Guest Post: The Road to Lonsdale Street – Part 1

Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, October 13th, 2008 - 42 comments
Categories: uncategorized - Tags: ,

You’re going to love this story.

Pay attention, you’ll need patience and concentration.

It’s got the lot – lies, conspiracy, fraud, theft, and a truly good cover up that has stood the test of time (until now). Let’s begin.

Here’s John Key lying to Claire Trevett:

Mr Key said he left Elders Merchant Finance in 1987 three months before the “H-Fee” was dreamed up and knew nothing of it.

“So Labour is sitting there thinking ‘we’ve got this guy. John Key’s done the Foreign Exchange deal’,” he said.

“Just one small issue: Three months before any of those deals got decided, I had left Elders. I never did the deals I never knew about the deals, and wasn’t involved in them.”

Hmm, that’s pretty categorical isn’t it, possums? Wasn’t there, can’t be involved – end of story.

But no – look what he tells Eugene Bingham eleven months later:

In 1988 Key was on the verge of leaving Elders, unshackling himself from a three-year contract after agreeing to three months “gardening leave” before taking up his new job at Banker’s Trust, newly established in New Zealand.

Well, look at that.

Claire Trevett hasn’t bothered to authenticate her story about Key’s departure date – she could have found out when the H-Fee actually happened, and could have verified his departure date with Elders Merchant Finance – now Hanover Finance – or any of the half dozen or so EMF employees still around, often in other roles.

(You’ll be surprised at some names, possums, but that’s for later).

This tour de force of journalistic incompetence or indolence becomes received wisdom in the Press Gallery and is not picked up by dear old Granny Herald when Key tells Eugene Bingham something closer to the truth eleven months later.

This is that he leaves EMF in 1988.

Eugene Bingham’s digging has been with a teaspoon. He obviously hasn’t read Trevett’s earlier piece, but despite the differing year, he still prints the lie, that Key had left. Isn’t that what Editors tidy up?

Either Granny Herald’s huge political staff is asleep at the wheel, or this “watch dog” has turned into a blue rinsed poodle. Batman charitably favours the former explanation.

Tomorrow: The date of the H-Fee and how the biggest white collar crime of the last century worked.

– Batman

[Update: one of the joy’s of The Standard is that, as a loose collective, we can write pretty much what we want without going through any approval process but the drawback is sometimes people stuff up. It relies on a lot of unwritten rules. One of those rules that’s now been written pretty firmly is that when we get an email from some joker calling themselves Batman, we don’t make them an author. I don’t want some random writing whatever they want on a blog with my name on it. But they do have an important story to tell, even if their writing style is a bit esoteric, so we’ll give them a guest post to tell it. SP]

[lprent: I was wondering..]

42 comments on “Guest Post: The Road to Lonsdale Street – Part 1 ”

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  1. T-rex 1
    13 October 2008 at 8:45 am

    Nice work, keep it coming.

    Next time I wear my “What would batman do?” t-shirt, I’m wearing it for you.

  2. Bryan Spondre 2
    13 October 2008 at 8:49 am

    “This tour de force of journalistic incompetence or indolence becomes received wisdom in the Press Gallery” Real journalists publish under real names.

  3. ghostwhowalks 3
    13 October 2008 at 9:05 am

    yet another masked crusader to unveil the misdeeds of the The Joker and his sidekick the Penguin

  4. Steve Pierson 4
    13 October 2008 at 9:12 am

    So, I missed the H-Fee story first time round, I was overseas.

    Seems that Elders did a bunch of fake foreign exchange deals as a way of illegally channeling a payment of $66.5 million to Equiticorp boss Alan Hawkins in 1987.

    Key was heading Elders foreign exchange team in 1987 but claimed he left before these illegal transactions took place. But in other interviews, it seems he was at Elders into 1988 and so was there while these illegal transactiosn were taking place through the part of the organsiation that he managed.

  5. Tigger 5
    13 October 2008 at 9:25 am

    Glad someone is doing some digging… The lack of interest in unmasking the true John Key astounds me. It’s enough to make me suspect there really IS a secret conspiracy between the big media outlets and the Right… Of course, I know there isn’t! Or is there….?

