For many of us, “Cover me!!” means we’re about to do something that may not turn out well…not so much a military “Hold My Beer!” as this needs doing and I’m going to need to some help… Covering fire is a little more personal than the good old ‘Fire mission, Regiment’ and other such methods of registering one’s unhappiness with a given individual, object or grid square…

But there’s other ways of providing cover…

Be honest, you all had a snigger when you saw this one, like, der, man…

It would be nice to think that it would be possible to deter ANZ New Zealand with a massive show (or application – I was, after all, the Force Application lead for most of my four years in the Air Force) of force/might/power. Even it such force/might/power was available, poor old ANZ New Zealand is like a mega-dinosaur controlled by a myriad of different brains that don’t talk to each other that well, if at all…any effect registered by one is unlikely to affect the others…

With ANZ New Zealand, the only brain that counts is its ego, the bit that gets worried when it might look bad; the one whose worst nightmare is a world where all its bribes of super-low interest rates (coincidentally announced just after the release of the FMA/RBNZ report on banks’ conduct in New Zealand)  or the millions of look-good dollars that it invests into sports… Like the cool kids at school, looking bad is what ANZ New Zealand fears the most…it cancelled the auction of my home to prevent 1 News running the story on it…

The path to ANZ New Zealand’s main ego brain is indirect…for any direct approach to work the brain would have to care and the simple truth is that ANZ New Zealand doesn’t care what you say to it, because ‘the people’ are beneath it, beneath the executive team, beneath the board, beneath the CEO who ‘earns more in an hour’ than most Kiwis take home in a week…instead the path to ANZ New Zealand’s care factor is external and three-fold:

The Banking Ombudsman Nicola Sladden nicola.sladden@bankomb.org.nz and the Chair of the Banking Ombudsman Board Miriam Dean  miriam.dean@barrists.co.nz

The political realm, especially those elected representatives who have been supportive to date. They have been looking at the changes necessary to close off all the remaining loopholes relating to banks’ lending. 

The media who play a canny game of what to release when…

to be continued…(nothing worse that a looooong post….)

It’s actually not about covering me…it’s about covering each other…