This weeks guests are Street Chant front woman Emily Littler and former librarian and radio personality Sigrid Yiakmis. We talk about music, following your dreams, living life to the fullest and why Sigrid cried during mad max.
It’s not a riot because Serco – the company who would be fined for a riot – told the Corrections Minister it wasn’t a riot – unbelievable! Instead of the Corrections Minister ‘grilling’ Serco – how about the media grill the Corrections Minister on the $1billion spent on Serco?
I’ve been covering the privatisation of our prisons since they were first mooted by National when they came into power in 2008. The warnings, the issues and the counter productive outcomes have all been ignored but the current implosion at Serco should come as no surprise to those who have paid attention.
The only surprised person here seems to be the Corrections Minister
Yesterday the Corrections Minister knew nothing about prisoner abuse in Serco. Yesterday he didn’t know about a death. Yesterday he’d never heard of ‘dropping’.
Yesterday all that was required was just a stern telling off of Serco with acknowledgement those rascals in prison were drinking and smoking drugs.
Butter wouldn’t melt in the Minister’s mouth as he alternated between ‘I-know-nothing’ mock shock and shrill accusations of ‘playing politics’.
Today, a different story…
…so how much do we now actually trust the Minister when he says the staffing isn’t a problem? How much trust do we have in this giant corporate prison to give a damn? How much is this right wing experiment costing us our ethical value as a free egalitarian nation?
If you refuse to accept that incentivising incarceration for profit sets up some perverse outcomes, then look at what 2 guards per 50 prisoners and a corporate culture of hushing up mistakes with a corrupt record produces for us.
A Lord of the Flies fight club that insults every concept of civil society.
That’s why we have a public system, because philosophically the State should always be directly accountable for anything that happens in the prisons as the detention of another human beings liberty is power we want to be able to directly influence if it is abused.
Right now the Minister can hide behind Serco rather than be held directly responsible for this madness.
That’s why the Minister must resign if he has been found lying. The threshold must be the same as it used to be, we should reject outright any claim by the Minister that he wasn’t aware, the Government changed this system from public to private, if it had happened in a public prison the Minister would have resigned by now, we should refuse their redefinition of responsibility because they’re the ones who made the change.
This is a Government that stripped prisoners of their rights to vote in NZ elections, so these prisoners can’t even vote against the system that is placing them into fight clubs.
It just manages to uglier and uglier doesn’t it?
The Minister was verbally told last month in a open meeting about the prisoner allegations, Serco knew about the fight clubs for 18 months, Guards were complaining in 2012, 2 previous investigations have been completed but not released, there was a riot and now allegations of total Gang dominance inside the private prison.
And while we are on the topic of corrections, isn’t the true incarceration numbers actually far higher than officially recognised?
Have our 3 categories of home detention (Home, Community & Intensive detention) become a shadow prison population?
The introduction of, and/or beginning of recording of Home Detention statistics, these 3 categories of external detention has now grown to fully over 100% the size of the actual prison population. That was reached in 2010 when the total number sentenced to one of the 3 home detentions exceeded the total number of prison sentences. In 2014, the number in home detention was 127% higher than the total prison population as far as sentences handed down goes (16,176 / 7,114).
So our true incarceration population when we include those on community, home and Intensive detention isn’t just the 7114 prisoners in prison. It’s also the 16 176 on detention.
So that’s a real prisoner population of 23 290.
How’s this prison nation of ours looking now? When do we start asking some hard questions about our system of ‘Justice’?
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How is this nonsense and Max Key’s holiday shots dominating NZ News sites?
Are we so lacking real journalism that vacant petty celebrities are somehow important enough to eclipse real issues? Sure, the weird social media hatred thrown at Crystal gives a dark insight into how much we dislike women in this culture, but this still feels like a privileged school yard fight at a Private College.
Kelvin Davis is finally making some headway on the failed Private Prison experiment (although his performance on Paul Henry was a bit flat footed). Davis asked hard questions and as TDB suggested last week – the allegations are worse than just fight clubs.
