16th of August 2013 (Friday) Report on the Judicial Review in Whangarei High Court for the Mangawhai Ratepayers and Residents Association VS Kaipara District Council (Commissioners ) This is going to be quite a long newsletter. We had a big day. Much to report. Some people don’t like getting long emails (from me). I don’t have accurate information as to who they are. If you are one of those people, rather than get angry at having to read too much, please press delete now. I think it took longer to write than it will take to read it. The Big Day in Court Yesterday, Friday August 16, commencing at 10:00am, the Kaipara District Council, through its Queens Counsel, David Goddard, attempted to quash our application to have certain Council Decisions reviewed by the court. The CEO of KDC, Steve Ruru, and two of the commissioners, Peter Winder and Richard Booth were present. All of those people were paid for every second they spent there and their costs of getting to and from the court were all met, by you. The QC and the team of lawyers they have employed to crush our application is also paid for by you (as a ratepayer). And to complete the cost picture, if you are an MRRA member you have probably contributed something towards the cost of representing our side of the story. Many people had taken time away from their jobs to attend the hearing, and everyone had had to meet their own cost of getting there and back out of their own pocket. Our Team We were represented in court by Dr Matthew Palmer and Mr Kitt Littlejohn. I will talk about the job they did for us a little further down. Acknowledgements Some acknowledgements are in order. The first is to you, our members, and supporters who attended this long full-day hearing. There were over one hundred people in attendance, and in order to accommodate everyone the court permitted us to take over the adjacent court room. We set up a closed circuit TV link so that the seventy-odd people who could not fit into the main courtroom could get a view of proceedings and hear what was being said. For the benefit of those who did not attend, and I know there were many who would have liked to but couldn’t, I will take the risk of being patronising and say that it was a source of immense pride to me to see such a huge turnout. It was also noticeable how magnificently everyone turned out. It was very clear that everyone had dressed to demonstrate that we are serious respectable and respectful people, and the conduct of everyone was impeccable. As the KDC case unfolded, and counsel for KDC uttered one outrageous indefensible, even preposterous claim after another, I could feel the seething behind me, but not once in the entire day did anyone interrupt the decorum of the court. Very near the end, when Matthew was making a plea that the people who had been so egregiously wronged by the Council should be granted their right to be heard, there was a chorus of “Hear hear”. Matthew said to the judge, “You can see your honour that there are deeply felt emotions in this case, and I apologise for this interjection”. The judge replied “There are times Dr Palmer, when a little judicial deafness does no harm”. The judge acknowledged the attendance by so many affected persons at the very end by thanking them for coming and for listening in silence to many hours of debate. Starting at the beginning I want to thank John Bull for taking on the task of organising the bus and collecting the fares. Thank you to every member who travelled by bus. We made a modest profit on the journey and we have applied that to defray the cost of the CCTV link. Most of the balance of that cost has been picked up by Bill and Christine Bygrave because, as Bill said, “this is a very important day in the life of this struggle against bureaucratic oppression, and everyone who goes to the court deserves to see justice being done”. We all owe a vote of thanks to Bill and Christine for their generosity. Next, I want to acknowledge the provider of the CCTV system Eric Adams, of SoundCave in Whangarei. They were very helpful, and they made their excellent equipment available to us for a very reasonable price. If you should need Audio-Visual services at any time in the future, please consider using these guys. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of both the court administrative officer Paul Lincoln, and the judge, Justice Paul Heath, for allowing us to film in court and accommodating the overflow. However, the Court Security people were clearly driven almost demented at all this irregular conduct, and they went to considerable trouble to frustrate everything that anyone tried to do. Their favourite trick was to lock any door immediately after anyone had gone through it, so that when the person tried to come out again they found themselves nabbed, like a common criminal. The Lighter side of Life. It is a deadly serious business, but it had its lighter side. The court opens at 8:30 in the morning. At the entrance, the security people set up an X-ray scanner and a metal detector. I went in with Matthew Palmer who had a very large shocking pink suitcase on wheels. He was lifting it up, with considerable difficulty, because it was full of paper, to send it through the scanner. A guard said, “Are you a lawyer?”, and Matthew, being the honest fellow he is, said “Yes”. The guard then said, “Oh well, just go on through. If we can’t trust lawyers who can we trust?”