PONTIFICATING OFFICIALS

Last week an Adelaide judge in sentencing a couple for a bestial act with their dog was reported saying, “the charges were serious because they presented an affront to public dignity and the norms of human behaviour.”

While not as bad as blowhard coroners, judges should restrain their impulse to pontificate and advance their private views. The judge presided over a court of law. The law says bestiality is a crime and prescribes punishments. Dealing with that should have been a straight-forward matter without His Honour tendering his gratuitous opinions.

Take the “affront to public dignity” assertion.

In my view and I don’t doubt so too with a sizeable percentage of the population, the spectacle of grossly obese people is a massive affront to public dignity. Unfortunately, being an affront to public dignity is not a crime and we must endure this daily abominable spectacle on our streets.

More to the point, such judgments are personal. For example, one of our best-known cartoonists openly admits to a life-long penchant for fat women, puzzling to be sure for most of us but nevertheless a fact.

On a personal note, I’m enormously affronted by many of our recent years’ commercial buildings for being in the business I’m aware of their glaring functional design errors. But nearly everyone else is understandably oblivious to these, which underlines the silliness of the judge’s sweeping assertion in ascribing university to what constitutes offending public dignity.

And consider the judge’s “norms of human behaviour” claim as a benchmark.

In a free-ish society such as Australia, despite the irritating regimentation efforts by wokeists, conformity is not a legal requirement, thus again the judge was spouting nonsense.

Furthermore, it’s a bit bloody rich coming from an Aussie judge dealing with a bestiality matter given Australia’s 70 million sheep. With the recent years collapse in wool prices, piling into the ewes is an established compensatory perk for hard-pressed sheep farmers, indeed to such an extent I’m surprised Australia’s bestiality laws don’t exempt sheep, more so as the evidence is compelling that both parties enjoy it.

They’re all at it, including here in New Zealand and if you don’t believe me, ask them. So let’s hear no more from judges about breaching norms of human behaviour.

Good lord if abnormal behaviour was a crime everyone would be in prison.

Take well-known Wellington commercial real estate broker Chris Gollins. Chris has the unusual, indeed I’d venture peculiar to him, but who can ever really know, practise of eating a daffodil uncooked each morning. He claims it has health benefits. God help him if he should find himself before the courts on a traffic matter and a pontificating judge learns of this abnormality.

In our Wellington office Sam Cooper likes to sit at his desk with a pair of his wife’s underpants on his head, presumably as a sign of affection. Wellington QC Hugh Rennie has taken up yodelling while riding a unicycle. House Speaker Trevor Mallard tucks his shirt into his underpants, which to add to this oddity, he favours wearing back to front. Well known Wellington lawyer John Langford dons a top hat when he goes to the toilet, a practise he’s adopted to curry favour when appearing in the High Court as most of our judges do this, and so it goes. It’s certainly not for others to question.

My point is these behavioural peccadilloes can be described as harmless personal quirks, characteristic of a free society and the judge’s “norms of human behaviour” criterion is sheer nonsense.