In for a penny.....

Agenda Piece.

2005-03-30T12:50:00.000+12:00

This is the script of my media piece that appeared on Saturday on Agenda. All transcripts and a very good feedback area are also available on the site. Go there.

Obviously it is better if you watch it, but this may give an idea.

Whatever happened to the Catholic media?
Agenda, March 26

Thirty-three years ago the influence of church press, and New Zealand in general, was very different indeed. It was the year of the Kirk Labour Party landslide, and in the weeks leading up to the election the prominent Catholic organ, the Tablet, threw its weight behind Kirk with an unprecedented editorial entitled ‘Time for a Change.’

“It is the firm belief of this paper that the time has come for a change in Government in New Zealand, that the destinies of the nation for the next three years should be committed to the Labour Party and that in Mr Kirk there exists a man with the potential to give the country the leadership that has for too long been lacking”
Tablet editorial excerpt, November 15 1972

Many credit this stand as galvanizing Catholic support for the still red-tinged Labour Party, and, as a contributing factor to their victory.

But that was 33 years ago. The Tablet, after over a hundred years publishing as a national magazine, closed its doors in 1996. It reappeared shortly after as the Dunedin-only Diocesan news it is today

Is this story of the Tablet symptomatic of the wane in influence of the Catholic media in general? Well, we’ll have to check on the other patient – the Zealandia.

At around the time of the Tablet’s endorsement the Zealandia was a weekly newspaper with a circulation of around 28,000.
In 1989 it moved with the times- and declining readers- and shifted to a monthly glossy magazine format under the name New Zealandia. It attracted up to 10,000 readers in its peak.
In 1996 the decision was made to shift again, this time to fortnightly editions under the name NZ Catholic. Today the paper draws upwards of 6,000 purchasers.

This publication, in its many guises, has attracted strong writers and contributors including award winning journalist Pat Booth, known for his work on the Arthur Allan Thomas case and Mr Asia.

Today Pat McCarthy is editor of the NZ Catholic. It is based here at Auckland’s Pompallier Diocesan Centre. McCarthy has been with the paper since ‘96 and is well placed to give us an idea of what state the Catholic press is in.

Simon Pound: What does NZ Catholic provide to its readers?

Pat McCarthy: Our aim is to keep the New Zealand Catholic s up to date with what’s happening in the Church, in the community, in the world. We cover all six New Zealand dioceses, we have a wide range of overseas news and we have a broad range of opinion as well.

Simon Pound: So, providing Catholics with all the information they need to make their own decisions, but nowadays, fewer and fewer people are reading religious papers – why is this?

Pat McCarthy: Well, since the heyday of John Kennedy’s tablet there has been a tremendous explosion of media in New Zealand television, radio, weekend newspapers and the internet, so all things considered I think we are doing pretty well.

Pat McCarthy is right about the fragmentation of the media. Even the Catholic Media.

Tui Motu is a contrarian Catholic publication that is at best left-leaning, at worst left-capsizing.

Around for some years and sold in an amazing twenty countries, it is continually surprising, especially considering that a good deal of what they say could have them excommunicated.

Take a look the cover of November 2004, for instance. We need go no further into the mag to find its stand. Equal space is given to a dissident theologian and the very Pope that stripped him of his title. This may not seem particularly heretical but 500 years ago they might have burnt you at the stake for this sort of carry on.

Thing is, the Catholic Church is still a very top down organisation, and does not take kindly to the kinds of suggestions that Tui Motu regularly sends back to Rome. These are on matters as varied as allowing married clergy to equating YWYH – the letters God gave Moses to describe himself – which mean ‘I will be who I will be – to a god given sanction for homosexuality.

Another point to note alongside the growth in alternative Catholic Publications, like Tui Motu, is the growth of Church Newsletters. The ability to now cheaply print, and closely aim newsletters at a congregation’s concerns is another factor offsetting the apparent decline in the Catholic press.

In fact, the Catholic Church can be seen as an unlikely example of this new media people bang on about. This decline in heavyweight titles coupled with the growth of targeted information and niche publications is the very picture of new media.

Well there you go – glad to see that the Church press isn’t taking Easter lying down.

Getting Kinsey With It.

2005-03-15T13:35:00.000+13:00

This is a story that I wrote for Remix. It was truncated a wee bit. Probably for good reason.

Sorry I've been quiet Sage, but I really do think that you are the only person reading! I'll be posting a lot more as I start doing these Agenda media pieces.......

Anywho......

Kinsey

Fifty years ago the extent of sexual advice available in the public sphere was minimal. There were no self-help sex books, no Sex therapists and certainly no Cleo sealed sections. It was a very different landscape, one where America was scared of sex, where the Kama Sutra was considered pornography, one where they talked seriously of American as apple pie.

And certainly not the American Pie apple pie you may be thinking of. Well at least on the surface it was. Underneath her prim puritanically influenced exterior, under the skirts as it were, America had what these days we’d call a full and varied sex life. And it took a zoologist who had spent his early life researching gall wasps to break down the taboos and get the world talking about sex, acknowledging life’s second biggest reality.

The first biggest reality being bad café art.

A cursory glance over a newsstand confirms that this Dr Alfred Kinsey character did a pretty good job. Sex, once the unmentionable now permeates every aspect of our public life, well and truly out of the realm of the unmentionable. J Lo’s butt. One night in Paris. Michael Barrymore’s pool parties. Certain TVNZers and glass coffee tables. Charlotte Dawson at play. E-mail accounts full of invitations to ‘pound black ass’ and ‘enlarge that member, size matters guys’.

It would appear that all we really need help with nowadays is cutting down our diet of free and frank sexual discussion. A revolution that our man Kinsey brought about through two not-so-radically entitled reports; "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female" (1953). Hardly sounds like the kind of material that would turn America on its ear but you really do have to watch the quiet ones.

Which is exactly what Kinsey the man was before he embarked on his project. Some say that it was his inexperience and quite startling lack of knowledge about the most basic and instinctual of human needs that led him to his life work. A process that changed the straight-laced son-of-a-preacher-man type scientist to the extent that he went from not knowing how to approach sex on his wedding night to enter into a world of wife swapping and homosexual experiences.

For although our generation may have house music for this, Kinsey had to blaze his own trail against the weight of an entire culture that just didn’t talk about sex, baby.

The two matter of fact titled books were reports on sexual activity of Americans. These were based on thousands of interviews about subject’s sex-lives and habits, proclivities and practises. And the stir they caused cannot be overstated. The findings of the first large scale look into the bedrooms and closets of American sexuality have been described as the first shots fired in the sexual revolution.

More than ten thousand men and women were interviewed and the end findings challenged the prevailing ideas of abstinence and heterosexuality as the norm The thing is that Kinsey unearthed, and meticulously recorded, a secret and prolific private sex life occurring all around him. Ten percent of all men were found to be exclusively homosexual and 80 of the other 90 were found to have at least a certain lean that way. 25% of married women had had affairs. And it was at this stage that one of life’s certainties was confirmed. He worked out that the only people who told him they’d never masturbated were lying.

