I started reading the news this morning, and I was really quickly struck by how many opinion pieces and comments of outrage there were over the Government removing the voting rights from prisoners.
There was, just by my account, two full opinion pieces by academics, a newsletter that landed in my inbox, a left-wing blog post, outrage from Labour, and outrage from the Greens.
So when I saw that, I thought, jeez, there's quite a lot coming from these guys.
It might be interesting to compare this to how many opinion pieces and comments of outrage there are about the four killings currently in the news that have all been committed by people either previously in jail or previously in mental health care.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the man who has now murdered twice and been found insane twice.
It's the two murders by Hill Morton mental health patients, and it's the murder by the parole rapist in Christchurch.
All of them have been in the news just in the last few days.
I didn't find one piece - not one opinion piece - by an academic about this, not one comment of outrage from the Greens, and the only relevant comment that I could find from Labour was the Labour MP saying that it was inappropriate to comment on it.
Now, doesn't that tell you a lot about where we're putting our energy at the moment?
We are, it would seem, angsting more about protecting the right that a prisoner has to vote - a right which, by the way, we were just told yesterday that most prisoners don't even want. But we are angsting ourselves over protecting that.
And we are more angsting more about protecting that than we are about protecting the rights of innocent people not to be hurt by high-risk people who we know are high-risk.
Now, we should be interrogating the agencies responsible here. We should be finding out what went wrong, and we should be angsting over it so it doesn't happen again.
And I would venture that our priorities are way out of whack if we are more stressed in the news media about whether the bad guys can vote than where authorities are keeping innocent people safe.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
Good point!!!
The reason is that the left, which includes the media, needs the criminal vote. Many of the partly maori and green party openly support the gangs and criminal element and think that law and order and morals are a colonist construct.
The outrage seems to be that "going to prison" actually means becoming a prisoner - rather than a lifestyle where you can relax or work when you feel like it, attend family events like tangi, play sport, get free medical and dental treatment, determine the country's and local authority's political future, sue the government with legal aid, but all with free accommodation.
What gets me is that under co-governance (at both local and national levels), the 80% of prisoners who are Maori will have seven times the political say as I do. They are also part of the Mana Whenua who have to be consulted on everything.
Be very afraid of the inescapable consequences of this.
If someone has behaved badly enough to be sent to gaol I am happy that they lose the right to vote while they are serving their punishment.
Just shows how, as a nation, how shallow we have become, (and especially our news media journalists), when four people are murdered because of poor decision making by do-gooder public Servants, gets very little news coverage. But prisoners rights to vote being removed gets the headlines. Note that prisoners never had the right to vote, until the criminal friendly Labour govt allowed them to. So what is the big deal in practical terms. Only the academics seem worried about it (big surprise there!!)
Post a Comment