If you have a taste for the somnambulistic — or the sado-masochistic — you can wade through the 441 pages of the Western Australian Legislative Council Standing Committee on Legislation’s report into “stop and search” laws for yourself. Given that it took 11 months, 21 submissions, 76 witnesses and three delays to write the thing, and might take about the same process to read it, let me save you the trouble and quote from the first page the only thing you need to know.
“After considering [the Bill], a majority of the Committee (comprised of Hons Mia Davies, Dr Sally Talbot, and Alison Xamon MLCs) could find no justification for the Bill.”
That would be, for the uninitiated, the Liberal Government’s own Upper House committee, saying very clearly that the Bill has no justification. Never mind any amendments, never mind any supposed safeguards or limitations or utterances of faith. Stop and search legislation should never have been proposed in the first place.
As for amendments designed to provide “checks and balances”, what is the point? The entire idea of removing reasonable suspicion from was to remove checks and balances in the first place. Any government really interested in safeguards and accountability would never have put this turkey of an idea up at all.
Surely now Police Minister Rob Johnson must go. He’s presided over laws that jail the mentally ill, laws that confiscate innocent people’s cars and now had laws designed to remove an innocent person’s right to personal physical sanctity rejected by his own people. How much is enough?
This legislation is now a dozen pages of condemned product. And if the Government had the common decency of even a corner supermarket grocer it would have done the honest thing and recalled the bill; the whole thing has been killed stone dead by the Government’s own committee, and to proceed with it any further would be a sort of legislative Weekend at Bernie’s, propped up by wires and rods and bugger-all raison d’etre.
But of course, this is politics. And facts have little to do with the case.
In a display of arrogance that would be breathtaking if wasn’t predictable, the Barnett Government will press ahead with the laws. Laws, remember, that have no justification and no chance of rectification. Laws that have been shown by trial and evidence to have no effect on crime but every effect on everyday citizens. Laws that are so flawed in concept and execution that everyone from the Law Society to former Liberal politicians to the United Nations reckon they’re stuffed.
You can only assume they’ve lost the plot.
All this drum-beating is occurring in the midst of household utility prices rising an average of $1000 a year thanks to Government policy, ministers who can’t explain their own policy and treasurers who lose their jobs shortly after they lose their trousers. Never mind all that, eh? Carry on with legislation that isn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, doesn’t work and shouldn’t happen.
This penny-pinching, piss-ant mob of mean, nasty, ignorant little intellectual dwarfs that pose as the Western Australian government seem intent on proving their own caricatures.
Prohibited behaviour orders? They don’t work, but we’ll bring ’em in anyway. Naming and shaming kids on the internet? Saves on the cost of building stocks on Subiaco Oval. Stop and search laws? 60% of the public don’t want them (very courageous, Minister, very courageous), the police didn’t ask for them and our own committee killed them; but what the hell, let’s persist with a bit of Zombie government.
These laws have curled up their toes, started pushing up daisies, rung down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. Yet with rising prices, falling crime and ministerial dysfunction, this is what Colin Barnett has chosen to pursue; he’d rather you be frisked without cause than you pay your power bill. It isn’t so much out of touch as it is a total loss of sense and feeling.
Stop and search is dead, and nothing short of a jolt of electricity can bring it back to life. Anybody got a Taser handy?
Great article. The staggering thing is that WA is too busy rolling around in the mining cash to give a stuff about this.
great piece
it is a constant source of puzzlement to me that the continual erosion of civil liberties in WA gets so little coverage, and that the police and criminal justice system is never called to account.
Not just stop and search, but mandatory sentencing, restriction on the right of assembly, tasers, the extra-judicial powers of the CCC, continuing aboriginal deaths in custody, and the piss-poor performance of the police in the Mallard, Mickelberg, Rainey and Puddy cases.
Reference should be made to WA Chief Justice Wayne Martin’s speech this time last year when he said that Politicians are playing “punitive chicken” as they compete to impose tougher laws, fuelled by distorted public perceptions of the level of crime, and endorsed by a weak local media for whom crime stories are the only source of copy in a quiet town.
I disagree with your assertion that ‘the police didn’t ask for them’
Commissioner Karl O’Callahan said back in February: “we don’t have the power currently to simply walk up to people and check them for edged weapons. So we asked for the power or started having discussions about that back in 2006. What you’re seeing is the ultimate position of that discussion. ”
so what you need to be asking is: if the Legislature doesn’t want it, the public don’t want it, and the Liberals’ own select committee doesn’t want it, what kind of pressure is being exerted by the police on Colin Barnett to have these laws passed?
@Skink: The commissioner wants “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.[1]” – for police.
Remind me not to visit the place for a while.
[1] well, not quite as extreme as the origins of that quote.
Yes, Sanity is not something that resides in the state of WA ever since the inmates took over the asylum, but then again, it’s always been a crazy neighbourhood regardless of who’s incharge.
**Weekend at Bernie’s**….eh?…yeah!!..there was a few of those until we fell out of bed together right on top of her.
@Meski
***Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.***
Aleister Crowley stole that from the Sabateans who stole it from Old Nic. Are you saying that this is the new direction of Govt in WA? I fear you be right.
I currently have no plans to visit the state of WA.