The right to silence is not going to be removed.  Justice Minister Andrew Little has today ruled that out.

He’s going to cop flak for this, but he’s right.

Let’s clear something up. No one is calling for the right to silence to be removed. Take close look at what the Children’s Commissioner, the National Party, and the Act party are all saying. 

They’ve each come with their own solution for how to force families to talk, but none of them are calling for the right to silence to be removed.

And I think that’s probably because they’ve all realised just how fundamental a right this is - the right to not incriminate ourselves - and that removing it is a bad idea.

So good on Andrew little for standing firm.  

But as for what they’re actually saying, well, I don’t think it’s going to solve anything.

Most of their suggestions only duplicate what we already have in law, or probably won’t help much.

The Children’s Commissioner and ACT have pretty much proposed the same thing, which is to make it an offence for families not to cooperate with reasonable questions.

That’s already an offence - obstruction of justice. And how do you define what’s a reasonable question and what is an unreasonable question?

• Removal of right to silence backed by Victim's Rights Advocate

Probably the idea that has the best chance of doing something is National’s, which is to force anyone with knowledge of what happened to get in touch with police and cough up what they know, or they get three years in jail.

But then, if they know what happened first hand, surely police are already talking to them?

If they’ve heard third hand, maybe they’ll get in touch, maybe they won’t, but the problem is if they’re not already on the police radar, they might just take their chances with the fact they might never be and stay schtum.

This is not to say we can tolerate what’s going on. I can’t comprehend why a family wouldn’t want to tell police who it was who hurt that four year old boy. 

That family’s silence baffles me and makes me angry, and I’m sure it does you too.

The best thing that can happen is that we all, and the community surrounding that family, put moral pressure on them to talk. But there is no legal silver bullet to force this family to talk.