Pay no attention to the hypodermic syringes – they’re no problem. The victims are long gone. But always remember that all this rubbish is much more threatening to your normal way of life than the so-called Urewera Liberation Front.

Grenade launchers and land mines are the latest manic and completely unsupported claims associated with the allegedly state-sponsored Urewera Liberation Front, a group of people who were thought to be teaching bushcraft skills under a government grant, but now turn out to be – if you believe the hype – agents of revolution, bloody land grabs and indiscriminate slaughter of white-skinned folk who don’t like Maori people or wind farms or organic food. Or whatever.

It turns out, according to the Christchurch dealer who sold the “landmine”, that it was just part of a paint-ball kit, as used by companies who take their employees on team-building breaks.

Hopefully, it contained eco-friendly acrylic emulsion from Resene, in a really fashionable colour that wouldn’t mess up your make-up too much if you accidentally trod on it during some corporate bonding and mission-intensive foray in the bushes with your pals from the office.

The grenade launcher, mentioned by Martyn Bomber Bradbury on National Radio during one of his pull-out-and-throw-away remarks, will probably turn out to be a powerful Chinese-made Guy Fawkes rocket bought and hoarded shortly before Nanny Clark and her friends decided to reduce risks to life, limb and the utterly dumb even further by banning any firework that could start a fire or provide any sort of exciting display.

More seriously, Richard Long in the Dominion Post writes an article about the raids that, once again, is very Long on speculation and severely Short on fact. No doubt others have been writing in much the same vein, but life is too limited for Grumpies to read all their raving nonsense.

Mr Long makes many, many ever-so slightly paranoid claims about this so-called threat, and backs them up with not one iota of evidence, protecting himself by saying that it will all come out from the police in the end. We won’t waste space by copying his article.

However, we can say that it is one of the most scurrilous, unsubstantiated, pompous pieces of twaddle that the Dominion Post has published in living memory.

And we ask Mr Long: If what you say is true, Richard, why indulge in idle speculation in the first place? Why not support it with evidence? Or why not just shut up and leave it to the law to deal with?

The fact that Richard Long is a long-time advisor to the National Party, and the ease with which he infers close and secret knowledge of what’s going on (as Bombless Bradbury claimed, but is now moving swiftly in reverse from), should inspire serious doubt among voters who might be considering a change of government by bomb or ballot box.

We’re grumpy, but we’re also fair-minded. It’s appreciated that, following widespread protests including some from Gog supporters, the Dominion Post has dropped its ridiculous Terror Raids logo, featuring a New Zealand flag superimposed by a Kalashnikov rifle.

What we want to see from Government, the police, the press and the likes of Richard Long and Bomber Bradbury is a lot less loose talk and a lot more fact. Otherwise, the suspicion will grow that – like Ahmed Zaoui – there are people being held in custody for no good reason.

It took four years to clear Zaoui and it may take at least one year to bring any of these arrested people to trial. Once again, justice delayed is justice denied – to the arrested and more importantly, to the public who rely on their Government for genuine protection.

Until that happens, we won’t believe a word from any of them. We can all take our dogs safely for a walk. Osama Bin Laden is probably still living in Filthystan, but we nevertheless await no doubt better information from the SIS, who might well claim that he’s a distant relative of Ahmed Zaoui and his extended family, and could be hiding somewhere with the lost tribe of the Moriori slightly west of Te Anau.

Since when did we start celebrating crime figures?

In what looked like a remarkable display of complacency, Ms King went on to say she was “welcoming the almost zero increase in recorded offences for the 2006/07 fiscal year and the increased resolution of offences.”

Recorded crime remains steady; known offences increased by 0.03 % (115 more offences) in the year, recorded crime per 10,000 of population decreased by 1%. This might be related to the reduced population brought about by migration. Who knows? The resolution rate (crimes solved) rose from 44.2% to 44.7% (2194 more offences were resolved than during the previous 12 months). Nobody knows the benchmark for that particular statistic. Ms King is juggling with figures.