  6. vidiot 6
    13 October 2008 at 9:27 am

    /yawn

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/4178667a6160.html

    He’s already been cleared by the SFO of any involvement.

    To quote the article – “Wouldn’t it be better if government just got on with running the country and making it a better place for us?”

    Now about something a bit more current, how about that TVNZ Colmar Brunton poll ?

  7. T-rex 7
    13 October 2008 at 9:34 am

    “Real journalists publish under real names” – That’s true Bryan… excepting of course the vast number that choose not to, for a variety of reasons. Only retards judge the credibility of a story on the teller rather than the facts, especially in the age of interweb-anonymity.

    Please go and find a contest of wits with a slightly more manageable opponent – I know your coffee got the better of you last time but possibly if you practice a bit more and glare real hard you can come out on top in round two…

  8. Tim Ellis 8
    13 October 2008 at 9:42 am

    I am very surprised by this. It appears that Batman has uncovered evidence that the SFO didn’t have about John Key’s involvement in the H-Fee scheme. This is very good amateur journalism. With a bit more work, I’m sure you will also find that John Key was the second gunman on the grassy knoll.

  9. Aldnut 9
    13 October 2008 at 9:44 am

    Never trust a guy who smiles as he tells you hes going to take money out of your pockets

  10. travellerev 10
    13 October 2008 at 9:45 am

    Hi batman,

    Interesting find about John Key giving us two different dates for when he left Elders.

    Let’s go with date one first. He leaves Elders in 1987. According to the treasury site the deal to sell NZ steel was October 1987. Let’s assume that the decision to sell and the subsequent H-fee sandal that went with it was fomented at the same time say about a month before the actual signing of the contracts ( I think that that is way to short but I don’t have a means to prove the real date) than we have to assume that John Key left sometime in late May or early June of 1987. He went on to work for Bankers Trust as a foreign exchange trader and if this date is correct he can’t have been involved in the H-fee scandal.

    Now date number two. According to the interview with Eugene Bingham he states that he only left Elders in 1988. This allows him to escape another nasty connection; the attack of Andrew Krieger on the NZ currency in the Autumn of 1987. Almost collapsing the NZ economy and earning the Bankers Trust $ 300 million dollars in two months.

    In the same interview the NZH states twice that John Key did not work with Andrew Krieger until 1988 well after the attack and therefore he cannot be associated with the attack.

    Either way both dates seem to have been given in order to escape being linked to two financial scandals that rocked the world politico NZ in 1987.

    So in order to establish which of the dates is correct we need to find corroborating evidence for either one of them.

    I did so in my post on John Key’s connection collaboration with Andrew Krieger.

    According to the online New York Times archive, two articles, one from 1989 and another from 1990 Andrew Krieger worked for the New York Bankers trust during 1987 and until February 1988. At the time he was the Global head for Forex for the Bankers Trust. According to the same articles it was during the autumn of 1987 that he masterminded the NZ dollar attack.

    In two articles, one in the Sunday Star Times and in the NZ Herald John Key states that he was Andrew Krieger’s account manager dealing in tens of millions and this is confirmed by his then boss Gavin Walker. According to Gavin Walker Andrew Krieger was entirely John Key’s responsibility and he knew everything there was to know about Krieger’s dealings.

    According to the same NYTimes articles Andrew Krieger did not only leave Bankers Trust in February 1988, he only did a short stint for Soros from March until June of that year as a Senior manager of one of his trading departments and left the forex trade all together in that month only to return to trading sometime in 1990.

    So if John Key could not have worked with Andrew Krieger in 1988 he must have done so in 1987. Even if the statement in the NZH interview about three months gardening leave in order to prevent John Key to earn money for Bankers trust with inside knowledge about his previous employer are correct, John Key was only able to work with Andrew Krieger during the 1987 Autumn raid on the NZ currency.

    So in conclusion I would have to say that in trying to escape one accusation of being involved in criminal fraud he inadvertently had to give his real time of departure form Elders but in doing so he also exposed what he was really doing in 1987. Aiding a big Wall street banker in wrecking his own countries currency.

    Nice one batman.

