The regime introduced a bunch of bills today: an Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill to introduce a "papers, please" regime for anyone MBIE (which also means the police) suspects they may be liable for deportation or in breach of their visa conditions; a Corrections (Management of Prisoners, and Prisoners’ Property) Amendment Bill to enable them to torture prisoners with solitary confinement more easily and stop them from writing books about it; a Fisheries Amendment Bill to make the Quota Management System a matter of ministerial fiat and introduce a secrecy regime for boat camera footage; and a Policing Amendment Bill, to allow the police to arbitrarily close public places and spy on people without warrants. There's a couple of themes across these bills. The first is overturning court decisions, including some that have affirmed quite significant protections for human rights. The second is replacing statutory protections with executive discretion, which means executive arbitrariness and corruption. And the third, linking the two, is tyranny. Because that's what we call an arbitrary executive which does not respect human rights: tyrants.
The Fisheries Bill secrecy clause deserves its own post, so I'm going to talk about the policing bill here. And it is awful.
One part of this is the creation of a new regime allowing any police officer to close access to any "accessible area" - meaning "an area of land that is accessible to the public, or a section of the public, by motor vehicle", and apparently including private property. So anywhere that is a road, or connected to a road. They're probably thinking of car-parks, but of course the definition also applies to your backyard, and even your house if you have an indoor garage. These closures can be done for a variety of reasons, some of which are good (for example, if there is a danger to the public, like a gas leak or incipient landslide, or a serious offence has been committed and there is a need to secure the crime scene). But most of it is of course aimed at one of the regime's perennial targets: boy-racers. So they can close roads to everyone if an "antisocial road use offence" is being committed or might be committed; if people are operating (or are expected to be) motor vehicles in an antisocial way; or if people are creating (or are expected to create) excessive noise with a motor vehicle, or if there is (or is imminent) "public disorder". If they close an area, its an infringement offence not to leave immediately.
The regime will be looking at this and thinking "anti boy-racer law". But the public disorder and noise clauses also make it an anti-protest law, because the police have a history of regarding public protest as inherently disorderly, and noise (say, from a vehicle-mounted PA system leading a protest march) which upsets those in power as "excessive". Naturally, there's no protection against this - no Terrorism Suppression Act-style clause saying "for the avoidance of doubt, protests, strikes, lockouts, and industrial action are not 'disorderly', and their noise is not 'excessive'". The drafting is so shoddy they haven't even excluded dwelling-places or marae from the definition of "accessible area". And given the regime's anti-protest noises, this should be regarded as deliberate until proven otherwise.
That all stinks, but its not the worst of it. The other part of the bill "reaffirms" the rules about the police collecting intelligence and recording people in public places. I put "reaffirms" in quotes because it does nothing of the sort. The courts and the Privacy Commissioner, in a long series of judgements (Tamiefuna v R, but also Hamed v R), have said what the law is, and that the police have been systematically breaking it. The regime's response is to dramatically broaden the law, and legalise the police's unlawful behaviour.
The new amendments start with a list of "purposes for which Police may collect information", which is a good start. It then says that the police can record anything they can see or hear in or from a public place, or anything they can see or hear on private property if they are lawfully there. No warrants required. To see how much of an intrusion this is, we have only to look at the police's illegal photographing and databasing of young Māori, or the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamed v R, which found that the police could not just covertly film and record people on private (but generally publicly accessible) property under "implied licence" without a warrant. That ruling led to a temporary law change, which was later incorporated into the Search and Surveillance Act 2012, which set limits on the police's ability to spy from public places without a warrant. The amendment bill would void that long established law.
If this passes, the police will be able to park outside your house with a camera and spy on you in your yard or through your windows, and record anything visible (to what wavelength?) or audible (with how much amplification?), without needing any type of warrant. They won't even need to be physically present, because the "by any means" allows remote cameras and microphones. Or they can use a drone, with thermal cameras and high-gain directional microphones and just spy on you 24/7, without any warrant, oversight, or reporting. Those are unquestionably "searches" in terms of the BORA (clearly being interference with a reasonable expectation of privacy) - but they'll be lawful. And of course they can hassle people on the street, photograph them, database them, and record their conversations without any suspicion of a crime.
This is obviously very convenient for police. But it is not the sort of thing done in a free and democratic society. We need to stop it. We need to topple the tyrants at the election.
