Posts by James George
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Hardly surprising to see most in here have taken up the shooting the messenger distraction which the US government has been crafting about the same time as Assange was pulled up on BS sex charges.
Sometimes I really wonder how it is humans can allow themselves to be manipulated so easily. (Note to the usual mudslingers insinuating that it is I who is being 'taken for a ride' is as clichéd and old as all the other 'turn it back on the poster" sledges which lazy and ill-informed types need to resort to)Who cares what Assange gets up to in his own life? What does that have to do with anything?
Especially since the Afghani war logs Assange's life has been circumscribed by some of the most dreadful state interference in the private life of an individual since the US began chucking 14 year old kids into Guantanamo Bay without trial, or any other recognisable form of due process.The same peeps, who accuse Assange of endangering others, then complain about WikiLeaks no longer publishing "the other stuff".
Wikileaks would love to be able to keep all that stuff up. However since western governments have cut off most of the avenues WikiLeaks had to receive donations, there is no money to pay for the servers to host the other data.
Right now WikiLeaks is able to keep its front page up, but only the front page, documents are hosted on much smaller servers which are harassed 24-7 with DDOS attacks.
Being a target for denial of service doesn't endear a site to any hosting service. Most of those that do want extra dough.
So why keep on the US thing? As I understand it from trips to WL when they aren't being harassed, the stalwarts of WL are trying to help a comrade.
This is not a vendetta; it is out of a sense of loyalty. Bradley Manning is the reason.Not that WL can say so publicly for obvious reasons. That young man was being held indefinitely in a Middle Eastern prison of poor repute until WikiLeaks decided to play hardball back with the US. The bulk of the evidence against him appears to be the accusations of self-confessed computer hacker Adrian Lamo, who may be trying to get out of charges against himself by giving up someone else.
There is a great deal of BS out there. Rather than believe the tide of disinformation about WikiLeaks pumped continuously out of the mega-media, why don't people check out what Glenn Greenwald has to say about the activities of his colleagues in the US media when it comes to libelling Assange?
[url|http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/24/assange] is a column he wrote after the NYT hatchet job on Assange the week the Iraqi documents were released.For all his alleged character flaws, no one can accuse Assange of being stupid, which means he is aware as anyone else where his actions are likely going to take him. That is either dead or into a super max for life. I'm sure he would prefer that not to be the case, but this is a strange world we live in, one where an amerikan president the media call a liberal is praised for a determination that anyone including US citizens can be 'legally' murdered, if they are suspected of acting against US interests.
A world where the Australian government, another bunch of suits who talk loudly about freedom and democracy, can abuse a law passed to prevent the publication of kiddie porn, by using that law as a mechanism to block Australian citizens' access to sites whose opinions they (the Australian Government) disagree with.
Enough of the soap opera, what about the real issues, what US diplomatic missions are up to in nations that the US considers to be BFF (best friends forever)
Perseverance will get you past the wiki-leaks front page. May I suggest that when you do manage to slip past the constant hammering on the front door, that you grab the compressed archive containing all the cables that have been released thus far (there will be more, I understand US banks are next in line for a going over unless some sort of reasonable deal about Bradley Manning is made).The archive is available as a torrent (Yuk) but Opera is browser that handles torrents in a straightforward manner without port forwarding or any of the other dramas that made P2P such a bore.
Once you have the archive in either SQL or CSV format it contains over 1500 cables from the Wellington NZ embassy, amongst many thousands of others, grab a great utility called dtSearch [url|http://www.dtsearch.com/] unless you are a type who knows their way around a database and can construct SQL searches with the sort of ease I don't have.
dtSearch is an app I have used since Win7 search turned out to be hit and miss, it will build an index of all the cables and then you can look for subjects which you consider apposite.
for example the original Afghani diaries had some 70 hits on the text string 'kiwi' using dt search was great for finding the location of particular words and phrases, then the other tools (google earth, and the guardian/WikiLeaks statistical analysis could be used to create perspective on the string.
Yes these diplomatic cables are different but a little bit of elbow grease which NZ media rarely undertook even back in the day when they had resources may reveal things we should already have been told.
It is apparent that as pressure builds on those media outlets that have a WikiLeaks deal, much of the emphasis of the scoops has shifted, from talking about what it is the US gets up to, towards selective release of bits that promote warmongering eg repeating a US diplomat’s assertion that a Saudi Prince wants to nuke Iran.