  11. Jasper 11
    13 October 2008 at 9:46 am

    The other side of the coin as well

    – Key has stated her worked with Andrew (Freddy) Kreiger, responsible for the currency attack in July 87, at BT in 88 for several months.
    However, the NY Times of February 22 1988 reports that Kreiger walked out of BT on Feb 21.

    Nothing about Key colludes, confirms, matches, or even affirms what this slimy weasly snake of a man believes or has done!

    My prediction is we’ll see our 3rd National leader since 99 before Christmas Lunchtime. Funny, they dont seem to have cottoned on they need a strong leader to hold the caucus together – Key certainly isn’t.

  12. Aldnut 12
    13 October 2008 at 9:46 am

    way too smarmy

  13. Jasper 13
    13 October 2008 at 9:48 am

    Thanks Trev. You’ve certainly delivered a more comprehensive overview than I have!

  14. T-rex 14
    13 October 2008 at 9:53 am

    Trav – It’s posts like that that have made me ease up on you about towers and cars 🙂 Good stuff.

  15. Bryan Spondre 15
    13 October 2008 at 10:02 am

    “excepting of course the vast number that choose not to, for a variety of reasons.” – got a list T-Rex ? I would love to know which professional journalists blog under pseudonyms.

    If this is the Labour Party’s fabled “neutron bomb” may I suggest it sounds more like a damp (and I understand banned) Christmas cracker.

  16. travellerev 16
    13 October 2008 at 10:04 am

    Tim Ellis,

    It must be hard to see your hero exposed as a fraud and a Wall street scheister.
    And I’m sorry that your only available response is the ole “conspiracy nutter” defence.

    The good news is that batman’s conclusions were wrong. John Key was not involved in the H-fee scandal and like both journalists he quotes he should have tried to find corroboration for either story.

    The New York Times online archives are a huge source of information readily available in the public domain. According to the timeline established by the NYT it would have been impossible for John Key to have worked with Andrew Krieger in 1988. Since he himself has stated that he had a huge responsibility in dealing with Krieger and his millions while both worked for Bankers Trust, John Key can only have worked with him while Krieger almost bankrupted NZ. That’s the bad news.

    Do you really want to vote for a man who saw nothing morally wrong with almost bankrupting his entire nation for the love of money and who is very comfortable lying about it twenty years later?

    Is that really the man whom you want to entrust with this nations well being while his banking mates are being bailed out left right and centre by us the taxpayers while it gets harder and harder for us to make ends meet?

    Surely not.

  17. ak 17
    13 October 2008 at 10:10 am

    Holy forexkins Batman! Trapped on a narrow ledge with Eve and the Crepe Crusader tracking his every evil move, how can the Smiler slip out of this one!

    Is this the end of the greasy Golden Wether or can Baron Press and his shady network snatch their preening prince from the clutches of justice one more time?

    (to be continued……..)

  18. travellerev 18
    13 October 2008 at 11:05 am

    Why thank you T-rex,

    Isn’t it funny how I seem to be able to apply my intelligence so piercingly when it concerns John Key while appearing to be totally barmy and devoid of any sense of reality when it concerns other subjects. LOL.

    I can’t wait to finish part 2 and 3 about the things John Key does not want you to know. Asian crisis and Russian collapse any one? Subprime, Bonds and Derivatives any one? You name it he was up to his neck in all the financial shit heading our way.

    $ 50 mill and counting made over the backs of prudent and hard working people who now have to bend over backwards paying for his and his fellow scheisters greed for generations to come while they escape an live happily ever after in their mansions and Hawaiian condo’s. It’s enough to make you sick.

    T-rex,

    I honestly don’t want to upset you again with the next bit, OK, but it’s just so exiting.

    About the car. 38 % more efficiency. Now an officially “wof”ed and legally accepted part of the motor (the first one in NZ I think. Australia and the US are way ahead on this one) and this week a meeting with a local philanthropist/investor to continue the development of said fuel cell. I ain’t complaining. LOL.

    By the way for those of you keen to try building a cell yourself, check out the photo’s at the above link and if you need info contact “mudsucks” (don’t ask) via the link on my post.

