“Labour looks almost certain to oppose the bill after justice spokesman Charles Chauvel had his first look at the draft.
“There’s no undertaking about avoiding urgency or going to a select committee, and the bill itself goes much further than anything we’ve been lead to believe,””
I want to see Labour stick to its guns. We thought this law would individually target one Supreme Court case and put it on ice. An unprecedented abuse of the rule of law and separation of powers. How can it be worse?
“The bill would legalise all police use of video surveillance on private property, even if a search warrant had not been issued, as long as the “search” would have been lawful without planting a hidden camera”
Jesus, that’s terrible. There’s a reason we require agents of the State to have positive authority for their actions – eg search warrants. Under this law, if the police record you on your private property or someone else’s, that will be legal unless you can prove that they couldn’t have gotten a search warrant for their search. Rather than the State’s agents having to provide prove they have the authority to search and surveill you, it will be on you to hire a lawyer, go to court, and prove that they couldn’t have gotten that authority had they tried to. Which we all know amounts to carte blanche for the Police to do whatever they want. It seems that the ends justify the means and the rule of law can go fuck itself in the Nats’ mind. Chris Finlayson should resign for even proposing such a heinous law.
“Mr Key’s claim that serious criminals could get away with breaking the law continued to be questioned, in light of a clause in the Evidence Act that empowers a judge to allow illegally-obtained evidence on a case-by-case basis.”
We can expect Key to be true to form on this. He will simply refuse to engage. He has his spin line; the facts don’t enter into it.
“An alternative solution emerged yesterday: to remove the clauses in the Search and Surveillance Bill relevant to video tracking, and insert them into existing law until the whole bill can be passed. The clauses, which have broad support and have passed select committee scrutiny, would make police use of cameras legal with a search warrant for investigating crimes punishable by seven years’ jail or more, and for firearms offences.”
Why isn’t the government just doing what it could have done any time in the past year and pass the Search and Surveillance Bill or, at least, the relevant clauses?
It’s clear that this is about more than fixing a hole in the law that was well known but which the Policy chose to ignore. It’s an anti-democratic power grab in the tradition of Ecan, CERA, the Supercity, and the RWC Enabling Act.
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