Malfeasance is a lovely word to use when you’re speaking about government departments who misuse their influence. It means “wrongdoing, especially by a public official in the US, but I reckon it fits in our part of the world too.
Governments hate whistle-blowers who reveal actions that are embarrassing to the government. We often hear politicians commenting that whistle-blowers should be encouraged and protected from prosecution, but that hasn’t happened.
Whistleblowers are treated as traitors and criminals largely because they have broken the trust of the secret society that comprises the senior ranks of our bureaucracy.
There are many machinations in the government, policies of benefit to the country, that would be de-railed if they became public knowledge at the wrong time. But there is also corruption, collusion and malfeasance that is at times so ugly that it needs to be exposed before it results in harm to the country’s citizens.
It would be nice to think that the latter scenario would be tolerated, at least by the government of the day, but it is seen as vile disloyalty by the bureaucracy and is treated accordingly. Never be in doubt as to who runs the government.
In general, a whistle-blower is an individual inside an organization but sometimes that label is also be applied to unfortunate individuals who have reported on corporate and government iniquities that they themselves experienced.
Bureaucracy can’t silence and jail them, but they will still be punished in an attempt to silence them. That often works, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Brian Clinton Arndt experienced, at the hands of refinery management (a joint venture between the New Zealand government and oil companies), a situation which has left him scarred for life, literally. He has been subjected to a despicable campaign involving at least 2 New Zealand government departments or agencies, including an oil company giant, in an attempt to discredit him, deny the manual blending plant he worked in ever existed, and basically make his life absolutely miserable in the hope he would die.
His “crime” was that he has told the story of his experiences, comprising corporate and government actions, that have potentially ruined the lives and futures of tens or hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders.
New Zealand has long had a need and love of the motor car, but corporate greed and government collusion has turned the use of the motor car into a poisoned chalice that will continue to cause harm for generations to come.
The pettiness, malice, vindictiveness and sheer inhumanity demonstrated against Brian uncovers just how far the bureaucracy is prepared to go, short of murder, to cover past crimes.
The crime I’m talking about is collusion between the oil companies and government departments, to ignore and suppress the knowledge of the devastating health effects of leaded petrol and of lead. Every country in the world has used leaded petrol, but not every country has used leaded petrol that is even more polluting and dangerous than it already was. New Zealand was in the somewhat unique situation of having built a refinery that was unable to produce a petrol distillate of a sufficiently high octane rating to be suitable for local use. The “solution” was to use an increased amount of leaded petrol additives, at least 2-3 times as much, to provide useable fuel for New Zealand motor cars.
That generated a lot more income for the companies comprising the entity that supplied the leaded petrol additives (at that time Associated Octel), primarily tetraethyl lead (TEL) and ethylene dibromide, and it solved the problem the government had that funding constraints in the original refinery design and construction meant that it could only produce low quality distillate that would have been totally unsuitable with the normal amount of TEL.
What Brian has revealed is not only that the operators of the plant were willing to ignore the safety of the workers handling and exposed to the leaded petrol additives, but the lengths the government was willing to go to in an attempt to hide what had happened.
They knew how dangerous TEL and the other additives were, and yet they were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the fact that they were poisoning the blending plant workers, and eventually the people of New Zealand by using much higher TEL levels in petrol. One glaring piece of evidence that this happened is the total lack of information on how much TEL was imported.
If you look up the history of the Marsden Point refinery, you’ll find that the money to upgrade the refinery was finally invested to upgrade the refinery to what it should have been in the first place. It was 20 years too late, and the malpractices of the early years of the refinery had to be covered up.
In fairness it’s hard to get the same information about the Australia’s use of TEL, possibly because Australia’s phasing out of leaded petrol for cars was 6 years later than New Zealand and the regional Octel office was in Melbourne. The Australian estimate (by Louise Jane Kristensen , Macquarie University PhD student) from leaded petrol sales figures is that 240,510 tonnes of lead from leaded petrol was released over a 7 decade period from 1932.
Had the New Zealand government and oil company consortium spent the extra money for the necessary infrastructure to turn foreign and New Zealand crude oil into a higher-octane distillate for petrol blending, New Zealand would be no worse off than other counties using leaded petrol. That’s not great by the way, but they’d have nothing that needed hiding.
As is, New Zealand is possibly more heavily polluted from the combustion of high-TEL leaded petrol than most other countries. There are exceptions like Iraq and Pakistan where leaded petrol has continued to be used, but it is likely that New Zealand could be the most lead-polluted country, per capita, in the world.
If that was revealed, embarrassing doesn’t begin to describe the likely outcome. After all, executives of the company manufacturing the leaded petrol additives in the UK (Octel, now Innospec) ended up being jailed for bribery and corruption. That was the same company albeit with a different name that had such a comfortable relationship with New Zealand bureaucrats. Octel/Innospec are now the only source of TEL, which is still being imported into New Zealand as Avgas 100 LL (low lead, 0.85g lead /litre).
It isn’t unexpected that the government and oil companies did a thorough job of the cover-up. That included erasing the fact the manual blending plant and it’s 150 workers ever existed, shredding the workers records in the belief they would all die, or were already dead, and extensively erasing the evidence of excessive use of TELL and the other additives.
It’s worth elaborating on that statement. Brian met one of the refinery supervisors in 1985 and he was greeted with “I thought you were dead”. In the ensuing conversation the supervisor told Brian he had been instructed by senior management to shred 1500 documents, which comprised the work and health records of the 150 employees of the manual blending plant. There are a number of reasons why the supervisor might have thought Brian had died and the most chilling one was he was the last man standing. It must have been a shock if the supervisor told refinery management that Brian was still alive.
While they couldn’t erase Brian, they tried very hard to wear him down. Anyone who doubts that Brian was a threat to the bureaucrat’s malfeasance should look up how James Hardie, the asbestos products manufacturer in Australia, was finally brought to account thanks to the image of one man in court kept alive by an oxygen tank.
Listen to Brian Arndt’s podcast/interviews on New Zealand’s Reality Check Radio in the links below.
https://rcr.media/episodes/brian-arndt-former-marsden-point-refinery-worker-lead-lies-resilience
https://rcr.media/episodes/rodneys-mailbag-faith-free-speech-and-fierce-truths
https://rcr.media/episodes/rodneys-reflections-giving-thanks
Brian is 85-years old, a true survivor with a story so unpalatable to the New Zealand government that rather than compensating him for what he suffered because of his working at the refinery, they continue to deny that any injury has happened, possibly in the belief that would make his story disappear. They’ve used experts to make biassed and incorrect testimony, intimidation, “lost” records, denied procedures and so on to make sure Brian was unsuccessful in his compensation claim and possibly in the hope he would die.
Lead accumulates in the body, in the bones and teeth, and the additives he handled also caused characteristic cancers which he has had. Denying he was harmed by TEL and additives doesn’t change what happened, but it does illustrate the vindictiveness of a bureaucracy that feels it’s been wronged..
There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Brian was poisoned in his 10.5 years working in the manual blending plant. Any worker, even today, would have been heavily lead poisoned over that period of time. But the ACC continues to deny that he was harmed. Why?
Travesty, injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and malice still fail to adequately describe what various New Zealand government departments have done to punish Brian for his whistleblowing.
This has to stop.
Lead in Australia - what you didn't know 