A good week for Taking the p... Thorpe Park, a popular British theme park, is asking visitors’ help with a signature smell for their forthcoming ride and is offering £500 to the visitor with the most pungent urine. The ‘signature stench’ will be used in its horror maze SAW Alive, which opens next month. Tips on how to make stronger smelling urine are: consume alcohol, coffee, garlic or asparagus. The job of selecting the smelliest sample falls to Thorpe Park’s entertainment manager, Laura Sinclair. She said: “We want SAW Alive to be as authentic and terrifying as possible to make visitors feel as if they are living in a real-life horror film. To do this we need to really push the boundaries of what our guests experience from a sensory point of view.” - Daily Mail
A bad week for Hospital stats In 2006 over 48,000 healthy patients died from infections they caught while in United States hospitals. “In some cases, relatively healthy people check into the hospital for routine surgery. They develop sepsis because of a lapse in infection control and they can die,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, of Resources for the Future, a think tank that sponsored the study. The researchers said that 1.7 million health care-associated infections were diagnosed every year. Many were because of drug-resistant bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, which cost more to treat because only a few drugs can work against them. Measures to prevent infection were simple and included careful handwashing, hygiene, and screening patients when they checked in. But these measures are difficult to enforce, Mr Laxminarayan said. - Reuters
The Minister of Housing and of Fisheries, Phil Heatley, resigned his Cabinet post over his use of a ministerial credit card for personal spending, which is against the rules. Two bottles of wine, for which he paid $70, during a dinner at the governing National Party’s conference in Christchurch last August, undid him. There had been other instances of card misuse, and he had been warned, Tracy Watkins and Vernon Small wrote in The Dominion Post. “In July and September, Mr Heatley was told by a Ministerial Services manager: ‘Due to the scrutiny that credit cards attract we would like to remind you that all records are open to review and should comply with the five expenditure principles ... of the Ministerial Office handbook.’”
What the editorials said
“‘Minister and spouse – dinner’ read the entry on the expenses claim that brought him low,” said The Dominion Post, whose journalists had sought details of ministerial spending under the Official Information Act. “Beneath the claim was the most damaging item of all – Mr Heatley’s signature. The minister had attached his signature to an ‘inaccurate document’.” “That form carries a declaration that those signing believe to the best of their knowledge that the form is accurate. It wasn’t,” wrote John Armstrong of The New Zealand Herald. “That is the nub of it.” “There is absolutely no question that Phil Heatley had to resign from his ministerial posts,” The New Zealand Herald said. “The Prime Minister’s suggestion that the Whangarei MP was being too hard on himself was wide of the mark. The errors in Mr Heatley’s ministerial expense accounts are merely the latest in a series of episodes that reveal a readiness to grasp at taxpayer money.” The Nelson Mail amplified on that: “Earlier in the week he agreed to pay back $1000 for a family jaunt around Marlborough, incorrectly plopped on the plastic.” There had been other spending, since repaid. Mr Heatley had said he wasn’t as familiar with the card rules as he should have been. The Southland Times: “But it’s not as if any of these were mysterious dark magic. If anything, it would seem the rules are simpler than some of the card-holders are minded to acknowledge. They are essentially the same as for company cards anywhere. It’s for business, not personal spending. Receipts for everything. And remember that, after all, it’s not your money.” “Just how he could have got to such a senior position in the National Government with such a limited understanding of his responsibilities is astounding,” The Timaru Herald wondered. The Mail added: “If he did really find the rules that difficult to get his head around then he clearly has done the right thing in standing down as a minister. The requirements for a Cabinet career demand greater intellectual firepower than this episode would suggest he has at his disposal.”
And …
“It doesn’t appear that Mr Heatley was deliberately dishonest, it just seems he was at best absent-minded, and stupid and sloppy at worst,” Warwick Rasmussen wrote in the Manawatu Standard. “The total amount of money involved – $1200 – was never going to bankrupt the country, but the principle and perception were too much for him to keep his job.” The Timaru Herald gave Mr Heatley some credit: “he finally got one thing right when he resigned as a minister.” The Dominion Post said he had done the right thing in quitting. “It is not acceptable for a minister in a government that is getting tough with beneficiaries and cutting public services to spend taxpayer money on alcohol for party mates or family holidays as he did.” The Marlborough Express said that in the short time he was Minister of Fisheries Mr Heatley had been popular in Marlborough. A cod ban would be lifted in April and that had been “met with acclaim in these quarters”. It went on: “He is viewed by the aquaculture and fishing industries as the first minister holding the portfolio to really listen in a long time. If he does return to his fishing portfolio he will be warmly welcomed back by this region.” But The Timaru Herald said: “MPs must be above reproach. They must be honest and have integrity. The public has voted them into a position of incredible privilege. If they abuse that privilege, they have to go.”
What next
The official probe into Mr Heatley’s use of his ministerial credit card will be widened to include all spending that can give a private benefit to a minister (The Dominion Post). Mr Heatley, Prime Minister John Key, and Internal Affairs, which administers Ministerial Services, had asked for the inquiry, Auditor-General Lyn Provost said. It would audit spending by Mr Heatley's office from when he became a minister in November 2008 to his resignation – February 25 – including whether spending was within the rules, policies, and procedures. The New Zealand Herald: “That scrutiny should also signal the end of ministerial credit cards.” And whether Mr Heatley returns to the Cabinet, The Press said: “Heatley commented … that ‘I need to spend a long time on the backbenches’. It is likely that he will get his wish.”
