As cargo from the wrecked Rena continues to wash up on the shoreline, the government faces calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the maritime disaster.
The container ship – which ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef off Mt Maunganui in early October – broke up seven days ago after being battered by rough seas.
About 881 containers remained on board the ship when it split up and about 150 are thought to have spilled overboard in the subsequent hours. Since then, freight such as timber and milk powder has washed ashore.
Then they administer the coup-de-grace, that renders the whole piece somewhat meaningless:
Green Party oceans spokesman Gareth Hughes has called for an independent commission to investigate the disaster and Maritime New Zealand's overall management of New Zealand's commercial waterways.
"The government still hasn't committed to an independent inquiry. But we need one," Hughes told the Sunday Star-Times.
It must be a slow-news day, for Stuff to be beating this story up. You see; Gareth Hughes isn't just an interested observer of the Rena stranding, and the subsequent salvage effort, which has been little short of heroic at times. Hughes was one of the first to spy a political opportunty when Rena ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef.
Hughes' worst excess was when he suggested around a week after the stranding that oil could and should have been being pumped off from Day One. Given that Rena's internals were badly damaged when she went from 17 knots to a standstill in about a boat-length, that could never have happened, even if the necessary tankers were waiting alongside the reef in case a ship like Rena became stuck.
Gareth Hughes might be the fresh, young face of the Greens, but his contributions on Twitter and Facebook tell of a young man who has quickly become accustomed to flying up and down New Zealand at the taxpayers' expense, giving us all the benefit of his deep and extensive wisdom. Perhaps there DOES need to be an independant inquiry; into whether Gareth Hughes' repeated jumping of sharks actually made the salvage of the Rena more difficult; wouldn't that be a hoot?
3 comments:
Come on now K.S. cut the poor boy some slack. He has never had a job ( outside the sheltered workshops of Greenpeace & Parliament ). How could he possibly know the complexities of pumping hundreds of tons of heavy fuel oil off a stranded ship ?
Perhaps you should offer ( for a suitable fee ) to mentor him in the ways of private taxpaying industry.
I read the tripe that Gareth produces and sigh.
As SL says so pithily he needs educating on the realities of life in the real world.
Quintin Hogg said...
I read the tripe that Gareth produces
Why, for gods sake?
Why?
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