5 posts tagged “justice”

The first time I read about Philip Glenister getting his driver off for speeding (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) I chuckled, as he adopted his Gene Hunt persona. The cop saw the actor and said, according to Glenister, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this sir, I’ll let you off this time if you don’t mind.’
   Glenister had apparently said to him prior, ‘Yes, I’m the one on the booze, not him. Go and catch some proper criminals.’
   Then I found the earliest article on the incident in the Daily Mail tabloid which contrasted this with others in the UK:

   Earlier this week it emerged that Sydney Duffy was fined for doing 35mph in a 30mph area when he tried to leave the road quickly as his wife had an epileptic fit. The 63-year-old has appealed against the fine from Cumbria police and will appear in court.
   And Stephanie Cornwall was issued with a £60 fine after rushing to hospital when her six year-old son Alfie was mauled by a dog. The mother, 40, from Leicestershire, was travelling at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

   One law for celebrities?
   The Met should have more sense than to fine people like Mr Duffy and Ms Cornwall.
   At least here the traffic cops allow for some speedometer error and that humans cannot be expected to constantly monitor their speed when traffic safety is at issue. If you kept staring at your speedo, you might get involved in an accident!
   It is worse here in New Zealand than it was 30 years ago but by and large, 5 mph is not something for the cops to get that upset about.
   I know there are exceptions but I am talking in a general sense. As we work in metric, 5 mph is roughly 8 km/h.
   The second incident probably would have been frowned on more today, less so 30 years ago: 7 mph goes past that 10 km/h leeway that some cops have as a rule of thumb.
   I tend to drive at the legal limit but realize that due to speedometer error I can be anywhere between 5 km/h over or under.
   The ‘Your speed is’ digital signs around some parts of New Zealand are helpful as a means of calibrating my own speedometer—so why do so many of them have their displays closed?
   They tend to show that my car’s 50 km/h is actually 47 km/h so I tend to go closer to 55 km/h on my speedo.
   The problem is that speeding here is governed by legislation that brings strict liability, which basically means “no excuses”.
   But I would think a Kiwi copper would have been able to judge in both cases somewhat better than his or her British counterpart.
   I am not sure if we would distinguish between celebrities and everyday folk. Any stories? I know of one incident told to me by an eyewitness (the passenger) where a rich driver was let off because of the car he drove, and the officers wound up going into macho mode to discuss the vehicle and neglected to issue a fine for excessive speeding. I cannot reveal more since I am not permitted to, and I would hope it is exceptional rather than commonplace.
   If a flash car could get me off a fine, I would have really opened up the Astons and Porsche 911 I have driven, but I prefer my clean licence (knock on wood) and was much more careful.

