It seems to me that the Christchurch City Council has really got it in for the Arts Centre.

For starters, when the Arts Centre asked for $20 million in council support over the next 10 years, the council said “yeah, nah” and gave it just under $6 million instead.

Now, it wants to sting the Arts Centre $18,000 for increasing the number of food trucks operating there.

The council says the charge is for “added stress” on its transport network that will be caused by the extra food trucks rolling into town, which is out-and-out nonsense as far as I’m concerned.

And the council needs to be told to pull its head in and stop trying to punish the Arts Centre for doing exactly what the council wants to happen, which is attract more people to the central city.

It’s especially bad when you consider how hypocritical all this is – I’ll get to that in a second. But here’s what’s happened:

The Arts Centre decided that, since the council wasn’t going to give it the extra funding it says it needs, it started to think about how it could generate some extra income itself. And it decided to get more food trucks on site, the idea being that it would bring more people into the Arts Centre and get people spending more. A win-win, you would think.

So good on the Arts Centre for not sitting around whinging and getting on with the job itself of trying to bring in some extra money.

Of course, if it wanted to have more food trucks it needed to get resource consent. So it went to the council, wanting consent to have up to 33 food trucks there. The council wasn’t fussed with that and so, between them, they agreed it would be cool to have up to 25 food trucks.

So compromise reached: more food trucks, more people, more money spent. Brilliant.

Until the council got back in touch and told the Arts Centre that, because there’d be more food trucks rolling into town, that would put “added stress” on its transport network. And because of that added stress, it would be billing the Arts Centre $18,000.

But here’s what makes it even worse. Here’s where the hypocrisy comes into it.

Do you remember a couple of years ago —nearly three years ago now it was— and the Destiny Church was running those anti-vax protests in the centre of town? They called themselves the Freedom and Rights Coalition and they had those protest marches in November and December 2021, and January and February 2022.

They got quite feral at times. And the problem the city council had with them was that it wasn’t notified beforehand. Which other protest organisers do, apparently.

And so, because of that, the council hit the Freedom and Rights Coalition and the Destiny Church with a $50,000 bill for doing traffic management during these protests.

Which is fine, but, at the last minute, the council backed down and told this outfit to forget about the $50,000 bill and ripped up the invoices.

And this is what really riles me about what the council’s doing to the Arts Centre. It wants to charge the Arts Centre $18,000 for showing some initiative and trying to get more people going there and spending more with more food trucks. The council’s quite happy to effectively fine an outfit for doing something positive, when it’s the same outfit that told the Freedom and Rights Coalition that they didn't have to pay their $50,000 bill.

The hypocrisy is staggering. And the council needs to get on the phone to the Arts Centre, apologise for its hypocrisy, give it credit for trying to get more going on in the centre of town, and tell it to forget about paying this stupid bill.

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With nearly every Comanchero gang member in this country facing criminal charges, is this the beginning of the end for this Australian outfit’s New Zealand operation?

They set-up shop here six years ago and have been helped enormously by Australia’s 501 deportation programme, but it’s not as if the gang’s been operating here just to give these guys something to do once they get off the plane from Sydney.

Have no doubt, the Comancheros are here because they see it as a great place to make money. If they didn’t, they wouldn't be investing so much into their operation.

It’s not a club. It’s a business. The question now, though, is whether the fall-out from this three-year operation by the police is going to make it too difficult for the Comancheros to do business here.

When it comes to a start-up business, the Comancheros have wasted no time getting their share of the drug trade here. Especially, when you consider that they didn’t arrive en masse - it was a small, but influential group that arrived here first when the 501 deportations started.

But, in just six years, they’ve more than given the other gangs a run for their money. One report I saw this morning said the Comancheros had created a “radical shift in the criminal underworld”.

Nothing demonstrates that more than what the police are saying about the gang getting this former US marine into the country last year to give gang members training in combat drills and military tactics.

So there they were —allegedly, of course— these gang members all dressed up in combat-style clothing with full face and body paint. Camouflage and everything.

They were, apparently, using plastic bullets and real firearms in this training. The police are describing what went on as military-style camps. The purpose of them was to make sure the gang had the capability to take on wars and continue doing their hits.

