The whole nature of the council siege of Cr David Scott requires a full exposé. We will do what we can, but the investigations will take at least 3 months.
In the meantime, this is a letter from a reader to the Kapiti News editor, who as we’ve noted, is reluctant to publish anything critical of the council.
Dear Mr Haxton
I refer to the article ‘Loss of confidence in under siege councillor’, (Kapiti News, May 30, 2018, p. 5). His Worship K. Gurunathan is quoted as stating that given the guilty verdict regarding Cr. Dr. David Scott, His Worship has ‘a political responsibility to relay [a] clear message to our communities’, that Dr. Scott has lost the confidence of all councillors and the majority of community board members.
Given that this matter is still before the courts, and that a conviction has not been secured, it is surely not appropriate for Kapiti News to have reported these politically opportunistic comments.
The report, the gleeful promptness of His Worship in making the comments, and the unseemly haste of the council in regard to legal matters that have not yet been fully resolved, is particularly gutless and dishonourable given that the stress inflicted on Dr. Scott, over the course of more than a year, resulted in him having an SVT attack on Thursday 31 May, and undergoing lengthy surgery for a pacemaker on Friday 1 June; the culmination of several such attacks over the course of the time that Dr. Scott has endured the filthy accusation.
So congratulations to the cowardly liars in KCDC who have long regarded Dr. Scott as a hindrance to their perks, rates rises, pay rises and wasteful expenditure.
K.R Bolton
KCDC iGaslighting, others to cover up their own shortcomings disgusting.
This has been the most disgusting attack I have ever read on a person who has stuck up for the ratepayers. I have been with cr scott throughout the whole dreadful business, it has caused me to have a heart attack, and for cr. Scott to have three of these dreadful attacks. The whole of senior staff should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. They are the ones that should be resigning.
David Haxton’s reply was to stand by his reporting of Guru’s survey. Fair enough, from a newspaper’s position. What really gets me, however, is the complete lack of interest from the media as to wider factors that might provide a real ‘news story’, and not just surface banality But that is the way of the media in general – no investigative journalism.
Mr Haxton’s response was that ‘six [sic] jurors had heard all the evidence and found Cr. Scott guilty’. One might hope that a journalist would be curious as to why some of us also heard the evidence for three days and can categorically state that there was no evidence whatsoever that justified producing a ‘guilty verdict, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. None. Zilch.
I think that the biggest flaw was the failure of the defence to challenge the medical pseudo-evidence, which should have easily been shown to be WRONG on ALL points. Again, the media is not even curious as to this.
We have two community newspapers, and neither one can be said to serve Kapiti adequately.
It’s been said to us by several people that ‘Kapiti News’ and the ‘Kapiti Observer’ are clones. Both get a lot of advertising from the council and are thus obedient to them.
Notice kapiti news has not published your letter Kerry or mine. Stinks