Youngsters in a suburban Texan school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they’ve got – books, pencils, legs and arms.. …   http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003304148_defending14.html

      This  is a good story.  Women’s self defence classes have been teaching for decades that the best defence is to fight back and yell if you can’t run out of the situation.  Many opportunistic attackers are bullies/cowards and there is a chance the unexpected opposition will frighten them off.   Being prepared to use self defence empowers people in any situation, and they should be supported when they have to defend themselves. I think it would be great to teach children here what to do in a classroom invasion, and equally hope none in New Zealand ever have to use it.

Was Sutch Guilty? I have no doubt that Dr Sutch’s defence lawyer at the trial, Michael Bungay, believed his client was guilty. Bungay was a flamboyant man who loved company. He needed to share his pride after the jury’s “not guilty” verdict.The jury verdict came early in the evening. I was working alone in the Law Society Library, unaware of the drama across the corridor in the No 1 Supreme Court. The library gave lawyer access to the robing room, where barristers kept their special shirts, collars, wigs and gowns. During ordinary court hours the robing room could be thronged with lawyers in various stages of dress, There was no better place for a young lawyer to hear gossip and to see the profession’s stars, both bright and dim..

Theodore Dalrymple Speaking Tour 

English writer and social commentator Theodore Dalrymple had a very successful tour of New Zealand in October under the auspices of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, For the sake of our children Trust and the Family First Lobby.

The website is here 

Remember the beginning of last week? National was demanding a fresh election because it was too late to prosecute the Prime Minister for electoral corruption.

There’s a more solid constitutional reason to dissolve Parliament if anyone is interested. The government has admitted that it can’t pass its tax bill for international investments. Instead we are now offered the “Shewan proposal” but at 5% instead of 3%. Dr Cullen claims it is much the same.

That claim will not be just to save face. He may be doing it to save the government.

Under our constitution when a governing party can’t pass a money bill the Governor General is supposed to get a new government which can. That could be by a coalition reshuffle, or a fresh election.

This supply bill convention ensures that the Crown can pay the public servants. But it is also a leadership test. When squabbling in the House makes it unclear whether anyone is in charge, then out they must all go, to give us a chance to choose a new set who can promise leadership.

As summarised in Philip Joseph’s Constitutional and Administrative Law in New Zealand the “convention… obliges a government that is defeated on a confidence issue either to resign or to request a dissolution and fresh elections.”

David McGee’s Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand says “a government refusing to act appropriately in such a circumstance could, it has been suggested, be dismissed by the Governor General.  Indeed the Governor General may be obliged to do so to preserve constitutional government.” Further, “a government retains the confidence of the House for so long as it can avoid defeat on important Parliamentary votes – those that involve a question of confidence”.

Our political founders feared that democracy would not provide leadership, that the delays and uncertainties of debate would handicap democratic peoples, in mortal struggle with peoples ruled by smart and decisive dictators. Dictators have ruled more countries for much longer than democratic leaders.

Our forebears remembered Athens, which invented democracy. It did not last long, defeated by the Spartan militarists. They remembered too that Athens’ democracy and the mob decided to kill Socrates.

Anyone with practical experience of “rule by committee” knows that democracy can be a good way to toss out bad governors, but a hopeless way to govern.  Our forebears evolved representative government (rather than ‘participatory democracy’) to give us leadership by time limited “elected dictators”. We got the decisiveness of concentrated leadership. The safeguard against abuse of power is our right to toss them out as soon as they can no longer persuade us to entrust our money to them.

The Governor General’s duty to call fresh elections when a government can’t command a majority vote for “supply bills”, dates back to the earliest years of Parliamentary government. The absolute monarch’s divine right to rule was overcome by the need to get followers to volunteer their money. The king’s plans for war (or a palace or wild parties) relied on assembling enough wealthy men willing to tax themselves and their fellow subjects to fund the plan.

The question is whether a defeat on the international investment tax shows that our minority government can no longer lead. In Britain, by convention, a government in such an uncertain position would feel obliged to call for a specific confidence debate and vote. Jenny Shipley did that to confirm her majority in September 1998.

As a technical ploy Dr Cullen may claim that the Government was always ready to accept whatever the Select Committee comes up with so this is not really a defeat.

Whatever.

The government may also argue that that the only vote that counts is the third reading vote, and that the convention need not apply.  As McGee says “it is… the practice to regard those provisions of a tax bill setting the annual tax rates (without which there could be no assessment tax) as inherently raising questions of confidence.  Other provisions of tax bills are not inherently confidence matters”.