. To which Matthew replied, “Not many people hold that view these days!”. One would have thought, given all the hassle recently with that woman lawyer smuggling stuff into prison for her murderer boyfriend that lawyers would have been especially suspect, but not at the Whangarei High Court! So, everyone was scanned and frisked as they entered, and once that was done, the security people took all the scanning equipment away and put it back in storage. Apparently, anyone thinking of bringing a gun into the High Court will only ever try to do that between 08:30 and 09:00. Outside of those hours only law-abiding decent people come and go into the court. The Hearing and the Arguments Now, to the hearing itself. The court sat to hear the Council’s application to have part of our request for Judicial Review struck out (cancelled). That is, a judge, four barristers, and a hundred and twenty (odd) people devoted an entire day of their lives to a discussion about whether there should be a further discussion. Abuse of power This is where you begin to see the abuses of power that take place. The council openly acknowledges that pretty much everything we allege in our statement of claim is correct. All of the rating decisions that we want the court to give an opinion on and set aside have been formally acknowledged to be invalid, because the council itself has compiled them into a Bill that it wants Parliament to pass so everyone can pretend they were legal after all. The day in court could (and should) have been spent dealing with the case itself, and not with the piece of mischievous legal trickery that KDC brought to the table. There are two shameful things about this. The first is that this process is immensely and unnecessarily expensive, but because the commissioners are not in any way accountable to the ratepayers for what they do, they can blow away any amount of money they like on pretty much anything they choose, including legal games, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. And secondly, why are they doing this? They are doing everything they possibly can to delay our court action, because they “know” what the outcome of it will be, and if that decision is handed down before the Bill is passed in the House, not even the Parliament, with its well-established contempt for constitutional democracy, will be able to push that terrible Bill through. KDC’s Arguments David Goddard QC, leading the arguments for the KDC, took all of the morning sessions and part of the post lunch session to say two things: 1. The MRRA should have taken the council to court years ago, and all of this illegal behaviour by the council could have been nipped in the bud. And BECAUSE the MRRA did not act earlier, it has somehow forfeited its right to act at all. Friends, you would not believe, unless you were there, how many different ways there are to say what I just wrote. 2. If a council borrows a substantial amount of money thus creating what is known as a “protected” transaction, the council has the right to get the money to discharge the obligation it has entered into (repay the loan) from its ratepayers, absolutely regardless of how it went about doing the borrowing, or what the reasons for the borrowing were, or how it spent the money it borrowed. I will add in passing that instead of relying upon the affidavit of KDC’s chief executive, which said, among other things, that it was unlikely that anyone from the past would willingly step up to the plate and help out, he referred frequently and copiously to the affidavit of Clive Boonham. The legal mind knows no bounds. Using Mathematics to make sense of all this Now, let us take this second (ratepayers carry the can) argument first, because it is unquestionably the more beautiful of the two. Mathematicians use a technique which is known as reductio ad absurdam and it involves going to the extremes to see what happens there. In mathematics it usually involves setting something at zero or at infinity. For example, say you wanted to know if you should turn your engine off at the lights to save fuel. Without actually going out and doing that, with all the complicated measurements that would involve, the mathematician would say, “If the car is stationary and the engine is running, it (the car) is doing an infinite number of gallons to the mile. If the car is moving and the engine is off, the car is doing an infinite number of miles to the gallon. This indicates that (all other things being equal), you should turn the engine off whenever you don’t need it, unless your objective is to waste fuel. Let us apply Mr Goddard’s argument in the same way, but before doing so, let us make sure we are clear about what he says. He says that absolutely regardless of how any council went about incurring any debt, let me repeat, ANY DEBT, the ratepayers must, if called upon to do so, provide the