OPINION
The Labour-Greens Government wasted precious time and money on Covid when the country needed relief from the high cost of living, poorly maintained roads, hospital staffing shortages, high truancy rates, the explosion in youth crime and rising welfare dependency.
The politicians in government today cannot be trusted. Some were in the House during Ardern’s tenure and they have a vested interest in distancing themselves from the fallout.
Ministers during Covid didn’t ask probing questions, which is one reason desperate voters brought Winston Peters back in from the cold.
We don’t have politicians like NSW’s Craig Kelly or Queensland’s Senator Gerard Rennick asking the hard questions.
Instead, we got Ardern’s Royal Commission on Covid, which will not be independent or unbiased because the chair is Professor Tony Blakely (An ex-New Zealander working in Public Health in Melbourne) who worked with key players during New Zealand’s Covid response. Blakely, with Michael Baker and Nick Wilson of the University of Otago, authored the paper, “Elimination could be the optimal response strategy for COVID-19 and other emerging pandemic diseases” published in the BMJ in 2020. A more biased eye would be hard to find for a project costing upwards of $10M.
Ardern’s fiscally irresponsible and destructive Covid strategies received zero scrutiny from the thunderously silent opposition benches and media who were bribed into compliance by conditions attached to the Public Interest Journalism Fund.
The Covid years got our full attention but only as possums in the headlights.
Law changes made during the Covid years would have fallen at the first common sense hurdle, had it existed, but nothing would have changed the outcomes because the deck was stacked against us.
On 9 December 2021 the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill was passed unanimously on its third reading, allowing people to self determine their gender from 16 December 2021.
Pandering to a small but vocal LGBTQ community was complete madness for the general public and downright insanity for the mentally ill.
Cross-dressers previously indulging secretly behind closed doors are weaponised today to demand our respect.
Their publicly endorsed, self-determined gender fluidity is both a weapon and a shield.
A weapon against the very young offspring of stupid parents who dragged them along to Drag Queen Story Hours in public libraries, potentially as prey to paedophiles hiding in plain sight and a shield brandished in the legal system as demonstrated by the felon in the following story.
In November 2022 Matthew Richard Nelson was sentenced as a transgender woman in the Hamilton District Court to twelve years and ten months jail for stabbing three people, breaching a protection order, intentional damage, and resisting police. Nelson’s jail time was reduced by 30% to nine years and three months “in recognition of Nelson’s guilty pleas and aspirations to rehabilitate herself.”
All Nelson’s victims were severely injured, One man is the restaurant owner, the other man a customer who came to aid the attacked and the sole female victim was Nelson’s former partner. Yes, Nelson (presumably in his male persona) had a female partner.
Although Nelson goes by the name Emma and is known to identify as a woman, she is named on police charging documents as Matthew Richard Nelson.
As the court was told, she now prefers to go by the name Pandora Electra – and it was this name by which Judge Noel Cocurullo referred to her during the sentencing process.
Stuff
Twenty years ago anyone with three different names and three separate personas would be considered mentally defective, but not today.
Nelson wanted to be held in a women’s prison (presumably as a male persona – a pig in clover) but what about the safety of the female prisoners when his “pre-sentence report had found Nelson to be at high risk of further violent harm to others”?
For his previous convictions, Nelson was incarcerated in Spring Hill Men’s Prison but wasn’t happy about returning there, and his counsel argued for his return to Auckland Women’s Prison because “she [Nelson] felt safer and was motivated to engage in drug and alcohol rehabilitative programmes, as well as a business and creativity course.”
At the end of his nine years and three months in a women’s prison will Nelson prove he earned the 30% reduction in his sentence because he has rehabilitated himself? Will the justice system actually check? And what does rehabilitation actually mean for someone arguably desperate to get out of prison?
Another major law change was to the cause of death recorded on death certificates, which occurred in March 2023 when the Coroners Amendment bill passed its third reading. It was aimed at reducing the backlog of death certificates awaiting coronial investigation.
The Coroners Amendment Bill, amongst other things, will establish new coronial positions, known as Associate Coroners, who will be able to perform most of the functions, powers, and duties of Coroners.
The new roles are intended to help reduce the time it takes for certain cases to move through the coronial system, and free up Coroners to spend more time on more complex cases.
Beehive
The medical practitioner, nurse practitioner or coroner can now record the cause of death as “unascertained natural causes” instead of asking for more information or referring the death to a coroner for investigation.
Four amendments include establishing associate coroners to perform most functions of a coroner except inquests, and giving coroners power to decide not to hold an inquest, and allowing written findings to be issued with the cause of death only if the broader circumstances are not considered to be of public interest.
However, it’s the proposal to allow the cause of death to be recorded as “unascertained natural causes”, with no need for an autopsy or further investigation, that has forensic pathologists worried.
Northern Forensic Pathology Service clinical director Dr Simon Stables told the justice select committee in October the amendment was “flawed” and would not make any difference to the workflow of coroners.
“It is true some deaths cannot be determined, in terms of cause of death and that’s even after a full post-mortem. Those deaths are well less than 5 percent of all deaths,” Stables said.
“To institute a policy or especially legislation that allows a non-medical person – that is, a coroner – to determine the cause of death without adequate death investigation, without a post-mortem, just because on the surface it seems as if the person died of natural causes, I think is a very slippery slope down. This is a dangerous practice.“
RNZ
Isn’t this law change awfully convenient for a government that is very slow to acknowledge that the Covid vaccine was not as safe or effective as promised? It’s better for them that the increase in excess deaths in highly Covid-19 vaccinated countries remains a complete mystery.
But this week’s shocker in the courts was the judge who granted name suppression and discharged without conviction the man who seriously assaulted an elderly woman at the Posey Parker rally in Auckland last year. What have we become and how do we find our way back to a decent and safe society when we are blocked by stupid politicians making stupid laws for stupid judges to enforce?