Rather than attack Assange with the lynch mob, wouldn't it be smarter to take advantage of the fact our govt hasn't barred the site (yet) and find out if there has been anything really dodgy about those always stymied, free trade 'deals' with the US. -
Well lets hope Key does more than propose a royal commission that he comes out of that Cabinet meeting tomorrow, clutching a warrant for the Gov Gen to sign that sets up a royal commission(dunno what the correct term or even provcedure is, is it commission a royal commission?). Or does a royal commission require an act of parliament? Some of the ones in Australia were set up by a special act of parliament. Those that I can think of were set up by state government, the royal commsion into the melbourne painters and doctors was federal come to think of it that was how they managed to shift from melbourne to perth, from wharfies picking up things 'that fell off the back of a truck' to the cream of the ASX avoiding tax with bottom of the harbour schemes, but I can't remember if that was set up with an act of parliament or not.
There is much to be said for writing an Act of Parliament for something as critical as this, because it makes third hand interference that much more difficult. Particularly if an inquiry is treading on toes, being set up by special act reduces the chances of the inquiry suddenly having its budget 'amended' or its terms of reference 're-interpreted'.
If Key does convene a Royal Commission (yeah I'm sure convene isn't the verb I'm after either) it will be quite sea change, since only a few days ago he was saying a royal commission was un-neccessary and that a 'commssion of inquiry' would suffice, because there wasn't much difference between the two.
Much of that will depend on the terms of reference of course although Royal Commisions do have more power to demand testimony and they also usually have supreme authority when there is a potential conflict between them and another inquiry.
I really hope I have been wrong and a fully staffed and resourced Royal Commission into the Pike River mine and the methane explosions is called, but there's many a slip twixt cup and lip.
There are some big picture issues which would fall outside the bounds of a smaller focussed inquiry, but which needed examining because they do have an impact on the Pike River accident. From time to time ACC has muttered about NZ's rate of injury and death from industrial accidents being 'too high' compared to other nations. This sort of data is hard to uncover - all studies appear to be in journals behind paywalls, but if that is the case, that many more people per capita, are killed and injured while at work than in say, Australia, we need to look at why that is and whether any of those issues affected what happened at Pike River.
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Those who questioned the number of inquiries when I posted that it would likely be quite a few (five) would be advised to read[ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10689942 | Thursday's Northern fishwrap]:
A series of high-level inquiries will be held into the Pike River mine tragedy as the families of the miners demand answers about the loss of their loved ones.
Prime Minister John Key has indicated a commission of inquiry may be held into the deaths of the 29 miners, while police, the Department of Labour and the coroner will all examine what went wrong.
"There is going to be a range of inquiries that will begin fairly immediately," said Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee.
"And in the long term, of course, everyone will want to know what happened up there. It's pretty essential we find out, and the nature of how we achieve that is yet to be determined."
(Apologies if I've got the PA protocols wrong)
Hadn't seen this until a few minutes ago, Brownlee has taken this play straight out of the " ministerial ass covering 101" textbook.
As pointed out previously a multitude of inquiries will cause all sorts of demarcation issues where important lines of inquiry are left 'because I understood that to be the task of the blahblah inquiry". In addition there is every likelihood that any inquiry which goes further in it's findings than the pols who appointed it wanted, will be told it is involving itself in business "outside it's purview"
Anyway I've no desire to bore myself silly by responding to every nit-picker on what is really a visceral issue that normal humans feel rather than think about, but this Brownleeism was too aposite to ignore. If you give my posts the hairy eyeball, fair enough, but don't forget to be equally wary of the paid liars in Wellington. Then in a year or so we'll see who was the conniving vote-grubber, or who was the paranoid 'conspiracist'.
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I won't bother to respond to the usual raft of insults or as these blogger types like to call em 'ad hominems' but I have to disagree with Brown's statement that the Cave Creek Commission was other than what the Govt wanted.
There was no way the Government was going to get away with a complete whitewash on that one, there were far too many 'ordinary kiwis of standing' in their local community who lost children, to get off scot free. As Brown may recall from the response of those parents when the report was finally released, the anger from those parents at the weak kneed report was palable.
Cave Creek went to the heart of exactly how wrong-headed and greedy the government had been in so much of its policy.
The resignation of an average minister is nothing, That happens over a couple of airfares, Cave Creek occurred because of a series of decisions made by that government - from deregulating building permits and inspections to forcing government departments to adopt a quantitatively based cost accounting on every action, including those functions that should be measured qualitatively.
Decisions that were at the heart of everything that government had done, yet the report avoided addressing those issues, just as the inquiry 'duck-shoved' the issue of prosecutions between itself and the inquest.
The same will happen now. Key has already been talking about 'the need' for more than one inquiry (enquiry/inquiry I always get that wrong) but that a Royal Commission is not needed.
