ACT's Grand (prohibitionist slag-heap) Coalition idea.

Mild Greens support ACT's Grand (prohibitionist slag-heap) Coalition idea

NZ's outspoken cannabis law reform advocacy group is saying it supports the coalescence of simple-minded right wing parties in NZ, as suggested this week by ACT (association of consumers and tax-payers) party leader Richard Prebble.

Because all these “freedom, property rights and responsibility” touting parties support tough-on-crime-prohibitionist (crime-creating) laws, then their alignment in stupidity and hypocrisy seems logical, say the mild greens.

ACT apparently wish to include conservatives National and NZ First to form a big "centre-right" force in opposition to the purportedly center-left Labour-led government - but seem to have forgotten dedicated right-wing prohibitionist stalemates, United Future.

Anti-drug Fascists and double standard "get tough on some drugs" stalwarts Anderton and Robson from the "Progressive Coalition Party" (PCP) will of course be automatically admitted to the hypocritical fold, suggest the mild greens.

But the Mild Greens say perhaps Helen Clark's prohibitionist Labour Party, the “New National” of NZ politics, should be welcomed into the conservative right wing coalition as well…

Members of the grand coalition will share in common unprincipled, illiberal drug policy.

- by collecting fat "tough on law and order" MP salaries and doing nothing (and pretending the crime/drugs/decrim/harm-minimisation debate is not central to NZ's progress as a civil society), these parties share the dishonour of keeping "home invasion" laws in place.

Criminalisation, say many, is a policy unaccountable, inhumane, divisive and counter-productive.

And by NZ parliamentary standards "undebated" (where was the conscience vote).

Unfortunately the right-wing prohibitionist element in power are too chicken to properly and openly debate the cannabis public health evidence and public opinion heard by a Parliamentary inquiry up and down the country in 2001.

[Inquiry carried over before the Health Select Committee, but still stalled into its 3rd year, in what some believe is a serious parliamentary breach of faith…]

Instead cannabis reform is "off the agenda" thanks to Labour's absolutely unprincipled capitulation to United Future in return for government "confidence and supply" support.

- and the grand coalition have, instead of repairing cannabis-related health promotion, “cracked down on methamphetamine” with class A status as of yesterday.

What kind of unspeakably idiotic message do our "leaders" send the adults and children of Aotearoa?

In a bizarre twist, the Mild Greens agree with Police Minister George Hawkins that NZ First’s suggestion of doubling police numbers to 14,000 to stamp out crime (and methamphetamine) “is a crazy idea.” – but for different reasons.

Hawkins responded to New Zealand First's call saying "what counts is smart policing”.

But the Mild Greens say a genuinely smarter policing strategy includes cutting areas of policy administration of least community benefit.

Given that double standard based criminalisation of the popular herb is the obvious gateway to alienation, crime and black market hard drugs, “right-wing” cannabis enforcement is of course, the most highly indicated area of “bad policing”.

Time to legalise and bring on harm minimisation and harm reduction in a public health model and be damned with right wing prohibitionist law enforcement "harm production".

Prohibition deserves to be on the slag-heap of history, along with the careers of all centre-right 'freedom-and-responsibility' hypocrites, say the Mild Greens.

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