The madness of pouring money into a hole in the ground

Human beings do some incredibly stupid things as we all know, and the current NZ Government is not immune to this malaise.

At present they seem obsessed with pouring money into all sorts of holes in the ground. In some instances they are doing this literally and in others figuratively. However in all cases the practice makes no sense when the longer view is taken.

Unfortunately when you have a Government that is headed up by a money trader you are going to see policies that are driven by the desire to reap short term gains and to hell with any ‘collateral damage’ that might be caused by chasing those gains.

Under this sort of management anything that doesn’t bring the cash that will enrich the drivers of those policies and their mates is expendable.

This is the philosophy that allows companies such as Anna Dark Knight to plunder the depths of our oceans in search of 20^th Century fuels for the 21^st Century.

We are told by the Government that if we allow these modern day environmental rapists to drill ginormous holes in our seabed we will all get fabulously wealthy and live happily ever after. In true Nelsonian style Jianqi has hoisted his telescope to his squinty little eyes after first sticking a large banknote over the lens which is bad enough, but he wants all of us to look through it as well without removing the distraction of the cash first so that we can see the real picture.

A conspiracy has been hatched to massage the figures so that we are not being made aware of ADK’s track record and the true number of ‘incidents’ that have occurred as a result of their drilling operations. The EPA (Environmental Prostitution Agency) has pimped us to these people based on the directives given to it by the Government. Figures with dozens of zeroes at the end of them have been bandied about in an attempt to dazzle us with their bright shiny nature and imply that we will all get a big share of the dough. This is going to happen via the trickle-down effect which is the system where the earnings all go to the rich who drink up large on their bounty and then piss on the rest of us.

Meanwhile the enormous pachyderm sits in the corner waiting for the day when he inevitably has to take a dump and we end up spending any gains we might as a nation have made trying to mop up somebody else’s shit from our ocean. However that won’t bother Jianqi and his bunch of vagabonds because they will have all made their money and buggered off somewhere else leaving us with the mess to clean up and still not a cent better off.

Some might say our Government is not putting any money into this particular hole and that it is ADK that is pouring money into it instead. But our Government has sold these resources to ADK extremely cheaply when compared with most other countries in the world and when it all goes wrong that is when they will really have to chuck a load of money down a very deep hole.

But not content with chucking millions or possibly billions down into the ocean Jianqi is also feverishly doing the same with large holes in the ground looking for another form of ‘black gold’. The only difference here is the scale f the operations and the fact that this particular product is 19^th Century fuel for the 21^st Century.

Instead of damage to the marine environment we are gearing up for damage to the land, gas explosions, collapses, and further fiascos of the Pike River variety.

Once again the usual suspects will be the only ones who will be enriched and as usual the taxpayers will pick up the tab for the damage when it inevitably occurs.

But I said earlier that money is being also chucked down what I call figurative holes and it is these holes in which you will find the key (geddit) to what is really wrong with this Government.

One of the smaller examples of this earlier this year was the $250,000 they spent on trying to get Grocer Tim a job at the WTO (World Twats Organisation). In the overall scheme of things this is a paltry sum; but try telling that to an NZ Post worker who is about to lose his $30,000 a year job because the Government is hell-bent on running the company down so it can be sold to another of their cronies.

Of much more concern is the money that is being thrown at our farcical attempts to get a spot on the UN (United Nitwits) Security Council is one such example. If ever there was a waste of public money on a grand scale, then this is it. The figure of $25M has been thrown around and although Jianqi doesn’t want to get specific (why not it’s OUR money?) it seems this is probably a bare minimum that will be spent on this programme.

So we don’t have enough money to run our health sector properly but we still have a lazy $25M to waste on trying to get a seat on the world’s most toothless organisation where any one of the permanent members can use their power of veto to stop anything we might want to bring up there. Was there ever anything more pointless upon which to spend $25M?

