The EQC Song

Asshole of the Year - 2012

Welcome to The Jackal's prestigious Asshole of the Year Awards for 2012. The Jackal has been running a weekly asshole award with recipients automatically nominated for the coveted Asshole of the Year Award. It's what you've all been waiting for... Here are the nominees:

The previous National party lister, Greg White, won an Asshole Award for having the clear stench of corruption about him. Through his various conflicts of interest and underhanded dealings the asshole ensured a Taranaki iwi lost almost $20 million in dodgy investments Greg White had set up. The money has not been recovered and the conman has not been held to account.


The usually thoughtful Gareth Morgan won an Asshole Award for his ranting about "lefties, extremists, nutters," the "green extreme" and the "loony left" and saying that they are inhibiting their causes. Unfortunately the entrepreneur and philanthropist's inability to control himself has often undermined much of the good work he does concerning the environment, with many environmentalists now not giving him the time of day.


Mark Unsworth of government relations consultancy Saunders Unsworth, is perhaps the best example of a capitalist running dog that New Zealand has ever seen. His despicable attack on Massey University environmental scientist Dr Mike Joy for speaking out about environmental pollution was totally unacceptable! His attempt to use a position of power to try and close somebody down just because of what they're saying is why the prick won an Asshole Award... And rightly so.


Those who know Louis Crimp and what he believes in will fully understand why he's won an Asshole Award. The thoroughly racist Act party financial backer is as deluded as they come and typifies the old bigoted fool! People like Louis Crimp are why the Act party will not be around after the next election.


The ever repugnant Cameron Slater won an Asshole Award for yet another feckless rant about how terrible Winston Peters is and failing to check the facts. The deluded right wing propagandist was proven completely wrong about what Peter's said when the Teapot Tape transcript was leaked to the public.

Despite the transcript proving Slater to be full of shit with his accusations about the NZ First leader, he still continued to promote his poisonous brand of disinformation. Anybody who keeps track of Slater's blog knows that he's a consummate liar... Believing what he writes is akin to believing the holocaust never happened.


Judge Raoul Neave won an Asshole Award for giving Guy Hallwright a slap on the hand with a wet bus ticket after he was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm with reckless disregard.

There were some real doozy judgements this year that were completely disproportionate to the crimes committed. Raoul Neave unequivocally displayed that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. The problem of rich people being able to buy their way out of more serious sentences is something that's so entrenched within our judicial system as to be somewhat unfixable. The problem is now so large and systemic that it's ignored by judges and politicians alike.


Tim Groser won an Asshole Award for spending up large again while on an all expenses paid first class trip to Paris costing the taxpayer $33,494 in airfares. However he has undoubtedly exceeded himself with other acts of assholism concerning the Kyoto protocol, with Groser's lack of negotiation skills leaving the rest of the world thinking Kiwi's must be a bunch of inbred hicks to have voted such an idiot into power.

The Minister for Climate Change Issues is obviously a climate change denier, with his ability to come up with the worst possible excuses for not dong anything about climate change having no equal. Similarly Groser's excuses for implementing the TPPA with it's entirely detrimental investor-state dispute provisions were entirely feckless. Groser is more than just an asshole, he's also a traitor to New Zealand.


Bill English is the worst Minister of Finance New Zealand has ever had. Not only has he failed to meet every financial projection National has made, he's now going to go back on their promise and increase taxes to pay for Gerry Brownlee's roads of little significance. The Minister of Finance won't get us back in the black of course, because he couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery. Through the disasterous neoliberal agenda Bill English has ensured that many generations of Kiwi's will be shackled through the governments unprecedented levels of debt that are now comparable to Greece's.

English won his Asshole Award for duping the public into believing asset sales would help reduce debt and also pay for new infrastructure spending, while actual figures from treasury show that the sales would come at a longterm financial loss. It's simply cheaper to pay the interest on the debt to service new capital expenditure than it is to lose the revenue streams from our SOE's.