money required to meet that debt. A Flutter at the Tables So let us use reductio ad absurdam to see how this works. Mr Ruru wakes up one morning heavily cast down by the poverty of his council. But today is different because today Mr Ruru is feeling lucky. So, he writes a cheque on the council’s account for $2 Million dollars, and he gets the finance manager, who depends for his living on Mr Ruru, to countersign the cheque. He takes it to the bank and asks for cash. The bank immediately recognises that this is a protected transaction. Mr Ruru is asked to certify that all is in order, and he does so. Under sections 117 And 118 of the Act that is ALL the bank has to do. There is no obligation at all upon them to test the truth of what Mr Ruru has just told them. Why did he need this $2 Million dollars? Well, he is an accountant, and he knows how much debt the council is carrying, and he calculates that if he could stake that $2 Million dollars on the right kind of bet (Make a smart investment) he could generate enough money to repay all the council’s debts. His motives are as pure as the driven snow. He jumps in the Council car and drives to Sky City, where he starts investing the $2 Million. Things go up, and they go down, he changes strategy, and things go up again, but again they take a turn down, By five o’clock (because that is when his working day ends), he no longer has the $2 Million. It is already on its way off shore to be washed and ironed. Remorse and how to deal with it He returns home a little crestfallen , but comforted in the knowledge that he has done his level best , for the council and its ratepayers. In the morning he knocks on the door of Mr Robertson, the Government’s Commissioner. He explains that yesterday there was a bit of a financial mishap and the overdraft has blown out by two million. He is quick to point out that that is not what he intended, and that he had expected to be bringing the news that there no longer was any overdraft at all. Mr Robertson, who has a QSM for his lifetime devotion to being a good employer, can see that Mr Ruru is distraught and close to tears. He cannot bear to see this level of distress in someone who matters to him, and he immediately arrives at a solution. “I’ll tell you what Steve, let’s transfer this stress you are experiencing to some people who don’t matter at all, and for whom stress is just a normal part of daily life”. “Oh”, says Steve, “Who would that be?” “Why, you silly boy, the Ratepayers, of course. You’ve got all their details on file, you’ve got a billing system that can generate invoices at the drop of a hat, and, frankly, you’ve got direct debit authorities over thousands of them so you can just help yourself to as much of their money as you need. Problem Solved!” “But”, says Steve, “Wouldn’t that be stealing?”. “Steve, Steve, Steve, that is a protected transaction that you created yesterday. Now I’m certainly going to have to ask you to check with me before you do that again, but what’s done is done, or, as I heard David Goddard say only the other day, it’s water under the bridge, and we have not only the right, but the DUTY to collect that money from the ratepayers, and we are absolutely within the law to do so”. “Well, phew”, says Steve, “I thought I was in a bit of a pickle for a minute or two there. Thank you John, You have put my mind at ease”. Look in the Mirror- If you see a trussed turkey- that’s you. So there you have it people. No matter how idiotic, criminal or, as Mr Goddard put it, “Dog’s breakfast” the behaviour of a council is, its ratepayers must pick up the tab and no questions asked. When confronted with this scenario Mr Goddard would say, no doubt, “Don’t be ridiculous, that could never happen. There are all kinds of checks and balances in place to prevent anything like that from ever happening. For example the auditor general is there to detect and prevent such abuses of power, I have worked alongside some of their best people”. “But Mr Goddard, you told a High Court Judge only yesterday that the auditor general is engaged in an investigation into how almost the exact scenario just described above could have taken place under her very nose, and we are all, are we not, inclined to be skeptical about investigations that are inquiring into the actions of the investigator?” “Yes, I told the judge that because I wanted him to strike out the MRRA’s request to test the utter and total absurdity of what I am saying. I have a reputation to maintain, and the conventional wisdoms that I have spouted for years that have garnered me fees in the untold millions are not going to be knocked out of whack by some band of country bumpkins”. What does “Good for Local Government” Mean? Now let us turn to the most important thing that Mr Goddard said to the judge yesterday. It exposed to me for the first time the nature of the travesty that local government has become. He said that ss 117,118 (in particular) exist to make it easier and cheaper for councils to borrow money. He said, and I am still a little breathless when I recall it, that if banks and other lenders had to do due diligence when lending to