whanganui.org

Due to a total lack of interest in this blog by the good folk of Wanganui, ably assisted my failure to advertise it or to post enough information, I’m retiring the site.

All existing posts and comments have been copied to my super-blog

http://mywitsend.co.nz/

Please visit me there and make your views known.

Any future Wanganui posts will be published there along with a lot of other stuff about computer care for non-geeks, New Zealand, and my view of the world from the far centre. This site will closed down when my subscription to the domain runs out.

Thanks for calling.

And then it got worse

About a million years ago I was in the navy. Towards the end of my service time in the 1970s the Domestic Purposes Benefit was introduced. One result of that ill-advised legislation - Defence had to build a high-rise accommodation block for Auckland’s Devonport Naval Base. Just another cost to add to this millstone around the neck of society.

Why?

Before the legislation was enacted, there were usually about a dozen senior ratings living in the naval accommodation at HMNZS Philomel. Most Petty Officers and Chief Petty Officers were married and when serving ashore lived at home with their wives and families.

Those whose marriages were no longer in the first flush of burning passion didn’t have the option of shooting through because they couldn’t have afforded to pay maintenance to their abandoned wives and still live the high life.

Here’s a free ticket to the good life boys

Within a very short time - I think it was months rather than years – there was a flood of people needing accommodation – the long suffering taxpayer offered to subsidize the bludgers and they abandoned their wives and children in droves. The shore accommodation overflowed and a multi-story accommodation block was built.

Stupid legislation, and over 30 years later we’re paying for it bigtime. Anecdotally, we’ve all heard about young women getting pregnant just to get the DPB. You need to be wearing rose-tinted glasses to believe that it’s otherwise.

I have nothing against the DPB in principle

But like all other welfare payments it should be a safety net for those who have no alternative. Not an open slather giveaway.

What I object to is:

• that we haven’t done enough to force many thousands of fathers to pay their proper share of the cost of it.
  I know that some fathers are being taken to the cleaners. The system is far from fair. But many others pay little or absolutely nothing.
• that we haven’t done anything to discourage thousands of women from using it as a lifestyle choice.
• that, as a society, we aren’t encouraging wider families to look after their own.

And don’t give that politically correct nonsense about “better the kids are brought up with a single mother than in an unhappy two parent environment”.

• It isn’t so.
• Even if it were so, that doesn’t make it right.

Before this poisonous benefit was brought in I don’t recall abandoned mothers sleeping under bridges. I didn’t see neglected kids starving in the streets. People took responsibility for their actions and the actions of their families. People stuck to their commitments.

Society was better for it.

There’s art and there’s street sculpture …

The chainsaw carvings in Victoria Avenue were an eyesore. Good riddance to them. I’m sure that sculptor Merv is a very nice bloke and I’m sorry that his feelings were hurt, but his masterpiece was my blot on the landscape.

There’s a place for chainsaw sculpture but that place isn’t a permanent spot in a tree-lined avenue. An avenue is, by definition, a street lined with trees.

Living trees.

… and then there are trees

And while we’re on the subject of trees, what about replacements for the missing trees in Victoria Avenue and myriad streets all around Wanganui? Trees help to absorb the noxious emissions that we fill our city air with. As well as being easy on the eye they help to reduce city temperature extremes by absorbing heat and by shading asphalt.

Have you wondered why the temperatures shown on the evening news are a lot lower than what you suffered under during the summer days? It’s because of the vast areas of asphalt on our roads and ever-expanding heat retaining tar-sealed car parks.

Cities are invariably significantly hotter than the carefully selected places where the weather data are recorded. How many times do we look at the TV weather figure for Wanganui and say “Yeah, right”?

In my own little street I’m confronted by patches of flourishing weeds surrounded by concrete edging. These patches of ugliness were intended as tree sites. How difficult is it to sort that out?

Won’t put much strain on the rates.

And to stir a little controversy

It would be nice if the Victoria Avenue trees could be progressively replaced with natives. Won’t hold my breath on that one. I suspect that would be a minority view and I’ll bow to public opinion if that’s the case.

But we need lots of natives to replace lost trees in many other streets of our city. Beautiful Victoria Avenue is one of the reasons that so many visitors are surprised at what a pleasant city we have. Let’s add to that pool of beauty.

A dearth of decency

Michael Laws and offensive people I have known

I recently gave the Red Eye Café a swerve because some inconsiderate idiot had parked precisely dead centre between two car parks leaving no space for my little Freelander. I headed for Oggie’s Café instead. On the way I spotted a man pushing a beat up van in the opposite direction to mine. I stopped 100 yards up the road and walked back to lend a hand.

