Every now and again I will tune into Parliament TV when there is nothing else on worth viewing. Invariably I last about ten seconds before I get bored and tune right out again. But last week I stumbled upon a wee gem involving none other than Diversity Placement No.1, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Kelvin Davis.
Now we all know ‘Special K‘ has a particularly hard time of it in Parliament. He regularly gets put into the witless protection programme and if he gets flustered he either resorts to replying in Te Gibberish then blaming everyone else for not understanding him, or just says “No” to everything, which spectacularly catches him out at times.
On this particular occasion, Kelvin was asked a series of pretty simple questions by young up and coming National Party MP Simeon Brown regarding quite why 138,000 hours of community service penalties had been remitted due to COVID-19, rather than simply extending the time that the criminals had to finish their sentence.
The Hansard transcripts are here for you to peruse should you so wish.
When I listened to the waffle and incomprehensible nonsense that came out of Davis’ mouth, I struggled to understand what he was trying to say, so I went to the Hansard document to try and unravel it.
Well blow me down, the transcript provided of Davis’ testimony on Hansard was actually understandable. So this got me thinking. How sanitised are these Hansard transcripts, and is it right to clean them up this much? Here is the transcript of Kelvin’s reply.
I’ll answer the second part of the question around why under level 1 there were some people who didn’t have their—sorry, I’ll just say 37 people had their community work hours remitted under level 1 and that was simply because some organisations took some time to get back up and running once we got into level 1. We also, and I’ve answered it in the House at question time, too, with this, when the member has been asking questions about the hours—extending the hours would have disadvantaged some individuals for something that was outside of their control. It would have created a backlog of hours for Community Corrections to manage and with the associated health and safety risks, so, quite frankly, it was just in the best interests.
We’ve got to remember that the people who he’s talking about, he’s saying that their sentences—well, look, they were given community hours and over half of those 5,000 people, their community hours were given for traffic offences and not paying fines. We’re not talking here about hardened criminals or people who were in prison. We’re talking about people in the community. Now, they did break the law. There’s no getting around that. But also COVID created conditions outside of their ability to manage and we just think that it was best for Corrections to be able to manage those hours in the way they did.
And here is the actual video of the reply. This part of the dialogue starts at 58 seconds in.
So all this got me wondering. Do you as readers, prefer the sanitised versions of transcripts, which aren’t really transcripts at all, merely summaries, or do you prefer the full versions that repeat faithfully what was actually said, even though they are harder to understand?
A truthful transcript of the above answer would read more like this.
I’ll answer the second part of the question around why under level 1 there were some people who, ah, ah, didn’t have their, well, sorry, I’ll just say 37 people had their community work hours , didn’t have their community work hours, oh sorry, had their community work hours remitted under level 1, ah, and that was simply because some organisations, ah, took some time to , to get back up and running once we got into level 1, ah. We also, and I’ve answered it in the House at question time, too, with this, ah, when the member has been asking questions about , ah, ah, the hours—extending the hours would have disadvantaged some individuals for something that they had no, ah, ah, that was outside of their control. It would have created a backlog of hours for , ah, Community Corrections to manage and , and, with the associated, ah, health and safety risks, umm, the, so, so, quite frankly, it was just in the best interests.
We’ve got to remember that, that, umm, the, the people who he’s talking about, he’s saying that their sentences—well, look, they were given community hours and, and over half of those 5,000 people, their community hours were , ah, were given for traffic offences and not paying fines. We’re not talking here about hardened criminals or people who were in prison. We’re talking about people in the community. Now, they did break the law. There’s no getting around that. But also COVID , ah, created conditions outside of their, umm, ah, ah, ability to manage and we just think that it was best for Corrections to be able to manage those hours in the way they did.
Personally I think Hansard should be showing the true transcripts of what these incompetents are saying, purely to show how bad they are, but I get that someone has the awful job of listening to all this verbiage in order to clean it up as the automatic transcription software can only do so much.
What do you good folks think?
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