Does she not realise that thousands of offences go unreported and therefore unrecorded because the public perception is that the police are too busy, that the police are understaffed, that the police are overworked and must set priorities when dealing with calls? People have given up ringing the cops about their letterbox being vandalised, or graffiti on their fence, vehicles or other private property.

Taxi drivers are regularly given the run-around, with fare jumpers taking off as soon as they get to their destination, and that’s not reported because the police are thought to be too busy on “real” crime. Students’ bicycles are stolen by the hundreds from school bike racks. Like countless other mindless acts of theft and vandalism, it’s just too trivial to report…

But Ms King steers well clear of the appalling fact that violent crime has rocketed by 32 percent to 53,000 reported offences last year, which is an average of 140 nasty incidents every day.

Ms King says the campaign to encourage New Zealanders to report domestic violence will continue: “Of course, no one likes to see the number of recorded offences going up, but I would rather that continue to happen than domestic violence remains the hidden evil in our society”. Note: Ms King offers not a scintilla of an idea for curbing domestic violence.

The spin applied by the Labour-led Government to the reporting of crime statistics is a deliberate act, intended to mislead us. The real villains will rest easy with the numbers, knowing that their handiwork will be disguised in a new flurry of figures that favour a government desperately clinging to power, and apparently unworried by the lawlessness over which it presides.

Yes, the cost of dentistry has literally gone through the roof of almost everyone’s mouth. One patient was this week quoted more than $2000 to fix a single loose tooth. Fortunately, she was sitting firmly in the chair when the dentist warned that if a single-tooth bridge was required, the bill would easily exceed $4000, but that his ten minutes of consultative wisdom would cost her a mere $60.

Little wonder, then, that the problem of bad teeth is now an epidemic in New Zealand. Few can afford to bite the bullet and fork out such fortunes on their gnashers.

And little wonder that National’s badly bungled announcement that it would lift the cap on GPs’ fees caused many a jaw to drop. A similar act of folly led to the crisis in dentistry – crisis, that is for the patients. The dentists are doing very nicely, thank you.

National has seriously misunderstood the public mood when it comes to basic health provision. Rather than freeing doctors to charge what they like, National would have done better to reintroduce price controls on dentists, because dentistry prices are now wildly out of line with reality.

For little more than that $2000, our patient could either buy a half-decent coffin, or enjoy a two-week holiday in Phuket, Thailand, with the bridge work included. And we’re not talking about some Doc Sawbones working out of a bamboo hut, either.

A company called Australian Dental Tours specialises in putting together holidays to suit you, your teeth and your budget. It guarantees that the quality of care “is as good as here at home. It is the recovery that is different – in Thailand, the recovery is better; you can lay on a beach or by the pool, go shopping in one of the world’s best shopping cities, or have someone take care of you 24 hours a day”.

Four composite resin fillings are quoted at AUD 75, and an all-ceramic crown is less than AUD 600. In Australia, the company is doing great business, which is not surprising when it claims to save 60% on local dentists’ charges, and throw in a pleasant holiday as well.

So whenever a Kiwi dentist needs some tooth treatment, they’d be wise to head straight for a well-earned break in Thailand.

It’s no good encouraging people to breed through Working for Families handouts, when the schools turn out youngsters whose only future is one involving even more benefits, or a secure roof over their heads that normal folk know as prison.

Among the cohort of soft and pink teachers, there are even a few who don’t believe in competitive sport, because it involves someone ‘losing’. This is extremely odd, in a country that prides itself – and sells itself internationally – through being super-efficient in agriculture and Top Nation in the organised brawl called Rugby.

Some of the more “progressive” suggest that correct spelling and grammar are no longer relevant, and that it’s OK to use cellphone TXT language in exam papers. For them and their pupils, scant career opportunities will exist in languages or the legal profession.

Consequently, every year, they let loose into the world many young people who are used only to self-gratification and genuinely believe that the world owes them a living for nothing in return. Little wonder, then, that we have on the one side a skills shortage and on the other a bunch of dumb young troublemakers, angry that they can no longer get their own way.