By the time I got to him he’d stopped pushing, but the van was still in the middle of the road. “May I help?” Said I.

He looked at me dead-faced and said “No.”

Nothing more. No thank you, it’s OK, or kiss my backside. Just a flat expressionless “No.”

“You’re welcome.” I said, and walked back up the road to my car. I was not pleased. Perhaps for the first time in human history, the Good Old Days really did have something going for them.

What’s this got to do with Michael Laws?

I’m sure that Michael is not an inconsiderate parker.

Well, I’m almost sure.

But his crusade to sort out the Whanganui DHB may have more chance of working if he gave some thought to the feelings of the other folk who’re trying to do the same. He and Clive Solomon appear to be lacking in the basic skills necessary to make a team work.

His recent confrontational behaviour at board meetings can do nothing to further the aims he espoused which persuaded folk like myself to give him their vote. Whether his views are correct or not, a more reasoned approach to people and problems would be more likely to produce results than the confrontational and aggressive behaviour exhibited recently at board meetings.

See for yourself in this Wanganui Chronicle report.

Makes me wonder whether or not Clive Solomon’s community support is standing on shaky foundations too.

First published in @ My Wits’ End March 12th 2008.

Roman Hasil isn’t the chief guilty party in yet another DHB fiasco

Watching the news media hounding Dr Roman Hasil has been disturbing to me.

Anyone who has experienced depression or lived with a victim would have immediately recognised the outward symptoms.

Watching the way TVNZ’s trusty news team pounced on an obviously distraught Hasil and his female friend in Australia was very disturbing. It wasn’t news reporting, it was akin to ambulance chasing. It was cruel.

The 8 unfortunate women whose lives have been affected by this flawed man’s botched sterilisation operations and problems with the bottle would have gained little comfort from the exercise in persecution. Hasil is as much a victim as they are.

Who is really to blame here?

OK, Dr Hasil is not blameless, but what about:

• the decision makers at Wanganui District Health Board and Wanganui Hospital who failed to carry out the most basic background checks when hiring Dr Hasil. They didn’t even contact his last employer.
• the recruitment company who held back a damning reference from one of two referees (yes, just two) listed in Dr Hasil’s CV.
• the string of employers who failed to address Hasil’s obvious health problems.
• the Medical Council, who could have done more to obtain information from their Australian counterparts.
• the whole unwieldy New Zealand health edifice which has left the Wanganui Hospital so short of medical staff that they find it necessary to cut corners. Too many administrators – not enough doctors and nurses. Overworked staff. A vicious circle of destruction echoed around the country.
• the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons who should have a one stop shop database of information about their members.

Who will pay when the lawyers start on the compensation hunt?

We all know who will pay. It’ll be the long-suffering taxpayers and ratepayers when the District Health Board is sued. It’ll be the patients whose care will suffer because of funds diverted to the battle and staff diverted by the process.

Who should pay?

• The recruitment agency.
• The individuals at the DHB who failed in their duty. Not the organisations to which they belong.

Every time an MP, a Minister, a council, a cop, or a raft of other perpetrators does something stupid which results in litigation the taxpayer pays the costs and the damages.

It’s time the individuals shouldered the responsibility for their actions. Maybe we could then look forward to a little more care being exercised before decisions are made or libellous statements uttered.

Responsibility

And after all this and various other fiascoes, the DHB Chief Executive, Memo Musa, still has his job.

Curious.

Published today in New Zealand matters:

As ye sow, so shall ye reap

Our dear leader, Czarina Helen, adopted an aristocratic disdain for anyone who didn’t toe her line even more quickly than that other political bully Rob Muldoon. For 8 years, through fearsome competence and an enormous capacity for doing everybody else’s job, she’s got away with sneering at you and me via the media when tough questions were posed.

This time she seems to have underestimated the resentment her high handed tactics have fuelled. Displaying hubris worthy of Ozymandias she and her yes-men have bulldozed ahead with draconian legislation which has got people’s backs up.

Despite the National opposition having been hiding their guttering lamp under a bushel for months, the polls have given them a dose of rocket fuel and dealt Labour a sucker punch. The usually canny Greens after playing “Me too” have also felt the backlash and rightly so.

It’s early days yet, but riding roughshod over freedom of speech is a good way of provoking a massive defection of swinging voters – those are the ones who actually think things out rather than doing what their father did.

To add insult to injury she preceded this outrageous attack on democracy with the cynical de facto promotion of Trevor Mallard as punishment for his unacceptable Mohammed Ali impersonation in the lobby of the House.

