Cotterill on Hipkins

Bruce Cotterill writes:

As Minister of Police he oversaw a level of public lawlessness that is new to us. His big idea was fog cannons. Although once he announced it, we realised we hadn’t ordered enough (more on that shortly). Fog cannons are the ultimate ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Instead of stopping robberies, and instead of playing hardball with the crims, our solution is to wait until they start robbing the store and then blow smoke in their faces.

That is a good description of it.

What will stop ram raids is catching them at it, and making sure they can’t do it again.

Take Hamilton. Send in say an extra 200 Police (2% of total in NZ) and for a month have them on duty every night, scattered around the city so that the moment there is a ram raid, you have Police there within a couple of minutes. Arrest those responsible and keep them in custody awaiting their first court hearing. I guarantee you after a fortnight or so, no more ram raids.

Announcing before ordering was something he’d done before. As Covid Minister, he told the nation that we were at the front of the queue for vaccines. We weren’t.

Failed to order both fog cannons and vaccines!

Chippy has also been the Minister of Education. In fact, during his watch we have learned that almost half of our kids aren’t going to school regularly, and our educational achievement levels are worse than ever.

Not even close to half – just 40%. And for Maori students only 27% attending regularly.