But this is chicken feed when compared to the costs involved in selling off our assets. $100M was apparently spent on selling 48 percent of Mighty River Power, which the Bill Nospeakada English is claiming as a victory netting 1.6B for the Government. But that is not taking account of the loss of profits from a very large company such as Mighty River. In 2012 the net profits were over $83B and 48 percent of that is nearly $40B. Of course there are other costs to come out of that, but I am sure you get my drift. More money down a very large hole that was spewing money in our direction but instead is now feeding the overfed.

Despite claims that money is tight and ‘we are not out of the woods yet’ our Government is spending truckloads of money on every magic bean it can get it’s grubby little paws on despite the fact that none of them are going to germinate and produce a plant that will nourish the nation.

Meanwhile the greater majority of us are being told to save our money (what money?) and tighten our belts – but we all had to change to braces years ago to hold our increasingly roomy trou up. But the porkers at the public trough cruise along on the largesse of the Remuneration Authority who has kindly given them another pay rise backdated to the middle of the year.

I know what I’d like to throw into a big hole.

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).

Who’s pulling our strings?

Time was when conspiracy theorists were made fun of by the bulk of the population, and to a certain extent that is still the case. However the joke is starting to backfire upon the mockers as it becomes increasingly obvious there very definitely are conspiracies and the theorists are quite often bang on the money.

I’m not talking here about moon landings, 911, Kennedy assassinations or reptilian shapeshifters, interesting though they might be; I am talking about ‘everyday conspiracies’ if you like. These are the ones organised by Governments, powerful cartels in strategic industries and businesses where competition is less robust or the major players fancy themselves as being more entitled than others.  

A great example of this is the sort of nonsense that goes on around sponsorship deals; especially those associated with a major international event.

Last year we saw an example of this with Addled Ass and the ridiculously overpriced souvenir All Black jerseys. This was a conspiracy in that Addled Ass was able to do this with the compliance of:

·         The IRB, who could have made some rules around the sales of merchandise

·         The NZRU, who could have made some rules around what their branded product would sell for

·         The New Zealand apparel retailers who went along with it and sold the items at the overinflated retail price instead of telling Addled Ass to shove them.

This year I learn Workers at the Olympic Games Village in London have been told they must not eat any chips other than McDonalds’ in their onsite canteen. That directive would be enough to make a bloke give up chips for life. Anyone who has tasted those limp, skinny, greasy bits of goop that McDeaths call chips knows they might be a lot of things, but like most of the toxic waste served under the golden arches their only claim to being food is that some silly buggers actually put them in their mouth.

The games bosses have relaxed the rules for the workers after a shit-storm of protest, but for those who can be bothered attending the games it will be nothing but McDeaths. To my way of thinking that is just making what would already be a dire experience a deadly one.

This might not seem like a conspiracy, but actually it is. After all to be a conspiracy, it only needs to be a plan agreed to by two or more parties and designed to commit a crime or a harmful act. The parties here are of course the International Olympic Committee and the Purveyors of Poison. And while it is not a crime to leave people with only a choice of McDeaths or McDeaths, (more’s the pity), it is definitely an act that is designed intentionally or otherwise to bring harm to a group of people. And you have to wonder why an event that purports to showcase fit and healthy people would want after finally encouraging people to leave their couches and attend the games to have them trough out on a load of unhealthy rubbish.

A couple of years ago we had a similarly stupid situation where Bug Wiser was the official beer sponsor for the Soccer World Cup and a bunch of people in orange T-shirts were evicted from the games and accused of ambush marketing. Of course that is exactly what they were trying to do, but the action by Cup officials to eject them was excessive. While it is true the orange was the colour of the Dutch brewery they were representing; it was also the colour of the Dutch soccer team. I’m only surprised the officials didn’t make them change their shirts before taking the field. Once again a conspiracy had been hatched between FIFA and Bud to deny the attendees any choice.

These are just three examples of corporate conspiracies, and while they are annoying, we can refuse to go along with them by boycotting events that allow the sponsors to hold such sway. It is much harder, though to counter the activities of companies with whom we have no option but to deal.

