Former Deputy PM, Civil Libertarians Unlikely Allies Against New Knife Crime Law Push

Both Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce and the New South Wales (NSW) Council for Civil Liberties are alarmed by the push from NSW Police, via their union, to have criminal penalties imposed on the parents of children found to be carrying weapons, including knives. When a riot broke out following the stabbing at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, six paramedics were forced to take shelter in the church for three and a half hours. The state’s health minister, Ryan Park, described it as “a situation where they were held up with frontline police with hundreds of people outside …. That’s not the sort of scenes we want to see in NSW and it’s not the way in which our paramedics [and] frontline emergency workers should be treated.”...