As, in his carefully constructed and watertight confidential interviews, he would soon turn up that everyone treats themselves now and again. As you can imagine this didn’t go down too well. The disturbing depth that he went into won no friends either. Even today one can safely assume that the information he gathered on, for just one unsettling example, the length of time it takes to achieve climax in under 12 year old boys still wouldn’t find a receptive audience. The research in that category was, for your interest, conducted by a paedophile who kept good records.

This entire process of looking under the societal rock and letting all the many-legged truths scurry out brought Kinsey into contact with many undesirable elements. It is an ethical question well beyond most peoples’ reckoning or desired contact as to whether it is better to accept data from a man interfering with children or conduct the research afresh.

Either way fifty years later we are no closer to answers about how to approach the curly questions this survey threw up on the subjects of child sexuality and sexual orientation boundary lines. Aside from changing sex-habits from the least to the most discussed taboo this issue with categorising sexuality is perhaps the most significant effect of Kinsey’s work on our outlook today. Prior to his study the idea of having to categorise oneself as gay or straight was not an issue. If the possibility of a range of preferences is not officially acknowledged then the problem of having to gather people into camps simply doesn’t arise, so to speak.

Kinsey changed all this by proposing a scale, which had ten percent of all men as purely homosexual and ten percent as purely heterosexual. All men between these points were a mix of the two leaning in degrees more towards the one than the other. The scale runs from 0-6, where zero is exclusively hetero. The Kinsey Scale has long since fallen out of common knowledge and usage though could be due for a light-hearted revival. Meterosexuals, say, could be said to sit around the 4.5 mark. In any event whereas before it was implicitly expected that men where straight or gay, and very brave they had to be to be openly gay, though that is another story, the idea that there were shades can maybe be seen as responsible for all the aftershocks of identity politics and other such sociological afflictions and arbitrary categories. One can’t pick up a magazine without amateur analysis as to whether his wearing a pink shirt and having a hairy chest makes him, this week, a reterosexual, a fauxmosexual or simply a tosser.

All this exposure to new things can have unforeseen effects. For Kinsey some of the research went well past the interview process. One of his research assistants became the lover of both Kinsey and his wife, mutually and separately. Photographic records of Kinsey’s sexual encounters with subjects were recorded. When revelations about the extent of the bent to Kinsey’s methods came out it was quickly decided that one mans deviation is not in fact another mans sexual habits survey. Making swinger home movies is always going to be making swinger movies.

Which leads to the other major problem with his work, the sample that was interviewed. Many were volunteers and those who volunteer to speak about the unspeakable in a society are quite obviously going to be freer. Some candidates well and truly occupied the sexual fringes, such as paedophiles, and they were included and found through secret networks, not random no matter how you squint.

The most glaring problem though would have to be that one in four respondents were prison inmates. If prison inmate sexual activity is being used as the measuring stick for a societies' habits the findings may get a little skewed. Skewed prison style at that.

There is a wonderful legend about Winston Churchill drawing up the new borders for the Middle East after World War One. Having indulged too heavily at dinner he was drawing a straight line when affected by a hiccup. A change that has been there ever since and has no rational explanation. The resultant bump in the line helped to separate Kuwait from Iraq, so in part brought us Gulf War One.Well Kinsey provided a similar redrawing of our collective boundaries, simply by starting to map out what was occurring behind closed doors. And like that hiccup it was an imperfect approach that still affects the very topography of sex.

I have no morals

2005-03-01T16:37:00.000+13:00

No really.

According to this test.

Check out these answers....

Your Score
Your scored 0 on the Moral Order axis and 0 on the Moral Rules axis.
Matches
The following items best match your score:
System: Socialism, Authoritarianism, Conservatism, Liberalism
Variation: Moderate Socialism, Moderate Authoritarianism, Moderate Conservatism, Moderate Liberalism
Ideologies: Social Democratism, Social Republicanism, Capital Republicanism, Capital Democratism
US Parties: Democratic Party
Presidents: Gerald Ford (86.74%)
2004 Election Candidates: John Kerry (84.07%), Ralph Nader (73.12%), George W. Bush (68.75%)
Statistics
Of the 54863 people who took the test:
2.3% had the same score as you.
30.9% were above you on the chart.
57.3% were below you on the chart.
27.9% were to your right on the chart.
60.3% were to your left on the chart

pretty interesting huh. how could you be all those things at once I wonder?

thanks to the PM....

Rules to Avoid Banishment From Grey-Lynn: No 2

2005-02-09T02:29:00.000+13:00

Rule Number Two: Do Not Believe in the Importance of a Viable Defence Force

For some reason believing it is really important that our tiny underpopulated unspoilt country should be able to defend itself is particularly unpopular. This I do not understand. What could be contentious about defence?

Right now New Zealand is woefully equipped. There are simply too many areas we fall down in to mention, and to single any out for special praise would not be fair to all the other failings. For this reason, and to try to stem the feelings of vulnerability a good look at all our gaps inevitably raises, we’ll only talk about axing the Air Combat Wing of the Air Force. At the same time we also appear to be doing our very best to distance ourselves from our natural and historical allies. It does not strike me as a particularly good idea that we should be doing things like removing our Air Force combat capabilities and drawing away from our mates who do have Air Forces at the same time. Surely it is a case of one approach or the other.

In fact, what should we call the Air Force now that we have stripped it of its Force? The “Air Ask Really Nicely” perhaps? The problem is that although that seems ridiculous we have not been asking these questions. What the hell are we going to do if we need an Air Force – we can’t very well borrow one.

It puts me in mind of the Albanians. They took defence very seriously, as you would if you were a country that had five or so different owners during World War One and about 100 over the centuries.

In the late 60s they split from defence arrangements with Soviet Russia and then the Warsaw Pact altogether. So, after losing the deterrent value of these friendships Albania had to protect herself. It was decided that the best way to self-reliant defence was to build pill boxes in backyards and issue rifles to every household. So it was that 750,000 bunkers and pill boxes came to be built. The idea being that if anyone invaded then the entire citizenry would take up positions inside these boxes and the invader would have to fight for every inch of the country. Mad maybe, but effective. Point being that if we are going to break off our good relations with our allies – by doing truly stupid stuff like bailing out of ANZUS – we’d better have a plan B.

Because bailing out of ANZUS was truly stupid. If the shit ever hits the fan again we will go running back behind that banner as quickly as possible, all high-minded moral positions on Nukes will disappear faster than Chief Executives at Maori TV. And we’ll be damned lucky if they take us back: twenty years of looking down our noses at the most powerful nation on earth and of not keeping up with regional defence responsibilities with Australia will not be forgotten or forgiven easily.

