KEY POINTS:
Isn't this passing the buck over who stuffed up over murderer Graeme Burton an outrage?
It seems his crimes weren't the fault of the prison in not informing the Parole Board it thought he was still an evil bugger and shouldn't be released. It wasn't the fault of the Probation Service that he wasn't living or working where he should have been. It wasn't the fault of the Parole Board, which released him on the unsuspecting public. And it wasn't the fault of the police, who apparently couldn't pick him up or interrupt the holidays of their surveillance staff.
And according to Burton, it's not his fault, either. We can only conclude Karl Kuchenbecker's death was an accident, or his own fault for riding a bike in the forest.
This is in addition to the killing last year of Liam Ashley, who was put in a cage with a psychopath who bludgeoned him to death. This apparently wasn't the fault of the Mt Eden prison service, which claims no responsibility for sending Ashley off with his killer, or of Chubb Security, as it says it wasn't told they shouldn't be together. And apparently it wasn't the fault of the killer, as he is purportedly criminally insane. Once again, it seems the fault must lie with the deceased for being there in the first place.
Even the sordid episodes involving Clint Rickards and his group-sex partners don't seem to be anyone's fault. According to Rickards, his two male bed mates shouldn't be in jail, even though they were convicted of rape. And the sexual encounters with teenagers handcuffed to bedposts was, according to the police participants, only bit of light giggle and tickle.
The fact that senior police managers knew about these allegations didn't stop Rickards from being promoted again and again. His meteoric rise to Deputy Police Commissioner was thwarted only because the Prime Minister turned down his promotion after being informed about his past.
Last week, our suspended Auckland police commander said he wasn't at fault. And the rest of the police fraternity claim it's not their fault, either. It must therefore be the fault of the 16-year-old girls, who obviously enjoyed being pack-bonked by large men with batons while handcuffed. Our culture is based on things not being anyone's fault. Just look at the cynical manoeuvrings by Air New Zealand management to sack hundreds of workers. This was a company we bailed out by $1.2 billion after its Qantas management and their Singapore owners ran it into the ground. Nobody was responsible for that mess. Now it is making record profits it wants to sack its employees. But then no one's responsible for that.
Remember the Bank of New Zealand bailout, when we gave them a billion dollars? I would have thought it was the overpaid bosses at BNZ who were responsible for that crisis. Apparently not. It must have been the unemployed and sickness beneficiaries' fault, because a billion dollars were cut off their benefits and transferred to BNZ.
What about the young kids who were killed at Cave Creek, after the platform collapsed? Apparently it wasn't the fault of the builders because they were untrained and didn't know you had to use bolts, not nails. It wasn't the fault of the Department of Conservation, because it wasn't in charge of structures on its land. It must have been the dead kids' fault for being there.
If you're thinking these are just isolated mistakes, how do we explain the Mercury Power outages in the Auckland CBD last year? Apparently they were no one's fault, because no one lost their job. At least it wasn't as bad as the complete closing down of Auckland for days several years back. Apparently that cost us billions of dollars and made us the laughing stock of the world. But that was no one's fault, either.
Some of our biggest business scandals, which you would have thought would have resulted in people going to prison, ended in no one being held responsible. Remember the Winebox scandal, where hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes were secretly transferred to the Cook Islands? No one got even so much as a smack on the hand.
This week, the Government conceded that we were investing $600 million into our railways. We should all be hopeful that it improves our transport infrastructure. But let's not forget that a previous government sold off our rail tracks for $1 and allowed its new private owners to strip the assets and made thousands of New Zealand workers redundant.
If you think it's all ancient history and behind us, let me remind you about our leaky homes.
Apparently it's not the builders' fault or the developers' or even the council building inspectors'.
They're all trying to blame the Government while the Government is busy blaming them.
So it must be our fault, because we're going to be paying for it.
International studies show that New Zealand ranks consistently as one of the few uncorrupted societies. But I suggest this comes because no one in power ever seems to be responsible for anything that goes wrong here.
