I can’t wait for the Opening Ceremony and then of course the game

So what do people think the score will be?

My column at the NZ Herald is on how the Rugby World Cup may affect the election. An extract:

Now of course it was not the current Government that bid for the Rugby World Cup. The bid was led by Helen Clark around six years ago, and it was her Government that agreed on the timing with the IRB. It is possible that a motivating factor was the thought that if Labour had won a fourth term, then this could help them win an unprecedented fifth term, making Clark the longest serving Prime Minister.

A very insightful post by Chris Trotter on what went wrong in the Urewera case.

Adam Bennett at NZ Herald reports:

New Zealand has crushed Argentina to win the Rugby World Cup – the Parliamentary Rugby World Cup that is.

The New Zealand team made up of MPs, political advisers and guest players including an ex-All Black made a strong start and won “about 40-nil” in the final played in Auckland according to captain and National MP for Napier Chris Tremain.

“We played well, we had a good team on the paddock. We scored well in the first quarter.”

Stand out players for New Zealand included National MP for Maungakiekie Sam Lotu-liga who scored a “superb” try from a short lineout.

Congratulations to the team. NZ has now won the parliamentary title four out of five times. The team does a great job raising money for charity as well as giving people the chance to ruck an MP 🙂

Hadn’t forgotten this morning- just got a puncture on the way to work on bike. It takes a lot longer to commute at walking speed, pushing a bike 🙁

Wanted something seasonal this morning, with a touch of black. So, no need for explanation I guess about this photo.

Click for larger, higher resolution image

Hope everyone else had a better start to the day 🙂

Stuff reports:

It’s a video that has melted the hearts of hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Laboratory chimpanzees at a research facility in Austria were filmed stepping into daylight for the first time after decades in captivity – and they did not hide their joy.

They peered out of an open door, uncertain at first, before hugging each other and taking their first steps around the sunlit outdoor compound, climbing to the top of the trees to look at the views outside.

German television network RTL broadcast the footage on Sunday, and different YouTube versions of the 10 chimpanzees exploring the outside world for the first time have since attracted more than 130,000 hits.

The chimpanzees, who were part of tests for a pharmaceutical company since they were infants, were freed from captivity after a 14-year battle, the Daily Mail reported.

The video is below. Very moving and wonderful.

Note the video is now the English language version.

The NZ Herald reports:

Protests by hundreds of schools against national standards in reading, writing and maths have been called off.

Schools are required to report on students’ learning in relation to national standards, however, many schools have refused to include the standards in their charters this year.

They faced statutory intervention if they did not.

Yesterday, the Boards Taking Action Coalition (BTAC) recommended schools who had opposed including national standards in their charter alter it to include them, but make it clear the school was forced into it, BTAC spokesman Perry Rush said.

I suspect the reason they have done this, is they realise Trevor Mallard is not going to become Minister of Education in 11 weeks time. They were hoping they could outlast Anne Tolley, but they failed.

It has been such a fuss about nothing. The national standards are a minor but useful additional reporting requirement. Schools keep all their current assessment tools. All that is required of them is to moderate those against the national standard framework and include that extra data in school reports, and provide it to the Government so the government has some comparable data.

The Herald reports:

Most Fijians think the world should butt out and leave the country to sort out its own return to democracy, according to a poll released today. …

The Lowy Institute Fiji Poll, which last month surveyed 1032 people from Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu, found the majority of local people opposed the international pressure and thought the country should be left alone to return to democracy.

Of those surveyed, 63 per cent either strongly disagreed or partly disagreed with the international approach taken towards Fiji in response to the coup. …

Cmdr Bainimarama’s performance as Prime Minister was highly regarded by 66 per cent of those interviewed, and 65 per cent said Fiji was heading in the right direction.

A slim majority (53 per cent) said democracy was preferable to any other form of government.

The poll’s credibility is expected to be questioned by the regime’s opponents, who say that people living in Fiji are under pressure to toe the Government line.

It sounds like the poll was done face to face, in which case it is hardly surprising that people said good things about the Commodore.

I’m not saying that the Commodore doesn’t have popular support, but you have to remember Fiji is now a country where the media is censored, you are basically not allowed to criticise the Commodore publicly and there is no scrutiny of the Government and no opposition is allowed.

Popularity alone is no excuse for dictatorship.

