Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Russell Brown,
I did try and get them to make complaints, but I could understand why they weren’t interested in engaging with the police again.
Understandable, but also an unfortunate enabler of the very behaviour that put them off engaging. The IPCA is quite willing to administratively crack heads, and stories like that are a part of the reason it's now the I PCA. (Don't like that I can't put emphasis without having to put a space afterwards. Can be fixed, please?)
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Russell Brown,
they also knew that there would be very strong objections from within the education sector
To some degree, I think they were hoping there would be strong objections, which they could then dismiss as teachers being out to protect their own jobs. And there is a segment of the electorate who see teachers' resistance to National Standards and everything else as pure patch-protection. Based on what I've seen in the cesspit of Your Views I'm quite prepared to believe that it's a fairly widespread belief: teachers don't want performance-based pay and all the things leading to it because it'll make them actually work for their money.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to JacksonP,
where is the funding coming from in a zero budget?
It's worse than zero. It's a budget that hasn't yet funded (PDF, bottom of page 2) the next fucking general election!
This school shit annoys me, but with no children as yet I have no immediate skin in the game. But the wholesale destruction of everything in pursuit of budgetary savings is now attacking our very democracy.
</threadjack>
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to BenWilson,
We do have secret police here, of several kinds
No, we don't. We have police, and we have intelligence services. We categorically do not have secret police.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A drivers license is a right
Bollocks it is. If it were a right, you wouldn't have to jump through hoops in order to get one. It's a privilege, allowing you to legally be in control of a lethal weapon. If a driver's licence is a right, then so is a firearms licence.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to DexterX,
perhaps there are less police about at present on party nights
I dunno about that. Look at the obscene level of force on display for the second student protest in Auckland, which occurred on a Friday afternoon (and was a striking contrast to the inspector and a couple of other uniforms who observed the first protest), and I doubt that there's any shortage of police officers available to enforce the law on "party nights". More about where they're deployed, and how.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Ruining people’s livelihoods is a horrible thing to do, and has to be bound up with legal safeguards.
And what of the potential consequences of failing to follow the law around sale of liquor to minors? Let's not delude ourselves, Keir, the harm is not a one-way street: alcohol is a controlled substance with great potential for causing harm. The laws exist for a reason, and if you've been granted the opportunity to play within the controlled area it's contingent on you to follow the rules. It's not hard to follow the rules. If you can't do that, you should have no expectation that the state will show you any great degree of leniency. Revocation for a first offence would be a bit steep, but the penalty should make you absolutely aware that you have transgressed, broken the social contract.
If you don't like the rules, don't play. There are many, many other ways to make a living, even other ways to make a living by retailing things. Having your liquor licence revoked doesn't terminate your capacity/capability to carry stock, gain credit, sign a lease, or sell things. It merely terminates society's acceptance of you as a proper person to be peddling a poison.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Keir Leslie,
If you start up a business, the state shouldn’t be able to just shut it down on whim. And while yes it may be too far one way, and maybe things should be rebalanced, the consequences of taking people’s jobs off them are very hard, and do need to be taken seriously.
Of course. But when you are selling something with potential for significant social harm and you fail to adequately discharge your not-terribly-onerous obligations, you have failed to hold up your end of the bargain. You have a right to make a living, but that doesn't extend to being a right to make a living by selling controlled substances. A liquor licence is a privilege, not a right, just like a driver's licence.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Sacha,
so those are in the legislation, not case law? Interesting
No, case law, but a decade of case law carries its own weight. An authority that suddenly slapped a heavily punitive punishment on an offender would have the decision appealed to the courts and the courts would soften the penalty to something in keeping with those handed out in similar cases.
The case law is that you need to have offended multiple times for your licence to be at risk, and it seems that even a third offence including a second incident of staff being caught hiding intoxicated patrons is insufficient to cancel a licence.The only way to achieve the necessary abrupt reversal (as opposed to a gradual shift) is statute. It's also only statute that can mandate against a presumption of a right to make a living from a particular activity.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Sacha,
name and shame weak judges?
Probably won’t help. The established precedents are so strongly in favour of a right to make a living from selling alcohol that only an explicit alteration to statute will usefully change how these decisions are made. An appeal to the High Court would not support a sudden change of direction by the District Courts, no matter how strongly pressure was applied to judges. I also have to say that I’m rather glad that that is the case on a macro level even if it does lead to situations such as this being a bit harder to rectify.
As Chris said, licences are easy to get and incredibly hard to lose. That needs to be reversed before casual attitudes on the part of licensees will change. Right now they’re banking on a low likelihood of getting caught (very limited resources for authorities to conduct sting operations), weak penalties (a 48-hour suspension and low-rent fine isn’t terribly scary), and effectively zero chance of losing their licence. The financial incentives to look the other way when taking money from minors are enormous.