A sick, 61-year-old former missionary is brutally beaten for no apparent reason at a bus stop in a “safe” area of Auckland, and slowly dies.

An old farmer in a remote part of Hawke’s Bay is shot dead at dawn by a killer with a high-powered rifle. There is only one escape route for the killer, and it runs for almost 40 kilometres. Yet he is not caught or even noticed. Four years later, an expensive trial comes to nothing and somewhere or other, a murderer is walking around scot-free.

Two tiny babies are battered to death by someone in their whanau who threw them against a wall. Three years later, nobody pays the price for that. It’s another case of too little, too late, too sensitive, too under-staffed.

Too many cases are failing because of inadequate investigation and grotesquely delayed justice.

On the other hand, a semi-literate vandal is swiftly jailed for tagging by a judge who describes his conduct as “culturally offensive”; and then a Maori Party MP describes the judge as a dickhead.

Hagley Park, in Christchurch, is declared an unsafe area after nightfall, like many other public parks across the nation.

When night falls, all sorts of pond-life emerge to crawl about our cities, towns and countryside, leaving spray-painted graffiti like a dog marks its territory, breaking into houses, stealing for drug money, causing danger to others on the road or mindlessly assaulting innocent people.

Bone-headed, ugly, drug-dealing gang members parade about in patched insignia and self-tagged tattoos, intimidating unpatched and untattooed people, naturally believing that this is their right because police and politicians have shown that they are very, very frightened of gangs.

A group of churches plans to issue pamphlets drawing attention to pressing moral issues. It runs up against the Electoral Commission, which – casting about amid the total confusion of the Electoral Finance Act – suspects that this might somehow be construed as party political propaganda and subject to prosecution.

Meanwhile, a union that wanted to flout the EFA and subsidise Labour election propaganda discovers that it is actually a “legal person” and not a disembodied, impartial entity that is innocent of political bias.

The rest of us, striving against all odds to lead a normal life, are naturally shocked and bewildered by all this lawless, immoral behaviour. We demand answers.

Do we need more police? What’s happened to the justice system? Should sentences be harsher? Where is the leadership that will curb this tendency towards barbarism? How come churchmen are being dragged by politicians into their dirty business? And we all thought that unionism had been sent back to the cave.

Well, the short answer is that while we have been watching the telly, a sick society has crept up from the gutter, and we are governed by out-of-touch good-for-nothings who proudly strut about promising to save the Earth, but could not run a public convenience, let alone a justice system. As decent neighbourhoods are nightly despoiled by crime and violence, almost everyone (no matter how honest) gradually develops a disrespect for so-called law and order.

Instead of getting up and shouting about the harsh realities in New Zealand, a large number of Kiwi couch potatoes recently spent half of one night glued to an episode of the facile Coronation Street, and the “conviction” of a brutal female Barlow killer who was “sentenced” to 15 years without parole. Such was the mock gravity of this episode that the final credits and always-depressing theme tune were omitted, while viewers were given time to ponder the result, put the kettle on, and mourn.

No doubt they felt a lot better for the gruelling experience. But, hey, she’s an actress, and she’s leaving the show. And the show is long past its view-by date.

There are those on the Right who would prefer minimum interference in their lives by politicians, but urge the harshest punishment of wrong-doers. They are the same people who, when burgled, complain when the under-funded and over-managed cops don’t turn up within five minutes. They’d like boot camps where naughty youngsters would learn marching and how to swing from branch to branch (irrelevant, since many offenders can do that from birth).

There are those on the Left who blame all this malaise on poverty and disadvantage. They are the same people who, over the last nine years, have done virtually nothing about that – apart from recruiting a vast army of unproductive and clueless civil servants who bleat on, but remain solution-free.

The long answer is that you don’t solve social problems by endlessly increasing the prison population and building more punishment cells in which to keep convicts bored and restless. At what point do you say we have enough prisons? Hundreds of years’ experience proves that this system simply does not work. Go to countries like Finland and discover how they have dramatically cut crime and recidivism.

You don’t solve social inequality by State redistribution of wealth, either, through open-handed welfare benefits or “Working for Families”. You spend a lot of the prison budget instead on providing real (and sometimes compulsory) opportunities that force young people to learn the basics. You provide an environment – inside and outside prison – where it makes more gut sense to earn a living than to steal from others or spray-paint their garden fences, or go on the dole.

When a Hawke’s Bay judge recently jailed a young tagger, the sentence was greeted with widespread rejoicing that had the faint echoes of ugly mob rule. One dissenting voice was that of Hone Harawira, the Maori Party MP, who needlessly played the race card and muddied the ducking pond by calling the judge a dickhead. When Harawira was quietly advised that this constituted contempt of court and he could be jailed for quite a long time, he rapidly apologised, but called loudly for yet another “debate” about some undefined subject concerning either culture or offensiveness or both, or neither.

Unless Harawira can track down the culturally offensive people who killed the Kahui kids, he is as useful to Maori and the rest of New Zealand as a moa armed with a box of matches.

It will be interesting to see whether or not Judge Tony Ahearne’s sharp treatment sees the tagger emerging from jail as a reformed character, whether the tagging epidemic subsides, and whether Harawira will stop pretending that his tribe are victims and ceases his ignorant and culturally offensive tirades. None of this is likely.

Modest standards of literacy and numeracy are the minimum qualifications of any decent member of society. They are the bedrock of civilised life. They can turn taggers into artists.

No prisoner should be let out of jail, no immigrant should be let into this country, no student should leave school, and nobody should get access to any form of benefit unless they are mentally incapable or can prove beyond doubt that, in the English language, they understand right from wrong, can read the final demand from a power supplier, do basic arithmetic, and can accurately write their own name in big letters on a garden fence, clearly enough for PC Plod to read.