Views expressed by Meros are not necessarily held by the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective.
" Soon there is gonna be this art exhibition at Garrett St under the title 'concerned citizens'. In that exhibition I am selling muesli with berry soaked strips of the Terrorism Suppression Act (2002) in it. People will buy these bowls for $5 apiece. The funds, minus costs, will go to helping defray expenses of people who are still being chewed up by the criminal justice system.If I were an odd type of pun-smith I would call it the criminal just-is system. I would do that to emphasise that it seems like the procedure of these trials is as much the punishment as any additional sentencing.
If I were a liberal I would say that my muesli is to protest the erosion of civil liberties likely to occur if a judge only trial were to take place.
If I were a comedian I would focus on the berry-soaked strips coming from the fertile anti-terror terra of the USA.
If I were a realist I would focus on Tuhoe and the Urewera ranges where the alleged firearms offences took place as being part of a land that was never ceded to the crown. I would add that the crown ought to be on trial for its violations of Te Mana Motuhake o Tuhoe. I'd not even have to get into wider issues of Tino Rangatiratanga nor the Treaty. (Tuhoe did not sign the treaty).
If I were a pragmatic realist, with a bent for representative democracy I would say that these trials are a bad advertisement for clean, green 100% sanitised Aotearoa-if-you-say-so and will cost us in a Rugby World Cup year.
But I am all of these things. I truly am! And so I say them all. I say them all at once."
