The sobering lesson for Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in the stormy exit of Stuart Nash from a ministerial portfolio he once handled is perhaps to look back and wonder how he got through that tricky phase himself.

New Zealanders will recall the kerbside meeting Hipkins, then police minister, held with media and business owners in Mt. Roskill in Auckland some five months ago. He was sceptical of what he called the “tough-on-crime rhetoric” that defined the response of the business owners towards young offenders.

But the spike in the number of ram raids, back-to-back burglaries and smash-and-grab incidents, particularly in South Auckland, have left small businesses that are the backbone of New Zealand’s economy spooked.

Dairy owners, who form the segment bearing the brunt of this type of crime, are largely New Zealanders of Indian origin who toil day and night to ensure the uninterrupted supply of such basics as milk and eggs to the wider community.

But heightened police presence and community patrols are proving blunt instruments in the face of loopholes in the justice system, with juvenile offenders returning to the streets before the ink has dried on the paper work after arrests are made.

The government is looking at long-term solutions by introducing the “Better Pathways” package that aims to bring more young people into the ambit of education and jobs training as a means of checking youth crime.

Hipkins is a staunch votary of this approach and believes the package is designed to prevent young offenders from reoffending. Children aged under 14 years who are implicated in ram raids are referred to the cross-agency Social Wellbeing Board which intervenes with “wrap around” support.

But the stats are not encouraging. As Parliament has heard recently, retail crime is up by 39 per cent with more than 100,000 incidents recorded over the past twelve months.

Noticeably, retail crime was not part of the conversation when Hipkins briefed the media for the first time after taking charge as the prime minister in January. But that changed when the Indian Weekender asked the PM about his plans for dairy owners affected by ram raids and other retail crimes.

Hipkins replied: “The former prime minister and I announced just late last year quite a significant amount of additional support for small businesses, dairy owners in particular, who have been affected by ram raids and aggravated robberies. That includes making fog cannons much more widely available.”

On the question of culpability for retail crime, the PM said: “We are making sure that we are doing everything we can to identify who the young offenders are and to hold them accountable for their actions and actually stop their offending from continuing.”

Given this backdrop, Nash’s recent display of tough-on-crime hubris left the PM with little room for manoeuvre, especially with the hawks in the Opposition benches ready to swoop on every misstep, quoting chapter and verse of the Cabinet Manual and the Policing Act 2008 on the floor of Parliament.

Labour MPs and ministers gamely attempted to control the damage by noting that no appeal had been lodged by the police against a court sentence for a firearms offence that outraged Nash in the first place.

The Opposition parties spared no metaphor in describing the police minister’s “forced resignation” as a mere “slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket,” considering his continued presence in the Cabinet.

But Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, caught in the eye of the storm, recalled Nash’s 2021 phone inquiry, whether the police intended to appeal against the court sentence of home detention for a repeat firearms offender, as being a “rhetorical question.”

Then, so is the question whether Nash’s “error of judgement” while he was the minister of police qualifies him to remain as minister with sundry other portfolios such as forestry and fisheries.      

But does it?