I imagine we will have a Mines Department bureuacrat produce a quick inventory of a comparison of mining regulations in say, Oz states and here. It will be crafted to obscure rather than enlighten, so that will be another 'inquiry'. Plus we are bound to see some sort of attack on the environmental issues surrounding Pike River. If the govt can't or doesn't want to open the Pike River Commission up too far in case it spins out of control, then there will almost certainly be another body tasked with considering 'the impact of the lengthy and expensive (their terms not neccessarily what I believe) Resource Consent process on Occupational Health and Safety issues.
I could go on but I don't wanna give the pr1cks ideas.
I have no wish to slander anyone and ensure that this post is pulled but apart from the fact most of those who responded missed a couple of the big issues I mentioned which most likely contributed to creating the ideal situation for a methane explosion, I will re-iterate that in a nation which cared about all its citizens and not just the rich and powerful, those individuals who willingly ignored safety in order to get the coal out faster and cheaper, would be prosecuted.
I have no doubt whatsoever that some of the decision makers at the Pike River Mine did exactly that, but I am also certain that few if any will be prosecuted.
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Nobody is asking for a no risk world, but how about one where workers are trained before they are asked to undertake dangerous tasks. This mine had no apprentices, it preferred to hire straight off the street and down the mine, hence one of those killed was a 17 year old boy having his first day at work. Two things there, somehow I doubt that even the coach and horses joke that is NZ Occ Health and Safety legislation permits children down mines. The second issue is what the f**k was he doing down pit on his first day?
If the mine had all of these safety protocols they claim to have had, shouldn't the kid have had a bit of training in em before he began digging out coal? The poor little bugger may not even have known how to use his respirator.Some journalists have made a big deal about how Solid Energy just down the road had been running for years without any major incidents, yet not one journo has asked the obvious: "Is there much difference between work practices at Solid Energy and work practices at Pike River?"
Trouble is the minesr are too weighed down with a mixture of guilt, cause the Pike River deal was a sold as a much needed to boost to a region hurting from mining and forestry closures, not to mention fishing being contracted out to foreigners, so a bit of a blind eye was turned to Pike River's lack of training and adequate back-up and safety procedures. That mixed with this silly bourgois notion that it dishonours the need to bicker about how they were killed, means that the sociopaths who gambled with 29 lives just to make a quid, and lost, will probably get away with it.
The nats want the mine to start up again to generate money for the shareholders who back them and the labourites are the mugs who let the neo-liberal claptrap about deregulation even infect the coal mining industry, the very industry where the workers movement started in NZ, precisely because greed can put so many coal miners lives at risk.
I am sick to my guts about this - nothing demonstrates exactly how far NZ has regressed from the ideals of the 19th century Pakeha settlers than this awful incident.
I don't expect many to see it, most will be too busy spouting the same individualist garbage that has made so many ordinary NZers vulnerable to corporate sociopaths, and the others will use this horror as a way to flex their technocratic speciality, by arguing pointless issues like the best way to ascertain when these poor bastards copped it. Even that is wonky - like the bloke talking about fibre optics and electrical sparks causing explosions in the same sentence.
If you want to get all technocratic ask yourself how it can be that the alarm at the mine wasn't raised until 1 hour and 50 minutes after the explosion? Who was on duty above-ground? The limited experience I have had in working on an underground mine (not a coal mine) in another country admittedly, featured safety officers above ground in constant communication with the underground. Knowing exactly where everyone was at any time was their job, precisely because of the need to know where everyone was if there was a collapse.
The only evidence enyone has that this mine was safe is the continual protestation by the company boss that it was safe. Yeah right well you can take that to the bank, he's got nothing to gain by not being forthright has he?
Yet the media has repeated that "this was a safe mine" over and over until it has become unpatriotic to question the mine's protocols. Whenever a foreign journo less cowed by life in regimented NZ asked a question that had the least edge to it, the local media hopped onto that journo like ton of bricks. That when they should have been either kicking themselves for getting beaten to the draw or hopped in with a followup to get to the bottom of what the hell has been going on at Pike River.But we are going to get a commission of inquiry not a royal commission. Oh great. Not! Royal Commissions have gotten drastically out of favour since the royal commision into air NZ's incompetence and cover up of Mt Erebus.
That particular commission of inquiry is the only one in my lifetime (and I suspect I have been around a quite a bit longer than most posters here) which delivered a finding other than the finding the govt of the day wanted to sell the masses. Not that it mattered - the govt participated in a kangaroo court against the royal commissioner it appointed and the findings were over-turned -unconstitutional comes to mind but kiwis are known for their regard for constitutional niceties. Another reason pols shaft them with consumate ease. .
