The Clerk of the House advises that urgency be accorded the introduction and first reading of the Taxation (Business Tax Measures) Bill, the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill, the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill, and the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill.

So this week we’re going to tax the crims, create curb-appeal police to clean up Wanganui’s ill dressed households on top of Chester Burrow’s fashion police, and we are going to take DNA samples from everyone arrested for an imprisonable offence to profile them against a database, all without proper parliamentary scrutiny. I seem to recall a certain Hon Dr Nick Smith bludgeoning the last government for “rushing” legislation (which had, in fact, gone through a proper select committee process) and calling it un-democratic. It seems the new government is no better.

Tumeke has an interesting take on the DNA bill and an “exclusive” on police profiling here.

NoRightTurn blasts the DNA Bill as a violation of the Bill of Rights Act, here.

RadioNZ has a brief summary here.

What I would like to know is; How the law will differentiate between a law-abiding person  with a gated driveway and a suspected gang house with the same? Are we not about to criminalise both? And what are the enhanced surveillance powers being given to police, ostensibly to fight the gangs? Will they be turned upon other groups that the police think are threatening? Just how are we going to define “gangs”?

The report on the first reading debate can be heard here. (audio)

And as far a taxing the crims, well, populist an idea that it is, is it even remotely practical in the real world? Are criminals as likely to pay their fines on time as anyone else?

I will stop short of damning it all outright, but I wonder if we haven’t traded in the nanny state for Big Brother.

TV3′s Sunrise programme devoted quite a bit of airtime this morning to the incident, and it is worth watching the interview. Two questions sprang to mind instantly when I heard the broadcast:

Was it really the yellow shirt that Jordan Herewini was wearing that ultimately got him killed or some other aspect of the subsequent fight that broke out between his brothers and the visiting Mongrel Mob members?

Will the entrenchment of gang culture in New Zealand bite us in the bum as the economy sags and tempers fray among the economically disadvantaged?

I have no doubt that I am reading far too much into a single incident, but I still wonder if allowing an obsession with gang colours to flourish is setting us up for serious strife further down the road.

Anecdotally, I hear stories of youngsters refusing to play with toys of certain colours and that sort of thing, presumably because of the gang association.

This incident follows on the heels of a man being killed by a gang prospect for coming to the aid of a woman being assulted by a gang member.

On the one hand we have the nanny state response which is to ban all gang colours and insignia in public, such as Chester Burrows’ Prohibition of Gang Insignia Bill. To think that unleashing the fashion police in Wanganui is going to make anyone feel safer, let alone actually safer, is laughable. It also flies in the face of many basic civil rights.

On the other hand we have the lock-em-up and throw away the key brigade, who also miss the point in their effort to whip up some sympathy for their failing political ambitions.

Having said that, both of these parties now form the backbone of our coalition government, so their messages, however unsuitable to solving the gang problem, do resonate.

For my part, I just worry about raising a generation of kids who are not divided along racial or ethnic lines, but rather along the colour of their clothing. None of the solutions on offer from the government will make this better. Burrows’ Bill will make it worse, and codify in law that gang insignia, including colours, actually mean something and represent what is good and evil under the law.

There must be a better way. There must be a more constructive way to approach the gang problem that doesn’t reinforce it in the long term.

What Stokes and other apologists, like the Black Power’s confrere Denis O’Reilly, preach is that gang members are human too. That they have rights. Yet these claims are, surely, questionable.

This is the flawed foundation of all of Law’s logic. That certain human beings are not really human after all. We know from both living memory and ancient history where such logic leads. I hear goose-steps and it gives me goosebumps.

When did outlaws – who exist to defy the law – deserve its protection?

Now we get an idea of which humans are not really humans after all – the outlaws. So I’m safe from being declared ‘not human’, as long as I am not an outlaw. (Or of a certain faith, or wearing particular colours) Who determines who is an outlaw? The courts? No. Michael does. And he says that all gang members are outlaws. People who wear patches are, by Law’s definition:

… staunch, an outlaw and a pseudo-warrior – all rolled into one. Penniless but pitiless. And then there is the P, the dak, the booze and the companion psychos addled by years of such combination. Vilified by normal society, targeted by rival gangs and required to subsist on the state’s largesse – be it benefit, state house or legal aid.

Having painted all gang members with the same brush, Laws closes the loop on his logic. No gang members are human. All gang members are outlaws. Outlaws don’t deserve the protection of the law. Outlaws do not get any rights.  Therefore, and in conclusion, those inhuman, outlaw gang members have no rights and

Gang rights are silly sophistry.

With this impeccable logic in hand, we can now legislate what it is that people can and cannot wear in public. What is almost as galling is that Michael Laws actually believes that having a public dress code is going to help solve the problems associated with gangs!

Do you think that creating a new power for the police force, let’s call them the fashion police, is really going to put a dent in the very real social issues and challenges that our communities face? Or is this the top of a very slippery slope leading to the destruction of the civil rights we have spent the last century fighting for? I don’t claim to have the answers to the social issues we are facing. But I can say with confidence that creating the fashion police in New Zealand is just a little bit daft and no solution at all. In fact, it is downright dangerous.

Now that you’ve read it, I have to ask: Could you vote for investment banker John Key and his gang in the next election? It’s not that the Greens would be exempt from the gang description used in Kay’s article. It’s just the National Party’s (and Labour’s), obsession with growth-at-all-costs against the reality of a finite world that has me wondering if either party is truly fit to lead.

Just in case you are locked out of the FT website because you’ve been there too many times before, here is a reasonable summary of the article.