smoking

PRESS RELEASE from WHALEOIL

For Immediate Release

Date: 9 March 2010

WHALEOIL to Appear Before Select Committee to Expose Ministry Incompetence & Troughing

Well known New Zealand blogger Whaleoil (Cameron Slater) is appearing before the Maori Affairs Select Committee to expose the excessive troughing of tax-payer funding by anti-tobacco groups.

“I expect the Committee to be shocked and outraged when I present my findings to the Committee tomorrow as they hold their inquiry into the tobacco industry” said Mr Slater.

“I will be bringing along a wine box of documents obtained under the Official Information Act to demonstrate a complete disregard for the accountability of taxpayer money by the Ministry of Health, alongside the incompetence of anti-tobacco groups who have received millions of dollars with little to show for it.”

“Groups like Te Reo Marama and its director Shane Kawenata Bradbrook received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer funding from the Ministry to help Maori stop smoking, yet spent most of the time on overseas junkets to exotic destinations like Hawaii (3 times), Bangkok Thailand, Durban South Africa, Helsinki in Finland and Mumbai India.

“And all the Ministry got from Mr Bradbrook was a couple of reports and a performance which resulted in a “damning” internal Ministry audit report.

It simply is not good enough for New Zealand to continue pouring $55 million into stop smoking programmes for little or no return. The only people it is helping are the NGO troughers rorting the system, who are now asking the select committee to recommend they get more money.

Of all the submitters I am the only one with zero conflicts of interests, there is nothing for me to gain or lose by my submission. The rest are either involved in receiving government money, or deciding who gets the government money or in a few cases doing both.

……….

Whaleoil

(Cameron Slater)

whaleoil@gotcha.co.nz

The Broadcasting Standards Authority has found that Michael Laws;

…unfairly represented Mr Broughton’s views.

Mr Broughton had said that “Pakeha continue to allow [smoking] in the country and make profits from it’, but Laws told his listeners that Mr Broughton believed, and told his clients, that smoking is a “Pakeha plot to kill Maori’, an assertion he made several times during the course of his programme.

“The authority is firm in its view that such blatant misrepresentation cannot be regarded as `fair comment’, as argued by the broadcaster,” the decision said.

The authority considered whether upholding the complaint would infringe on the broadcaster’s freedom of expression, but decided its decision would remind broadcasters to ensure they dealt with people referred to in a programme fairly.

With my submission to the Maori Affairs Select Committee on Maori smoking highlights the culture of the Maori anti-smoking lobby. I hope to present a full submission to the Select Committee in person and table my evidence of Shane Kawaneta Bradbrook’s epic failure along with other Maori anti-smoking campaigners.

Mr Broughton is on my list of people who are part of a nasty spiteful list of anti-smoking adherents discovered via the OIA.

The last fews days have seen me expose Te Reo Marama and Shane Kawaneta Bradbook as troughers extraordinaire. The organisation so far has lightened the taxpayers pocket to the tune of almost $2 million dollars and there is more yet to come. Despite a damning audit report the Ministry of Health continued to fund Te Reo Marama to the tune of $500,000.

Yesterday I revealed that Te Reo Marama had also gone dipping in the DHB troughs for additional funding and today I will reveal an extraordinary programme that they received funding, not once, but twice for that the Outcomes report for each of the programmes show little was actually achieved.

In July 2007, just months before the damning audit report was to be released, Te Reo Marama applied for and was granted two contracts to deliver what they describe as Tika/Pono Programmes, one for Wairoa ($29,560) and one for local schools ($27,160) in the region.

These programmes are designed, according to Te Reo Marama’s description as acting as an intervention enabling maori youth to halt smoking or if not yet smoking resist the evil advertising onslaught from the multi-national tobacco companies.

Yet the Output reports suggest that the Hawkes Bay District Health Board might have better spent the $60,000 on putting up posters saying “Stop smoking you Thickies” for all the good these programmes did.

Output Report Schools
Output Report Wairoa

If you look at those reports they are actually damning. Worse if you look closely at the contracts there is far more reporting requirements stipulated than a couple of two page reports. For $60,000 the HBDHB essentially received 4 pages of output reports at a cost of $15,000 per page and no discernable or measurable reduction in smoking in Maori Boarding schools or in Wairoa. Hell’s teeth for $60,000 you could have employed a security guard full time to check school bags that would have been more effective at stopping smoking at school, or paid a bonus for the teachers to actually remove their prodigious arses from the the staff room and patrol the grounds.

