Doesn't Pike River represent the very same type of deregulated industry National advocate?

Past the fluff language used by John Key to comfort the nation's loss at Pike River, isn't the glaring reality that this type of tragedy represents perfectly the very deregulation that the National Party are always attempting to promote?

Isn't it a terrible harbinger of the delusional self regulation meme that National lives by and the ACT Party are attempting to ignite as an election issue (cut down to size by the brilliant Keith Ng today on Public Address)

The disconnect between the ramifications of deregulation and self regulation espoused by the right are as far apart as the media's canonization of Mine boss Peter Whittall in the immediate wake of the tragedy, as Matt McCarten pointed out at the time...

Eventually someone will be held culpable
Someone has to say it. The collective media swooning for Pike River boss Peter Whittall is just wrong.

Of course Whittall is devastated about the miners' deaths. But he is also the guy in charge of protecting his workers and his company may have failed in that duty.

Instead we have sainthood surreally foisted on Whittall by the media and politicians alike, anointing him as the public face of national mourning for his dead employees and subcontractors.

Yet under his watch, 29 men were killed and still lie entombed. Family members and friends of the dead have been robbed of a loved one. Many other workers, as a result of the explosion, will lose their livelihoods.

Unbelievably, the chief executive of this company becomes a media darling.

At some point, the political elites love affair with self regulation which directly attributes to disasters like this must be challenged so that no other families are put through the pain those at Pike River have had to sustain.

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