Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Bart Janssen,
for most jobs the “code of ethics” is the law.
Yet people feel quite entitled to talk down their noses about a profession that has both a statutory obligation to the law and to their clients, as well as a professional obligation to same. How's that work? What makes y'all so high and mighty and moral that you get to preach about lawyers?
And back to my slippery slope argument, yes, if we start saying that lawyers may only use the available tools that pass some arbitrary socially-prescribed morality sniff test it will end up with criminal defendants being denied representation because a lawyer could not do anything more than enter a plea on behalf of their client before the moral defenders of society's collective nose declared that the sniff test had been failed. Garth McThicker would be champing at the bit to lead that pack if there was the slightest possibility of its coming into being.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You know as a scientist I’m also bound by laws, if, like a lawyer, I assumed that anything not prevented by law was just hunky dory then there are a whole bunch of things I could do (legally) that would be morally indefensible.
You have a code of ethics, as do lawyers. I posted a link to the one that applies to lawyers in this country. It's pretty broad. Your ethical codes in science are much stricter. It's the way it is.
And for as long as the ultimate legal adversary is the State, with all its resources and powers, that's the way it needs to be. -
Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Russell Brown,
In the case of the injunction against Native Affairs, the client’s interests were badly damaged by the action, because the required affidavits contained information that added to and supported Native Affairs’ report.
Sometimes you just have to give people the advice but know they'll still ignore it and insist on a particular course of action. Happens all the time in other fields of human endeavour so why should the law be any different?
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
changing seats to be easy access for confidential conversation.
I didn't find anything overly WTF or scandalous about that particular bit. If you're offering up the PM as an announced guest at an exclusive, expensive dinner you're going to find a way to let everyone who's there get a little bit of one-one-one time. It was all the other circumstances that lead up to that changing of seats that made me think the Maori Party is playing a very, very dangerous game. I don't recall Helen rubbing shoulders with any of the Maori Party's supporters over dinner.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Martin Connelly,
Maybe its time for Lawyers to develop a moral/ethical framework then – otherwise they are just ‘guns for hire’, which is not what we should expect of professionals whose training has cost the public purse a lot of money
They have such a framework, Martin. There are both statutory obligations and professional ones, but both of them boil down to, pretty much, this: lawyers are officers of the court and that is their principle duty, but within the bounds imposed by that duty their highest obligation is to do all within their competence to represent their client's interests.
So, yes, they are guns for hire, and that's the way it is intended. They're bound by their duties to the law and their profession to represent their clients, and once you break that down it roughly means "You can't break the law or advise your client to break the law."
It's perfectly legal to send lawyer-grams that allege all kinds of malfeasance on the recipient's part, and if the client insists that they want said letter sent then the lawyer's only options are to send it or to refuse to continue as counsel. The solution to what happened here is to change our libel/defamation laws, not to say that there's something wrong with lawyers using the available tools to represent their clients. That's the start of a slope that ends with "He's clearly guilty, everyone knows it, so he's not entitled to a lawyer because a lawyer might just get him off." -
We journalists can be annoying buggers.
It's what the news-consuming public want, if said public bother to think about it. Compliant, complicit, sycophantic "journalists" do your profession a disservice and also do a disservice to a society that requires the media to act as a check on those who stroll the corridors of power.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Ross Mason,
However, Ross, NZFS has no statutory duty to do anything other than fight fires. Road crash rescue, USAR, and all the other non-fire emergency services provided by NZFS are done under the general competence to respond granted to a district’s Chief Fire Officer by section 28(2) of the Fire Service Act 1975. Even hazardous substances response is a "if the CFO thinks the brigade can be useful" situation, whereas responding to fires is a "the brigade shall respond to an alarm of fire" situation.
Which is something that a lot of people don’t realise. NZFS does a huge amount of stuff for which they are not explicitly funded and, because it’s not the Service’s explicit duty there are gaps in supporting structures. NZFS is the lead agency for USAR, for example, but 22/2 demonstrated that there are some conflicts between providing USAR response and providing fire suppression response, and in how USAR response is managed.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to George Darroch,
taking away an Epsom ACT electorate win takes National’s chances of an outright victory down from 40% to around 33%.
What happens if you plug in CCCP with an electorate and whatever their current share is of the party vote?
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But most New Zealanders expect Labour to do something so utterly compellingly stupid before the election that they will fail to win
I suspect it's actually more that most New Zealanders have been conditioned by the polls and reportage thereof to believe that National's victory on the day is assured.
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Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Hebe,
Hell, the CTV site is less than 10 minutes’ walk to the Central Fire Station.
First appliance on scene was from Addington. There was no directed dispatch to CTV, just self-responded appliances crawling through grid-locked traffic looking for requirements for assistance and informed by the radio traffic from other appliances. See paragraphs starting at 36 in the Coroner's report.