John Key got elected on a popular mandate. He is the country’s most popular Prime Minister ever. Key may well hold a genuine belief that the former Labour Government was corrupt. And if he had the former PM arrested, abolished Parliament, promised elections in eight years once he has got rid of the racial Maori seats and ruled with no opposition or media scrutiny – well then he might still be quite popular in the polls.

But would that in any way justify him doing any of that? No – not at all. A country must be a nation of laws, not power seized at gunpoint.

If the Commodore is so popular, then let the media be free, let there be an opposition, let political parties campaign and let the Commodore stand for election.

It has now been five years since he seized power. he has promised elections in 2014. I remain sceptical that these will eventuate.  I hope they will, but I just can’t see him risking a future Government ever being independent of him – as there is a risk he could then face charges.

Labour have failed with their year of filibustering the VSM bill. It completed the committee stages last night and is set down for third and final reading on Wed 28 September.

Hilarious to hear Labour MPs use 1984 speak in claiming the bill removes democratic rights from students. They would have you think our soldiers fought in WWII to defend the right for students to be forced against their will to fund a incorporated society that advocates for things they don’t support.

Having failed in the House, NZUSA have come up with a new strategy:

Maori student representatives have formally lodged a claim into the Waitangi Tribunal seeking an urgent Tribunal hearing into the impacts of ACT’s bill to end universal membership of students’ associations. The Tribunal has acknowledged receipt of the claim and is currently being considered as a single new claim. …

The claim seeks the Tribunal’s recommendation that the Bill is:
(a) abolished and
(b) that provision be made to protect tauira Māori, their local roopu, and their national representation.

“NZUSA supports this claim. The government does not seem to care about the real impacts this will have on the ground. The disgraceful fact remains that the government has done no analysis or real consideration of what impact this Bill will have on student services, student representation, and the quality of education for students as a whole,” says NZUSA co-President David Do.

Mr Do is of course a former chair of Princess St Labour.  NZUSA at times resembles the tertiary education wing of the Labour Party.

I have to say it was very forward-looking of Governor Hobson to have inserted the secret fourth article:

ARTICLE THE FOURTH

Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals that if it establishes any tertiary educational institutes in New Zealand, it shall require all students thereof to become a member of an association of students, and pay whatever fee is demanded by said association, so the association can pay for taonga such as psychic hotlines.

I guess the next step after this will be for NZUSA to ask the United Nations to intervene.

Anna Leask at the NZ Herald reports:

A furious Auckland mum has complained to the Prime Minister and police after an “abusive and degrading” driving incident involving National MP Tau Henare.

Cicelia Holliday told the Herald she was “absolutely gobsmacked” by the incident and wants Mr Henare to be called to account for his behaviour. …

She said she was driving with her 12-year-old daughter along Ash St in Avondale just after 10.30am last Thursday when a car in the lane beside her suddenly pulled in front of her without indicating the lane change.

“I reacted by quickly blaring my horn to draw attention to the fact that they had created a ‘near miss’,” she wrote to Mr Key.

“I noticed the driver give me the finger though the driver’s window and I couldn’t quite believe it. Then he gave me the finger through the rear window with his left hand.”

Mrs Holliday then noticed the red Audi stationwagon carried Mr Henare’s name and photograph and the National Party logo.

Both drivers stopped at a red light, and Mrs Holliday said Mr Henare wound down his window and started to shout at her.

“He started going on about ‘what happened to common courtesy’ … repeatedly talking over me when I tried to ask him why he hadn’t indicated his intention to move across the lane in front of me.

“He shouted, ‘Do you expect me to stop and let about 10 cars go past?’ and I said, ‘I expect you to indicate your intention to change lanes’.”

The light turned green and Mr Henare drove away.

“I am a National Party supporter, but Mr Henare’s behaviour was reprehensible, to say the least – both his driving and his finger-signing,” Mrs Holliday wrote.

Mr Henare laughed when approached about the complaint, and refused to comment.

“I’m not going to respond to it, quite frankly, I’ll just leave it,” he said.

Mr Henare said he had seen the complaint and knew it had been sent to the police.

When told it had also been sent to the Prime Minister, he said: “The police are more important in this respect. I’m not going to deal with it through the media.”

There are two sides to every incident, so I can’t comment on the specifics of this incident except to say that it is a reminder that not all publicity is good publicity.