The deluded fool John Roughan won an Asshole Award for arguing that the founding document of New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi, should simply be ignored, echoing the bad faith shown by National during asset sales negotiations. More recently Roughan tried to dismiss the massive privacy breach at ACC, arguing that the victims of sexual abuse and violent crimes weren't identified in the leaked information when they were. The old hack is clearly a lying fool! As long as people like Roughan get away with making up whatever bullshit they like to fit their own decrepit belief systems, we will continue to get manipulative articles in the NZ Herald that are written with all the skill of your average drunkard.


Other nominations for Asshole of the Year include:

Guy Hallwright
Jian Yang
Michael Christian & Mel Greig
Michael Laws
John Hansen
Paul Mackay
Phil Heatley
Kate Wilkinson
Bob Jones
John Tamihere
Ray Sharp
Tony Gibson
Richard Pearson
Vladimir Putin
Robert Bales
Mary Beth Sharp
Cathy Odgers

Runner-up:

Hekia Parata has been an unmitigated disaster as Minister of Education. From failing to read and understand Ministerial briefings to signing off on the Novopay disaster to flip flops that would make the best gymnast jealous, Parata has displayed an unprecedented level of incompetence and a gross lack of care in looking after our children's education.

After a lackluster propaganda campaign on increasing class sizes, only the most ideologically blinded Nact supporter believed that reducing the amount of teachers per student would equate to better learning outcomes. That's why Parata won an Asshole of the Week Award, for developing policy that was so clearly detrimental. Just like closing and merging schools in Christchurch, National's changes to teacher student ratios was a badly researched, poorly thought out and a terribly executed policy that threatened to kick our world class education system in the guts.

As the Minister of Education, the buck stops with Hekia Parata... She should be made to resign.

Second runner-up:

John Banks is a disingenuous bumbling right wing bigot that has no place within our halls of power. After intentionally trying to hide the $15,000 donation from SkyCity and the $50,000 donations from Kim Dotcom, Banks was unbelievably allowed to keep his position because of a Prime Minister who's equally if not more inept than the slimy Act party leader.

John Banks seems to have a knack at getting away with his dodgy dealings... In 2007 Banks along with former National Party leader Don Brash escaped prosecution for misleading investors in their Huljich Wealth Management fraud. That lack of accountability has clearly emboldened the conman to be even more dishonest.

Politicians need to be held to account when they're caught selling themselves to the highest bidder and the days of anonymous donations should be over. Businesses must not be allowed to purchase New Zealand's decision making process because of a few corrupt politicians... And clearly John Banks deserved his Asshole of the Week Award for displaying such a low standard of ethical behaviour.

Any Prime Minister with an ounce of credibility wouldn't have confidence in John Banks, and the fact that John Key allows such a moron to reside in his government speaks volumes.

Which brings us to the winner of this years Asshole Award, John Key.

The Prime Minister really did outdo himself this year, giving us lots and lots of reasons to think he's a complete asshole... From comments about David Beckham's intelligence, gay red shirts, eating maggots, the GCSB cover up, ignoring child poverty and failing to ensure Ministerial accountability, just to mention a few of his more overtly disgraceful acts. However the main reason Key has won is because he's entirely remorseless when caught out acting like the contemptible fool he is.

The smiling assassins juvenile attitude obviously makes him unsuitable to be the Prime Minister of New Zealand and his childish comments to provoke a spectacle on Waitangi day were in my opinion particularly despicable! Key's verbal diarrhea in the house of representatives and his ability to provide a veritable shit storm of disinformation knows no bounds. The antithesis of good leadership is clearly the frontrunner by a country mile and therefore John Key is Asshole of the Year for 2012. Hurrah!

Protests happening around the world

John Roughan rewrites history

Today, the NZ Herald reported:

ACC data leak turned out to contain nothing personal. 

Among the Christmas cards I get at work there is always one from the Privacy Commissioner, Marie Shroff. Invariably it contains a good visual gag. 

This year's features a Slane cartoon of a boy stuck with his head and upper body in a Dutch dyke and a passer-by explains to another, "The leak was worse than first thought". 

