Hard News: Where nature may win
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Sacha, in reply to
The Brian Edwards posts about Pike River.
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I'd be in favour of denying Edwards the oxygen of publicity, but obviously that's just me.
More details on Royal Commission proposal. I'm a known Key apologist, but the preliminary talk seems pretty solid to me:
[Key] will take a proposal to Cabinet today for an inquiry into the disaster.
Yesterday he said there were "very hard questions to be asked and answered".
"In the end, the future of Pike River and actually underground coalmining in New Zealand rests on this," Key told TVNZ's Q+A programme. "We can't put people into environments that are dangerous."
The royal commission would be led by a judge and two others. Its work would be carried out in addition to inquiries by the coroner's office, the Labour Department and the police.
There would probably be "an international component" to the commission, which would in turn draw on international and local expertise and have "absolute powers" to subpoena witnesses, gather information, and ask questions.
The terms of reference for the commission would be "very broad", Key said.
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It will be interesting to see what the Commission determines about the incident management decisions. I doubt Knowles has anything to fear from the Police internal process, and I imagine that he'll probably get some kind of commendation for his handling of the incident, but hindsight from non-expert examiners is frequently harsh and unforgiving beyond what is necessarily reasonable.
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Sacha, in reply to
denying Edwards the oxygen of publicity
Some useful stuff in the comments.
the preliminary talk seems pretty solid to me
Not quite prelimiinary. Key initially said a royal commission wouldn't be needed but polling since no doubt said otherwise. Now it's his idea. Good politics..
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Some useful stuff in the comments
..like this from Edwards himself:
Curiously enough, I was speaking today to a member of the Waihi Mine Rescue Team whose view was that the communication to the public by the police had been poor at best. It took him two minutes to explain to me how one trouser leg brushing against another could produce enough static electricity to cause a further explosion as someone walked along those 2 kilometres.
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I’m reminded of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which perhaps expresses how one might feel too. To this day, you do not make jokes about the tragedy in the Great Lakes region, as many a would-be comedian has found. Another parallel is the destruction of the submarine Kursk.
Comedians have tried to do that? I'm amazed anyone would try to make jokes about either the Edmund Fitzgerald or the Kursk.
The song Gordon Lightfoot is a pretty close description of the Edmund Fitzgerald's fate - and shortly after the disaster, the wreckage was located, and is shown here in the tribute that was put up with the song.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
So what he's saying is that Knowles didn't spend enough time justifying to the baying hounds of the collected meedja why he wasn't sending men to what's turned out to be almost-certain death. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Knowles spent more time than was strictly necessary trying to pacify the rabid hordes as it was, without having to spend more time presenting explanations that, no doubt, wouldn't have been passed on to the public in news bulletins anyway.ETA: If it took two minutes in a one-on-one conversation, how many hours would've been wasted trying to answer the inevitable thick-as-shit questions from fuckstick Aussie journos who just wouldn't want to know the answer? Not a good use of Knowles' time to try and explain this one in a press conference.
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
And really this is not rocket science. There are a few basic principles which needed to be explained and just about everything else flowed from there.
Apart from the initial CIMS/Rescue 101 stuff, it is not Knowles job to ensure that everyone keeps up. I've not spent time trawling through the history of articles but the impression I got over time was that media websites were lacking. In particular they could have had a link (writ large) to a page that explained these to Jo Public.
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So what he's saying is that Knowles didn't spend enough time justifying to the baying hounds of the collected meedja why he wasn't sending men to what's turned out to be almost-certain death. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Hey, it's not my fault if I'm ignorant, unwilling to get informed but still eager to make my opinion known and drive traffic to my blog.
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You know what else gets on my tits? Public libraries.
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Sacha, in reply to
Yes, one wonders if Edwards considers "the communication to the public by the police" to include the media in between?
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
Sacha - you aren't seriously suggesting that the news media is a means of education? What would the sponsors think....
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Sam F, in reply to
You know what else gets on my tits? Public libraries.