MP Kelvin Davis initiated a snap debate in Parliament this afternoon following the recent release of videos showing inmates, likely to be from the privately-run Mt Eden remand prison.
He said there were allegations seriously injured prisoners had been transported to other prisons around the country including Ngawha in Northland so the injuries wouldn’t be recorded in Serco’s statistics.
Mr Davis named a man, who he called ‘Prisoner Evans’, who had received a ruptured lung during a practice called “dropping”.
“I’m told on good authority there is a practice in Mt Eden Corrections Facility called dropping where prisoners, new prisoners usually, who walk into Mt Eden Corrections Facility are sized up by gangs, they’re bashed up and dropped off the balconies on the concrete below for good measure. That’s what happened to prisoner Evans,” Mr Davis said.
He claimed the prisoner had been transferred to Ngawha where he was “almost immediately” transferred to Whangarei Hospital where he subsequently died.
…the review Corrections Minister Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga is a joke because there have already been 2 reviews that haven’t been made public. This one has been co-ordinated to review only the last 3 months so Serco had a chance to clean up its act after the pref ious two reviews found serious issues. They have been investigating this for 18 months so the Minister’s claim he knew nothing is either a falsehood or the words of a Minister who is totally out of his depth.
Evidence to the latter could be seen in his hamfisted and ridiculous defence against the allegations Davis made in the house yesterday. A clearly rattled Minister claimed Davis was using the death to make ‘political gain’.
Really?
Minister, seeing as YOUR Government has adopted this right wing experiment in Private Prisons, the only one making any political gain from the death of a prisoner at the hands of Serco, is in fact YOU.
Here’s what happens. Prisoners get beaten up in Serco, Management then arrange to have that prisoner shipped off to a public prison and the public prison cleans up the mess. This means there isn’t a blot against Serco’s record and the problem gets swept away under the carpet. Serco are trying to claim that Nick Evans gained his ruptured lung from the Mt Eden Correctional Facility to the public prison while in transit. How one manages to rupture a lung on a van trip is a bit of a mystery.
The Police to investigate and the culture of violence created by only having 2 staff per 50 prisoners at Serco needs urgent attention.
You judge a Society on how it treats its lowest, our prisoners dying in fight clubs inside prisons reflects as poorly upon us as a nation as 250 000 kids in poverty.
Join us on Saturday 22 August for our winter City Vision debate on the proposition that “There is NO place for politics in local government.”
We are delighted to have secured seasoned political raconteurs Jacinda Ardern MP, Matt McCarten and Michael Wood to square up against the cutting prowess of Denise Roche MP, Martyn Bradbury and Cr Cathy Casey.
Hon Phil Goff will try to keep order in the house as our Master of Ceremonies and impartial adjudicator.
The evening will include the launch of City Vision’s mid-term report by Cr Mike Lee.
Tickets $25 (concession $15) includes nibbles. Cash Bar
Invite your friends and whanau for what promises to be a fun, social evening.
Saturday 22 August 7.30pm at the Polish Society Hall on the corner of Ethel and McDonald Streets in Morningside off Sandringham Road.
Preferred option is by internet banking to the City Vision account 38 9007 0461177 00, coded with your name and number of tickets.
One of the hallmarks of an ideology in its death-throes is the weird, inexplicable, and outright-ridiculous shapes it ties itself up in knots in in order to avoid confronting simple, basic truth.
They do this, because they’re so rigidly ideologically inflexible that their brains (such as they are) will strive peerlessly to come up with all manner of stupendously stupid over-extensions of logic and inversions of fact for the simple and explicit purpose of defending their core values against reasonably couched challenge.
It’s despicable.
And into this sorry pattern of phrasing-an-issue has ridden our very own Republican Party-lite weight, David Seymour.
Never mind the environmental, ecological – and ultimately, human health – costs from using and then discarding fossil-fuel derived plastics all over the place.
ACT’s ideology and its backers are fundamentally against sustainability and renewability.
