Listen... Do you want to know a secret?

Well if you promise not to tell then it is a fair bet you are not working for a department of the New Zealand Government right now. In a time when an increasing amount of data is stored about us all by the state and many other organisations, we are finding examples of how this data is not being looked after appropriately.

It is hard to imagine that this can be rocket science. The whole thing is simple really; you collect personal data you store it securely and you release it only to those who have a right to access it. All it takes for that to happen is to hire someone who can (a) read and write and (b) at least finished primary school.

Regular readers will know that I love sticking the boot into the Jianqi Government and to be fair for a nano-second they have not been the only ones on whose watch such blatantly negligent acts of disclosure have occurred. However it is also fair to say that this particular shambolic arrangement of village idiots masquerading as our leadership has presided over more leaks than a long serving public toilet attendant.

Since the little money market twerp with the slightly effeminate speech patterns and the permanent look of a possum caught in the headlights took the reins of office just lets recap what we have seen.

1.      In March 2012 we discovered that ACC (Accident Compensation Catastrophe) had inadvertently divulged all sorts of stuff about 6700 vulnerable sick and injured people including 250 sexual abuse victims to Bronwyn Pullar. In January of this year we learned that since then they have been involved in over 500 further privacy breaches and they are still breaching the privacy of Kiwi citizens at the rate of 1 per day.

2.      On September 11, 2012 we learn that WINZ (What Idiots New Zealand) sent out some great reading matter to one of their clients – only it was about another client. And just to make things even more interesting, when the recipient rang up and told them of their error and offered to bring the material back to them some cretin told them to just destroy it themselves.

3.      On 15 October 2012 we learned that the MSD (Ministry of Social Dysfunction) leave their information kiosks so unprotected that some 12 year-old kid with basic computer knowledge would be able to hack into them and of course someone did, laying bare all the secrets of many thousands more vulnerable people.

4.      On October 28, 2012 we heard that another punter had received from the IRD (Inland Robbery Department) a bunch of unsealed letters containing private tax details. Further investigations revealed that IRD had in the previous 12 months breached the privacy of 6400 Kiwis in 32 separate incidents.

5.      Now the latest breach du jour comes from the EQC (the Earthquake Cock-ups). They like to do things on a big scale, rather like the Christchurch earthquake. No little breaches by this mob, despite them originally claiming a mere 9000 people had been compromised. No; we find these geniuses have actually liberated 83,000 records which is reckoned to be every single one of the ChCh claimants. Well done them!

But I doubt we are finished with these stupid and inexcusable cock-ups yet.

Over the last six months the Government has kept persevering with the doomed NoNo Pay scheme for not paying teachers. Given that many teachers on leave have been paid and many more who have been working have not and another was sent on maternity leave well after she had passed beyond her fertile years, you would have to wonder how many breaches we have not yet heard about in this system.

But lest we think that is the end of the saga, let’s not forget several million of us have just completed a census form. Some will even have (rather foolishly) put their correct earnings information and religious persuasion an various other theoretically uncheckable bits of information into those sheets along with of course their name and current address. Imagine the fun Statistics NZ will have leaking those all over the country?

But, dear readers, there is a sublime irony in all of this. Have any of you ever tried to get a public report out of a government department or even some sensitive information about yourself? If you have you will know you are made to jump through more hoops than an Olympic gymnast and made to wait until you can no longer remember why you requested the information in the first place.

Yet every so often they have a kind of mufti day for information when they scatter it to the four winds like so many prayer lanterns to drift wherever they may and enlighten the lives of persons in places unknown.

It certainly makes the case for living in a cave in the back of beyond seem increasingly attractive.

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. 

Knock-ons & hospital passes

Many people say rugby union is a violent game with the chance of serious injuries. But as a former player (about 100 years ago) and an obsessed fan of the game, I say you have to get things into perspective. (irony)

While it is certainly true the game is an aggressive sport, I doubt it is any more violent than our daily lives, today. In fact I would say it is less so because there are some pretty strict rules around the conduct of players during a game and pretty strict penalties are handed out for infractions.  Furthermore the game doesn’t involve anyone who doesn’t want to play.

I think it is also important to acknowledge that violence need not be of a physical nature to still be violence and frequently the non physical violence causes the most hurt. Quite apart from the obvious examples of child abuse, partner abuse and elder abuse that our society seems to be plagued with, there are plenty of examples of corporate abuse of staff, customers and investors.

Take our spectacularly failed finance companies as an example. Aorangi Securities, Belgrave Finance, B’On Financial Services, Bridgecorp, Capital & Merchant Investments, Dominion Finance Group, Five Star Consumer Finance, Hanover Finance, Kiwi Finance, Nathan’s Finance NZ, National Finance 2000, and South Canterbury Finance are just the ones who have been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. There have been 38 others and they have all violently upturned the lives of many thousands of people who were naive/trusting enough to entrust them with their savings and investments. In many of these cases, if not all, investors’ money was treated like a piggy-bank for the directors. It is quite noticeable that few of those appearing before the SRO are destitute. For many of their investors, however it is a much different story.

