Huge conflict of interest has been exposed by Newsroom. The public service scum who has called for the investigation of corporate spies, also used those corporate spies!
An ironic case of foxes and henhouses
The Government’s spooks and snoops have obviously been getting a bit cocky. But the announcement to investigate their use by government departments is highly ironic.Because the guy calling the inquiry, State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes, was in charge of MSD when it was using private investigators. Particularly in court cases where the state was on the hook for serious liability. Like, say, when children in state care have been raped.
Hughes was the boss at MSD when the Crown defended the White case in 2007. The civil case was about many things but it was essentially a test case about the Crown’s liability for abuse of children in state welfare institutions. Crown Law and MSD chucked millions of dollars at defending it because they knew if they lost there were thousands of other victims they’d be paying out substantial damages to.
The Crown won on statute of limitations, although the judge accepted the allegations of sexual abuse by one of the main plaintiffs. This judgment set the precedent the Crown wanted and allowed the state to pay negligible amounts to claimants on terms that suited the Crown’s budget. If victims don’t like what they are offered, their only option is to go through the invasive interrogation of a QC acting for the Crown in a court, with little to no chance of winning. Despite a Royal Commission of Inquiry that’s still their only option.
The case received no media coverage, probably because of heavy suppression orders. But there were all sorts of details that didn’t appear in the proceedings.
…MSD HAD to win the 2007 case because they had been using so many corporate spies and mass surveillance powers in so many other cases, if they lost the 2007 case, it would have exposed them to multi-millions in damages.
So the person who was deeply involved in using corporate spies, is now all of a sudden reviewing what those corporate spies have been doing.
How convenient.
Was that out of a sense of duty to get to the bottom of corporate spy use by the State, or was that to ensure what was revealed wouldn’t expose their previous use of those corporate spies?
After seeing how Housing NZ destroyed lives based on a myth, after seeing MSD attempt to imprison and damage beneficiaries by defining loans as income, after seeing the cruelty of the state in dealing with the most vulnerable amongst us time after time after time – learning public service scum who controversially used corporate spies is now investigating the use of those corporate spies should be a final straw.
The Left look at the State as the great leveller of unregulated Capitalism, but what if the State is part the bloody problem in crucifying the poorest and weakest amongst us?
The neoliberal revolution that occurred in NZ changed our public services from being the instruments that facilitated egalitarianism into psychotic corporations focused on making rather than doing. The neoliberal welfare State is there to punish and damage, it is not there to look after the welfare of those people.
The radical Left needs to consider targeting the State for an existential change.
I look at the spinelessness and gutlessness of the Labour Party and the Greens in power so far and I wonder at how a new populist, militant movement could be established to force real change. I see an army of beneficiaries who have been abused by the state and who the Greens and Labour are too frightened to stand up for in case it annoys the PSA.
Imagine if someone created a radically militant response to these public service scum, how many tens of thousands who have been abused by this system would rally to a far more radical agenda than the weak one being pushed by the current political spectrum?
I think Ross Meurant was onto something when he spoke to the gangs about political engagement. What if prisoner rights merged with beneficiary rights and a militant political expression of contempt for a public service that no longer serves the public but the elites?
Imagine.
Head spinning. Peter Hughes, rightly, I thought, regarded as a v good CE of the MSD, behaving like an antipodean Perry Mason behind the scenes ?
He really needs to distance himself from this inquiry, and a complete outsider be brought in. This is Stalinist Russian scenarios, where the individual is sacrificed for the good of the State, and if it has been happening throughout govt agencies, and under a National Govt, then any State servants leading such an inquiry make themselves suspect participants.
Little surprise then, that the NZDF thought that they could lie and get away with it.
I believe that the only way to claw back NZ from the oppressive clutches of the elite is for the gangs as discussed to form a political party and represent the masses in keeping the political establishment honest ,they don’t care for the laws and in some cases employ an attitude of “whatever means necessary ” which is needed ,I have been watching for a long time fed up with all the corrupt practise in NZ politics ,short of a armed revolution I don’t think there is any other alternative .as the screws tighten more and more we see the poor getting more desperate and going to more extreme lengths look at how many fairies gas stations are being knocked over at the moment it’s almost daily and it’s not for the mass drug problem that nzers partake in its for food to survive , but why don’t we also take away people’s rights to have a natural fire in their homes when China has no such ban and the industry is prob the most major contributor ,shit is all frked up ,globalism didn’t work ,everyone should go back to worrying about their own shit …bit of a rant sorry
You are on to it Martyn.
I have said before on several occasions about how the political right decided that in order to take possession of New Zealand they first had to take possession of the MSM.
Just how successful they were has become glaringly obvious over the last decade.
You can add infiltration of government services. The political right has stealthily bent them to its own agenda so it matters not whether you have a Labour government, you still have a public service which is loyal to National.
