Getting into heavy vetting

Donald Trump sees only the upside of a process his administration calls ’’extreme vetting’’.

In his couldn’t-be-simpler world view, ‘‘extreme’’ suggests an action that is emphatic and therefore bound to be effective.

Certainly extreme vetting sounds like a much more compelling rallying call than ’’tad more carefully thought-through vetting’’. Which is something New Zealand needs.

Not so much in the Trumpian context of keeping terrorists out , but in the more down-home day-today practice of calling on police to check the backgrounds of the citizenry seeking sensitive positions of trust. Police do this for roughly 7500 approved agencies, chiefly for those that employ staff or volunteers working with children or people with special needs.

State-funded organisations have to vet children’s workers, and if the applicant doesn’t consent to the check then that’s them ruled out. However, religious institutions aren’t covered in the requirement. Many have by now required clergy and volunteers with access to children to be police-vetted. But there is a gap, one example of which is the recent discovery that the leader of a new-age spiritual group, the Foundation of Higher Learning in Waikato, has a child sex offending history.

There’s a strong prima facie case for more compulsion. It does not suffice to say that if a group isn’t receiving Government funding the state has no right to stickybeak into its private business to this extent. The issue is child safety, not taxpayer accountability.

Neither could this be called antireligious discrimination. It would be more a case of removing spurious exemptions based on deference to religion. In the meantime, and at very least, parents looking to entrust their children into the care of many a fine-sounding organisation owe it to their kids to have some fairly pointy questions about what vetting processes, if any, have been applied.

But vetting raises other issues too. The Privacy Commissioner and Independent Police Conduct Authority have warned there is no clear framework for the legitimate criteria and scope of vetting checks.

They found a lack of coherent guidelines about whether the police should release, such as information they had on file but had not led to prosecution so had not been tested by the courts or any other independent agency, and the applicant hadn’t necessarily had the opportunity to rebut.

So the upshot is that we have some areas where we do need police to be doing more vetting, and some areas where the rules for the process need to be betterdefined. With extreme care.