Just supposing.........

I’ve been watching with increasing concern as those responsible for the Rena disaster seem to be successfully dodging all the bullets. Furthermore they have amassed an enviable arsenal of their own which they have turned upon those already hurt by their negligence.

Costamare Inc and Daina Shipping have been able to limit their liability to an outrageous extent, due in part to the carelessness of our Government. I say carelessness, but this is a rather generous view for me to take as the more likely scenario is that if we were to probe the issue deeply we would find some kind of concession for some kind of politician ‘coincidentally’ occurred after we agreed to the ridiculous piece of legislation that allows liability for such ‘accidents’ to be limited

Of course there is far more than money at stake in cases such as this. Damage to the environment and the wildlife that live in it are beyond mere dollars. Once animals are dead, money can’t replace them and once an environment is polluted by oil the consequences can last for decades.

So no sooner had our environment been assaulted by what will undoubtedly be found to have been a grossly careless act than we felt the cold steel up us as we learned the ship’s owners would have their liability for damages limited to $12.1M, and WE the people who played absolutely no part whatsoever in the grounding of this ship would have to pay the rest. Now to most of us $12.1M sounds like a lot of money, but to put it into perspective consider these reports:

·         As at 17 October 2011  (just 12 days after the grounding) the costs of the clean-up had reached $4M (NZ Herald)

·         By 27 October the costs of the clean-up had risen to $10M (ODT)

·         As of December 7, then Transport minister Steven Joyce said the cost had risen to $19.5M (NZ Herald)

So as of a week ago the costs had already exceeded the owners’ liability limits by more than 50 percent and we already had to fork out $7.5M of our own money to fund the clean-up which won’t be over for many months yet.

Of course additionally a lot of businesses lost a fortune in revenue over this matter, too. Tourist operations, fishermen, and water sports enthusiasts have all suffered a great deal since Captain Pugwash crashed his tub onto Astrolabe Reef. Some have suffered fatal financial losses and have basically no comeback apart from a few empty promises made a couple of months ago by Ministers keen to get re-elected. Good luck there.

But the latest kick in the guts that delivered to New Zealanders over this sorry saga has been the ransom demands made by the salvors to those unfortunate enough to have cargo onboard. At first they sent out demands to every person with goods on the ship, including private individuals whose cargo was made up entirely of personal effects. Then following a bit of shouting from their customers they made a small tactical withdrawal. They claimed the letters had been sent to individuals in error and should only have been sent to those with commercial cargo on board. It sounds like classic ‘softening up’ tactics to me.

But in any event I can’t see a huge amount of difference here. Both private individuals and businesses have already paid for their goods to be delivered to them. So why should they have to pay for the cost of salvage? Effectively Svitzer is trying to extract payment from the owners of the goods rather than the owners of the ship.

Now some might say this is a non-issue and as most people have insurance they can leave it to their insurance company to sort out. But we all know what happens following a load of insurance claims; premiums go up so the insurance company can recoup its payout. But what on earth could anyone do about it? These massive corporations are too big for a fight by a little man and it would seem the insurance companies can’t be bothered arguing about it. Why would they when they can simply increase their premiums and carry on as normal? Let’s not forget who it was that crashed this tub. Costamare and the rest should be relying on THEIR insurance company for cover.

But what if.....what if somebody found a way to challenge these modern day pirates and mounted a test case against them? It would be expensive and the only way it could ever happen would be through the philanthropy of somebody who cares enough about justice and hates highway robbers.

I don’t know if there is someone or a group of people who would love to give these guys a fright – probably not, but it would be great. I have a theory that is untried, but just might be the path towards how one could unravel this mess.

Consider this; the shipping company entered into a contract with their customers to ship their goods to them. The contract wasn’t to sail them all the way to Tauranga Harbour and then leave them out on a reef. It was to deliver them to the port and then forward them via land based carriers to their destination. 

Failure to do this is surely a breach of contract? The usual effect of a breach of contract is to bring that contract to an end. When this happens the defaulting party is usually expected to pay some kind of compensation to the person whose goods they have failed to deliver. Normally this would involve replacement of the goods concerned and/or a full or partial refund of the freight costs.

So my contention is that the shipping company would have no right to recover the costs of salvage from the shippers because that is simply an incidental cost they have incurred through their own negligence. Negligence that furthermore could be said to go beyond the bounds of a simple accident given the criminal charges filed against the owners and the crew.

It might be a lengthy bow I’ve drawn, and I am sure that even if I’m right there is probably nobody with the funds or determination to take these guys on. But just supposing someone did; wouldn’t it be fantastic for the common man?

