It’s probably just as well Police Association president Chris Cahill is no longer a serving cop.
One suspects that if he did still have the power of arrest, he’d have happily put handcuffs on the government this week, chucked them in the cells for the night and had them up before a judge on a charge of performing an indecent act in a public place.
To say that police are not happy with the government’s latest pay offer — the aforementioned indecent act in a public place — is a bit like saying that Winston Peters can get a bit splenetic.
In a determined effort to make clear just how angry the country’s coppers are, Cahill told a press conference his members had called the offer “disgusting”, “farcical”, demoralising”, “disrespectful”, “insulting”, “a kick in the guts” and “an absolute joke”. So it’s on the cards they might reject it.
But then they already have. The deal, with no added backpay, turns out to be pretty much the same one offered last September under Labour, which as National has banged on about endlessly, was “soft on crime”.
Of course, the National Party, as it does every election, has promised its voters it will be “tough on crime”. The coalition’s just-completed 100-day plan is sticking it to the crims through a bill to ban gang patches, giving police greater powers to search gang members for guns, “cracking down” on youth offending, and so on.
Meanwhile, the government’s policy statement on land transport released last week demands more police enforcement on our potholed roads, including setting a target for at least 3 million roadside breath-alcohol tests a year.
So it sounds like this being “tough on crime” stuff will require quite a lot of extra work for an already hardworking bunch of people who are currently extremely narked with the government over its latest pay offer.
In response to what are quite obviously hard-bargaining tactics from the Police Association, our new Police Minister, the life-like Mark Mitchell, offered the pitiful riposte — one favoured by every employer in the history of the world — that the negotiations were happening in “tough economic times”, though it’s increasingly clear the economic times are tougher for some than others.
On one hand, according to the Act leader David Seymour, the country can’t afford school lunches. On the other, he was extremely pleased to announce this week that landlords, a group even less popular than politicians, will again get billions in tax breaks.
Meanwhile the country can no longer afford to increase benefits at the same rate as wages (they’re back to being linked to inflation), but it could afford to pay the Prime Minister Christopher “Luxe” Luxon $52,000 a year to live in his own mortgage-free luxury apartment, though of course he saw the light on that one eventually.
Frankly, it becomes more and more of a mystery every week what the country can afford and what it can’t in this era of fiscal austerity.
When it comes to our coppers, it doesn’t take someone as smart as our police minister to work out that because police cannot go on strike, or take any other kind of industrial action, the only way they can stick it to their employer is to embarrass them publicly, particularly when the government is talking big on being “tough on crime”.
Whether the Police Association’s tactics work remains to be seen. Though given Mitchell is committed to hiring 500 extra police in the next two years, it’s probably safe to say police complaining loudly and publicly about their pay and conditions isn’t much help if you’re a police minister trying to drum up new recruits to meet an election promise.
The other thing for Mitchell to keep in mind is this: although our coppers can’t go on strike, they can move to Australia for much better pay — and a fair few already have. So if Mitchell wants to stay on the right side of the law, he’d better do better than trying to fob off Cahill — an ex-detective inspector — with flannel about “tough economic times”.
Will David Seymour do anything for a headline? The answer to that question was answered definitively back in 2018 when he twerked his way to infamy in yellow Lycra on Dancing with the Stars, a sight that can still cause a bout of dry-retching for those of us who saw it.
Back then, Seymour appeared to be little more than a goofy, smiling, political outlier spouting the sort of crazy ideas that more than nine out of 10 New Zealand voters still won’t have bar of. Back then, only the small-government-flat-tax-personal-responsiblity-individual-freedom wing-nuts on the fringe of the right took him seriously.
Yet look at him now. Post an election that has finally delivered Act the sort of political power it has long longed for, the smiling outlier has become the smiling assassin. It takes a certain kind of politician — in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, no less — to attack a school lunch programme providing access to nutritious food to about 235,000 students who are in need of the greatest support.
It takes a certain kind of politician — in “tough economic times”, no less — to gleefully suggest that hundreds of journalists losing their jobs are a bunch of whiners who are more or less getting what they deserve.
And it takes a certain kind of politician to expect universal sympathy when he comes a gutser. On his way home from an event earlier this week on his e-bike, Seymour apparently didn’t see a car, slammed on his brakes a little too abruptly, and ended up, whoopsy, going over his handlebars.
Evidently, passersby went quickly to his aid, though one person wasn’t quite so sympathetic. “While I’m sitting on the traffic island in a state of shock,” he told the Herald, “some guy comes over and starts filming me. I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird’ and then he says, ‘You know what, sometimes you get exactly what you deserve.’”
Saying such a thing to someone while they’re down is very poor form, and Seymour was rightly put out. But isn’t that exactly what he was saying to hundreds of journalists not too long ago?