These teachers are, in truth, not that concerned about student failure. What really worries them is that one of these days, someone powerful will wake up and realise that failure is not just the pupils’ fault. It’s the slack teachers and the educational ‘reformers’ who will have to take responsibility as the real losers.

In early August, Grumpy Old Geezers said:

“There is only one way to reduce premature deaths of young people in hot cars, and it’s not by refusing them the finance.

It’s called compulsory third party insurance, and – yes – we once had it in New Zealand as part of the registration fee. If Dr Michael Cullen can find it so easy to organise a State-run Kiwisaver scheme involving private pension companies, he can do exactly the same with motor insurance.

Third party insurance should be mandatory for every New Zealand driver, and the premiums should reflect age and experience. In the UK, where this is the norm, the annual must-pay insurance premiums for under-25s owning hot cars often cost far more than the vehicle itself. (There, youngsters rarely smash themselves to pieces in fast cars or on race-bred motorcycles, because they cannot afford the insurance.)”

Allowing motor insurance to be voluntary places an unfair cost burden on those responsible drivers who choose to buy it. It also places an unfair burden on taxpayers and the victims’ families who must recover from, and pay for, all the wreckage.

Compulsory third party insurance is the easiest and most straightforward step in pricing young lunatics and their hot cars off the road.

Astonishingly, the AA (which claims to represent responsible motorists) is opposed to compulsory insurance, saying it would be difficult to enforce.

Nonsense. It’s easy to police. No driver should be permitted a rego without producing proof of insurance, and the databases maintained by the authorities make it easy for LTNZ, and police at the roadside, to check driver credentials within seconds.

There is also no problem, in almost every other civilised country, in assessing the insurance risk based on the age and experience of the driver and the car they intend to drive. This is the proven and market-driven method by which good drivers are encouraged and bad risks are persuaded to stay off the highway.

This method costs the taxpayer absolutely nothing. It’s all based on wise commercial judgements and better shareholder returns: safe drivers mean higher profits to investors in insurance companies. Bad drivers are the kiss of death to dividends.

The one essential difference in New Zealand should be that high-risk drivers of whatever age are insured only for the vehicle they own, and not covered to drive any other car.

Prime Minister Helen Clark half-seriously frets that compulsory insurance might penalise youngsters living on farms, who may need to drive on the highway to help run the business. But any responsible parent – particularly those with quad bikes and dangerous farmland – will have taken care to insure their kids against a driving mishap.

We have to protect the mostly urban crazy youngsters (many of whom think milk comes from a plastic bottle) from themselves, and we must finally put a stop to the damage they are causing to innocent people and their families.

Just like the boy racers, it’s a no-brainer. There are no credible alternatives, apart from the idea of lifting the driving age by only 365 days. Otherwise, all we can look forward to is an endless stream of bad accidents waiting to happen.

A teachers’ union representative, discussing youth anger management on the radio, said that a good method would be to gently advise the miscreant that “when they felt the anger coming on”, to go for a run round the sports field. Many schools don’t have sports fields. They were once good places for organised anger management, but many modern teachers don’t like competitive sport because it involves losing – which goes against their doctrine of guaranteed total and effortless success.

Pigs will fly, before that bewildered teacher’s comfy suggestion takes off. Get real: we’re talking about bloated and hyperactive examples of what lazy parents, junk food and an obsession with TV, computer games and texting can create. The last thing these small sods would volunteer for is healthy exercise to work off the aggression, when they can get it off their hairless chests right away by thumping the teacher instead.

And it’s a measure of the impotence to which we so-called grown-ups are now reduced.

There are no serious sanctions available to deter little hooligans from running amok (or worse), thanks to the antics of a few infantile, libertarian politicians. Violent three-year-olds who yell “You can’t touch me!” are a modern phenomenon. When will adults learn that it’s the liberals’ softly-softly approach that has produced these horrible little hard cases?

If a run around the park is the best we can suggest, it’s only a matter of time before some parent or teacher is maimed or slain by a small child.

