Point of Order: There’s a lesson here for Tamati Coffey

You should tweak things to fix a cock-up, not to create one

Inland Revenue Minister David Parker joined the ranks of the Government’s tweakers when he announced his department is refining the screening tests for eligibility for the Cost of Living Payments ahead of the second payment being made from 1 September.

This refinement – the introduction of extra checks to stop cost-of-living payments being made to people based overseas – follows Inland Revenue’s finding about 31,000 of the 1.4 million people who received the first payment might have been overseas. They will have to provide further information before receiving further payments.

Roger Childs: A Royal Commission should investigate the White Island tragedy

It’s now a year on from the disaster which killed 22 people in the Bay of Plenty, mainly Australians. The governor-general, prime minister and other dignitaries were there for the recent anniversary and took the usual photo opportunities. There was a lot of grief and sorrow, but I didn’t hear White Island Tours giving an apology.

 Last year’s catastrophe was an accident waiting to happen and it appears that because of the blasé attitude and greed of the tour company, lives were lost. Most people would have expected a Royal Commission to investigate the tragedy as happened with the Pike River Mine disaster and the shootings at the Christchurch mosques. Instead the government workplace regulator WorkSafe carried out an inquiry and last week decided to prosecute – 10 organisations and 5 individuals – seemingly anyone who had anything to do with the tragic events in the Bay of Plenty in December 2019. However Work Safe did not include themselves!

This scattergun approach to assigning culpability may have been intended to soften the blow for the chief culprits: the Ngati Awa tour operators.

Mike Hosking: Labour's Pike River disgrace now that victims' remains will not be recovered

So the day of reckoning, or at least a day of reckoning, has arrived. The jig is up.

Andrew Little, the Minister in charge of Pike River, fronts the appropriate select committee and reveals what most of us had worked out well before they ever entered the mine.

The retrieval of bodies is no longer practical. The simple truth, a decade on, is that the retrieval of remains was never practical.

Little perpetrates the con a little further by suggesting that the main reason they are still there, apart from perceived political gain, is to gather evidence for the crime committed.

Karl du Fresne: Pike River - a lot of ifs, buts and maybes

This might seem an insensitive question, but it needs to be asked. Exactly what will be achieved by going back into the Pike River mine?

The justification for the $36 million re-entry operation is often vaguely expressed and seems to vary depending on who’s doing the talking.

Anna Osborne, who lost her husband in the Pike River disaster, wants the 29 miners’ remains recovered. Bernie Monk, whose son was killed, talks about wanting “justice and accountability”.