Police Minister Annette King is entirely right to say that no government can be expected to have a policeman on every street corner, waiting to intercept acts of random robbery, rape and mindless violence.

But she misses the point. She says that her government has thrown millions of dollars into extra police officers and “systems”. Evidently, almost all of it was a waste of money, given the tide of crime sweeping parts of the nation. Her visit to the trouble spots is as useful as the Queen Mother’s trips to blitzed East London during World War 2.

King and her party are misguided and rudderless.

What she and her colleagues could have done during the last nine years was to create a positive, competitive society where underprivileged people get real opportunities and feel less inclined to be involved with P-labs, drug trafficking and prostitution, along with gang intimidation, drive-by shootings, vandalism and general disorder. Poverty is a breeding ground for crime. Hope for a better future discourages it. In this key respect, Labour is an utter failure.

Hopefully, King and her deluded administration will soon be able, in semi-retirement, to regret almost a decade of social disasters, where caring parents were criminalised, all manner of weird social experiments came to no positive conclusion, places like South Auckland were allowed to descend into the cesspit, and we over-filled our expanding prisons with people who were offered no hope.

While Labour and friends were busily stifling public opinion, the kids were out robbing, vandalising and driving dangerously without limit, and some of their elders became convinced they too could get away with almost anything. While socialists were busily legitimising gay unions, the queues for common justice grew so long that it now often takes more than two years to bring an alleged killer to the court.

Now, King’s leader says that all kids will be required to stay in some sort of education until they are 18. That puts more pressure on teachers and trainers, and it doesn’t address the issue of parental responsibility and their role in widespread truancy. This is because liberal socialists, having for decades denied the value of stable families, cannot bear to confront the horrible truth of what they have spawned.

They also neatly side-step the Government’s responsibility to create an equitable society. Despite Working for Families and the rest, the rich are much richer and the poor are seriously poorer. Little wonder, then, that middle class anger may have expressed itself with the fatal attack on a stupid teenager tagging someone’s fence. Little wonder that teenagers are prepared to murder while they rob a dairy.

Little wonder, too, that ordinary people are outraged when victims of a pathological killer allegedly faced a $19,000 legal aid bill (even though the Dominion Post was once again guilty of gross misreporting). The very fact that this issue arose is due entirely to a wholly insensitive approach to the victims of crime. And Annette King is personally culpable for that.

Vote for another three years of this? Yeah, right.