Why would you believe MBIE report on cheap Chinese steel???

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China is watching

I believe we have gotten to a point with our neoliberal Government state agencies where you can’t actually trust their decisions.

Look at how the Ministry of Primary Industry protected and lied over fishing by fishermen.

Look at the way CYFs killed and abused kids and manage to escape historic scrutiny.

Look at the way State Energy have lied and manipulated the situation at Pike River Mine.

Look at the way Housing NZ allow state houses to be empty for years on end.

Look at the way the Government manipulates statistics…

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
  • Social Housing lies:

To make it look like the National Government are doing something about the homelessness crisis caused by the lack of social services and state houses, National have cleverly manipulated the way people can get onto the waiting lists to make it look like the waiting lists are actually shrinking…

Government manipulating social housing data – Child Poverty Action Group

An anti-poverty group says the Government is manipulating data on social housing.

The Government is pledging to reduce the time it takes to place people in state housing by 20 percent, as part of its Better Public Service targets.

Child Poverty Action Group housing spokesman Alan Johnson said the Government has made it harder for people to get on waiting lists, and people are discouraged from applying.

“Basically the target is about the waiting list and how long people spend on the waiting list.”

Mr Johnson believes that the waiting lists are being tampered with.

“We believe that … there is evidence of those lists being manipulated by the Government officials who are responsible for them.”

…by discouraging the poor from getting onto waiting lists and making those waiting lists even more difficult to get onto in the first place does nothing whatsoever to make the lives of those people better, it just hides the damage the National Government are causing.

  • Charter school lies:

The National Government are actively running a misinformation campaign to hide how much money Charter Schools are getting while hiding the results…

The Charter School Performance Cover Up

The major problem relates to the issue which surfaced last year, when the Ministry acknowledged that the interpretation of the secondary schools’ contract performance standards had been incorrect. As a consequence, the schools had also reported incorrectly against their contracts.

These incorrect figures had been used to determine the Ministry’s ratings in its May 2016 advice, referred to in the footnote. While the Ministry has now acknowledged that these figures are incorrect, nothing further has since been released.

The poor performance of the primary and middle schools is also evident in the Evaluation Report. Of the five primary and middle schools, which have contract targets set against National Standards, only one school, the Rise Up Academy, was assessed as having Met its contract targets.

And problems are also clearly evident in the assessment of performance against the Student Engagement standards. Vanguard Military School and Middle School West Auckland performed very poorly against the standards for Stand-downs, Suspensions, Exclusions and Expulsions.

Overall, the main takeaway from the Evaluation Report is a fairly damning indictment of performance to date.

But the continued cover up of the true picture should not be tolerated any longer.

…the National Government see Teachers as taxi drivers in an uber world, and believe they could dramatically slash education costs through charter schools hiring untrained teachers and by pushing education provision online. The National Government are hiding the failures of charter schools so that the anti-teacher beliefs underpinning their education policy won’t be challenged.

  • Prison reoffending lies:

Government walk away from their self created prison horror

the National Government who had ACC invest in 30% of the private prison at Wiri and who brought private prisons into NZ and who had to remove Mt Eden from their control after corruption and violence issues have now quietly removed the reoffending rates as a measure of success???

What a gutless back down!

National set 25% as their target to reduce reoffending and could barely get 4.5%. They sold the neoliberal private prison reforms on how amazing they would be to reduce reoffending, the truth is they have failed abysmally and the National Government will now hide the stats so NZers can’t see how much of a failure they have created.

…the National Government have lied about the good their neoliberal prison system could create and are now hiding that failure. This should be front page news and an outrage, but it’s not because the voters have been so conditioned to hate prisoners by a mainstream media who make ratings from that hate that they can’t see the human beings for the bars.

  • Beneficiaries are druggies lies:

In the above cases, the National Government manipulate or hide the stats to get their neoliberal experiments through, but in this stat all the National Government can do is actually lie about the stats. Remember when Bill English justified his open floodgate immigration policy because Kiwi workers were just too stoned to work…

Bill English says employers are regularly telling him that Kiwis can’t pass drug tests

Prime Minister Bill English is blaming young Kiwis inability to pass a workplace drug test as one of the reasons why overseas workers are needed.

