The government adding even more unduly harsh restrictions to the gang patch law at the last minute is doubly disappointing (see the Newsroom article).

It’s disappointing because the new changes further breach civil liberties by allowing police to search people’s houses in the name of stopping repeat offenders living in a house with a gang patch. It moves the focus from enforcing public behaviour to interfering with private lives. A search is a serious intrusion of government power into the lives of all the people who live somewhere, and the stated purpose of stopping someone from living in a house with a gang patch seems unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile.

It’s also disappointing because this significant change was added at the very last minute. The Select Committee process was already over, there was no time for further submissions from the public, the Attorney-General didn’t get to do another Bill of Rights analysis. The changes are being rammed through and flouting the norms of lawmaking in New Zealand.

The NZ Law Society wrote a strong letter opposing the changes.

The Law Society believes this is an incursion into private life that is not justified on the basis of the evidence available, and raises Bill of Rights and rule of law concerns. It has expressed its disappointment at the introduction of these amendments after the Select Committee process, without any indication that further consultation will be undertaken.

They also noted the concern raised in the Regulatory Impact Statement, “This risks distorting the general legal basis of search powers, from a tool for collecting evidence to a method of punishment/deterrence.”

These changes make a bad law worse (see our original submission). The bill was already a shocker in terms of civil liberties, giving police new powers that they could use against people not because of things that they had done or were suspected of having done, but because of bad things that they might do in the future. This is not the sort of law we should be making in a rights-respecting society.