But it does remind me of an conversation I had some years ago with an MP, about what changes being elected had meant. They replied that one of the changes was that if some moron cuts you off in traffic (not suggesting this is what happened in this case), you can’t honk your horn or gesture at them as you might once have.

I recall thinking it was another good reason for me to not stand for Parliament!

UPDATE: Tau disputes the claims. Also Whale has linked to other complaints from the complainant about road safety.

Dom Post Editorial:

The word “bullying” does not even get close to describing the reign of terror a gang of Hutt Valley High School thugs imposed on their fellow pupils.

Serious sexual assault, extreme violence and brutal humiliation are more accurate terms for the pack attacks on nine tormented Year 9 boys over two weeks in late 2007.

The sickening details are laid out in a damning report by Ombudsman David McGee. One by one, the victims were hunted down and violated with objects including a drill bit, scissors, a craft knife, a plank of wood, a shoe, a cellphone and a screwdriver. According to police reports, victims screamed in pain during the attacks. One endured up to 10 such assaults. Another was kicked in the face when he refused to kiss his attackers’ shoes after they had sexually violated him.

The response of the school’s authorities to such systemic violence defies belief. Having failed to establish proper systems to prevent and detect such attacks in the first place, the school then failed to safeguard the well-being of the victims and ensure the complaints were dealt with properly. They did not inform the victims’ parents or alert police or Child, Youth and Family to what were plainly allegations of serious sexual offending.

Even worse, the acting principal at the time, Steve Chapman, and the then-chairwoman of the board of trustees, Susan Pilbrow, played down the seriousness of the assaults. Mr Chapman’s decision, backed by Ms Pilbrow, to stand down the six attackers for three to five days obviously failed to reflect the gravity of their offending or send a message that violence would not be tolerated. The school’s refusal to back down from a statement that it had acted “reasonably and responsibly” confirmed concerns that it had not acknowledged the seriousness of the attacks.

It was a failure of the most basic kind – to keep kids safe.

I wonder whether those in charge at the time are still involved at the school. Their website states Steve Chapman is the Associate Principal still. Ms Pilbrow does not appear to be on the Board of Trustees anymore.

UPDATE: NZ Herald reports Mr Chapman may be sacked by the Board. It is hard to see how he could continue in the job and believe the school is serious about ensuring this never happens again.

I’ve not been commenting on most of the evidence at the Pike River Royal Commission because it is the Commission’s job to come to conclusions based on the evidence.

But I have to say that on the basis of reports to date, I’ve been horrified by some of the evidence. No trial evacuations, lack of escape routes, the fact it took 45 minutes to even realise there had been an explosion, no answer on the emergency line, safety equipment not working. It must be horrific for the families to be hearing this evidence.

Also chilling has been the strength of the explosions. The Press reported:

Footage of three subsequent explosions at Pike River mine was also shown at the inquiry yesterday, including the second explosion at 2.36pm on November 24, which ended all hopes of the men’s survival.

White said the second explosion was of greater magnitude than the first, and blew a 300-kilogram robot inside the mine more than 100m.

My physics is too rusty to calculate what level of energy is needed to move a 300 kg object over 100 metres, but my gut reaction is absolutely unsurvivable. If the first explosion was anything like the second, then those down the mine hopefully died quickly. I guess this will be a key issue the Commission will form a view on.

Whale blogs:

Trevor Mal­lard is host­ing a Live chat tonight at 7pm.

You can ask your ques­tions & fol­low my answers via the ‘LabourLive tab’ on the New Zealand Labour Party Face­book page or by going here.

It is on from 7pm Wednes­day for about 30min.

Your mis­sion should you choose to accept it is to ask ques­tions, like these suggestions:

• When you retire, which Labour MP do you think should inherit your seat?
• Who is a bet­ter leader, Helen Clark or Phil Goff?
• How do you think the Labour Cam­paign strat­egy is get­ting on?
• Do you think Paul Quinn’s list posi­tion is indica­tive of the lack of diver­sity in the National Party?
• Has he ever felt like hit­ting Tau Henare again?
• What’s more impor­tant; diver­sity or competence?
• Is 24 years in Par­lia­ment too long?
• Why do you think social media is more impor­tant than door knocking?
• Did Chris Carter get a fair trial, or has he been proved right?
• Was there ever an Amer­i­can bagman?
• Does you think Shane Jones will make a good Labour leader?
• What’s it like know­ing you are going to lose the next election?
• Can he give an uncon­di­tional assur­ance to Hutt South vot­ers that he will go full term if/when Labour loses, or should they vote for Paul Quinn?
• How many pairs of under­pants has he stolen so far?
• Which polling com­pany do you trust the most?
• What does Blue State Dig­i­tal think about your social media strategy?
• Do you think Win­ston will get back in?
• Why did Win­ston lie to the select committee?
• Are you a mem­ber of the gaggle?
• Is there a mean­ing­ful role for a straight white male in mod­ern Labour?
• Is Phil Goff a corpse-cuddler, just like Helen was?
• Will you apol­o­gise to Pansy Wong?

