NZ won’t be joining up with Australia any time soon

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Another disappointment for the Pike River families provided the low point of a busy week in the New Zealand political and news scene.

The High Court has dismissed an appeal for a judicial review of the decision not to prosecute Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, brought by the partners of the 29 men who died at the poorly run mine.

The families believe with some justification that the $3.41 million payout, or $110,000 each, is “blood money” in exchange for the charges being dropped. Cruelly the decision came in the same week the families marked the fifth anniversary of the disaster.

Perhaps the most striking political headline of the week came with the offer from Australian senator Ian McDonald for New Zealand to be the seventh and eighth states of Australia. Millions of Kiwis choked at the suggestion.

Unsurprisingly Andrew Little and Phil Goff returned empty-handed from their visit to seek a better deal for expat Kiwis. There is strong anti-immigrant feeling in Australia and what appears to be, sadly, a growing anti-Kiwi attitude.

New Zealanders working across the ditch should not be denied the rights and benefits of other taxpayers there. It is a hard one but the Government should not let it go.

Little returned to New Zealand to celebrate Labour’s 80th birthday, a chance perhaps to reflect where the country’s oldest political party is going.

John Key was heading in the opposite direction, first to Malta for the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference — which one English paper described as a chance for the Queen to meet a gallery of despots and undesirable characters. From there he goes to Paris for the key climate change conference.

The Government’s only success of the week was to get its long-desired reform of the Resource Management Act on to the Parliamentary agenda — but without having economic development added to the Act’s stated purposes. It was really a victory for the Maori Party, which forced the backdown.