He bandies the promise of thousands of new homes about with gay abandon, like an exact science, but without evidence or the properties and builders to back him up.
Bennett's piece was gobbledygook at best, with baloney, twaddle, mumbo-jumbo and hogwash all springing to mind as well.
I can't believe the lack of commentary questioning what she wrote. It's been a week now, and apart from a text telling her (as the it-girl off social welfare) to, ''Go Paula,'' and a fistful of Labour versus National battlers on social media, no one's taken her to task.
So lets look at what she wrote.
First, like Smith, with no indication whatsoever how they were derived, she pulls precise (recruit) numbers out of her Commissioner Plod's police hat: ''a $503m initiative called Safer Communities that will increase staff by 1125''; ''140 new officers to regional and rural areas''; ''more mobility devices ... (so) ... the equivalent of 354 front line officers have been freed up ... the equivalent 354 in addition to the 1125 just announced''.
Are these 1125 still to go through police college, or are they there waiting, just raring to go? Whose to say with so many experienced police perfing from the force at their earliest opportunity, that Kiwis would want to enrol as things stand today. And what's the equivalent of 354 front line officers? Ten or twenty Robocops? Or drones?
And the 140 new cops: is that 140 for each region or 140 to be divvied up between the whole country? We're told: ''As a priority area you can be assured your fair share of police are on the way to Hawke's Bay''. So what's our fair share? After so much precision, Bennett didn't say.
Mobility devices? What are these? Wheelchairs? I think she means mobile phones or iPads, or are we looking to recruit competitors from last years Paralympics, like Liam Malone leaping after crims on his blades through town faster than any car, or Sophie Pascoe, swimming to save someone from drowning quicker than you can launch a police craft.
Then there was the precise: ''Over the next four years police will seize $400m of cash and assets from gangs ... up from $230m''. Really? How long did it take to get $230 million?
Where did all that money go? Not on keeping police stations open, that's for sure. And how do you guarantee gangs and organised crime will earn you $400m. Do they show you their books? Surely that's an unknown quantity. What if the bottom falls out of the crim-market; or P? That should be the goal.
She repeats ad nauseam that she's ''unapologetic about targeting the worst offenders''. Of course she is. They're a cash cow.
Promising to ''increase their response time for attending calls''. Surely police should decrease their response time, Bennett, not increase it. Shouldn't 111 suffice? Not 300 24/7 individual police station numbers; there's no one there.
'The community expects to see police on the beat ... 95 per cent of NZers are within 25km of patrolling officers'. A beat is not 25 kilometres, Bennett. That's a half marathon.
People want 24/7 police stations, and bobbies on their streets, not undelivered promises or glib facts they can't refute.
- Graham Chaplow is a retiree, volunteer teachers' aide and award-winning writer.
- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
