Friday 21 December 2012

Intensive care awards – Primary care


Another year has come to an end and if you believe the seriously deranged, (and who wouldn’t – look at the government our fellow citizens elected), the entire world is actually ending as I write this.

Traditionally at year’s end people look at the high achievers for the year just gone and hand out plaudits*. These are very difficult little things to wrap as they aren’t actually physical objects; more like the mean man’s present. In fact you can’t really do much with them at all, despite the fact they are relatively easy to hand out. To be precise, the only way you can offer plaudits is by hand, so I guess what I am handing out is something less substantial than a plaudit as there are no hands involved apart from the two fingers on the keyboard (and possibly pointing upwards for the benefit of some of the recipients of these – audits. That’s what we’ll call them. Audits for idiots might be more accurate.

It has been a busy year on the idiot front and thus it is impossible to rank the recipients n order of merit (?). So I will simply randomly select a few over the next couple of weeks in particular order or all over the place like a mad woman’s shit as an old mate of mine used to say. And that is probably the appropriate description because it mirrors pretty accurately how most of them performed over the last twelve months.

First cab to crash into a truck in this careless coterie would have to be HeckYeah Parata or Lady Gardiner as I think she will soon have to become again. HeckYeah’s list of cock-ups in her role as Minister of Illiteracy is far too long to list here. Suffice to say she is likely to be back at home as a Lady of leisure sometime soon because even that simpering little twat of a Prime Monster is getting tired of all the flak he’s copping because of her.

Actually it should come as no surprise to him that she has failed so monumentally. Cock-ups and controversy have followed this dozy cow about for years. The fact that the National Disgrace Party took her on as an MP and gave her a ministership to run aground tells you (a) what poor leadership can get you and (b) how much they care about education.

A quick scan of HeckYeah’s CV reveals that in 1995 she and her equally self-serving husband Sir Weary Gardiner were the subjects of an investigation by then State Services Commissioner Don Hunn over the purchase of two vehicles for Weary who was the CEO of Te Puni Kokiri at the time. Although they were both cleared of any illegal activity at the time, significantly both cars were returned to the Ministry for re-sale by auction.

In 1999 HeckYeah was under scrutiny again. This time her consultancy firm had provided ‘ongoing high quality Maori advice (which is presumably different altogether to ordinary high quality advice free of ethnic tags) to WINZ at a cost of $207,500. How ‘high quality’ it was I’ll leave you to judge apart from mentioning that the late Rod Donald raised it as a criticism in the house due to the fact that the Maori unemployment rate rose by 2% following this ‘high quality’ advice.

Then in 2003 HeckYeah raised the ire of Murray McCully after the Ministry of Economic Development had wasted, I mean spent $240,000 of taxpayers’ money on Treaty of Waitangi training courses run by (you guessed it) HeckYeah’s company again.

In another move that shows her consummate lack of judgement HeckYeah was appointed to the board of Maori Television in 2001 and resigned two months later citing a lack of funds. I’d say that was a pretty lucky escape for Maori TV, because she would have been sure to fuck it up if she’d stayed around.

HeckYeah stood for the Wellington Central electorate at the 2002 election and thankfully the capital’s citizens proved too smart to elect her. Thankfully she also missed out on her each way bet with the Nats not getting enough party votes to bring her in either. It got a bit sticky later on when MoFo Williamson got himself offside with the party hierarchy and it was only thanks to the elevation of well-known Maori basher Dong Brash to leader that HeckYeah wasn’t hauled in to replace MoFo.

Interestingly Dong nearly saved us all from this useless woman with his Orewa rotary club speech. After that Weary and HeckYeah contemplated leaving the Nats. Unfortunately for us and the teachers of this nation they did not and after a suitable period of blubbing over her 2002 disappointment HeckYeah came back in 2008 and stood for the Mana electorate. Once again the voters had more sense than the Nats and rejected her again, but this time she had secured (begged, borrowed or stolen?) a suitably high place on the list and this time her each way bet paid off and she was elected despite being roundly rejected by the electorate.  

In 2010 HeckYeah became a Cabinet Minister when another of the party faithful slipped and grazed her knees. Pansy made a Wong decision to use taxpayer money to help her husband promote his business and she was toast and HeckYeah was slipped into her portfolio.

Also in 2010 HeckYeah actually won the Mana seat in a bye-election after sitting member Winnie Laban had resigned to pursue greener pastures. It was nothing more than a lucky break as she was the only candidate for the seat with others realising there wasn’t a lot to be gained from holding a seat for just a few months before a general election. However HeckYeah with that impeccable judgement we have seen since she became a Minister went for it with the idea of securing it into the future. Fortunately the electorate turned out again in halfway decent numbers in 2011 and she lost it again, but by now she had enough clout having been a Minister albeit for about four and a half seconds and only as a subbie off the bench, to be well enough placed on the list to get in again after being rejected by the voters.

HeckYeah therefore is a worthy recipient of the inaugural and inauspicious Money & Titles Talk award because it is hard, given her history to imagine what the hell else caused her to become the Minister of Illiteracy.

*a plaudit is actually a round of applause – so I guess you could say we are giving the winners the clap. 