Owed (Ode) to Tauranga

The Bay of Plenty in general and Tauranga in particular is a great place to live. I love living here and hope to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. But sometimes I wonder if I will want to.......

You see the problem is that many factors and fuckwits are conspiring to ruin everything good about the place.

For anyone who has not had the pleasure of living here, here are some of the benefits of living in Tauranga.

1.      The weather is possibly the best in the country taking into account all of the seasons. Every year Tauranga is in the top three towns in NZ for sunshine hours. That alone is a damned good reason to live here. Frosts are as rare as hens’ teeth and our rain usually has the good grace to get itself over and done with by falling on about a third of the days in each month.

2.      The cost of living is much lower than Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch, despite being New Zealand’s fourth or fifth largest metropolitan area. If you include Western Bay of Plenty District, the total population is in excess of 150,000 yet you still have a kind of’ village’ atmosphere where people who don’t even know you smile at you in the street and pass the time of day like people do in small rural towns.

3.      There are excellent white sand beaches, mountains, forests, and excellent soil for growing produce.

4.      A great range of organic and biodynamic food is available and very often grown locally.

5.      There is an amazing community of outrageously talented artists musicians and creative types, most of whom do not carry the airs and graces and general ‘up-themselvesness’ of their equivalents in places like Auckland. (Sorry Aucklanders, but after 18 years spent living there I feel well qualified on that one).

6.      Traffic is not a huge problem with the rush hours being more like rush quarter hours and often much less. The drivers are just as bad as anywhere else though, although not as bad as they were here 20 years ago when the town had a huge elderly bias.

7.      The town and country are so near to one another. You can drive ten or fifteen minutes from the CBD in any direction and be surrounded by farms and bush.

8.      If you get a hankering to go elsewhere, Rotorua, Hamilton and Whakatane are all with an hour to an hour and a half’s drive, Auckland is just two and a half hours away (but why would you go there?) and you can be on the Coromandel Peninsular in an hour and a half or in Taupo in two.

I’ve probably forgotten a whole lot more good reasons, but that is enough to be getting on with.

So who and what are all these factors and fuckwits running this paradise?

The answers to most of the world’s problems can usually be found by ‘following the money’ and I think Tauranga is a classic case of this.

We have (not me I hasten to add) elected at least two consecutive councils that have done Tauranga no favours at all. Led both times by (Getusintoa) Stu Crosby; a man with a strong business profile in Tauranga through his family business – a holiday park.

Now a man with a foot firmly planted in the tourism camp might sound like an ideal Mayor for Tauranga, but unfortunately Getusintoa is an empire builder like so many politicians. He sees himself as the key man in the area and has already made noises about a BOP ‘supercity’, no doubt with himself as Lord Mayor. He is surrounded by a council of mostly like-minded individuals they appear to want to make Tauranga like the Auckland of the BOP. You can see it in the way they have built their newer roads and in their eagerness to build toll roads (just like Big Bro up North). This type of thinking has led them to the immovable notion that Tauranga needs millions of ratepayer dollars spent on a museum of some kind, rather than cleaning up the waterways and upgrading the general infrastructure of the town. Ultimately if such plans are allowed to progress Tauranga will begin to look so much like Auckland that you will need a GPS reading to confirm your location. Of course your rates will have risen dramatically to try and keep pace with Auckland as well.

Of course along with such ambition comes the need for more business, more people more cars, more roads, more mayhem! The ten or fifteen minute drive to the countryside will become an hour due to increased traffic and also because so much of the rural land near to town will have been developed into ghastly housing subdivisions with names like The Lakes (I know it’s there already), The Ponds that all look the bloody same and a GPS will be necessary to navigate your way home from work if you want to positively identify your own house and section.

Along with bigger business comes a larger domination by the big players and this will be most obvious in the case of the food available locally. If the supermarkets continue with their current policies of stocking almost no organic or biodynamic produce, then these will become increasingly difficult to source as more and more big ‘food’ barns squeeze out the smaller operators currently supplying a good range of these foods.

Another factor working against the great food is the Kiwifruit industry which most people think of as a benefit to the region. My take on that is that it is and it isn’t. It is great that kiwifruit grow here and I love kiwifruit, but what is not great is that most of that fruit is grown with the use of nasty agri-chemicals. The sprays and other nasties used by these growers have caused heaps of health and other problems in the area and unfortunately the discovery of PSA just makes this worse. The kiwifruit industry is so hooked on chems that every time they get a wee problem (or a large one) they reach for the chemicals. Of course the whole process becomes like the old lady who swallowed a fly. So look out for many more nasty chems and antibiotics on your supermarket kiwifruit in future.