Many of us know a bit about the American public service, how when there is a change of administration there is an almost complete clean out in government services. The new administration wants staff who will work for them, not for the former government.
We used to believe the myth about our public service being neutral, getting on with the job on the instructions from the government of the day, whoever they were, and that political loyalties were not part of the scene.
In the past nine months we have seen that this is no longer the case.
The public service is political to an extent that we have never seen before in New Zealand. Many government departments are colluding with National to cover up the departmental disasters which have occurred over the last nine years (think corrections, MPI, foreign affairs, statistics…) and be as obstructive as possible to Labour.
Corruption on a massive scale.
I wonder what the antmen of Freedom.org think of this, if they have ever bothered to investigate?
OK, first it sounds like this Pete Hughes character does have a serious conflict of interest in investigating public service use of corporate spies. I agree he ought to step aside, and allow a more neutral person to run this inquiry, any nominations?
But *sigh*, like Bomber you are blaming the politicization of the public service on all public servants and the PSA, when it’s pretty clear to anyone who actually has any direct contact with people in the public service that it’s the corporatization of the public service that’s the problem. Corporatization, ironically in the name of cutting “bureaucratic red tape” imposed a strict corporate-style bureaucracy that centralized all decision-making in the upper management, especially the CEO. The CEO can be selected by the government of the day, along with the rest of the upper management, to carry out the exact policy of the government of the day, regardless of outcomes. This is the problem, not the majority of public servants doing their best to serve the public interest despite this crazy system, or the PSA that tries to protect them from their corporatist bosses while they do.
In the traditional organizational structures of the public service, public servants were obliged to work towards policy *outcomes* specified by the government of the day, but they had a lot more freedom to base the policy detail on how the governments’ chosen outcomes were to be achieved on peer-reviewed research from the universities. They developed and implemented policy by forming working groups with a reasonable degree of autonomy, working cooperatively across departments, ministries, and the public services as a whole. It wasn’t a perfect system, but for a couple of generations it gave us public health, education, housing, infrastructure, accident compenstation, and social welfare systems that were the envy of the OECD.
Short of abolishing the state and replacing it with a interlocking network of public interest cooperatives, the next best solution is to return to this more horizontal, self-managing style of public service. That way, it can’t be weaponized against an incoming government with plans for reform by stacking the upper ranks with patsies, which is the problem Bomber is so consistently misdiagnosing of late.
“The radical Left needs to consider targeting the State for an existential change.”
That sounds a bit like ‘smashing the state’.
“What if prisoner rights merged with beneficiary rights and a militant political expression of contempt for a public service that no longer serves the public but the elites?”
That sounds like the start of a workers united front. Because prisoners and beneficiaries are also workers criminalized and punished by the bosses state.
Imagine uniting union struggles with the WHOLE of the working class, de-unionized, divided, criminalized, and demonized, as a force capable of “existentially” changing the state?
Then imagine the whole working class united with other oppressed and exploited people – eg slaves, poor peasants, and workers drafted to fight bosses’ wars.
There you have the Russian Revolution, which threatened to ‘existentially change’ the whole capitalist world by smashing the Tsarist state, and the bourgeois state that tried to restore it with a military coup, as an example to all the worlds workers.
Such was the fear of the international bourgeoisie that the revolution could spread that it was invaded, bombed, and quarantined by world imperialism until it collapsed 70 years later.
Naturally, the bourgeois counter-revolution blamed its defence of capitalist private property and profit on the revolution and its Bolshevik leaders, and so set about dividing, criminalizing, punishing, and exterminating the working class and its revolutionary leaders ever since.
We are still living through the aftermath.
I’ve been waiting for your next post involving our Public Service @ Matryn, after having discussed various issues with a few (now retired) former Senior public servants.
We ALL wonder what (or more accurately WHY) the fuck happened to our public service over the past 3 decades (neo-liberalism/corporatisation and business imperatives, fiefdoms), BUT more especially over the past decade (politicisation, punitive culture, and the service of the ‘self’ and career, rather than the public.
And we DON’T have some romantic notion of the way things used to be in ‘the olden’ days either, but something fundamental and nasty has happened as senior management pursue their personal, often egotistical agendas.
Simply, they are not serving the Public.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Andrew McKenzie at HCNZ, Smol at MBIE, MSD, Corrections, and various others in central government, or at DHBs and in local government administration.
And it’s not anything that a State Services Commissioner will fix by merely shuffling the cards in the deck. That makes him part of the problem, not the solution.
I’m not sure Shane Jones has the answer either but he’s correct to point out some of the muppetry that’s become evident and that continues almost daily.
Chris Hipkins recognises things aren’t working as well as they could be, but let’s hope any review not only recognises the need for structural change, but also a cultural change that reinforces what it is that the Public Service is there to do – and that is, first and foremost TO SERVE THE PUBLIC in THEIR best interests.
