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mainland press
THURSDAY April 18 2013
Editorial
Jo Kane jo@mainlandpress.co.nz
Counter spin
Tom Frewen
Spies and gobbledygook Who creates jobs? AS the nights start to draw in and the days seem go by so quickly we seem to be bombarded with all manner of security leaks. With that comes a lack of confidence in the systems that are put in place to respect and honour our private information and our right to access them. We expect our private information and the responses to be shared with us so we can make decisions based on the very best information available whether for our health, education, finances, work or in Canterbury’s case postearthquakes. Is it too much to ask that those that hold our personal information share it with us but also make sure that it is secure from any other intrusive parties or for ill-gotten gain? The whole realm of sophisticated and technologically advanced gadgets with websites, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have some putting their whole lives out there for everyone to see. They do this willingly, knowing that once it’s in the public domain then it’s there forever. But then other people post photos or information that they have not asked permission for and at times the consequences of that come at a tragic cost and undermine our own civil rights. The sending of multiple (huge) files containing personal information seems at best sloppy but now in epidemic proportions. It seems unfathomable that there are no simple procedures that prevent such occurrences. When one thinks of a workplace and disgruntled employees, how vulnerable is our privacy when relationships go pear-shaped? The explanations or apologies for these lapses are now trite and over used. The EQC emails have added another
dimension as it seems the information attached to an email contains evaluations that are meant to help the client come to a fair apportionment of the costs to settle some claims. The disquiet now is Jo Kane about how fairly has each claim been treated. The question is why was the information not shared with the hapless homeowner who just wants to get on with their lives by restoring their homes with a honest and even handed appraisal from an organisation (EQC) that was set up to protect from natural disasters - not screw us. Spies, withholding information, inaccuracies and plain nosiness do nothing to help the general public confidence in those holding our personal files and our right to privacy. Unfortunately our lives have become open books whether we want it or not. There are those who do not appreciate, yet, the advances in technology and its web. It has become an unmanageable beast, with spammers, corrupt files, a slip of a finger, a moment’s inattention having the potential to undermine trust, confidence and the security of our most intimate details. We are vulnerable under this type of information technology and it won’t get any better as we strive for faster access to information that is all reliant on a microchip. Perhaps it’s time to bemoan the endangered species like the cheque books, cash, the daily post, physically talking to each other and even newspapers.
GOOD government is built upon the objectives of full employment, adequate housing and affordable health and education services. If that makes sense to you then you must be a socialist like Warren Freer, the Labour MP and cabinet minister who died recently aged 92. He retired in 1981 just after Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s prime minister and made ‘socialist’ a term of abuse. As repulsive as they appear, the riotous celebrations at her death last week, aged 87, are an inevitable part of her legacy. “There is no such thing as society,” she famously said. No society, therefore no need for socialism which, she believed, encouraged dependence on the state. Too many people were thinking: “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it”. If Warren Freer’s beliefs were the norm in the three decades after World War II, Margaret Thatcher’s represent the second 30 years. That’s enough time to judge how well individualism and the free market have done in delivering the objectives of full employment, adequate housing and affordable health and education services. In Auckland, you would have to say the market has created a total dog’s breakfast of housing, not to mention the leaky buildings crisis.
What about full employment, remembering that it is just an ‘objective’? Well, jobs are no longer on the Government’s to-do Tom Frewen list. “What the Opposition does not get,” social development minister Paula Bennett told Parliament last week, “is that it is not actually the Government that creates jobs; it is businesses.” But the Government does create jobs. Walk down Lambton Quay at lunchtime and every second or third person with a briefcase is probably a Government spy, one of 500 working in nearby office blocks. Spending on them has shot up over the past 10 years, from $23 million per annum in 2003 to $57 million today at the GCSB (300 employees), and from $15.6 million to $40 million at the SIS (200 employees). But the Government’s biggest job creation scheme is in the finance sector. The partial privatisation of state-owned energy companies will generate $100 million in fees for the bankers, advisers, accountants and parasitical professions such as communications that are the real legacy of Thatcherism/ Rogernomics - and who now decide which health and education services we can afford.
Tom Frewen's career as a journalist began at the Otago Daily Times and Radio Otago. After an overseas experience at the BBC he came back to be editor of the Gulf News on Waiheke Island. Moving to Wellington, he started the Mediawatch and Today in Parliament
programmes on National Radio, and has reported Parliament for the past 19 years. The author of a variety of columns, going back to his student days at Otago University, he can safely claim to have spent almost all his life writing rubbish.
Letters to the editor Local body elections Cemetery or dog park? Regarding the article What’s their agenda? Councillors reveal election plans (Mainland Press, April 11): I HAVE read the article, it was very fair and interesting for those who don’t know us. I wanted to explain my choice of dinner friends, not that it matters now but in case you wondered why, Jenny Shipley because I think she has achieved a work/life balance, which I have never got quite right. Maybe she could help me. Nelson Mandela because he lead his people in forgiveness and reconciliation and John Button because I never see my husband enough. Thanks for doing the article. Ka kite ano Ngaire Button Christchurch deputy mayor
SINCE when did the Sydenham Cemetery become a dog park? Here, there is a regular procession of seemingly upright citizens who having either exercised their dogs in the adjoining Bradford Park, then stroll through the cemetery while allowing their animals to free range unseen until called. Unbelievably, others simply drive into the car park and let their dog out for a while. Our much-loved mother’s funeral in February was ordeal enough without also having to pick our way carefully across heavily fouled grass, to reach her gravesite. Family members visit several times each week, and on nearly every occasion, there are confrontations with any number of roaming, leaping dogs, before having to deal with the disgusting mess that they have left behind on the
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top soil of the grave, and on flowers previously placed there. It is not so much that some local dog owners blithely ignore the council signs about keeping dogs leashed in this area, but clearly that they show a total lack of respect for what is a burial ground, and for the people who visit it. We wonder if they would be equally as indifferent if they found their front fences tagged? Yours sincerely, Brent and Lesley Gibbs (for the Gibbs family), Papanui
Millionaire leader LABOUR leader, David Shearer, must be a very wealthy man if he can forget $50,000 he had lying around in an offshore bank account. He probably qualifies as one of Sir Michael Cullen’s ‘bloody millionaires’. Yours faithfully, Bruce Grimwood, Cashmere
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