The only argument that is ever wheeled out for the way we have let relationships rot and our services atrophy is that we don’t need them now. Rubbish, crap, baloney, bollocks bollocks bollocks. And bollocks again. Are we to believe that for some reason after millennia of conflict humans have decided not to have any more wars, or at least if they do they will leave NZ out? Unless we have that in writing somewhere I’m not buying it. Preferably in writing that means more than, say, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

Thing is that all this talk of benign strategic environments is rubbish. It is about as clever as declaring peace in our time. Just 60 odd years ago we were at war with half the world. We were fighting Germany, even though after the First World War they had taken steps to ensure that that wouldn’t be happening again. On what evidence have we decided that there will be no eventuality where an Air Force might come in handy? That being matey with the US might not be useful, even vital?

It boils down to something that sounds a bit boy scouty, just without the lawsuits:

You can’t be sure things wont happen, but you can be prepared in case.

And why this viewpoint is anathema to Grey-Lynn I truly cannot fathom. From the reactions I used to get, before I learnt to keep such opinions private, to, say, advocating keeping our military strong and up-to-date you’d think I was suggesting that we should use said imaginary military for whale hunting and permanently getting solo-mothers off the DPB.

It is incredibly un-PC to realise that we are vulnerable without protection. This is odd as that statement and belief is as self evident as saying ‘water is wet’ or ‘Brian Tamaki does pretty well out of that God racket’. It is a simple truth, yet somehow this ill-informed flower-power hangover means prioritising defence is about as popular in these circles as supporting George W Bush.

Which Brings me to the next rule, don’t support Geeorge W Bush (this rule is particularly important)………

How to become a pariah in Grey-Lynn

2005-02-04T01:03:00.000+13:00

Steps towards the hopeful end of left and right wing.........

There are a few sure-fire ways to spoil a nice Grey-Lynn dinner party. I’d say that there are four topics that are certain, certain, to upset the mood and leave fellow guests thinking that you are a baby-eating, male (a term often wielded as an insult) right-wing cunt.

Unfortunately for my social standing in respectable left-wing circles I am guilty of all four transgressions regularly though do not identify as right-wing, in fact I don’t think the terms left and right wing mean a thing anymore – lest of all to the people who throw them round.

As it is much easier to point out how you can avoid the social ostracization I faced until I discovered these rules than it is to actually get a left-wing person to define what left-wing economics entails, or even to provide a definition for progressive taxation, I thought I might share these guiding suggestions for the benefit of all.

Number One: Don’t, for godsake do not support Genetic Engineering.

Many a coffee in Verona has been irrevocably changed by the meekest pro-GE utterance. When it comes to tampering with nature and putting fish genes into tomatoes I’m all for it. In fact I thought it the height of wit to remove the ‘free’ from the ‘GE free NZ’ stickers.

‘Fucking go for it’ would be my sage advice to all aspirant Dr Frankensteins.

I’ve found myself having to explain myself to kaftan-wearing advertising executives and washed up pop stars (who really should join Rotary or volunteer with City Mission, I mean if they insist on having a mid-life social conscience crisis I can’t help but feel that the least they could do is play it out privately and constructively….) anyway, you know the types.

To assuage these people my reasoning generally runs that I feel that the biggest lunacy of our age is the way we produce and protect food. It reminds me of the situations we scoff at now – things like feeding the ill Mercury (the kind of thing that these people suspect right-wingers still want to do today) or insulating homes with asbestos or, and this is my favourite folly, using lead pipes to pump in drinking water.

All of these things, thanks to scientific advancement, are now known to be harmful. I can’t help but think that in maybe just one hundred years time you’ll hear conversations like this:

“You know what they used to do with food back in the 1900s? They used to spray poison all over it as it grew to keep the insects off!”

“You’re shitting me? Spray poison on their own food – they can’t have been that stupid.”

“No really, they called it insecticide probably hoping no-one would notice that it was also humanicide.”

“And they wonder why the Cancer epidemic hit, fools”

Or something to the effect.

Trick is that GE is part of that same imperfect scientific advancement that now lets us know not to do stuff like treat a toothache with leeches.

It is true that we don’t know yet what GE might produce – which is, as far as I can tell, the closest thing the ‘anti’ movement has to an intellectualised opposition. I agree, we don’t. The part we diverge on is that I reckon we should be doing our best to find out, while they advocate sitting there – with brand new access to the coolest tool-shed ever – and doing nothing.

I figure that the most likely way to safely and sensibly feed and, in the long run, medicate and protect all humans is to be found in Genetic Engineering. And I’d really prefer it if wives with health plans, royalty cheques and far too much time on their hands would stop impeding the arrival of such a time.

In fact I’d go one further and say start the inevitable process of turning the technology onto humans. With any luck they could cleanse from our make up the ability to confuse fear and ignorance with morality and the protection of mother-nature, man.

Not that I don’t have reservations about the intellectual property on genes being corporatized and the likely emergence of higher and lower classes of human, in fact about the countless possibilities of abuse I can imagine. I’ll contend that I probably have a much better informed full list of concerns than the vast majority of people who consider themselves anti-GE. I believe, however, that we’ll stumble through the problems and that on balance GE is an historically unrivalled treasure trove.

But you’d be astounded how badly such an optimistic outlook goes down in these circles. Apparently it is reactionary to believe in revolution and safe to believe in the status quo. I reckon that alone might say more about the state of the trendy left these days than anything else more pithy. How on earth my position on GE can make me, as it was levelled, ‘more right-wing by the day’ I am unsure. Yet, I hope, not nearly so unsure as the leveller.

In any event in fifty years this whole discussion will be as irrelevant as the near exact arguments that raged against the adoption of chimneys and electricity. It’s the march of progress, or some such cliché.

Three more rules to follow – if there is demand for them. Let me know and I might get around to writing them.

Becuase People Really Care What I thought Of the Big Day Out

2005-02-02T13:46:00.000+13:00

This was meant to end up in Rip It Up but you will probably see why it didn't......

There was one act that I was burning to see at the BDO: Le Tigre. Strolling through the gate at a tremendously leisurely hour I managed, indeed, to catch the last bars of their performance.

Thus was the tenor set for the day, both The Hives and Le Tigre missed I re-jigged my priorities around the beer tents.

It was a funny old line-up with no other must must must sees. This being so my compatriots and I shuttled our way from reclining beer to reclining beer, steering in the main well clear of any crowd or, in fact, act for the entire day.

Ignoring all warnings from St John we ate as many party, or otherwise, pills that we could get our hands on and spent a blissful day in the sun people- and munter-watching and doing our very best to hold it all together, thank you very much.

We were all terrified by the crowd for SlipKnot. Terrified because any group that big of people with taste that bad should always be avoided – that is how religions and riots start, and while I like riots I'm petrified of religion. Though it would make a good'un, what with the masks, ritual costumes and sacrificial virgins (at least I figure they must be sacrificial, what woman would enter that crowd voluntarily?).

It was good to see Shihad rocking out, and brought back many happy memories of Powerstation concerts and illicit drinking.

The day was rounded out with watching the Beastie Boys from the top beer garden – the very furthest point from stage, and that was ex-fucking-zactly what was needed. For a bunch of aging politicised vegetarian types they rocked out pretty well we reckoned.

