Populism rules in Nats’ proposals
Law and order paper presses buttons for voters
There is plenty in the National Party’s law and order discussion document that will draw voters. Whether there is enough evidence behind the proposals to appeal to justice and health experts is another matter.
The document includes some meaty proposals, such as explicitly spelling out in law the right of judges and juries to take a negative impression from a defendant who refuses to give evidence.
Former Justice Minister Simon Power pushed one like it in 2011, which met heated opposition from the judiciary and was shelved.
One of the paper’s strongest elements is setting up a special police team akin to the fabulously named Strike Force Raptor unit in New South Wales to crack down on gangs.
The growth in gang numbers is alarming, and National wants an arsenal of policies to combat this.
But how much would public safety improve with a ban on gang patches in public, or inspecting tax returns to check for welfare fraud?
The prospect of making it illegal for certain gang members to hang out with each other might be more disruptive to gang activity, and voters are unlikely to care much about curbing a gang member’s right to freedom of movement or association, or presumption of innocence.
It’s often hard for Opposition policies to get oxygen, and the extra power of this proposal would be the opposition to it from Labour as well as civil libertarians.
Likewise voters will applaud cumulative sentences for murderers and rapists, no parole for murderers who won’t say where the body is, notifying schools when a sex offender is released, and zero tolerance for the country’s worst youth offenders.
None of which policy experts have been crying out for.
Voters will also likely support drug-driver testing, despite warnings of the danger of false positives.
Tougher sentences for synthetic drug suppliers is similarly populist, but is a curious addition given it’s not as tough on drugs as the potential life sentence already provided for in the Government’s revised drug law. Not that tougher sentences are actually considered effective, as recently stated by High Court Justice Matthew Palmer and in a Court of Appeal ruling on meth-related sentences.
Other National ideas may appeal to sector experts patiently waiting on the Government’s response to the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group final report.
These include having mental health nurses at police watch houses and attending incidents alongside police and paramedics, and social investment attempts to use data to
find those most at risk from an early age and intervene accordingly.
More and earlier treatment for remand prisoners and more education, training and work to help keep prisoners from re-offending seems to be one area where National and Labour can agree.
Such proposals show National’s trying to appeal to the evidence as well as the voter. But the main impression is one of an election-year document that seems to make no apology for populism.