MEDIAWATCH: Luke Malpass’s Military Boot Camp column misses the real friction point

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
33
1545
Would you like ice cream with that ankle bracelet?

I like Luke Malpass, I think he is one of the best political columnists at Stuff and he is always a must read journalist but I think his latest column assessing Luxon’s Military Boot Camps misses the real issue at hand by an enormous mark.

Luke’s argument is that this tough on crime punitive approach by National will reward Luxon politically.

I disagree.

Putting ankle bracelets on 10 year olds IS NOT a middle ground policy.

National aren’t trying to win Labour or Green or Māori Party or TOP or NZ First votes here, they are desperately stealing them from ACT!

The most recent polling tells us that National have hit their ceiling and that Luxon’s electoral appeal is actually a lot more limiting than strategists had prayed for.

His inauthenticity from Te Puke to Hawaii makes it difficult for voters to believe him when he talks about their cost of living economic pain.

His  ability to u-turn a total 180 degrees within 48 hours is now becoming legendary.

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You constantly get the feeling that Chris is telling you what he thinks you want to hear rather than what he actually  believes.

National can not be perceived as a Government in waiting when ACT are in double digits.

This insane attempt to out-ACT ACT by being even MORE punitive than ACT when it comes to ram raiding kids is a desperate strategy to win back ACT voters.

Luke ignores the reality of this political dimension to the policy and as such reduces it to ‘Lefties screaming at Luxon’ which misses what is really going on.

The danger for National is that they move so far right to take votes from ACT that they lose the middle who recoil at the harshness Luxon is promoting.

This is dumb desperate stuff and should be called out as such.

A rare miss for Luke.

 

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33 COMMENTS

  1. Re-written headline:
    Luke Malpass’s Military Boot Camp truth irritates leftwing who care fuck all for the victims of crime. It’s all about the poor crime these days.

  3. In absence of anything even resembling a solution to this issue from the left, sadly it will benefit National. Labour can pull their heads our of their proverbial any day now, and finally start working for this country and all of its citizens or it can go on with is social grand cultural reform and lose to National.
    You either take these kids of the street into something structured where they can’t continue their criming, or you watch them become professional criminals, or worse kill someone during a ramraid or a bashing gone wrong and that then is on the Labour Party as they are the government, left and the enablers of this government and its failure to clean house.
    Choose.

  4. Its interesting that you say that national can’t look like a govt in waiting if they are polling at 35% and act is at 10%

    I think that would have been true prior to the labour/green mou when the media and general public only thought of parties as indivudal entities ie national would be at 46% and labour would be reported as at 29-32%.

    Since the mou was signed and this blog was right about this six years ago, it forced the public and news to talk about left and right blocks not individual parties so it was now 46% right block to 43% left block.

    I think the general public is knowledgeable enough that it sees national and act and labour and the greens as blocks now and based off that national/act do look like a potential govt in waiting.

    We live in the era of blocks, if labour was polling in the mid 40’s and national mid 30s we probably would revert back to indivudal parties being seen as govts in waiting but with both parties in the early to mid 30s that ain’t gonna happen.

    Nat/act look no less like a govt in waiting at 35/10% than labour/green did in 2017 polling 36/9.

  5. “I think he is one of the best political columnists at Stuff…..”. WTF??!
    I am surprised at your standards comrade.

    Malpass came from the the Far Right thinktank — the so-called “New Zealand Initiative”.
    The extreme bias in his articles renders him one of worst, not best, political columnists.

    His lickspittle praise of whatever tosh Nazional/ACT spew is NOT journalism. Far from it.
    STUFF is composed chiefly of neoliberal propaganda, with little actual unbiased and critical journalism. He fits right in of course.

    • I agree Luke Malpass is a very capable Journalist but you are not wrong Jase. I loathed him for years because he was so right wing. Then Stuff had it’s come to Jesus moment and suddenly Luke was spouting Woke virtuosity. I couldnt believe the hypocrisy.

      However, having said that, he has been instrumental in Stuff’s more recent journey towards the middle.

    • Mind you, given the way Martyn usually talks about Stuff’s standard of journalism, being described as one of their “best political columnists” smacks of backhanded compliment.

  6. I certainly don’t think it’s just lefties screaming at Luxon. Former National MPs are pointing out its not an effective solution ( probably because they were around when National ditched it).

    That being said look at a number of comments on this site. If Luxon proposed smearing that McDonalds ice cream on his testicles, as a solution to youth crime, they would just say ‘so what are the left doing?’

  7. Nobody likes the idea of ankle bracelets on children but what are the alternatives?
    If there are no consequences these children will continue and innocent people will get hurt or possibly accidentally killed.