The international investment tax bill contained rates, but the right constitutional answer should turn on what this policy derailment says about confidence and the ability to provide leadership, not lawyerly hair splitting.

This is not the first important tax policy to be derailed.  The carbon tax dropped off the agenda when the government saw that it could not get through.

Our new Governor General will not be eager to explore the constitutional convention so soon in his term.  But, as Ralph Waters, the retiring CEO of  Fletcher Building in effect said last week, New Zealand is dithering in a growing crisis.

If we’ve lost our mechanism for tossing out leaders who can’t lead we’ll all bear the price. The misguided vote for the “consensus’ style of MMP got rid of the more decisive first past the post. If our governments cannot develop, announce and implement their policies, and it is unclear until any bill has passed just where decision-making power rests, that price may be heavy indeed.  In the meantime, Dr Cullen should have our sympathy, swimming in uncharted constitutional waters.

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… Yeah right”. Sadly not only lying witnesses are to blame for this Tui ad. Arrogant judges prevent juries from hearing the whole truth. They suppress evidence to whack the police for disrespecting judges’ views of how suspects should be treated. Whether the rules mollycoddle the accused is for another day.

An Auckland court withheld from the jury a videotape said to show Noel Rogers confessing to killing Katherine Sheffield. He was acquitted last week.

What if this means guilty men go free, the public ask? Don’t judges realise that it is not the police who are punished, but their victims who are deprived of justice? What about the rest of us, if justice is not done?

“Whatever” seems to be the court answer. And now their tangled web is growing. As usual repression begets repression.

TVNZ wants to show us the video so we can judge for ourselves what was excluded from our so-called “open courts”. Rogers objects. In round one this week the court supports him, worried that Rogers’ privacy would be breached, and considering the Police conduct to be”improper”.

This is “hero judging”. TVNZ should remind the appeal judges of a simple truth. Acquittal just means not proven beyond reasonable doubt. It does not force the rest of us to accept the accused’s innocence. A victim can win a private lawsuit based on exactly the same evidence as failed in the criminal acquittal case, reassessed on the civil “balance of probabilities” standard. Nicole Simpson’s family succeeded against O J Simpson on that basis.

Acquittal merely means that the State’s powers of punishment cannot be used against the person acquitted. Victims and relatives and employers and news agencies must remain free to make up their own minds, and free speech helps ensure we have the information on which to exercise our freedom of thought.

An acquitted person can use defamation law for protection from baseless accusations.

Thankfully TVNZ has the resolve and the resources to fight on in this case.

If TVNZ does not succeed in round two the courts will be going far beyond their current hubris. Not content with ‘punishing’ the police, (and all the rest of us if Rogers was in fact the killer), judges will be sacrificing free speech to deny us the information to judge the judges’ use of their suppression powers.

No wonder non-lawyers despise court processes as a game captured by self-absorbed insiders. The system’s highest value should be ascertaining the truth, to determine guilt or innocence. Judges force outsiders caught up in their game to swear allegiance to the transcendent value of the whole truth, then make a mockery of that oath. Plainly they regard police adherence to process rules as more important than the truth.

Sure, judges can argue that limiting police questioning discourages improper pressure which could extract untrue evidence. They would claim that this upholds the third limb of the witness oath to tell “nothing but the truth”. So would routine prosecutions for perjury, and much more directly, but how often do the courts pursue perjury?

“Better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be convicted” is another glib response to complaints about wrongful acquittals. But only if that trade-off is unavoidable. How much effort have the courts made to ensure instead that there are routine penalties for the police actually responsible for improper procedure. As far as I am aware, none.

I suspect the judges do not call for that solution because they would lose control. Someone would have to negotiate such rules, and persuade Parliament to authorise them. Under the current system the judiciary preserve a unilateral power to impose their preferences for police practice, without being forced to justify them in open debate, weighed against other objectives of the criminal justice system

But now the news media and the people have a once in a generation chance to express their view of the balance the judges have been striking. The Evidence Bill is before the Justice and Electoral Select Committee. Clause 26 purports to govern Judges’ power to exclude improperly obtained evidence. It is wordy waffle. It simply confirms that judges can make things up in this area as they go along. It does nothing to prevent judges extending their current exclusion power into a de facto permanent suppression order, by ruling that excluded evidence is thereafter secret.

