The buck stops where exactly?

The relentless push for value deducted continues unabated in Godzone. We shouldn’t be surprised as we have elected a Government that cares only about feathering its own nest and despises everything that is good about this country.

Sooner or later their arrogance is going to result in some much more serious social consequences than we have seen hitherto.

As a New Zealander you would not be alone feeling you were under attack (or at least your way of life was) from all sides. It is quite exhausting trying to keep up with all the mayhem these jerks are causing. Let’s take a look at what is under threat.

The Economy:

 I find it rather ironic how a Government that focuses so much on the financial bottom line makes so many brain-dead short term decisions that don’t stack up economically. The most glaring example of this of course is the asset sales circus.

I don’t think I have seen a single commentator regardless of their political persuasion that has said selling these assets is a sound decision for the economy. Even the government hasn’t said that. If you look at what they have said I think you will find they have actually avoided that question instead relying on the ever-present TINA for an explanation. But of course there is ALWAYS an alternative.

If it wasn’t so tragic I would find it funny how they like to tell us they have no other way of getting out of debt than to sell the family home. As any fool knows when you sell a major asset; unless you have a cunning and foolproof plan to earn far more than you have been earning up to the point when you sold it, that asset will never be yours again. If the asset is merely a trinket, that is of no importance. However if that asset is a business in a market that provides an essential product or service, you will miss out on all those earnings for evermore.

It is also an extremely unwise move to allow strategic industries to fall into the hands of foreign powers. There are fewer industries more strategic to a country than the energy industry and the potential exists for us to be held to ransom over products that have been made with our resources in our country.

In a move that typifies the arrogance of this Government, Jianqi has announced a measure he calls a guarantee and which he would like us to think precludes that happening. Unfortunately our too often too compliant media have helped him in this regard by not exposing the package for the cynical sop it is.

His idea is to offer an incentive to Kiwi buyers. (That’s the millions of Mum and Dad buyers we are always hearing about who are champing at the bit to buy up huge chunks of companies they already own). His shonky smoke and mirrors deal is that those among the Kiwis who buy shares in these power companies will be up for an incentive bonus of extra shares if they hold onto them for (possibly) three years. As this is an incentive it means there is no compulsion involved and therefore no guarantee. Furthermore you and I will finance the cost of these extra shares and after the three years has passed and the punters have received their bonus shares they will have much more financial incentive to quit them to the highest bidder. But the media are all t5o busy breathlessly announcing a ‘guarantee’ from the Prime Manipulator to either notice or bother to tell their readers that this is all simply an elaborate illusion that belongs on stage with Paul Daniels or Derren Brown rather than masquerading as news in the nation’s papers.

The Environment:

Rapacious money men are attacking our land on almost every imaginable side. Jianqi and Aimless Adams are collaborating to allow almost every variety of planetary parasite access to our waters, mountains, farmlands and scenic delights to do with them what they will. Aimless seems to have dropped the second ‘d’ from her surname but the horrors she is contemplating would make even Morticia squirm. Make no mistake none of these projects they are contemplating ‘green-lighting’ are going to make any meaningful difference to our economy in a positive sense.

As always it will be the wealthy foreign companies and a few privileged and already very wealthy Kiwis that will benefit. No doubt our useless Government will limit the liabilities of these outsiders so they can walk away with very little responsibility for any damage they might cause much as those responsible for the Rena disaster have.

Give these guys another three years and we will have oil wells off the Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay coastlines. Huntly, the Coromandel and the West Coast will be turned into giant honeycombs and Fiordland will be owned by Disney.

The Press/Media

As witnessed during the 2011 election, this Government is not fond of anyone who might wish to tell it how it is rather than how they would like to spin it.

We saw bizarre Government favouring decisions from Ombudsmen, High Court Judges and newspaper editors. Wasn’t that lucky for a government who didn’t want the truth to get out?

