"New Zealand, A land fit for Criminals" - the roadshow, coming to a town hall near you.
As slogans go, it's not a bad one. It fair trips off the tongue.
First it was a book, then it was a catch-phrase and now it is a movement.
In the face of some mind-numbing individual crimes in recent times, you can't blame people for hopping aboard although, personally, I'd advocate a note of scepticism.
The book was authored by David Fraser, former prison officer, probations service employee and criminal intelligence analyst.
The British "crime expert", "doctor of philosophy" and "professor" - as he has been variously described by members of my profession - has been brought out to New Zealand to walk the talk of a triumvirate of pressure groups: the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First, and For the Sake of Our Children Trust.
Mr Fraser has written a book to purvey his views on crime and punishment.
He is no shrinking violet, so there is no mistaking his ideological position.
And by and large - surprise, surprise - it coincides precisely with that of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First, and For the Sake of Our Children Trust.
They all agree that we are a nation of hopelessly liberal softies and that essentially we should lock criminals up for a very, very long time and throw away the key; out of sight, out of mind, out of trouble.
In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, the visiting British expert finds himself not quite "lost for words" when confronted by a couple of local examples of rampant criminality and "soft" punishment.
"Most of us viewed New Zealand as a haven of good sense. The power of this left-wing thinking takes my breath away."
Mr Fraser's model criminal justice system would appear to be that of Singapore, where the government made the "pursuit of criminal lives unbearably hard".
It is also a system where drug offenders are put to death, shoplifters and traffic offenders routinely jailed and freedom of speech, assembly and association severely curtailed.
Next on his list of admired systems is the United States which, in the 1960s, had become "the crime centre of the world".
"But then there was a public revolution and . . . they arrested everyone who broke the law, shut down petty criminals, imprisoned those who needed to be imprisoned, lengthened prison sentences.
In 1980, they had 308,000 people in prison; now there are two million."
Its imprisonment rates would appear, in Mr Fraser's view, to be a badge of courage - partly because they raise two fingers to that apparently absurd notion that crime could have anything at all to do with underlying social problems.
"It isn't real. It is an idea. It is an invention somewhere in the 1950s by left-leaning sociologists, who developed this idea. There is not a shred of evidence to back it up," he told NZPA this week.
But in the school of visiting British prison experts, Mr Fraser does not have the floor to himself.
Baroness Vivian Stern and Prof Andrew Coyle, associated with the International Centre for Prison Studies at Kings College London, were in the country last month.
They, too, were astounded at the criminal justice system, although for different reasons: the high rate of imprisonment in New Zealand.
At 197 per 100,000, it is almost twice that of most western European countries and approaching that of Libya, Azerbaijan and Brazil.
France locks up 90 per 100,000, Finland 70 and the UK 140.
And contrary to everything we are told by the Sensible Sentencing Trust et al, the International Crime and Victimisation Survey (supported by the Ministry of Justice in the Netherlands) puts New Zealand at the top of all 14 other western industrialised countries for providing support to victims of crime.
So says a press release from the lobby group Rethinking Crime and Punishment, the views of which align with those of Baroness Stern and Prof Coyle.
Putting more people in prison, they argue, does not actually make the community any safer.
"Putting people in prison, especially minor offenders, actually increases the likelihood of further criminal activity after their release," claims the press statement.
"Hogwash," reckons Mr Fraser.
One suspects the truth lies somewhere in between.
And that the more insistent and vociferous the lobby group, the more cautious one should be in swallowing its line.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
