Rt Hon Winston Peters
New Zealand First Leader
15 November 2012

Kiwirail Management Should Be Sacked Over Hillside Sale

New Zealand First is calling for KiwiRail chief executive Jim Quinn and his board to be sacked following their decision to sell Hillside workshops to an Australian-based company.

Rt Hon Winston Peters says Mr Quinn and the KiwiRail board are traitors to New KiwiRail workers.

“They have consistently overlooked Hillside as being suitable to carry out all manner of KiwiRail work.

“Locomotives and freight wagons – most plagued with mechanical faults – were made in China.

“This work could have been carried out by Hillside workers to a much higher specification.”

Mr Peters says KiwiRail are going down the same disastrous path as the National Government in July 1993 when it sold our national railway to private investors who ran it into the ground.

“Hillside has been flogged off at a massively reduced price so National’s rich, paper-shuffling business cronies can again make as much profit as possible.

“History is repeating and it’s obscene,” says Mr Peters.

ENDS

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Gordon Campbell: On Failures Of Care For Those With Mental Disabilities

Hard to imagine a more disturbing insight into the treatment of the vulnerable than the Health Ministry report on Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau. The Ministry has found that the country’s only kaupapa Maori intellectual disability residential care provider has been “seriously dysfunctional.”

The ministry says the business has failed to recruit and retain quality staff – and says the kaimahi (caregivers) that have been employed are seriously unsuitable for the job, lacking basic knowledge. But Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau doesn’t get all the blame. The report says there’s a significant gap under disability laws to ensure there’s oversight by qualified clinical professionals. More>>