    We have found that Potassium Hydroxide is the best electrolyte (forget about baking soda, that is a scam) to use in order to facilitate the release of the gas with about 12 Ampere drawn from the car battery.

    A litre of distilled water with a 28 percent by volume of PH will give you a 38% efficiency over about 2500 km and counting. When the cell starts to draw less current all you have to do is to top the cell up with a little more distilled water.
    We drive an old but well maintained Honda Civic so the above stats are for a car like that.

    Have fun but be careful. While seeing water burn must surely be one of those “oh my god” moments (it was for me) both Hydrogen and Oxygen are very explosive gases.

    Sorry for the digression and my next comment will be on topic again.

    AK,

    Hilarious

  19. randal 19
    13 October 2008 at 11:16 am

    what about the ‘never ending’ taxbreak on the amphibious car. that one has been passed around and around for the last thirty years!

  20. Matthew Pilott 20
    13 October 2008 at 11:28 am

    Hey Bryan – you know what? The only person who mentioned a ‘neutron bomb’ was Hooton, and I think he was talking about National’s tax policy instead – talk about a fizzer indeed!

  21. ghostwhowalks 21
    13 October 2008 at 11:52 am

    Clever Johnny can be precise when he wants to be about dates and times…

    “Have you ever been off your face completely hammered?”

    He laughs again.

    “Yes!”

    “How long ago?”

    “Before I went into politics.”

    “Did you have a stag night before you got married?”

    “Yes, in my flat, Derby St, Christchurch. 1984.”

    Paul Holmes interview, he gives it off the cuff just like that

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz-election-2008/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501799&objectid=10537211&pnum=0

  22. Ms M 22
    13 October 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Close Up recently used some archived footage of John Key at work at Elders, with the date 1987. I have enquired about the date of the actual footage with CU but no response so far.

    Alan Hawkins and co were concocting their Equiticorp BHP deals as far back as April 1986.

  23. travellerev 23
    13 October 2008 at 1:36 pm

    Ms M,

    Is that the video with him pissing in a bottle?

    In the timeline I’ve been able to establish he could have been working for Elders until either late May or early June 1987.
    Interesting information about Equiticorp BHP. This means that John Key could have been involved in both that scandal and the attack on the NZ dollar in the autumn of 1987.

    You always come up with such titillating little titbits of gold. Love it. LOL.

  24. Steve Pierson 24
    13 October 2008 at 1:51 pm

    ev. that’s just a joke vid. they’ve mashed the old footage with a new shot of what’s meant to look like a dude pissing into a bottle.

    Ms M. The footage was on Eating Media Lunch a few months back, episode on leaders

  25. travellerev 25
    13 October 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Cool Steve,

    I’m sure it happened though. LOL.

    Must admit I saw it only from the corner of my eyes on the computer screen of my better half while under the influence of a shot or two so not entirely in control of my critical abilities.

  26. Robinsod 26
    13 October 2008 at 2:01 pm

    Did Dad write this? I know he uses “batman” as regular moniker and it certainly has his style…

    [lprent: If dad wrote this then I need to ^(^*%$$$##@#!!!!!! someone.
    Nope – just read it – ain’t him.
    Hey ‘sod – don’t give me heart attacks like that. I’m nearly a senior (hacker)]

  27. Felix 27
    13 October 2008 at 2:02 pm

    Hey Bryan Spondre Executive Blog Producer-General,

    Why are you demonizing IrishBill on your peculiar blog?

    I see you’re still publishing full IP addresses too.

  28. T-rex 28
    14 October 2008 at 5:40 am

    Spoon: “I would love to know which professional journalists blog under pseudonyms.”

    Your world view is so narrow it ought to embarrass you.”Blog”? That being the definitive forum of all time right? Jesus. Wept.

    Anyway, no, I don’t have a list handy right now. It probably wouldn’t contain any names you’d recognize even if I did, just historical nobodies such as Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell).

    —

    Trav: “Isn’t it funny how I seem to be able to apply my intelligence so piercingly when it concerns John Key while appearing to be totally barmy and devoid of any sense of reality when it concerns other subjects. LOL.”

