January 8, 2013 11:00am by David Farrar

Oh please ….

Labour MP Jacinda Ardern said there was a fine line between being overzealous and exercising caution.

She wanted a government body to investigate how a mental health patient managed to walk along a 192-metre-high Sky Tower platform over the weekend.

“I think the appropriate response should still involve a government department taking an interest because adventure tourism, and tourism generally, is so important to the New Zealand economy.”

I’m sorry but what nonsense. The Sky Tower near-suicide is in a totally different category to the ballooning tragedy where there was a failure on the part of operators.

The man involved was a customer and removed his harness and threatened to jump. To paint this as a safety issue is ridiculous. It is a mental health issue. Calling for an inquiry is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Herald editorial also goes down this path:

SkyCity and the company that runs the SkyWalk adventure on its tower have said very little since the incident on Saturday when a disturbed man paced the platform for five hours threatening to jump. There is not much anybody can say for the organisation that allowed this to happen.

The company’s director said it was reviewing its systems to see “whether there can be any improvements made to our systems to prevent such an incident from occurring in the future”. There had better be improvements. The organisers must find a foolproof solution if the platform is to be reopened for these attractions.

That should not be hard.

Nobody should be able to get outside the tower for the SkyWalk or the controlled SkyJump unless they are in a safety harness they cannot remove. There is no conceivable sensible need for customers to be able to release themselves from the harness once they are on the narrow platform 192m above the street.

The precautions seem so obvious they might have been assumed to be in force.

I’m sorry, but again this is raving bonkers. The Herald is saying that people should be padlocked into a safety harness? Why not handcuff them so they can’t try and remove it? Or use straitjackets?

By this logic, we should ban pedestrians from bridges, in case a mentally ill person tries to jump from one.

And all office buildings over one story in height must have windows which are unable to be opened in case anyone tries to get out of one.