And just to make absolutely sure no truth seeps out into the awareness of the public they made good and sure by closing down TVNZ7, the only television channel that dared to question what they were up to and had the audacity to run programmes that didn’t always show the Government as an infallible and beneficent force.

Radio NZ will probably be next because the Natzis all avoid going on there as much as possible while meantime basking in a confrontation-free zone on commercial radio stations such as Newstalk ZB.

Some breaking news today is further proof they don’t want us to have access to any news programmes that actually attempt to find the truth. I read this morning that TVOne ‘s documentary programme Sunday, is to be cut back to a 30-minuyte format so we can all ‘enjoy’ the latest incarnation of New Zealand’s Got Talent. Apart from Q & A which is on during daytime, Sunday is about the only remotely serious news programme on the Channel and they want to cut it down so we can see more formulaic enfranchised crap instead. Marshmallow TV for marshmallow brains. Fortunately not every person in New Zealand has a brain that would be better used by being stuck on a fork and held over a flame. A great and encouraging example is Wellington alt-country outfit The Beens who sum up the Government we currently have in a great song called Not My Problem which you can find at http://thebeens.bandcamp.com/track/not-my-problem. I shouldn’t think it will get any airtime on any of the radio stations the Government approve of, but it deserves to go to number one for the sentiments it expresses. It’s also a good piece musically and the vocalist reminds me of Graham Parker.

I could go on about the numbers of Kiwis chasing greener pastures across the ditch, the underfunding of the health system, the rising unemployment figures and the widening gap between rich and poor.

It certainly ain’t Jianqi’s problem; but it’s all building up to a big one for us.

Half-baked Pita, anyone?

I saw a posting today on Facebook that said “Dear Maori Party - what's the point of sitting at the table when John Key has sold the table?” It was a link to a short blog piece by Bomber Bradbury.

And Bomber is right on the money here. The carefully orchestrated displays of mock annoyance by Tariana Toofeeble and Pita Metacarpals were never anything more than a PR arranged mock grumpy face.

Tough guy talk was sprinkled about how they would have to ‘review their arrangements’ with the Natzis but their first mistake was to allow Jianqi to call the shots and decide when and where they would meet. This resulted in them sitting about like the new boy at school while teacher eventually got around to seeing them in his own good time.

They weren’t in a good position to bargain from the outset considering the money lobby’s darling doesn’t need their vote in Parliament as long as Peter Dung still loves him.

Add to this the fact the odd couple are very fond of the mana they think is rubbing off on them by being so close to Jianqi, and the fact Metacarpals doesn’t seem to be able to string two words together coherently these days and you knew it was always going to be a win for the Natzis.

Of course Little and Somewhat Larger came out grinning like imbeciles and saying how they had reached an agreement. This was true of course because they had agreed to agree with Jianqi. I don’t suppose anybody ever said an agreement had to be beneficial to both parties, but those of us with a mind for fair play always live in hope.

And while we are on the subject of fair play; what about the interests of the Maori Party’s constituency? Clearly the party leaders are not concerned about the issues their people have raised about the water which Jianqi says nobody owns. I would love it if nobody owned the water, but clearly somebody does otherwise farmers wouldn’t be required to pay for water rights to take water from rural streams and rivers. No matter how they try to dress that up with nonsense about administrative costs etc, people are still paying money for water. If those charging the money do not own the water then we could all quite simply tell them to get stuffed without risking prosecution. We are not able to do this, therefore it must follow that somebody owns this wet stuff.

However this is rather unfortunately being cast as simply a Maori issue. I believe it is far bigger than that and the numbers of people opposed to the State Asset Sale of the Century are surely testimony to that. Rather fortuitously a Maori group has come up with a fairly decent challenge to the process, but they have been seriously undermined by the performance of Toofeeble and Metacarpal who have not only let down their own people on this occasion.

I have always felt the Maori Party was a dodgy concept from the start. A political party based upon one single ethnic group can easily become self-obsessed and pose a major impediment to racial harmony. This particular party seems to have suffered from that fatal malaise so many Maori groups have suffered from over the years; poor leadership. Having said that New Zealand has hardly been blessed with a great lot of real leaders over the years in general.

