Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Labour on rule of law repeal

Labour has finally spoken up about National's plans to oust the rule of law and retrospectively validate unlawful police surveillance, saying they will not support the bill until they have seen it, and they will not support the bill being passed under urgency:

Labour wants a select committee to scrutinise retrospective legislation to allow secret filming on private property by police.

[...]

''The bottom line is it must go through a select committee process,'' Goff said. ''It needs to have expert opinion, we need to have the Law Commission, we need to have the Law Society, the other players in this game, able to comment.''

He added: ''We haven't seen the law yet, we haven't seen the bill, and I'm not going to support anything I haven't seen.''

This is better than I had expected, but it still leaves the door open to support interfering in ongoing criminal trials to support the prosecution. And that is something no party in our Parliament should support.

Update: And more from Charles Chauvel here.