It’s only money

The world seems to be universally in turmoil at the moment over the Global Financial Crisis. Having said that; it is interesting to not e how conveniently the GFC is invoked when Governments are asked to do something that will benefit the largest number of their constituents. You will notice how it magically evaporates when they want to tell you how why it is fine to get tough with beneficiaries who should just ‘go out and get a job’ (where?).

It is truly sad that so often our worth, or quite often our self-worth is defined by the abundance or otherwise of our financial wealth. We’ve all heard people say, “It’s only money” or “It is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for a camel to enter the Kingdom of God’ (or some such), but as Berry Gordy once wrote, “The best things in life are free; But you can give them to the birds and bees; I need money”

And although money is only a symbol of the material world; for most of us that’s the one we are living in. It can’t buy happiness but most of us would prefer to be unhappy with it than unhappy without it. But I digress....

Money exists in great abundance and despite the fact it has very little value, given most of it is fiat money and of no real value to most of us. Governments know this because they gave the orders to print the stuff, yet they still go to extraordinary lengths to make sure you and I and anyone else not part of their club don’t get our hands on any of it. They will spend large sums of money to ensure ordinary folk don’t get any. Sounds crazy? Well check this out.

Some of you may recall a fight between the Ministry of Health and parents of disabled persons who were caring for their offspring full-time. The MOH had decided these people were not entitled to any payment for the care they were giving despite the fact many had given up their paid jobs to look after their kids and were effectively easing the burden on local services. The issue had been in the ether since about 1999 and in 2010 a group of carers took their case to the Human Rights Review Tribunal. The Tribunal ruled the Ministry’s policy not to pay carers who were related to the patient discriminatory.

The Ministry was not prepared to give up and appealed the Tribunal’s ruling to the High Court where the Office of Human Rights backed the caregivers in early 2011. The High Court also ruled for the parents explaining that by being excluded from paid work meant they were being treated differently because of their family status and that treatment was discriminatory.

So the Misery of UnHealth has been through two hearings both of which would have cost a lot of money and they’ve lost both times. But do they give up and do the decent thing and pay these tireless and selfless workers? Do they ‘eck as like.

Immediately following their second loss the MOHOFOSOBOs up the ante (and the cost to you and me – but heck it’s only money) and appealed the High Court decision to the Court of Appeal.

The whole sorry saga arrived there in February this year and has been decided once again this week. The Court of Appeal confirmed the High Court’s decision in favour of the parents.

According to Fairfax Media this case has cost Crown Law $1.4M so far and the whisper is the mean-fisted, tight-arses are likely to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court, now. But then I don’t suppose we should expect anything else from the Minestrone run by that horrible little oik Toenail Vyle.

Now it’s important to remember here that this is the Government that sets great store by money. It’s never out of their conversation. The budget is to contain provisions for getting students to pay their loans back quicker; we can’t have public service television because  we don’t have the money for it; we need to sell our best performing state owned businesses to get some quick cash; we need to change the gambling laws so SkyCity can spend millions building a convention centre they will charge us to use......Listening to them you would think there was nothing else in the world except money and that money was the sole answer to all our problems. So if we believe them (and let’s face it we are a pretty damned credulous country); then how is it that the parent caregivers don’t need any money for what they are doing? Their job is tough mentally and often physically, is 24/7 and offers no perks. Compared to them our useless Government Ministers have got it easy and they insist on being paid six figures (not including the cents) to do their job. How would they like the roles reversed. I’ll bet they wouldn’t do their job for nowt. But why shouldn’t they? After all; it’s only money.

Who’s afraid of the big bad truth?

I sometimes wonder who that stranger is in front of me at the checkout counter. Is he/she a child abuser? A rapist? A thief? A drunk driver? A conman, a vicious thug or a bungling idiot?

The trouble is that we don’t know and the authorities, in an effort to allegedly ‘protect the innocent’ are hanging out the rest of us like fresh meat in the jungle.

The judges who think they know what is best for us and the politicians who ‘know’ they know best are determined that we should not know who to be wary of or who to run a mile from. Never mind that many more of us will fall prey to the criminal tendencies and the reckless actions of people who are being protected by what is essentially a crock of shit.

We can’t know the names of the two pieces of flotsam that locked their 9 year old daughter in a cupboard, and tortured her and beat her in what amounts to one of the most heinous and sickly perverted examples of child abuse you could think of. The excuse we are given by the judge is that if we were to know it would then lead us to identification of the victims.

There are several things wrong with this approach. While it is true the naming of the parents would ipso facto lead to the identification of the kids, it is first important to remember these kids will already be known to close relatives and anyone else who rocked up to the court. So in a way the cat is already out of the bag, but what worries me more is how these orders bind everyone concerned. In real terms one presumes the victims are also bound by such an order. If they weren’t there wouldn’t be much point in granting it would there? Because this effectively means these kids have to walk around with this terrible secret locked inside them and are only ever able to discuss it with counsellors. I can’t help but feel having to keep shtumm about such things is probably far more harmful in the long run. Covering the thing up sends a message to the kid that this is somehow shameful (for them) when in reality they have nothing to be ashamed of. They need to know that victims should never take on the shame that belongs fairly and squarely upon the shoulders of the offenders.

It is also unfair that the community is not going to know when these people are released back into their midst. This is possibly not so important in this case but it certainly is important in cases involving paedophiles, thugs, or others who perpetrate crimes upon the general population.

And regarding the bungling idiots I referred to at the beginning of this blog, there are few more adept at this type of behaviour than our District and High Court judges. I think they should be made to wear some kind of identification when out in public (do they ever go out in public?). Something understated like a dunce’s hat would suffice.