    • scott, if a kid wearing a bracelet goes out and kills someone you can prove he was there for the court but it’s doesn’t stop the murder

  8. What is happening now it 100% ineffective. Whats been announced by the Govt is nothing but words. The facts show that while the last incantation of boot camps wasn’t hugly successful there was a real drop in offending, the seriousness of it and frequency of it.

    So the chooses appear to be either Nothing or something that has a proven reduction even if its not huge or ideal.

    I sad to see so many of the selfish would prefer to do nothing purely due to thier political leanings.

  9. Martyn, I agree with your comment.
    The problem for Te Reo Luxon is that he is a dollar short and a day late.
    He is incapable of taking votes away from ACT.
    He is, I believe seeking to take back the 400,000 National votes ( mainly women ) who went to Labour to keep the Greens out in 2020.
    ACT voters will never go to Luxon who has publicly stated he believes the treaty is a “ partnership “ and supports co – governance as it applies to lakes , rivers, beaches , National Parks and DoC land.
    Totally unacceptable to the growing numbers of ACT supporters who are fleeing Labour – Lite National.

  10. I defiantly do not align with the so called “lefties,” anymore, but the “hey, let me serve you up a burger even maggots or mold wont eat,” doesn’t do it for me either. And no Luxon does not push voters to Act, he pushes them to literally nobody. It is the pissed off middle of mostly women- you know the ones you were warned about… And further, what evidence is there that all these ram raids are by children? Every recording I have seen of stealing have been by grown people and it is obvious, but somehow in the dark of night with no cvtv its all a massive amount of kids running wild- so many in fact we need a boot camp school? Is that right?

  12. National have more than a few problems:

    1. What the boot camp announcement showed is National are not planning nor thinking but reacting. I.e., making shit up as the go.
    2. Luxon, who has zero experience in the lying game of modern politics, is struggling. You want to see omissions, diffusion, avoidance, and weapons grade bullshit , all in one seamless sales pitch with a variety of empathetic expressions to close the deal, and in action, watch our current PM.
    3. His team for whom he is reliant upon are inept.

    But what the boot camp announcement ended up being was an unnecessary own goal. They showed they don’t understand the immediate problems or the long term with youth crime.

    They fail to realise Labour’s corner stone justice policy of jail emptying and keeping them empty without a plan B is at the immediate root cause of no consequences facet of the crime wave we are experiencing. And when potential societal game changers like Covid lockdowns came along to heap more complications to a failed housing situation, the cornerstone no consequences model is an even bigger failure.

    The immediate fix isn’t that hard, bring back some form of meaningful consequences. If you don’t, the rest of us have to suck it up and live in the crime garden paradise we are currently living in. But then work on longer term solutions to the bigger underlying causes.

    If National don’t understand the issues, they are going to flatline in the polls forever more! Because as voters look to other party’s for solutions to the current malaise, they don’t see any! They see a bunch of clowns in suits little better than the current idiots!

  15. National talks about ‘monitoring young offenders..’ but exactly which organisation will be expected to do the ‘monitoring’???!!!! Will it be down to the NZ Police who are already over-worked? Will it be the Justice Dept who are also over-worked??? Will it be MSD who are in the same boat as the Police and the Justice Dept i.e over-worked????? Or will it be up to each individual National MP to ‘monitor’ the offenders in their very electorate???!!!

    National are so full of re-hashed failed policies of the past that they again want to re-create these failed policies but all in all they will only contribute more so to a problem in years to come.

    They have no idea of what to do than regurgitate like vomit things that have never worked in the past and are unlikely to work in the future. They haven’t learnt anything but will continue to also beat an out-dated Mantra on their outdated National Party Blame-Game Drum i.e it’s always someone elses’ fault and never their for what happens even whilst there was a National government.

    And they have a Flip-Flop leader who cannot be consistent but seems to love the sound of his voice and being in the media limelight thanks to the NZ National Party Faithful in the mainstream NZ media.

  16. At $250k per head for Bootcamp ‘Ukraine – Cannon-fodder’ training. There will be a lot of interest from Zelensky.

    Look. Its election year so it out with the Hard-on for Crime, the Poor and the Brown and others!

    I just cant wait for the hung parliament and,or minority government that follows with the ensuing following election. Then will get to a place where the shite has been culled, rejected by the public and the Woke-eetes & Wokesters will have given up because they and their mortgages are underwaters from all that debt and their tears! Good fuckn job!
    The greedy pigs!
    That $55b Robo-Bazooka cash that made them the landed gentry when they went on a spending spree and pigged out on property purchases that took them all into the ‘trillion club’, that party is over.
    They’ll go spastic at next years election and the next one that follows that!

    Fun times ahead.

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