Labour calls for sackings

Press, 28 April 1981, Page 3

Labour calls for sackings

PA Wellington The Labour Party last evening called for the senior management of Air New Zealand involved in the Mount Erebus disaster to be immediately relieved of their positions. The move should be taken without waiting for another inquiry or possible judicial proceedings, said the party’s Shadow Minister of Transport, Mr Fraser Colman. Mr Colman said the report was “a devasting indictment of senior administration of Air New Zealand and also shows grave deficiencies in the administration of Civil Aviation.”

It was now imperative that constructive action was taken to give a new impetus and vitality to the airline and to retrieve the high international reputation it once enjoyed. The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Rowling) described the attitude of the board of „• Air New Zealand as "a complete denial of their public responsibilities.”

Mr Rowling said the board’s refusal to accept the report’s findings, and refusal to look at the administrative defects that had cost the lives of so many people and the Government’s apparent refusal to take any direct action to enforce their own responsibility, were a travesty of public administration that had seldom been seen in New Zealand before. “The comments of an incompetent, and obviously totally negligent Minister that he is going to wander off and discuss airline safety overseas, while ignoring the very direct criticism of a department and an airline under his own direction must stand as the epitaph of a totally incompetent Government,” Mr Rowling said.

He made it clear there was no way that senior management implicated by the report would hold their jobs under a Labour Government. The airline had a right to a new start and to a new administration, he said.