Law and order riddle: how can you be shot in a pub in July after getting three months jail in June?

Alf can’t wait for the screening of the Native Affairs programme in which members of the Ratahi family “share their story”. He expects they will do a great deal of bitching about what everybody should have done for the late Anthony Ratahi without much acknowledging their own shortcomings.

The late Anthony Ratahi, of course, is the bloke who was shot by the coppers after he took his former partner Marcelle Beer hostage at gunpoint in an Opunake hotel last weekend.

According to an early account of the hostage incident –

On Friday night, armed with a gun, Ratahi walked into the Headlands Hotel where he ordered staff and patrons out before he barricaded himself and Ms Beer inside. She works there as a waitress. Twelve hours later he emerged with a knife before going back into the foyer where he was killed by a single police gunshot.

Holding a female hostage is a dastardly way to behave, of course.

Ordering patrons out of a pub is more than a tad uncivilized, too, and should be an offence in its own right.

But hold on.

Shouldn’t he still have been in the slammer?

Bill balks at building more jails, true, but this is readily reconciled with Crusher’s plans

And if we run out of containers, we can try Joe's tent idea.

Alf is much more appreciative of Bill English than the law-and-order lobbyists who lament he has gone lame.

Tossers like Garth McVicar have seized on something Bill said without taking into account what he was busting to say next, before his Q+A interview was abruptly terminated.

McVicar – at the Sensible Sentencing Trust.- is accusing Bill of destroying the good work done by Crusher Collins and Simon Power by saying we shouldn’t build any more prisons.

Bollocks.

English did cavil with the idea of spending good public money on building more prisons.

But where in the inteview did he say he objected to banging up bad buggers in converted shipping containers?

Overcoming work stress with a noggin

A case just settled by the Employment Relations Authority, an outfit responsible for some daft decisions on occasion, this time has Alf in two minds.

The authority has decided Resene Paints was justified in firing an underperforming worker, who was too ill to come to work but was able to spend two afternoons a week in the pub.

Paul Woodhead, who was employed for 15 years as a colour matcher in the Hutt Valley paint factory, claimed he was unjustifiably given final warnings and dismissed last year.

However, ERA member Gregory Wood determined his dismissal was justified and was what a fair and reasonable employer would have done.