The problem here is blindingly obvious.

It has nothing to do with food additives. To feel safe and secure, kids (who lack the age and experience to make good judgements) want and need rules backed by unpleasant penalties, plus firmly-drawn behavioural boundaries fixed by loving and committed parents. They run riot when there aren’t any.

But here’s an alternative interim solution that no one seems to have tried yet:

Because these children can no longer be properly punished (either at home or at school) for unacceptable behaviour, and they are below the age of criminal responsibility, what’s to stop the teachers from turning the tables? Why not privately prosecute the parents for assault or vandalism? They are – in principle, if not in reality – responsible for the actions of their dreadful brats.

A few pre-emptive strikes of this kind, along with heavy fines and reparation, might help to get the message across that the official hands-off approach to child-rearing is unacceptable and doesn’t work. Right or wrong?

Greens resent this just because they hate large companies, but they also seem to have a particular attachment to the illegal green stuff that’s grown by small businesses, deep in the bush or in hydroponic greenhouses hidden in shabby houses and student flats.

They say that, while it’s fine for the cops to pull over drunk drivers and prosecute them to the limit of the law, this shouldn’t apply to drugs because it might involve other charges too – like possessing illegal substances, or having a mobile P lab in the car boot – and that this is somehow unfair.

No doubt the Greens are also opposed to the police having ready access to car boots that might contain corpses, also in the name of civil liberties.

Grumpies think that pub landlords or bottle store staff who supply too much drink to patrons they suspect might climb into the driving seat should be also answerable, but life isn’t that perfect – and like it or not, alcohol is still legal.

But cannabis, P, cocaine and heroin aren’t. Three, if not all four, are more dangerous than fags and booze put together.

If we’re to combat the evils that all these drugs add to an already atrocious collection of social problems, the police must be able to stop and prosecute anyone driving under the influence of them – and hit them hard for possession as well, if they can. After all, they can already stop any car, merely on a suspicion of anything.

The hitherto almost unknown Green Party list MP Metiria Turei, no doubt encouraged by hairy colleague Mangled Tanglemop, says that if the aim of the proposed bill to outlaw driving while impaired by illegal drugs is to get unsafe drivers off the road “then the reason why they are incapable of driving safely is largely irrelevant.”

What’s she on? That is a piece of total garbage only surpassed by her water-muddying, unsubstantiated and spurious claim that prescription drugs are more heavily implicated in road deaths than illegal drugs. Perhaps she was thinking of methadone, the heroin substitute. (Some drivers have caused fatal accidents while trying to light a cigarette. Was it the nicotine addiction that did it, or the carelessness?)

The fact is that, if you are driving a vehicle under the influence of illegal substances, you’re committing at least one more offence than a drunk driver, and under current law you must pay the extra penalty.

In other countries, the law goes much further than ours. Many have a catch-all driving offence called “driving while under the influence of drink or drugs”. That includes drowsy cough mixture and glue fumes. It’s nice and simple.

One of the original meanings of Green is “ignorant or naïve.” Do we really want such low-calibre people “helping” to run the country?

Our mail boxes are stuffed with election propaganda that’s resulted in thousands of sustainable trees being felled to provide the printing paper, so that they can tell us what they’ll do to create a heaven on Earth.

Back here in reality, we have to dispose of all this rubbish at the dump, or burn it ourselves (to save the landfills) or spend more bloody money on fossil fuel as we drive long distances to the recycling centre.

Candidates have erected billboard hoardings that blight the landscape, filled with grinning pepsodental teeth and airbrushed faces, advertising how they will save the environment if we give them the big tick. All these hoardings are supported and framed by timber provided by even more sustainable trees.

(In Upper Hutt, the billboards face drivers leaving town, rather than the arrivals. There’s a subliminal message in there, somewhere.)

But there’s a major problem with all this sustainability guff.

Rubbish dumps generate the dreaded methane greenhouse gas, but – if you’re smart – you can capture it to generate heat and light and power.