Telecommunication companies are a good example of this and they seem to be getting even more powerful.

As we all know the Telcos act pretty much as a cartel and they are forever lavishing money on lush adverts and PR to tell us how they are going to cover the whole country in Megultraincrediblyfast broadband which is crucial to all of us (so they say). In reality most of this warp speed stuff is of no particular advantage to us regular punters unlike reliable cellphone coverage or in many rural cases even a moderately fast broadband connection.

But no, we can’t have that because this fasterthanthespeedoflight shit is the bomb. Of course the reason is that this stuff is what is wanted/needed by large institutions that pay large sums of money for their set-up and Hooray Henrys who have more money than sense and like to show off they have the biggest and fastest broadband connection in their social circle. The rest of us would be thrilled to be able to use our cellphone from home or watch movies without experiencing a frozen screen at any stage.

 You know it’s a conspiracy when Vodafone made $151.2M net profit for the year ended March 2011 and recently spent $840M buying TelstraDim, while Telecom had net earnings of $878M for the 6 months ended December 2011 yet rural customers are still having to wait years for broadband and many city customers can’t get cellphone coverage. These guys certainly don’t lack the money to sort this inequity out; but they do lack the collective will.

The law and order situation in New Zealand is another example of a conspiracy. In this case the co-conspirators are the Government, the judges and to a lesser extent the police. The way it works is that the Government has been encouraging the police to work as a business according to departing Northland area commander Paul Dimery (an unfortunate name for a police officer).

Paul’s claims start to make sense when one looks at the sorts of targeted campaigns police have run lately. Most have focussed on matters that result in fines and many have already accused them of revenue gathering over their obsession with anyone who exceeds the speed limit by more than 4km/h. It has also been noticed that judges are for the most part handing out fines (along with disqualifications) for drunk driving. Surely if we want to stop drunk driving we should be handing out quite uncomfortable penalties rather than fines which are seldom paid and disqualifications which are often completely ignored by the offender? And surely if we want safer roads we might be more concerned about people who can’t keep on their own side of the road, failing to give way at roundabouts and intersections or who are driving erratically?

On the other hand if your plan is to ignore the safety aspects and simply collect revenue then I guess you would do exactly what they are doing now.

Makes you think, though, doesn’t it?

The Emperor’s new clothes and other naked truths

I’m sure you can all recall The Emperor’s New Clothes; written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 where two cunning weavers who actually might have been the first spin doctors (geddit) made a suit of clothes for their tragically vain Emperor.

These smart fellows realised their regent was a mirror-gazing tosspot with a hugely over-inflated sense of his own significance. So, probably to inflate the price of their work, they told him the suit they would make him would be made of special fabric that is invisible to idiots and incompetents and can only be seen by smart or important folks. Of course the self-obsessed Emperor bought their line (of garments) hook, clothesline and sinker.

When the time came for the Emperor to model his new suit (or nude suit) nobody in the court wanted to appear stupid so they all went with the ridiculous notion. All that is apart from one small boy who had not yet been indoctrinated by all the state bullshit and who yelled out that he could see the King’s willy or words to that effect. Emboldened by his childish outburst the remainder of the King’s subjects begin to admit they had thought he was stark bollocky naked as well.

Despite the fact this story is extremely old and earlier versions have been found that pre-date Andersen’s by at least five hundred years, we still have a lot of people in the 21^st Century who will accept that black is white if someone possessing apparent authority which they automatically mistake for credibility, tells them so.

An example of this can be found in the Government’s policy to sell us state assets. Whether you agree with the sale of these assets or not doesn’t matter too much because there is a major disconnect involved with this. We already own these assets; they don’t belong to the Government. Somebody must have forgotten to explain to them they are in the positions they are in ostensibly to be kaitiaki. They own neither the country nor the assets. They each own about one four millionth of them just like the rest of us. Their job is to manage them on our behalf.

