Darroch Ball
Sensible Sentencing Trust.
Stuart Nash, the ‘renewed’ Minister of Police, says he doesn’t think dairies should sell tobacco.
Call me old fashioned, but maybe Nash as the Minister of Police needs to focus on ensuring these criminal thugs are caught and held to account, instead of waxing lyrical about what legitimate businesses should or shouldn’t be selling. Hey Stu, it’s called “enforcing the law”.
There are so many things wrong with what he has said it is difficult to figure out where to begin.
First of all let’s address the now obviously false ‘sound-bite’ that the Government has been using to feed media – who lap it up without question: “There are only around 100 recidivist youth who are committing most of these ramraids”.
If that is anywhere near the case then what Nash is suggesting is to literally destroy the main income of around six thousand mum and dad dairy owners because of just 100 youths. He would rather see innocent, law-abiding citizens give up their livelihoods than enforce the law and stop this ‘small number’ of criminals.
What seems logical to me, is that if there were a small number of youth crims, and the government is confident of the number, then surely that means they know who they are and where they are. If they don’t, then it’s clear they are just taking a stab in the dark.
The reason why I think it’s the latter, is because successive governments, from at least the last National government, have been spouting this clearly nonsense narrative that ‘there are only 100 bad youth committing all these crimes’. Bear in mind, they were saying this almost ten years ago when youth crime had supposedly ‘been decreasing over the past ten years’.
In fact, five years ago, I sat in the Minister of Justice’s office as a Member of Parliament, with the Associate Minister who had the youth crime portfolio at the time, both of whom were Labour MPs, and was told this exact same thing: ”Oh no the youth justice system is working, there are only around 80-100 bad eggs in the system”. To which I choked trying not to burst into incredulous laughter.
It was at that point that I knew the youth crime narrative was controlled by the officials and these ministers were just repeating an obvious lie – without having a single clue what they were talking about.
Either it was a lie ten years ago or the government has been so incompetent that nothing has changed – obviously apart from the fact that youth crime has increased. So riddle me that.
The most obvious thing about Nash’s recent comments about taking tobacco out of dairies is that his focus as Minister of Police is not finding these youth, not holding them to account, not stopping them from swinging machetes at innocent people, not arresting them and keeping them off our streets, not enforcing the law; no, he instead wants to find a solution that lies somewhere with the dairy owners.
There is nothing more antiseptic than saying ‘I told you so’ – but I did. I warned not so long ago about the pathway successive governments have gone down trying to solve this issue with reactive pointless policies that take blame and responsibility away from the offenders, and instead place it squarely on the law-abiding business owners. Think about the fog cannons, think about the bollards, now it’s getting rid of the business altogether – meanwhile, the criminals and gangs are laughing all the way to the bank. Where’s the new policy for stricter enforcement, accountability, and punishment for offenders? Why is it now all on the business owners to pay for fog cannons, to pay for bollards, to lose tobacco, to lose customers?
However, what seems the most obvious in this whole thing, is that it’s not just dairies that are being ram-raided or robbed. Alcohol shops, jewellery shops, and a myriad of other businesses are being done over. So how does his solution fix that? Perhaps he might want to step back a bit and have a look at where the problem actually lies – not with the businesses and what they are selling, but with the idiot teen criminal thugs who don’t give a stuff about the law, about the owners, about their families, about the joke of a justice system, and certainly about what they steal – as long as they can sell it for profit.
What Nash’s comments highlight perfectly is the incompetence, laziness, and sheer hopelessness of this current government. They have no clue, no idea, and no plan.
It is seriously scary to think about what would happen to our country if they got another term.