Posts by Kyle Matthews
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"I don't know what the lawful route for that would be and in my position I have to advise people to act lawfully."
My translation: I'm kinda happy that this has all come out as it takes the pressure off me and the police. But as PM I have to say my line of 'people should follow the law'.
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Would I use this as my principal line? I'm not sure. The call quality seems a bit squawky, and certainly isn't a patch on my bangin' Ihug digital phone, which runs over the Wired Country connection.
I thought it's a great deal. Fixed line is basically the same price, but all national calls to landlines for free? That's blowing the major competition out of the water.
I'd have signed up already, except vodafone coverage is no good at my place. To have a decent conversation at my house on my mobile I need to go to one side of the house. It gets better if I stick my head out my lounge window. I'll stick with ihug and see how things develop with options over my broadband.
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The haka yesterday had a true purpose of expressing the hurt & anger Tuhoe feel at what the Police Commissioner accepts was wrong.
I'm sure it did. And I'm sure that all the people involved in doing it, and most if not all of the other people on the protest were 100% behind it and put everything into it. And I'm sure the police coped with it fine, it would have been a little intimidating, but they're big boys and girls and they can take action if anyone crosses the line.
All of those things won't change how it's perceived by the public when they watch it on TV. If public perception is what Tuhoe were working on, then I don't think it would have grabbed the middle ground and convinced people of any of their arguments.
If I was to summarise the perception that it carried in one line, it'd be "police restraint in the face of Tuhoe intimidation". I can't imagine that's what Tuhoe wanted to get across yesterday. Surely the opposite is what they've been saying.
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Ahem, he was only asked about TSA charges for a reason. There were only Arms Act and TSA charges going, and Arms Act charges aren't part of what the Attorney-General (least we forget) delegated to the SG. The SG deciding the accused shouldn't be charged with TSA charges does mean he thinks they should (or perhaps could would be better) be charged under the Arms Act. There is no remit for him to come up with other charges.
I don't disagree with that. What Sara originally said was:
the Solicitor General - highest legal prosecutor in the country - has concluded - after reading a great deal more than the single affidavit upon which the Dominion bases its report - decided that the evidence collected against these 16 at a cost of over $8 million (according to the police) is insufficient for them to face anything more than illegal possession of firearms charges
That's simply not true. The Solicitor General made no statements at all about whether the evidence was enough for Arms Act charges, or any other charges. He simply declined to pursue charges under the TSA. He was not asked about Arms Act charges, or charges under any other act. So statements about the evidence being insufficent for them to face anything other than TSA charges, are just putting words in his mouth. We have no idea what his opinion is on the Arms Act charges, or any other charges that could have, but aren't being brought against the accused.
The SG's statements were very significant in a number of ways. Most importantly because the accused will not face charges under the TSA, but also because he made comments about the quality of that law. We don't need to add to their significance by attributing things to him that he clearly did not say.
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the Solicitor General - highest legal prosecutor in the country - has concluded - after reading a great deal more than the single affidavit upon which the Dominion bases its report - decided that the evidence collected against these 16 at a cost of over $8 million (according to the police) is insufficient for them to face anything more than illegal possession of firearms charges
I'm going to say again, that's not what the solicitor general decided. We have no idea what other charges the solicitor general may have thought the evidence was sufficient for, he was only asked about charges under the TSA, and that's all that he ruled out.
If people are going to keep quoting him in support of their argument, it would help if they looked at what he said rather than what they wanted him to say.
PS: Russell, I know that the Te Qaeda thread is still larger than this one, but this must be the fastest growing thread you've ever had? 20 pages in about 16 hours. I've spent a fair portion of my day just reading.
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I think it's a bit sad that the MSM is granted any respect as bart of out National identity at all when relatively small groups of local human such as Tuhoi require PR budgets in-order to get accurate press.
I think whenever you're doing a public event designed to get public support, you should think about how it appears in the media, if you want to get the most out of it. That would have been my advice to Tuhoe today, it would have been my advice to Destiny when they did their fascist styled march a while ago.
I don't know what you mean by 'accurate press'. There were people there wearing balaclavas. Indeed, as I understand it, that was part of the costume of the protest. Having arranged that particular image for the media, the marchers couldn't exactly complain if the media then publish it.
And a muzzled dog I saw in one photo, held by a guy with a bandana over his face. Are we going for 'looking real threatening and scaring the white folks' as our image this week?
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Apart from anything else, nobody is being charged with terrorism, so being found guilty of it isn't very likely. And the firearms charges are simply charges of failure to comply with bureaucracy, which doesn't strike me as beyond the pale.
Yup. It's not running military style training camps and talking about killing people that's the problem.
It's failing to fill in the paperwork for your training camp. OSH regulations you understand.
