Cam Slater: Oh, So You Want Evidence?

The Greens love to lecture us about evidence-based policy, but strangely they never seem to produce any such evidence when it comes to their own policies.

Chloe Swarbrick has her knickers in a bunch over Labour’s weak policy response to ram raiders.

Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick has hit out at the Labour Party, saying its ram-raid crackdown is not based on evidence and it’s playing politics.

Earlier this month, Labour announced it would make ram raids a specific crime, which could be punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The move will also allow police to charge 12 and 13-year-olds so they can be tried in the Youth Court. Under the current system, they can only be charged for the most serious charges like manslaughter and murder. It will mean pre-teens can face penalties like being locked up in a youth justice facility or wearing an ankle bracelet.

Swarbrick was critical of the announcement on AM on Monday it was “gutting” and not evidence-based.

A survey conducted by MYOB of 500 small and medium-sized enterprises in New Zealand showed 43 percent of respondents wanted harsher penalties for criminals, which was the top priority for them.

Swarbrick told AM co-host Ryan Bridge she supports small businesses but is also in favour of evidence-based policy.

“What we know is the concern out there with regard to what’s been happening in law and order and the criminality space has, I guess, to be really frank, kind of been exploited by parties who are looking to put forward non-evidence-based policies which we know demonstrably do not work,” she said.

“We’ve sat on this couch in the past and we’ve spoken about when people spend longer in prison, they are in fact more likely to re-offend. We have to change that entire system such that we get far better outcomes in the first place.” 

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This is the same silly bint who wants to abolish prisons. Has she presented evidence that that policy would make communities safer? No, she hasn’t.

So let’s get this straight, Chloe doesn’t believe that there is any evidence that getting tough on crime will reduce crime, but she does believe that there is evidence that if we ban plastic bags and straws then the global temperature will go way down and the polar bear and walrus populations will massively increase?

Meanwhile there is strong evidence from her own electorate that soft sentencing instead of prison for an assault perpetrator is not the answer to her “close the prisons” stance.

Or did she miss the death of two innocent people gunned down in the middle of her electorate, as well as the hundreds of armed Police that swarmed all over downtown Auckland to clean up the results of that soft-on-crime stance? Pretty compelling evidence, don’t you think?

Apparently, there is no “evidence” that putting a violent offender in jail will protect us from them, but there is evidence that using the correct gender pronouns will stop genocide. Tell us more about what you mean by “evidence-based” Chloe; we are all ears.

Does Chloe’s newfound desire for evidence-based policy mean the Greens will remove their opposition to genetic modification and genetic engineering? Will it mean an end to their anti-nuclear stance given the so-called climate emergency and the evidence that nuclear power is the cleanest and greenest source of energy, by a country mile?

Or is this just another case of virtue signalling without any actual evidence that Chloe Swarbrick has a brain?

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