councils, the cost of borrowing would go up! His argument is that the ability to borrow essentially infinite amounts of money at low interest rates and with no brakes on the mechanisms, purposes, uses, or other conditions surrounding the borrowing is somehow “good” for local government. That statement is true if and only if by local government you do not mean the ratepayers. If you ask almost any ratepayer in the country whether the council to which they have to pay rates ought to have access to unlimited amounts of money to use in whatever way they choose, most of them would say “No”. It might well be that if ratepayers were given a choice they would opt for restrictions on councils’ ability to borrow money, and they would probably be very happy to pay slightly higher interest charges if that meant that the lenders to local government were taking proper commercial risks, instead of, as Mr Goddard puts it, and appears to believe is right, taking absolutely no risk at all. Are we alone? You might be asking yourself why we have this problem while nobody else does. It is actually highly likely that nearly everyone else has this problem in some degree, but due to various strategies employed to cover their tracks and due to the on-going utter incompetence and hopelessness of the auditor not many of the other catastrophes have broken out into the open as yet. Head in sand Governance and Government The really galling thing is the way the commissioners and the government are responding to the Kaipara situation. They have no intention to change anything or get to the bottom of what went wrong, even though they are prepared to admit that nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong. If you go back to 2012, you may remember that Neil Tiller, to his credit, sent a written apology to almost all ratepayers for having stuffed up. Also, to his credit, at least in the big picture sense, he had dealt with a root cause and got McKerchar out of the place. The government realised that Neil Tiller and his council were edging towards full frank and open admission of wrongdoing that would train an intense and very revealing light on its watchdog, the Auditor General. If that happened the next development would be a claim against the government for some kind of compensation (dare we say bail-out?). Despite the scarcity of affection between the government and the OAG, it was important to throw a cloak of secrecy over all this, even if that meant hiding the (in)actions of the OAG at the same time. They decided to act quickly and biff the council into the dustbin so that nothing else would get out into the open. We had not taken court action because, I remind you all here, Steve Ruru had agreed to allow us to put our appointed auditor into the council to work alongside the auditor general, and to independently verify the gruesome financial facts. Given that degree of openness and co-operation we had grounds for believing that things could get resolved without litigation. At the same time I was having discussions with Steve about the possibility of a zero-based rates review, where we would recalibrate the rates based on a basket of similar jurisdictions elsewhere in the country, and we would sit around the table at the end and work out what to do about the gap between a fair rates take and what would be needed to balance the books INCLUDING defaulting on all or part of some debt. The government rammed these terrible commissioners down our throat and they immediately strangled all the negotiations with the CEO at birth. This displays a level of cynicism and lack of concern for the rule of law that almost defies belief. Day Tripper or Ego Tripper? There was a respectable old fellow outside the High Court as we went in yesterday. I don’t know him, but he knew me. He shouted abuse at me, and said, “This is just a gigantic ego trip for Bruce Rogan”. I think that he, and many others simply cannot believe that elected and appointed officials responsible for running the district they live in would ever behave in the way that we are saying they have. If they admit that, they have to admit that they have been made complete fools of, and that involves a very unpalatable loss of face. As to the ego trip charge, any ego boost I get from people who appreciate what I have been doing and are pleased that someone is willing to front aspects of this fight, is adequately offset by those who think I am a trouble-making oaf, at best. You should have acted sooner Now we need to address ourselves to Mr Goddard’s earlier and rather more prosaic argument that we have run out of time. It runs along these lines. The agreed facts confirm that illegal activity was occurring in 2005. That being the case, 2005 was when the MRRA should have raised the alarm and brought legal action. In a spirit of being helpful to the court, and in a spectacular attempt to find someone else to blame for what has happened, he argued that IF the MRRA had acted when it should have, in 2005, all the subsequent illegal activity (again, not in dispute) would probably have been cut off at the pass. Mr Goddard does not address himself to the question of how