Corrections Minister Phil Goff announced today that he’d keep an eye on the South Australian trial of banning gang membership. He said that if it works, “then I’m 100 per cent in favour of it”.
Basically, in South Australia, the government can decide (on police advice) which gangs are going to be banned, and then individual members can be ordered to not associate with anyone from the gang. Gang members can also be banned from certain events or places.
According to the Herald, “The South Australia ban has been criticised for limiting freedom of association, but Mr Goff said he agreed with [South Australian Premier] Mr Rann that the gang problem was serious enough for civil liberties to be overridden.” I disagree. I think there are very few things sufficiently serious to override civil liberties, and that this certainly isn’t one of them.
I’m generally fairly trusting that our government and our Police force are well intentioned and won’t try to abuse the powers. But I also don’t think we should get complacent just because we have a relatively peaceful and democratic society. We can’t guarantee that in future our leaders will be so benign. As they say, power corrupts.
Members of the Green party have been known to be involved in a bit of civil disobedience – Sue Bradford was arrested a few times for her protests. What if a future government decided to declare the Green party a gang? That would make it illegal to join the party, and illegal for party members to gather together or speak to each other. A government could shut down political opposition fairly effectively by declaring them a gang. Now, I don’t foresee any immediate danger of this happening, but why take the risk?
Does it really help us to police gangs if we make a crime out of gang members talking to each other? Wouldn’t we be better off if we concentrated on discovering and prosecuting actual crimes?
I don’t want to see New Zealand go down the same path as the US in slowly eroding the human rights that they have been respected and revered for. Freedom of association is right up there with freedom of speech as a fundamental human right.
In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
September 15th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Scare mongering… Political Parties like the Greens would never be defined a criminal group while as long as they participate in parliament and don’t participate in eco-terrorism etc.
IMHO its better to attempt to control/restrict criminal organisations by what ever means necessary. Should in some unforseeable future NZ become so corrupt that such a law was being used indiscrimanently by some political group, society has way of correcting such imbalances; Revolution… ref: almost every country thats been around for a while.
September 16th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Prior to 9/11 who would have thought the US government would repeal habeas corpus and allow people to be indefinitely detained at Gitmo on purely on suspicion of being an enemy combatant? I think the way a country loses its freedoms is slowly and gradually and I wouldn’t want to see NZ going there. And sure, we can eventually slowly give up all our freedoms until we are so repressed we have to overthrow the government in a revolution … but surely it would be better to just keep them in the first place and not go through all that?
Anyway, I do agree that it seems unlikely for an NZ government in the near future to label a political party as a criminal gang, but I’m still not comfortable with the idea of giving the government the power to decide which groups of people are not allowed to associate with each other. I’d rather they focus on actual crime.
Having said that, I doubt they will actually do this – I think it’s just political grandstanding to show how tough Labour is on crime before the election. I don’t think this ban will actually happen.
September 16th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Could we get some thoughts from our esteemed Labour colleague?