Monday, June 19, 2017



More National lies on Pike River

One of the government's justifications for its refusal to re-enter the Pike River mine to retrieve the bodies of the 29 who died there is that there is nothing to retrieve - the mine was an "inferno" after the explosion, and any bodies would have been burned to ashes. But it turns out that that's just not true - and that they've known all along:

New footage from deep inside Pike River Mine shows no sign of an inferno or underground fire.

The footage, obtained by Newshub, also shows what appears to be a pair of spectacles belonging to Ben Rockhouse, the only miner working in that area who wore glasses.

Filmed in 2011, just over a month after the fourth 2010 explosion, the footage shows the coal face of the mine, as deep as operations had got.

There are wooden pallets, rubber hoses, and other combustible items that are untouched and uncharred.

It flies in the face of what officials told the families on November 24 2010 - that the no one would have survived and the bodies would have been reduced to nothing.


They've had this footage since 2011. They've never shown it to families, and they have effectively covered it up. As for why, I guess the last thing the government would want is evidence that people might have survived the initial explosion and waited for rescue which never came. Then they might go from a government which merely let people die needlessly due to deregulation to one which callously left people to die. For the politicians, the safest course is simply to seal it all up and forget about it - because actually looking might find something they desperately, desperately don't want to. For them, our ignorance is their bliss.

National has lied so often on this that we simply can not trust anything they say on the issue. And pretty obviously, if we want different decisions to be made, we need a different government, which isn't primarily invested in covering its own arse on the issue.