NZ Punching Above Its Weight Again

No doubt many people will be happy that there are now a record number of people in our prisons. It's a theme of letters to the editor pages that somehow hard time and plenty of it is the solution to our ills. Less people will be happy to know that some of these inmates are in Police stations because we now lock up so many people up our dedicated penal institutions can't cope with the numbers. At Wellington Central Police Station this means no natural sunlight, no exercise and a menu of junk food. Even less people (I'm hoping no-one) will be happy when they realise that the inmates spending time in police custody are remand prisoners ie they are awaiting trial and have not been proved to have done anything wrong. One would hope that even the eye-for-an eye crowd are alarmed by that.

John Howard-Human Rights Champ

Putting aside the question of whether we should be playing cricket with some of the other test playing nations if human rights observance is the issue, many people think Zimbabwe is the last place anyone should be sending a representative cricket team. The last time the question was raised here there was much talk of politics in sport, law suits against New Zealand Cricket for breaching its contractual obligations and other assorted brow furrowing. In the end the team went with the Government expressing disappointment and wringing its hands. Now it's Australia's turn to tour but in typical Ozy fashion there's not been a lot of angst. John Howard simply threatened to exercise the Government's powers to remove passports from the tour party and that was that. Because of our Passports Act that simply can't be done in New Zealand. The power to remove a passport is restricted basically to cases of lack of entitlement or where removal is demanded by national security. And just as well too.