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Justice you thought it was safe to go back in the courtroom


Justice is an interesting concept. The first three definitions my dictionary offers are: just conduct; fairness; and the exercise of authority in the maintenance of right.

The first of these definitions requires further resort to the dictionary wherein we find the first definition of just to be acting or done in accordance of what is morally right or fair. So essentially what we have is an agreement among those first three definitions that justice is about what is morally right and fair. That doesn’t seem to match up terribly well with some of the examples of our so-called Justice system in New Zealand. Nor does it have much of an existence in any other aspects of our lives where you might expect to encounter ‘the exercise of authority in the maintenance of right’ or people ‘acting in accordance with what is morally right or fair’.

One reason might be the fact that if you base your concept of justice upon morality you are always going to have a problem when there are so many individualised definitions of that particular concept. Perhaps three better opening definitions for this hard to pin down concept might be:, the exercise of authority in the maintenance of the right (wing): the exercise of authority in the hands of the privileged few who can afford a high-priced lawyer; or acting in accordance with what matches most closely the policy objectives of the Government of the day.

I have been trying hard to understand where this Government stands in relation to the concept of justice. It talks the talk when it suits it or when it makes for a good photo op or PR headline, but when it comes to actually exercising that power or authority it would seem it works on its own set of secret rules that nobody else can fathom.

Individual MPs trample on the rights of their constituents on a regular basis as did Paula Bumfat when she deliberately leaked private details of a woman who had the temerity to complain about her treatment by WINZ.  Then we have that dufus Horon the Moron who seems to think he can stay in parliament as an independent MP when the only people who ‘elected’ him were his own party caucus who have now unelected him. We won’t even go there about what led to his expulsion other than to say if the stories are true it is another example of an MP not acting in accordance of what is morally right.

The Kim Dotcom case is another well publicised example of Government agencies acting in a way that defies the three definitions of justice I mentioned at the start of this. They should just own up. The matter is very simple. He is a New Zealand resident and as such cannot be spied on by the GCSB. He was and therefore they are in the wrong. He had a high profile and had been in the news not long beforehand so there was absolutely no reason why they would not have known he was a Kiwi albeit one with an accent. And it is inconceivable they wouldn’t have known the law in that regard (mind you they are just glorified dumb coppers with sunglasses and shiny suits – so who knows).

But the case that really has my bile mobile is the David Bain compensation issue. If this isn’t one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by an unholy coalition of the NZ Police and the NZ Government upon one of its citizens, then I don’t know what is. I realise this is hyperbole and I will now probably bombarded with a thousand other cases more worthy of this honour(?) but I am sure you get my point that this is one I feel very strongly about.

I wasn’t sure at the outset about David’s guilt or innocence as initially I didn’t take much of the case on board. I realised at the time of his conviction that some of the ‘evidence’ was questionable and I felt that he was convicted more on a ‘he must have done it because who else could have/” basis than any solid evidential grounds. At the very start I expressed concern that this might be another miscarriage of justice like the Arthur Allan Thomas case, but I could never have dreamed it would turn out to be such an ongoing Circus of Horrors where the injustices keep on occurring.

The Minister in charge of The Exercise of Authority in the Maintenance of Right (Little Bo-Tox) has trumped even herself this week with her eminently ‘fair and just’ decision to criticise the independent report by Justice Ian Binnie into whether or not David Bain should receive compensation from the Crown for his 13 years in prison.

What makes Bo’s criticism so vile is the fact that she will not release the document so we can all be the judges of whether her assessment is fair and just. But worst of all she won’t even let David Bain see it until she has had the chance to roll in a couple of her own tame lawyers to tear it to bits and discredit it so comprehensively that the question of compo for Davo will sink into a deep pit where she can bury it forever. (Tui ad tagline anyone?)

What makes this stupid woman so stupid is that she actually believes her own PR and hyperbole and she believes we will as well. She is right about a part of that; many of the sheeple of Godzone will believe her bollox. However many others will not; Justice Binnie won’t for one and Joe Karam certainly won’t. A guy who has devoted as much of his life to this case as Karam has is definitely not going to slip away into the shadows of the night. He will come out with guns blazing.

I will make a prediction now. David Bain will get compo despite Bo Tox’s manoeuvres. All this stupid bint is doing is adding to our costs as a nation both in terms of the amount of cash all of this is going to end up costing us and also in terms of our reputation as a place free from corruption and where justice actually exists in accordance with the three dictionary definitions I listed at the start of this blog.

So far this lot has cost us all the time keeping David in jail for 13 years; all the costs of Crown opposing his appeals along the way and the major expenses leading up to and including the appeal to the Privy Council all of which I gather has cost us well in excess of $3M and then we have just forked out the better part of half a million for the report from Ian Binnie and now Little Bo Tox wants to enrich even more of her lawyer mates at our expense before ultimately we will be enforced to pay David out at least a million bucks.

So what does justice really mean in New Zealand given this scenario? Well it means that justice is when the wrong guy gets sent to prison for 13 years, then spends several more years trying to appeal his unsafe conviction and several more years battling for compensation, while the nation foots a bill for what will probably be the thick end of $5-$6M and those responsible for all this expense – the incompetent/crooked cops, various gold-digging lawyers and the Munter of Just-Is walk away scot free.

I must contact the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary and get them to add that definition and put in brackets (NZ).