Every year news media have to spend a fortune on lawyers, challenging the suppression inclinations of Judges and other justice system insiders. I hope that at least some media leaders are willing to spend a fraction of that amount before the select committee. They can remind MPs, with examples, that judges cannot be trusted to protect free speech when it comes to disclosure that might discredit their pet process games with the truth. Submissions closed on 12 August 2005, but the new committee might accept substantive late submissions.

News media could help themselves more from today, reasserting our private and individual freedoms with a bit more scepticism of accuseds’ claims to have been “cleared” by acquittal or even by police decision not to prosecute. A robust “Yeah right” might be the first line of protection of freedom of speech and thought from the discretions of judges and other insiders of the justice system.

This “Unfranked #44”

1. notes the extraordinary luck of the two ACT MPs in taking two out of the three bills drawn in yesterday ‘s ballot for member ‘s bills; then

2. links two unrelated events:

(a) Sir Geoffrey Palmer ‘s appointment as president of the dispirited Law Commission.; and

(b) my return this week to legal practice with my old law firm, Chapman Tripp.

Another Treaty Principles Bill

One of the ACT bills drawn in the ballot was the Richard Prebble draft to define the principles of the Treaty (described in Unfranked # 34, http://www.act.org.nz/news-article.aspx/26601 ). Parliament gets another chance to debate its hypocrisy in stuffing into legislation phrases with no agreed meaning.

Public Law: PC Claptrap, or Silver Bullet?

There ‘s no causal connection between (a) and (b), but I hope they seem linked in hindsight, because I want to fill part of the legal services gap Sir Geoffrey will leave.

Sadly for everyone except lawyers, the mushrooming Wellington bureaucracy and minority government make it a great time to become a regulatory lawyer in Wellington. Government is stuffed with bossy boots. They ‘re egged on by a generation of lawyers churned out to think that the rule of law means the rule of lawyers. The lawyer on last night ‘s Close Up, urging the transfer to lawyers of all teacher and school disciplinary processes, was typical.

Public law enthusiasts tend to be politically correct. They don ‘t recognise the gloating in their advertising, but they ‘ve been insinuating law into every corner of New Zealand life. That seeping legalisation is why political correctness matters. It is not just a passing silliness when ordinary peoples ‘ commonsense is stifled by law.

So people in business, the people who make things and construct and take risks, can ‘t afford not to have their own lawyers to beat off the lawyers for those who merely take, and consume, or judge and punish risks that do not pan out.

I spent the last 6 years doing my best to prune new laws. Now I can help individuals and companies to cope with what we could not fix. Woolly thinking leaves loopholes in such law. Using these loopholes is better than whining.

There is also positive value in skilful and energetic public law practice. Sir Geoffrey specialised in early contact with officials, punchy explanations, and well drafted alternatives to head off foolish rules and decisions. His Labour connections helped but it is not hard to open doors in Wellington. What counts is the value of your information once inside the door. Even as an ACT MP I mostly found open-mindedness. Politicians and officials welcome the help they can get from a practical combination of business law and Parliamentary experience.

I can deplore the growing need for this kind of law practice, but it helps nobody to refuse to work in it. It would be like refusing to build prisons because you ‘d rather crime shrank.

I’ve come back to Chapman Tripp because that firm offers the best platform for the kind of work I want to do. Partners like Jack Hodder, David Cochrane, and Frank McLaughlin have discreetly run an extraordinarily successful public law practice for years. Here I can get back to advising company boards and executives, with the added Parliamentary experience of the constitution in action.

Sir Geoffrey started his “public law ” private practice at Chapman Tripp, before founding the firm of Chen and Palmer.

Law Commission Revival: Good or Bad? Sir Geoffrey should be able to revive the Law Commission. He created it in 1985 and now has the chance to rescue it. For people alarmed about the PC lawyerisation of New Zealand, this may seem a serious threat. I am, however, optimistic, despite the worrying aspects of Sir Geoffrey ‘s record.

The Law Commission was born in 1985 during his famous quango hunt. He vowed as Attorney General to strangle useless quasi autonomous national government organisations (see Unfranked 3/6/05 www.act.org.nz/news-article.aspx/27029 ). Professional full time Law Reform Commissions were then fashionable internationally. Every era is convinced that their ‘modern age ‘ is more difficult and complex than any before. Palmer made political capital out of the presumption that any law older than say 20 years must need an expert rewrite.