Royal Commissions are much more powerful than ordinary commission of inquiry chiefly because they can widen their terms of reference if the commissioners believe that is needed. They can also set their own rules of evidence and do exactly what is needed to be done in a situation where there has been "an orchestrated litany of lies"
A commision of inquiry whose brief will be limited to the rescue after the explosion and which probably won't be allowed to look into wider issues such as training, back up ventilation systems, comparisons with other coal mines etc, won't find bugger all. Anjd if it does it won't be able to follow up if it goes outside the terms of reference, which will be tightly set.The govt will announce it right at the height of the 'silly season' either right before xmas or right after the new year and it will be able to have its hearings in camera (out of the public view) not all, just the embarrassing stuff, which we will be told is because of 'commercial sensitivity'.
Chances are the inquiry will be given 12 months to run and will report back the following 'silly season'.
It is pitiful. I spoke to a journalist today, who was full of self importance about how they were 'going to get to the bottom of this'.
Yeah right that will be why she/ he's doing a 'human interest' piece first. The full investigative stuff will come later, next year she/he reckios. Yeah right. I don't think so- the journos bosses will tell him the world has moved on next year if she/he does remember, and the journo will acquiese just like every NZ journo always does.
How about you mob ? The usual apologists for the staus quo will drop by for a spot of name calling after this, if you haven't all already moved on to the next big news story. But those that haven't - how about instead of just dismissing what I write or arguing the toss over minor issues, how about you think about this when the BS inquiry is announced, when it runs and when it reports back.
Sure I won't be 100% correct on everything, but I guarantee that the inquiry/ies (another kiwi trick have 5 inquiries instead of one and everyone reckons some really important issue is the other fella's job or conversely they all trip over each other saying that is sub judice for the other inquiry which never looks at whatever the sub judice issue was) don't find anything majorly wrong.
By then those who have been listening will have begun to hear some of the stuff I have alluded to, but it will be too late kiwis will be 'sick of it' and more interested in whether Sonny Bill's hands can reach round his old fella or some such twaddle.
At least remember this was predicted and the fella who predicted it did so because he hopes that eventually younger NZers will wake up to the big lie they have been sold.
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I'm going to repeat what I posted last night and got sledged for. Because I said I was no engineer, the hysterical 'back the status quo to keep me mortgage paid', cowards who hopped in did so on the basis I wasn't an engineer.
Practically every rebuttal of ordinary caring human beings' criticism of the way the mine has been run along with the appallingly incompetent way the police have attempted to control the situation, treating it as though the mine and the miners are a mob of recalcitrant drunks, has lacked any substance other than "what would you know about it anyway?"
Nabobs of negativity attacking honest queries. I know enough to read the attitude of complacent disregard 'cause my back's covered' that seeps outta every pore of the stand-up spruikers for mining who have been wheeled out 24/7 since this began.
Brown alluded to three disasters (west virginia, Russia, and Pike River) that have had methane explosions in 2010 as some sort of proof that such explosions are inevitable & random -totally outside our control.
That is sheer rubbish. The investigation at the West Virginia mine to which I linked a media report of last night, found categorically that the explosion only occurred because of lax and disregarded safety procedures. The russion one will be the same although we will never hear of it.
Literally thousands of coal mines around the world extract coal without incident because they observe correct procedures. There is nothing random in any of this.
My concern about the situation here is multi-faceted. But let me go back to tors and repeat the statement I made before which so many seemed to choke on.
"If coal cannot be extracted without a risk that there could be a major methane incident which will kill around thirty humans, then it should not be mined in NZ."
That is not an unreasonable statement. The coal will still be there - it isn't going anywhere and will always be in demand, so what is the hurry to get it out now.
If it can't be done in reasonably guaranteed safety, leave it until in can be. Surely in a modern social democatic society it is untenable to employ people to do a job if there is a strong possibility many will be killed doing it?
Not even 21st century racing drivers risk themselves to the extent which so many seem to blithely accept miners should risk their lives. Miners get paid a bit more than many other manual workers but not a lot more than other machine operators, most of whom don't have the unpleasant working environment that miners must endure. They are well paid because they are highly skilled and work hard in a human unfriendly environment. They do not get paid to risk their lives, yet it seems that many in the industry (bosses & engineers) appear to behave as if they do.
