Heather du Plessis-Allan: Sandringham dairy worker killing: Labour was warned

Sunny Kaushal stands outside the Rose Cottage Superette in Sandringham where a worker was stabbed to death. Photo / Jed Bradley

The fatal stabbing of the Sandringham dairy shop worker is not the Government’s fault. The blame lies entirely with the person who took a knife to that superette.

But the Government will wear the anger of voters who saw this coming. For many this was inevitable.

Dairy owners have been warning for months that someone would die. Ram raids are a weekly if not a daily news story. Some stores are hit multiple times in a matter of months. Robbers in balaclavas are so brazen they now hold up jewellery stores in busy centres in broad daylight.

Public frustration is at fever pitch. This is not the New Zealand they know. Passers-by have started intervening, frustrated at a perceived lack of action from authorities.

So, when the death came, it led to public anger.

And the circumstances could not have been worse for Labour.

It was a shop in the Prime Minister’s own electorate. The shop owner had reportedly asked police for extra security twice. He’d been denied twice. His shop was apparently not a priority.

It is likely awful for the dairy shop worker’s family and friends that his death became political within hours. Their grief has been hijacked by politics. But crime became political long ago.

That this happened is bad for Labour. How they handled it made it much, much worse.

The Dairy and Business Owners Group immediately asked for an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister. She dismissed it. She was satisfied that they’d met with the Police Minister recently enough. That meeting was three weeks ago. It was as if a death hadn’t happened since.

The Police Minister wouldn’t meet with them either.

It might well be because the group is led by Sunny Kaushal. He’s something of a political enemy of Labour’s. Once upon a time, he stood for Labour, as a candidate in Pakuranga. But then he defected to National and started attacking Labour in the media for failing to pay compensation to the Albert St businesses affected by the construction disruption of the Auckland City Rail Link project. Then he started attacking them for a failure to help retailers.

To Labour, it might seem perfectly reasonable to refuse to meet with a political enemy. Most voters don’t know that detail though. To them, it simply sounds like Labour won’t meet with the guy who represents dairy owners. And that sounds like Labour doesn’t care.

To make it worse, the PM failed to even show her face in her own electorate. These are the people who voted for her personally to represent them in Parliament. Many are drawing a contrast with her rush to get to Christchurch after the mosque shootings.

But the difference in her reaction is obvious. With the mosque shooting, she could comfort the victims of an attack no one predicted. With the Sandringham stabbing, it was predicted. And she could not present herself as a fellow victim. She leads the Government many will hold accountable for this.

Labour is on the back foot here, big time. As ram raids have hit store after store, night after night, Labour has done very little. Their $6 million package of bollards and fog cannons rolled out in May has only fitted out five stores at last count and this was not one of them.

After repealing the Three Strikes Law, giving $2.75m to the Mongrel Mob and harping on about how “complex” it is to deal with offenders, Labour is perceived as soft on crime.

They now need to find a way to tell voters enough is enough and they’re going to at least try to sort this out. Their usual response is to throw money at a solution to the problem. They used that trick with the bollards’ money.

But whatever they do, this will be a hard situation to rescue. An innocent man is dead. Whatever Labour now does, we’ll ask them why they didn’t do it before he was killed.