The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons

I chose the above quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson to entitle this week’s blog about dishonest leaders of many differing types.

I often wonder why we have governments. For all the good they do, we might as well all just join a gang, because you can say what you like about gangs, but at the end of the day they usually look after their own. Politicians look after their own as well – but it’s their own personal and extremely vested interests.

So after they’ve robbed us all blind, how much money do these sleazy swines have? Muammur Gaddaffi the self proclaimed non-leader of Libya certainly has plenty and he is far from the only political leader to have enriched himself at his nation’s expense. Time was when I used to think these greedy bastards stole millions from their treasuries, but now I know better.

They don’t steal millions; only small fry from rogue Pacific Island states do that. These guys steal BILLIONS. Yes Billions with a B.

In the case of Gaddaffi and his cronies, at the time of writing the count is not complete, but so far the US has frozen US$32B (more than NZ$42.6B) and Britain has frozen US$19B (NZ$25.3B). By my count that amounts to US$51B which I learn is equivalent to approximately 47 percent of that Libya’s central bank reserves or if you like 82 percent of its GDP!

Now I know old Mu doesn’t personally own all of this but he and his entourage have no doubt been deriving their lavish lifestyles and buying ‘hits’ on their enemies from this bounty. The scary part is, that is only what has been found so far and it is only the proceeds from ONE corrupt regime. Imagine how much loot has actually been stashed away by dictators?

And that’s just a glimpse into the billions being ‘acquired’ by the obvious bad lots. As we know only too well, even leaders in so-called developed/enlightened/civilized (you pick your word of choice) countries help themselves to their nation’s lolly.

Yep crime is rife in high places all over the world and sadly most of the time we are led by crooks. But it’s not restricted to the politicians; leaders of industry and many senior government workers are just as bad.

The endless procession of failed finance companies led by people who hardly seem to be on the bones of their considerable bums when their companies ‘collapse’ is just one example.

But issues such as the nuclear bunfight in Japan at the moment are even nastier because they cause direct physical harm in addition to the emotional anguish. It is now revealed that Japan undertook a safety audit of their nuclear plants in 2008/9 following the fright they got when the Kobe earthquake struck in 1995. The first thing I find interesting about that is that it took them 13 years to get their fingers out.

But I digress. The committee that met to decide how to make the plants safer dismissed the need to take a tsunami into account where the Daiichi plant was concerned. In fact little account was taken of the dangers posed by tsunamis generally because they only had two tsunami experts in a group of 40 ‘experts’ who were assessing the risks. One member of the group has since broken ranks and supplied transcripts of the meetings in which he raised the tsunami danger and reminded them of the 8.9 earthquake that had struck the area in AD869.  Power plant officials dismissed his concerns saying that earthquake was ‘historic’ and implying it was of no relevance. The consequence was that no additional tsunami precautions were taken at the plant and of course as history now records; it was the tsunami and not the earthquake that damaged the plant.

So will any of these people be charged with the death of any of the citizens that perish from radiation poisoning? Get real. They still haven’t made anybody properly accountable for Bhopal unless you count the pathetic 2-year sentences and piddling fines handed out to seven officials last year. These people have escaped any penalty for nearly 30 years and they were responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 and still counting. Some of the scumbags even pulled the old Radovan Karadzic trick of pleading extreme frailty and old age as an excuse to not have to face trial. Of course they were old, because the bullock cart wheels of Indian justice had taken so long to turn.

The there were those who chose to ignore warnings about the land upon which Christchurch is perched. A TV3 documentary made and screened in 1996 warned the city was sitting on “a soft, shaky sponge of river stones and silt half a kilometre deep. In any decent quake, Christchurch will shake like a leaf.” It also pointed out the hundreds of old buildings in Christchurch that had not been strengthened.

But those responsible for building standards ignored the warning, preferring instead to play the numbers game where they keep their money in their pockets and bank on nothing going wrong. As I write, the Wellington City leaders are contemplating a similar three wise monkeys approach in our nation’s capital.

To know of a serious risk and fail to act to mitigate it in any meaningful way is criminally irresponsible and reckless behaviour which should be punished. ACC soon jumps on employers who ignore hazards in the workplace. I wonder if we could complain to them after the event.

But what do these last two have to do with theft? Well in my opinion they are stealing other people’s futures for the sake of growing their own stockpile of money? Personally I’d prefer they just nicked our stuff and be done with it.

