Banning gangs?

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."