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Pike River movie undermined by glaring omissions
Richard Phillips
@Richard00691257
29 June 2025
This year’s Sydney Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Pike River, a 138-minute drama about the Pike River disaster, which killed 29 miners in November 2010 when a series of methane gas explosions struck the South Island coal mine.
Almost 15 years later it remains New Zealand’s worst industrial accident—one for which no one has been prosecuted, despite overwhelming evidence of criminal breaches of workplace safety laws, mishandling and suppression of evidence, and unprecedented legal efforts to protect those responsible.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/06/30/waro-j30.html
I haven’t seen the film. But lingering in my memory I think, was a mention of the miners being under pressure to make the mine profitable, to reach certain tonnage or they might close down and lose their jobs. And because of the pressure some decided that the safety controls were set too high and slowed output. And it was quietly said, one of the the younger members changed the setting of detectors scanning and indicating gas levels so they built to unsafe levels. And apparently it was a mine leaking with a gas that became potentially explosive when mixed with a certain amount of oxygen. The levels were understood by seasoned miners, but a younger mind might not have realised the deadly significance of certain mixtures – and ignorantly ‘played with fire’.
Poor wee Grey-cub, still trying to do The Stories.
Imagine if the next march was solely focussed on complaining about Peters.
Here’s John Lennon singing Imagine for you Jacqueline. It seems your sort of thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgFZfRVaww
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/578427/password-blunders-nuclear-codes-voicemail-hacks-and-businesses-going-bust
We give up our thinking brains, wariness and completely trust these new systems at great risk.!!! Scepticism is the catchword.
If we let our wariness drop about the way that tech is being insinuated into our lives, then not only will AI lessen our jobs it will dope the dopamaine in our minds.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/578397/is-ai-really-coming-for-our-jobs-and-wages-past-predictions-of-a-robot-apocalypse-offer-some-clues
Ozymandias !* https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=175514
The beautiful building is empty
November 8, 2025 33 comments
by Lindsay Shelton
I visited Tākina for the first time this week. It’s a huge and beautiful building. But it was almost empty. It’s called a convention and exhibition centre. But when I was there – there were no exhibitions and there was no sign of any conventions.
Just a very large cafe running from Cable Street to Wakefield Street. Almost as if they couldn’t think of anything else to fill the [..dah, dah] –
~~~$180m space.~~~
There was a lot of advertising for a future exhibition. But it’s still more than six weeks away. And I didn’t see any equivalent promotion of future conventions.
The Tākina website makes you think there’s always a choice of exhibitions.
“Explore world-class exhibitions at our premier venue … Discover a diverse range of premier exhibitions … Our space offers something for everyone … experience the best of culture, innovation and creativity.”…
I uncovered an old disparaging comment the other day that I’ll put in here –
‘Fine words don’t butter any parsnips’. They make more sense when you think about the intent, than what is actually being delivered at first sight by the promotion above. And on last sight as well. However there will be nothing left to see of our brittle little short civilisation after just a few years of climate change and destruction by human hornets and cockroaches.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition[1
Whakaari revealed much about NZ government’s lax approach to everything. It is deeply disturbing how far this country has fallen from a lightly into a hardly regulated system. Hot air balloonist going up, coming down alcohol impaired also, and a Scottish man come to deal with his daughter’s body after a mischance vowed never to come here again. And still we lie on and are hard to pin down.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/578438/pilot-reveals-chaos-amid-whakaari-eruption-aftermath
Thoughts about our declining future, and how we deserve better, but have to reach up to the level that some have imagined for us. And I am concerned for visitors to the country as well as our own conditions. The government does not seem to be able to apply itself to its task of running effectively a modern polity efficiently. The system is expending heavily in ways that don’t provide outcomes to serve the nation’s needs. This that happened at Wakaari after the eruption in 2019 is painful to read, as it is recounted at the current Coroner’s Inquiry.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/578438/pilot-reveals-chaos-amid-whakaari-eruption-aftermath
He said they provided aid where they could by going person to person.
“Most had ash covering their faces, so I just tried to clear their mouths and noses so they could breathe. It was a very intense situation and a real mix.
“Some I could tell were clearly dead. Others I thought were in the early stages of dying. Others seemed to be in marginally better shape, but everyone was covered in ash and debris.
“When you give someone a really good old shake, get down and have a listen, because you’re down there cleaning the ash out of their mouth and trying to free up their airways, you’re looking for dust moving around their nostrils, their face, trying to feel their chest for rise, things like that.”
Law said he did have first aid experience due to his military background and had assessed people being deceased before the 2019 eruption.
[But this:]
>>>>>>>>He said while doing his best to triage and provide aid to survivors he was >>>>>>>>surprised to hear emergency services wouldn’t be coming.
>>>>>>>>The inquest has been told that all 39 people rescued from the island on >>>>>>>>the day of the eruption, was done entirely by civilian boats and helicopters.
I have arrowed the parts that we should all note. This is our country taken over by amoral actors, who have learned their morals and behaviour while connected to unprincipled, acquisitive people who have adopted middle class mores in place of real values of humanism, morality and religion.
True Kiwis need to inform and raise ourselves for much of our lives to counterbalance the others who sink. Who knows how much time there is left while we have resources available; the amoral will deny us them if there is money or power in keeping us bereft. (Consider the Sicilians who have wet and very dry periods. James McNeish* wrote about Danilo Dolci*, an architect turned social activist who was unable, despite challenging the authorities with public fasts, to push through a dam project to give the people water in the dry season. Those who had control of the water had control of the people!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danilo_Dolci, and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNeish (He spent three years in Sicily with Danilo Dolci, the non-violent anti-Mafia reformer, and wrote Fire under the Ashes (1965, London: Hodder and Stoughton).)
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/87049775/obituary-sir-james-mcneish-19312016-intrepid-writer-who-looked-at-nz-with-a-cool-eye
…But he believed passionately in his craft, and left a body of work unusual in New Zealand writing. He came to believe, he wrote in his 2012 memoir Touchstones, “that writing is not something one does for amusement or even primarily for a living; that a book is not a toy or a plaything but rather something that can become a motive force or an instrument for action.”… He described books, writing, as as an instrument for action. It could be our action – why not?
And James McNeish was a power source, an example a human living, expanding adding to society. …he told one interviewer.
“It’s very dangerous to go to sleep, which is why I find permanent residence in New Zealand dangerous.”….
[Earlier he had inspired a Sicilian Mayor when on a project of recording folk music]:
“I recorded nubile maidens and grandmothers, lute-playing barbers, the songs of salt miners, the ballads of travelling minstrels, village festas – and once, after taping a town band playing mazurkas, was sent for by the mayor, who asked if I could arrange on returning to New Zealand for the entire village to emigrate.”.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/578442/sas-forces-used-in-search-for-fugitive-father-tom-phillips-military-confirms
I don’t think our police and ‘armed forces’ are really good citizens helping keep the peace. I object to people being hunted like mountain goats. That was all out of proportion, and if he failed to turn up to a hearing, probably he knew he wouldn’t be heard anyway. Mediation was being used in various ways, was heard about quite a lot, some decades back. Where have all the good practices gone?