If we could stop interviewing the toilet Aaron Smith had sex in for a moment, as first reported on The Daily Blog last year when this SERCO scandal broke, there were previous internal reports into the fight clubs that were incredibly damning and were smothered so that the Government would not be embarrassed by failure at their latest right wing social policy experiment.
I blogged last year that the Government were holding up the release of these reports…
It is no surprise that Serco and the Government are hiding the report, they have to get their stories straight before it gets out to the media.
The whitewash into the allegations at Serco follow previous unpublished reports that highlighted concerns going back over a year. Why haven’t THOSE reports been released and when will they? The reality is those previous reports won’t be released as they are the most damning.
The reason the Government need this to dip beneath the media radar again is because they are very reliant on the idea to privatise social services and private prisons failing won’t help that.
The ever brilliant Antony Loewenstein makes the point that Serco are only staying afloat because of their brutal Australian refugee camps…
British multinational Serco is in trouble. After years as the favoured outsourcer for public services in Britain and countless countries around the world, the latest figures show a financial crash of unprecedented proportions. The firm announced it is writing down its business value by nearly AU $3bn with no dividend for shareholders and a plea for an injection of a billion more dollars. This is a “bitter pill”, according to its chief executive Rupert Soames.
Revealingly, the corporation admitted that without its Australian detention network, its profit would have been even worse. In other words, imprisoning asylum seekers in poor conditions for extended periods of time in remote locations is good for business. Serco won the contract to manage all of Australia’s mainland facilities and Christmas Island in 2009 – I was part of a team that first published the contract between Serco and Canberra in 2011 – and the profits have soared ever since.
Those of us who have been campaigning against the privatisation of prisons were making these points over 6 years ago, it is sad that the media’s honeymoon with the Government has kept the deep problems here off the media agenda for so long. The reason no one cared about this is because NZers have built up such a media fuelled hatred of prisoners that their abuse has not registered at all as something we should even be informed of.
…hilariously I noted at the time…
Stripping prisoners of their right to vote, abusing them and leaving them in poorly guarded environments where that abuse can become the norm should embarrass us. My guess is the report will get released over Christmas or on the day the All Blacks do their victory parade.
..the Government waited until an All Black had sex in a toilet to release it.
The stuff that has been going on is “bizarre” to put it bloody mildly.
On The Nation this morning Lisa Owen interviewed “Crusher Collins” about the now released complete report and its findings. Oh, how defensive she was, while she tried to appear so “staunchly” determined to get things right in future.
So the blame went to the monitoring staff, to the existing or former staff at Serco, she claimed the same “fight clubs” already existed before Serco ever took over the Mt Eden Auckland Remand Prison, and she was “astonished” about the findings.
She asserted that Serco started off doing a good enough job, but then it kind of went wrong. She defended the Wiri Prison they run, and said that state run prisons basically had the same problems.
And on and on she went about not having seen any reports, about Serco only having taken over management of prisons (as private operator) “recently”, and bla, bla, bla, I could not believe her answers.
She also defended herself, for having only been in charge of Corrections for a short time, and laid most responsibilities on the Chief Executive and his staff for details not coming to her attention.
And when Lisa mentioned how the union(s) had by way of emails already raised concerns about the goings ons in 2013, “Crusher” even went as far as blaming the UNIONS?!
Why would they not inform the Minister, why would they back off when the Corrections or Serco management told them to back off, she asked?
Come on, Judith Dishonest Collins, this is not all “new” to you people in charge of this government, same as you know more about other stuff happening and going wrong. Your calls for “more transparency” is hollow talk, as we have demanded transparency for years, but your lot blocks and delays OIA requests on a regular basis, “transparency” you may desire for YOURSELF, on your Minister’s desk, but certainly not for us the public.
I am astonished though, how the Office of Ombudsmen did not pick up on fight clubs and so, as they do regularly inspect prisons, year in and out, as that is their legal responsibility.
But knowing how underfunded the Office of Ombudsmen has been for years, how they struggle to keep up with their work, and how they will likely also have been hindered by operational staff in prisons, acting on orders or instructions by management, if not higher up, I am NOT SURPRISED that the Ombudsmen cannot and will not do their job.
The Ombudsman should give us some damned answers also, why they failed, and speak up and out again, stating clearly what is hindering their work. If nothing improves, we may as well get rid of the useless “watchdogs” without teeth that we have.
I know people waiting over three years now for that Office to finalise investigations into OIA related complaints, which seem to be lying on their desks endlessly, not being addressed.
We have a dysfunctional system, not only at Serco prisons, at prisons generally, not only at Corrections, we have a dysfunctional public service and even private service providers employed by state agencies.
Where are also the “evaluation reports” on welfare trials, such as on “Mental Health Employment Services”???
We get NO TRANSPARENCY, no proper answers, and endless obfuscation, pressures on public servants and private operator staff to shut up, while they get no pay rises, or even actual cuts, with more working on time contracts on outsourced basis.
New Zealand is going downhill fast under John Key and his government, it is becoming a basket case when it comes to standards, the law and proper services being delivered.
And I do NOT believe Judith Collins for one bit, to not be in the know about much of this, some of the issues will have been discussed in Cabinet, and decided on to be swept under the carpet!
