On Entrenchment, And Being ‘Soft On Crime’

Good grief. Is it really a grave misuse of power to entrench safeguards against the irreversible sale of key public assets? Hardly. If this country has learned anything over the past 40 years, it should be that New Zealand has suffered lasting economic and social damage from the previous sales of its key public assets. Why on earth would we want to risk doing it again? Why should we allow an ideologically-driven party with a simple majority in Parliament to sell off to a wealthy elite even more of the vital assets that previous generations bequeathed to us all?

In this context, it bears repeating that New Zealand has only a single chamber Parliament, no written Constitution, a weak Bill of Rights and a judicial system subservient to the primacy of Parliament. As currently mooted, entrenchment of the ownership of water assets would be at only 60%, still well shy of the 75% level at which say, the voting age is entrenched. That 60% figure seems like quite a low safety threshold, given our relatively recent history.

Moreover, the privatisation of water is not like other laws about entitlements, or taxation, or sentencing rules etc etc. Those can be tweaked and changed back and forth over time, by any party that has won an electoral mandate. Key assets are quite different. Once you’ve sold off the banking system, the telecommunications system, the energy companies, the railways and the airlines (as New Zealand has done in the recent past) it is enormously expensive, or utterly impossible to get back even a part of what we once owned in full.

Surely, the irreversibility of the sale of a key asset (e.g. water) into the hands of a wealthy few Kiwi individuals – or a predatory foreign buyer - should require protections stronger than the simple majority required to change the laws on say, dog registration or the taxing of fringe benefits. Yet it looks as though a timid Labour government is – once again – preparing to buckle under pressure.

Talking tough

The call for youth offenders to be (somehow) made to realise “their actions have consequences” is merely the fear and frustration talking. Most of these kids can’t be scared straight. Sir Peter Gluckman said as much in his fabled 2016 report on boot camps and on other dubiously punitive responses to youth crime.

After all, it is not as if these youth offenders have been coddled or spoiled in childhood. Many young offenders have grown up facing realities at home that are more bleak and terrifying than anything anyone could dream up in a military-style boot camp. Some of them have concluded they owe nothing to a society that has largely written them off from birth.

If anything, they need to be shown that alternatives are possible and that they can have a future. Unfortunately, that approach is routinely mocked as being ‘soft on crime.’ As a society, we’ve become so addicted to punishment that any funds spent on the rehabilitation of offenders runs the risk of being denounced as an insult to the victims of crime, and neglectful of their rights.

That’s a mistake. Responding to crime shouldn’t be treated as a zero sum game. If we’re serious, we need to pour more funding into the counselling, drug treatment, mental health care and upskilling of offenders as well as looking after the recovery needs of the victims of crime. It’s a both/and situation, not an either/or.

After Sandringham

Obviously, the killing of Janak Patel, the worker at the Sandringham dairy, was shocking and utterly unacceptable. Dairy owners and their workers have been in the firing line during the recent spate of ram raids and violence. However, since the two people charged so far in connection with Patel’s death are aged 34 and 42 respectively, this case has nothing to do with youth offending.

To repeat: It is socially unacceptable for anyone to be killed at work. Surely, that should be the case whether the fatalities are caused by criminal actions, by avoidable accidents, or by a disregard for worker safety. From that perspective, it is worth considering why similar levels of outrage and national soul searching do not arise with respect to our levels of workplace-related fatalities, even though 68 people died at work in 2020, and 65 in 2021. The same data indicates that retail trade was actually the safest place to work during the year to August 2022 – with .41 fatalities per 100,000 workers, far below the 16.42 rate of fatalities per 100,000 for employees in the transport industry, for instance. An avoidable death in the family is a tragedy, whether it is caused by crime, or the heedless pursuit of profit.

No one wants to see Janak Patel’s death used as a political football. But it is worth pointing out to the “lock’ em up” advocates that New Zealand already has put a very high proportion of its population behind bars. The current rate of 150 inmates per 100,000 people is almost double the 84 inmates per 100,000 in Ireland, which has almost the same population as we do. Nor do the figures indicate we are soft on the imprisonment/detention rates for juveniles and minors. Young offenders comprise 1.3% of our prison/detention population, a ratio higher than the .9% in Ireland, and the .4% in the UK.

Making these global comparisons might seem like nit-picking. But the rhetoric that “nothing” is being done to deter crime and youth offending seems wilfully divorced from reality. On RNZ, PM Jacinda Ardern rebutted the accusations the government was being soft on crime by pointing to the extra $500 million that has gone into supporting the Police crime prevention unit. And even more to the point:

Ardern said ram-raid numbers had declined to about 13 this month. One of the reasons was the impact of prosecutions and convictions, she said… The other was the intervention with about 70 young people identified as contributing to the problem, some repeatedly, that resulted in half of them getting back into education and training, she said. "We've worked on specific plans for each of those individual children because in those cases you've got to work with the family too."

Among the “soft on crime” crowd of course, that sort of thing tends to be derided as a kind of a “Kumbaya” response. The hardliners appear to want a response so thermonuclear that youth crime will be vaporised on impact. On past experience however, the boot camp proposal that’s currently being suggested would very likely be doomed to end up as a costly exercise in futility. When this was pointed out to Christopher Luxon by interviewer Jack Tame on Q& A yesterday, Luxon responded that his new version of the boot camp idea would last longer – for a year, not 12 weeks – and would also include more intensive wraparound services provided by community groups.

Let's leave aside for a moment the very real problem of why making a failed process last four times longer would be any more likely to achieve a successful outcome. The proposal would also involve finding enough qualified NZDF personnel available for year round boot camp mentoring duties at a time when the Defence forces are struggling to fill their traditional roles.

Also… What level of funds would be needed to house, feed and mentor young offenders in those camps for a year at a time? Where’s the cost/benefit analysis? In sum, the boot camp idea looks like a cynical bit of political posturing at the expense of the victims of crime. There is no clarity as to what alternative policies to cut the rate of youth offending would be (a) feasible and (b) affordable – and that’s before we can even get close to a consensus on what would qualify as a lasting success.

More to the point, we haven’t started to ask what is causing so many youth to feel they have no future in this society, such that they may as well grab from it what they can.

Pretend politics

Don’t know why, but the Luxon interview on Q & A did make me think of these lines:

…. My need is such I pretend too much
Adrift in a world of my own….

Too real is this feeling of make-believe
I seem to be what I'm not, you see…

Here’s the original version of “The Great Pretender” as performed by Tony Williams and the rest of the Platters. The Platters may be all but forgotten now, but they were one of the most successful groups of the 1950s:

© Scoop Media