There are a few, I am sure loyal Army mem­bers can come up with a few more to fill in the 30 minutes.

I am a fan of iPredict. I trust it because I think the fact that people have to put money up to back their beliefs, means that the wisdom of the crowds often wins out. If you think a market is wrongly priced, then you can make some money buying or selling some stock.

However there is a flaw in the way a few stocks operate. Not the binary stocks (x will happen by z date) but the party vote stocks. These are used to predict the a party’s vote percentage at the election.

VOTE.2011.NAT is currently at 47.5c. It will pay out 1c per 1% party vote, so it is predicting a party vote of 47.5%. Now let us say I genuinely think National will get 50% and I have $100 to spend. I buy $100 of shares at 47.5c, or 210 shares. And if I am right and National gets 50% I get 50c per share so get $105 back. Now as an investor a 5% return on capital doesn’t get me very excited, so you may have few investors in that market.

Now let’s say I am the National Party Campaign Chairman, Steven Joyce. Let’s say I don’t want National’s share price to be 47.5c as that may not be enough. Let’s say Steven decide to buy up VOTE.2011.NAT shares to 55c so there is a story about how the market thinks National will get 55%. Steven has a bit of money so spends $1,000 buying 1818 shares at 55c. Whenever the price drops below 55c he buys shares until he has spent his $1,000. Now if National really only gets 47.5% then Steven loses 7.5c a share or $136. So a 14% drop on his money.

Now if other investors out there think National is over-priced then they can move the price below 55c by selling the share, which is equivalent to buying the reverse. What it means is they pay 45c for their “reverse” share and when the stock closes they get $1 less the party vote share or $1 – 47.5c or 52.5c. So they could sell to Steven his 1818 shares for $818 and if National gets 47.5% will make $954.  That is $136 profit (made off Steven) and is a return on capital of 17%.

So for a major party like National the relative rate of returns are not far off – 14% for the person buyign at 55c and 17% for the person selling at 55c.

But now let us try this with say NZ First. You are the NZ First Campaign Chair and you want NZ First to show at over 5%. You have $1,000. You can buy 20,000 shares at 5c.  Now if NZ First actually get 4% then you have only lost $200.

Now what say you are an investor who thinks the correct share price is 4c. In theory you can make money by selling at 5c and buying at 4c when it closes. But you have to effectively buy the reverse share at 95c and sell at 96c.

Now to buy 20,000 shares at 95c will cost you $19,000. And the payout will be $19,200. You will get a miserly 1.1% return on your money. Would you want to lock up $19,000 for a 1.1% return? No.

So what is the moral of the story? When it comes to the minor party stocks, it is possible for supporters to push the share price up at almost no cost to them, but at a great cost for others to push it down. This only applies to the party vote stocks, not to all the binary stocks.

This is why NZ First often has a stock price over 5c indicating Winston will be back, while the binary stock of “Will Winston get back into Parliament is at 22c, indicating only a 22% chance.

Likewise I suggest the stock showing United Future will get 2.6% is also the result of party activists pushing it higher. The same for ACT at 4.0%.

As we get very very close to the election, this problem may sort itself out. When there are only a few days to go, then even a 1% return may be decent enough for people to push the stock prices down to what the true level would be.

iPredict can also probably avoid this issue in future by having the cost of buying minor party stock at 10c/% point instead of 1c/% point.

Talking yesterday with a friend, I came up with a great win-win for the Labour Party.

Julia Gillard is close to being rolled by her colleagues in Labor. Her approval ratings have plummeted, and the chances of her making it through to the next Australian election are slim.

So Julia will be looking for a job shortly.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, Labour are looking for a leader.

So why not offer Julia the leadership of the NZ Labour Party? Let Kevin Rudd take his old job back, and Julia take over here. Labour would bounce back to at least the 34% they got in 2008.

