Henry Nowak and Stupid Rules

The Haps

ACT’s annual rally is on Sunday 28th June. This is the biggest Party Event in 3 years where the themes of the campaign and new policy will be launched. Please reserve your tickets to support the Party this election year.

Mark Cameron is a stand up good bloke. He took off his overalls, (reluctantly) put on a suit, and travelled from his Ruawai Dairy Farm to Parliament. He did it because he saw his family (he acts like he is biologically related to every other New Zealand farmer) under attack. Scapegoated for environmental harm, rural children were taught their parents were bad people by the schools those same parents paid for.

Yesterday Mark announced he won’t stand for Parliament again. He’s fought kidney disease for years, and hoped to get a transplant, but his heart failed him as he was preparing for the operation. Now he doesn’t believe he’ll be able to return to Parliament. It is a tragedy for him and ACT, but also for the country that’s been richer for having him.

We believe his greatest legacy is the Government halving methane targets. ACT alone voted against those targets and Mark carried on the fight. He scared the bejesus out of other parties and made change under this Government inevitable. Without him, it would have been kicked down the road and the most efficient farmers in the world would still be facing punitive costs their competitors don’t face.

His other legacy is that another Dairy Farmer, Andrew Hoggard, followed him into ACT. Mark has left ACT’s future in rural New Zealand strong.

Henry Nowak and Stupid Rules

Henry Nowak’s murder happened on the other side of the world, but it is difficult to ignore its tragedy and injustice. This week Free Press remembers a life taken too soon, and asks ‘could it happen here’ and ‘what can we learn from it?’

The tragedy and injustice is twofold. There is the life taken from a promising young man and his family in vicious and violent circumstances. Then there’s the almost unbelievable reaction of the British police on the scene.

If you haven’t read about it, Henry Nowak was a first year university student walking home from a party. He was not drunk, his blood alcohol was below the legal limit for driving. He was stabbed, and later died from his injuries.

Police on the scene chose to ignore his cries that he had been stabbed and could not breathe. Instead they treated him as the criminal, and handcuffed him as he bled to death. They believed his attacker, who said he was guilty of racial abuse, and ignored his suffering. The accusations of racism were not true, not that that should have been the priority when he was dying.

When something like this becomes global news, especially in a country we share much in common with, people naturally ask: could something so awful possibly happen here?

Free Press doesn’t think so. New Zealand Police are not been infected with the virus of identity politics that seemed to play out in the Henry Nowak tragedy.

But neither is New Zealand immune to putting the scourge of identity politics ahead of basic and important facts and equal rights.

Just under two years ago, the Solicitor General of New Zealand produced prosecution guidelines saying that Police should think twice about prosecuting somebody if they were Māori. With ACT in Government, such a racist doctrine was withdrawn. We now have a new Solicitor General completely committed to the rule of law. You have to keep fighting for fair.

We had a Police Commissioner whose priorities often seemed far from the basic expectations that New Zealanders have: enforce the law effectively, without fear or favour. That Commissioner is also gone, and the new one has started off well.

But there is another lesson, and another problem at play here. Why did the British Police act the way they did? It’s not that the actions of a few officers represent the entire force, of course they don’t. The issue is how something so extraordinary could happen at all.

British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has given a useful explanation. We at Free Press admire Badenoch, she is the only political leader we know who is an Electrical Engineer, besides David Seymour. Badenoch asks:

“How was it possible that the police officers heard two accusations, one of racism and the other of stabbing, and it was the racism they appeared most attuned to? I believe the issue is the training they are given. Well-meaning, but totally wrong-headed, lacking in common sense and, possibly illegal. Common sense is disappearing because people have replaced thinking with box-ticking…”

In other words, people have been paralysed by process. The outcome doesn’t matter, so long as you follow the correct process you will be ok. This cultural problem is making everything slow and leaving people miserable.

One of the most important things we can learn from Henry Nowak’s tragedy is that people need the authority to make common sense decisions without being paralysed by bureaucratic process. Without that authority, people like those British police can follow well-intended processes to absurd and tragic results.