English’s comments come on the back of record highs for immigration after it was revealed on Monday 71,300 more migrants had arrived in New Zealand than left in the year to January.

Speaking at his weekly media conference English said two or three business owners a week told him about the difficulty in getting Kiwi workers who apply for jobs to pass a drug test.

…so let’s just get this straight. We need to bring in tens of thousands of workers on dodgy work/student visas where they can be exploited…

…because NZ workers are too stoned? Really? It’s not to prop up the property bubble the National Government have inflated to keep property speculating middles class NZers voting for them, oh no folks, we have an open floodgate of immigration because NZ workers are too stoned to pass the tests?

Turns out that claim is just more beneficiary bashing…

Few beneficiaries fail pre-employment drug tests

In the last six months of 2016, more than 18,000 beneficiaries were sent for drug tests and 80 failed.

The Ministry of Social Development said the number of failed tests included cases where beneficiaries didn’t turn up to be tested.

It said only 54 sanctions were applied to peoples’ benefits for failing the test.

Over the previous three years, nearly 95,000 beneficiaries were drug tested – and only 450 failed or didn’t turn up.

That’s a failure rate of one in every 200.

In February, the Prime Minister, Bill English, defended record immigration levels saying businesses keep telling him that New Zealanders aren’t passing drug tests and jobs can’t be filled locally.

…so example of lie after lie after lie after lie.

So why the hell would we believe MBIE’s report on cheap Chinese steel that let’s Chinese steel importers off the hook?

Only one Chinese manufacturer even bothered replying to MBIE’s request for information, and MBIE admitted they made their conclusion based on “very limited information”.

So based on next to no information whatsoever, MBIE have decided that there is no issue with China dumping cheap and dangerously substandard steel on the NZ market which means we won’t anger China who have their hand around our throat economically because they take mountains of of our milk powder.

How convenient of MBIE.

 

6 COMMENTS

  1. Your first sentence says it all really.
    Anyone in the know will tell you that cheap unsuitable dangerous substandard steel has been used in some of our major infrastructure projects.
    One example is the main overpasses heading south of Auckland towards Huntly.
    A lot of the structural columns had to go back for a very expensive re-design to ‘beef up’ the amount of concrete around them to compensate for the weak steel.
    The absolutely out of his depth Simon Bridges has tried to cover it up and apart from a small mention when it was first discovered the media have obliged.
    It should have been a huge story as it has affected a lot of projects and if it hadn’t been picked up by a vigilant junior engineer it could have had and still could have catastrophic consequences down the line.
    Turns out the Chinese Co. that manufactured the steel was doing their own testing….
    The classic fox guarding the hen house.
    Bridges wanted it because it was cheap…he is about as naive as you can get.
    All products used on construction sites in N. Z should go through a N.Z certified testing laboratory…they don’t….plumbing products are another huge issue…..the list goes on…,

  2. We might as well put tariffs on imported products (No TPPA now) & use that revenue to support local manufacturing to make these building products like we use too! Better quality & better paying jobs! No need for Fletchers to have monopolistic control of the entire building product supply network anymore.

  3. New Zealand is caught between the emerging trade war between the US and China, the inevitable result of our ongoing neo-liberal approach to economics and politics. We are now suffering the consequences of cow-towing to American politics and it’s economic power base. Our problems are severely acerbated by the current America First power play.

    I find Scott Brown’s (US Ambassador handpicked by TRump) suggestion disturbing as recently reported: that if we didn’t want America’s help we should let him know and they would take their help elsewhere. Go figure! Get knotted, buddy!

    I advocate a pivot – letting go of America and allowing the Chinese Government decide on how to deal with illegal commercial dumping practices in our small island nation. China hasn’t told us that we will come last in any trade related negotiation and there are still over a hundred million Americans who honestly believe that TRump and his goons are the good guys – and that problem isn’t going to go away soon. Let America go figure out its moral conundrums while New Zealand resumes the moral leadership it has exercised for a century.

  4. Not just infrastructure building material either.
    In a few years time, there will be a nationwide outcry on the number of vehicles on the road, light and heavy that are structurally unsafe.
    A lot of the buses, trucks and cars on the road that are only a few years old are silently and unobtrusively rusting away but this has been covered up by the vehicle imports and sales industry.
    And no-one wants to know about it.

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