Oh man, do not get me started on that one again…
So what he’s saying is that Knowles didn’t spend enough time justifying to the baying hounds of the collected meedja why he wasn’t sending men to what’s turned out to be almost-certain death. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I think he's now tacitly admitting that his earlier pontification on mine rescue methods was entirely meaningless and ill-informed, but as a professional comms consultant he believes the news media were poorly served by the rescuers, and that's clearly the real tragedy, amirite?
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I was flattered to see a link to my "Lead Agency 101" post flying around twitter as the explanation for why it was Police running the show, but I never saw anything in t3h meedja explaining it to the wider public. I tried hard to use accessible language in the explanation, and everything that I said could've been verified with a called to MCDEM or, heaven forbid, the Police themselves, and then published for general consumption. That would've nixed a whole heap of the gripes that were floating around, perhaps even a majority once it became clear to people that the call not to send in rescue teams was being advised by Mines Rescue.
But, rather than trying to educate the media just left the confusion to feed on itself and fuel anger and ignorance. -
Sacha, in reply to
you aren't seriously suggesting that the news media is a means of education?
Education is failure - just ask that Mike Hosking chap.
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Sacha, in reply to
Hey, it's not my fault if I'm ignorant, unwilling to get informed but still eager to make my opinion known and drive traffic to my blog.
You must be "grandstanding" to point that one out. :)
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Oh yes - read that yesterday and lol'ed.
Especially the line about knowing his place.
Is there sumwhr on the interweb I can goes 2 lurn teh nu social order?
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All credit to Kerre Woodham for eloquently opposing a talkback perspective.
But I hope a few New Zealanders take a long hard look at their own conduct too. What on earth made many people, whose only experience with coal mines was driving past one, assume that they knew more than guys such as Pike River boss Peter Whittall - a man with nearly 30 years' experience in coal mining and a man who was a personal friend and colleague of most of the guys trapped?
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These were blokes who yearned to wear their undies on the outside of their trousers and play Superman for a day. I'm sure their motives were pure but if Dan Rockhouse, one of the survivors of the initial blast and a man with a brother trapped in the mine, understood the necessity of waiting, what gave armchair critics the right to criticise and worse - accuse the rescuers of deliberately sitting on their hands?
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
NZ uses the Coordinated Incident Management System for command and control of emergency responses.
Having read the relevant sections of the Royal Commission's report, it's quite interesting to look back at this. I had assumed, very wrongly, that there was a proper CIMS structure in place. There wasn't. In fact, the Commission raised concerns that some of the issues with the management of the response were down to the fact that there wasn't a proper CIMS structure in place. Knowles hadn't even been through formal CIMS training despite its having been in existence for so long that he would've been at least a senior sergeant and an inspector while it was in place. Clearly the Police have a lot of work to do around being read to operate within a CIMS structure for a real multi-agency response.
More broadly, the Commission was pretty damning on the true level of formalised cooperation between the state emergency services, Department of Labour, Mines Rescue, and Pike River. That is, there was none, at any level. No MoU anywhere to resolve the question of who would be lead agency and who would provide the Incident Controller (IC doesn't have to come from the lead agency), etc. The contrast with NSW and Queensland is stark and unflattering, though that's really unsurprising in the NZ environment.
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Yet another example of Nationals "Do Nothing" style of "Hands Off" government.
It is getting to the point that I am losing count of the trail of incompetence they always leave in their wake, leaky homes, idealogical meddling in Education, Highway mania, I could go on but the most damning has to be the destruction of workers rights and safety.
Leaving the safety of workers up to the whim of profit seekers in an effort to increase productivity will always end in tragedy.
I would like to remind John Key that being Prime Minister is not a hobby and being "relaxed" about the effect his tenure is having is insulting to the rest of us. -
Sacha, in reply to
"Do Nothing"
The examples you use are all quite active destruction and harm. Please stop describing it in ways that leave govt's hands looking clean.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
Whatever, I'll just fuck off then.
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Sacha, in reply to
eh? find a better way of framing their harm is all. That 'do nothing' line utterly failed to engage between 2008 and 2011. Public deserve better.
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