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. 

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