I hope the irony was intended, because it's time to acknowledge that the biggest leak of the year, the one that the news kept calling a "massive privacy breach" which the commissioner had to investigate, turned out not to be very big at all.

John Roughan seems to be questioning whether ACC leaking the names and details of 7000 claimants, including 250 sensitive-claims clients who were victims of sexual abuse and violent crimes, was a big deal... What an idiot!

If leaking thousands of people's personal information isn't a 'massive privacy breach' I don't know what is?

It sounded serious when it was first reported that the personal details of thousands of ACC claimants had been accidentally emailed to one unnamed claimant. Among them were said to be victims of sexual offences.

Said to be victims of sexual offences? Trying to dismiss this as a none event is bad enough, especially when Roughan is doing his best to ignore the facts of the matter, but providing disinformation of this magnitude in New Zealands main newspaper is entirely unacceptable.

One of the undeniable facts that Roughan has ignored is that the leaked information did contain the addresses, names and other private details of victims of sexual abuse and violent crimes. Instead of acknowledging the seriousness of the problem, Roughan decides to belittle those that do understand the magnitude and scope of the privacy breach.

Meanwhile, Labour and the Greens made a sustained attack on ACC's "culture", not just its carelessness with email but its determination to check all claims rigorously and get the injured back to work quickly.

The story took on so many dimensions and ran for so long that the Privacy Commissioner's investigation of the original data leak became little more than a footnote.

Actually the Greens and Labour were raising concerns that the Privacy Commissioner, Marie Shroff, also concluded were serious problems within ACC. Roughan is trying to rewrite history here, and doing a pretty lousy job of it.

By the time they presented the Privacy Commissioner with their report, the country was sick of the subject and hardly anybody read it.

How on earth would Roughan know that? He obviously doesn't have access to the download statistics of the Privacy Commissioners report (PDF), and is therefore lying like the fool he is.

It ran to 102 pages. You had to read to page 99 to discover exactly what sort of confidential client information had escaped.

But finally, in the fifth appendix, there it was: a sample of the fabled spreadsheet of "personal" data. It consisted of four tables listing claimants' names (removed for the report), their claim numbers, review numbers, branch, lodgement dates, issue codes, decision dates and the like.

That was it. That is all there was.

There was nothing that could be of the slightest use or interest to anyone outside ACC. No personal details alongside the names, no injury information, nothing.

What a load of turgid rubbish! Firstly the leaked information contained addresses, which would be of interest to more than just ACC staff. The victims of violent or sexual crimes would not want their addresses known by their abusers and many of those abusers would be interested in where their victims lived. Only a complete fool would think that such information wasn't important.

The other fact that Roughan is ignoring is that sensitive claims are identified at registration through their injury code and these codes were included in the leaked information. Therefore the leaked information directly identified people who were the victims of sexual and violent crimes. The codes within the leaked information also outline exactly what injuries were inflicted.

Saying that the victims of violent and sexual crimes weren't directly identified in the leaked information when they were is a particularly disgusting part of Roughan's propaganda. Either through sheer ignorance or contemptible blatant disinformation Roughan is displaying a complete lack of journalistic integrity. The deluded old hack then has the gall to question reports that deal in facts.

That is what all the fuss had been about. 

The thing that disappointed me was that so many people had known all along that the "massive privacy breach" amounted to nothing more than this. Investigative reporters, the Privacy Commissioner, her Independent Review Team, all would have discovered the contents of the spreadsheet very quickly.

None blew the whistle. No reports that I saw looked critically at the facts at the heart of a story that kept on growing and giving. The Privacy Commissioner did not say something to restore a sense of proportion. The review team, no doubt well paid, went about its investigation as though there was a serious problem.

Roughan is correct that nobody else worth mentioning is dismissing the massive privacy breach at ACC or the Privacy Commissioners report... That's simply because they shouldn't be brushed under the carpet like the ignoramus Roughan is trying to do.