Bear in mind that the HBDHB has refused to release many more documents regarding the contracts and performance and costs of Te Reo Marama.

We are still awaiting the OIA documents from NZAID and other DHB’s to see the total size of the trough that Te Reo Marama built for itself. Te Reo Marama is jut the tip of the iceberg though. Next week we will release documents that show other Stop Smoking organisations are troughing it up even worse from the Ministry of Health and reveal documents that show that ASH and the Health Sponsorship Council are amongst the worst troughers again with little measured results. On a more serious note we will show serious discrepancies in reporting of expenditure and the reluctance of the Auditor-Generals Office to get involved.

What is clear from the case of Te Reo Marama is that there is a division in the Ministry of Health that simply doles out money willy-nilly in vast quantities and then cares not a jot for any outcomes. Only when the troughing becomes obvious do they get audits done but then they bury those and continue funding.

What is also clear is that there is an organised anti-smoking lobby out there working together to push funds the way of their mates, pat each other on the back and run interference whenever someone comes poking their nose into their cozy, comfortable little state funded world.

Only the most stupid person in New Zealand would now choose to take up smoking with all the evidence that is before us. Sure once started on smoking it is an addictive product and difficult to stop but the point is that at some point an individual made a conscious  choice to have a cigarette.

The actuarial evidence would suggest that instead of maligning smokers we should in fact be congratulating them on sacrificing themselves for the better good of the nation. Their early death and paying of extra taxes ensures that there is more to go around to those smart enough to never have smoked in the first place.

Next week we will also name Ministry of Health officials who have turned a blind eye and signed off on reports that were clearly, obviously and demonstrably false in their declarations.

This is a Whale Oil Beef Hooked Exclusive series and will be running for the next few days. The reason I can’t run this story in one post is simply because it is too big. I have obtained under the OIA a large box of papers about one organisation purporting to be at the forefront of stopping Maori smoking. The only problem is that the organisation isn’t. It isn’t in the forefront of anything other than the self promotion of its principal Shane Kawenata Bradbrook and is spending up large on the taxpayer with little observable results.

On top of that WOBH has obtained an 88 page audit report (the full report and extracts will be published in subsequent posts) of the performance of Te Reo Marama which damning to say the least. Despite this the previous government kept on funding Te Reo Marama and its egregious troughing from the public purse for an additional two years.

This post serves as a preface if you will to the coming posts on Te Reo Marama and the huge wastage of public monies that have simply been used to enrich the life of Shane Kawenata Bradbrook. One other thing should be noted, whenever Shane Kawenata Bradbrook or Te Reo Marama comes under the microscope Shane Kawenata Bradbrook resorts to threats and intimidation, this blogger is used to such threats and will not be stopped from telling this story. Shane Kawenata Bradbrook also likes to say that he is mates with Pita Sharples and Tariana Turi and so “can’t be touched”. Well we will see about that shall we?

Just by way of example Te Reo Marama was established to combat Maori Smoking yet somehow Shane Kawenata Bradbrook saw fit to expend some $77,000 on international travel in the space of just three years. These figures are obtained from the OIA documents. Not only that over the past nine years under Labour Shane Kawenata Bradbrook has visited Chicago, USA in June 2000, Helsinki, Finland in August 2003, Hawaii, USA in November 2005, New York in April 2006, Washington DC in July 2006, Cairns, Australia in November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand in July 2007, Hawai again in Oct 2007, Broome, Australia in Nov 2007, Hawaii again!!! in May 2008, and Melbourne and Tuvalu in the same month, Durban South Africa in Nov 2008, Mumbai, India in March 2009, Perth, Australia in May 2009 and finally Darwin just recently in October 2009.

He has been quite the gad-about going to all those amazing places all in the name of stopping Maori smoking. All paid for by the taxpayer. Not only that Shane Kawenata Bradbrook claims all sorts of positions that there is no evidence to suggest he even holds such as being on the Executive Committee of the World Conference on Tobacco or Health. Even a Google search cannot find any evidence of such a claim.

Clearly Shane Kawenata Bradbrook thinks travelling to New York, Helsinki, India and other exotic places  must come before the good of the people. Speaking of the people let’s look at some of the statistics that Shane Kawenata Bradbrook is supposed to be trying to affect.