They see it as a cost. An imposition on their unsustainable way of doing business. Pandering to namby-pamby airy-fairy quasi-hippy environmentalist concerns like cleaner societies and more responsible usage of finite resources.
Well y’know what?
If ACT is suddenly so VERY DEEPLY CONCERNED about the potential health risks and even untimely deaths that may result from us acting out OUR ideology – of sustainability …
… can I just, for a moment, raise the question of WHEN will they become similarly concerned about the health impacts and spiralling mortality rates from neoliberalism, and its unfair, unmandated imposition right here in New Zealand.
We’ve seen it at Pike River – where lax safety standards in the corporate world, and an underresourced Ministry of Works coagulated to kill Kiwis.
We’ve seen it at SERCO’s Mt Eden Prison – where cut-cost corporate practices conspire to produce a prison environment replete with fight-clubs and drug culture that’s HARDLY amenable toward rehabilitation of prisoners and their eventual reintegration as healthy members of society.
I could go on at some length listing specific ways in which the fundamentally fundamentalist more-market madness of the ACT Party has come together to RUIN LIVES if not rob them entirely over the last thirty years since the beginning of its imposition in our (formerly) fair land … but you get the point.
If ACT quite genuinely and seriously believes they’ve got evidence to support reusable bags killing people … I’ll listen.
But only provided they’re prepared to listen and take seriously OUR evidence that THEIR actions hurt us – as a society and as individuals – first.
Turns out that reusable political “principles” in a reusable “rotten borough” seat are FAR more deadly than mere recycling of bags.
It’s time we recognized that. And took action accordingly.
Fun Fact 1: New Zealand has one of the highest bowel cancer rates in the world. Bowel cancer is the second highest cause of cancer death in New Zealand. More than 2800 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year and more than 1200 die from the disease. By 2016 the number of new cases of bowel cancer diagnosed each year is projected to increase by 15% for men and 19% for women to 3302 (for all ages).– Ministry of Health
Fun Fact 2: Bowel cancer is more common as you get older, particularly from the age of 50. Bowel cancer affects more men than women. – IBID
Fun Fact 3: People who are diagnosed with bowel cancer, and receive treatment when it is at an early stage, have a 90% chance of long term survival. If there is a delay in diagnosis and treatment, and the cancer is more advanced, it is harder to cure. Bowel screening can detect cancer early, when it can be more successfully treated. –IBID
It is a sobering statistic that we try to ignore and put out of our minds; more than 2,800 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year and more than 1,200 die from the disease. If that were a death toll from a communicable disease, the media would be carrying front page newspaper stories and lead bulletins on 6PM news. The government would impose a State of Emergency, and strict travel conditions imposed on everyone.
But we don’t.
Bowel cancer is hidden away. Victims are not acknowledged. People go about their every day lives. Media focuses on sensationalism or trivia (with few exceptions). Government does nothing. The death toll continues to rise.
And it is wholly preventable.
In October 2011, the Ministry of Health began a four-year-long bowel screening pilot in the Waitemata District Health Board area. The screening was offered to everyone aged between 50 to 74, living within the Waitemata DHB zone, and who was eligible for publicly funded healthcare. Those lucky to be eligible were sent an invitation letter, a consent form along with detailed instructions, and the necessary free bowel-screening test kit.
Those are 255 people who might not have approached their medical clinic for a test screening kit, or followed up with a colonoscopy. Those are 255 people whose cancer was detected early, and who had necessary treatment.
The pilot screening have also picked up non-cancerous polyps (adenomas) and those participants will still be at an increased risk of developing more adenomas or bowel cancer. These participants will require on-going regular bowel checks in the future.
The initial four year pilot project, initially costing $24 million, was extended to the end of 2017, with a further $12.4 million invested in the programme. But only in the Waitemata District Health Board area. Those living outside the WDHB are not eligible to participate.
That result is from just one DHB “catchement” area. There are twenty DHBs throughout the country. If similar results were obtained from the nineteen other DHBs, that could mean approximately 5,100 people detected with cancer.