While Palmer held Lange ‘s government together the new Commission had real power. “Superlawyer ” was the media label for Commissioner Prof (now Sir) Ken Keith because the government used him so often to second guess others ‘ legal work. He was farewelled last week from the Supreme Court to the International Court of Justice. Chapman Tripp ‘s Jack Hodder was there for first five good years. With Sian Elias (now Dame and Chief Justice) he was largely responsible for the acclaimed Companies Act 1993 among other projects.

Those golden early days ended. The “Yes Minister ” skills of officials stonewalled or dumbed down Commission draft Bills. Some plainly PC appointments lowered the mana of the Commission. The Commission joined in the nauseating recitations of submission to the Treaty, when a quality research body might have objected until it could say what that meant. Government shelving of reports gave the Commission a less than 50% strike rate ( see http://www.lawcom.govt.nz/UploadFiles/AnnualReports/Annual_Report_2004-2 005.pdf ). As Sir Geoffrey said that strike rate was probably not high enough to justify its cost. He also said in 2000 it lacked expertise in policy and economic analysis.

Sir Geoffrey will be determined to match Sir Ken Keith ‘s record. Assuming he is allowed to find new members who fall outside the sisterhood ‘s quotas, he could pleasantly surprise business people. An eagerness to ensure rigour in analysis, and a shrewd choice of priorities might outweigh an urge to cure the problems of too much law with more law. For example he shares my strong concerns about the constitutional and practical dangers of the Privacy Act.

Business people should see both risks and the opportunities. Let me know if you have any candidate issues we should nominate to the Commission for a quick review. Start with a clean slate and do not miss the chance to push for reform.

I ‘m looking forward to hearing from people we can help.

Before any more of you have to ask “what comes next for you” I’ll tell you. This column is all about me. More dust must settle before I’ll venture any prescription for ACT, after our voters went to National.

I’ve been dumped from the most challenging and worthwhile work I’ve ever done. Being sacked is hard but my sulk formally ends today. Fortunately I cannot afford to wallow in it. My first new legal brief is under action. I’d forgotten the satisfaction of working knowing that the result must be good enough for someone to want to pay for it.

So I’m cranking up my dormant legal practice. I have yet to decide whether it will be alone or in a firm. Naturally I’ve been keeping an eye on changes in securities law, but I’m welcoming more interesting offers

All week big green wheelie bins have been trundling out of ACT Parliamentary offices. I’m up to bin number six, with perhaps four to go by the end of the day. This evening, for dumped members, the Parliamentary computer identity closes down, with no forwarding service. Secretaries go (Dan McCaffrey moves to work for Bob the Builder from Tauranga) and our Parliamentary phone and mail services cease today. Our replacements swarm in on Monday.

If only employment law applied.

I could demand reinstatement and personal grievance damages from you as my employers. Did you give me formal warning of dissatisfaction? Shouldn’t you have a duty to guide and retrain me? You knew I didn’t have a safe working environment, in which I’ve been subject to harassment and personal insults. You’ve showed no interest in protecting me from stress.

Judge Coral Shaw might order damages because I got no consoling poroporoaki (farewell). Instead the sacking occurred on national television.

All that is as it should be. The ability to sack rulers is the defining strength of our democracy. It would never work if rulers could entrench themselves like dud employees behind tricky process rules, or the need to prove that dismissal is fair.

Nevertheless rejection hurts and the silver lining is only aluminium foil. Contrary to folklore, for MPs elected after 1996 there is no continuing travel entitlement, and no pension unless you can draw from your voluntary defined contribution super scheme.

Rejection pales beside the melancholia of long days tossing out files. There are so many projects I had underway. They are in hundreds of folders, the concentrated essence of six years of cases and causes, questions and tip-offs, challenges and endorsements. Carefully composed summaries and speech notes and pleas and arguments – and my responses – nearly all must go. I am avoiding newspapers, radio and TV to wean myself off the urge to comment, or to put down a parliamentary question.

Who now cares that I am appalled at complacency over the plane that missed the Sky Tower? Could New Zealand ever again host something like APEC when we would be helpless against an airborne nutter hunting an Auckland venue, even if we suspected his intentions all the way from Invercargill? I think we’ve lost the law that would let us shoot him down even if we could.

‘Write a letter to the paper’ I tell myself on hearing about kids treating Police pursuit as extreme sport. What else could be expected from instructions that call off chases if they become dangerous? What a silly message is sent by obsessively searching for someone to blame for failing to stop idiots from killing themselves. The sanctimonious twits who impose the “safety first” religion never ask whether they save as many lives as the deaths they cause by signalling that fleeing can work, thus increasing the number of pursuits.

