By: Larry Williams | Tuesday, October 02, 2012

ON THE GCSB

Police will investigate the GCSB for illegal spying.

Last week Green Party Co-leader Russel Norman asked police to investigate the spy agency after it was acknowledged the GCSB broke the rules when it monitored Kim Dotcom and Bram Van der Kolk.

So a senior police investigator will, well, investigate the GCSB for spying because the police asked them to.

The information that they were foreign nationals and not NZ residents came from the police.

Now the police will investigate.

The spooks stuffed it up on behalf the cops.

Here's the thing :

Russel Norman is now getting all excited. He wants the cops to interview the PM and deputy PM. It looks like Norman would like to do the investigation himself. Not only did he want an investigation he's now starting to dictate which way that investigation will go.

Really what he wants is to get at the PM. At the Government. He admitted last week.

Reality is, what expect to come out of this?

Who are they going to prosecute?

Labour's David Shearer jumps into this today as well. He says the police investigations is not enough. I think he wants a public inquiry which is really quite silly when you consider the GCSB is a 'secret service'.

His target, like Norman's, is the PM of course.

The police decision to investigate looks about as dumb as their advice to the GCSB.

ON RENA

A settlement has been reached with the company that owes the grounded ship the Rena.

The shipping company will pay $27.6m to settle the claim. This leaves the taxpayer with the rest - another $20m. They will pay another $10.4m if they get resource consent to leave part of the wreck in place.

This of course is unsatisfactory but the law only obligated the company to pay a maximum of $11.3m. So in that respect the Crown has done OK.

The Marine Legislation Bill, which is going through the parliamentary process, would substantially increase the amount of compensation payable by ship owners for incidents such as the Rena grounding.

But there is an international limitation on these kinds of events.

However, the Government should have already updated the law.

ON PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

The first of three Presidential debates comes up this week in the U.S.

Its hard to see Romney making any gains. The polls have consistently had Obama leading. Romney's expensive campaign has faltered at every turn. It started with the secret video that showed him saying the almost half of Americans were losers.

This has all helped Obama even though he has hardly delivered on his 'hope and change' platform.

To be fair to Obama he was handed an economy that was in tatters. Still is.

So I don't see the debates will change anything. Obama has the X factor. Romney doesn't.

ON T20

The Black Caps are out of the T20 World Cup.

Again it went down to the Super Over and again they couldn't get there even though they scored a quite magnificent 17. Taylor was superb.

That the West Indies got that target with one ball to spare is either quite remarkable batting or poor bowling.

I suspect a bit of both.

Anyway, the Black Caps did not disgrace themselves. The T20 can be margin of error stuff and so it was.