Naughtiness goes unpunished

There are a lot of naughty people around and it is little wonder when you take account of how weak the disincentives are for naughtiness.

One of the most obvious examples to come to my attention lately has been the head boy of Hastings Boys High School. Luke Bradley was convicted in the Hastings District Court on drink driving charges last month.

Now this was not a matter where a young man had had one drink too many and was picked up at a checkpoint. Oh, no. Young Luke, for the lad is only 17 (i.e. an underage drinker as well), got caught because he lost control of his car while over the limit and rolled it into a stream.

He got the usual wet bus ticket response from the court (a 3 month licence disqualification), but the court response was positively draconian compared with how his school reacted. They decided to do nothing and allow him to remain in his position of head prefect and role model to the rest of the young boys at his school. Headmaster Rob Sturch says, "Many people won't know how out of character this is for him.....He's made 2000 right decisions and one bad one.”

So if he had brought a gun to school and taken a couple of random pot shots in the playground this would have been one bad decision amongst 2000 good ones? I believe the parallel is a fair one given cars can kill people when piloted by drunken teens.

Sturch later says his school’s attitude to drink driving hasn’t changed. Since 1956, I’m betting. What sort of message are these half-wits sending to young people? Drink driving is okay as long as you make lots of good decisions too? If I had a kid at that school I’d be pushing for Sturch’s resignation. I’d love to have seen what would have happened if some, shall we say, boy of colour from Flaxmere with a crap academic record had done the same. My guess is he would have got the old heave ho, but maybe it isn’t like that and maybe that school just thinks drink driving is socially acceptable. Either conclusion should lead to a change in management.

But it’s all about no bugger ever being required to take responsibility for their own actions. In this same week I see ‘a comedian’ has finally saved his victim the agony of a full trial and pleaded guilty to ‘unlawful sexual connection with a child under 12’ which is a bizarre sounding charge because I can’t say I have ever heard of lawful sexual connection with such a person. However the scumbag who thinks he’s funny has been granted name suppression on the grounds that identifying him would also reveal the identity of the victim. I can call this guy a scumbag without fear of reprisals because he would have to out himself to sue me.

Now I recognise the implication here is that the victim is closely related to Mr Funny Pants, but how can we assume that this lowlife is only interested in young blood relatives? What of the potential danger to other kids? It just somehow doesn’t seem right he is able to hide under his victim’s skirt (or pants).

But this sort of thing happens far too often.  Only last year a prominent local body politician and well known person in a small rural community in New Zealand gained similar protection after he had been found guilty of possessing child porn on his computer and, I believe after some unwelcome behaviours with some young whanau members. This is a person who is out and about in the community and considered to be a good man, but he got name suppression and one of the reasons was (you will gasp at this), because none of the images were of New Zealanders! It would seem if you have images of foreign kids then clearly you will not be a danger to your local community. I can see all the perves photo shopping their images now to add the relevant features that make them look like another race.

So as I conclude this week’s posting I learn that Labour MP Darren Hughes is being investigated by police for ‘a complaint made by an 18-year-old man relating to a late night incident.” It seems the young man was a youth MP last year and the incident allegedly took place at Annette King’s home where Hughes apparently lives. So what has naughty Dazza done? Probably not a lot, but given he doesn’t exactly look like the pugilistic sort I doubt it is the sort of thing Trev Mallard got into trouble for. Far be it for me to paint too graphic a picture here, but ...young boy....late night...lonely single male MP.... you do the maths. Unless there was violence or threats involved I doubt it is anyone else’s business, but really guys, why can’t our pollies keep out of trouble? The rest of us manage just fine with far less resources and advantages than them.

Time to sit up and pay attention

I believed for many years that life is about learning stuff. Good stuff and bad stuff. You see I believe our task is to strive for betterment. I’m not talking about money or position here; I mean making an effort to improve ourselves and our surroundings for the benefit of us all. That’s why we need to be alert to what is happening in the world, give some thought to what might be causing it, and if it is detrimental, try to do something about it.

Sadly, as a race we don’t seem to be too good at learning lessons. Over the last few months the universe has given us a few mighty whacks up the side of the head and our future depends on whether we learn from these events or not.

In the last 12 to 18 months there have been a series of major disasters around the world. This in itself is nothing terribly unusual, apart from the fact the scale of several of these incidents has been far greater than normal. From the devastation of the floods that spread across several states of Australia, turning what had been desert into lakes, to the current catastrophe in Japan, the world has had a bashing.

