History often repeats

Mass murderer and racist Brenton Tarrant has now been sentenced and justifiably given the most severe sentence within the powers of the New Zealand judiciary.

It was a good job carried out by Justice Cameron Mander who conducted himself extremely well during the sentencing process and made it abundantly clear how most of us felt about the nature of the offending.

However, since the sentence was passed we have heard some rather stupid remarks by people who should know better. Chief among these voices has been Whinny, who by his remarks has only served to remind us how much he is past his sell-by date.

He has been banging on about how the offender should be sent back to Australia to serve out his sentence. This appears to be based upon a desire to save the Kiwi taxpayer the costs of Tarrant’s incarceration.

It is an extremely flawed idea from the start because (in my understanding) only one of the Australian States has within its arsenal of sentences, the ability to jail for life without parole. That immediately raises questions as to whether the sentence would be transferrable.

I understand that Tarrant’s home state is New South Wales and that they do have the ability to impose such a sentence and so that might make it possible to transfer him there with no alteration to the sentence.

However, that is a move that could backfire dramatically, because if he is sent to Australia, then we lose control of the situation. There is nothing to stop a future Australian Government from releasing him at some stage in the future, regardless of what ScoMo might agree to at this stage.

I realise that (theoretically) a subsequent New Zealand Government could do the same thing in the future, but I doubt that would ever happen. To do so would be political suicide for whichever party decided to do that, but it would be unlikely to have the same effect for an Australian Government.

There is an old saying, that goes, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, although it is more likely that the original version of this was uttered by George Santayana and it actually said, “"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" . I’m being pedantic (as usual) but the point is still the same.

All we have to do in this case is cast our minds back to the 10th July 1985 to recall the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, which was another atrocious attack on our sovereignty by outsiders. For those who genuinely don’t remember what happened next, our police were remarkably successful in very quickly locating the culprits, as with this case. They were then subjected to our justice system and duly sentenced only to have David Lange – a man who had previously show a reasonable measure of good judgement, suddenly cave in to pressure from France to have the culprits serve out the remainder of their sentence under the control of the French. The French then housed them on an idyllic tropical island and allowed them to shag each other and basically have no restrictions at all upon them and then to cap it all off just nine years later they were awarded the Legion D’Honneur and we were given 30 pieces of silver for our troubles.

In other words, due to our then Government’s weakness we lost control of people who had offended against us and allowed a foreign country, who were supposed to be allies, simply piss all over us.

Whinny was alive then. In fact, he was in parliament then, albeit as a member of the opposition party. But he saw all of that up close and personal. Has he forgotten? There have been a number of rumours circulating that might support that idea. I don’t know how accurate they are, but one thing is for sure; if he thinks that sending this bugger to Australia for his sentence is a good idea, then he is not fit to continue as an MP in any capacity.

The cost is high to house this guy, admittedly – I have heard that it could be as much as $4000 per week which, if he lives for another 40 years could balloon out to about $8.5 million. Now while that is a lot of money, in the scheme of things it ain’t that much and I believe it is money well spent in this case. A message needs to be sent that we will not tolerate such actions and that we are not a bunch of hypocrites that say we believe in justice but are more concerned about how much dosh it takes to mete it out.

Let’s just suck it up and do the right thing for a change and to hell with the expense. Let us also not forget that we would be sending him back to the environment in which he developed his views.

Some things are far more important than money.