Pakeha have had to shoulder the blame for nearly every gripe or woe that hinders the progress of Maori for nearly180 years. While it is true Pakeha did some very shitty things ‘back in the day’ and some of the flotsam and jetsam of Pakeha society have continued to act in a bigoted way towards Maori. It is grossly unfair and inaccurate to blame Pakeha for everything.

A lot has been said about how the settlers ‘tricked’ Maori out of land and many other things, but it is important to remember there were misunderstanding on both sides. To each race the other was a complete mystery and neither had any understanding of the other’s culture.

I don’t think it is a huge leap to lay some of the blame for how 1840 worked out at the feet of Maori leadership at the time. Clearly I wasn’t there – no, really I am NOT that old; but it is possible they let their people down by (a) Not being united (Remember the old adage – United we stand; divided we fall) and (b) because some of their leaders liked the bright shiny objects they were being offered by the glib talking Pakeha.

I dunno about you, but it looks a little like déjà vu to me; and I ain’t talking about the album by Crosby Stills, Nash & Young despite that haunting refrain in the title track, “We have all been here before”    

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?

Not really any mystery here

How can people be so stupid as to vote these guys back into power? How can people not see what is really happening with their rates money? How come people don’t understand they are entitled to (an employment agreement/an opinion/good service)?

These are questions you regularly hear being asked by people who care what goes on or basically give a shit. They are fair questions and sometimes it is hard to understand why people are so gullible, but a few items I have culled from recent news articles go a long way towards answering those questions.

The first of these is a short piece from SunLive dated 4 July 2012. Apart from the last line which refers to someone not mentioned elsewhere and whose role we don’t know, this story tells us of a 33-year-old Pukehina man who burned himself as a result of pouring petrol on a fire. Ashes to ashes, dumb to dumber.

The next tale is from the Bay of Plenty Times dated 3 July 2012. It tells of the ingenious cunning one Gate Pa resident whose partner had been caught drink driving in their jointly owned car on Sunday night, 1 July. Around 1am on Monday July 2 Ms Dipshit decided to go and pick him up from his place (apparently they don’t live together). The problem was that she took along her two kids and a belly full of booze. The cops recognised the car cruising in Gate Pa and decided to pull it over in case it was Sonny Jim who they’d nicked earlier. Imagine their surprise when the driver blew more than twice the legal limit and they realised they had got two hits from the same car in one night. Teaching the kids to drive drunk – fag-end!

My third sorry saga comes from Wellington, where a lot of sorry tales are made. This one I saw in the NZ Herald of Monday 2 July. The coaches of two Under 11 rugby sides got into an argument about how the game was being refereed by one of them. As they were unable to reach a meeting of minds they decided to resort to a meeting of fists upon heads. A couple of parents jumped in to pull them apart and later a parent was also assaulted by an 11-year-old player who was no doubt simply emulating his elders. The cops were called and the two bozos that started the whole thing are being charged with assault. The Wellington Rugby Union is scratching its head trying to decide what to do, while any sane person can see exactly what to do. Stick a fork in ‘em and turn ‘em over; they’re done.

And to show there really is very little hope for our nation; here is the final tale of woe or is that whoa if that’s what you yell at an Ass to tell them to stop being what they are?  

This one I first saw in the New Zealand Herald of 3 July 2012. It involved the two Mensa hopefuls from Mosgiel who were enjoying a quiet huff of LPG on a chilly Mosgiel afternoon. For the uninitiated, huffing is the practice of inhaling a gas or similar toxic vapour. The two bright lads each had a 9kg cylinder of the stuff and they were getting stuck into these, while keeping warm in front of a nice cosy gas fire. I gather huffing is a rather imprecise process and there is no guarantee one can inhale every last drop of the gas being released. As a result there is a certain build-up of what one might call stray gas that is released into the room.