Most of these disasters would have happened anyway as they were usually driven by natural phenomena, but there are some important lessons to be learned from many and it is crucial we ‘get it’ if we are to avoid similar catastrophic results when these natural phenomena return with similar force, as they ultimately will.

So what are the lessons? They are all pretty simple really and what is frustrating is what needs to be learned is actually stuff that has been known all along and which has been ignored in the interests of expediency, complacency, and most of all, money.

There were ten major mining disasters around the world in 2010 resulting in over 400 deaths. Of those ten disasters, only the Chilean Copper-Gold Mine had a non fatal outcome and in at least five cases, there are serious questions about health and safety practices. But irrespective of this, there has been a large body of people trying to put an end to these sorts of operations because they not only make a serious negative impact upon the environment; they are also inherently dangerous for those working in them.

Do we have to kill another 400 this year before somebody ‘gets it’ and re-evaluates the whole practice of underground mining, especially when it is for yesterday’s fuel.

But it is not only the mining disasters we need to learn from. We have also had a clutch of serious earthquakes that contain within them some important lessons we should have already learned.

In my own country the city of Christchurch has suffered two massive quakes in the last six months. The first one on September 4, 2010 destroyed a lot of property but no lives, but the second, on February 22, 2011 was a different matter altogether. The final toll is not in yet, but it is likely to be in excess of 200. The town was already severely weakened after the September 4 event in which widespread liquefaction had occurred and thus the whole city was floating on a blancmange when the latest shake came.

But what is so sad about the Christchurch events is that warnings had been given for both of these events and they were ignored by those who could have done something. An Inside New Zealand documentary screened on TV3 in 1996 warned of the sort of soil Christchurch was sitting on and what the effects of this would be in a major earthquake. Furthermore many buildings had been identified as not being sturdy enough to withstand a large earthquake. Nobody in power took any notice.

Then on February 14, 2011 weather forecaster Ken Ring predicted a very big quake would occur in Christchurch between February 17 and 21. He was only one day out, but was ignored and then ridiculed by interviewer John Campbell who ignored the fact this guy gets the weather correct far more often than the Met Office. What’s worse I doubt anybody was listening when Ring also warned about March 21 and April 17 shakes yet to come. He might be wrong and I hope he is, but given what he has already been right about, it might be wise to take some notice.

The TV3 doco also reminded us of Wellington’s many buildings not up to earthquake standard. However, so far, the Wellington City Council is still sitting in that river in Egypt and claiming it is too costly to upgrade all the buildings properly. Current regulations only require strengthening these buildings to one quarter of the required strength, which quite frankly would be a waste of money, because it would make no significant difference in a large quake. Apparently mass fatalities are a much better option.

But what has happened in Christchurch and what is likely to happen in Wellington pale into invisibility compared with the situation in Japan. Now I really am on a hobby horse.

How could a country that suffered the world’s first known major nuclear event (Hiroshima) even begin to consider building nuclear power stations?

For Chrissakes they knew what the effects of radiation on people were better than anyone else in the world. Did the geniuses who decided to build nuclear power plants there think an accident couldn’t happen?

If they did then they must be the most stupid people to have ever breathed in and out. The bloody country is a bunch of rather small islands (the whole place is only 50 percent larger than New Zealand) laid out along a massive fault region known as the Pacific Ring of Fire containing 10 percent of the world’s active volcanoes.

When you think about that it makes Japan’s nuclear supporters as bright as that bloke that blew half his face off when he was siphoning petrol and lit his lighter to get a better view of his work. But the trouble is this is not a matter of Japan blowing its own face off.  If it was simply a matter of that, we could (perhaps rather uncharitably) say that if they are really that stupid, then it serves them right.

However it is not just their face they stand to blow to pieces; it is the possibility they will do the same to the rest of us, or at the very least leave us with some pretty nasty and untreatable scars. Thank god some men with actual gonads have warmed the treasury benches in New Zealand every now and again. Without the vision and tenacity of people such as David Lange (for all his other faults) we could well have had one of these ridiculously dangerous contraptions built in, for example, Christchurch and we might be the ones now threatening the entire planet thanks to our brainless pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Above all others, this is the lesson we need to learn and to teach or even beat into the skulls of everyone on the planet. Nuclear power is dangerous – far too dangerous for us to be messing with. We still haven’t come up with a safe way to dispose of the spent fuel rods and despite all the ‘safety precautions’ nobody can guarantee there will be no accidents, even if everyone follows procedures, which many don’t.