Best of all, Julia actually believes in stuff such as education reform and standing up to the teacher unions, so Labour would get some decent policy also.

Everyone knows Goff would have been rolled by now if any of his colleagues were willing to take the leadership on before the election. Well Gillard will be willing to, so now they have no excuse not to act!

Tony Ryall announced:

A record 145,414 patients received elective surgery in the year ended July 2011 says Health Minister Tony Ryall.

Elective surgery operations include hip and other joint operations, cataracts and grommets amongst other important life improving surgeries.

“This means an extraordinary extra 27,000 patients a year are now benefiting from elective surgery compared with the numbers treated under the previous Government”, Mr Ryall says.

“Over the term of this Government, around 60,000 more elective operations have been delivered over the three years.

This would be a good achievement if it occurred during a time when the Government had massive surpluses and could throw unlimited dollars into Vote Health.

To manage to get an extra 27,000 elective operations a year during a time of our largest ever fiscal deficit, and a global recession is quite extraordinary.

I tend to refrain from using terms with “nazi” in them, but sometimes the categorisation is just impossible to resist, as in the case of Polly Higgins. You’ll see why.

Isaac Davidson writes in the NZ Herald:

A visiting author is calling for crimes against nature, or “ecocide”, to be recognised as the fifth crime against humanity.

British environmental lawyer and writer Polly Higgins said current environmental laws are not fit for purpose and corporations which do serious, lasting damage to ecosystems should be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court (ICC), similarly to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression.

Now you might stop reading at this point, and even have some sympathy for what she advocates. Until you realise she is not advocating that people who break the law should face criminal sanctions, but in fact she wants to jail people for having a different view to herself.

Individuals, such as chief executives and energy ministers, could be charged with unintentional ecocide, ecoslaughter, or ecocide. Their sentences would be equivalent to death caused by dangerous driving, manslaughter and murder.

Okay so she wants ministers and chief executives to face up to life imprisonment for what she calls ecocide.

The definition of ecocide she proposed was the mass “damage, destruction or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished”.

Now note the term the inhabitants. This means that building a mine on the west coast that “diminishes” the peaceful enjoyment of the snails would be ecocide, if the territory it covers is big enough.

The size, duration and impact of ecocide could be measured by the international laws applied during wartime. Ecocide was committed if the size of the affected area exceeded 200km in length, had an impact on ecosystems for more than three months and had a severe impact on human or natural resources.

Higgins suggested lignite mining in Southland and proposed deepwater drilling in the Great South Basin could qualify as New Zealand examples of ecocide because they would create enormous greenhouse gas emissions.

Here is the point at which I concluded she was an eco-nazi.She basically is saying that if a democratically elected Government in NZ decided to lignite mine in Southland, and got elected on a platform of doing so, that the UN should swoop in and arrest some Government Ministers and lock them up for life imprisonment.

Higgins also seems to think that creating greenhouse gas emissions should count as ecocide. So I presume she also advocates that the CEO of Fonterra should be arrested and sent to the Hague for trial and life imprisonment.

Air New Zealand also has a huge carbon footprint. Now putting aside the hypocrisy that Higgins probably flew to New Zealand, will she call for Rob Fyfe to be jailed for 30 years for all the carbon emissions put out by Air New Zealand jets?

Richard Long writes on Bryan Gould’s comparison of John Key to Muldoon:

Jetlag is bad enough, but returning to headlines about Rob Muldoon last week was completely destabilising. I thought I’d been transported back a few decades.

Part of this was publicity over the Bats theatre play portraying the former Prime Minister as the most evil leader we have ever had. As one who suffered under his idiosyncrasies (banned from his press conferences at times; fingered to this newspaper’s chairman of directors as someone who should be fired) even I felt this was a bit over the top.

Could you imagine a politician today getting away with banning journalists and lobbying to get them sacked.

As for Bryan Gould, we can only assume that the political scene in New Zealand is a huge disappointment. It has to be remembered that Mr Gould was on the Left of the old British Labour Party in the days when many clung to the credo of nationalising the means of production, distribution and exchange.

About the only thing to the Left of British Labour then was the Soviet bloc, the Cubans and the maniacs in North Korea. Mr Gould, tipped as leadership material, lost out because he was too far to the Left of the British Left!