Why in the name of God would we want to buy something we already owned? If the Government wants to borrow money off us, why don’t they just say so instead of trying to sell us stuff we already own.

Meanwhile all the Government PR people are busy telling us what good investments these assets are, which to a smart person raises the question of why we would want to sell them anyway.

However the PR machine has indoctrinated many with the mantra that we are in debt big-time and T.I.N.A. But of course there is always an alternative and in this instance ACC is sitting on a surplus of $3.5B, which by my reckoning is about half the amount Jianqi reckons we’ll get for the part sale of these assets. Incidentally part sale is a nonsense it’s like being partly pregnant. The correct term should be sale of a limited share release, but I don’t suppose that fits too well in a snappy headline. Alternatively they could just be honest and call it conversion.

So just to keep this in perspective; imagine if you will, the Minister for State Owned Assets streaking across your garden. Not a pretty sight.

Question: What do we call people who take possessions away from their owners and then sell them?

Answer: Thieves.

Question: What do we call people who buy these possessions?

Answer: Fences or dealers in stolen goods.

Question: What do we call people who buy back their own possessions from those who stole them?

Answer: Mugs.

And while we are on the subject of conversion, look at what the Government is doing with our free-to-air television. Before this week is out they will have dumped TVNZ7, one of the brightest hopes on our screens for a very long time. It leaves you wondering why the Government bothered plugging digital TV at all considering how few channels they will be presenting.

Furthermore this was a gigantic con-job from the beginning. When Freeview first became available just five years ago we were given a list of channels and they included TV One, TV2, TVNZ6, TVNZ7 Parliament TV TVNZ Sport and half a dozen private channels.

TVNZ Sport dropped out of sight very early in the piece and without any fanfare, TVNZ6 was changed and now TVNZ7 is to go. Therefore after promising us six TVNZ free-to-air channels the Government is now only giving us four (plus a delayed repeat of TV One).

Question: What do you call someone who sells us a product with one set of specifications, then quietly changes those specifications and continues to market the product as the original?

Answer: A fraudster.

What makes this so much worse (and this is where the conversion comes in); is that during their 50^th Anniversary celebrations last year TVNZ gave us all a preview of their fantastic new digital channel Heartland TV that would be a repository for all those wonderful dramas and programmes we have funded over the years initially through licence fees and more latterly through New Zealand On Air. It would be a fantastic idea were it not for one thing; the bastards have leased the channel to Sky so anyone who wants to see these programmes has to subscribe to a Sky package to get them.

So once again something we own has been stolen by the government and sold to the highest bidder who happens to be an overseas company. We must pay money to an overseas company to watch programmes we used to own until the Government stole them and sold them.

So at the moment we are being governed by a gang who are stealing from us and then trying to sell the booty back to us, passing off an inferior product as an earlier and superior one, and selling of our archival treasures that we paid for to an overseas company and then charging us if we want to watch them.

One or two of my friends would say this is simply business as usual under our current political system. Personally I’m still a little wary of chucking out the bathwater in case there actually is a viable baby in there. My hope is that the excesses of Jianqi and co become their undoing and the nation’s awakening all at the same time, because it is Governments such as this that offer us the opportunity to see where the shortcomings really are in our system.

But we make our politicians more accountable. And by ‘we’ I mean all of us; especially the media.  

Just because we currently hold the Rugby World Cup it doesn’t mean we have to be a nation of mugs.

Now there’s not many people know that

This week I thought it was time to enlighten you, dear readers about some little known pearls I have recently become aware of. Some might make you laugh, some might make you cry, some might make you begin looking for a heavy calibre weapon and others might just make you go, “Huh?”

Not many....#1

The first of these is a bizarre contradiction I personally encountered in the last week. I recently developed an abscess under a tooth and had to go to the dentist. As is the norm, the dentist prescribed some antibiotics to help with the healing. However when I went to fill my prescription the pharmacist demanded a payment of $15 for the common antibiotic amoxicillin. I asked why this prescription cost $15 rather than the $3 that is normally charged for the same drug. What they told me was a real eye-opener as to the fiendish lengths governments go to in order to save a couple of dollars while trying to tell us all that they are backing our health needs.