Don’t be fooled by these bastards. Always remember when businessmen and politicians start quoting the percentages on the likelihood of an accident they are simply playing the numbers game. They don’t give a toss about people; for them it is all about the bottom line, or as it should be called, the low line. It’s time to put the heat on councils and governments over mining and unsafe buildings and it is definitely time to stop any more nuclear power stations being built – anywhere!

Madness – the universal malaise

Well after some of the daft things that have happened in the last week I am relieved to say it is not only Kiwis that are barking mad. The whole bloody world has lost the plot. If you think that sounds a little, er extreme then take these examples from the last week’s news.

Example number one:

The Aussies and the Chinese are getting all excited about the possibility of making an invisible cloak. Yep, that’s right the diggers have taken some time out from mopping up all that unwanted water and figured that what the nation needs right now is a good dose of invisibility. Perhaps they think they might be able to hide from the rain – or is it part of a dastardly plot to win the Rugby World Cup by fielding an invisible team. Anyway, whatever it is, they have hauled in a bunch of Chinese scientists to help them because they had nothing important to invent in China, what with it being such a great country where everyone eats and lives so well.

To be fair the Sino-Ocker partnership is not necessarily trying to make a Harry Potter cloak. They claim to have artificially reversed the Optical Doppler Effect. This effect is what scientists call the way in which light is emitted from objects so they are visible to the human eye. They reckon they have found a way to divert the light away from the human eye so the object becomes ‘invisible’. It all sounds pretty far-fetched to me, not to mention pointless, but I’ve no doubt some lab-coated genius will have a wordy, jargon filled explanation designed to make us think the entire future of our civilization depends upon it. Frankly I think it would be a damned nuisance. Let’s face it we have an aging population with failing eyesight and the last thing we need is some beakerhead making objects invisible.

Example two shows the Poms are also mad (although most of us already knew that anyway)

An apparently anally retentive football referee red carded a player from the field in a game between Dorchester and Havant & Waterlooville for a head high tackle. Now normally this would be the right and proper thing to do, but in this case the person the player tackled was not another player but a bloody stupid streaker who had charged onto the field and disrupted their game. He kept running around holding the game up while the useless officials couldn’t catch him. Then when Dorchester player-manager Ashley Vickers stepped in and dropped him so the officials could get him off the field the whistling retardate reached for his red card and banished Vickers for doing everybody a favour. What’s even worse is the score was 1-1 at the time and subsequently Dorchester was beaten thanks to Mr Dimwhistle.

I found my next example of incredible stupidity in a place that has had its fair share of that particular commodity lately; the Middle East.

After this week Muammar Gaddafi must be a shoe (or sandal) in to win the coveted misplaced trust award (Political Division). He recently held to a press conference to show how much in touch he is at which he stressed, “There have been no demonstrations” and “My people love me”. After seeing old Muammar give that interview I couldn’t help but become transfixed by his face, which these days bears a scary resemblance to Michael Jackson’s during his latter days. Has old Mu been under the knife or does he wear an old mask of the gloved one to hide his real appearance for when he has to do a runner? Given his foolishly inaccurate and complacent statements about what is happening in the country which he doesn’t lead – he makes a point of saying he is not the leader – one must wonder if he has a similar appetite for drugs to the one Jacko was alleged to have had. Wake up, Mu and smell the burning buildings – people seldom burn those they love in effigy.

The Americans, have also jumped into this week’s cesspool of stupidity thanks to their latest conference of Catholic Bishops. Their idea of a great leap forward for the spiritual health of their nation is to edit the New American Bible so that it is as PC as possible. The word ‘booty’, which is a perfectly good word for the spoils of war will be replaced by the three word definition of it, while ‘holocaust’ (Don’t mention ze war) is to be replaced by what I feel is even worse – burnt offerings. I wouldn’t be surprised if all references to asses are removed if they haven’t already been. But the one change that really could be interesting is the removal of any reference to the Virgin Mary as a Virgin. The reason given is that the Hebrew word almah doesn’t strictly mean virgin. What baffles me is why this was not realised 2100 years ago. But the worst part of all this is they feel it is more important to prevent kids sniggering in Sunday School when they come across the word booty in their scriptures than it is to prevent their creepy clergy from molesting those kids.

