Dear panicking civil libertarians – isn’t a pandemic the reason you have urgency?

35
2012

A lot of angry and frightened civil libertarians  (many of whom I admire ) were rattled last week by the use of urgency to pass the traffic light vaccination passport scheme.

On any other day of the week, I would be alongside them demanding to know what the bloody hell was going on too, but this ain’t one of them.

Firstly the entire breathless denunciation of what Labour did had a whiff of the hysterical about it from people who were making arguments of due process which seemed to miss the urgency of the reality.

There is a pandemic going on! Urgency to ram through urgent law in a truncated democratic process is what is required!

We have urgency powers for issues of immense urgency! We are looking at limiting people’s liberty and that demands oversight and obligations WHICH HAVE BEEN BUILT INTO THE LEGISLATION!

This is not the same as when Key misused urgency to ram through the mass surveillance powers! This legislation must be voted back in using the basic majority of Parliament every few months while there is a sunset clause built into the law that removes all these powers altogether once the pandemic is over!

This is hardly the civil liberties crushing Nazi Germany framework it’s being sold as.

Of course Government should be challenged every day over its use of power over us but this traffic light system is a hurried response to an ongoing public health emergency – of course there will be stupid anomalies and counter productive outcomes because of the haste and those will be cleaned up in whatever omnibus package is passed to do that, but all in all this is a Government moving as fast as it can to treat a novel virus in the middle of a pandemic.

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There are legitimate reasons to use urgency – a fucking plague is one of them!

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35 COMMENTS

  1. If urgency is not justified now when could it ever be justified?
    From day 1 of the pandemic civil libertarians and many others have not grasped that the virus has absolutely no concern about, or respect for, ‘due process’.
    We should all be thanking the Government, especially Jacinda Ardern, for just getting on with the job inspite of all the vitriol being directed at them.

  2. They had time to put this legislation through a select committee process, they chose not too. And even if they didn’t have the time they could’ve reviewed the legislation via a post enactment review, which the government voted against… When the human rights commission, amnesty international, council for civil liberties and your own speaker criticize the move, are you really on the right path?

    • Statement from The American Civil Liberties Union

      Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of colour hit hard by the disease.

      Since its creation in 1920, the ACLU has been the United States leading watchdog in protecting the civil liberties, freedoms, and rights of all people. It preserves the Constitution by defending liberty against government abuse and illegal policies.

    • MB, my view is none of those ‘authorities’ you mention have the responsibility for manoeuvring us through the pandemic. Their judgement is (rightly) based on their responsibilties, just as the MoH, business organistions, etc, advice is based on their areas of responsibility and representation – but in the end someone has to get on with the job…. that we are in a position to discuss the finer points of ‘due process’ and not all off attending funerals is a measure of our success so far, and for that we can only thank the Government – none of the other parties have had demonstrated any understanding of the quickly changing conditions involved in the pandemic.

  3. Every politician loves an emergency or disaster, best time to get stuff done, while the people are busy or distracted. Never waste the opportunity.

    Probably justified in this case, but it always pays to check because sometimes “extras” get tacked on or slipped through under urgency. Then everyone is surprised by the “unintended” consequences. Democratic processes are there for a reason (though are mainly only used to give the peasants a feeling of having participated in the decision making process, so they can feel their input was valued & important, even if it wasn’t actually considered & didn’t effect the outcome one jot).

  4. Its arse covering legislation!

    It’s also poorly written and will be considered so ambiguous to the point the courts will end up allowing it to challenged in the Appeals Court.
    And it may even get to the Supreme Court too.

  5. That passport will become entrenched and still be here in 1000 years, it’s not disappearing.

    Just like the airport security terrorism fiasco, have you noticed that being scaled back?

    • they had ID cards in the UK during the war with very strict checking after the war they were shitcanned, what people should be worried about is that a driving licence has become the de facto NZ IDcard and exactly who that disenfranchises….

  6. Say RickyBoyle…..read..
    Statement from The American Civil Liberties Union
    Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of colour hit hard by the disease.

    Since its creation in 1920, the ACLU has been the United States leading watchdog in protecting the civil liberties, freedoms, and rights of all people. It preserves the Constitution by defending liberty against government abuse and illegal policies.

      • do you mean NEWSPEAK or DOUBLETHINK or are you another one who bandys Orwell about having never actually read him

        surveys suggest your far from alone

      • as my post hasn’t appeared…

        do you mean NEWSPEAK or DOUBLETHINK ? or are you another one who references Orwell but have never read him?

        don’t fret surveys show you’re not alone.