FFS.
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I don't see anything off the wall in assuming that our police would behave in much the same way as the UK police / security forces. There's pretty much no oversight that would stop them engaging in that sort of activity (using major criminals as informers).
I'm sure they do. I wasn't aware it was illegal, though probably more often it's done by catching one, and then giving him a deal to testify against the rest, rather than paying money to one.
I just fail to see how the behaviour of the UK police in dealing with a mafia gun runner and drug dealer, makes it likely that the police paid someone to infiltrate the 'Te Qaeda' group. It's a tenuous connection held together by old sticking plasters and wishful thinking.
I'd find it much more believable, as an alternative to my 'peace activist finds camps not to liking, tells police' story, if someone was to wave around 'one activist gets approached by police, who put the heavies on them for their future legal career/international travel', and activist spills to save themselves.
And I'm sure that that is just what some in the police force are counting on by roping in the pacifists and environmentalists with the really dangerous people.
It's not of course possible that there's one or two police officers who are for peace, or green themselves, who might find the unjustified linking together of the 'pacifists and environmentalists' with the 'really dangerous people', y'know, immoral and illegal.
I don't get why some people, with anything to do with the police, jump first to the conspiracy theory. Given that the same people think the police 'leak like a sieve' whenever it's convenient for them, wouldn't it also be logical that if police start getting that fucked up, that this also might become public?
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New citizens swear oaths of allegience. Does that mean that those granted citizenship can commit treason while the NZ-born can't?
I don't believe that a treason charge could ever be justified in peacetime these days.
Well I'd be pretty much in agreement with your belief there, I don't know the answer to your question on the first one.
But just saying, it's my understanding that all New Zealanders at least are covered by the treason law. The original poster indicated otherwise.
I wandered down the hill to take a look at the hikoi during lunch time: the unintentional irony of ranks of people dressed up in combat fatigues with keffiyah masking their faces chanting 'we're not terrorists' was certainly worth a walk in the wind.
Seriously, the photo on stuff of the protester with the covered up face and the dog with a muzzle on. That's a future class in 'bad public relations'.
"It's highly unlikely the police would have used paid informants"
Really? they do it with every other crime. Why would they suddenly develop scruples around this?
Because the informant would have to:
A. Already be on the inside somewhat. Been to the camps, or knew someone who had been there who told them about it. The logical place they're going to come from is a peace or environmental activist. They're not going to take money from the cops to nark. They'd be a very principled person, and they would have done it, I would guess, out of anti-violence beliefs. Or...
B. Be someone that the police paid to infiltrate the camps. And the police wouldn't use a civilian to infiltrate a camp of people training with weapons. They'd use an undercover cop. And if they had an undercover cop, they wouldn't be relying on all this recording, their primary evidence from the 10th would be the cop's testimony.
Police pay informants in other crimes where they know the person has knowledge, and the only way they're going to get it out of them is by giving them money. Drugs crimes most commonly.
There are people facing arms charges, and those people were facing considerable damage to their reputations anyway for their involvement in things that were stupid but not illegal, but there was and is no terrorism.
That's not what the SG said. He didn't say there was, he didn't say there wasn't. He made a legal ruling in relation to the TSA.
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Were they? thats the point.
The question shouldn't be 'were they', it should be 'what did the police have good reason to believe'. Police are always having to deal with the best information that they have, and their best guesswork.
The Dom material that we've seen today indicates that they could have been seriously talking about it, but probably weren't close to enacting anything (unless the time period Oct 10 - Oct 15 had something happen in it that led to the police raids along those lines).
The two questions about police actions should be separated.
1. Should the police have intervened when they did?
2. When they intervened, did they use appropriate methods?I think it's useful to consider them as separate questions. You could see an alternative version of events where the police intervened, but Ruatoki was no where near as 'ramped up' (eg, no AOS), and people didn't feel so threatened. The police actions on the day don't necessarily mean that they were wrong to be there, they may just mean that they did it wrong.
Ignoring 2 for the moment, for 1:
Clearly there was stuff being said and done that police should definitely have been interested in. We want police at least keeping an eye on people who are talking about killing other people and who have weapons and training camps along those lines.
They could have intervened earlier, but it may be that they were waiting for evidence and more incrimination. Obviously one of their concerns is getting convictions and putting people away. If they'd jumped earlier in the operation, they might have missed some people or important evidence.
I'm not sure why the police intervened when they did, perhaps that's just information that we don't have. Obviously at some stage, if things had gone down a path where something was going to be done, you'd want them to intervene to stop it in a safe way.
Of course, if the activities had come to nothing, waiting would have had the advantage of seeing things through to an end game (group fizzles out or something), and then deciding what charges if any should be laid.