President's Column - Urgent law change needed for Police video surveillance
“The reality is that we did what we did with the Court’s approval to enter private property, albeit not specific authority to film, simply because no legislation existed to allow such authority to be given.”
As I write this column, we are hurriedly preparing our submissions on the Government’s urgent bill to legitimise and reinstate the evidence we gather using video surveillance.
The media and political commentary around the Supreme Court finding discussed below this column has shown how difficult it is to get the real facts into a debate where politicians, lefties, righties and it seems everyone in between has seen it as an opportunity to get on the telly. As usual, police have borne the brunt of the attack, with claims of trespass and illegal activity.
The reality is that we did what we did with the Court’s approval to enter private property, albeit not specific authority to film, simply because no legislation existed to allow such authority to be given. A good analogy is the difference between trout fishing and whitebaiting. You must get permission to fish for trout, but you can’t get permission to fish for whitebait because there is no legal mechanism to do so – but you can still whitebait.
Hopefully by the time you read this, the bill will have passed and we can keep the whitebait we caught before it was decided it was unlawful.
It won’t silence the critics, but may balance the media commentary.
On media commentary, we also had sad old Ross Meurant trying to rewrite history in a totally unbalanced magazine article. The pleasing thing though was seeing the Commissioner prepared to treat that ill-informed rubbish for what it was, and correct it. Hopefully, gone is the pathetic beaten-dog reaction from the Executive which has been the norm in recent times when we have faced similar attacks on our integrity.
We have been an easy target for the ill-informed and self-interested for too long. It’s time to do some target hardening and only accept the criticism which is truly justified.