    Not meaning to be at all rude, but it actually makes perfect sense to me. All of your research, regardless of the conclusions you end up drawing, relies on spending a huge amount of time sifting through sources of information of varying quality. Sometimes you’re looking for something which (in my opinion) isn’t actually there, and you end up with (what I think) is misguided nonsense… but other times what you’re looking for has just been hidden in swathes of noise by a bunch of pricks who don’t want the news to get out, and tireless review is the only thing that exposes it, so you might well hit paydirt.
    In both cases, good on you for looking, but it doesn’t mean a potentially accurate conclusion in one case lends credibility to conclusions in others (though it does elevate you above “raving nutter” which is why I don’t mind having you around (as long as you’re not railing at people for being white and middleaged or whatever 😉 ).

    re: the car; that’s great, doesn’t bother me at all. I take it you’re talking about a 30% increase in efficiency compared to what you observed before you installed the hydrogen booster? Excellent outcome, but if it’s a relatively old car then the improvement in burn quality alone could give you that if the engine had been a bit dirty. You already know my views on the subject regarding repeatable tests with isolation of the variables of interest, so I won’t drone on about them again: suffice to say I stand by all of what I originally wrote re: the upper limits of improvement from such a system but am delighted you’ve managed to reduce your fuel consumption by 30% WHATEVER the cause may be (30% is 30%, regardless of whether it’s from tyre pressure, flame front speed, driving style etc).

  29. T-rex 29
    14 October 2008 at 5:57 am

    Also: Steve – What the hell you on about? Have you SEEN Batmans crime lab?!? He is possibly THE definitive source of all information related to skulduggery.

    Although that said, he has never (to my knowledge) referred to his audience as “possums”. This may be an imposter. Good catch!

    I saw the bat-sign and figured they must be legit… although thinking about it Batman always uses DSA when he writes to me. Careless careless careless…

  30. travellerev 30
    14 October 2008 at 8:35 am

    T-rex,

    Nice touch the (in my opinion) and (what I think). That’s a big shift from stating your opinion as fact. You have a powerful mind and maybe one day you will use it to review the official 911 story again. Until than you are just fine the way you are.(Not trying to be patronising here)

    I shift daily through huge amounts of information and I did not intend to find what I did. I did not go looking for a “Conspiracy”. I just googled 911 truth for a laugh.

    I believed the official story even though I had my doubt as to why the towers collapsed. Call it instinct but it just did not seem right for towers to collapse in 10 seconds and the third building was even more of a conundrum. Being a real world special effects engineer for 18 years I was used to make things happen, looking like it could while violating all the laws of physics so I was used to thinking around the real world laws of motion and I had those little SFX alarm bells go off on that day. The laws of motion can not be broken and yet this is what people asked us to do every day for twenty long years. That was our job.

    Looking at those video’s of the buildings collapsing in mere seconds and finding the evidence of explosions at the onset of the collapses and the fact that the New York Times had to go to court for years to get witness statements with regards to these explosions finally woke me up.

    It was a painful, lonely, year long, looking at the evidence time time and again journey and more so because I knew that this was not something people would like to hear and I knew I had to face intelligent and generally nice guys like you who would fight me every inch of the way when I would bring the 911 stuff out. Believe me it is not a nice position to find your self in.

    About the Pakeha thing.

    I know a lot of middle aged white guys and most of them are fine but in New Zealand there is a hard core middle aged white guy superiority sentiment in a lot of guys.
    99.9% of them are salt of the earth, hard working and good family men but most of them still live in the old Anglo-Saxon “we are the future and the best God ever created and good old mother England is where I stem from” paradigm and expect to be treated that way. Does it make them bad people? No, but I meet this sentiment a lot.

    I’m sorry if my view of that group of the NZ population comes across as racist but there you have it. In fact I would call their paradigm racist since they think of themselves and their lifestyle as superior to, Maori, Pacific, Indian, Dutch, German or Chinese to name but a few. And they don’t even think of themselves as racist. Their superiority is a given.