What the hell is it, given the evidence that was known at the time, made Andrew McKenzie think it was OK to do what HCNZ was doing?
What the hell made Senior Managment/CEO at WINZ think credit card debt and loans should be considered as beneficiary income? (they may have received legal advice – if they did – to support their agenda, but they’ll have been responsible for initiating the process. They may have had pressure from politicians at the time, but if so, it was their DUTY to protest it (publicly if necessary).
The MPI not prosecuting……..
MoBIE enabling and encouraging labour exploitation by not properly resourcing various of its entities and encouraging shoddy vertically integrated consultancies in favour of curved screens, hair straighteners and stab proof vests.
The list goes on and is a matter of record. It is cultural and attitudinal starting at senior management and CEO level, and it is trickling down the longer it is left to go on.
Labour, NZFirst and Greens seem to recognise there is a problem. Now is the chance to fix it.
Christ! even at its most fundamental, dearest Matty H knows it isn’t working (after is recent criticism of a MoBIE report on Nine to Noon), and it’s usually a cold day in hell that I have to agree with him.
Why do you persist in pretending (or deluding yourself) that there is any other solution other than armed uprising by the underclass?
I surrender. Now, that wasn’t hard.
Was the first Labour government a result of an armed uprising?
Of course not.
Violence very rarely helps working people. If the Russian revolution proved anything, that so called workers revolutions are soon captured by power hungry lunatics.
If we are to have an uprising it must be none violent.
Although having a hefty set of balls is a double edge sword. It allows guys to get buff, take risks, see things no one else can see, it engages the entrepreneurial spirit. In the other hand it can take blood away from the brain. So like anything in life done execcivly will produce excess attention and then you’ll get people coming on who don’t really know what they’re doing.
So back to violence. The collapse of the petro dollar is absolutely unavoidable. Then you’ll get people looking back while getting run over trying to resuscitate a dead corpse and the dead corpse is the oil industry. No where on the planet is it profitable and even economically viable to extract oil. And that’s just the way it is. So you’ll get Luddites coming over to renewables, complaining that every ones taking muh job, not really having a clue what’s really going on. And you’ll also get nation states coming over not really knowing what’s going on. The local guys we can handle. But when nation states start trying to exercise control over New Zealand interests well that’s when the big boys have ago at each other. So a proper response to external control is parliament + capabilities of our own + approved first responders. And that’s having an open domestic door policy while at the same time having a bit of an independent foreign policy with around a $billion in annual expenditure and about $20-$30 billion in recapitalisation programmes across NZDF, foreign ministry and the rest of government, just to deal with any problem that may come our way from bio security and constabulary duties up to our tier one peace keeping / making ambitions both at home and abroad.
So yeah, no ones saying lets go out and give those nazis the death. But we should be wise to there tricks.
yes castro and it may come to that but I think we are miles away from that yet.
Because there are decades of peer-reviewed research pointing out that violent revolutions consistently produce regimes worse than the ones they replaced (the Bolsheviks being a classic example), or drift back to exactly what they were like before within a generation, while non-violent revolutions are historically much more likely to result in meaningful and sustainable change for the better? One example, with a few references to others:
https://www.v-dem.net/files/45/Users%20Working%20Paper%203.pdf
“M.B. says “I look at the spinelessness and gutlessness of the Labour Party and the Greens in power so far and I wonder at how a new populist, militant movement could be established to force real change.
Violence is not the answer, live by the sword die by thy sword. Been there done that, lucky to still be here. A ballot box revolution undertaken by a really staunch bunch of radical individuals will do it.
Drag radicals from right across the political spectrum into a patriotic, uncompromising centrist movement; smash the establishment by motoring up the middle between the centre left liberal neo-liberals & centre right conservative neo-liberals (Tweedledee – Tweedledum).
Then we’d be in a position to form a revolutionary, interventionist national unity/salvation government & bring about wholesale change & renewal. Classic divide & conquer as was recently done in Italy.
Eureka Martyn! You’ve discovered the State is the “leveller of unregulated captalism” but also the source/the problem that creates poverty. The State by operating within capitalist society is itself capitalist. This is disguised by ‘levelling’ – the attempts by the working class to get a share in what they produce. I see the distribution of some material goods around the community as masking the fundamentally unequal society we live in. But many contributors to TDB recognise this, they recognise the way capitalists protect their own interests at the expense of workers, the poor, the sick, foreigners etc It is necessary for capitalists to oppose anything that undermines the capitalist system. They may make concessions to appease the stroppy who want and need more to survive – as long as the system continues. What I am saying is that those who struggle for a share don’t upset the basis of capitalism. For real equality, for real democracy, we must get rid of capitalism itself.
This is what happens when you set up a Stazi Network here in NZ ?
Who actually are the Spooks and who are they working for the NZ People, CIA, Mossad the plot thickens ?
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