‘Surely’, I fume, ‘some Maori Affairs spokesman must hound Mallard for the indefensible racism in forcing Te Wananga a Aotearoa to apply a 20% pakeha quota. Is that needs based?’

But ‘let it go’ is the mantra for the day.

The mantra will fail. I will not be able to suppress my interest in public affairs. I’ll upgrade my website – www.stephenfranks.co.nz – and maintain commentary on legal issues.

The website will list the pet legislative projects fermenting in my files.

For example, I’d like to help someone in this Parliament carry on the project to roll back the kind of law that threatens volunteers with liability if things go wrong on the school camping trip. The law should not drive cops into prosecuting the father of a four year old killed on a quad bike. What penalty can the state add to his misery?

I’d love to help with a bill to restore some legal meaning to marriage promises for those who want to opt in to such a regime.

In the meantime, thank you for all the encouragement, suggestions and criticisms. I’ve appreciated having an audience. Sitting down to write for you has often clarified my thoughts, and indeed aborted some werewolf ideas.

This column is not a disguised Arnie-style “I’ll be back”. Whether another election lies in my future will be decided in the future. Until then, I’m looking for interesting work.

You’ve asked to be kept up to date on Treaty issues. The knowledge will never be more important than now. On Saturday you decide who’ll be in charge of treaty issues for the next three years.

So here is some inside info. You won’t get this comparison of policy promises anywhere else. TV and the newpapers rarely dig below the surface. For me as a lawyer, the fine print is where I look first because the sound bites are reported, and cunning politicians calculate that they are all that will be reported.

So I’ve done some homework. Set out below is a comparison of ACT Party promises with the others.

Judge for yourself whether National will be able to implement its Treaty policy without ACT support.

Conclusion

For a classic example of slipperiness follow Peters’ trail on the Maori seats. Originally he was going to abolish them. Then it became “when the people agree”. Next, NZ First candidates started mumbling agreement to the Labour line “when Maori agree”. Now Dail Jones has confirmed that NZ First policy is to “discuss with Maori the ending of Maori seats”.

If National have to rely on NZ First or United Future to govern, National is unlikely to be able to fulfil its Treaty promises, assuming National and NZ First deign to throw their support behind National instead of Labour.

ACT can ensure they deliver. In fact we will press National to include the additional elements from our policy.

‘This is worse than water torture for me. You just want entertainment while I believe the issues are vital to our future” were Green MP Sue Kedgley’s opening lines to the Aro Valley community election forum.

I could sympathise. That notorious Wellington Central forum can make democracy look bad. Partisan roasting can drown any earnest attempts to reason. Wit is valued but logic and facts are immaterial or worse. They are sooo boring.

Yet on reflection democracy triumphed. The meeting worked like question time in Parliament. Important information emerges out of a sometimes riotous and often puerile process. It is extracted precisely because the targets are at the same time anxious to please, and flustered.

I learned things I did not want to know about leading fellow candidates; Labour’s Marian Hobbs and National’s Mark Blumsky, a former mayor. But first, more background.

Wellington’s Aro Valley is the native habitat of an endangered species; the remnant for whom communism was never given a fair chance. Many live comfortably now as policy analysts, beneficiaries of the Labour bureaucracy boom. They and their related species are host reservoirs for once virulent diseases, like “CIA paranoia syndrome”.

So Tuesday evening’s favoured candidate was an intense youth communist, appropriately full of envy, conspiracy theories and hate. This delightfully old-fashioned specimen seemed modelled on Pasternak’s Strelnikov from Dr Zhivago.

In that gathering, if anyone else could have been confident of a rapturous reception it should have been Ms Kedgley, but she never fully recovered after the opening heckler wanted to know whether she had arrived by bike or by broomstick.

Still, under the expert chairing of broadcaster Tim O’Brien, the meeting distributed their jeers and cheers surprisingly even-handedly, largely according to delivery performance not political alignment.

The forum made every question challenging, whether it was shrewd or not. Ms Hobbs revealed early the long term shadow of her years as a member of the Communist party.

I’ve been puzzled in the past by dislike for Ms Hobbs. I’ve seen her as an amiable duffer at worst, yet she’s faced derision even from Labour colleagues.

I saw another side in a nasty schadenfreude as she clapped in rapture at Strelnikov’s analysis of the New Orleans disaster. According to them it is the predictable reward of freedom and free enterprise.

