This week National and Christopher Luxon have been talking publicly about which human rights they could trash for gang members.
Generally Luxon is pretty good at delivering the same old cliches time and time again. But every time he strays into slightly more specific comments he puts his foot in it, or at least the left think that he does this.
Who can forget his description of helping poor people as bottom feeding or his insistence that public transport should pay its way?
This week he added another draw dropping example of some pretty crazy stuff by proposing that photos of gang member wearing bling should be banned from social media.
From Radio New Zealand:
Luxon told Morning Report National also wants gang activity to be restricted on social media.
He said police were telling the party that gang members were doing an effective job of selling gang lifestyle on social media to attract new recruits.
While it was a difficult area to navigate it had been used to control extremist material so the same approach could be tried with content promoting gangs.
Told that Internet New Zealand has dismissed the proposal as impossible to police, Luxon said it has been difficult to deter violent extremism and organisations and he could not see why it cannot be tried.
“Gang life is actually promoted with all the bling and all those presentations. That’s what we can have a crack at it.
“I appreciate it’s tough and it’s hard but we should try doing something and giving the police some tools to push back on.”
When Luxon was pressed on whether the party’s gang policy had been formed taking into consideration the Bill of Rights and the Human Rights Act, he countered that gang members wanted the rights and not their responsibilities.
So any gang member wearing bling will have their photos banned from social media? And a picture of a Headhunter with a fancy watch is the same as the live video from the Christchurch Mosque massacre?
Any leftie or person who actually believes in human rights would think that proposing this would be crazy. The attack of the freedom of expression would be so profound, with such limited benefits that it would have to fail.
There has been another example overseas which makes me wonder if this is not a random event but a feature of right wing politics.
In the United Kingdom the Conservative Government has its own egregious attempt to undermine human rights. The Government has proposed that asylum seekers, no matter which country they come from, should be shipped off to a holding prison in Rwanda as a way to deter people smugglers.
The policy was announced with some fanfare by Boris Johnson who promised to dig in for the fight with leftie lawyers to make sure that the policy succeeded.
He said this:
There’s going to be a lot of legal opposition from the types of firms that, for a long time, have been taking taxpayers’ money to mount these sorts of cases, and to thwart the will of the people, the will of parliament. We’re ready for that,” he said.
“We will dig in for the fight and, you know, we will make it work. We’ve got a huge flowchart of things we have to do to deal with it, with the leftie lawyers.”
And dig in they did. The Government resisted applications for interim injunctions through the English Judicial System but a last minute decision by the European Court of Human Rights stopped the flight. The test case involved an Iraqi national who claim that he had been tortured has some support from medical authorities. The Court ruled that the arrangement, involving a non legally binding promise to return refugees to England on request and the question whether Rwanda was actually safe deserved proper consideration.
The Government’s response was typical with deputy prime minister Dominic Raab claiming the Court had overstepped its powers.
Asked about death threats made on social media to human rights lawyers, he said they were unacceptable but then doubled down by saying that Britain’s Human Rights Act had led to an “industry” of lawyers promoting “elastic interpretations” of the law on behalf of their clients.
And pro Brexit backbenchers have gone to town and demanded that England withdraws from the ECHR, even though it was set up before the European Union primarily through English efforts to address human rights violations that occurred during the second world war.
The Rwandan policy has been heavily criticised not only by Human Rights lawyers but also by the Churches, Prince Charles, and even even some Tory backbenchers, including the former prime minister Theresa May. It has all of the hallmarks of that other example of accelerated cruelty where the Australian Government transported refugees to a detention centre on Christmas Island.
I mention this because the UK policy and National’s anti gang rhetoric have some similar features. Attack an unpopular minority with laws that breach their and our rights and get ready to blame the lawyers if the attempts fail.
And Luxon’s proposal that social media be scoured for Gang members wearing bling will have another feature that National normally repels from, a multitude of public servants will need to be employed to scour individual face book pages, and tick tock and instagram feeds.
Both attempts are crass and directly violate some fundamental human rights. It is sad that there exists a political market for this sort of behaviour.
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