CONSTITUTION

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10867918

Will having a Constitution and a credible "Bill of Rights" actually make any difference to New Zealand ?

One of the most egregious trampling of Human rights, the "Bristol Clause" in the Care of Families Act is used here as an example.

The Bristol Clause allows allegations , and most importantly poorly supported ones or ones that don’t make the usual standard for evidence, to be treated as hard evidence in Interventional Jurisdictional overriding Individual Parental rights, where the "dangers" are seen to outweigh the granting of normal rights to our citizens.

Mostly aimed at "violent men", this clause has also been used by violent women to allege and obfuscate the truth of many domestic incidents.

After several unpopular law changes the evidence actually shows that women are equally as violent to children as men, cognitive dissonance for the Feminists Gender Based programmes that the Bristol Clause was a child of. In fact this "Duluth" Interventional programme has been shown to be unnecessary, destructive and counterproductive in many enlightened International jurisdictions and is now receding in favour in most places, except here in NZ where it is being tenaciously defended as some sort of gold standard bastion for the world to follow.

So the fundamental conflict is the overriding of rights of usual access to children as a parent and usual "human rights" to go about our lives as normal, by State sanctioned "Intervention". State Violence denying individual rights, by Judicial order, is another way to describe this process. From a Childs point of view any adult can inflict damage regardless of Gender, so why do we have Gender based bais in our legislation ? No need for "Bristol" Clauses if the violence is clear and present. Anything else is subjective.

If our Bill of Rights had any teeth would we have challenged the Bristol Clause on its simple denial of human rights ?

If we had a constitution guaranteeing Human rights would we still have granted a clause such as the Bristol clause in an emotional and political based reaction to attempt to attend to an open wound in our society ?

Probably not. The Bristol clause is being elegantly made redundant by the implementation of a myriad of other "protections" under law, but still organisations like Owen Glenn's Commission are crying out for its preservation.

Our ad hoc attitude to legislation would simply suffer delay if needed to be passed by an upper house using a Constitution as a guide, and in typical ad hoc-ary style if we found it too complicated we would probably be endlessly changing the Constitution to suit. We are a small country with a small power distance, its as simple as that.

The fact that Countries like Canada are finally using their Constitution to scrutinise their own legislation and Interventional programmes on a Human rights basis is something that so supporter of Duluth or Bristol clauses wishes the general public to have any knowledge of.

Constitutional reviews, postulating a Constitution are all essentially just Quangos and more work fo the boys.

Human rights and Constitutions are dangerous things. They enable common citizens to tell misguided academics simply to piss of out of their lives, and stay out. We will never have a bar of this in Godzone......we feed hungrily on the utterances of every new whim and research document produced by "academics and Evidence Based Process" and seem to both eagerly and blindly follow such speculatory recommendations.