Unfortunately Tauranga doesn’t seem to be that interested in supporting local live music at the moment. Fewer and fewer live venues are providing regular opportunities to hear good ORIGINAL local bands.

So that has pretty well starts to demolish reasons 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of my eight key reasons for living here.

The Rena has given us what should be a big wake- up call over our beautiful beaches. But Jezza ‘Billy Bunter’ Browneye still wants to drill for oil out here and I would be very surprised if this council did not also support that idea. So there goes that particular neighbourhood along with reason 3 for living in Tauranga.

Hopefully reason 1 (the weather) is beyond the reach of these metropolitan and national vandals. But if the cowshit does hit the fan I will be pleased that reason 8 exists and I can scarper elsewhere (albeit a little more slowly due to the increased urbanisation).

Oil probably not the only lubricant used

How can you drive a boat at 17 knots into a bloody massive well charted reef in fine daylight weather? With all the electronic gadgetry plus the legal requirement to carry paper charts to avoid crashes caused by the failure of electronic navigation aids, it seems impossible.

However I hear the job is much easier if you are pissed or not looking out the windscreen.

Puzzling as the original grounding, (or considering the boat’s reported speed, ramming); what is even more puzzling is why authorities took so long to do anything meaningful about it. The grounding occurred on Wednesday morning yet there was no attempt to get fuel off the vessel until Friday. So where the bloody hell were they? A guy called John Riding who is an expert in these sorts of operations was saying the first priority should have been to begin pumping oil off the vessel before they bothered about anything else. As he pointed out at the time; the weather was good but there is never any guarantee of how long that will be the case.

Furthermore the first reaction from authorities was to start spraying so-called dispersant chemical Correxit 9500 which was used to no good effect in the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But experts in these types of situations say the dispersant chemicals should only ever be used as a last resort because they very often don’t work and the jury is still out over whether they are less harmful to the environment than the original spill. In fact some say that Correxit is four times more toxic than oil. I think that song I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly should be taught in schools and sung in the way a National Anthem used to once be. We need to get it through people’s thick heads that putting out fires with gasoline does not work and in fact makes them blaze far more energetically.

Meanwhile on Monday, (five days after the crash) as Maritime NZ continued to plonk their lazy arses down on their hands, some concerned locals went down to their beaches and started to clear up some of the gunk being carried in to shore. But did Maritime NZ say, “Hey thanks folks for being such responsible and concerned citizens,”? Did they bollox! Instead the officious wankers told people to cease clearing up the mess and to wait for the official response - presumably this would be the same response they had already been waiting 5 days for.

As usual when something like this happens in this election year a host of heavyweight MPs descended upon Tauranga to stand resolutely alongside Simon the Pixie sporting suitably grim expressions show how concerned they are and how important they think Tauranga is. (So important they don’t have any suitable gear stationed here to deal with such events.) Of course between them they have done nothing more than make a dent in the MPs travel budget and grab a shit-load of photo opps to smear like great gobs of icing on their election cake in an attempt to fool the foolish and the senile, both of which we sadly have in abundance up here.

Meanwhile the same Jiangqi who was ‘so surprised and disappointed for Tauranga that we didn’t have any RWC matches’ and who cares so much about this incident, is prepared to set the navy on the wise ones among the populace who want to prevent Petrobras drilling for oil in the Bay of Plenty. Heckyeah Parata says oil drilling will provide so many jobs and so much money, but what use is money and jobs if your environment is fucked?  Will the extra dollars from oil drilling make up for the ruined fisheries and all the jobs lost from that area and its satellite industries and occupations? I doubt it very much. Somehow the supporters of that venture seem unable to understand that any cock-ups in the oil-drilling operation would make this mess look like a teaspoon of milk in the Atlantic Ocean.

So what should happen now? Well the prick in charge of the boat should walk the plank. I would be very surprised if he is not found to have been drunk, stoned, criminally negligent, or all three. The owners will obviously have to pay for the clean-up and should be fined enough to rock their corporate boat so much they do everything possible to avoid any further cock-ups of this sort.

As for the Petrobras fiasco; Jiangqi, Heckyeah and Billy Bunter Browning all need to move into the 21^st century and realise oil-drilling is not the way or the fuel of the future. But as usual it is short term (and somewhat debatable) gains taking precedent over the longer term results which are evident to anyone who cares to look at the bigger picture. But then our blinkered politicians and their bureaucratic bunglers have never been able to see beyond the end of the next election anyway.