Some might say investments by their nature are risky and those people were among the lucky ones who had some money to invest unlike many others who are just scraping by on a day by day basis. But a lot of these people were those ‘Mum & Pop’ investors Jianqi and his motley mob have been telling us will snap up our state assets when they go under the hammer. Many were just trying to ensure they wouldn’t need to rely on the state to make ends meet when they retired. What has happened to these people is far worse than a smack in the nose when the scrum goes down.

But the corporates and the scumbags living in (insert your favourite notorious suburb here) are just the beginning. Even more random violence and injury is caused by those in the public sector and those who pull their strings.

Our so-called social welfare services seem more geared towards warfare than welfare. ACC wriggles every which way it can to avoid paying for the treatment of people who through no fault of their own are injured. We all know of people who have fought long and hard to get assistance for rehabilitation and medical care (and I use that last term advisedly).

Our main social support organisation Working Hindrance to Innocent New Zealanders goes out of its way with various doorkeeping measures to ensure none but the totally useless get any meaningful assistance whatsoever ........unless of course you are the type of person who specialises in (metaphorically) kicking down doors and kicking arses, and can understand their regulations better than them. Which doesn’t take a lot of doing most of the time.

But ACC and WINZ are just babies at this game, really. The real masters of the cruel and unusual treatment doctrine are the masters of our glorious third world health system. This is a system so cumbersome that it can often barely manage to get out of its own way.   

Now while I am bagging the health system, I should qualify that by saying that for the most part I am not including the real health professionals. Most of them are very good, although there are some useless clock-punchers among them as well. But primarily it is the dweebs in offices on more money that most of us who dream up strategies to ensure they are able to sing from the same round sheet as the Minister.

Under the stewardship of the current incumbent (I’m sure there’s a good anagram possible there); we are told of great improvements every other week. Toenail’s grinning mug is plastered all over compliant rags trumpeting such things as how the DHB is getting more elective surgery done than ever and how nobody has to be on the waiting list longer than six months. This all sounds very encouraging. At least it would if it was even slightly true.

The reality is that people all over New Zealand are being denied timely medical interventions so Toenail and his mates can boast about how efficient they are. How does that work? It’s quite simple really. First of all they set the bar for a specialist referral high enough to exclude anyone who is not extremely ill. So rather than deal with an emerging problem, they choose instead to wait until it has not only emerged, but also gone to the second or third stage of its development. Hence a man with varicose veins that cause regular attacks of acute pain, cramps at night and eczema is told he will have to wait until he develops ulcers before he qualifies for so much as an examination by a vascular specialist. This keeps the patient off the waiting list and enables the DHB to report back to the Vile one that they are up to date with all their elective surgery. It might seem like a small point here, but I can’t help feeling varicose vein operations to relive pain and prevent thromboses don’t really sound like elective surgery to me. I would have though elective surgery would be just that. Something you want to do, but don’t need to.

The other waiting list trick the DHBs are fond of is the one where older people are kept waiting interminably, unless they can find themselves someone to advocate forcefully for them. This tactic appears to be a cynical ploy to keep them out of the system in the hopes they will fall off the perch before the need arises to do something about them.

However for those who manage to navigate their way through all the chicanes and blind alleys and scoop up all the golden apples along the way face another danger; admin mayhem. It would seem the hospitals are so busy trying to keep within the confines of what the DHBs want to report back to their shiny suited Minister that they are dropping the ball sometimes in a most alarming way.

According to the report released this week by the Health Quality and Safety Commission, there were 377 ‘serious and sentinel events in NZ hospitals last year. While that is not a huge number as a percentage of patients seen (2.7 million), it still works out to an average of more than one every day and I’ve no doubt every one of them was serious to the patients involved. The most common events that fell into this category were falls which probably suggest a lack of proper health and safety and/or supervision of vulnerable patients – the very sort of thing one would expect when work levels are high and manpower numbers are not.

The report says 86 of these people died though not necessarily as a result of the ‘events’, which seems a rather pointless statistic to publish. I would have thought it would be more worthwhile to find out how many did die as a result and print that. But we can’t upset the Minister’s plans, can we?

But there were also 25 medication errors which I find completely unforgivable and 11 cases of wrong patient, site or procedure which is really scary. But worst of all there were the 108 clinical management events which is DHBSpeak for wrong diagnoses or treatment.

If you think these figures aren’t too bad, consider this: a sentinel event is only one that results in death, serious injury or disability for the patient. A disclaimer also advises the figures are not necessarily all of the events and are only those the DHBs chose to voluntarily report.

I don’t know about you, but I think I might have to dig out my old rugby boots again. God knows it can’t be any less safe on the field.