The fault for this accident rests with the mining company and its executives, no matter what the immediate cause turns out to have been. As I said above there is no way that conditions favourable to a large methane, followed by coal dust, explosion should have been allowed to develop. How many back up power systems for the ventilators were there? I hear none. How many back up ventilation systems were there? Once again the scuttlebutt round town here is there was no real back up. Yet being NZ, the land of the fitted up commission of inquiry, none of this will ever arise, or rather if it does we will be told that this mine, a brand spanking new mine, compared OK with other mines about the world. Even if that were true it would only be because many of the other mines are 50 to 100 years old, & behind the former iron curtain or in China.
It needs to be compared with other coal mines built in the so-called developed world this century. If that were to happen, and be done honestly this mine will be found wanting. Guaranteed but this is NZ where successive power elites have bought in a myriad of 'overseas experts' to spout a script in return for a cheque, whenever it was required.
(My personal favourite was the english 'arms expert' bought in to the Thomas Royal Commisions who swore black and blue that the bullet casing found in the garden could have been made before the shootings. No one believed him but it didn't matter he had effectively sabotaged any chance of charging Bruce Hutton or his offsider, and provided cover, if threadbare, for senior police when asked about evidence 'planting'.)This whole mess reminds of those Muldoon days, everything about it reeks of a corrupt alliance between police, the pols and business just like the 'old days'.
It is possible to design, build, and manage a mine so that the risks of a major explosion are non-existent. And still make money from it. The set up costs may be a bit higher but it is achievable. That is what independent industry experts have been saying today and that was my original contention.
But the rescue that isn't a rescue, is really the worst of this awful 'blast from the past'.
Nothing about the explosion & the mine, has changed since Friday night. The video of the explosion coming out the entrance was available then so that video should change nothing now. Yet Broad is pulling it out from under his jacket like it was "Brucie does Pike River" foisting it on passers-by & saying it 'proves the police"'played the hand they were dealt" Yeah right Howard.
The inane way the police have managed this shows exactly why police should stick to law enforcement and leave rescuing to rescuers.
The most visible police attitude has been their usual over the top 'media management' where journos are kept in their place by the threat that any lip will result in the loss of a major 'news source'.
Consequently the police hang onto real informationa i as if it were gold dust. Govt and the police were obviously concerned about 'another Chile' so they kept everyone including families away from the pit head & only begrudgingly bussed them in and out on the Sunday as if the victims families were an impedioment tey just couldn't ignore. Not partners in the rescue, no even stakeholders in the rescue, just a pain in the ass that needed to be humoured. The families felt that and won't wear it.To make matters worse the media fell into line and began spouting the "west coast man' (and woman) BS that has been used to control Coasters for more than a century.
People on the coast are just as human as anywhere else but it has always suited those who want to exploit coasters to play into the 'west coast myth'. Keeping the pubs open late wasn't about freedom it was about sucking in some of the mugs (Cause we have mugs just like anywhere else) to tolerate dangerous work and insufficient pay and in return they were allowed to give more of that pay back to the Kellihers and the Coutts's.
But drag out the "west Coast myth" and the whole nation including those mugs on the coast expect everyone close to those humans who are prolly injured, & stuck 2 clicks up a pitch dark stinking hot tunnel for days, to be stoic in the face of an awful horror.
By playing the "west Coast myth' it means people expect the miners to put up with working conditions no other kiwi worker would consider.
They are 'men' so they can handle being left there and all the rest of the garbage people spout and dream to avoid an ugly reality.
The police managed to create a 'lose' 'lose' situation for themselves with their taciturn controlling take on saving life.
The longer they leave beginning the rescue, the more they have to lose by going in and saving someone. "How many others would have still been alive if they went in sooner" will be what everyone wants to know.
If everyone is dead (the best outcome for those police who are 'political' )it means there is a good chance of spinning that everyone died in the explosion, but that means total control of information which is looking harder to hang on to.
The cause another explosion excuse is difficult because Key & Co won't wear the mine being shut forever, yet in all likelihood the longer rescuers wait the higher the levels of methane and CO in the mine will go. They are going to have to go in sometime, but the rescuers who are prepared to risk their lives to try and save others are unlikely to be so keen to risk death to 'save' bodies.
So they could wait a month still have an explosion and that would be really difficult to 'media manage'. eg it could leak out that some had lived for a few days, that the air initially wasn't that bad.
Which brings me to the other point so many armchair do-nothings apparently found so risible in what I posted last night.When I said that even I could come up with a concept for a rescue vehicle which could move in a high methane atmosphere without raising the risk of explosion.
It wouldn't look anything like the toy robot the army drag out when the coppers need a PR diversion though.