From the Prison Inspector’s Report (that Serco tried to keep secret through unsuccessful Court action), on page 14;
Ref: http://www.corrections.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/856650/Phase_One_MECF_Report_FINAL_REDACTED.pdf
So there we have it. The secret report by the Special Monitors (not to be confused with the ordinary Prison Monitors tasked with monitoring Mt Eden) was shelved not by Serco – but by Corrections Dept management.
The question is: why?
Sounds similar to the Ministry in charge of monitoring fishing withholding recorded evidence of dumping certain loads of fish they were not supposed to catch.
This is what goes on all over the show, I bet, the ones in charge of checking and monitoring are told to shut up and not make public what really happens in our ministries and government departments.
Those that dare talk, they risk their bloody jobs.
“secret SERCO report that was smothered?” sickening Martyn.
Boy OH BOY, Steven William Joyce is truly proud of his “propagandist prowess as his relative William Joyce was;
William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw as he won the heart of Adolf Hitler who requested William be invited to Berlin to live in his palace there in 1942 for his propagandist prowess.
For his part here in NZ Steven is probably also expecting this from his master J Key for also churning out such high quality propaganda designed to smoother the reality of our time.
After all it was jonkey who asked S Joyce to be his “Campaign Manager”
See the similarities here?
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres8/twilight.pdf
Unless Key and his Campaign Manager don’t reverse their inherent desire to follow the Globalist “free market economic models here and everywhere they risk loosing the next election as more of this brutal servitude of repression of our sovereign rights to a Social order that we built up formerly under “Egalitarianism” (sharing in equal re-distribution of our common wealth) the voters will turn toxic and revolt against this Globalist Governence.
I have just read Steven Joyce’s Relative’s chapter during William Joyce’s self exiled writings in Germany during the war on 1800th century English Economics and it seems that William Joyce was railing against the premise of “a free market” as being good for our society!!!
Quote “To understand the passion for Free Trade, characteristic of industrial Liberalism, it must first be appreciated that the employers wanted cheap food for their employees, not in order that the latter might have it in large quantities but for the sole purpose of keeping wages as low as possible.”
So it now seems by this William Joyce unlike Steven Joyce is going against his Nephew’s eagerness for a global “free market” plan as Steven is directing John Key to open NZ up to “free trade,” so read this exert from chapter one on England’s 18th century economic transmission.- William Joyce’s 1940 writing of “Twilight over England”
(It is now clear that Steven Joyce is a traitor to his own ancestry as he is to us kiwis.)
TWILIGHT OVER ENGLAND
by
WILLIAM JOYCE
alias LORD HAW-HAW
Internationaler Verlag
Berlin W 15
1940
AAARGH
Internet
2008
William JOYCE : Twilight over England (1940)
Chapter II: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
THE reader may have innocently hoped at the close of the last chapter, that the historical discussion had come to an end. In this life, the innocent are often maltreated and the hopeful disappointed.
Our brief general survey was intended to prepare the ground for consideration of those issues which are of major importance today: but no such consideration can properly exclude the subject of England’s economic development during the last century: for modern capitalism must be traced to its roots before its nature can be understood.
At the end of the eighteenth century the population of the island was about one fifth of what it is today: and the land was capable of maintaining it. Poverty certainly existed: but it was due to maladministration and to a defective scale of social values, not to any inadequacy of natural wealth.
If England had fewer than ten million people to support today, her economic position would very certainly be different from what it is.
One must try to understand that the Industrial Revolution meant a transvaluation of all values.
People had hitherto been content to live on the land and draw from nature their simple but, in general, adequate needs: with the rise, however, of the great towns, they began to long for the relatively high money payments which, in the first instance, were used to lure the healthy peasant
population into the factories.
We should doubtless call these wages ludicrously low: but to the country people they at first seemed high, because they were used to handling very little money and did not appreciate how expensive town life would be.
Having been accustomed to living on food from their own land, they were unable to visualize the snares of urban shopping.
It was not, however, the desire to handle more money that was solely responsible for the fateful transmigration that [26] occurred.
Another powerful factor was the destruction of the cottage textile industry by the overwhelming competition of the factories.
The genius of men like Crompton and Arkwright had rendered possible a greater, a more rapid, and a more uniform supply of spun and woven
goods: but it had, for obvious reasons, put the cottage weaver and spinner out of business.
Thus Goldsmith’s Deserted Village was not so much a description as a prophecy.
Agriculture grew weaker every day: and as the old landlords found themselves in ever increasing difficulties, the Liberal or Whig industrialists
determined to make an end not only of their political power but also of their economic existence.
Many years of propaganda were required to prepare the way for the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846: but once the Liberals were firmly in the saddle after their victory of 1832, it was only to be expected that the policy of importing cheap foreign food would be adopted, whatever the consequences to the British farmer, who was no longer regarded as the backbone of the country but rather as a sort of pendulous abdomen that kept one warm in the winter but hindered locomotion all the year round.
To understand the passion for Free Trade, characteristic of industrial Liberalism, it must first be appreciated that the employers wanted cheap food for their employees, not in order that the latter might have it in large quantities but for the sole purpose of keeping wages as low as possible.
The media are not responsible for the apathy the public have towards prisoners’ living conditions. The public feel the way they do because they have for too long suffered at the hands of those criminals, who have absolutely no regard for the rights and welfare of the NZ public. Prisoners are simply reaping what they sowed.
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