    I’m a white, middle aged female and being Dutch from another empire building nation but unlike the white middle aged Pakeha male I’m of a generation who has never seen our empire die.
    I look on NZ culture from the outside and while I love this country and 99.9% of its citizens (including your average white middle class Pakeha male) I do see some of it’s less attractive qualities. For pointing this out I am rewarded with the honorary title “Tulip” another sign of the sense of superiority of the average white Anglo Saxon middle class male. Tulip, Frog, nice derogatory terms for people other than yourself.

    In Holland we don’t have terms like that for the French, English, Italians or Germans, not because we’re not racist (because we are) but because it is not so accepted to be.

    If you don’t think of yourself as that kind of a guy than feel free to walk away from it because then obviously I’m not talking about you.
    What’s more you and me actually debate (mostly) in a civilised manner so clearly we don’t stigmatise each other with silly labels (Well, not all the time.Lol) hell, you even stopped calling me a conspiracy nutter or come to think of it you may never have and we actually appreciate each others opinions and findings when it does not concern the difficult topics.

    About the car;

    The improvement is 38% as in almost 40%. Hubby sitting next to me just said, “hum, so he picked up on the dirty motor bit”. Hubby ( electromechanical engineer and ex-real world sfx engineer too) being right there with me in the “barmy” bit.

    Yes, it cleans your motor, then it goes on burning every molecule of fossil fuel every time and doing it so fast you can forward the timing of you engine to the point of the fuel explosion happening when the piston goes down unlike the 100% fossil fuel motor which has the explosion start before the piston is completely up and end on the way down. Both mean more efficiency and less emissions. In fact we get more mileage out of our Honda Civic than my father in law does with his hybrid.

    We never claimed a miracle just a much more efficient running motor and almost 40% more efficiency (as compared to before we put the cell in indeed) is not bad.

    Next, will be the injection of steam which through the explosion of fossil fuel mixed with hydroxy (2 Hydrogen molecules against one Oxygen molecule also known as H2O or water (not for you but for others who might not be so savvy)) will be split into more Hydroxy aiding the engine into even more efficiency. We’re aiming at 80% for now.

    Hubby is also working on a more advanced spark plug system (plasma rather than spark) not because he invents these things but because like him there are thousands of guys worldwide doing the same thing and putting their finds online. It’s like a huge world wide brain coming up with ideas and it is awesome.

    You should put the power of your brain at their disposal. If only to criticise and analyse their efforts and make them even stronger and I mean that in the most positive way.

  31. T-rex 31
    14 October 2008 at 8:59 am

    “99.9% of them are salt of the earth” – it’s these guys who I imagine would feel a little aggreived by your terminology is all. It’s a heavy hammer to use on the 0.1% of the demograph who offend you!

    Good luck with the car, I’d get involved but I already have more projects on the go than time (and a major one at the moment is enabling widespread Electric vehicle use – even enhanced IC engines don’t thrill me much, though it’s a vast improvement). My primary dispute was from way back in the day was when you said something along the lines of “In time we hope to get to 100% and then we’ll be free from the oil cartels”. But there’s plenty o’ water gone under that bridge. Good luck with it all. Beats the sh*t out of playstation 🙂 50 bucks says you won’t beat the hybrid on an urban driving cycle though!

  32. travellerev 32
    14 October 2008 at 9:40 am

    T-rex,

    I meant that of those 99.9 a vast amount hold the above described sentiment. The 0.1 are the really bad eggs those who know they are racist and thingk that that is OK.

    My dear father in law, a mellow Methodist minister, made remarks that were truly horrific and when I pointed them out to him he was really shocked and stopped making them. He was just so used to saying things about other peoples that it didn’t even dawn to him how hurtful they were.

    And this is a man who condones gay marriages (in fact he went to the lesbian marriage of his current minister) has done a lot of services for Maori’s and Samoans and who for all intends and purposes didn’t act racist at all.
    Most Pakeha people here have that ingrained sense of superiority but it doesn’t make them bad as such. It’s just how they have been raised.

    We still hope to get to a 100% but we’ll announce that when it happens, how’s that?

    Hubby drives the HC to work and back everyday and has to drive into town a fair amount and I’ll concede that that is not as efficient as a long leisurely drive across the country and I’m sure that for now Hybrids will beat our mileage in the city 100% however we still get 580 km a tank without going below the empty mark with a 35 km twice daily commute and a lot of city driving.