It would be large made of plastic with a spark proof housing around the engine and drive train and have been built robustly enough to withstand a hit with a fire hose let alone a few splashes of underground H2O.The technology to build such a vehicle exists right now. The issues are nowhere near as complex as flying drones into afghani weddings, controlled from the Creech Airforce Base utility building basement opposite that base's Taco Bell.
We are talking basic 21st century engineering that the company should have stumped up for long before they began excavation.
Yet it hasn't happened and that was major oversight by those charged with keeping NZ miners safe.
If the mine had been properly managed it wouldn't be neccessary to have a rescue system, but given NZ's track record on industrial accidents since the deregulated or sorry 'industry self regulated environment' we have had foisted upon us, it is crininal that no such peice of equipment was available for use.
That is what the jacks could do here at this rescue to earn their keep.. Arrest themselves. You can be sure many man hours of police and mine bosses time were wasted before this horror in BS 're-enactments' of a real mine accident.
They woulda had the office staff playing annoying media workers being rude at the interminable press conferences, and off duty miners playing the wounded, yet none of these rescue experts saw fit to ask the obvious. "When the mine has had a major explosion how do we get the workers out?"
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While the self congratulatory little bourgois world moves along its predictable track of "Mr Plod knows whats best for us all" tempered with "Those foreign journos need to learn to be accepting little sheeple taking their spoonful of soma when its offered" there is no chance of anyone being pushed out of their comfort zone into a world where hard questions are asked and answered.
Questions like "In hundreds of years of methane explosions in coal mines, why is it that if the coal earns billions, there is such reluctance to develop technology to prevent recurrences?"
I'm no engineer but I can envisage the obstacles that a vehicle (manned or unmanned) designed to work in a volatile atmosphere would need to overcome, and I can envisage workable solutions to each of those potential problems. For example electric motors and their battery power supply can be built into a sealed module from where no spark could be generated, much less escape.
The Pike River Mine company knew the potential risk yet no one made them protect their workers. If many millions to protect snails was affordable, then surely a few mill for an escape pod to protect humans is also possible.That is without looking at the reality, that a massive build-up of methane should never have been able to occur undetected in a 21st century coal mine. Everyone is toeing the nice govt/corporate sponsored line "This isn't the time to kick up, lets wait and have an inquiry". That is designed to ensure there is no accountability because unless the facts on how this tragedy was allowed to occur are aired now when the fickle public is paying attention, theose responsible won't be held to account and the incident could re-occur.
The facts are simple if you think. Either methane explosions are an uncontrollable reality of coal mining, in which case the mine should never have been allowed to open at all. Or they can be prevented, in which case the mine owners and bosses are responsible for this tragedy (as much as I want to be wrong on that reality is after 4 days, this is a tragedy the only issue is how big a tragedy it is) and the decision makers should be imprisoned, NZ's coal resources are taken off the current operators and the coal left in the ground until a mine company comes along with a workable plan which protects both the environment and the workers.
It is unthinkable that in 2010 NZ accepts a business model that includes the possibility of a large number of workers being killed as one of the hazards of doing business. For any amount of money.
Andrew Little and his engineers appear to be the trade union with coverage. What happened to the old mineworkers? Was a political decision made to bring in a more 'flexible' trade union, one which also had coverage for the bosses, but little practical experience in the realities of shovelling out coal in a dangerous mine?
The inquiry should also look at whether the workers' representatives bargained safety away to get coverage of all workers. If that did happen then those self described trade- unionists need to be slotted up in the cell next to the company's so-called mining experts who ran the show.
It was only back in April (6 months ago) that | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/06/west-virginia-mine-explos_n_526810.html 29 miners were killed in a West Virginia coal mine. The public kicked up there not heeding the company calls for a 'grieving time' free of 'politicking'. It transpired that the govt mining watchdog, the mining company and even some miner representatives had been engaged in a conspiracy to sacrifice safety for money.
The company got hit hard because people were paying attention so politicians got too scared to protect their mates who owned the mine.
The only way the same thing (catching& punishing those responsible), can happen here is if we show we want action not smarmy spin. -
Oh god I had a flashback of the Alice for a minute there. I lived in the territory for 20 years travelled round it mobs but always tried to avoid Alice Springs the asshole of Australia, and very definitely a whitefella town, not a blackfella one.
Which in some ways goes to answer the question above from the victorian bloke who claims to have never seen many Aboriginal people despite their making up a a couple of percentage points of Australia's population (I suspect that 500,000 identified Aboriginal people is a little on the high side. Prolly more like 200,000 to 300,000 but substantial enough)
The thing is normal whitefella hangouts big cities or towns like Alice (ouch sorry bout the pun) are not the types of places where a lot of Aboriginal people enjoy spending time.
