Clampdown on Kiwis jolts Aussie
The incident was the second fatal bus crash in a fortnight and the third serious crash involving a bus.
Last Thursday 19 people were injured after the bus they were travelling in crashed into a ditch alongside State Highway 1 in the Manawatu.
Another bus crash, on Mt Ruapehu, killed 11-year-old Hannah Francis after the vehicle she was travelling in rolled near Tu¯ roa skifield on July 28.
All three buses involved in the crashes were Mitsubishi Fuso models, however the bus in Wednesday’s crash was said to be a “totally different” type of vehicle and much larger.
“Three crashes in quick succession, lives lost, a lot of injuries, we need to look at this and see what lessons we can learn,” Twyford said.
“My thoughts are with the families — there has been loss of life and a lot of people have gone to hospital.”
He said the investigation would allow him to see the facts and identify if there were any common elements within the three crashes.
“I have asked the Ministry of Transport and the NZTA to look at these three incidents and first tell me whether or not the certificate of fitness testing has been implemented
with sufficient rigour,” he said.
“Secondly I want them to look at all three cases and see whether there are any common elements that we can learn from.”
Other issues that would be looked at were the age of the vehicles involved and whether seatbelts needed
to be compulsory in buses, he said.
When asked whether the issue was with Mitsubishi Fuso buses Twyford said: “I can understand why people would jump to conclusions based on the fact that the three incidents have involved buses of the same type, but again there may be other factors at
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play here. It is really important to get the facts and then we can talk about what the appropriate response is.”
He said there wasn’t a time limit on when the report would be submitted, but he expected it would be within the next few weeks. A former Australian Human Rights Commission president and public international law expert says even she was not aware of how discriminatory Australia’s deportation policies were against New Zealanders until she started looking into them.
Professor Gillian Triggs, Australia’s lead human rights advocate from 2012 until last year, said the “nasty issue” was was wearing the transtasman relationship thin.
She was in New Zealand this week to give public lectures in Wellington and Auckland on the widening gulf across the Tasman over refugee rights.
Now the ViceChancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University, Triggs said she had never seen such “negative, jarring” debates between New Zealand and Australia on the latter’s deportation policies.
“To be honest, I wasn’t myself aware of just how apparently discriminatory the process has become, in effect, between Australia and New Zealand in relation to these deportation policies,” Triggs told the Herald.
“We’ve always had extremely good relations with New Zealand. There’s a great fondness, if I may say, between the two countries. But this has become a very, very nasty issue, especially when you realise when you look in terms of New Zealanders in detention. When you look at who those New Zealanders are, 60 per cent of them are Pacific Islanders or Ma¯ ori.”
Triggs said it was much harder for Kiwis in Australia to gain citizenship than Australians in New Zealand, making them vulnerable to characterbased deportations: “I’ve been researching the numbers and it really is shocking that 50 per cent of those in immigration detention are New Zealanders, many for over two years.”