There was a post on birdsite about the (lack of) rights of US prisoners, because the state will find reason to stop those that are politically inconvenient.

Unfortunately, NZ is no different.

In NZ, prisoners can't vote either. What's worse, is this law was introduced in only 2010, by the National (right wing) government.

Paul Quinn, the member who sponsored this legislation, bases his justification for the legislation loosely on social contract theory. This is the idea that prisoners have breached the contract with the state and therefore, some of their rights can be validly restricted.

They also tried to revert New Zealand to FPTP, because they felt MMP was... not good, for whatever reason. Probably because it allowed for fair and broad representation in the house?

National is fash-lite and will do whatever it takes to restrain inconveniences.

Thankfully the existing government wants to undo the prisoner rights' restrictions, like a lot of National's garbage.

Which of course is why Simon Bridges was so adamant about how gangs - predominantly pacific islanders and maori and born out of the cycle of inequality - were dangerous and we needed harsher laws, until he got booted out. The guy he's been replaced with is a piece of shit too, of course, but given he's got famous for having a MAGA cap, I doubt he'll be popular.

... not disastrously unpopular, unfortunately, because NZers have the memories of goldfish around politicians, but still.