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Home / New Zealand

Paul Holmes: Cops chase cops: It's the stuff of satire

NZ Herald
5 Oct, 2012 04:30 PM5 mins to read

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Kim Dotcom is on the news most nights.  Photo / Sarah Ivey
Kim Dotcom is on the news most nights. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Kim Dotcom is on the news most nights. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Opinion by

Dotcom saga turning into an episode of Yes Minister

Police investigating the police. It never ceases to amaze me. What is it with New Zealand? Why would the police ever find against themselves in an inquiry they do into themselves?

There obviously has to be an investigation into the police and GCSB and their cutsie relationship, and instead of making the inquiry independent the Government makes sure it's going to be nice and safe.

A senior policeman will "assess Mr Norman's complaint", and the police have engaged their pet QC to see if any action needs to be taken from her review of what the officer finds. She is none other than Kristy McDonald. Kristy McDonald and the police are tight as a drum. Kristy McDonald has acted for the police on lots of occasions and was even their lawyer in a commission of inquiry into police conduct in 2007.

She's even had some curious role as patron of young police officers. And while she might protest her independence, I simply don't believe it. She's a really safe girl, Kristy.

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So once again, the cops will investigate the cops.

This kind of nonsense is satirised ruthlessly in the Yes Minister TV series. At one point the Rt Hon James Hacker and his ever-wily personal secretary, Sir Humphrey, agree there has to be an inquiry into some matter.

But both men know such an inquiry has political risks. Sir Humphrey says he will be happy to run the inquiry for the Prime Minister.

"The job of a professionally conducted internal inquiry is to unearth a mass of no evidence."

The difficulty with an independent inquiry, he goes on, is that "everything depends on who the chairman is. He has to be absolutely sound".

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Dotcom brief was 'not memorable' - PM

03 Oct 01:45 AM
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Key's Dotcom 'brain fade'

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03 Oct 04:30 PM
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Dotcom glitch suspicion

04 Oct 04:30 PM

Meaning, of course, "He will have a sensitive and sympathetic oversight into the overall problem." Meaning, of course, he will know how to look after GCSB.

It's been a pesky week for John Key.

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Every night on the network news, there's Dotcom. The Herald website publishes a Dotcom picture right under the masthead. I think he is there as a "trending story".

Mr Key would no doubt like him to trend off into outer space and collide with space junk.

What's most intriguing is why Mr Key released that mention of Dotcom had been made at a totally secure GCSB briefing in February.

But, says, Mr Key, he hardly noticed it. Look, I'm sorry, but that's impossible. There had been one of those wild police raids just weeks before which attracted about as much attention as a nuclear blast. And nothing about Dotcom is too small to be noticed.

I received an overwhelming amount of mail from my column last week in which I said that the whole Dotcom saga is part of a long history of incompetence and corruption which has characterised the history of this country. Many agreed. Many seemed overjoyed to hear me say it.

But I have to say too there were some other, darker emails from people who had observed Dotcom over the years and are less impressed with him than I was.

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Then Kate Wilkinson got herself in a right pickle with her assent to a visa for Mike Tyson, one of the greatest thugs to ever enter a sports arena. Tyson's rape conviction got him a six-year sentence. No foreign national can be granted a visa for New Zealand if they've committed a crime worth more than five years in jail. Wilkinson gave him a visa.

The storm built and when Key said he had no idea how the man was awarded a visa to come here, that was the end, really. Wilkinson stood corrected and the visa was revoked the next day.

From what I could work out from his barely comprehensible manner of speaking from Vegas the other night, I don't think he's ever taken responsibility for that crime, or ever admitted he committed it. Tyson is so unsavoury. He's so low he could parachute out of a snake's backside. One just looks at him and is filled with revulsion. Having said that, I've always preached that there has to be redemption. A man's got to be able to change his ways. And a man's got to be able to turn his life over to good and the world has to give a him a chance doesn't it? And he does seem to have changed. But on further interrogation of the Life Education Trust, Wilkinson found out that they didn't want a bar of him.

And in the big American presidential debate? Romney was very impressive, more so than I'd ever seen him. But I don't think you can beat soul. Or a man who says when he walked into the White House the country was paying for two wars on credit cards and the country was about to go broke.

Nevertheless it was all pretty evenly matched, good looking roosters both of them.

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