the MRRA (or anyone else) could have applied for judicial review of a decision the existence of which was not known to them. Almost all of the decisions that the MRRA is challenging were dark impenetrable secrets until 2011, and from then until March 2013 the MRRA did everything it could in every way it could find to sort out the mess without subjecting the community or its members to the cost of court action. Mr Goddard takes the view, which he expressed forcefully, that the MRRA’s decision not to apply to the court as soon as it was satisfied that there was something about which an application to the court was appropriate (and Mr Goddard readily agreed that there was no shortage of these), then the MRRA had forfeited its right to make such an application. Assistance to the Judge Seeing a slight frown on the brow of the judge at this line of reasoning, Mr Goddard clarified. He said that in 2005, the council consisted of John, and Fred, and Mary and Bill, and of course, Jack. But here, and now, it comprises a new John, Peter, Colin, Richard and of course, Steve. All of the earlier people have gone, and it is highly doubtful whether any of them would be willing to assist the council to defend its actions in court, even if they could be induced to return from the Bahamas for the purpose. Mr Goddard also said that he was aware of 53 boxes of documents that would probably have to be looked at if council was forced to defend itself in court, and looking at these boxes would involve considerable time and effort that would be much better spent getting on with the future. Mr Goddard’s catch-all phrase for this is “water under the bridge”, and it was plain to me, watching, that the judge got the drift, or went with the flow, so to speak. Mr Goddard is not at all used to being interrupted in full cry, and he found it necessary to confer on the judge, when he ventured a question, one or two lessons in the law, which I feel sure the judge received with gratitude. Missed opportunity Many of you are aware that for one term I was a Kaipara District Councillor. Regrettably, I was completely unaware at that time of the statute of limitations that Mr Goddard laid out for us in the high Court yesterday. Had I known, I feel certain that I could have found someone who would, for a commission or an emolument, have assisted me to embezzle a million or two out of the council, and so long as the defalcation remained undetected until I left, I would have been a wealthy and untouchable person, very well placed to accept commissionerships which would have come my way. Making a Case for the utterly absurd takes special skill. You will be beginning to see, I think, why Mr Goddard’s arguments took some little time to enunciate. He appears to contend that any unlawful act should be detected at or very soon after it is committed, and that any unlawful act that remains undetected for more than a few moments ceases to be prosecutable at law. I will have to leave it to the reader to apply reductio ad absurdam to this construct, but if you do, I think you will find that the MRRA (or anyone else) would really only have grounds for approaching the court up until an illegal act was committed, and thereafter it would be too late. Mr Goddard recognises others’ strengths Mr Goddard expatiated on the role of the auditor general, in whom he expressed a degree of confidence that verged on mysticism. The thrust of his submission in this regard was that much of what the MRRA sought to clutter the High Court with was being dealt to, as he spoke, by the Auditor General. While he did not place before the court any evidence of what the auditor general was doing, his faith in that office was such that it was clear that the judge was encouraged to feel very comfortable that everything exercising the minds of the MRRA was being attended to by the Auditor General. Now it is not entirely common knowledge that the highly-competent senior legal officer in the OAG of whom Mr Goddard spoke in glowing terms but did not name, was at one time his spouse. I am sure we would all like to be able to hold our former partners in such high esteem, and it goes to the credit of anyone who does so. The Tireless front-facing Commissioners Then Mr Goddard turned his legal howitzer on those who detract from the work of the government’s commissioners. The judge was told that these commissioners were forward focused and toiling night and day to create a distance between the dog’s breakfast that was the council and the high-performing little powerhouse it is destined to become, now that it is not constrained by the debilitating effects of democracy. Mr Goddard made it very clear to the judge that he (Justice Heath) had a part to play in facilitating the work of these commissioners. If they were to remain future-focussed, as Mr Goddard is clearly persuaded they ought to be, the judge needed to see that allowing a bunch of ratepayers to distract them from their work by bringing vexatious court proceedings against them, would incur cost, misuse of resource, and generally interfere with the task of stripping all remaining wealth from the district’s citizens. This