I think the majority of us would agree that the gang patch ban, along with the renewed police attitude to gang activity, has produced a pretty successful answer to what was previously a situation with gangs where they basically ran rampant, ruined a lot of people's lives and produced untold misery in a lot of small-town New Zealand.
I note as a watcher of Parliamentary Question Time that Minister of Police Mark Mitchell is very rarely peppered with questions these days because the Opposition know they were on the wrong side of history i.e. letting gangs run wild.
It hasn’t stopped though, with some bloke who got arrested and charged with a gang insignia breach finding himself a lawyer, going to court and successfully finding that the gang patch law is not consistent with the Bill of Rights.
The upside is this now gets referred back to Parliament and they don’t have to do a lot about it.
They can of course appeal the finding. But Judith Collins, before she retired as Attorney General, suggested the new law may well find trouble in court. So whether an appeal is wise is debatable.
But this bloke's lawyer (his details by the way are suppressed) thinks if this goes nowhere, it can be taken to the United Nations, which I think is where most of us would want to end our interest in the case.
Kim Dotcom's case might go to the UN as well.
My question is: for what?
We have of course signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which I'm sure when we signed it, like a lot of United Nations frippery, we didn’t anticipate the nitty-gritty of gang law being part of it.
Generally, the UN conventions are built around the more extreme outworkings of law and morals and societal ills, and the Mongrel Mob down State Highway 1 on a funeral process wasn’t one of them.
Which brings us to the important question here.
Let's say the court here is right, and the gang patch ban is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. But in being inconsistent it's brought some peace to people's lives, has quelled a level of behaviour most of us saw as out of control, and has broadly solved a problem.
So who really won then?
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