Mike's Minute: Crime is now the election death knell

As we end the week there's a question to be asked as to why, in this election campaign, people support who they support. There was much debate about a year back over the disappointment from some that the Labour Government hadn't been transformational the way Jacinda Ardern had suggested they would be. Things like child poverty and the climate were nuclear moments and crises. And yet, each year passed with a lot of word salads but not a lot of action and tangible results. Then we came to this week and a display as raw, venal and blatant as I have ever seen. We have been lectured for six years over law and order and how those of us who favour accountability and genuine punishment as a means of deterrent were wrong, and keeping people out of prison was right. The ideology turned into an avalanche of misery all over the country as behaviour deteriorated and consequences became farcical. As police minister after police minister came and went the mantra stayed the same - "be kind", give the bad ones an ankle bracelet and the rest an Oranga Tamariki telling off and if the really bad ones end up on a roof of a juvenile detention centre, give them some chicken. In return for this, we would change lives. The only lives we changed are the ones that were wrecked in attack after attack. The bills for security went into the millions and that was just for individual, large retailers. The police didn’t cope, the courts in their many actions, or non-actions, didn’t help. Now look where we are.   It's an issue sinking the Government. Instead of saying "sorry, we're wrong", instead of even pleading for more time because they truly believed their approach would eventually work, the Prime Minister, showing he will do and say literally anything to save his job, gaslit us and told us as a nation we had failed. We haven't failed. He failed. He failed as Minister of Police and now Prime Minister. The previous Prime Minister failed by appointing Andrew Coster as commissioner and Poto Williams as minister in another of her vacuous kumbaya experiments. So, to save themselves they essentially lie and say they will change policy. A policy they argued for six years was the wrong thing to do. To add insult to injury, in presenting the policy, they don't even have the detail. And some of the detail they did have, they got wrong, indicating, or at least giving away, that the whole thing is a sham. A Government that believes nothing, or believes whatever is necessary to survive, is a Government of self-interest. Not of leaders.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.