Madness is catching. These days you don’t just catch it off the toilet seat; you also catch it from the newspapers, the television and the Internet. It’s one of those caring sharing things that have gone totally viral as a quick skim through your newspaper will confirm.

Don’t worry about the brain drain, there’s nothing left to go down it.

I can’t believe this shit only happens to me. It must happen to everybody, but folks, I just don’t think we are making enough of a fuss about incompetence. I am referring not just to incompetence in general but to the sort of monumental I’m-brain-dead/I-don’t-give-a-fuck type of incompetence that has thoroughly infected large corporations, retail stores, government departments and councils. This is incompetence due to bad attitude rather than lack of aptitude and it is rife throughout not just this land, but also the rest of the world.

There are times the universe appears to be conspiring and we encounter a large number of these micro-intelligences over a short period of time.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of a bunch of microbial life forms I have encountered recently and the names of the guilty parties have been published to avoid any further illusions any of these charlatans know which end their arsehole is.

First up to the plate is Contact Energy, possibly so named because their abilities in this sphere (making contact) are even more abysmal than their abilities to manage their power resources. You can waste a lot of energy trying to contact these numb-nuts, and marvel at their complete inability to manage simple one-on-one communications. My conflict with Contact Inertia began after a particularly lazy meter reader from a company who shall remain nameless, but we’ll call them Wells, failed to read our meter or leave a card to let us know he’d been for several months last year. When I realised what had happened I did a read myself and found the geniuses at Compacted Inertia had underestimated my gas bill (at summer levels) all winter. I had a massive bill to pay all in one go. I negotiated a settlement with accounts and then a complete retard manager sent me a letter threatening recovery action. But when I tried to speak to the culprit I found I had to spend the next three days arguing with nitwits on the phone that refused to put me through to her. Eventually it was sorted, but it should have been on the day I first rang them about it.

Second on the agenda is Westpac Bank. They effectively stole money from me. We filled out forms to cancel two insurance policies and I took them to the Greerton branch to action. An imbecile whose job description has him as a customer banking consultant invited me into his office ostensibly to discuss my decision and check the forms. However he simply asked me why we were cancelling. I told him they were overpriced and he smiled weakly and took the forms. Apparently it never occurred to him to check them, despite this being part of his job, and it would seem they were not entirely correctly done, or at least one wasn’t. The reason is minor, technical, long-winded and unimportant here, but what happened next is not. Wankpac duly took the forms, cancelled one policy, and then waited two weeks before sending out a letter advising of the error in one of the cancellation forms. In the meantime they had removed a further premium for the policy that, given it was handed in at the same time and accompanied by the other and were obviously intended to be cancelled. Once again resolution took several days and the ‘letters of apology’ I had demanded were more attempts to justify their own incompetence than any acknowledgement they acted unprofessionally and incompetently.

Vodafone also qualifies as extremely stupid, although by telecommunications standards they are one of the better ones. Their problem is the Vodadrone website that says you can click on a button for webspace and then doesn’t have one. It also has a button for transferring or registering a domain name, but when you click on it you only get the option of registering a new name. I subsequently found that if you overlook that little discrepancy and click anyway, it takes you to that option. But how the bloody hell would anyone know that?

The next two nongs managed to turn up on the same day and both are international companies.

International nitwit number one is Skype who for about the four hundredth time informed me my subscription is due to run out – except that it isn’t. It had several months to run before they sent me an extension recently due to an outage they had recently that left all subscribers without the service. What makes this interesting is that when these cretins send you an email about your subscription it is one of those ones you can’t reply to. Okay, so go on the site and hit the ‘contact us’ button or better still Skype them. No actually you can’t do either because Skype website has no ‘contact us’ button and if you want to contact them you have to go through tons of hoops until you get to a place where you can finally bang in a question although even then it will attempt to drag you off to one of its forums. Incredibly one can’t find a way on the website to phone the people at Shype.

And last but not least we have a delightful new business relationship between me and a domain and web hosting company called Just Host. Well it certainly ain’t Just Ice, I can tell you that. These guys are incredible. First of all their website advertises the cost as $4.45 per month and advertises a 20 percent discount on that. What it doesn’t make clear is that if you only take out two years instead of four, the price is $5.95 per month. Not satisfied with that, when I ordered the package Just Ass added two add-on services which they asked me if I wanted during the ordering process and which I rejected and of course billed me for them.