The government’s response can best be described as slow – at worst, reluctant to invest in a nationwide programme. On 6 July, Health Minister Jonathan Coleman announced a graduated roll-out of a nationwide screening programme.
First, Minister Coleman began with the usual meaningless platitudes;
“Delivering better cancer services is a top priority for the Government. Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in New Zealand.”
Minister Coleman then explained in a little more detail;
“I expect to take a business case to Cabinet by the end of the year which will consider a potential staged roll out of a national bowel screening programme from early 2017.”
However, note the caveats;
“I expect to take a business case to Cabinet by the end of the year which will consider a potential staged roll out….”
“To inform the next steps towards a possible roll out of a national bowel screening programme, the Ministry of Health will be consulting with the health sector and other agencies on how the service could be provided across the DHBs.”
So not only will any nationwide extension of the life-saving screening programme not begin until “early” 2017 – which happens to be an election year (no connection of course) – but at this stage it is still only a “possible” or “potential staged roll out”. At this point, Coleman will be only be taking “a business case to Cabinet by the end of the year”.
Unsurprisingly, health advocates and professionals are not impressed
Bowel Cancer NZ’s, Dr Sarah Derrett, did not hold back when she condemned National’s lethargic response to the sucessful screeing programme;
“Currently this Government is more interested in holding a referendum for a flag as a legacy to our Prime Minister at a cost of $26.5 million than it is at saving lives… it was scandalous there had been no action on a national programme, given 1200 people a year die from bowel cancer in New Zealand.”
Bowel Cancer NZ’s chairwoman, Mary Bradley, was also scathing;
“We are really pleased that this is happening and that they are talking about a staged roll-out, but we would like to see potential moved to definite roll-out in 2017.
We would like to see a staged roll out now or a start next year would be fantastic. We’ve always known it [screening] is proven, so why wasn’t it done sooner. It could have happened a couple of years ago. This is great, but it’s taken a long time to get here. In the meantime, people are dying.”
There is no feasible reason why Coleman is delaying a national extension of this screening programme that has already saved 255 people. Delaying the roll out condemns hundreds of New Zealanders to a horrible illness and unnecessary death.
“The largest constraint to a national bowel screening programme is having the workforce to do the colonoscopies. There are a number of initiatives underway to address this.
[…]
Initiatives to strengthen the endoscopy workforce include increasing the number of gastroenterology trainees. The sector is also considering increasing the use of CT colonography where appropriate.”
Yet, the pilot programme has been in operation since October 2011 – giving this government a lead time of five years to begin training required staff. Where was the planning for staffing a nationwide screening programme that was being considered after the Waitemata DHB pilot?
Did no one at the Ministry of Health or the Health Minister’s office pause to think; “Ok, what happens after the pilot?!”
The only possible explanation for this tardiness is purely financial. As Bill English attempts to balance the books and deliver a budget surplus, cuts to health services become more invasive;
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National’s reluctance to spend on much-needed, critical services is no secret. Successive National governments have cut services, whilst giving away billions in tax cuts.
But it is also not averse to spending taxpayers’ money on projects it deems “necessary”;
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Those four examples alone come to $78.5 million that could have been invested in rolling out a nationwide bowel screening programme plus pay for training of required specialist staff. Instead, the money has been spent on a luxury apartment; bribing a Saudi businessman; John Key’s vanity-project to change the flag; and acceding to a multi-national corporation’s demands for a cash subsidy.
This is worse than wasting tax-payer’s hard-earned money.
New Zealanders are dying whilst National fiddles and wastes time.
It is not the first time this has happened;
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On 21 July, I wrote to Minister Coleman on the issue;
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Kia ora Dr Coleman,
I understand that you plan to “take a business case to Cabinet by the end of the year which will consider a potential staged roll out of a national bowel screening programme from early 2017”.
Considering that a Ministry of Health pilot programme carried out by the Waitemata District Health Board since October 2011 has saved the lives of approximately two hundred and fiftyfive people who had been identified with a cancer, it seems unbelievable that New Zealanders will have to wait at least another year and a half before a screening programme is rolled out nationally.
