Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: We have bigger concerns than prisoners not voting

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

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11h ago 2:00

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Now, I've done a bit of an exercise today.

I started reading the news this morning, and I was really quickly struck by how many opinion pieces and comments of outrage there were over the Government removing the voting rights from prisoners.

There was, just by my account, two full opinion pieces by academics, a newsletter that landed in my inbox, a left-wing blog post, outrage from Labour, and outrage from the Greens.

So when I saw that, I thought, jeez, there's quite a lot coming from these guys.

It might be interesting to compare this to how many opinion pieces and comments of outrage there are about the four killings currently in the news that have all been committed by people either previously in jail or previously in mental health care.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the man who has now murdered twice and been found insane twice.

It's the two murders by Hill Morton mental health patients, and it's the murder by the parole rapist in Christchurch.

All of them have been in the news just in the last few days.

I didn't find one piece - not one opinion piece - by an academic about this, not one comment of outrage from the Greens, and the only relevant comment that I could find from Labour was the Labour MP saying that it was inappropriate to comment on it.

Now, doesn't that tell you a lot about where we're putting our energy at the moment?

We are, it would seem, angsting more about protecting the right that a prisoner has to vote - a right which, by the way, we were just told yesterday that most prisoners don't even want. But we are angsting ourselves over protecting that.

And we are more angsting more about protecting that than we are about protecting the rights of innocent people not to be hurt by high-risk people who we know are high-risk.

Now, we should be interrogating the agencies responsible here. We should be finding out what went wrong, and we should be angsting over it so it doesn't happen again.

And I would venture that our priorities are way out of whack if we are more stressed in the news media about whether the bad guys can vote than where authorities are keeping innocent people safe.

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Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: We have bigger concerns than prisoners not voting

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

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published 11h ago