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Before the Public Health Response Bill was made law, various government departments took a look at it from various angles, and the Ministry of Health’s take on it was not just about its effectiveness (or not), but in regard to where it sat against the New Zealand Bill of Rights (BOR).
The Health chappies concluded that it ‘appears to be consistent’ with the Bill of Rights Act.

We have considered whether the COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill (‘the Bill’) is consistent with the rights and freedoms affirmed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (‘the Bill of Rights Act’).

We have not yet received a final version of the Bill. This advice has been prepared in relation to the latest version of the Bill (PCO 22923/4.2). We will provide you with further advice if the final version includes amendments that affect the conclusions in this advice.

We have concluded that the Bill appears to be consistent with the rights and freedoms affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act.

Considering that they would naturally have had a large hand in crafting the Bill this could hardly be a surprise. The reason audits are carried out by independent agencies is precisely because any institution, even with the best will in the world, cannot audit itself with any degree of confidence.
You can read the thing itself here, but a brief synopsis of the powers it grants the State and its paramilitary wing, the NZ Police Force, is as follows:
  • Enter homes, Maraes, land, building, craft, vehicle, place, or… “thing”… with no warrant.
  • You will be legally required to do whatever they insist you do.
  • Close roads and public places.
  • Stop vehicles.
  • Demand identification of anyone. Which includes: full name, full address, date of birth, occupation, telephone number, or any of those particulars.
  • Demand closure of any businesses and “undertakings”.
The bill also solves that pesky little problem of there being not enough Police to do all this, by empowering “enforcement officers” to able to do it.

The Director-General may authorise a suitably qualified and trained person who is not an employee of the Ministry of Health, or a class of suitably qualified and trained persons who are not employees of the Ministry of Health, to carry out any functions and powers of an enforcement officer under this Act.

I always love it when government departments cover their butts with language like “suitably qualified and trained“. Given the clash between the need for rapid deployment of such people in a pandemic and the fact they won’t be just waiting around in sufficient numbers you can bet that “training” will amount to brief set of instructions in an office before they hit the streets.

That will probably also mitigate the unemployment numbers we’ll soon be seeing. Young men will be especially excited to join, especially if they get a baton, taser and really cool, spiffy uniforms.

Something in black with red highlights I would think. With leather boots too.
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Even so, I was more interested in how all this could be given the thumbs up against the New Zealand Bill of Rights, not just by Health but by other parts of the government. To my complete lack of surprise it passed their rules of consistency-thumb as well.
This is the usual nonsense you get when nations simply pass bits of paper into law and call them things like Constitutions and Bills of Rights but then honour them more in the breach than in the observance.

Every Communist nation had stuff like that, filled with more “rights” than anything in the West, a fact the Communists and their useful idiots in the West proudly boasted about. But in reality it was all worthless. The rights in those BOR’s were breached regularly and with no consequences.

Same here in New Zealand. And that’s not because of the cynicism of our political leaders, although there may be some of that.
No, it comes from the simple fact that for things like this to work they have to be buried in the psyche of the people of the nation. That it becomes something we know more than just intellectually; that we know such rights instinctively in our hearts and souls and that we’ve seen the consequences for those who have tried to breach our rights.

The American population has such rights seemingly in their bones because they’ve had a Bill of Rights embedded in the foundation of their country over two hundred years ago, but even there it gets breached often, usually in small ways, but sometimes in large ways, as now with the differing lockdowns in various US States that are being challenged in courts and on the streets.
That sort of constant vigilance is required from the American people themselves to make their rights meaningful, with cases in courts and Police and other law enforcement authorities, and even occasionally their political masters, held accountable in meaningful ways. Meaningful in terms of firings, resignations, fines or even jail time. Not to mention a solid amount of public shaming.

Here in NZ we simply have not had enough time pass – just thirty years  – for our Bill of Rights to become as meaningful and as embedded. And the more situations like this Public Health Bill that we have, the less meaning our Bill of Rights will have. People will just shrug their shoulders and say that it is the supremacy of Parliament that counts, just as it always did.
With time the New Zealand Bill of Rights might amount to something more than what it is now, but as this farce has demonstrated, it’s well on its way to becoming as much of a joke as the old Soviet one..