Minister concedes response time too long
Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter has conceded that she took too long to respond to emails from Waipapakauri Ramp man Peter Birchall.
Mr Birchall was injured, along with his wife and a friend, in a two-car crash on West Coast Rd on April 13.
He pulled off the road to his left when a car driven by a Chinese national crested a rise on the wrong side of the road, but could not avoid a head-on collision.
He has since begun campaigning for measures to ensure that foreign tourists keep left, but had had no response from Ms Genter until last week, less than 24 hours after the Northland Age advised her office that he was about to go public.
Ms Genter agreed that the time taken was not good enough, saying her office was reviewing its processes to ensure correspondence was responded to in a more timely manner.
Mr Birchall said he had written to the minister on April 29 and again on May 20. Others, including Northland MP Matt King, had requested answers
"Isn’t it unfortunate that we suffered this terrible accident with tourists travelling on the wrong side of the road back in April? And isn’t it unfortunate we are still suffering all this time later, and you cannot spare a few minutes of your time to write to us or take the opportunity of meeting some innocent victims? "
Peter Birchall
Waipapakauri Ramp man
from her but had not received responses.
“Your prime minister’s secretary and the minister of transport’s secretary have both said you are the person who needs to reply, yet you do not,” he wrote last week.
“Isn’t it unfortunate that we suffered this terrible accident with tourists travelling on the wrong side of the road back in April? And isn’t it unfortunate we are still suffering all this time later, and you cannot spare a few minutes of your time to write to us or take the opportunity of meeting some innocent victims?
“A few weeks after our horrific accident there was another only about 25 minutes from ours that killed two elderly local residents. The son of one has written to you about this, and has no reply.
“FNDC went out of their way to address what they could up here, which was painting some of the large arrows.
“The person responsible in the council even took the time to come and see us.
“I guess he and our mayor do not have your workload, as both have been in contact many times . . .
“I am very disappointed that we and others like us are ignored.” Two whales, tentatively identified as a female Bryde’s whale and its calf, were found dead on the beach at Taupo Bay yesterday morning.
The mother was around 5m long and the calf, some 500m south, about 2m. Local Andy Mouat said there was evidence that a cookie cutter shark had attacked the mother, which had circular marks all over its body, while the calf had what appeared to be a “nasty” infection.
There was no indication yesterday regarding possible causes of death, however.
Earlier in the day a DoC spokesperson said one of the pair was believed to be a white pygmy whale, and the other was likely to be “something similar”.
DoC, which had yet to reach Taupo Bay at that stage, was delegating the decision regarding disposal of the carcasses to Ngati Rua, which is likely to bury them today if last night’s tide did not take them off the beach.