Te Radar: Reward prisoners and everyone's a winner

When it comes to human rights abuses, I suspect it wouldn't really matter what regime was walloping me with hosepipe, removing my fingernails, or attaching electrodes to my nether regions, I would resent the ransacking of my dignity regardless.

Fortunately in this country those kinds of human rights abuses are generally perpetrated not by the Government but by P manufacturers.

Here genuine human rights violations perpetrated by representatives of the state are relatively slight: a few prisoners complain about overcrowding, students are overcharged for education, and hospital waiting lists are increasingly a little too long, all relatively minor infractions in the scheme of things.

The Prisoners and Victims Claims Bill (which will allow victims of crime to sue the perpetrators for any money they are awarded in prison for alleged maltreatment) will impinge the human rights of the prisoners, because it will apply retrospectively.

What allegedly happened to the various prisoners was unpleasant, but there are some prisoners whose ill-treatment most right-minded folk would agree was not only fair, but should have been conducted in public.

That way we could encourage the perpetrators of the degradation to commit even greater and more crowd-pleasing indignities on those who had no qualms in inflicting worse acts on their innocent victims.

I am convinced that a great public good will come from rewarding these prisoners. It will mean that in the future prison guards could be induced to humiliate and degrade certain incarcerated reprobates, who will then be awarded compensation, which can then be claimed by their victims. Everyone wins.

It isn't so clear who wins when it comes to trade deals with China. Clearly they are an oppressive anti-democratic regime overly paranoid about beardies with placards and the word "Taiwan".

They also have a habit of unjustly detaining thousands of dissidents in prison camps but, as trade deals go, it seems these prisoners need warm woolly sweaters too, just as we need an unending supply of bizarre novelty toys.

Some say the members of our SAS, having cadged a lift on an American Air Force plane named a Globe Master, will be mere pawns of those oppressive neo-colonialists the Americans, and thus also a part of their violations of human rights.

This may be true, but unlike the morons who were in charge of Afghanistan before the forces of enlightenment arrived, at least our chaps can be held accountable for their actions.

Not only that, but we will not suppress this news, unlike China which, with as much subtlety as Michael Cullen in a hallway full of journalists, censored CNN's broadcast of Helen Clark's interview.

This may have provided our leaders with a sense of slightly envious optimism that this kind of control could be exercised here, especially in the face of recent ministerial faux pas.