Why? Well those that had substantial Aboriginal populations before the white invasion (eg Sydney but definitely not Alice) got rid of most of the traditional inhabitants in some really brutal ways. Who wants to hang close to where your family got wiped out?
No need for Kiwis to feel smug, instead they should ask themselves what happened to the Tangata Whenua that used to live in and around ChristChurch before whitefella invasion.
Sure there are small communities at La Perouse (or were) but until the Mabo decision aboriginal people were moved further out as the whitefella population grew. After Mabo things got better for a little while.
Some town eg Darwin managed to co-exist with aboriginal communities and whitefella suburbs side by side. For a while but the concentration of defence forces in the top end has made the once peaceful co-existence a lot more fraught than it once was because the 'new whitefellas' aren't that intererested in getting to know the Larrakiah mob who have always lived on the Darwin peninsular.
Not that the Larrajiyah mob are going anywhere. The old Darwin families which are a complex mixture of anglo/aboriginal/filipino/chinese/malay will outlast those army navy and airforce blow-ins.
Digression alert.
Anyway aboriginal people generally mix in whitefella communities when they have no choice. That is either the whitys have come to live in their country or there is some institution or service that aboriginal people need to access in the whitefella settlement.
This isn't racism it is pragmatism. In day to day confrontations with whitefellas many aboriginal people know they will be the loser if the problem occurs on whitefella country.
There is a substantial amount of truth to that feeling which is little more than a modern rendering of aboriginal lore.
That holds the person who land you are standing on is generally the person 'in the right' empowered to make decisions.
I hate to generalise like this because nothing is simple but basicaly in a place like Alice, the only Yolgnu (a top end word for our peole I can't remember the centre word) likely to be found are those in town on business or those who have been told to stay away from their communities. Often because of violence committed when drunk and addiction to alcohol. Those in town on business tend to party hard because many live in dry (alcohol free) communities
J Howrd's changes to the law in the NT which took away aboriginal community council's right to decide who was allowed on tribal land, had nothing to do with violence and/or child abuse.
The report he selectively quoted from was ten years old when he dragged it out. That isn't to say those problems don't exist because they do and aboriginal people need all the support they request to fix those issues. Taking away the council's power to bar troublesome whitefellas isn't helping anyone.
This is a transperant ploy so that the government can intervene in the protracted negotiations over mineral rights on traditional aboriginal land.
Now the army can be sent in if any whitefella alleges child abuse.In the past communities protected themselves by barring geologists and mining engineers and all the other agents of social and environmental destruction. Now they can't.
That Rudd flea has done nothing to repeal the changes because the whitefellas have used up most of the easily accessible resources. They've all been dug up and sold to USuk for a cent on the dollar, so now they need to get at those resources that traditional owners who had seen too much of the destruction of Yirrkala (Nhulunbuy) or Angurugu (Groote Eylandt) were resisting the exploitation of.
As for the poor buggers in town camps and government communities, its difficult to envisage a positive outcome.
Traditional aboriginal life is very focussed on the small clan groupings which are destroyed when 5 or fifteen mobs who all speak totally different languages and who may have been feuding or shunning for centuries are told to live together. In the end all the languages get lost and the people have no way of passing on their oral culture. 'Creole' the bastardised language of mixed up english a few aboriginal languages, some chinese and a little malay, doesn't have the same power as the original language the story was first told in.
I have no doubt that some aboriginal mobs will 'make it' eventually.
The self hatred Graham described is all too common among those aboriginal people taken outta their clan at a young age, but the leaders will come from within aboriginal society not from outsiders thrust upon them because they are the same colour.Any kiwis feeling smug about this shouldn't because for every horror methos of australian colonisation of the indigenous population there is a horror tale here in NZ against Maori.
The only difference is we have convinced ourselves that what we did was 'right' and necessary' which is pretty much what australians tell themselves about aboriginal colonisation.
As for the crack about Gulpilil, I've no idea how he is now, I haven't spoken with him in 20 years but last time a spent time with him he was a mess,one morer addicted aborigine. I hope he has got it together now but he is a bloke that copped the absolute worst of what white culture does to those it colonises.
the last wave may have been very entertaining for whiteys but it came close to killing David.
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A couple of typical overly verbose points:
Firstly given that Veitch's job is as a journalist reporting on high profile so-called elite sports, does anyone else see the conflict of interest situation arising if you are one of those high profile sports people asked to supply veitch a reference?
