Guest Post: In my opinion, Dr Emmy Rākete’s support for prisoner voting rights is inconsistent with her communist views

A guest post by Lucy Rogers:

I have no strong view on prisoner voting rights. I am open to arguments either way. However, I find it inconsistent of Dr Emmy Rākete to claim that a ban on prisoners voting is an “attack on democratic principles” and that in implementing such a ban the Government is “spitting on the rule of law” (see: https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/nz-news/360670649/prisoner-voting-ban-be-reinstated-government) when she is a professing communist. Communist nations have never respected the right of anyone to vote (whether prisoners or otherwise) and that is to say nothing of the rule of law.

Similarly, a few years ago Dr Rākete’s organisation People Against Prisons Aotearoa protested the practice of solitary confinement in New Zealand prisons. In my opinion, it is likewise inconsistent for a communist to protest solitary confinement when it was a common practice in the Soviet Union and remains a common practice in communist nations like China and Cuba today. If Dr Rākete has ever condemned human rights abuses in China I have yet to hear about it (although she regularly criticises New Zealand’s failings).

The truth is that Dr Rākete is in effect acknowledging that free elections are a positive thing when it suits her to do so, while actively seeking the destruction of those self-same structures. This is typical of the intellectual and moral dishonesty of both postmodernism and communism.