So they’ve rounded up next to every member in the country and thrown charges at them relating to importing and selling drugs, running what they’re saying was a pretty elaborate money laundering scheme, and running these military training camps run by a former US marine.

Now there’s no doubt the Police have done a brilliant job.

It’s taken them three years and, as we know, these kinds of operations are dangerous. They are dangerous, painstaking and they take time, so congratulations to the Police. But I reckon they’re going to have to keep the foot on the pedal if they think this is going to have a long-lasting impact on the Comancheros.

In fact, I don’t think —long-term— that this is going to change much when it comes to this particular gang.

And the reason I say that is because the Comancheros aren’t just some hokey kiwi gang. And let’s be honest, compared to the Comancheros, our other gangs are pretty hokey.

But what the Comancheros have over all the other gangs here, are two things: money —and lots of it— and international connections. Head office is in Australia, where they’ve been causing strife for decades, and their international drug network is said to be second-to-none. If you can put it that way.

So this sting by the police, while it’s absolutely brilliant, I think it is just going to be a blip for the Comancheros, and I don’t think this is the beginning of the end for them here in New Zealand.

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Nothing brings out the redneck in me as much as a judge handing out a concurrent prison sentence.

You know the situation. A person’s found guilty on, say, two charges —let’s say they get two-year sentences for each— but they don’t go to prison for two years plus two years (four years), instead, they serve the sentences concurrently. Meaning they’re serving both sentences at the same time.

It’s something the Government is turning its attention to with these tougher sentencing laws it’s cracking on with, but I don’t think it’s going far enough.

It’s introducing legislation to deliver the tougher sentences it promised prior to the election. Paul Goldsmith, the Justice Minister, says the changes are going to mean criminals will “face real consequences for crime and victims are prioritised”, saying there has been a trend in recent years where courts have handed-out fewer and shorter prison sentences.

Stupidly, he’s saying that the legislation changes will help ensure there will be 20,000 fewer victims of crime within five years and that serious repeat offending by young people will be down by 15 percent.

I say stupidly because the Government has no idea whether that will happen or not. It might be its target. But, anyway, they’re a couple of outcomes the Government thinks we will see as a result of these tougher sentences.

And it’s all the stuff that people have been talking about and the politicians have been banging-on about for a while: the legislation is going to put limits on sentencing discounts judges can apply.

It’s going to mean harsher penalties for anyone involved in crimes against sole-charge workers or at places where people live and work. So that’s your dairies, where the family lives out the back or upstairs.

Young people who commit crimes over and over again can forget about sentence discounts because of their age or because they say “sorry”.

But the one that I’m most interested in, is what the new legislation is going to do about concurrent sentencing. Which I think is a good start, but I also think the Government should be doing more, going further on this one.

As it stands at the moment, through this new legislation, the Government is going to encourage judges to hand out cumulative sentences for crimes committed by people on bail, in custody or on parole - instead of concurrent sentences.

So if they’re in custody and commit a crime in prison, that’ll get added to the time they’re already serving. If they’re on bail and commit more than one crime and they’re sent back to prison, they’ll serve time for each crime. Not concurrently. The same if they’re on parole.

And, as far as I’m concerned, these are all good things. I don't necessarily think that this will stop these people from re-offending, because I’ve never bought the argument that tougher sentences stop people from offending.

Because, most of the time, their heads aren’t screwed on properly, anyway. And thinking about the punishment they might get if they’re caught is probably the last thing they’re thinking about at the time.

But these changes are great for victims of crime and their sense of justice. But, as I said earlier, I don’t think the Government is going far enough.

I think we need to pretty much do away with concurrent sentences for all crimes. For all criminals. Because how can anyone think it is fair and reasonable to send someone away for the least amount of time?

Which is what happens when someone serves their sentences concurrently. They’ve done multiple crimes, they’ve been found guilty on each of them, there is a punishment for each crime, but —in real terms— they are punished as if they’ve only committed one crime.

And I reckon that if the Government was really serious, it would be doing away with concurrent sentences altogether.

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