DECISIONS, DECISIONS…

Where are all the Damned Decisions?

Decision: noun a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration

New Zealand, especially since it adopted Persona Aotearoa, has become hopelessly indecisive. (Me, I blame our nation’s self-sufficiency in food and water, for spawning the pervasive complacency.)

Work is muck for Suckers

Amongst the many myths that the departed Labour Government promulgated, the most pernicious was an Identitarian Revelation that no-one need labour, wealth is printable and task orientated business productivity is inherently evil.

The only work done by the ousted Labour government, certainly in its second term, was a sinister form of State-run, Mainstream-Media-Promoted, Performance Art. But, true to form, Labour couldn’t even get its act together enough to create the Radio New Zealand-TVNZ Public Propaganda Machine that it so feverishly dreamed of. This was despite having absolute legislative and executive power and spending about $30m of our public money on their fascistic Orwellian plan.

Sadly, although there are hints of an attitudinal change, the dithering and shillyshallying continues under the current Government and judiciary. Let’s pluck a trio of titbits from the petri dish of procrastination…

Snail’s Pace Inquiries into the Christchurch Mosques Massacre

Brenton Tarrant went on his killing spree on 15 March 2019, more than five years ago. In the wake of the massacre, there was a Royal Commission of Inquiry that studiously fudged the blatant reality that our Police Force enabled the massacre by unlawfully issuing Tarrant with the gun licence he needed. I cover this inconvenient truth in an earlier Substack https://mcleanj.substack.com/p/cops-broke-the-law-and-tarrant-won

Technically, the Coronial Inquiry into the Mosques Massacre began on the same day as the Massacre, when the duty coroner was notified of the deaths. The Coronial Inquiry has waxed and waned over the five years…Five F’ing Years!...that it has drifted, and shows no signs of concluding any time soon.

The Coroner’s tortured and torturing meander (one can hardly say progress) highlights the arcane and infuriating depths to which our judicial system has descended. On 24 February 2022, Killer Tarrant's lawyer Ron Mansfield KC told the Coroner that his client was appealing the earlier Royal Commission of Inquiry's findings. The ground for appeal?…that poor little Tarrant only received a copy of the final report the week before it was published and was therefore denied "natural justice". At the risk of offending anyone else’s own sense of natural justice, Tarrant is on tax-payer funded legal aid. We’re all paying for the likes of Mr Mansfield’s Greenfield lazy harvesting.

The Coronial Inquiry devoted the last 10 days of May 2024 to deliberating on whether a door of the Masjid an-Nur had functioned properly during the attack. The Inquiry, which after five years has yet to complete its First Phase, is currently adjourned, due to reconvene in August 2024 to muse further on said door. Untouched to date is the one truly pertinent question that the Inquiry has asked itself, “Whether the firearms licensing process followed by Police in issuing the offender’s firearms licence can be causally connected to the attack, and therefore to the deaths”. Earth might just freeze over or be gobbled up by our Sun before that vexed question gets addressed.

Diseased COVID Inquiry

The public COVID Inquiry announced by the Labour Government in its death spasm was a sham deliberately designed to avoid any public scrutiny of how New Zealand might have better responded to the COVID Pandemic. Revealing features of the “First Phase” of Inquiry include the following:

• The First Phase is being held behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, and is talking only to those it wants to talk to

• The First Phase is chaired by Tony Blakely, who was not only a direct adviser to the decision-makers on New Zealand’s COVID response but also nurtures close relationships and friendships with many of those decision-makers. That’s Blakely on the right (below). But who’s the dude on the left? I thought it was former Prime Minister Helen Clark’s enigmatic but ubiquitous husband, Peter Davis. But I’m told it’s former Secretary of The Treasury, John Whitehead. Neither Blakely nor Whitehead will be part of Phase 2 of the COVID Inquiry.

  

  This is not a matter of a perception of a conflict of interests. Blakely’s is an actual conflict. Blakely’s personal interest in marking his own homework directly conflicts with his ability to dispassionately assess New Zealand’s COVID response. The fact that Flaky Blakely doesn’t step aside, or get the boot, says it all. What have we become?

• Matters expressly excluded from the First Phase include the following:

  • Vaccine efficacy (“safe and effective”?)

  • Judgments and decisions of courts and tribunals and independent agencies such as the Ombudsman, the Privacy Commissioner, or the Independent Police Conduct Authority relating to the COVID-19 pandemic

  • Particular decisions taken by the Reserve Bank’s independent monetary policy committee during the COVID-19 pandemic

The National-NZ First Coalition Agreement requires the Parties to do the following:

Despite the manifest shortcomings in the scope of the First Phase of the COVID Inquiry, National has not scrapped it. Blakely remains the Chair, and the Terms of Reference and modus operandi remain unchanged. Phase 2, apparently to meet the National-NZ First Coalition Agreement, is not scheduled to start until November 2024 or to deliver its final recommendations until February 2026 – more than six years after the Deadly Virus arrived.

For the first and probably not last time, NZ First has had to invoke the “agree to disagree” provisions of the Coalition Agreement.

Siouxsie and the Court Freeze

Siouxsie Wiles, who specializes in bioluminescence, bathed in the glowing limelight of COVID. The self-style “science communicator” (and KiwiBank New Zealander of the Year 2021) lapped up the public attention and adulation. Most of her COVID activity was gleeful moonlighting; outside of her job as an academic at Auckland University. The University did not require or expect Wiles to make herself a prime pubic figure over COVID. By mid-September 2021, Wiles was arguing for a permanent New Zealand COVID-19 elimination strategy, asserting that anything less would put the unvaccinated and vulnerable at intolerable risk.

Wiles drew flak from some quarters. Some of the flak was distinctly nasty and deranged. But unfortunately Wiles doesn’t subscribe to the adage, If you can’t stand the Heat, get out of the Kitchen. Wiles blamed her employer for not shielding her from the criticism, and sued Auckland University.

The only interesting thing to emerge from the November 2023 Employment Relations Authority hearing was that Wiles’ overriding motivation for wanted to see COVID permanently kept out of Aotearoa was that…she didn’t want to get COVID herself.

The Employment Relations Authority’s website states that “90% of judgments will be delivered within three months of the last day of the hearing”. With the Authority’s decision still pending, more than seven months after the hearing, Siouxsie’s case has fallen into the 10%-over-three-months basket, and likely into the Too Hard Basket. How long do these sorts of Court decisions have to take? What politics is playing out behind the scenes of these theatrical Court cases?

So what decisions could New Zealand usefully make, right now? Here are my top five:

• Make Police Commissioner Andrew Coster much less “Cozy”, by sacking him

• Express no confidence in Adrian Orr as Governor of the Reserve Bank, or just sack him too. (In November 2022, Orr’s Plum Chum, then Minister of Finance Grant Robertson, re-appointed Orr for five years, the maximum term available. The current Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, can remove Orr for “just” cause, which includes failing to adequately perform or exercise his functions or powers. New Zealand’s inflation rate has now been above the mandated 1-3% band for over three years…)

• Tell KiwiBank to abandon its New Zealander of the Year Awards and general Wokery and instead focus on providing a credible, cost-effective alternative to the Australian-owned Rapacious Oligopoly Banks (BNZ, ANZ, Westpac, ASB)

• Stop pretending Air New Zealand is a real business, and nationalize it

• Create a Government owned food procurement and distribution network enabling ordinary New Zealanders to buy staple foods at reasonable prices