Arresting Hone for “Failure To Remove His Vehicle From The Road” Is A Hint Of Things To Come

This morning News Papers duly reported the arrest of Hone Harawira MP for his “part” in a demonstration. The demonstration was peaceful and Hone at the time was in his car listening to music.

To arrest Hone the police claims they had to bash in the back window of his car to pull him out and the reason for his arrest was failure to remove his vehicle off the road. In fact they have now officially charged him with this very serious crime.

The police also arrested a girl who sat on the roof of a house removed from its original premise to protest the Glenn Innes redevelopment and the subsequent destruction of a social housing estate. The girl was bashed with her head to the ground and was left lying on the road unconscious and without assistance.

For the purpose of this post, sad cruel and inhumane the eviction of the Glen Iness community is, I don’t want to go into the protests because what happened to Hone is, I fear, a much more dangerous and dark hint of things to come than the casual destruction of a community living in social houses in a spot that could be sold for loads of money to people who have it while the people who live there don’t. That is just par for the course in a society such as ours.

Here is my take on what happened to Hone. It is also my take on what is happening in New Zealand’s political climate on the whole.

At the moment we have a Prime Minister who has been caught lying to the New Zealand population several times. We have several ministers who broke the law, showed total disregard for the level of ethics required to be in Government.

We have a Prime minister who calls upon the police to investigate what he considers breeches of the law when it concerns what he considers invasions of his privacy but who manipulates and orders the police to stop investigating his ministers and even himself and the GCSB when it concerns serious and illegal invasion of privacy of others breeches of the law.

Yet at the same time we have a police force who uses excessive violence against an elected MP during a peaceful demonstration. Bashes his car window, pulls him out of his car and who beat demonstrators unconscious while they exercise their right to peaceful protest.

Did Hone lock himself in a car and turn up the music? Quit possibly but why, when it is clear that John Key rather than support a small group of protesters lies to the entire population of New Zealand and when caught tries to obfuscate and diminish what is clearly breaking the law by one of the organisations tasked to keep us within the law, doesn’t the same happen to him?

Where are the police in this? Why are they not doing what they are supposed to do as part of the third independent branch of government?

The sad truth is that with the economy tanking and the fault lines in our society emerging more strongly the trend towards less tolerance towards the poor and those representing them will deepen.

The ruling elite will be able to behave  more and more as thought they are above the law while those at the bottom will be expected to live under more and more draconian rules. What is more it will become more and more clear who actually belongs to that elite. it will for example include the encapsulated so called opposition.

For example, while Hone stood with the poor in Glen Iness and with hunger striker Sam Kuha who after 30 days of not eating finally was granted an audience with the benny bashing Queen Bennett Minister Paula Bennett,  the so called left wing parties including the Quantitative Easing promoting Greens did not invite Hone Harawira or John Minto and Mana to their we are The Opposition bash.

Hone’s arrest, Mila’s brutal beating and the brutal violence that accompanied it are a sign of the times. While the middle of the road left wing parties and yes, I include the Greens in that, pretend to represent the poor talking the talk people like Hone and John are brutalised for doing the real thing.

To think that Labour, the Greens or even NZ first will ever stand up for the poor and the jobless other than marginally because they rely on the votes of the working and well meaning middle class is dangerous and naive as time will show.