Govt has a busy day dishing out funding to causes it deems appropriate but a fog shrouds crime-fighting costs

Buzz from the Beehive

Biggish lumps of money featured in each of four announcements posted on the Beehive website, since Point of Order last checked on what our hard-working and big-spending ministers are doing.

The government will spend

• $10 million on public housing in Raumati (and there’s lots more where that came from);
•  $2,876,500 (from a trough labelled Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund) for a boiler conversion project which used woodchips to make potato chips, while slashing emissions.

• $1.48 million to keep AM radio on air in the Northland region;

•  A “multi-million- dollar package” to tackle retail crime and reoffending. The exact cost to taxpayers is hard to fathom because it includes the provision of $4000 for all small shops and dairies in New Zealand who want a fog cannon installed, with shops to pay the balance. How many retailers will apply? Who knows?

• A new $4 million fund to support local councils in Auckland, Hamilton and Bay of Plenty with crime prevention programmes (which might  be the trough for the fog cannon funding);

• The expansion of eligibility to dip into a $6 million Retail Crime Prevention fund to include aggravated robberies, including those committed during the past 12 months.

Guess whose name pops up in connection with the law-and-order funding package?

None other than the PM, keen to get her name into the crime-fighting headlines alongside Police Minister Chris Hipkins.