I urge you to re-visit this problem and to begin an immediate, strategic roll-out throughout the country, so that screening can begin to take place.
It is simply unacceptable that 1,200 New Zealanders will perish this year; next year; and the year after, when an effective screening programme is available to save their lives.
If this government can spend $78.5 million on a Saudi farm; a Manhattan apartment; an aluminium smelter; and a flag referendum – then spending at least half that amount to save lives should not be beyond us.
2017 may be an election year – but we should not have to wait until then. Not when thousands of lives are at risk.
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One of Minister Coleman’s staff replied the following day;
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The Minister has asked Ministry of Health officials to advise him on the matters you have raised. Please be aware that due to the large volume of correspondence we receive, a personal reply to your email may take some weeks.
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Time, evidently, is not of the essence here.
What is truly shameful is not that a National government Minister is prevaricating on this critical medical problem – but that the Minister in question is a qualified medical clinician.
He, more than any other politician, should know better.
Somewhere in this country, another person has just developed bowel cancer. And doesn’t know it.
a ‘gangbang’ is a slang term for a pack rape – are McDonalds honestly using the phrase to describe a burger??? I thought their food was unappetising before, a ‘McGangBang’ burger is truly disgusting. Does it come with a side of molestation, rape culture and sexual assault as well?
The real issue regarding the PMs son, Max Key, is how his lavish lifestyle has become the only thing the media are focusing on rather than 250000 kids in poverty
Look at this – THE ENTIRE politics section of the NZ Herald…
…this unhealthy myopic celebrity obsessed focus on privilege is as crass as the thought of hungry children watching MasterChef in a freezing state house.
A journalist from the network that killed off Campbell Live for political purposes tries to claim Labour ‘cooked up’ figures & then sulks when he gets smacked down.
It’s fascinating that once again, just like the infamous Pam Corkery fight last election, it’s the manner in which people respond to TV3 being biased that becomes the story.
This network is just a mouth piece for the Government, how it continues to masquerade as news is a little beyond me.
The NZ-China free trade agreement doesn’t stop new restrictions on house sales to overseas buyers, but National’s subsequent deals try to.
New Zealanders are suffering because the wealthy 1 per cent from other countries buying our houses are driving up prices to levels our locals can’t afford. This is also destabilising our economy. Because 1 per cent of China is over 10 million people, it’s the most obvious example.
Labour’s policy is to ban overseas buyers of residential houses, other than our closest neighbours like Australia where we have a close relationship and reciprocal rights.
The recent column by Beijing-based Rodney Jones described the need to control the sale of New Zealand houses to overseas buyers. He was spot-on when saying we must carefully consider the effect of free trade agreements. This means the China FTA, the recent South Korean FTA, and the impending TPP.
…that is intelligent, that is right and it makes the points that need to be made for those NZers struggling to buy their first home. We didn’t get that from Gower today, we got petty name calling and claims of Labour lying to people.
It’s as ugly as Andrew Lim’s extraordinary use of violent language to try and turn Chinese sentiment against Labour in yesterdays Herald...
In the 1930s in Europe similar debate also began with a list of names. It was a list of names which did not sound like proper German names. The names on this list were also viewed as the problem in denying hard-working Germans their rightful share of business and property ownership. In the 1990s Slobadan Milosovic’s minions no doubt had a similar list of names.
The Labour Party’s targeting of people with Chinese sounding names is of course justified as being in the national interest, expressed through democratic means with the socialist agenda of indoctrinating Kiwis into believing that home ownership is their manifest destiny, an inalienable right. But Labour’s approach is clearly the continuation of nationalist socialist democratic politics by other means.
Carrying on with Little and Tywford’s logic, which seems to have adopted the xenophobic fear-mongering tactics of New Zealand First, lists of other ethnic names could also be used to generate national debates on other topics.
…so far all the ugliest elements put on display since Labour raised the issue of China’s speculation in our residential housing market have been displayed by those screaming racist.