Rodney Hide weighs in on gun control

I had something to say on this yesterday. Now Rodney Hide puts in his 2 cents worth.

Sense and nonsense about gun control in New Zealand

The ACT Party has played a pretty tawdry role in NZ politics, especially over the John Key years. However, I find it difficult to disagree over the stance on euthanasia, and now gun control

Opinion: The other side of the gun lobby’s story
Rodney Hide

Via Facebook, Wed, 10 Apr 2019

Hidesight

I learned from news reports of gun lobbyist Mike Loder’s must-watch submission on the botched and rushed gun laws.

His 15-minute presentation drove National’s Judith Collins to make common cause with Labour's Michael Wood to smear Mr Loder as a gun-toting, terrorist-inciting, mad-man.

He clearly struck a nerve: MPs ganged up to shoot the messenger, desperate to ignore the message.

The news only reported the verbal abuse.

His presentation was entertaining; his report sobering.

Experience shows guns aren’t the best terrorist weapon: 9/11 (box cutters), Oklahoma City (nitrogen fertiliser plus solvent), 2016 Nice (truck). The terrorist wrote he knew this: he chose guns not to maximise death but to maximise the political response. He’s won that one.

There is also a serious problem with the police administering gun laws:

They have lost the details of 25,000 gun licensees when they swapped out their bespoke database.

They haven't followed up 6727 expired licences.

They have licenced 29 gang members.

They have licenced at least 1132 criminals from Australia including Peter James Edwards who had 53 convictions in Australia. He used his licence to buy 72 rifles and shotguns, which he cut down and added pistol grips and silencers. He filed off the serial numbers and sold them to criminals including patched members of the Headhunters gang.

Years later there’s still no data-checking with Australian police.

The problem is criminals, not law abiding gun owners. Ninety-nine percent of gun crime is committed by criminals without a gun licence. They are not bothered by policy or statute. Nine percent of all gang members have five or more gun convictions. One has 46. One has been caught with illegal guns nine separate times. There is little or no consequence.

Criminals will always have guns no matter what: They can smuggle them, they can make them, they can modify them and they can steal them. We have had machine gun murders in New Zealand with home-made guns.

Less than 8% of gun thieves are caught. Police treat gun theft no more seriously than any other theft. If miraculously caught, the punishment is typically a fine less than the value of the gun or a warning.

Ordinarily, an opposition would stand up to a government rushing hamfistedly to confiscate the property of responsible owners demonstrably not the problem.

No. The two old parties have made common cause against the interest of a great many law-abiding citizens and against the principles of parliamentary democracy.

The MPs simply abused Mr Loder. Ms Collins questioned whether he was a fit and proper person while Labour MP Michael Woodhouse attacked him for calling Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern a tyrant. He was prompted to do so when she laughed when asked whether she would be seeking public input.

The MPs didn’t contradict his facts. They offered no followup to his alarming testimony.

It's only going to get worse: Soon the police will be able to arrest Mr Loder for hate speech. How dare he call the prime minister a tyrant.

Rodney Hide

Orwellian and Kafkaesque - Dark Times in New Zealand

And then they came for Rodney Hide?

Martyn Bradbury

The Daily Blog,

19 July, 2015

I’m no fan of Rodney Hide. The mans politics are a vicious mix of right wing scumbaggery and base appeal bullshit, but no one, not even Rodney Hide deserves to be treated like this…

Secrets and spies in God’s Own

You will no doubt be as surprised as I was to learn that a junior civil servant is able to scoop up more information about you and me, in secret, without a warrant, than the director of the Security Intelligence Service can.

Well, that's if the New Zealand Government is to be believed.

You will recall a couple of months back I reported my horror at discovering it appeared I was under covert investigation. I have since found out more — but not much.

It started with Hamilton-based Deputy Official Assignee Annemarie Foidl issuing what are called Section 165 notices to my friends and colleagues.

Foidl demanded that they appear before a private investigator to answer questions or face arrest.

They complied. In such fashion Foidl scooped up information about me, my movements, my activities, my family and more.

Foidl's boss, Mandy McDonald, will neither confirm nor deny the gathering of information.

She says I am not under investigation. I now know her real target is a friend of mine.

Quite how Foidl jumps from collecting information about his business affairs to gathering deeply personal information about me and my family I don't know.

I have complained repeatedly in detail to McDonald, who says there's no evidence her staff have operated "contrary to law, unreasonably, unjustly or oppressively".

I wrote to Minister Paul Goldsmith. He says there's nothing he can do and suggested I get legal advice.

I would have thought he would be anxious to ensure his department, when snooping on private citizens, is doing so lawfully. Instead he told me to get a lawyer.

He has left it up to me to prove their snooping unlawful — not for them to prove it's lawful.

The interesting thing for me is how upsetting it has proved to be. I have nothing to hide. I am well used to being in the public spotlight. It was once part of my life to have others talk about me in less than flattering terms.

I would have thought it no big deal to have a state agency do similar.

But I have found it extremely disturbing to have friends and colleagues compelled to appear under threat of arrest and answer questions about me and my family put to them by a private investigator under contract to the Government.

Oh, and to have those friends and colleagues warned not to tell me what they were asked.

It's extremely invasive and sinister. It's what we expect of totalitarian regimes, not free and democratic societies such as ours.

I have complained to the Ombudsman, who is investigating and I am hitting the law books to understand my options.

It simply can't be that Foidl, whose job it is to administer bankrupts, has more power to snoop on people than the director of the SIS, whose job it is to chase terrorists.

…the degree in which Rodney and his whanau have been threatened into providing information without any legal protections is Orwellian AND Kafkaesque. Allowing the State to have wide ranging unchallenged powers and then sub contracting those powers out to private organisations that have zero judicial oversight is a manifest contradiction to everything a liberal democracy built upon the rule of law judges itself upon.

When I launched the fight back against the mass surveillance powers Key rammed through Parliament, I argued this wasn’t a Right wing or Left wing issue – NO Government should have these types of totalitarian powers.

Rodney Hide, say what you will about him (and I think I’ve said everything you can about him) is no slouch. If he can be bullied and threatened like this, what do you think they can do to people with no public profile at all?

There has over the last 7 years been a creeping darkness at the heart of power in this country. Things that we fought and died in wars against have quietly shadowed the corridors of power and become the norm.

We are becoming the land of the long dark cloud.

Why am I under investigation?

The state apparently has me under covert investigation.