It got worse. She told a man who identified himself as involved with Stagecoach, the operators of the Wellington bus service, how distressing she found it that the system allowed him to make a profit. According to her, that profit is just the measure of “how much they are fleecing us”.

She was avidly for the proposition that Maori language instruction be made compulsory at primary school. “Of course – it should be taught as our basic language, and that means it must start at primary school”.

On that question Mr Blumsky too wowed the crowd. He would also make Maori compulsory at primary school. He considered the Treaty a partnership but not a living one.

Clearly a wobbly National caucus will give ACT work to do in reinforcing Dr Brash’s commitment to end the rule of the mythical partnership.

Mr Blumsky also showed the limits to his political flexibility with a touching residual loyalty to the party he chaired until late last year. Asked what party he would be in if National did not exist; he declared that it would be United Future; on the grounds that National was philosophically closest to them.

More work for ACT in holding National to its recently rediscovered commitment to freedom and personal responsibility?

But it was near the end that most candidates revealed their craven need for approval. Asked what we would do to reduce crime, Strelnikov’s solution was to drastically cut police numbers – because they are rapists and oppressors, responsible for so much crime. Other candidates endorsed this bold insight in various degrees. Murmurs of approval grew to tumultuous clapping. Clearly the analysis chimed with the crowd experience. It must be awful living in the Aro Valley where so many must be victims of police rape and villainy.

Carried away by the judgement of the collective Minister Hobbs found herself bouncing with enthusiasm. Flapping her arms she joined in the ovation as each fringe candidate added endorsement to the move to get rid of the Police.

What a flake the Labour Party has inflicted on Wellington.

Have you been struck by the apparent helplessness of the authorities in Louisiana in the face of looters? Is it possible that looters could really have forced the abandonment of rescue efforts, including a fully operational hospital. The tragedy is made so much worse by such depravity.

I can’t imagine anything more shameful for the home of the brave and the land of the free.

What has happened to the descendants of the people De Tocquville considered uniquely equipped by community spirit to govern themselves without arming their rulers with martial powers? Why was lawlessness not nipped in the bud, given that police are armed? Is some legal deficiency causing paralysis?

It set me wondering. What would we do if New Zealanders went feral after a major natural disaster? As a proud Wellingtonian I do not want to face shame as well as grief if we get the big one in my lifetime. We must know that decency will not be sacrificed in an overwhelming emergency. Such times can strengthen a community, but only when they call out the best of behaviour, not the worst.

Scum will surface here too in a crisis. Already the price for crime is not enough to deter them. Our crime figures tell us there are more identified thugs among us than in previous generations of New Zealanders. It is irrelevant whether the proportions of naturally selfish have actually changed. They are obviously more ready to break the law. We have higher burglary and assault rates than the US. They will prey on neighbours disabled by tragedy unless they know that the law will prevail.

They must know that they will not get away with crime, no matter how busy the police are saving victims. If there is no practical way to arrest them, looters should know that they will be shot on sight. Lawlessness must be stopped while it is minor, before it converts to robbery and rape.

Could our authorities do that?

The Crimes Act does not authorise shooting to stop looting. Even the Police are only permitted to use lethal force to protect themselves or others, not property. I have been trying to reinstate a general right to use proportionate force to stop crime.

What about if a state of emergency is declared? It seems there is no adequate power. Many powers are conferred on emergency managers, but they all assume that people are obeying the law. Naivety gutted our rights of self-defence 25 years ago, when provocation was removed as a defence to assault.

The same naivety and politically correctness prevailed in 1987 when the time-honoured Riot Act was repealed. From what I can work out from materials I can access on the road, section 88 was removed from the Crimes Act with no thought that our forebears might have known more about human nature than us.

I’ve been interested in the Riot Act since being told in school in Taihape that an early mayor used it to stop a violent Saturday night riot. Railway construction and timber mills gave Taihape a ten to one male to female ratio. The Act’s principle was similar to that wonderful Quaker warning to burglars “Friend, I would not hurt thee for all the world, but thou art standing where I am about to shoot”.

I think I can remember Sir Geoffrey Palmer pontificating about antiquated law, and opining that modern authorities would never again need such draconian powers. Sounds like the Prime Minister’s just before 9/11, opining that we live in an incredibly benign world.

When the new Parliament is reconvened an early priority should be a thorough review of emergency management powers. It raises the same issues of principle as my campaign to restore self-defence rights (see www.act.org.nz/selfdefence ).