Normally she rushes headlong towards a photo opportunity in the aftermath of a tragedy. Strangely, this time she’s bolted for a remote island far, far away.
ACT leader David Seymour has denounced the Prime Minister for flying to the Chatham Islands in the aftermath of an Auckland dairy worker being stabbed to death.
But Jacinda Ardern said she was trying to “delicately balance being in the right place at the right time”, noting she didn’t want to get in the way of an ongoing police investigation.
On Wednesday night, the worker was stabbed to death during an aggravated robbery in the suburb of Sandringham. The alleged killer remains on the run.
Responding to the killing on Thursday, Ardern said it was devastating.
“To the family who today mourns their lost loved one – I am so sorry this has happened. I know our Sandringham community is a tight-knit one and they will be feeling this deeply too,” said Ardern, who’s also the MP for Mt Albert – the electorate where the dairy was located.
“Our job as Government is to make sure those who commit such crimes are brought to justice and to try and prevent them [from] occurring at all. On both counts, we will keep doing all we can,” she said in a statement posted on social media.
In a statement, however, Seymour condemned Ardern’s response to the tragedy. The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to the Chatham Islands to open the Ngati Mutunga o Wharekauri Civic Building.
“The Prime Minister and MP for Mt Albert has shown a complete lack of judgment by going to the Chatham Islands today instead of supporting her local community after the tragic death of a dairy owner,” Seymour said.
“ACT offers our condolences to the family and friends of the man who lost his life. This should be a turning point where the Government finally takes retail crime as seriously as it deserves.”
Seymour said the tragedy should be making the Government act decisively.
“Instead of dropping everything to be in her electorate today and making the response to retail crime a priority, she is on a plane to the Chathams. A trip she could have easily postponed.”
Newshub
Ardern didn’t show such caution in the face of a Police investigation when she donned a hijab to go on a hug fest in Christchurch. Neither did she sit back and wait in the aftermath of the White Island tragedy.
She is quick to pounce on tragedies to shore up her support but, in this case, she seems afraid of the community backlash in her own electorate.
If a local MP can’t deign to visit her own electorate after a tragedy then she really doesn’t deserve to be the MP any longer. She’s abrogated her responsibilities and should be run out of town on a rail.
Her cowardice shows that she, and her advisors, think that there are more votes in pandering to Maori interests than showing some empathy for Indian dairy workers.
The bottom line is this, however: Labour’s soft-on-crime policies of emptying the prisons, turning the Police into woke Wombles and ignoring the social impact of their harsh lockdowns and the consequential hurt to society are all to blame for this tragedy.
They’ve focused, not on criminals, but rather on law-abiding firearms owners to demonise, belittle and persecute them for the evil acts of an Australian citizen that the Police bizarrely gave a firearms licence.
Instead of ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into attacking firearms owners, they should have spent that money on better prisons and more effective policing. They didn’t, and so the blood is on their hands.
But I really don’t want her turning up, grandstanding with her sad woeful face with all the cameras on her as she dresses up as an Indian dairy owner.
Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE
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