No one in charge can say that yet because of employment law, but it is absolutely going to happen - because there is no way that a man can do what he has done at the highest levels of police and then possibly continue to earn an income from the taxpayer. Him losing his job is the right outcome here.
But here's the question that I think is up for debate - is Andrew Coster a bad man? Or was he just bad at his job, showing poor judgment, incompetence, naivety, whatever?
And I'm going to suggest that it was actually the latter. He's not a bad man, he was just bad at his job. It doesn't seem like he did what he did because he wanted to hide what Jevon McSkimming had done, it sounded more like he tried to make it go away because he didn't believe that it was true.
It sounds like he believed McSkimming was just the victim of a really bad breakup - he'd ended an affair, she hadn't taken it well and now she was trying to destroy his reputation online, and so Andrew Coster seemed to have thought, maybe what he needed to do was try to prevent these horrible lies from destroying the career of a good man.
So he tried to hurry things up and shut things down and hide emails from ministers and not tell the people appointing the next Police Commissioner that there were complaints against McSkimming, and he got angry at police officers who tried to raise concerns.
Except, as it turns out, Andrew Coster was wrong. Jevon McSkimming was not a good man, he was a creep. And that woman's allegations should have been listened to.
She wasn't destroying the career of a good man, she was alerting authorities to a bad man.
But Andrew Coster was a police officer, and it is 101 of policing to investigate allegations and listen to complaints, not shut them down, so he failed at the very basics of his job.
And unfortunately for him, while he may not be a bad man, he ended up doing things that I think we can agree are bad things - misleading, shutting down good police wanting to raise concerns, protecting a creep.
Now I don't know, is there really that much difference in the end between being a bad man and being someone who thinks they're doing the right thing - but doing bad things?
For him, the outcome is actually pretty much the same, whether he was bad or bad at his job. He has lost his job and he's lost his reputation.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
To quote Jung, “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
What a revolving door of ick and Heather stop with your good cop bs. Coster and the other 4 bent, bias and corrupt cops protecting a deviate who groomed a 21 year old for sex and on the sly was a degenerate sex addict looking at child porn. The victim blaming is despicable, Coster deserves to be sacked immediately he is not fit and proper to hold office.
Maybe, Heather, just maybe, Costner and McSkimming are cut from the same cloth?
300 emails, and many similarly aimed at another target, does suggest a degree of irrationality or obsession. Had Mc Skimming not chanced to be convicted, Coster''s action in not escalating what will very llikely prove not nowadays unusual, could have served to restrain disproportionate disruption by an apparent obsessive..
Maybe Coster just didn’t have the intellect to deal with the issue. The leadership team was obviously tip-toeing around the issue as they did not want to damage their own career paths and promotion prospects. The other checks and balances eventually kicked in to bring things to a conclusion.
About the woman’s email campaign. Obsessive? I don’t think so. My feeling is that she was overcome by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD. The female psyche often finds different methods for dealing with crises. She is not blameworthy on any level.
Shouldn't the question be, "How is the Coster affair going to end for Nic Willis?". She said she's written to "his employer" concerning his behaviour. But she hired him. She wanted him to be the CEO of her own Social Investment Agency. She's his employer. Pretending she had nothing to do with his hiring and it was all the State Services Commission and they are his boss is untrue. Coster never could do the actuarial cost benefit mathematical based calculations that form the basis of everything the "social investment" approach is about. He was never qualified for that job.
As Sir Roger Douglas and myself said on the NZ Herald front page, Nic Willis is not up to the job. She can't buy ferries; she can't break up monopolies; she reappointed the wrong Chair of the Reserve Bank, namely Quigley; she hired the wrong person in Coster for CEO of her own agency. She is not telling the truth about how government debt is on course to explode to 100% of GDP. She said on the Platform that public debt is coming down when its going up. Resign Nic. Pease get out of Parliament. You're incompetent.
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