MFAT: everything rotten and wrong with Wellington

A foreign diplomat is up on attempted rape charges in Wellington in May and the Chief Executive of MFAT says he knew nothing about it until last Friday...

Stuff reporting:

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Key expressed confidence in McCully, and McCully expressed confidence in Allen, despite wide acknowledgment that Mfat's communications both internally and with the Beehive failed.

McCully admitted that while he was briefed on the situation on the day Rizalman was arrested, that was the last time it was raised with him, until the media began questioning him on Friday, more than a month after the accused and his family fled.

Allen himself was told nothing about the incident until last Friday, which he said was created by Mfat's strategy of "compartmentalising’’ information to limit its spread. He said he should have been told and that Mfat's communications policy would form part of an independent review.

Allen may face further scrutiny after he failed to follow up a warning from the Malaysians that the messages given by New Zealand were less clear than Key and McCully claimed.

The Malaysian high commissioner Rosmidah Zahid was called into a meeting with Allen on Monday night, during which she raised the fact that her officials had taken away a different message from Mfat about New Zealand's preference for where Rizalman should face justice.

[...]

"We didn't at that stage know there was in fact a foundation for what appeared to be the ambiguity that had been raised with me by the high commissioner,'' Allen said.

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In other words Allen doesn't know what the fuck is going on in his own department - as per his policies.  But it's quite alright, because he is now reviewing these policies! Uh-ha - and this is supposed to be sufficient considering all the shit he has got his boss into? No, that won't do.  These people are in an over-funded little world of their own and it is about time they came crashing back down to Earth.  Allen really needs to be sacked, and really soon.  

To accept this head of department's gross mismanagement on so many levels - political, administrative, legal, not to mention diplomatic - would speak gigabytes of the unaccountability of the Wellington public service.  MFAT has always thought itself above other departments (coasting along on the self-serving, delusional, mythic mistruth that the New Zealand government exercises an 'independent' foreign policy which the record shows it clearly does not) and this wretched, unwarranted arrogance is the very core of this scandal.  That is what must be dealt with.  A clear signal must be sent for once, something unambiguous.  Allen, for a start, must go.  It's either him or McCully - Key must see this.