do so, how WINZ could avoid denying or terminating unemployment benefits because of a refusal to accept a job opening at the local brothel, how training grants etc could be withheld for an employer or pimp who wanted to use them for recruitment and training.

I wonder if Ms Clark’s law drafters will be interested in a US Supreme Court decision on Monday 25 June? Our government is about to release a bill to restrict election advertising by people other than politicians.  In effect it will treat election debate as the preserve of politicians and political journalists.

The US Court has just held unconstitutional aspects of campaign finance laws restricting third party-funded television ads close to elections.. The court, split 5-4, said that an anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections.

Wisconsin Right to Life wanted to broadcast ads asking voters to urge the state’s two senators not to filibuster President Bush’s judicial nominees.

They were stopped by a provision that banned issue ads that cast candidates in positive or negative lights even if they stopped short of calling for their election or defeat. In 2003 the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He and Alito said only that the Wisconsin group’s ads are not the equivalent of explicit campaign ads and are not covered by the 2003 decision. Three justices, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, would have overruled the court’s 2003 decision.

Deputy Commissioner Provost’s evasions on Morning Report today leave me sorry for the lower level staff who remain committed to the law, and to simple honesty. They must feel ashamed when HQ’s culture is publicly displayed.

It can’t be long before the gap between Wellington and the frontline is as wide as it is in Corrections. When HQ show they want to be lied to, they’ll get from cynical staff exactly what they want.

Bill Ralston, until recently the top man at the heart of our state television news service, said on camera  three weeks ago that the NZ Police had become politically corrupted. No-one even thought it newsworthy enough to follow up to find out why.

As an MP I found Police HQ to be politically biased strangers to the truth, on a range of issues. We all saw the disgraceful decision not to prosecute corrupt election spending. In one inquiry my Select Committee found senior Police to be unreliable witnesses, so seriously that we considered using our formal powers against them.

I received patently false answers to Parliamentary written questions. 

They were the worst of all departments for answering Offical Information Act requests, simply ignoring the inconvenient ones. VUW’s Steven Price found the  police to be the worst in terms of compliance in his recent study of the operation of that Act.

Rampant political correctness at the top levels of the Police was always likely to lead this way. It creates a culture of deceit. When Police are the shambles we see in Corrections, however, the consequences will be much more serious.

No surprises in this evening’s TV ONE coverage. The QC showed the common court lawyer belief that costs are irrelevant when “justice” is at stake. To him it was imperative to retry Bain simply because otherwise serious offences would go unresolved. He showed no apparent recognition that the evidence has now been trawled, the battle lines are drawn.

Why would a new jury change any minds? Those convinced of Bain’s guilt will not change if a jury is persuaded now to feel that it can not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Those who already feel the evidence did not meet that standard will be similarly unmoved by another $10m spent rummaging through stale evidence and rickety memories.

Bain has served most of his sentence. By the time he is reconvicted it will have virtually expired. The Crown is not obliged to compensate him. He has not asked for a new trial to clear his name.

This sleeping dog should be left to lie. It has been rolling in ordure. Nobody will want it near them, whatever they may think from a distance.

What breathtaking hypocrisy from the politicians frothing to condemn Mercury and propose new criminal liabilities. 

They were never at my side when I called for accountability from the politicians and officials who design and run the parole system.

The Mercury policy had to have extraordinary bad luck to hurt someone, no individual involved thought they were calculatingly allowing an innocent death, and this is the first known case of its kind.

Those responsible for parole know with certainty that the evil men they release will hurt and kill. They deliberately do not keep count, but simple extrapolation from remimprisonment figures suggests that as many as 10,000 victims of avoidable violent crimes per year pay the price of the callous theory and carelessness of the parole mandarins.

 I hope the “corporate” bashers go ahead with their lawmaking plans. Then we’ll turn it on the public sector pharisees who cause the far worse mayhem.