Andrea Vance is a senior writer at Stuff.
OPINION: Occasionally, politicians have the capacity to surprise. Just when it seems they could sink no lower, a fresh opportunity arrives.
The absolute spectacle of MPs Instagramming themselves placing flowers at a memorial to slain dairy worker Janak Patel plumbed the depths of political opportunism. If we must have a crackdown, let it be on their own crimes against decency.
There is a thin line between a meaningful gesture and a hollow PR stunt, and that lot clog-danced over it.
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Egged on by a full-blown media moral panic, dairy crime became last week’s topic du jour.
Patel’s body was barely cold before ACT, National and wannabe politician Sunny Kaushal were howling for harsher consequences for offenders.
Empty words, followed by empty policies: Labour reacted with $10m worth of fog cannon subsidies and a local crime fund.
It’s difficult to view these measures as anything but a cynical exercise to cool the mounting criticism. Did they really have to wait for a murder to ensure the fog cannon scheme – which has existed since 2017 – actually worked?
GEORGE HEAGNEY/Stuff
Janak Patel was managing the Rose Cottage Superette in the Auckland suburb of Sandringham when he was stabbed to death following an alleged aggravated robbery.
Likewise, the motives of Seymour, Luxon and co are hardly pure.
The opposition parties are determined that crime will play an outsized role in next year’s hotly-contested election race.
Their eagerness to blame the current Government belies the fact that the problem began on their watch. Aggravated robberies of commercial premises doubled from 2015 – from 599 to 1170 – and it became a battleground of the 2017 election campaign.
That’s right. We’ve been debating this problem for close to a decade, and failed to move away from a shameless exploitation of victims, and vapid rhetoric that fails to take account of correlations between family violence, childhood poverty and limited educational choices.
Post-pandemic, there has been a rise in certain crimes (theft has increased by 25.2% and acts intended to cause injury are up 19.7%). But this is not limited to Bay of Plenty, Hamilton or Auckland – it is country-wide, and the evidence points to broad national causes driving rising crime.
These increases are serious and should not be trivialised. Yet, it appears to have escaped the notice of our politicians that the spike has occurred in a cost-of-living crisis – as if there was no relation to poverty and crime.
It would be a mistake for lawmakers to overlook solutions that address the broader, ongoing social and economic needs of poor communities in favour of unnecessarily punitive sentencing. But, of course they will.
The Sandringham show was only the beginning of last week’s gimcrack PR stunts.
Like so many leaders under pressure at home, Jacinda Ardern and her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin turned with relief to foreign affairs.
Their meeting earned global attention when Ardern, the smiling knife, skewered a journalist who asked about the purpose of the visit.
The question was clumsy and sexist in its composition, however the point remains valid. Marin didn’t travel half-way around the world with the sole aim of boosting our meat/fertiliser trade or debating the rules-based international order.
Stuff
Sandringham locals lay flowers at the Rose Cottage Dairy
It’s been four years since Helsinki sent a ministerial envoy, and six since we went the other way.
Only the naive would fail to see that that summit was as much about the optics of two glamorous, progressive leaders sharing a handshake, than boosting two-way trade that already sits firmly in Finland’s favour.
The bilateral had nothing to do with their age or gender – but it wasn’t much more than theatre.
The train of shameless opportunity didn’t just stop at Parliament, however.
There is much to criticise about Winston Peters’ unblushing courting of the anti-vax, anti-science vote by capitalising on the sad story of the parent refusing to allow their baby to receive blood from vaccinated donors. But why kick a man when he has fallen that low?
How did our politics get so stupid? Political life has become one long, permanent campaign where parties cynically offer up trivial sound bites in staged photo-ops – while kicking the most difficult decisions down the road.
There are many serious issues that urgently need attention – poverty, homelessness, shortages of housing, and mediocre health, education and public services.
But what we get is noise about crime, spaghetti-against-the wall criticisms of each other and very little in the form of substantive policies. Oh, and a lot of carefully curated Instagram profiles.