46% of Maori are regular smokers compared to 21% of non-Maori
The median age of Maori smoking initiation is 11.6 years
Maori of all age groups have higher smoking rates than non-Maori
Maori smoking prevalence is 50% in low socio-economic areas compared to 26% in high socio-economic areas
Maori women have the highest smoking prevalence of any ethnic group at 49%
The smoking rate of Maori females aged 25-29 is almost 4x that of non-Maori females in this age group
73% of Maori smokers use Roll your own
50% of Maori youth have smoking mothers and 48% smoking fathers

But wait there’s more…

Mortality rate for cancers overall for Maori was 77% higher than that for non-Maori during the years 2000-2004
Lung cancer is responsible for over 31% of Maori cancer deaths compared with 17% for non-Maori cancer deaths
Cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) death rates were 2.3x higher for Maori during 2000-2004.

Source: data from the New Zealand tobacco use survey as listed in the Ministry of Health Report on Maori smoking for the Maori Affairs Select Committee 12 June 2009.

It is clear as the nose on my face that millions of dollars of taxpayers money are being wasted on organisations like Te Reo Marama and the likes of blatant fraudsters like  Shane Kawenata Bradbrook. This blog over the next few days will expose just how wasteful that spending is and has become with a particular focus on Te Reo Marama.

Tomorrow: Troughing 102 – How to keep your funding despite a damning audit report.

Today I received via the tipline an anonymous mail. This is what it contained.

To: nztan@globalink.org
Subject: [NZTAN ] Awesome Stuff

I just want to mihi out to Te Reo Marama and Hone Harawira for spearheading the opportunity for the tobacco companies to appear before a select committee.  ”To bring them out from the shadows” as Hone put it.  Getting
them lined up like ducks is a milestone.

If there was ever a question over the effectiveness and leadership of Te Reo Marama in Maori tobacco control, it should end here.

TRM should be acknowldged towards contributing towards making this happen, (although you would never hear it from them.)

Dispite[sic] being the first (and only) SF/AK organisation to have their funding abruptly cut, TRM still relentlessly  forges ahead advocating, advising MP’s, responding to media and continues to fight the good fight.

Ka mau te wehi! awesome stuff

Steve Kenny  (Tipene)
Health Advisor – Maori – Pasifika
Regional Public Health
Tel(DDI): 04 570 9144  ext:9144
Mobile: 021 02952482
Email stephen.kenny@huttvalleydhb.govt.nz

For those of you who don’t know NZTAN is the New Zealand Tobacco Control Action Network, which are a bunch of militant and well funded anti-smoking health nazis. When I say well funded I mean very well funded particularly in the area of Maori stop smoking funding and in particular a nasty little group called Te Reo Marama.

Te Reo Marama is a small outfit run by Shane Kawenata Bradbrook. This guy would appear from documents that arrived in the post today to be a serial maori trougher. One example of many which I will have to outline in a series of posts so huge is the amount of information that has arrived courtesy of an OIA is the $77,000 spent on overseas travel in one calendar year…..on Maori Health!….Overseas travel….something isn’t right.

The word has it an the email above confirms that there are serious questions being raised about Te Reo Marama andits funding arrangments from MinHealth that it has had its funding cut off pending an investigation.

From the email above and also from comments on my previous blog post about Maori and smoking it seems that Shane Kawenata Bradbrook has a nasty little network of similar maori troughers deeply embeded in DHB’s and MinHealth who seem to want to protect him.

Is it just a coincidence that the very week that Te Reo Marama has its funding arrangements under the microscope Hone Harawira comes out punching and this email turns up on the NZTAN mail-lists? Surely its just coincidence or is Shane Kawenata Bradbrook still running (in a nice new green MG convertible like this one) around skiting to all who will listen that he “can’t be touched because he has the Maori Party in his back pocket”. A quick call to Pita and Tari should be able to confirm or deny that tomorrow.

And why is Steve (Tipene) Kenny, Health Advisor – Maori – Pasifika  Regional Public Health a the Hutt Valley DHB lobbying so hard in support of Shane Kawenata Bradbrook and Te Reo Marama? Is it because Steve (Tipene) Kenny knows of a little bit of double dipping going on?

From the documents I have received so far this may well be the tip of the iceberg. There is more to come on this story I can promise you. I just have to scan about 500 documents.

When giving the order to commence firing make sure the only thing down range are targets.

The video was taken at one of James Yeager’s Tactical Response Fighting Pistol classes. The photographer seen forward of the firing line is Jay Gibson, one of the Tactical Response instructors.

Apparently bullets whizzing by you as you train and is quite common at Tactical Response classes.

IMHO that video shows egregiously stupid behaviour on the part of the instructors.

hat tip The Firearm Blog