After popping our heads into the Boiler Room for The Chemical Brothers and removing them freshly sweat-soaked, though not with our own, we decided against braving the crowd which resembled nothing so much as Long Bay High on the burn.

A highlight would have to have been the far too many, far too hot and far too young girls, and so it was that we headed home with jokes that Statutory Rape should be renamed Introductory Sex in our ears and a solid recovery session in the pipeline.

Australia's Generosity

2005-01-06T13:23:00.000+13:00

Three words I don’t often find occasion to put together: Good on Australia. News is that they have pledged One Billion Aussie Dollars to help rebuild Indonesia in the wake of the Tsunami (sorry a pun that is both tasteless and irresistible).

This is fantastic news on a bunch of fronts, and tremendously, staggeringly good politics on a bunch of others.

Australia, and Howard in particular, are often accused of trying to play the America of the Southern Hemisphere type role. More bitingly they are often referred to as America’s sheriff. This has been for their tendency to ape (sorry) Dubya’s tough guy swagger and stances on matters of foreign policy, most notably the Iraq war.

What we are seeing now are the first steps of their emulating the very best international intervention isolationist America ever made – the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan was the huge assistance provided by America after WW2 to war-ravaged Europe. You can still see the affection and gratitude from Europe for this unilateral action of goodwill that was integral in getting the continent back on her feet. Actually you can’t, but that says more about the French and German mindset than anything else.

For years though you could, at least in places like West Germany, and the stark difference between quality of life in American influenced Europe and Soviet influenced Europe served as the world’s best argument for American inperialism.

This action set America up as the power it is today – you can’t grow rich off trade if everyone else is too broke to buy your product. And also those who have a greater interest in trading with you to grow rich themselves are less likely to invade you.

So to Australia and this Billion-dollar gesture. Should it actually work as a defusing gesture, and influence grabber, for their extremely stressed relations with Indonesia it will be the best Billion Dollars ever spent by a government. Sound over the top? Not so at all.

Remember East Timor. After decades of Australian, and for that matter New Zealand, gutless co-operation with the barbarous Indonesian military occupation in East Timor we all switched sides and pushed for East Timorese independence. Good for us.

This selfless act really got up Indonesia’s nose. The same Indonesia with 200 Million mainly dirt poor people. The same Indonesia with a massive and itchy military with way too much sway over national politics. The same space-poor people-rich Indonesia on the doorstep of people-poor but space and resource rich Australia.

Turns out however that this selfless stand for civil rights was nothing of the sort. As soon as East Timor was cleaved from Indonesia under the watchful eye of the UN the Aussies made a surprise claim for the massive oil fields just off East Timor. Imagine the East Timorese’s surprise.

It is safe to say that the Australians would not have pushed this claim as hard as they have if it were still Indonesian territory. In much the same way it is safe to say that Helen Clark was not elected on looks alone.

The Australian’s have become expert at redrawing International Maritime Boundaries Law to suit their own ends. Special credit for the slippery redefinition of great swathes of Australian territory as ‘not really Australia’ in the event of boat people landing on it but ‘Australia proper’ for all other intents and purposes.

Now, with this claim on the East Timorese oil fields their very crafty lawyers are basing their claim on the fact that even though the fields are way out of their territorial waters they do happen to share a tectonic plate. It does not take much imagination to see that around the world the adoption of such a standard for ownership would cause some difficulties. The whole of Europe, for example, shares one tectonic plate.

Not that you hear much about this. We are all still so busy patting our backs for saving those poor Timorese from the our erstwhile friend ‘the oppressor’ that we are not worrying that we’re sitting by and in effect keeping those poor East Timorese, well, poor.

And you can bet that that oil field is worth a hell of a lot more to the Aussies than this billion dollar photo opportunity. It is, if you can look at it dispassionately, a work of back-handed genius. That money from the fields was the big reason Indonesia did not want to lose East Timor in the first place. Oz snatches it, in the process painting Indonesia as a big bad wolf in the international court of world opinion, then they give them back a paltry amount as aid a couple of years on.

This aid too, of course, buys them responsible global citizen status – priceless after their miserable treatment of their unwanted boat-people arrivals, their pacific solution, their abysmal record of treatment of the Aborigines….. the list goes on.

The best billion dollars ever spent then. Good on Australia indeed.

Although if that billion dollars does buy modernisation and westernisation of one of the most populous and backward countries on the globe then I’ll be well pleased. It just pays to look at Australia’s generosity in the proper light.

True Love

2004-12-13T21:29:00.000+13:00

Righto - sorry to have been so quiet. I've been having fun.

This here is a story I did for the lovely folk at REMIX, you should buy their magazines.

In the next issue I have stories on Kinsey and Simon Gault, which will end up here in the fullness of time.

This story below was given to me to write whilst happily in a relationship and written while rather unhappily not in one, so that may explain the tone.....

True Love

How does one define true love? Can you, as with light and dark, define it by that which it is not? Or can you find it through examination of how it failed? What the hell are we looking for?

I’d like to know. My stories are probably just like everybody else’s, well maybe a bit dirtier. Like most people of our generation my tilts at true love have been a series of cycles of search, then destroy. And then on again to that process of pouring yourself into a person to try to see if this one is going to be ‘it’.

More likely however is that it will end like the last ones with custody battles over the toaster and a whole bunch of her friends who still won’t talk to you after they found out that you not only told her to lose weight, but that you thought her mum was hot. Anyway. Most times, most often, it isn’t true love and it doesn’t work. But it is as gamblers we stay in spite of this. Lower odds than lotto but we keep plugging away.

I reckon, having given it the odd go myself, and having found brilliant, varied and brutal disappointment, I reckon that the very best relationships are when both parties are high on compromise and low on expectation. In fact, I reckon that looking for true love at all, or believing it can be found, is simply a recipe for disappointment.

Although, I have thought before, ‘I’ve found it’. As often we do, in that first stage of mutual fascination and infatuation, when everything is going fast, so fast and neither of you are even thinking it might have to slow.
But then, inevitably, there is the period when you realise that she isn’t perfect. And every fault and obstacle and niggling concern eats away at your confidence that ‘this is it’.
And then, well then things get messy. Boundaries emerge then boundaries are broken. And with them those last romantic feelings. The battle of optimism against odds is lost, and the best idea is to make sure that you are not the one left holding more stakes in the lottery.
So why do we keep doing it? To what possible advantage do we endlessly put ourselves on the line in order to disappoint or to be disappointed? What is this true love that we expect to find?

The very notion of true love has changed considerably, and our generation is the first to feel the effects. So, as with many modern neuroses, lets blame our parents.

When our folks and their folks grew up things were different. Back then through a combination of social, legal and religious mores there were very few divorces. This difficulty in-changing-horses-during-the-race coupled with the fact that populations did not move so much meant that most kids fifty years ago grew up in a two-parent home and in one, or, tops, two places.