It transpires that I had to pay $15 because my prescription was written out by a dentist and not a GP. My dentist is a Doctor of Dental Surgery and not just a Bachelor of Dental Surgery, which means her qualifications are the equal of my GP; and yet if he had written my prescription for the same medication it would have only cost me $3.

Either this is the height of stupidity or it is part of an evil plan to hoodwink the public into thinking the government actually cares about our health needs. After all such medications are only prescribed when there is an infection and whether that infection is in my tooth or my leg, really doesn’t much matter.

Not many...#2

This next one I saw a few weeks ago and I only saw the one reference to it so imagine not too many people know about it yet, which is probably how TAG Oil and Apache would like it to stay.

A report appeared on Stuff on January 29 that had my eyes bugging out. It turns out the Gisborne District Council has already granted some consents to a joint venture between the two Canadian oil companies to begin “activities associated with drilling shallow shot holes and seismic testing," No supwises there you might say, given the current government’s long held desire to leap headfirst into an orgy of drilling and fracking and whatever else they can think of to ensure every minute particle of ‘valuable resource is extracted from our soil, rivers, lakes, mountains, beauty spots and (coming soon to a house near you). Okay I made that last one up – but it might not be too much of a stretch for these turkeys.

But what makes this little snippet different form all the other clodhopping the government is doing in the face of substantial popular opposition is that these consents were issued without any prior public consultation at all. In fact they were so secretly approved even Mayor Meng Foon didn’t know they had been granted. GDC Councillors are defending their actions because they only have to notify consent applications if "the activity will have, or is likely to have, adverse effects on the environment that are more than minor". Of course they know this will not be the case, eh? Well they must do because TAG Oil & Apache have both assured them the fracking they will be doing and the drilling of two wells up to 2500m deep will not be a problem. When the council said they didn’t have the expertise to assess the effects, the consortium agreed to send council officials on a paid trip to Canada to consult with some experts (of the consortium’s own choosing, of course). I wonder what sort of conclusion they will come to.  GDC’s chief executive (Chief FullofBull) has defended the trip saying it was a chance for council staff to upskill. Yeah, right; only if upskilled is a synonym for brainwashed.

Not many....#3

This one is a real shocker, I think. Have you ever wondered why so many convicted sex offenders re-offend? I’m sure most of you have your own theories about this, but I recently happened upon a little nugget of information that must surely be playing a big part in this.

It has recently come to my attention that there are no mandatory programmes for sexual offenders while they are in prison. Programmes are there but the offenders can choose to take them or choose not to take them. Now that seems ludicrous to me. What better time to address their offending than when they are unable to simply not turn up to their sessions. I wonder if the expression ‘captive audience’ has any resonance with the Departments of Corrections and Justice.

And if you think that is bad; get this – when they leave prison, if they wish to do something about their rehabilitation they must pay for the courses themselves. There are no funded community programmes for those who have sexually offended against adults. So the justice system is leaving it to the good sense and consideration these people might have towards their potential victims and is also reliant upon them being either willing or able to fund such a course. Duhhh!

Not many....#4

This next one comes literally from the twilight zone. Sanwa Corp, an enterprising (?) Japanese company has come up with the ultimate accessory for those too stupid to get the fuck away from Fukushima. It is a handy little Geiger counter designed to work with your i-Phone. For just 9800 yen (or NZ$165) you can detect exactly how many thousand millisieverts you are being exposed to while simply breathing in and out.  The press release didn’t say whether the device could detect how much you were subjecting yourself to from the i-Phone, itself, but I guess that’s a market they could expand into as well. Somehow I can’t help feeling it is a bit like sticking your hand deliberately into a furnace and then hankering for a little device to go on your phone so you can morbidly enlighten yourself as to how hot that fire is that is peeling the flesh from your bones.