These two young twits would have been frequently turning the valves on the cylinders on and off between each huff and as they got more whacked and less co-ordinated, I would imagine they took longer t turn the valve off each time. Anyway as I am sure you all know by now they eventually had enough stray gas in the place for it to erupt into flames, setting both them and the house on fire. Fortunately (or otherwise one might argue) they got out of the house and shortly thereafter a third gas cylinder which was actually being used to power the gas fire also started getting hot around the collar and blew half the roof off the house. Reminds me of the big stupid wolf - he huffed and he puffed and he blew his house up.

Is it any wonder people vote people who don’t have their interests at heart back into power? Is it any wonder people can’t see what’s happening with their rates money? Is it any wonder people don’t understand they are entitled to (an employment agreement/an opinion/good service)?

I don’t think so.    

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.

Intelligence gathering is getting harder

Is it just me or are our criminals getting thicker. Many of us have chucked scorn at the cops for years because most of us only see the slow witted, slow talking, ‘Mr Plod’ types who seem to struggle so much issuing a literate statement to media you wonder how the hell they could ever solve a mystery.

However lately it has come to my attention that an awful lot of the criminally inclined among our population are racing like hell to take the title of the thickest group of people in New Zealand from our dullards in blue.

Two examples of some of this latest batch of fumbling felons arose in the Far North this week and these two Northlanders were a long way north of sensible.

The first of those who is aptly named after the allegedly first ever man – (who by all accounts wasn’t all that smart either) is Adam Saville of Mangawhai. Adam had a really good idea about stealing a pair of Nike shoes from Rebel Sports in the Okara Shopping Centre. He was spotted by store staff trying to stuff them down his trousers (was he trying to impress the girls?). When he realised he had been tumbled, he took to his heels (presumably with the Nikes still in a position to bruise his tender parts).

Unfortunately Adam wasn’t that fleet of foot (maybe he should have put the Nikes on his feet instead of his old feller) and was soon caught by some civic-minded bystanders. They brought Adam back to the store to face the music, but Adam wasn’t yet singing from the same song sheet and decided to opt for adding a bit of percussion. He did this somewhat unwittingly as only the witless can, by attempting to flee his captors. However in his haste he forgot that it’s a better idea to look where you are going rather than where you have come from. As a result he ran headlong into a head-high horizontal bar that was holding up a street sign and took an enforced nap on the pavement where he was duly scooped up and arrested. I’ll bet he really reckons those $130 shoes were worth a smack on the head and a criminal record. Imagine if he’d got away with them; he’d never want for anything again (except perhaps a brain cell).

The second Northerner to display his cretinous credentials has not been named at this stage (presumably to spare the embarrassment of anyone who had anything to do with his birth.

Mr Anonymous or Mr Big (Plonker) as we shall call him came up with a brilliant plan to steal a packet of batteries from Pak ‘N’ Save. Unfortunately we can’t cost this one out so we don’t know if this is a three or four figure crime (including cents).

Anyway Mr Big had not quite mastered the magicians’ art of palming his booty and was spotted by store staff, and took off. He should have inserted the batteries first, because that might have made him a little brighter and more likely to avoid capture. Unfortunately he didn’t have the time or the wit to do this and instead simply ran down the street followed by store staff. A passing policeman saw the commotion and was able to easily intercept and arrest him. The policeman found it really easy to track the thief because he was wearing a bright yellow High-Vis vest, which we have to conclude, was the only bright thing about this person.

In an update form an earlier blog at this site entitled You’d better give the suckers an even chance I see former Hastings barrister Sacha Beacham has been in trouble again. Ms Beacham would appear to be in good company with Messrs Saville and Anonymous above as she hasn’t quite got the message that she needs to stop drinking or at least stop misbehaving when she does. Last year the boozing barrister was fined and disqualified from driving for her third drink driving conviction. At the time she managed to get the trial moved to Auckland to save her blushes in her hometown. Following the court’s generous indulgence Ms Beacham didn’t bother to turn up for her hearing because she heard a media had applied for permission to take pictures of her.

