One of Labour's first decisions in government was to respect the ruling of the High Court and inflation adjust Teina Pora's compensation payment for the more than twenty years of wrongful imprisonment he suffered. Now, National's "justice" spokesperson Amy Adams is warning that this move will "open the floodgates":
National's justice spokeswoman Amy Adams is warning the Government may have opened up a can of worms in awarding Teina Pora almost an extra $1 million for his two decades of wrongful imprisonment.
[...]
How the new calculation for Pora's settlement will affect "everyone else who has had compensation that wasn't inflation adjusted" remains to be seen, Adams said.
"The way the decision is written, it now throws in to question every sort of payment of any sort the Government might make that isn't specifically provided to be inflation-adjusted."
"There will be others now looking at whether they should be inflation-adjusted."
And so they should. Because the High Court has effectively ruled that National's penny-pinching policy of screwing over people shown to be innocent was wrong. And that means the current government may have to clean up National's mess. But the proper response to that is to clean the fucking mess up, not stick your fingers in your ears and deny that you ever did anything wrong.
So, let the "floodgates" open. The worst that will happen is that we'll have to treat people fairly, like we should have done in the first place. And only an arsehole from a party of arseholes which grubs for votes from other arseholes would see any problem with that.