Saying yes and giving a glowing testimonial would mean that if Veitch got his gig back, the sportsperson would be entitled to feel he/she had one in the favour bank with someone influential in the sports media. The ordure can hit the ventilator any place any time for those who live from/in the public eye. What's not to like about having a sports journo owe you one?
If Veitch is never rehabilitated (unlikely - see further down) then it is a 'nothing ventured nothing gained' outcome.
However if he is rehabilitated and you, the elite sportsperson knocked back the offer to get in on the ground floor of team Veitch shareholders, life could be difficult should a sunday journal fix it's sights on you in the future.
At least one member of the 'straight press' (irony intended) could feel he owes you no favours, you refused the opportunity to aid him we he was down.
Many of our current crop of sports people appear to be individualistic neo-liberal careerist types. Just the sort of person who could make a cold decision to write a glowing testimonial about a man despite his being convicted of assaulting a woman, if it could stand the writer in good stead at some future date.
I would have thought that issue alone would make Veitch's re-employ by state broadcasters impossible.
Of course a career end just won't happen. I'm sure someone somewhere has obtained a Ph D in communications or public relations or the semiotics of tabloid reporting, for their thesis which set out the methodology for determining the length of 'cooling off' required to 'spin up' a piece of media revisionism.
That is NZ's news media aren't famed for their institutional memory when it comes to national political matters let alone something as inconsequential as a sporting journalist's domestic relations.
So when Ms Hughes and Co do determine what the cooling off period for Veitch is and that has passed, they only need to promote a couple of stories about something peripheral to the Veitch case, preferably something derogatory about Ms Dunne-Powell and slyly inject what they are currently claiming to be the case as a fact in that future story, to have all NZ's mass media accept currently wild claims about set ups, insinuations about blackmail, as fact.
In no time at all, that most easily led section of the public, our swing voters so to speak, will be clamouring for Veitch's return on a Game of Two Halves, Close Up, Breakfast, the 7 o'clock news.
Watch and see.
It happens with everything else from global warming to crooked tory pols, so why wouldn't the same technique work for Veitch.
As for the elephant in the living room, how does an employee of a state broadcaster manage to afford such a vast PR campaign, seemingly extended over years? I dunno, but I believe that goes to the heart of everything that is wrong with TVNZ.For me, Veitch is the epitome of why TVNZ is the only public broadcaster in the world I refuse to use. Which is really saying something considering the appalling broadcaster the BBC has become since the Hutton inquiry.
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Yes the sentence seems light, but actually I don't think sending Veitch to prison would help anyone really. It'd make me feel a bit better, for a little while, but then what?
Well sending him down for the same sentence as your average unwhite man would get, would demonstrate to those who blindly follow the sensible sentencing trust's rants, just how destructive throwing people in jail really is.
Many NZers appear to have adopted a particularly nasty attitude towards the smaller weaker men thrust into the dog eat dog environment that some kiwi jails have become. How many times have we heard "If they didn't want to get bashed they shouldn't have broken the law"?
[Sorry dude -- I've removed a paragraph here. I understand your point, but I won't have you speculating that prison rape might be a good thing in any way. - RB]
Remember when NZ got so upset after the whitefella son of a bourgeois family got beaten to death while in custody. The corrections department was caught flat-footed. Around 20 young men a year die just in Mt Eden prison so this death wasn't 'spun' at all initially.
Too late the penny dropped in corrections - those other deaths were of unwhites or token unwhite (ie poor) young men.
Cynics wouldn't surprised to hear one of the tongue in groovers currently loudly demanding Veitch's testes for ear-rings privately concede that Veitch's incarceration would be bad for business that it would cause domestic violence sentences to be reduced long term.
But all of that speculation is' for the cat' as they say in Germany. There was no way Veitch was gonna go to jail and most of us recognise that 'deep in our bones'.
The thing that really s**ts me about this is was yet another example of a media figure complaining when he/she got treated the same as a 'punter' (ie a non media person).Too many in the media seem to regard themselves as some sort of protected sepecies, immune from the campaigns of distortion and sensationalism that anyone else unlucky enough to be deemed 'newsworthy' has to endure.
Can't help wondering how many stories about league and/or union players "going the biff with their missus" Veitch has run in the course of his media 'career'.
These talking heads are a dime a dozen. It takes a little skill to learn how to smile facing the correct camera, and read from a teleprompt seemingly spontaneously, whilst a boss's lackey is ranting 19 to the dozen in your ear, the sort of skill that comes to most humans given sufficient practise though.
Judging by the numbers of unemployed media personalities there are more than enough of these types to go around. So we should be insisting that any 'tv personality' who annoys sufficient members of the public gets the flick to be replaced by another fresh outta media training school every time.