In Hawke’s Bay, the Napier and Hastings city and district councils have just announced that they’ve spent $1 million on a landfill-to-gas system which could be operating by mid-2008 and produce enough electricity to power 2000 homes.

The trouble is that the amount of waste delivered to their landfill site has decreased for the third year in a row. It’s getting so serious that councils may run out of rubbish to power their methane-driven generators.

And the reason for this crisis is that we’re all recycling like mad.

So come on voters – it’s time to get down and dirty again. It’s your civic duty to generate loads of garbage and hand back all that crap to the council, for cheaper power and local authority carbon credits that will lower your rates. Honest… that’s a promise.

What’s the appropriate response? Offer them peace and love, turn the other cheek, take flight – or fight back?

The natural response of a cornered and outnumbered animal will be to fight.

But we are supposedly on a much higher plane, so Utopian politicians have written laws based on how they think people should behave, rather than how they act. And, to make matters worse, they have utterly failed to establish a system in which the law is applied fairly and consistently.

So it is that Christchurch chef Shyan Ricky Hill, who responded to the bully boys by stabbing one of them with a tool of his trade, sits in a prison cell facing two years inside. And so it was that Nai Yin Xue, on the run in the US after dumping his daughter in Melbourne and sought for his wife’s murder, walked free from an Auckland court after being convicted of a knife attack on his partner during which he also injured his child.

The reason why our society is plagued by violent crime is simply that the culprits can be almost certain they’ll either get away scot-free or their punishment will never match the damage and misery they cause.

You can bet your bottom dollar that most of the bad guys would think twice about assaults and home invasions if they knew that their victims had the absolute right to defend themselves, even to the point of terminating the perpetrator.

The reason why law-abiding people have scant faith in the police and justice system is that it constantly lets them down – to the point where even natural self-defence is in fact no longer a defence in court. Too many innocent people have been convicted and imprisoned for defending themselves, their families or their property from frightening criminals.

This is a particularly acute danger in rural areas, where it can sometimes take hours for the police to arrive. Out in the sticks, people have limited choices when the villains turn up. The State offers them no protection, so they are morally-bound to take the law into their own hands.

Sooner or later, the right to self-defence will have to be restored. But not by our current lawmakers, whose performance on law, order and justice – highlighted by the sickening sideshow of Sue Bradford’s useless anti-smacking legislation – has been nothing short of scandalous.

So it seems strange for Auckland police to claim that they had to wait a couple of days for a warrant to examine the boot of a car that

- was parked outside the residence of known missing persons, one of whom was a suspected victim of murder

- had been sitting there for days, surrounded by police and journalists

- was registered in the name of the missing woman’s husband (known to be on the run) who had been given back his passport and a dangerous weapon by the police, and was wanted on a separate matter, and

- was clearly marked with words in Chinese and English, linking it to the family and the suspect.

The police should not be surprised by the dramatic and mostly negative public opinions expressed over this tragic affair.

That the Plod and the sucker-fish journalists wandered around a parked and well-marked car for days is unlikely to inspire confidence in either the law or the press, and tends to further undermine faith in what looks very much like a bunch of plodding PCs and hopeless hacks.

The fact that the vehicle was located in Keystone Avenue was just too good a chance to miss, for those in search of a cheap jibe.

Perhaps the next time there is a missing person inquiry with a suggestion of foul play, the towies should be called in before the cops. They seem to be rather less bound by red tape and they have a complete set of car keys.

But in the meantime, we watch, gob-smacked by the media frenzy surrounding this case.

The New Zealand Herald, once the nation’s most boring organ, has morphed into a cheap reactionary comic and a receptacle for bottom-feeding knee-jerkers. It has a feedback website whose moderator is evidently on holiday. There, you can say anything you like about this tragedy, and get away with it.

Everywhere else in the media, it’s open season for those seeking anyone remotely ‘to blame’ for Chinese gambling problems, slow cops, histories of violence – you name it, they’ll shame it.

For us, and for now, the man who left his child at a railway station in Melbourne, and the police, are innocent until proven guilty.