is likely to have been the clincher for the judge, in my view. Mr Goddard shows deft footwork At about this point in proceedings it seemed to me that the judge was on the point of giving his decision, and I feel pretty certain that Mr Goddard thought the same. Mr Goddard obtains his remuneration by way of a meter. When it is running, he is being remunerated. If the judge had given his decision then and there, hours of metered time would have vanished into thin air, possibly never to be recouped, so he deftly interjected and the moment was saved. Moreover, Mr Goddard’s instructions from his client are to spin this exercise out for as long as he possibly can while action is taken behind the scenes to get the validation Bill tidied away. I may have been a bit snide about Mr Goddard in here, but I have not the slightest doubt that he is one of the most sought-after QCs in this country precisely because he carries out his client’s instructions better than almost anyone else does. But Wait! There’s more… This naturally brings me to the barristers who are just that little bit better than Mr Goddard. Dr Matthew Palmer and Mr Kitt Littlejohn. I think our members in attendance saw that our case was meticulously prepared, thoroughly researched, and clearly and forcefully stated. The submission was presented by Matthew, assisted by Kitt. The order of play was Council, MRRA, Council (right of reply). When (if) we get to a defended hearing of the case proper, it will be MRRA, Council, MRRA (right of reply). In this hearing the plaintiff was the council and we were the defendant (believe it or not). Matthew countered all the arguments that you have read about above- about how we are out of time, that Judicial Review should not (I think Mr Goddard said CANNOT) be used when the decisions were made in the distant past and can’t be changed, and that matters that occurred so long ago that all the culprits have skipped town are simply futile to pursue. Kitt did not appear to play a prominent role in this presentation to the court, but it was very clear to me sitting just behind that he had his finger on the pulse of every word and page of our testimony and was able instantly to give Matthew what he needed every time the judge sought clarification or additional information. By comparison the other side looked ill-prepared and ill-disciplined. David Goddard is one of the sharpest legal minds in the country; if he looked casual about all this it is probably because he wanted to. The self-immolatory submission from Counsel for KDC At one point in his submission counsel for KDC said that yes, perhaps the court could come down with a declaration that various decisions and actions were illegal, but so what? The AG was investigating all that anyway. Our submission in response to that was that it was perhaps a bit gob-smacking that an officer of the High Court would hand over the single thing that the courts exist for to an agency that has no power to bring a prosecution against anyone or anything. The purpose of the court is to determine whether actions taken by persons or organisations were, or were not, legal, or, sometimes, to determine whether an action that is proposed to be taken would be contrary to law. Beyond that the court has powers, defined by parliament, to impose remedies and give relief, and, of course, to punish people who have committed crimes. District Court High Court Appeal Court, Supreme Court Kangaroo Court. One of the very sad aspects of what is happening here is that the government and its commissioners are trying to subsume the role of the court in the interests of expediency and protecting the status quo. Parliament has the power to create and to modify our laws, and it is right and proper that is should have that power. Modifying laws should happen when either it is found that the law as written doesn’t work well, or where circumstances in society have changed in a way that makes the present law inappropriate. A very dangerous habit has developed where parliament allows people who have failed to comply with the law to get away with it by effectively saying that when those acts were committed the law did not exist. This extinguishes the right to redress, because when this kind of retrospective Act is passed there is no recourse to the courts because there is no longer legally, any unlawful behaviour visible to the court. Our case to the High Court essentially says that we believe we have been unjustly treated, that we have been harmed by that treatment, and that we deserve the right to seek redress in the way that any other person who has been harmed by the unlawful and indeed wilful acts of others is entitled to do. If Council cannot pay? The judge asked, as he might have been expected to do, “What happens if the council cannot rate for these debts”. Through Matthew Palmer we said “Everything that might happen if a council found itself unable to repay debt is more than adequately covered in the Receiverships law”. It is not widely known, but the Receiverships Act contains very specific clear guidance about who has what powers when a local body goes into receivership. KDC argue that sections 117 118 utterly preclude the possibility that a council could go into receivership. If that is true, why on earth did the framers of the law go to all that trouble to ensure that the Receiverships Act made detailed provisions for the conduct of a local government receivership? When Addressing the court on the subject of the Receivership Act and its relevance here, Mr Goddard was unable to repress a rather disconcerting derisory laugh. There may be other laughs to come. Matthew made the observation, attributable to Kitt, “Your Honour the appropriate question to pose might not be “Who is going to pay?” but rather “Who is not going to get paid?””