These complimentary forces meant that the kids grew up thinking that the ‘big idea’ was to find one person and stay with them. It also meant that all families lived, to degrees, a constant compromise to maintain it. Some compromises these relationships made obviously were worse than others, as in the less-easily-reported-and-escaped domestic abuse of the past, but it is also arguable that it was this greater willingness, or, depending how you are looking at it, obligation, to compromise that kept these relationships together. And together longer, more often, than we see today.

Because today nobody compromises. You are not meant to put up with anything. Fat? Don’t put up with it, take Xenical. Sad? Don’t put up with it, take Prozac. Wife not putting out enough? Take your secretary. Husband doffing the secretary? Don’t compromise, take a lover, then take half.

The whole culture is geared towards having what you want when you want it. You know, all that ‘not taking no for and answer’ and ‘always doing what is best to number one’; it is how we live.

Which is fine, in the worlds of make-believe, of marketing and philosophy. But in relationships, in our ideas of what is true love, and if we need it, there are costs.
The thing is this obsession and sanction for the never-ending new that is our legacy, passed down from our parents who blazed this trail, is having its costs, taking its toll you might say. This lifestyle and this unattainable ideal of true love are unsustainable.

The problem is that although the new and the self-indulging are exciting and alluring, are shiny shall we say, the problem is that relationships and love affect other people: they are zero-sum games.

A zero-sum game is when whatever is taken by one partner is therefore lost to the other. So, in love and relationships, the more things are favoured toward the interests of the self, the less is available for the benefit of the other. And, if you extrapolate it back out to that family situation, this indulgence of the self will come at the expense of the interests of those you are (technically) caring for.

And this is how the world has operated all our lives. This is how we have grown up observing the world, receiving our cues and following our role models as how to act, interact, love and most significantly for our generation, how to leave.

Our parents were the first generation to break in these rules. And at quite a cost to themselves, because they have the more immediate displacement of feeling that they are missing the lives they thought they would lead, those like their parents. Instead they have been the first to live in a time of emotional flux. It is now, in direct opposition to the norms of our grandparents, commonplace for a family to move often, a far away proposition than the rigid self-regulating communities of their day. It is normal to not adhere to religious codes of conduct that prohibit divorce. Indeed it is normal to divorce. In fact, oddly, it is now normal to have both these world-away scenarios of fifty years ago happening in tandem – a divorced family living across two houses in different areas, perhaps even living with other divorcees.

Just thirty years ago this idea that families might be split and then two split units might merge was so odd they made a sitcom on that premise –The Brady Bunch. And because divorce was so taboo they were split families because of death, not choice. Yet now it is not the slightest bit unusual to us. It is our normalcy.

Which is why true love is like a regressive gene, it is like, and about as welcome as, baldness inherited from your grandfather. It is a hangover of another time. The idea that there is just one person for you, that you will find them and you will be happy is merely the passed down illusions and delusions of another world. The world of fifty years ago.

The very notion of ‘true love’ is a romanticised ideal. It is an idea that conjures up ideas of solidity, ease, constant and continued bliss. The thing we look for, because we will know when we find it, and if we do find it because it is true it will be perfect, will seamlessly fit with our lives. Nonsense. Every word of it. Nothing good is easy. Nothing that comes without work and effort is lasting or rewarding. Everything has its opportunity cost.

Opportunity costs are the possibilities that become closed to you when you choose a certain path. In economics they are very easily stated, as in by choosing to spend your ten dollars on cigarettes you no longer have ten dollars available to buy drink. It is something we are all aware of, even if we don’t use that term, as all the time we make decisions knowing that by doing one thing our opportunities to do other things are shut off. But this reality is constantly being subverted. At the risk of sounding like a Sociologist, which thank God I am not, media and advertising really do work very hard to try to make us forget that our resources and time are limited. We are always being implored to have more things, even though every further small item we have stops us from attaining the larger items we wish for. Manufactured demand is what bores call it.

And we can see this in the way we today approach relationships, the search for true love. We have forgotten that in order to have true love we have to forgo other opportunities. It is the cost of tempered happiness. If only that illusion of an easy and uncomplicated love did exist. It does not, and that is why you are never going to find true love unless you are ready to compromise, ready to accept the opportunity costs of being with only one person.

And that is the hard thing. One person. That is our traditional idea of true love. What if you want simultaneous true love with multiple partners, what if they do? Potentially every trip to the dairy is riven with temptation. What if all of them are my chance at true love? See, it is rubbish. Show me true love and I will show you ten reasons that it is true, mutually beneficial compromise. But it doesn’t have quite the same zing to it does it?

So, seeing that we are the first generation to grow up thinking of true love as something that happens only in a Meg Ryan movie, how on earth are we meant to find it?

Well we find it exactly the way that our parents and theirs did. But now when the lustre dulls we don’t keep trying. We quit. Like magpies we keep chasing the shiny things, and like magpies we build, briefly protect and then discard nests, ever moving to the next one.

Now, with a shift in simile, if you don’t mind, the danger is that while we endlessly burn through and move on, like GIs in Vietnam, we leave no houses that can harbour things. And when the glow dies down in your relationship, and you head out to reclaim the fun, to try to find again with someone new what you once had when the two of you first started, you lose the whole house and everything it contained, everything that belonged to the two of you.

But that is how we do things these days.

We find true love, if we are lucky enough, and then we let it go, to see if we can find it again in a way that might suit us a little better. But it is better this way, no compromising see. Careful though, with true love, unlike all the other things that we continually make obsolete, there is no guarantee a new one, a better one or a shinier one will come along. Although, apparently, these days in our consumer world we are conditioned to discard. Not our fault like, why should we care what we throw away?

And coming down from the roof like Sting..........

2004-11-25T15:42:00.000+13:00

Aaron Bhatnager and Lyndon Hood are having a ruckus.

But what piss poor job they're doing of it.

There are no verbal fireworks, no cutting or incisive insults, no gore, no money shot. Just pomposity from the only man capable of being voted out in the one ward in the country where having a rich dad is an advantage, and, on the other side, drivel from Lower Hutt.

Matt Nippert did a better job and he can't even wash.

I wouldn't have thought, Aaron Bathhater, Auckland Political Activist that you would be so active these days, what with the being voted out and all. Sorry I wont mention it again. (Loser)

And Lyndon, stick to web design, Aaron Barklater had a point: it wasn't funny.

But for fucks sake Aaron Bathjelly what do you think you are doing?

This is the tip-top that AB could muster in response. Although he may wish to be Churchill, what with Churchill's ability to be voted out (sorry) yet still get back in to office, he may have to work on the old wit.

Lets run through with notes shall we. I'll be in brackets.