Well this time Ms Beacham faced the court over a charge of obstructing police and resisting arrest. I hardly need add the demon drink was involved again and it would seem she has learned very little since her last court experience as this offence took place on New Year’s Eve, some four months after her previous conviction. I notice Ms Beacham who is reported to have relocated to Auckland was this time tried in Napier (presumably for the same reasons she was tried in Auckland last time).  This time she turned up, however and unsuccessfully tried to oppose the press application to take photographs. I do hope Ms Beacham gets herself into a programme to deal with the obvious problem she has with alcohol before she kills someone. Most sane people would not go out and get bladdered and arrested when they have as much to lose as she does. You have to wonder how good she is as a barrister based on her own decisions.

Another criminal whose brains seem to be AWOL is former director of National Finance Anthony Banbrook. Mr Banbrook has just pleaded guilty in the High Court at Auckland to a charge of signing a company document which included untrue statements. His sentencing on the charge which carries potential penalties of up to five years in the slammer or fines of up to $300,000 is scheduled for August.

When asked to surrender his passport prior to his sentencing the former financial genius asked the judge if he could take his pre-booked holiday in Fiji first.

Thankfully Justice Mark Woolford was having none of it. Neither was Crown Prosecutor Steve Symon who pointed out that Banbrook had booked the holiday for the time the trial was to have been conducted. The only reason Banbrook was ‘free’ to take it was because of his guilty plea which meant the trial finished early.

So to recap; this financial genius pre-booked a holiday to Fiji for a time when it would be obvious to any but the eternally he would not be able to go if he pleaded not guilty and even less likely if he pleaded guilty. No wonder the company collapsed.

However just to demonstrate how equally dopey our legislators can be, I point to the Vehicle Confiscation & Seizure Bill. I think whoever came up with this idea must have been having a seizure at the time.

This week the first boy-racer (I prefer the term idiot-boy) car was crushed by Police Minister Anne ‘Tosser” Tolley. This one belonged to Daniel Briant who had reached the requisite three strikes for his idiotic behaviour in front of an off-duty police officer in Porirua. (there’s help in your town, Daniel). Less than three hours after being sentenced by the Court he was behind the wheel again doing exactly the same stuff, this time proving what a hopeless wannabe driver he was by crashing into a fence which wasn’t probably nowhere near as thick as him.

This bright young spark then set about trying to hide his car by a series of registration changes, but eventually the law caught up with him and the car was uplifted and made into a metallic poppadom.

But the point here is the legislation that empowers the state to wantonly vandalise an otherwise perfectly good car in order to ‘teach’ Daniel a lesson didn’t seem to stop him repeating his idiocy even after the order was made to seize his car.

For the law to work it has to appear reasonable to the ordinary man in the street and if young people in particular are to learn from it, there must be no stupid inconsistencies such as this. Simply seizing the car and selling it would deprive him of his wheels just as surely as this act of vandalism would. But then like so many laws enacted as a knee-jerk reaction, it’s all just window dressing; it looks pretty but it only creates an image and changes nothing.

Accidents in the workplace

There seem to have been a few accidents in the workplace lately but few of the people who have had them seem to be any the worse for wear. I guess it must be the healthy environment created by that bright new future that’s causing us all to have to go to SpecSavers.

The latest series of workplace accidents have happened at, ACC, which probably means they weren’t accidents at all; they were in fact pre-existing conditions. Actually the more I think about that, the more it makes sense.

ACC’s accidents began to emerge with the wholesale release of private and confidential information about ordinary New Zealanders to a lot of unsuspecting recipients including rather unfortunately for the Corporation, a feisty individual called Bronwyn Pullar.

As we all now know, Bronwyn is not the sort of woman to simply roll over and ask the corporation to roger her all over again. Furthermore their choice of Bronwyn as the recipient for these files was also stupid on the grounds she was a long term ‘client’ with a long term grievance against them. People in this position have nothing to lose and can make a Government department’s life very difficult. Bronwyn taped the whole sorry saga and left the fibbers with no wriggle-room.

