Editorial: Strange calls on protesters

OPINION: Two curiously contrasting cases involving protesters have been headlined in recent days.

The disparate outcomes raise important questions about how New Zealanders regard the exercise of their civil liberties.The first involved a woman who blew a raspberry at North Shore's mayor, Andrew Williams. She has been banned from the shopping centre where the incident happened. The second involved three peace activists who admitted causing damage ($1 million worth) at a South Island spy base. They were found not guilty and have won plenty of sympathy for their campaign to have the base closed.

The case of the banned raspberry blower verges on the risible. Shirley Squire, 74, obviously has a snitch against the mayor. She described him as a "cowardly careerist" before blowing him the offending raspberry after he finished singing with a troupe during Chinese New Year celebrations at the Northcote Shopping Centre. This was a petty offence. The response was too. A community constable presented the woman with a trespass notice, barring her from the centre. The notice had the endorsement of the mayor. "She was being offensive to many people who were there for the Chinese New Year," he said. "There were consul-generals from various nations there. She was a real embarrassment." That pretty well sums it up. The mayor was embarrassed and the offender penalised.

Blowing a raspberry is trifling alongside the damage caused by the protesters who were found not guilty of burglary and wilful damage charges laid in the aftermath of a raid on the Government Communications Security Bureau facility at Waihopai, near Blenheim, two years ago. Prosecutors accused the three men of cutting their way through fences into the base, then using sickles to slash a plastic cover protecting a receiver dish. The defendants did not deny this but insist they were impelled by a belief that the dish – which receives and sends satellite communications – caused human suffering. By temporarily disabling the base they were stopping the flow of information from it and helping save lives in Iraq.

It didn't matter, apparently, that nobody demonstrated whether lives were saved. The important aspect of the argument, as a defence lawyer explained, was that the belief "doesn't have to be correct". The jury took just two hours to accept this and reach its verdict after an eight-day trial. Presumably it agreed that laws designed to protect property can be over-ridden by well-intentioned protesters if they lack criminal intent. The offenders, paradoxically, were denied the martyrdom that would have accompanied guilty verdicts.

A jury is unlikely to accept Mongrel Mob pleadings, say, that there was no criminal intent in destroying a rival gang's weapons to save innocent people's lives. Not so obvious is whether the Waihopai defence will tempt pro-life activists to fire-bomb an abortion clinic or environmentalists to destroy a pesticide manufacturing plant to save lives. The verdicts therefore raise troubling questions about the precedent that has been set.

- © Fairfax NZ News