Lyndon Hood - part two
Lyndon Hood, who I described as a self appointed tit in a previous blog posting (self appointed perhaps being slightly better than not elected?) has taken umbrage (nice word, Dictionary.com or Thesaurus.com?) with my comments and launched into a spectacular Fallujah like offensive in his most recent blog posting (Yes, just like Fallujah). Except he's on the insurgent side (there I was figuring the insurgents were those without, say, office?(sorry)). And like any fanatic, he appears to desire his own being slaughtered (if even metaphorically) (If even metaphorically????? what the fuck - please point out all your radical language tricks in case we miss them like you missed the seat(sorry)) by choosing to respond to my criticism. (lets see how Aaron takes him downtown - looks promising doesn't it?)
He accuses me of not seeing the joke he was trying to make (to be fair he does look like he is squinting a bit in his photo, maybe Lyndon was concerned). He is right. This would have presupposed that his posting was funny. It was not. It was, in fact, an amateurish collection of dipsomaniacal (more nice use of thesaurus.com?) ramblings - an imagined conversation between himself and Rodney Hide. At least I hope he was drunk at the time. There would be real concerns if he imagined such conversations while sober (real concerns indeed, in fact the thought of a conversation with Rodney is, in itself, enough to make me want to get drunk). There was nothing particularly humorous about the posting, except that for all his efforts he repeatedly spelt Rodney Hide's name incorrectly. Riotous. (Riotous Bathwater, just like the way you are totally wasting him real-funny-guy, you're, like, totally metaphorically slaughtering him dude)
We can no doubt look forward to the feverish and deluded recollections
of his polemics with Don Brash, his affair with Winston Peters, and perhaps even
imagined recollections of his transvestite experiments with Peter Dunne. We
shall wait in earnest for the tales of these hallucinations - and pray, Lord,
how we shall pray that his humour becomes more apparent to us mere blogosphere denizens. (I'd say something about how lame and pompous this excerpt is but I reckon that it is so apparent that such a move would be redundant, much like Aaron (sorry))
Still, his response shows that he has some spine. I like that. It looks very nice on my home office wall. (What does, his spine? You barely even tickled his stomach. I'm fucking shaking myself, and have a few reference books handy in case you reply and provide me, too, with a metaphorical slaughtering.... I just hope the Marines are doing a better job with the insurgents in Fallujah than you are with the ones in Lower Hutt.)

Honesty in Advertising

2004-11-24T17:05:00.000+13:00

A certain publication that I hadn't worked for in this capacity asked me to review a film this week.

I imagine they wont be asking again. The film was Open Water and this is the unprintable review...... fair enough really.

Open Water

Open Water was heralded around the world as the new Blair Witch Project, and after riding in on the wave of such hype has managed to deeply disappoint audiences everywhere.

Not this reviewer though.

Such a billing as ‘Next Blair Witch’ was enough to let me know what I was in for; cheap production values, artificial suspense, hammy characterisation, and sweet fuck all actually happening in an overlong movie malnourished of content.

Deep breath time. The scenario is easy enough, and based on a true occurrence – the leaving behind of a couple from a dive trip in shark-infested waters.

This is all the movie is – a quick scattershot approach at characterisation at the beginning where all the clichés of money-rich time-poor successful American power couple types are wheeled out, then the being on the Island and then the being left behind.

How it ends for them cannot be divulged because the resolution of that question is the only thing likely to keep you in your seat as this thoroughly dislikeable couple bob in the water for a full two-thirds of the film.

I’d tell you their names or their jobs or their hopes or their dreams, but I can’t. I really just didn’t care enough to write them down. Never a good sign for a character driven dialogue film.
After so much time with such disagreeable characters, seeming as they do to have fallen out of a bad bad bad Starbucks commercial, one thing you can say is that you hope some sharks turn up quick.

The only shining lights in a film rife with poor camerawork, repetitive suspense techniques that lose their punch somewhat after the fourth outing, paint-by-numbers scene setting, secondary characters so obvious that they may as well have had cardboard cut-outs with signs on them denoting their roles and all the rest of the problems in this overlong undergood film is that the dive instructor was alright.

Really, that is about the best to be said of this film that plods through its excessively obvious and formulaic first third into a devastatingly boring ending.

But then again if you liked the Blair Witch Project maybe you deserve to see this film.

anyone else feel like getting the worst-tempered reviewer in the world on board - I quite enjoyed demolishing a film..........

Investigate the editorship

2004-11-14T15:32:00.000+13:00

This is the extended, untidier script from my Agenda media thing three weeks ago...

Investigate Magazine is one of those absolute gems - a self-styled home for true hard-hitting investigative journalism, a bastion for the truth, and, incongruously, the home of very conservative Christian values.

Editor Ian Wishart is well known for his investigative journalism and best-selling books looking into solid public-interest topics like the machinations around the sale of the BNZ.

Of late though he has become better known for his conviction in his Christian beliefs, expounded through his radio shows on Radio Rhema and Newstalk ZB. And also of course through Investigate Magazine.

This magazine is always worth a look for the shock value alone. All manner of otherwise contradictory values sit alongside each other, as with that other prominent Christian values proponent - United Future.
In the same way that United Future manage to be the Hunting Fishing Shooting Gambling Smoking and Drinking Christian Party, in this same all over the place manner Investigate Magazine manages to combine; hard hitting investigations into serious material like organized crime in New Zealand, Prime Ministerial character assassinations, bible lessons about everything from personal morality to the reality or otherwise of Noah's flood, discussions on, in fact almost a preoccupation with, intelligent design as a theory over Evolution or Darwinism, Business stories, conspiracy theories and, in the kitchen sink capacity, film and DVD reviews.

Wow, a bit all over the place.

Investigate really hit the headlines with their Nov 03 Helen Clark is a Lesbian Issue. The story combined very amateur Freudian analysis with a bunch of bare-faced and unsubstantiated 'secret friend' claims that our Helen was, aside from legislating the downfall of western society, engineering a secret homosexualising of the public service and country as a way of getting back at New Zealand for her having to bury her true sexuality.

No really. That was the story.

In an interview on bfm with Noelle McCarthy about the article Wishart pronounced that he knew the PM was gay. How? He just knew. Investigative journalism at its best.

The evidence amounted to something like look at her mates, check out her haircut, she didn't even want to get married and her fondness for wearing trousers - or some other list of similarly flimsy arguments, but the media splash was created.

Helen had the magnamanity not to sue them, though I'm not sure her doing so would have served to discredit them more than a cursory glance over their publication would.

The religious right sits very uncomfortably in easy going NZ, yet still they bang away at it. Investigate Magazine is a conspiracy theorist theologian mag. Kind of aliens stole Elvis because he was against abortion and man those homosexuals are ruining society.

Other notable stories have included a detailed look at why the moonlanding never happened, which to be fair left the jury out, campaigns against the Civil Unions bill and the Decriminalisation of Prostitution and the continued advocacy of Intelligent Design, which is kind of like Creationism in drag.

Well, what else to say about an Investigative Magazine that quotes the Old Testament to explain truths to readers? Buy it, I guess is all I can say. it is the most unintentionally entertaining read around.

Awesome

2004-11-09T15:15:00.000+13:00

stole this link off NZPundit tag board. Bob Hawke off the wagon.