These matters might not seem of great import in isolation, but when you consider this level of incompetence is going on every minute of every day, you can see why the entire Western world is a collection of economic basket cases. What’s more obscene is that most of these companies continue to make more money than many third world countries and control large sections of their various markets.

We could turn parts or even most of this around if we just all refused to be treated as afterthoughts rather than the stuff that puts food in the gaping maws of these troglodytes. The time is well overdue for us to vote with our wallets and slash with rapier sarcasm. Tell them bluntly and without any chance for misinterpretation exactly why you’re pissed off with them and what you expect to be done about it. Humiliation can be a great weapon.

In the worst cases, if you can find an alternative to your latest dickhead retailer, ISP, energy company or whatever, then do so at the earliest opportunity. But tell the new ones why you’ve chosen them and don’t forget to give the old lot a suitable goodbye wish so they know why you left. They won’t notice one or two, but a flood is pretty hard to ignore

A new year yawns before us

Ye gods, the bloody place is going to the dogs. (No offence doggies, I should have said it’s going to the mongrels).

The year has barely started and already the nation has stalled. Prime Munter John Key (or Jiang Qi as we prefer to think of him) has signed off on 34 new Beamers for himself and his lazy overpaid cronies, and his National (Socialist) Party shows its true blue colours for all to see in election year.

Despite the recession and rising prices without the accompanying wage increases for all but the politicians and a few other privileged ones, Jiang Qi labels all recipients of food parcels bludgers who don’t know how to budget. This of course is based upon his own ‘close-up-and-personal’ knowledge of trying to live on less than $25,000 per annum. JQ obviously sees himself as some kind of royalty if his actual words are any guide:” ...anyone on a benefit actually has a lifestyle choice. If one budgets properly, one can pay one's bills.” So why not just tell them to eat cake eh, Jiang Qi?

Without even pausing for a breath, never mind a thought Ill Health Monitor Toe-Knee Bile says he won’t rule out changing the law to ensure they can continue to pay care workers a miserable $35 for having to sleep over when caring for people in their own homes. Bile clearly has the view these already grossly underpaid and under-valued workers should be grateful they get anything for staying over. After all, they’re sleeping. So what if they have to get up five times during the night to wipe the bum of one or more of their charges. They should be grateful they have a job, unlike those bludging bastards picking up food parcels.

You might think all this is bad enough, but in this very same week I read about a lawyer, John Gordon from Tauranga firm Sharp Tudhope and BGH Group MD Warwick Talbut who are raising money to buy some legs for Charlotte Cleverly-Bisman, the young Glenfield girl who lost all four limbs when she contracted meningitis as a baby. And why are these two fine, caring men doing this? Because the government won’t, that’s why. The government supplies one pair of legs each year to this wee girl but they are crappy fibreglass ones that are too painful for her to use. So her family has had to stump up (no pun intended) $40,000 to buy her some useable legs. Meanwhile double murderer Graham Burton sports a fine spanking new pair courtesy of, (you guessed it) our benevolent government.

In another perfectly timed move the results of a series of investigations into police handling of child abuse cases has revealed many cases were, to put it extremely mildly, inadequately dealt with. In fact the wording used was "filed incorrectly" or "inappropriately resolved". In fact it is far worse than that; an officer was brought in to check out a backlog of 121 unresolved files in the Wairarapa region after a detective there had asked the commissioner for assistance. He found that most were what he described as ‘high risk’. A detective was then supposed to go to Masterton to help resolve the files but his assistance was declined by Mark McHattie, the officer in charge of the Masterton CIB who said the number of cases had miraculously dropped from 121 to 29 in the space of just one month.

In yet another example of how mentally challenged our police force is, nobody seemed to think this was odd at the time. You will not be surprised to learn the enquiry found or implied that many of these were just closed and put away without any sort of follow up. McHattie is now working for the CIB in Auckland, although he is currently being investigated along with a number of his colleagues. Now of course, the Rozzers are doing all the usual ‘show’ things that get done at times like these such as ‘designating a specific officer to co-ordinate all child abuse cases in each district. All of which will be a complete waste of time unless the plod on the beat actually learns to recognise the fact that people who beat their children or spouses with implements need to be removed to a place where they cannot harm these people and the family (or whanau) is very often NOT the best place for a child to be.

Now, if you’re still feeling positive about the way our country is going, remember this is election year and that means your state of euphoria is going to be short-lived.