But the micro-brains that have been running ACC have been left to their own devices and allowed to develop their own culture of blame against their clients, which is an interesting twist for a ‘no fault insurance scheme’.

After battling with them for almost 10 years, Bronwyn, who appears to have a perfectly reasonable claim, tooled herself up with a powerful ally in the form of Michelle Boag and met with the corporation to try and get things sorted out.

Of course as we know, they decided to fabricate the details of the meeting, leak personal information about Bronwyn to the Press, and accused her of blackmail.

Following this outrageous attack Bronwyn decided to finally allow the media, with whom she had been in contact for the last 10 years, to go public with her side of the story. The revelations that came from that interview she gave to TV3 were game-changers.

Since the programme aired only three days ago, the Chairman of ACC, John Poorjudgeofcharacter has ‘stepped aside’. He has not been fired and ACC Minister Little Bo-Tox won’t say he was asked or pushed, although her body language on TV One News told a very different story. The official blurb is that this guy is only leaving because his new job as the head (case) at ANZ National Bank would have him far too busy to bother with the malingerers at ACC (not that he ever did anyway).

So once again an incompetent person who couldn’t run a major Government Corporation efficiently and who has been caught out in more than one public lie and defamed a client doesn’t get sacked; instead he is able to move smoothly into another overpaid sinecure and nobody so much as even tells him off. Good luck to any customers at ANZ National Bank. If I knew somebody like him was moving into the top spot at my bank I’d be worried. ANZ National Bank should be too, because the man fucked up his last post and although I know banking and dishonesty aren’t mutually exclusive of one another, to have such an example out front is not a good look.

However Poorjudgeofcharacter is not the only ACC head we should soon be seeing rolling into the little basket; the mysterious Dr Burgess who is able to diagnose from halfway across town without even seeing the patient needs to bite the bullet as well. His association with ACC needs to be cut and his own ethics body might like to investigate the probity of arriving at diagnoses without consultation. He might be better off practicing in Haiti if that is the way he works.

Burgess’ unauthorised contact with the allegedly independent specialist raises ethical issues as well, and possibly privacy ones too. But worst of all is his unauthorised accessing of Bronwyn Pullar’s files after he was told he was to have nothing further to do with her files. Burgess went on to access the files on at least seven further occasions after being forbidden to do so. Staff who have done this at IRD and WINZ have been sacked. He should be too and police should be called in to determine if criminal charges are appropriate. I used to like A Clockwork Orange, but since the main characters began living out their fantasies at ACC I’ve gone right off it.

As I write this I learn that Ralph Stewart has also been shown the door by an increasingly panic-stricken Little Bo-Tox who sees her Ministerial posts under threat.

Stewart was the other wanker who told us all he had not heard Bronwyn’s tape when it was well-known her legal representatives had played it to him.

She who has been called the Crusher is obviously feeling the crush herself as she has apparently also informed two other ACC directors; Rob Campbell and John McLiskie they can forget about being re-appointed either. Of course the cynic in me (where would that be then?) says Bo-To is more annoyed these bumbling fools allowed this to get into the public arena and get some of their doo-doos all over her rather than for the nasty shit they threw at Bronwyn Pullar.

The cull-out can’t have finished yet, though because there are at least two other ACC knob-heads who should also go. Managers Philip Murch and Hans Verberne are the pair who concocted the allegation they had been blackmailed by Ms Pullar and called the cops in to investigate. Given they knew their allegations were baseless these two idiots should be charged with making a false complaint to police and then sacked as well.

So accidents or otherwise? Well I can’t help finding it extremely ironic that a corporation that spends half its time trying to deny accident victims support by labelling their accident induced injuries as ‘pre-existing conditions’ should be so accident prone themselves. A much better case can be made for their recent ‘accidents’ to be viewed as pre-existing conditions.

Your claims are well and truly denied ACC – time to remember what you were set up for.