Agenda Piece

2004-11-02T23:11:00.000+13:00

This is the extended script from which my Agenda piece was culled for last Saturday.

There was a little something that I reckon was overlooked when the decision was made to enlarge our existing papers and to set about publishing another weekend paper: We don't really have the content to pad out the advertising.

It is a problem peculiar to NZ. We have one of the most crowded radio and print environments in the world. Over 4000 magazines. More radio stations in Auckland per capita than anywhere else in the world (or at least it was 5 years ago, not sure now). 6 major weekend papers.

Which is great. Except with only 4 million people that means the talent pool is spread pretty thinly. Conversely it also means that we must have the best advertising sales managers in the world.

This situation may explain why our Sundays see us having certain columnists inflicted upon us.

The Herald on Sunday, in a candid and souless fashion, came right out and said it - advertiser pressure was one of the reasons for its existence.

How else can you explain, living in a civilised country steeped in Christian-traditions, on a weekly basis our having Rosemary McLeod, Michael Laws, Mike Hosking and Frank Haden, to name but a few, inflicted upon us on the Sabbath.

Nothing personal against this lot, of course, talented and wonderful etc. But well, the weekend read in England is what they save the cream of their talent for. Writing of note about people of note.
In NZ however, it is a different story. It is a dual indignity too, for some reason we aren't simply happy with our tendency to examine our public figures through Celebrity Treasure Island as opposed to insightful profiles, no, on top of this we also get to also read their innermost thoughts on our day off.

You can't help but be reminded of that old joke - first prize one week in Sydney, second prize two weeks in Sydney, third prize - well, you get the idea.

The trick is that personal musings are much cheaper and easier to fill the space between ads with than investigative pieces or even worthwhile profiles and essays.

Perhaps if we look at three of our columnists to illustrate- Michael Laws, Mike Hosking and Colin Meads.

Michael Laws is now a bonafide media guy. From enfant terrible of NZ politics to talking head in ten years. Still it could have been worse, it could have been five.

Laws wrote one of the best books on politics here, The Demon Profession, but has spent the intervening time espousing NZ First heartland attitudes through all mediums and undoing that original good work.

It is quite fitting, I guess, that a man who left politics for being inventive with words, through that forgery kerfuffle, is now a wordsmith in the Sunday Star Times.

Still, there is something disquieting about getting up on a Sunday and reading about his sex life, as so often happens to be the case with his column.

Perhaps the real problem is his talking about sex, in mildly misogynistic and never-quite-got-his-head-around-women terms, considering that he bunks down on that page with Rosemary McLeod.
Something about the juxtaposition can really throw me off my weet-bix.

Laws also examines the issues of the week, and after a whole week of trying these out on talkbalk land, through his radio....... show, they are turning into Garth George-light offerings.
Thank god, one Garth George heavy is quite enough.

For ample examples of these twin problems you only have to look to last Sunday's offering.

He manages to get a sexual reference in by line twenty "ready for bed, but the difference is that these days it is for sleep", and even before that, just ten lines in, he sets up a mental picture of himself naked, cellulite and all, in front of a full length mirror.
All that in the first two, short, paragraphs, and this is by no-means a record.

The term Florid doesn't do the writing justice - "....the problem with post-modern liberalism. It gives out like a whore but considers itself Mother Theresa".
A sentence that overburdened on both axes really needs a fulcrum, and probably ought to look like a see-saw.

The talkback honed simplicities soon emerge too. Talking on the Burqa case, they come thick and fast - "Much the same argument, presumably, runs through the minds of Muslim Fundamentalists who can fly jet planes into buildings, kill children in schoolrooms and incinerate Aussie partygoers with car bombs."

All in all, and about the only thing you can say charitably, is that it would appear that the only shades of grey Michael Laws sees these days are in his hair.

Moving right along then, to Mike Hosking.

I'm slightly concerned as to where to start with Hosking. After undergoing the most public mid-life crisis in New Zealand's history everyone has had a shot at him. His columns in the Star-Times come second only to 'About Town' in the much bagged but even more read category.

My only real concern is his frequent mentions of his twins - up there, almost, with Linda Clark. As an aside what is it with media personalities and twins - Mary Lambie, who must be milf to the nation if Judy Bailey is mother to the nation, has just popped some out also....
Anyway these mentions come after the costly and emotionally taxing case he took through pretty much every court in the land to stop New Idea publishing paparazzi pictures of them.
Because, he maintained, he wanted them away from the public eye.......Yet on a number of occasions there they are.
Still, as their father it really is up to him, though it does look a little funny in light of the cash that pictures paid for of the twins bring in as opposed to papparazi pickings.

Right - so his Wine column.
Hosking describes it as being written from the position of enthusiast rather than expert, and this allows it to be free of jargon. Refreshingly free of jargon. Unfortunately it is also mostly free of content.

My personal favourite must be the one in which he mentioned a recent mid week 2? day trip to San Francisco. A trip taken on a whim. How does one afford to do something like that, you have to wonder, how is this in keeping with the idea of a non-elitist wine column? It did serve to make concrete my jealous suspicion that it was criminal that he should be paid to write such garbage.

The real danger with wine writing is the trap of pretension that encircles the entire pursuit. A trap Hosking continues to stumble into. Columns are peppered with mentions of long lunches at trendy establishments, offers being put to him, junkets, in fact he doesn't so much write them as effuse them. Your average Joe might find them a bit painful, though Hosking goes to some lengths to assure us that Central Otago Pinot Noir, aside from being delightful, is not out of reach of the average man - he should just buy less and better. Thanks Mike, I'll put that cask down on your say-so.

The final straw for me really was the column talking about the increasing use of screw tops on wine. I paraphrase here but you'll get the drift - 'Tradition is being ignored' thundered the man formerly famous for being prematurely fuddy duddy, before his hip, gay-Sydney make-over. 'If ever', he finished the column by saying, 'Mouton du Rothschild, that wonderful French winemaker were to use a screw top then I would take my own life'.
Aside from the vaguely hysterical reactionary pomposity it put me in mind of a very funny scene - a French postman struggling under the weight of his mail sack - it has to be a man - this is France ok - making his way up to the Mouton du Rothschild vineyards.
On reaching the door he collapses, the owners come out and can't work out quite why their postman expired bringing them a full sack of letters from New Zealand.
'Nouvelle Zealande?'
And every single one, for some reason entirely unfathomable to them, asking that they produce a screw top vintage for New Zealand.

Enough of that before it gets silly - now perhaps Colin Meads.

Pinetree is known for a great many things; bravery, stoicism, taking the Cavaliers to apartheid South Africa, strength, investment advice. He is the only NZer alive that can be mentioned in the same breath as Hillary in icon terms.

What he has not previously been so widely known for is his writing.

The Herald on Sunday have fixed this by getting him on board as a rugby writer. And a very good idea too, as when Meads has commented on things of late, before getting the column that is, he has always been classic.