We’ve ended January 2008 here in New Zealand with 10 murders. The government is saying this is an anomaly, but is it?
   Crime has been rising in New Zealand steadily since I have been observing the numbers and for older New Zealanders, the latest figures are a disgust.
   I am not overly surprised, given the rising gap between rich and poor, suggesting a mismanagement of the economy and an absence of jobs, while values and education have suffered at the same time.
   Those older New Zealanders who can remember back to the 1950s remember a country with roughly half the population and 18 convictions for murder between 1951 and 1957.
   I realize actual murders and successful convictions are different, but assuming that there were a couple of murders in this period that didn’t lead to a conviction, then we’re still looking at 20 over a seven-year period from January 1951 to December 1957.
   That’s roughly three per annum. If there’s double the population now, then we should expect statistics to show that there are six per annum for 2008.
   Remember that medical science wasn’t as advanced, so if we adjust for that, then maybe this estimate isn’t actually that far off.
   In this election year, I wouldn’t buy any party line that says things are all right. I wouldn’t even buy policies that talk about tougher sentencing. Because neither of these address the root problem.
   We need policies in New Zealand that say: we will address this rich–poor gap.
   How? Well, how about recognizing what’s going on instead of kowtowing to multinational corporations operating here?
   Since the end of Muldoonism, New Zealand has become the poster boy of the technocracy, doing everything that the economic experts said should work: privatization, free markets, the ending of tariffs.
   Ask yourself, even in the last five years, can you afford more or less of the things you want in your life? I don’t care if you are a student or a wage-earner or even a small business boss. The answer is probably no.
   When will we wake up and realize that these policies have driven a wedge between the rich and poor in a nation that once prided itself on being a fair, just, middle-class country?
   Since Labour sold off so many state assets in the 1980s, something National continued doing in the 1990s, we now have a lot of things in the hands of foreign corporations.
   Now, if these corporations were running these assets more efficiently, logically the government should be able to increase its tax take, which leads to more money for hospitals, schools and social services.
   But the idea of being a private corporation that spreads its activities across different countries is the ability to minimize the tax you pay, by writing some of it off with the operations you have in other places.
   So the opposite has happened. Meanwhile, these corporations have shed staff so the people who used to work there wound up on the dole, and there’s less money to pay out.
   The rich in cahoots with the big companies have done well while everyone else has suffered.
   To make up the shortfall in government coffers, the Labour Government introduced Lotto and basically became the biggest attraction for gamblers. Now we are reporting a rise in calls to gambling helplines.
   The other idea behind liberalizing our markets was so New Zealanders could go and compete globally. But how were we expected to make that leap? Even the richest New Zealanders of the 1980s didn’t survive the decade in good financial shape.
   We need to innovate and create and start new businesses but the support, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not there.
   Yet New Zealand is a place of great, novel ideas that often stay dormant, unless that Kiwi goes offshore and has a foreign company become interested.
   I have repeated this example many times: if TradeMe was really that successful, it would have bought Fairfax, not the other way around.
   The solution must be to have New Zealanders own New Zealand businesses, so that New Zealanders have jobs and taxes and profits stay in New Zealand.
   This is not about putting the barriers back up. The multinationals have embedded themselves too much into New Zealand.
   We can only hope to create global businesses that do for us what the multinationals have done here. We also need to encourage entrepreneurship at the small- to medium-sized business level so that everyone can have a chance to get his or her idea off the ground, beating the world. We are still blessed with a fairly good internet infrastructure that can become a useful tool for New Zealanders. 
   We need to consider tax policies that help the poor and penalize the sources for the inequity in New Zealand. The next government needs to play, essentially, Robin Hood. It needs to create policies for the middle class of New Zealand and what makes them happy wage-earners or self-employed business people, because that is where the majority of the tax will come from. ‘Teach a man to fish and he will eat for life.’ Time to stop handing the fish out and pretending it was a conjuror’s trick. (It was only cool when Jesus Christ did it with the 5,000, anyway.)
   And while I am a globalist at heart, this economy is too small at this point to allow technocratic policies to have free reign, without someone seeing to the interests of the Kiwis that need the most help. I want to see food banks disappear in five years because everyone has a job.
   An innovative government that might create new businesses itself can be a useful agent in the business community. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand’s dual-fuel natural gas infrastructure is still a dream for most countries. Yet a huge percentage of the nation’s cars ran on natural gas back then, able to fill up at the majority of stations across New Zealand.
   Government participation in a modernized Keynesian model could just work in 2008 and one only needs to look at Singapore and Malaysia for nearby adaptations of the very policies New Zealand had only 30 years ago.
   No one can claim they are paupers, and Malaysia itself did find, in 1997, that the technocratic way of thinking didn’t work for them. Having a strong man as a prime minister worked in its favour as Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad was able to say what he thought of the corporations wreaking havoc on his country’s financial markets.
   And with relatively little corruption in New Zealand, government innovation is not a bad idea, provided these state enterprises do not get overmanned to the levels they were at in years past.
   Remember, Absolut, the people who make the vodka, is a government-owned enterprise. No one seems to urge the Swedish Government to divest for the sake of the technocracy.
   Then, those who might find themselves in similar situations to the 10 murderers won’t suffer from envy, depression or rage.
   In the 1950s, New Zealand had about nine people unemployed. In the 2010s, we should be looking at 18. Full employment is key and the policies we are following now—policies which Labour and National predict they will essentially follow—won’t lead to any change in our rising crime rate or the widening gap between rich and poor, which neither party has even mentioned in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.