. What next? The judge said he would do his best to hand down a decision within two weeks. I think he was keenly aware of the level of interest in this matter, and he had heard argument that other forces are at work trying to hobble the court here. If that decision leaves our application intact, a substantive hearing (to go over the same ground again, in much more detail) will be scheduled. If we are struck out, part of our case will remain afoot (as they say) but we will have to decide about the likely benefit to us of carrying on. We will not automatically do so. Either side would have the option to appeal the judge’s decision. But you cannot appeal decisions solely on the grounds that you don’t like them- you have to be able to point to something the judge did wrong. Justice Heath is a very experienced High Court Judge. I think (personal opinion) either side would have to stand on tiptoes on a high stool to find anything wrong with his conduct of the case to date. Personal statement. What is a personal Guarantee? And, to close, a viewpoint from me: If I stand guarantor for the debts of my son, or daughter, or friend, and I do not place any constraints on that guarantee, such as an upper limit of my liability, then if whoever I stand as guarantor for fails, I have nobody to blame but myself if I lose everything I own in the world. But in making that decision I looked at the facts at the time, and I made the decision to take that risk on an assessment of the probabilities as I saw them, I exercised a freedom to take a risk with my own resources. Do you wish to be a personal guarantor of KDC? If KDC’s interpretation of sections 117 and 118 is correct, any person who owns property anywhere in New Zealand automatically stands as guarantor for any debts incurred by the local government authority in which their property lies, quite regardless of how that debt came to exist. Many politicians own houses and land, so it beggars belief that the New Zealand parliament intended to create indentured serfs out of the entire property-owing population. Politicians will sometimes act against the interests of other people, but I don’t know of an instance where they have knowingly acted against their own interests. Again, if the KDC/Government view as put forward by David Goddard is correct, the only safe people in this country are those who own no land, or residential property. Does this give a clue as to why the government seems so keen to get everyone, but especially the non-rich, to own a house? Does all this debt really have to be repaid? I have heard many people say that the debt is the debt and it must be repaid. I think there are board members at Solid Energy who are having a bit of a re-think on that point at the moment, and, of course, the country is littered from end to end with corporate corpses and maimed corporate bodies and finance companies (The ones the government didn’t bail out) who, long since, abandoned the idea that debt must be repaid. They shift their position when a day of honesty comes upon them, the wishful thinking comes to an end, and the hard truth that the debt CANNOT be repaid appears in the lights. The necessary nudge required to get the government and its hatchet men to accept that that is the position in Kaipara has not yet taken place. It had dawned on Neil Tiller and his council, and they were girding their loins, too little too late, to deal with it, but they had to be stopped from doing that, because as the waiter said to the man who pointed to a fly in his soup, “Don’t shout and wave it about, or the rest’ll be wanting one too”. If our court action is frustrated, or we fail to make the arguments in court that carry the day, that will not make the slightest difference to the fact that Kaipara is insolvent beyond redemption. All it will do is delay the day of reckoning by (in my view) a matter of months, and hugely increase the cost of that day. If you got this far, you deserve a place in the birthday honours, so give your birthday suit a good press. Kind regards, Bruce Rogan. Mangawhai Ratepayers and Residents Association Inc Northland, New Zealand Contact: Bruce Rogan ( Chairperson ) Tel 09 4315413 Check out our web-sites @: mangawhairatepayers.ning ( old ) mangawhairatepayers.org ( new - January, 2013 ) facebook/mangawhai.ratepayers see also: kaiparaconcerns.co.nz/ e-mail:mangawhairatepayers@gmail
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:41:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015