Hooton on Labour’s biggest bungle?
Matthew Hooton writes:
The Ardern regime’s inability to deliver has become a national joke, with KiwiBuild the punchline.
But the endless failures, especially in sensitive areas of social policy, including mental health, have real-world consequences.
As Newshub’s Imogen Wells revealed this week, just short of a year ago no less than Ardern herself launched a National Strategy and Action Plan to Eliminate Family and Sexual Violence. “As Prime Minister, I take responsibility of lifting the wellbeing of our tamariki and their whānau,” Ardern told the assembled social workers, policy analysts, dignitaries and media called to Te Papa’s Rongomaraeroa for the historic event.
In support of the new strategy, the Government announced a $20 million fund to support victims of non-fatal strangulation. It was meant to fund 870 expert medical witnesses to help the Crown prosecute or secure early guilty pleas from sexual offenders.
In fact, it has been used in only 86 cases. Worse, more than half of those experts ended up being hired by defence lawyers to support not victims, but alleged offenders.
It is difficult to comprehend that any government could be so incompetent as to announce plans to help 870 victims of sexual crime and instead end up helping alleged perpetrators.
Of their many many failures, this could be the worse. They announce $20 million to help victims of strangulation and in fact most of the help goes to the alleged stranglers!!!!
When asked about the debacle at an event promoting their hate speech legislation, the Prime Minister said that neither she nor former Justice Minister Andrew Little was responsible.
It seems the Prime Minister only regards herself as responsible for Government programmes when launching them before the TV cameras, not for whether they happen or, in this case, don’t.
Precisely.
Another contributing factor is presumably that no one in the Beehive kept the pressure on the bureaucrats with weekly meetings to discuss progress, the way a Joyce, Cullen, Birch or Hipkins might have.
Yep, a strong Minister will be on top of this.