    • “communities of colour” LMAO why are people so race obsessed? I think race was just a social construct? So why do lefties like to define people primarily by their race

      • Silly accusation – poor comprehension. But you must admit that skin colours along with behaviour patterns are the first indications that we get that we have to allow for and be tolerant of people having different cultures.. It seems that you just want everyone to agree with guess who.

  7. Well, all I can write is that shit’s getting real when Israel bans all overseas visitors when I know, we all know, Israel manufactures terrible weaponry which they test on Palestinians so there’s clearly not much they’re afraid of.
    If ever there was a barometer for dangerous, out-of-control shit the Israeli’s are it.
    The Guardian:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/nov/27/covid-news-live-omicron-variant-spreads-to-europe-countries-rush-to-impose-travel-bans-on-southern-africa
    We AO/NZ’ers need to become much more proactive and make demands upon our politicians to see the picture beyond their masters ; the banksters.
    We must close the borders. If we don’t? We might die in our thousands. ( I truly can’t fucking believe I’m writing this !? )
    No…I’m not being silly old hysterical Countryboy. I’m being commonsensical. There’s a difference.
    An all but invisible, microscopic organism can float about, be inhaled, then multiply once inside one’s body then fuck one up.
    We’re 1641 km landfall to landfall from Australia and that line takes you over some of the most treacherous open ocean in the world. Ask any sailor?
    The other way to South America? 7475 km. Of open ocean.
    We AO/NZ’ers WERE perfectly able to weather out the viral storm but greedy fools sold us out and tried to farm us, like they’ve done for generations, for our money which they disappear. Aye boys?
    I’m right about the money/manipulations/farmer exploitation/thriving banksters and their all bought and paid for urban Kiwi traitors. I’m right about that.
    Many of you won’t believe me because you have no idea what you’re thinking.
    But I do.
    AO/NZ’s politicians are deeply fucked. Our politicians can’t allow us to survive too extravagantly because it’d suddenly show cash flows beyond comprehension and that’d hugely embarrass those who’ve made swindling us their life time’s work.
    That. And only that, is why we now have C-19’s delta variant where once we were entirely virus free.
    Again: Aye boys…?
    Farmers? You’re going to come under ever greater pressure to appear as mud slouching red necks who deserve to be exploited. You’ll get called racists, polluters, greedy, lazy, stupid, ugly etc.
    If all of you allow yourselves to buy into that narrative you’ll surely be totally fucked.
    But George Monbiot wrote that all it took to change a political vector is 25% of those affected.
    This is an interesting read.
    George Monbiot. The Guardian.
    “After the failure of Cop26, there’s only one last hope for our survival”
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/cop26-last-hope-survival-climate-civil-disobedience?utm_source=pocket_mylist
    Isolating is the only sure way of not getting covid or its varients. And we lucky,lucky,lucky AO/NZ’ers are perfectly positioned to be able to do that. The only way we won’t be able to achieve that unbelievably fortunate position is if we allow the politicians who are in foreign bankster pockets prevent us from achieving that.

    • The only way we won’t be able to achieve that unbelievably fortunate position is if we allow the politicians who are in foreign bankster pockets prevent us from achieving that.

      “Listen up, sleepy Kiwis!!”

      “The only way we won’t be able to achieve that unbelievably fortunate position is if we allow the politicians who are in foreign bankster pockets prevent us from achieving that.”

  8. Authoritarians will always justify authoritarianism.
    Those committing crimes against humanity will always justify their actions.

  9. Since when has a Government that has passed new laws granting it far reaching powers ever wanted to give up that newly gained power easily?

  10. I am not happy with the increasing Health Dictatorship in NZ — within 5 years Kiwis will be asking how do this happen in NZ? The Health Dictatorship of NZ.

  11. The plague excuses some urgencies but not others. This legislation could have been begun back before our winter when the UK looked at vaccine passports and mandates. Eventually the UK rejected them hoping that the prospect would have encouraged the unvaccinated to get vaccinated in sufficient numbers for the UK to dismantle the various controls that were in place.

    If you think that was too early, then the next moment was when we pulled finger and started vaccinating everyone – last August. The vaccination programme should have been rolled out as part and parcel of a prospective passport system. Again the moment was lost and consideration of not only the passport system but mandating vaccination for 40% of the workforce need not have been left till last week.

    But having left it till last week they could have opened the house next week and considered it in a slightly more relaxed manner then but didn’t.

    When even Labour’s own speaker of the house reprimands it for the loss of due process, we can all see how flimsy the cloak of the plague really was

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