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Quote of the Week – Judith Collins

by Whaleoil on August 29, 2010

“It’s difficult to educate them [fleeing drivers] because, frankly, they’re … utter morons, and they leave this utter devastation in their wake.”

A-Frame for punishment in Malaysia

A-Frame for punishment in Malaysia

Judith Collins is right on the money. Of course there will be the hand-wringers out there saying that we should show compassion but frankly it is compassion in our society that has got us into the parlous law and order state we have.

We simply have had politicians and others in society too scared to call things as they are. At least with Judith Collins you get the unadulterated truth no matter how un-palatable that may seem to the listener, it is still the truth.

Leighton Smith was so angered by the state of affairs on Friday that he was making the case for a benevolent dictatorship, at least them he said, you could pass laws like making it mandatory 10 years in prison and 6 strokes of the rotan for fleeing police in a vehicle.

Frankly the time for social liberalism when it comes to crime is over, there has been plenty enough time to see that the experiment hasn’t worked. We need to go back to basics. Simple things like removing sentence concurrency and changing maximum sentences into minimum sentences and removing judicial leeway when when it comes to sentencing.

We should no longer have to read about a judge expressing his opinion that offending “was at the light end of the scale”. There isn’t a scale, there should be offending or not offending, then if guilty of offending a stipulated punishment.

The hand-wringers of course will say that is too brutal, but then i would point them to the strewn corpses of their victims and ask if that is not brutal too? Brutal crimes deserve brutal punishment.

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  • grizz

    I agree. We need to take a hardline and zero tolerance on crime. Right now, the crims know that if they drive fast enough, the police will stop persuing them. There is a cost benefit to society with having a career criminal locked up for longer and removed from society. Hard Labour on Pitt Island for the most recidivist of crims I say.

    • churchless

      But the reality is that will cost more and more cash, when corrections is already becoming the largest govt dept. Are you ready to pay thousands more in tax a year to do this? I’m not especially when it does not make society safer.

      • grizz

        I am already paying for it now. It is well known that a large percentage of inmates reoffend upon release. The costs inocurred to the taxpay, ie legal expenses, police time and resources, ACC for victims, not to mention higher insurance premiums, actually outweigh the costs of keeping them in prison.

  • bystander

    We sim­ply have had politi­cians and oth­ers in soci­ety too scared to call things as they are. At least with Judith Collins you get the unadul­ter­ated truth no mat­ter how un-palatable that may seem to the lis­tener, it is still the truth.”

    It’s not the truth though is it. It’s an opinion. Calling someone a moron is a subjective observation taken from a limited context with no reasearch or reasoning, based on a personal emotional reaction to events. After reading some of this blog I could pick from a selection of collquial terms for you, but it wouldn’t the truth either. No politician speaks the truth because they don’t know it. If Judith or I knew the truth, the events we saw would cease to exist from our current perspective. They’d cease to be a problem. And that’s what you say you want – an end to something.

    You say you’re sometimes a bully, that you have or do neglect your wife because of whatever etc etc on and on and that’s fine, but it isn’t who you are. It’s something you’ve done. To get to the truth about who you are you need to move past merely accepting your not so nice traits. The difference too, between you and your selected moron, is that the moron hasn’t decided that he is a moron. He just has someone calling him that. Complete waste of time, from his point of view. Step one is self-assessment. Step two is acceptance. Step three – you have to act, i.e. once the emotional reaction to being called a moron is gone, you choose: stay as you are, or behave/control yourself to whatever personal code of behaviour you have.

    If someone consciously chooses to be abully (knows why and is compelled to be one, beyond all intervention), neglectful (same qualifier), a moron (same again), or whatever, then there is no problem. The world returns to the way it was and the silly cycle turns again. There is only a problem once an observing third party decides there is one, based on their values, their culture and to a certain extent, their ignorance toward themselves and life in general.

    And that is what politicians have trained themselves to ignore (or possibly don’t know): Short of putting a bullet in someone’s head, you cannot control the human spirit. And you don’t need politicians for that. Or laws. Or an expensive public sector or any of it. Forget it, move on, discover something we don’t know. Because while people wander around calling others names and saying it’s the truth, they simply miss the point.

    • http://whaleoil.gotcha.co.nz Whaleoil

      A thousand words of weasel by a crim hugger. Nice…and there ladies and gentlemen is why we have a crime problem.

      Step one is self-assessment. Step two is accep­tance. Step three — you have to act, i.e. once the emo­tional reac­tion to being called a moron is gone, you choose: stay as you are, or behave/control your­self to what­ever per­sonal code of behav­iour you have.

      How about this for a 3-Step program
      Step 1. Act like a moron
      Step 2. Get convicted
      Step 3. Contemplate your actions with a 10 year stretch in the pokie.

      Meanwhile society doesn’t have to deal with them anymore….out of sight out of mind.

  • oswaldbastable
  • grizz

    “No politician speaks the truth because they don’t know it. If Judith or I knew the truth, the events we saw would cease to exist from our current perspective. They’d cease to be a problem. And that’s what you say you want – an end to something.”

    Bystander, is this some form of “strategic discourse”? The truth is a driver fled from a police checkpoint. He was witnessed no long prior to be refuelling his car while intoxicated with alcohol on his breath. He drove off at speed in an inner city street, drove through a red light and crashed into another vehicle killing their occupants. The needless death of two people. I think the word Moron is rather generous for this driver. But that would be an opinion and not the truth now wouldn’t it.

    If you want to live in a world where you can view such people as wholesome and upstanding citizens of our society, thats fine. Go buy and island and move there. Next time two innocent people are killed by a drunk driver fleeing from a check point they could be your mother and father. Then we will see what you think of them. At least we know Judith Collins is representing the victims of crime and not the criminals as your metamessages imply that politicians should do.

  • todd

    bystander you’re wrong on a few points. First the truth is subjective and is often used to show agreement or beliefs. Taking a single definition of the word when there is multiple and expanding from there does not make a valid point. In saying that it could be considered the truth because she was telling her honest opinion therefore she wasn’t lying like we presume of politicians and in fact being truthful. You can follow this link and see a few different ways in which truth can be used:
    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/truth

    Controlling the human spirit is not exactly rare but maybe you’ve got it mistaken because we normally refer to it as breaking the human spirit. The problem is that normally such practices are untasteful.

    In any case controlling the human spirit is not of concern as it is up to the individuals to control themselves. Our concern is to remove the individuals once they fail to control themselves and even in the event they are reintroduced into society and they reoffend than at least we are minimising the occurance of offending by increasing sentencing.

    Most importantly what we are forgetting here is that the victims should be the ones we’re trying to help and not the criminal.