Mike's Minute: Labour's behind the scenes look reveals all

We could spend some time on the ineptitude of Jan Tinetti, who may well go down as one of our most ineffective education ministers.  The blow out in school buildings, as the Prime Minister suggested, borders on a crisis and, according to Labour, that’s just the price of stuff going up.  Which leads you to ask - were they setting traps for a new Government knowing they were going to lose, or were they genuinely thinking they could win and, if they did, they would worry about paying the ever-mounting bills another day?  But some real insight from former minister Stuart Nash who, in an irony of ironies, turned out to be a big Government supporter in their gang crackdown.  As the media set about finding every man, woman and dog to tell us how cracking down on gangs was a mixture between a stunt and a gimmick and a waste of time, forgetting of course most of last year's outrage over violence, what we got from Stuart was the proof of what Mark Mitchell had been banging on about for a year or so.  There's a limit set on what police could grab as a result of moneys earned by nefarious means.  The limit set by the previous Government on assets police can seize was $30,000.  Mark, and the rest of us, asked why?  Your chopper is $25,000 so you keep it, despite the fact you sold drugs to fund it. Why?  It turns out Stuart was busy in cabinet fighting for a zero target and he was being overruled by Hipkins and Ardern. In that revelation is an insight, or perhaps a confirmation, of what we suspected.  Labour are soft on gangs. Labour let people out of prison. Labour funded an industry in cultural reports. Labour encouraged the judges to go soft, and what we got was rampant crime and anti-social behaviour.  So much of it that it became somewhere between the number one or two issue in the election.  I don't blame Stuart. He always struck me as being at the more sensible, practical end of the party. But look at what he was dealing with.  This new Government has been left with the equivalent of an unexploded World War II bomb in a major built-up area and they're looking at how to defuse it and take it away.  It's almost daily at the moment.  And the more we get, the more we see the mess, the carnage, the tragedy, the abject failure and fiscal incompetence of Labour 2020 - 2023.  And with the more we know, surely the further from power they should be kept. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.