Instead of emigrating to North Korea, he then returned to New Zealand where life must have been a series of disappointments: Roger Douglas’ economic reforms; Ruth Richardson’s mother of all budgets; and now a former international money trader riding a phenomenal wave of electorate approval even as he prepares to prop up a massive Budget deficit by selling state assets and boosting mining and oil exploration.

Life must be very tough for poor Bryan as his socialist nirvana remains a distant dream.

Mr Gould lamented that Mr Key was a commentator on everything – national leader, moral guide, social commentator, sports journalist, pub drinking companion, comedian and was always on the news bulletins.

Yes, for two reasons: the electorate wants to hear his views and Mr Key has this disarming style of answering questions that are delivered his way, even when, at times, he probably should not.

I suspect his staff would rather he sometimes uses the phrase “no comment”.

My favourite, at a time when inflation was hitting 18 per cent, was the fallout to the question on whether he had a policy to deal with inflation. Of course he did, Muldoon responded, but he would not say what it was.

Next day’s front-page report that he had a secret new policy left Muldoon furious. The result was the ill-fated wages-prices freeze – a final straw for many Nats.

The late Treasury Secretary Bernie Galvin grumpily confided to me some time afterwards that officials had managed to talk Muldoon down from the madness of a wages-prices freeze till that report drove him into a corner.

So the media are to blame for the wage and price freeze 🙂

Lane Nichols at Dom Post reports:

Hutt Valley High School pupils were subjected to torture, extreme violence and sexual abuse, but school authorities failed to protect victims, alert parents or report numerous attacks to police.

A long-awaited Ombudsmen’s Office report reveals chilling details of systemic violence at the school, intimidation and abuse. It also identifies a history of failing to punish culprits or acknowledge the seriousness of their crimes.

A gang of six teens terrorised classmates in late 2007, chasing younger boys around the school, dragging them to the ground to remove their pants then violating them with a screwdriver, scissors, branches, pens, pencils and drills.

And what did the school do? Cover it up!

When the offending was identified, the 1700-pupil co-ed state school did not alert victims’ parents, police or Child, Youth and Family. It instead chose to stand down the culprits for a few days.

Incensed parents eventually learned of the attacks and complained to the Human Rights Commission and Ombudsmen’s Office.

One of the nine victims had holes ripped in his trousers during an assault. Another was kicked in the face when he refused to kiss his attackers’ shoes after being sexually violated.

The decile 8 school played down the attacks, saying, “It wasn’t an assault where somebody had blood spilt” and describing the incidents as “minor”.

The school did not play down the attacks. Some individuals did. I don’t know whether it was the school principal, the board chair, or someone else – but they should be named and shamed.

When quizzed later by Ombudsman David McGee about the attacks, school management said an investigating police officer was on a “crusade” and “out to make a name for himself”.

Who are these school management people? Do they still work there?

School bullying is not minor and trivial. It causes kids to kill themselves. For many kids it turns what should be five of the best years of their lives into an era of terror and fear.

Tabling his report in Parliament yesterday, Mr McGee described the attacks as “a pattern of repeated, premeditated, systematic assaults”. He slated the school’s response, inadequate discipline policies and failure to implement Education Ministry child abuse policies.

“Even disregarding the most serious allegations of direct penetrative assault, the systematic pack assaults with sharp objects and surrounding threats and intimidation … would seem to have justified, at a minimum, suspension of the perpetrators.”

Antisocial children were retained in the school and serious violence and sexual assaults went unreported to government agencies. The school also took it upon itself to interpret the results of a victim’s medical examination in favour of his perpetrators.

What was wrong with the school management that they acted in such a way?

According to a letter from another victim’s parent to the Education Ministry, no punishment was imposed for an earlier 2007 incident when a group of pupils held another boy down with a chain around his neck and tried burning him with a lighter.

A third pupil was pushed down stairs and kicked in the head and chest until unconscious in 2004.

This sort of behaviour should result in court action, not a school cover up.

Recently appointed Hutt Valley High School principal Ross Sinclair issued a full apology yesterday for the school’s actions. The school accepted it had managed the assaults poorly and made serious mistakes.

Mr Sinclair is new so can’t be held accountable. But he can clean out any of his senior management who were part of this reign of effective condoning of bullying and violence.

And likewise you have to wonder where was the board of trustees during this? They are meant to be the champion of parents – not force them to go to the Ombudsman. I wonder if a Commissioner should have been appointed?