The DotCom

Q: What’s the similarity between Kim DotCom and Tame Iti?
A: The NZ police and security services did their level best to
make them both look good.

I wonder if incompetence can be measured. Perhaps, if it could, the unit could be called “The DotCom.” The Dot Com could be defined as the ability of one govt agency to blow one case sky high by one piece of rank incompetence.*

Every now and then we get a clear peek into the inside of the government machine—a look behind the scenes into that ever-growing armed bureaucracy that asserts its power to run our lives, and to attempt to run this country.

The revelations of blunders, mistakes and cockups made by virtually every police and govt security organisation in the investigations of both the Urewera 18 and Kim DotCom and his band of pirates is such an occasion. Organisations set up to enforce the law can’t even follow their own laws they are employed to enforce.

It seems there is virtually nothing the police and its fellow agencies could not cock up, does there.

But they’re not alone. This is really the record of every govt agency everywhere, from ACC to the Auckland City Council—though not all their cockups make headlines…

We know the Soviet Union did not collapse because of the competence of its govt departments. In the same way, we can be confident that the incompetence revealed in the botched investigations of Iti and Dotcom are simply the very public tip of an iceberg of endemic incompetence.

I suggest that next time and every time you are confronted by a man with a plan to be carried out by government, you just think back to occasions such as these and remember: these people really do not have a fricking clue.

* * * * *

* But this might be confused with the other obvious use of “The Dotcom”: which could be defined as the ability of one person in one visit to parliament to put a Prime Minister on the back foot for one week.