You might think that a tad harsh, but it is an almost daily event to be gobsmacked by the latest judicial fuck-up hitting the headlines. I’m not just talking about minor errors either. One that has recently slipped by with hardly a murmur from anyone is the case of Olinale Ah You who was convicted of killing 80-year-old Manurewa woman Yan Ping Yang who he beat to a bloody pulp in her own home. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 18 years. But this guy is really nasty; two weeks after attacking Mrs Yang he, went out and attacked another woman. This scumbag has convictions for violent behaviour going back to 1998 and was jailed for 12 years with a minimum parole period of eight in May 2009 on another matter. As the Yang killing took place in 2008, I can only conclude the 2009 sentence was for the later offence. However I was more alarmed to read why Ay You is only just getting sentenced for the killing.

It would seem that when he was first convicted he was given life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 20 years, but the jury was told of his previous convictions before finding him guilty. Who told them is unknown but the judge in the case was Edwin Wylie and as this is basically judicial systems 101 you would have to wonder why he was not sacked on the spot. If someone let that particular cat out of the bag in court his duty was to dismiss the jury and order a retrial BEFORE sentencing. Instead of which this clown went ahead and sentenced Ah You whereupon his lawyer (quite naturally) went to the Court of Appeal to have the conviction quashed which they did.

No doubt all of this cost a great deal of money and no doubt we the taxpayer paid for both sides of the fight and now Ah You’s sentence has been cut by two years into the bargain.

I have since learned the reasons for the retrial were suppressed. I honestly don’t know if they still are, but since the information was still available in one report on the NZ Herald site recently I am assuming the suppression has lapsed. In any event it is not the sort of thing we should be prevented from knowing. This bloody judge is getting paid by us and he ought to be accountable for his performance and we have a right to know when he costs us tens of thousands of dollars through his poor case management.  

I don’t want us to be number one

Well congratulations to us. New Zealand has had shameful placings in so many world tables lately, such as child poverty, the gap between rich and poor and youth suicide statistics. But now we have the chance to be winners again – and so soon after the RWC too.

So what are we winning? Well I think we are in the running for several trophies at the moment.

First of all our government should win the award for the most cynically rigged election since the last fiasco in Russia where Vlad the Imputin arranged for his mate to caretake the Presidency while he slid into the PM’s chair for a term so he can then jump back into the seat his mate has kept warm for him until next year. The National Disgrace Party started the fiasco by hand-picking the candidates of their potential coalition partners to ensure they were all on the same page. What the book was, we can only speculate, but it will have had something to do with silencing dissenting views and enriching themselves at our expense.

Because of the fact we have no written constitution to fall back on it would seem the party in power can do whatever they like. For example they are able to choose the date of the election, which obviously means they can arrange for it to be held at a time that is convenient to them.

This year they were able to play an absolute blinder in that regard by beginning the campaign straight after the RWC. This meant the whole thing was rushed through while everyone was still enjoying the ABs’ win and were probably still a little light-headed. It also meant that policy releases could be timed to perfection; that is to say they could be released at the last possible moment so nobody had enough time to check them out properly before they had to cast their vote.  

Then Jianqi decided he was too important to debate the issues with anyone other than Phil Goshisthatthetime. Phil foolishly took his cue from Jianqi and said well I won’t if he won’t. Television for some unfathomable reason also decided to get onto that particular bandwagon and gave the two twats what they wanted instead of giving the public what they wanted; namely a debate between all the major party leaders. The channels should have invited all the major party members to the debates and made a point of ridiculing anyone too pussy to turn up.

But once again – our political system allows this sort of nonsense, where candidates like STP (Simon the Pixie) and Toenail Vile can refuse to front candidates meetings in their own electorates and instead hold their own little bullshit fests with all the party faithful cuddled up close and cosy. Dissenting views are not what these people want at THEIR meetings. Heavens above if you allowed that, the entire fabric of their smug and selfish society would unravel and some of that poor underclass might turn up and stink the place out.

Then of course there was the teapot saga where Jianqi mobilised the force of the law to gag the press, sent the solicitor-general to ‘guide’ the High Court and goodness only knows what or who was sent to ‘advise’ the Ombudsman that his role has now changed overnight to that of Protector-of-things-the-government-doesn’t-want-you-to- know.

As you might have guessed our other table topping achievements also spring from this so-called election. The first of these is the neutered state of our press. In 2009 the freedom of our press was judged to be one of the best in the entire world. The annual international survey by Freedom House ranked our press freedom at a score of 14 where 1 is the top and 100 the bottom. The highest ranking in that survey was 10 shared by (not surprisingly) Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Only nine nations did better than us in that survey. We beat countries such as Ireland, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and USA. But that was before the Samovar incident. It was bad enough for Jianqi to threaten and intimidate our press over that matter, but it was far worse that they listened to him. What a bunch of nutless wonders. They just rolled over like big pussies to have their tummies rubbed instead of scratching the little shit’s face. November 2011 – the day the NZ Press committed sideways.

Finally the biggest trophy we will probably cart off will be decided this Saturday November 26. If my guess is right and so is the government we elect, then we will qualify for the dumbest nation on the planet.

Jianqi was publicly caught out in the following lies:

Standard & Poors have said they will downgrade our credit rating if there is a change of government

I didn’t lie about GST or Kiwisaver – it’s a dynamic environment

I can’t recall what was said in my meeting with John Banks followed by There’s nothing on that tape that is important and then It’s nothing to do with me what the police do (about the tape)

I have treasury advice that we can keep the asset shares in Kiwi hands

We have no plans to hold back on police recruiting

If the country returns this slimeball and his ragtag bag of greedies to the treasury benches then it rightly deserves the title of the most stupid nation in the world.

I can only hope that Kiwis wake up and the NZ press discover they only suffered severe bruising and still actually have everything intact and lift their game to ensure his ride is a very brief and bumpy one.