Recently I read a news item regarding the 2020 road toll here in Victoria. The numbers seemed very low to me. In Victoria, we had 213 deaths last year which some would say was low because of coronavirus restrictions.
New Zealand had a lockdown as well, yet almost every time I go on an NZ news site I read of another fatal smash. New Zealand had 320 deaths on New Zealand roads in 2020 from a population of 5 million. Victoria – population 6.359 million had 213 deaths yet on most motorways here, the speed limit is 110kph, so speed cannot be the sole factor in road deaths.
Perhaps it is the years of underfunding of roads in New Zealand, which the Labour government has done nothing to reverse in the last 3 years. Or is it old cars, poor driver training, wet, gloomy weather creating hazardous conditions? Is it lax policing? Or all of these factors?
Seeing these figures made me think. Late last year my sister asked me, after a terrible year where our livelihood was decimated by coronavirus restrictions, didn’t we return to live in New Zealand? My off the cuff answer was that we couldn’t afford to with property prices the way they are in New Zealand. However, there was more to it than that. Having the most woke government in the world was another factor I dared not mention.
Digging deeper, there are other issues. One of the biggies for me is the level of violent crime. No-one can say that New Zealand has not become a very violent country. There are almost daily reports in the media of murders and serious assaults. So for some figures. Sorry, they do not exist. I have tried to find data for murders in New Zealand, but the data ends at 2017.
First I went to the New Zealand Police website for data on murder and serious assault. Figures are given for the year ended October 2020 – common assault (18,838) serious non-injury assault (20,884), serious injury assault (21,261). But there were no numbers for murder. On the Homicide Victims Report 2018 on the police website (published in July 2020) it states that from 2007 to 2017 there were 737 homicides in NZ. There was no numbers post for 2018.
On the macrotrends.com site I also found that the 2017 murder numbers represented a 36.36% fall. There were no figures after that.
On to the Statistics NZ site. Under the Crime tab, the numbers for fatal and serious non-fatal injuries ends at 2017. The information tab states that the fatality data is not available for 2018. Yet figures are given for other categories, such as income, population, housing. Is it that hard to collect data on murders? While there might be some time lag when a person pleads not guilty and the matter goes through the courts, surely there would be some data, even if were expressed to be provisional?
Why are these numbers not being made public? Has this woke, empathetic government got something to hide? Is NZ not the caring nirvana “St Jacinda” would have us believe? Or is censorship in full swing and are people only being told what the government wants them to know?
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