The sense of proportion for Roughan seems to be that he wasn't directly affected and so he doesn't care. But what's even worse is that he's actively lying to try and dismiss the problems inherent in the way ACC operates, with the Independent Review Team concluding that:

The Breach that occurred was a genuine error but that errors are able to happen because of systemic weaknesses within ACC’s culture, systems and processes. The subsequent “response process” could also have been better if appropriate policies, practices, escalation protocols and the “right culture” were in place to allow for transparency of breach handling at the appropriate levels, in an appropriate manner. A similar incident is much more likely to happen again in the current environment if the issues identified in this Independent Review are not addressed systematically and systemically.

Perhaps the NZ Herald might like to report on any progress that ACC is making to address the issues identified by the Independent Review Team... Such an article would be worth reading, which is more than can be said for Roughan's tripe!

An accident had happened. An ACC rehabilitation officer had a monthly sheet of case reviews on his screen when he decided to respond to an email. He dragged the data aside, clicked a wrong button and unwittingly attached it to the return email.

Computers are a minefield for privacy. Accidents will happen, despite all the procedures the commissioner's expert team has laid down. It happened to Social Welfare kiosks a short time later.

Despite these privacy breaches both being a result of incompetence and a lack of proper procedures, they're different types of privacy breaches that cannot really be compared. Being that this fact like many others has entirely escaped John Roughan's awareness just goes to confirm that he's an idiot of the highest order. Let's hope he takes more than just a couple of weeks off over Christmas.

Greenpeace says thank you

Brownlee's budget blowout

Today, the NZ Herald reported:

The Government has been accused of being a Christmas Scrooge and increasing petrol prices in order to protect its promise to get back into surplus in 2014-15.

Gerry Brownlee yesterday announced a price rise of 3c a litre at the pump for the next three years on petrol excise duty, and an increase in user charges by the same amount.

The tax is expected to raise a net total of $300 million over the next two financial years and will be dedicated to fund the roads of national significance under the existing timeline.

This is yet another economically detrimental move by a government that obviously doesn't have a clue. Let's be frank, there are no roads of national significance that the National government has undertaken. Investing in roads that don't have an effective cost to return ratio is not significant, it's stupid.

But Finance Minister Bill English conceded at the half-yearly opening of the books yesterday that without the extra excise, the tiny forecast surplus would have shrunk altogether. However he insists the excise was driven by the need to meet the roading plan timetable, not his surplus.

The May Budget forecast a $197 million surplus by 2014-15, which shrank yesterday to a mere $66 million.

So they stuffed up the budget yet again, this time by $131 million... Talk about incompetent!

Now that the tax cuts for the rich have not boosted the economy as was promised by John Key and with budget blowouts for Gerry Brownlee's stupid roads of little significance, National is just going to tax the people more to make up the shortfall.

Earlier this year, Gerry Brownlee claimed that the hugely expensive roading projects he was undertaking "would focus on supporting economic growth" but he and the rest of the neoliberal morons fail to understand that higher fuel costs will inhibit economic growth. Therein lies the sheer stupidity of Nationals policy, that increased taxes to build stupid roads will mean less economic growth which will negate the main reason to build the roads in the first place.

Gerry Brownlee also said that National would use the $12.3 billion to provide people with a range of transport choices, while being entirely averse to investing in public transport and particularly Auckland's inner city rail loop. This is despite that project showing a positive investment to return ratio meaning that it would pay for itself.

The timing of the announcement is also a conceited move to try and limit any public backlash. Increasing petrol costs by 3 cents a litre over three years for an increase in tax of 9 cents per litre by 2015 will be deeply unpopular and the announcement has been made just before Christmas to ensure people are distracted by the festive season.

National knows this new tax will be hugely unpopular, and will be working hard to reduce media coverage. They'll be happy with the limited exposure so far with a small article on page five of today's NZ Herald not even spelling out the total cost of the increased charges.

In comparison to the month long media furore the fifth Labour government received when it proposed to raise the tax on fuel by a similar amount, which effectively lost them the 2008 election, there has been a disproportionate response to National's fuel tax increase. It's entirely pathetic coverage and shows that the MSM is biased and still in the back pocket of big business and those who represent them, the National party. Unfortunately the people are not being represented at all.