The Exclusive Brethren made me do it

Yeah, right.

Although the Brethren are well endowed with hubris themselves – not to mention breathtaking hypocrisy – their ill-judged campaign against Labour in 2005 was never going to have much influence. Kiwis, even politicians and sect leaders, are mostly quite astute when it comes to plying their vote.

This legislation won’t change anything except maybe the advertising income of the big daily newspapers. Ways will be found to ignore or circumvent the law. The legal profession will make a bundle.

When the Law Society, the Human Rights Commission and the Electoral Commission all cry foul, it pays to listen.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Thanks Percy.

A couple of weeks ago, in his River City Press column Rana Reckons, Rana Waitai reckoned that the appointment of Hamish McDoull as Labour candidate for Whanganui was done and dusted.

Right on Rana. Your column is always full of solid common sense and that’s a refreshing change – the only thing common about common sense is how uncommon it is.

Who had a say in this? The local Labour Party membership? The beloved leader and her minders? I suspect a divine decree from the Czarina herself but I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Did Jill Pettis stand down or was she pushed? Did she “voluntarily” stand down before she was given the old heave-ho?

Good luck Hamish. But keep your powder dry. There’s no internal democracy in your party of choice.

I indulged my usual Sunday morning routine today – reading the Sunday Star Times over a cup of coffee or two at Legends.

Their café prices are very competitive (unlike Vincent’s, just up the road, they don’t charge me an extra dollar for decaf) and the outlook is superb.

The view from next door at
Tamara Backpackers’ Lodge

Legends doesn’t get much patronage during the day. It’s a shame, because it’s a first rate establishment with pleasant staff, good coffee and great cooking.

My theory on this:

• although they do great à la carte and blackboard fare, they don’t have a sufficient selection of café food – slices, muffins, wraps and so on.
• unless they’re busy at the time, they close at 2pm, reopening later for dinner. I know that this costs them a lot of my custom, perhaps I’m not alone.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice place. Give it a try.

Published this morning in New Zealand Matters

Mallard Reducks

I live in hope, but I forgot the rules.

Nobody ever got rich underestimating a politician’s capacity for cynical disregard of the electorate or that electorate’s ability to forget the politicians’ abuse of their trust.

I’m not a Labour supporter, mainly because I can’t abide the Czarina’s demeanor of superiority, her status as minister for everything and her hijacking of every kindergarten fence painting for a photo op. I respect her intellectual ability and her political skills but the person who sneeringly talks down to me from the evening news will (probably) never get my vote.

However, I believe that in many ways they’ve been a good government, ably abetted in retaining the reins by National’s continual ability to shoot itself in both feet at any given opportunity.

Trevor Mallard has been an effective minister, albeit occasionally erratic. Our government would be the poorer without him. And he seems a nice bloke.

Nevertheless, what he did was not acceptable. He should have walked the plank and awaited redemption (à la Ruth Dyson) until the next government or opposition is formed.

He still has his $250,000 salary (my guess), the ministerial car and the perks. He’s been demoted 3 places to the second bench but with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge has been given a virtual promotion with the redistribution of portfolios.

It’s not right.

I spent 20 years in the Royal New Zealand Navy. For the last 5 of those years I was a commissioned officer. If, while holding that commision or the Queen’s Warrant which preceded it, I had done what Trevor did, I’d have been court-martialled, lost my commission and been discharged from the navy.

Not so those who would have been my employers.

What sort of an outfit is this?

Rana Waitai’s column in last week’s River City Press was interesting reading. Rana has always seemed to me to be a man with his head screwed on and his down-to-earth observations on his new positions in council and the Hospital Board are a sign of hope that my vote for him wasn’t wasted.

I was tempted to say, “Hardly surprising when you consider his background,” but, sadly, a few of his erstwhile senior colleagues in the Police Force give the lie to that assumption.

Rana also wrote about the reduced vote count for Vision candidates in the election which brought him into Council.

There seems to be a feeling about, expressed often and with some vituperation by Rob Vinsen (who never misses an opportunity to put the boot into Vision whether it’s deserved or not), that the Vision team were given a thumping of Rugby World Cup proportions in the election.

Well, the fact is most people seem to have voted the way I did, giving an increased vote for Mayor Michael – despite his propensity for pit bull tactics – and pulling back a bit on Vision.

We had our way for good or ill – as happens with elections. We have “get things done” Bulldozer Laws and we have a Vision team without a majority. but let’s keep things in perspective. The Vision team have only been reduced by one. Hardly a massacre.