Sam Lotu-liga has finally done the honourable thing and has stood down from Politics after the his disastrous time as Minister of Corrections.
Why National thought an inexperienced Minister could keep a handle on a corporation as corrupt as SERCO is as surprising as how poorly he oversaw it.
You had this dreadful feeling that Sam was learning new allegations about SERCO while he was on air with Journalists asking him the questions.
He had no idea what was going on, he had no sense of what was needed to be done and he was the Minister when a huge number of abuses against prisoners occurred.
But Sam wasn’t the problem.
The problem is us.
The mainstream media are crusading at the moment about our privatised, corrupt and abusive prison system, but what their analysis misses is why we have locked up 10 000 people?
Why have we allowed ACC to be a 30% owner in a private prison?
Why have we allowed politicians and the Sensible Sentencing Trust to whip up our anger?
The answers are simple. The NZ media.
The NZ media love crime stories. They are cheap to make, they rate their arses off and it’s easy to fan anger and fury. It’s this mainstream media generated anger and fury that gets manipulated by get tough on crime politicians, this is the anger that allows 10 000 in prison, this is the anger that gives a state department like ACC a direct revenue stream from incarceration.
Every year without fail the NZ media all report on what Prisoners will get for Christmas dinner, every year it’s framed with ‘their victims won’t get that’ style commentary. We love to hate prisoners in NZ and we scorn the concept of prisoner rights, I believe this sadistic drive to see prisoners suffer comes from a place of deep cultural insecurity, that our racist justice system punishes Maori far more than white NZers can not be ignored.
We have a corrupt corporation running prisons which are producing men and women more damaged when they come out than when they went in. We have allowed anger to influence social policy and that social policy is merely creating an ocean of spite.
I had him marked as having a reduced political lifespan, but I didn’t expect him to stand down altogether.
https://willnewzealandberight.com/2016/12/12/divvying-up-the-portfolios-in-the-house-of-bill/
Clearly Sam has no future in an English led Government. So for the first time Martyn I have to disagree. Sam has jumped because he knew he was going to be pushed. In the cold heart light of day, Sam was protected under Key.
Maybe more importantly the story by Barry Soper of Key being Knighted( after Soper was ordained by Key) is a much bigger story particularly after Key stated honestly in front of t.v. cameras that all he wanted was to be liked. Key stated that more than most people he just wanted to be liked. So for me, the legacy of Key was “the boy who wanted to be liked”.
Sadly it was at every one else expense.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11766030
Good riddance to him. In fact, the whole bloody lot should go!!
@ PRISS. I agree. Fuck trying to dissect the why’s and wherefores. Lets get rid of the pricks. All of them. ( I realise I’m writing from La La Land but what a lovely thought for Christmas? )
Lotu-liga is a useless bastard and good riddance to him. One less politician to spend my taxes on himself while the homeless and mentally unwell scavenge the gutters for a fag ends.
You’ve got to hand it to National, they cynically set up Sam Lotu-liga as the fall boy should and probably when this policy imploded.
Whoever the ideologically/profit driven men were inside the National Party that thought this flawed, internationally proven failure would fly in NZ, it sure wasn’t Lotu liga. But I assume they guessed him to be ambitious and even better unquestioning. Because if Sam had given this crap idea 5 minutes close attention he would have realised how risky and awful it was and avoided it like the plague. He would have seen the failures within the US alone and realised for profit prisons don’t work for the people and cost a fortune.
Even worse for him he did not have the lying DNA required, that many of his compatriot ministers possessed, to talk his way out of the cluster fuck that was Mt Eden and no matter how hard Paul Henry tried to assist, Sam was a possum in the headlights from that day forward. He has gone because somebody else’s stupid ideological idea failed. Wonder who that Mr Ideological was?
But still Serco are still in place at Wiri and word is it ain’t much better.
The real problem isnt Serco, it is the Department of Corrections.
If they are not abusing the intentions of the OIA you will find that the record of Department run prisons is worse than the Serco run prisons – and keep in mind that Mount Eden is the most challenging prison we have.
Ask the Department how many Deaths in Custody they have had at Mount Eden since they took control in July 2015, then compare that with the number Serco had – only one of many examples.
As for the much heralded “Reducing Reoffending”: what a sad joke
Tis a shame, really. There are three National mps who I’d love to see remain in office; Hekia Parata, Nick Smith, and Sam Lotu Iiga. All three are so gaffe-prone that they are a very public reminder why National is hopeless at governance.
Damn. They may replace him with someone more effective at bullshitting on a Ministerial level…
The public seem to have forgotten all the NACT promotion of privately run prisons and the high rates of prisoner rehabilitation.
Where did all that bullshit come from.
“We have a corrupt corporation running prisons”
Martyn, – same thing with most of NZ now including who is running down our SOE’s also such as Kiwirail, and we saw what they did to Solid Energy also.
it seems that they at Goldman Sachs are running NZ into the ground like they did Greece before they sold it for a fire sale price.
EX Goodman Sachs employees are all winding up in our treasury also, like Paula Rebstock and her German husband and others!!!!!!
So Matryn we are being set up for a failed state like Greece had become, so you’d better get onto this story, and perhaps that was why john key fled as he was a part of inviting all these foreign crooks into NZ and sit on the treasury over the last 12 yrs.
it makes sense that treasury are saying kill Kiwirail regional services doesn’t it now?
Only Goldman Sachs folks could say to kill rail here.
They always backed SS Joyce’s plan to make road freight transport into another mega corporate monopoly monster.
They have already done this with air travel as we see now with high prices for air travel after it was turned into a virtual single market cosy monopoly.
Nactional hate healthy business competition also as they are crooked thugs, and have closed down many other former NZ companies to then allow foreign companies in to monopolise the markets in their favour, just look at the media now????
Slam the Nactional anti competition racketeering policy please as John Shonkey has fled but his soldiers are still everywhere and carrying on such as SS Joyce.
Nice post. Good one. It’s bloody outrageous.!
Cheers.
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