    The problem I have with electrical vehicles is the battery. And while it may drive clean and NZ has a source of energy other than coal, the electricity needed in the
    US will be produced by coal. A very dirty form of energy causing as much if not more pollution.

    And just in case you think that wind energy is the solution, in Denmark and Holland were a lot of windmills are installed they are tearing them down again because the sound and the view of these massive mills is literally driving people insane. Were I live the countryside (provided we have an economy that can pay for the monstrosities) will be littered with the monsters. Not something I look forward too.

    Added to that the production of batteries and the recycling is hugely energy intensive and potentially very toxic so on the whole I don’t think they are the solution either.

    I don’t even know what a play station ( and I love gadgets) looks like to be honest and I can’t remember when I last turned on the TV. LOL. I’ve got so much better things to do with my time.

  33. T-rex 33
    14 October 2008 at 9:56 am

    Ok, understood.

    lol, you can’t get to 100% without putting some other form of energy into the system! That was my whole point! But ok, yup, lets leave it at ‘you’ll tell me when you do’.

    The US will move away from coal faster than you might expect I think (check out their recent renewable incentives packages thrown into the “rescue” bill), and in any event well to wheel efficiency for coal power combined with electric vehicles is still higher than IC+petrol, to say nothing of the fact that a big centralised coal power station allows for (for example) district heating as an ancillary service, as well as stack scrubbers for CO2 and particulate. That said, it’s still a filthy power source and I look forward to the day when they’re all gone.

    Wind energy is going to be a major part of the solution. You’re right that many windmills are being taken down in holland and denmark, but the reasons are different to what you might think. Check this.

    Most of the turbines that are being pulled down are being taken down to be replaced with newer designs which are far prettier, quieter, more efficient, and dramatically more powerful.

    Why on earth do you think of a wind turbine as a monstrosity? To me they’re a symbol of the positive side of human endeavour.

    The production and recycling of anything is usually energy intensive, that doesn’t make it prohibitive. As for battery toxicity though, there are a lot of batteries out there. They’re not all chock full of cadmium.

    Either way, time will tell. Threadjack over, back to Key being a slimy bastard.

  34. travellerev 34
    14 October 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Hi T-rex,

    Yup, you absolutely have to put energy in, in order to get energy out so you have to have a battery in your car.

    It is not and never will be a “free” energy car. Rather a car that utilises an unmonopolisable resource (water) together with a conventional battery but let us first get there before we go into this discussion again because if we don’t succeed this discussion is moot and likewise if we do succeed. It would just be banging heads and that would be a waste of energy (no pun intended).

    If I read the the signs on the walls correctly, the US will not have the money to move from one source to another (thanks to sleazy John and his mates) and we might find that the whole energy problem solves itself because American will, like in the great depression, not be able to afford to drive anywhere.

    Let me explain my remark about the turbines, I love wind energy. Hey, I’m Dutch what can I say. In fact I bought al of my beautiful pigments from one of those beautiful old Dutch windmills. They way the Dutch used and still use wind energy was not to generate electricity but the actual wind energy to drive grinding stones, saws, and other machines that needed energy. They used small ones to pump water out of the polders (artificially created land well below see level) and big ones for local industry. They planned their routines around the actual amount of wind and these machines were therefore highly efficient.

    This week we installed two solar panels and we intend to build a small one family type windmill (we like building our own stuff).
    My husband was given (very generous from Fonterra as it was all very official and through the correct procedures) a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) and we were also in the position to collect a huge amount of batteries that would have been dumped thanks to a colleague of said hubby. They are only a year old and perhaps not viable in an industrial setting any more but they have at least another 10 years in them in the way we use them. So as you see we intend to get of the grid as much as possible and part of that is through wind energy. No problem there.

    What I hate about the windmills of what I call the corporate type is that they are very inefficient (Between 15% and 18%) because of wind intermittentcy, the variance in use (daytime and night time for instance) and the inability to store the energy they generate. In NZ power companies have to sell a guaranteed amount of energy in advance. If they can’t deliver in wind energy they have to get it from somewhere else.
    So there will be huge back up power plants needed to support the “Growth” as well.
    Well has in fact as much as admitted that the only way the Hamilton/Raglan windmill park will ever make a profit is not by selling energy but through financial Carbon schemes.

