Doing your nut

Idiot /Savant has just done his nut about the Chief Executive of the Department of Conservation telling a select committee that there will be no job losses in his department the day before announcing that 100 people will be losing their jobs.

Green MP Kevin Hague , who was on the committee, says he believed MPs were entitled to a more "careful and direct" response to their concerns.

It sounds like CE Al Morrison has misled the committee – on purpose. Idiot/Savant is calling for him to be sacked.

I’m not - and here’s why.

Firstly, Morrison knows how to answer questions. As a former senior journalist of both the (now) Dominion Post, and Radio New Zealand, he knows how to ask them too. He was asked whether any science positions would be lost. He replied he was not in a position to say.

Apparently, he still isn’t. So calls that Morrison misled the committee arose from him simply answering a direct question put to him. What is wrong with that?

In my experience some of the questions of select committee representatives are either misguided or pointless. Some are even patsy questions that give them the answer they already know. Some are worded in a way that does not give them the answer they desire. They are not "careful and direct" questions – and this appears to be another one of these.

If the member wanted to find out about job losses generally, the question should have been worded that way. It wasn’t. So why should Morrison be sacked for simply answering the question put to him?

However if any of the 100 jobs were science jobs, he has misled the committee, and he has lied to the media as well.