I love it. Dr Jay Parkinson of Brooklyn, NY, has gone online with his practice:

http://www.inter-actions.biz/blog/2007/10/is_there_a_doctor_in_the_house.html

That means you can reach him via electronic means and he will do diagnoses accordingly, even after hours for emergencies.
   Now, I would love to see lawyers do this. Even an e-court. Parties or their attorneys feed in their evidence to a site with limited fields and a judge decides. No emotion, no BS. The decision comes swiftly. Any mitigating factors can be fed in, but lawyers would be encouraged to write everything briefly. They would be unable to hide extra charges. And if they think anything’s been missed, then the process could go to appeal before a live court.
   It would lower the price of getting justice because the system would no longer need to support a live District Court, and appeals would be at the current price of the original claim. It would also make things faster.
   Best of all, the legal profession, branded as shysters even in Shakespeare’s day, would appear more transparent. It would start going up the ladder in people’s minds.
   I would love to see a country like Singapore, or even New Zealand, give this sort of thing a shot. Singapore prides itself on e-governmental processes and this would be an ultimate test. New Zealand’s system is far too entrenched but I’d love to see a party adopt this idea.
   It’s far too radical for Labour, and certainly would be gobbledegook for National.
   Greens? United Future? The Alliance?

Good news, from the Robinson family on my answerphone: Bruce Robinson was granted bail 5.30 p.m. Polish time. For all those who sent their prayers or signed the petition, thank you. He’s not out yet: the prosecutor can still appeal and had originally expected to be able to keep Bruce in jail till June, so confident he was of his situation. However, it seems a fair judge may have heard the pleas for bail.
   Despite our government’s inaction, hold your breath for the Foreign Minister-outside-Cabinet taking credit for all our hard work. Now we have to make sure he gets a fair trial, so I’ll still be active on it.

I keep wondering if Michael Richards would have gotten as bad a rap in New Zealand for his racist comments last week, or would we have moved on? He seems to avoided the press here, but strangely, Mel Gibson did not for his anti-Semitic tirade. Given how race is a contentious issue in the US—for instance, most Americans still have not seen the old BBC documentary about O. J. Simpson and the Nicole Brown–Ron Goldman murder (likely conclusion: O. J. didn’t do it)—I would have expected the use of the n word to have made the American-driven news more substantially.
   The fact that it hasn’t outside the US suggests that being an anti-Semite is more serious than being anti-black.
   So are blacks disadvantaged more Stateside? I mentioned O. J. purposely above. His new book, If I Did It, as many Americans know, was pulled by Rupert Murdoch during the week. The belief was that he should not be allowed to profit from his estranged wife’s and her friend’s murders, even if he was innocent in the criminal trial.
   However, most whites—not just American whites—believe that O. J. did it. Most blacks believe that justice was served in the criminal court and that O. J. didn’t do it.
   After seeing the BBC documentary and learning about Jason Simpson’s (O. J.’s son) tendency to violence, his accessibility (as a chef) to the very type of knife that killed her and Goldman, information about a plot to kill Nicole, and the way the police investigated the case, then it is very easy to come to the same conclusion as most African–Americans. British experts believed that most of the evidence submitted in the Simpson trial would never have been accepted in the UK: that the crime scene was heavily contaminated and that vital blood samples were not taken.
   But the white view seems to have got its way with Murdoch; never mind that an American court of law found the elder Simpson not guilty.
   I personally do not know any racist Americans. So the above is totally conjecture based on how the Michael Richards item was treated by the international press, and the public outcry over O. J.’s attempts to earn dollars off his story—as so many others have done.
   No, I don’t find what Michael Richards said acceptable at all. Nor do I find the murders anything but despicable. However, outside the United States, these items make for very interesting viewing, especially how they travel through the wires. I personally found Richards’ tirade as bad as (possibly worse than) Gibson’s, and question how one race’s viewpoint can so greatly affect whether a book written by a member of another race—yet the powers-that-be in the US, with its constitutional presumption of innocence, don’t seem to agree with me.