    Other than that they are highly visible and dominant and put in rural area’s where the silence is immense and the sound they make is very audible and they simply are not a sustainable resource in a society that seems to think that growth is a must and for ever possible.

    So Raglan will have a huge turbine park right in the middle of a rural area to generate a relatively small and unpredictable amount of energy into the main grid with nothing of that going towards the local community and Well will make a profit not because they present a viable green alternative but it can set off it’s windmills against some financial Carbon scam. It is a corporate destruction of a much loved mountain landscape and the windmills will be visible from the Bombay hills to bloody Taranaki. I call that a cynical exploitation of the wish of people like you and a lot of Raglan greenies (who all see through this scam by the way) who passionately want to live sustainable and within natures limitations.

    There are vastly superior and alternative ways of predictable and therefore more efficient energy generation such as wave energy generation and current developments in (much cheaper) solar energy. Well is not interested in these alternative energy generation methods as we have spoken with them and is hell bent on building their monstrous park.

    So it is not wind energy I’m against but the unsustainable corporate push behind them.

    I agree with you, there are huge developments in the battery production sector with the emphasis on sustainability and away from the old polluting ones so there is hope there.

    Anyway yeah let’s get back to Key. Man is he a slimy bastard or what? LOL.

  35. Ms M 35
    15 October 2008 at 3:07 am

    Ms M. The footage was on Eating Media Lunch a few months back, episode on leaders

    Steve, Ev: the On Demand site for TVNZ puts the footage as being filmed “just before the ’87 crash”.


    The Unauthorised History Of NZ
    Episode Name: Leaders
    Episode number: Series 4, Episode 2

    Just before the ’87 crash, a crew from TVNZ was filming a highflying foreign exchange dealer. He was considered the best on the trading floor. Today he’s better known as John Key.

  36. travellerev 36
    15 October 2008 at 6:02 am

    Ms M,

    Brilliant, that puts John Key right in the middle of Andrew Krieger’s attack on the NZ currency and in the middle of a great big lie.

    Wham bam thank you mam.

  37. travellerev 37
    15 October 2008 at 6:29 am

    Oh oops perhaps not.
    I could not connect to the video, Did it mention were he was working?

  38. Fool 38
    30 October 2008 at 8:20 am

    Lame.

    Rambling.

    Incoherent.

    Must have come out of the Labour Party Research Unit huh?!

    [lprent: Don’t use e-mail addresses (even rubbish ones) in the name field. Changing it to an appropiate name]

  39. Fool 39
    30 October 2008 at 8:24 am

    Eve says “I’m a white, middle aged female and being Dutch from another empire building nation but unlike the white middle aged Pakeha male I’m of a generation who has never seen our empire die.”

    What are you saying? That the Dutch still hold dominion over a large portion of the “savage nations”?

    I must say you are quite balanced though – with a chip on both shoulders!

    LOL. Keep fightin the system!

  40. Fool 40
    30 October 2008 at 8:25 am

    Oh, and Eve, you are technically a Pakeha, or were you using the term in a racist derogatory way?

  41. Daveski 41
    30 October 2008 at 10:23 am

    LP

    Someone needs to at least ask this question. My track record is to snipe from the edges but I clearly have no additional resources, no hidden agendas, and no external connections. I am even happy to provide email etc to back up what you can work out for yourself.

    This episode puts you personally in a difficult position.

    The Batman link appears to provide a direct link between Labour and people on this site. The link should be too uncomfortable for you. I note that some effort has now gone in to change the original batman post.

    I ask this question to allow you to respond and clarify as you seek fit.

    [getting an email from someone does not create a direct link. It just means someone emailed us. SP]

    [lprent: e-mail these days is pretty easy to be anonymous. Just go to gmail. There are e-mails coming in all of the time from many people. That is why there is a anonymous e-mail on the contact us – It says “Please feel free to email us: thestandardnz (at) gmail (dot) com”]

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