My favourite would be his pronouncements on what was ailing the John Hart era All Blacks. What they didn't need, according to Meads, was all of these sports psychologists and media managers and personal assistants and dieticians and all the other modern day soothsayers. No opined Pinetree, they didn't need all that clap trap. What they needed was more mongrel. And the best way to get that was from more red meat.
- ok so maybe they did need dieticians but only of the Meads variety.

Absolutely brilliant. When I heard he was getting the column I was really looking forward to seeing what Meads would have to say about the new look metrosexualised david beckham influenced sports stars of today.

Surely the man who played on with broken bones would have something to say about the All Black wearing eye-liner, or Daniel Carter's grin and package adorning everything from buildings to bus shelters, or Carlos Spencer's variations-on-roadkill hairstyles.

But sadly no. Thing is that Meads comes from a school of manly manners in which taking a bloke down a peg in public isn't on. Much to our loss.

Instead his columns have been real meat and two veg stuff, no flourishes, just non-egotistically dispensed advice and gruff opinions.

I really enjoy the easy blokiness of his writing - "He's a tremendous fella and I bet he and Richie McCaw are great mates". Great stuff even within the brief remit he has set himself and by far the best thing in the Herald on Sunday.

So there we go. Perhaps, just as a thought, this little review would have been a lot rosier if we'd been looking at the returns these papers must be making, rather than looking at the returns to the reader for a Sunday morning spent on them.

Tourism and Pure NZ puffery

2004-11-02T14:20:00.000+13:00

This first appeared in an Australian business mag that has since gone under before paying me. I do hope the appearence of this limp puff piece and the demise of the rag are not linked.

I have two or three gold stories, of getting in a fight, appearing in a dating show(!) and perhaps the tale of the music video-making, to be posted later this week, so do excuse my using this as a recycling bin.

The Australian government have just released the Tourism White Paper that allocates $235 million to market ‘Brand Australia’ internationally over the next four years. Australia’s trans-Tasman occasional adversary New Zealand has had such an over-arching approach in place since 1999 under the auspices of Tourism New Zealand; their approach and results are of especial interest.

Before George Hickton was appointed CEO for Tourism New Zealand in 1999 he had worked as a manager in a number of Government Departments, and, immediately prior, as Chief Executive of the TAB, New Zealand’s betting agency. Which was appropriate, as in one of his first moves with the Board he put all of their chips on just one project.

Before the introduction of the 100% Pure NZ campaign five years ago Tourism New Zealand had funded many different campaigns in many different markets. Each campaign was devised and administered in conjunction with an agency based within the Country targeted. Although this allowed for a great level of specificity, it also led to excessive duplication of costs and a severely fractured message. It quickly became apparent that this sending of mixed-messages could not be sustained in an age of increasing globalisation and utilisation of the Internet as a marketing tool.

So taking into account these twin international trends the need was identified for a campaign that could span markets around the world and provide a unique internet presence; or, as George Hickton concisely says “a consistent positioning campaign.”
Now all creative work is done in New Zealand through M&C Saatchi on the basis of exhaustive market research, both of those who have visited or intend to, and of the wider public in their many target markets.

This attempt to cut down the clutter led the Board to a single, unifying idea – 100% Pure NZ. The decision was made not to market the culture of the cities because the research clearly identified that visitors came for the landscapes. The customer research continually turned up the same themes; scenery, environment, authenticity, purity. The choice was simple - people felt that their greatest experience – the feeling they were left with - was the purity of the landscape, and so a campaign was devised around this theme.

To add to the universality of the campaign it has been, and is now, primarily image driven, with landscapes playing a much larger role than activities. In certain markets, those that respond well, elements of Maori culture are stressed. Maori culture features to a larger or lesser extent in all campaigns as it is so vital to the experience, essence and perception of the country. Purity and authenticity are closely related concepts.

New Zealand was recently provided with an unparalleled opportunity to increase its international profile as a tourist destination on the back of the success of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The films were shot in the Country, with the scenery playing a significant supporting role. Interest generated by the films was such that a guidebook to locations used in the film, written by Wanaka author Ian Brodie, has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. While Air New Zealand, the national carrier, was quick to brand itself as the ‘Official Air-Line to Middle Earth’ the Tourism board saw it as a chance to turn the increased profile into increased recognition of the Pure NZ brand. George Hickton explains, “with something like LOTR it may raise our profile, but the role of the tourism board is to capitalise upon it. So in a time of heightened awareness we have to push our core messages harder.”

The relationship between the Pure NZ campaign and the National carrier is important. Air New Zealand is the natural partner in many things, but, as in the case of the divergence over branding in the case of the Film Trilogy, it is vital that the two retain differences. To this end Pure NZ and Air New Zealand share strategy and ensure that their separate advertising schedules, where possible, complement each other. The overriding focus for Pure NZ is to keep promotions as simple as possible so all players in the tourism industry can rally behind the banner. Throwing their lot in too heavily with one group, even such a significant one, would alienate other parties and undermine the efforts to have an all-encompassing brand associated with the country.

In order to maintain a single-vision rallying-standard approach the Pure NZ campaign is entirely Government funded, a project of Tourism New Zealand. The organisation, set up in 1901, is the oldest state-funded board in the world. CEO George Hickton believes that it is crucial for the industry’s success that such a body is operating. “The tourism industry is different to any other. If you do not position your country appropriately you will simply be advertised as an airplane destination and a hotel room.” Without an overall branding in place he believes you miss the opportunity to attract tourists as “people do not come for these reasons, they come here to see our landscape and our environment.”

Which comes back to that central theme identified by extensive research – it is the natural beauty, the environment that brings people to New Zealand. Even when faced with the international downturn in international travel following September 11 2001 the importance of keeping the message clear and simple was not compromised. No moves were made toward touting New Zealand’s isolation, stability and relative safety. Hickton made that choice and firmly states that it was the right decision. “The campaign was appropriate and we needed to stay focused. As a result, in the end, we recovered better than most other regions.”

Tourism New Zealand are very happy with the results of the approach. The official tourist information websites are attracting ever-growing numbers of visitors, exceeding the stringent targets set down as conditions of budget provision. They believe that the current campaign, already five years advanced, has a further three to five years to run before significant changes have to be introduced. It is assessed continuously, always being refined and refreshed, but George Hickton and the Board are determined not to mess with success. “What normally happens is that marketers get sick of a campaign before the customer. All the people we work with offshore say ‘just don’t change this’ – people understand it now and associate it with New Zealand.”

Well Meaning Goats

2004-10-28T21:54:00.000+13:00

Ta Dog Biting Men. Remind me to get a job at the Herald on Sunday so I can repay you all fittingly.

This thing here first goes out at 8 10am on 95bfm, or it would if my weak chin and I could be bothered waking up.

With the entire world’s attention focused on the American election it is pretty interesting to look at how the rest of the world views what is, in fact, purely up to the Americans.

Survey after survey shows that the rest of the world wants John Kerry, while the polls, and the smart money, say Bush is likely to squeak back in.

The problem being, of course, that the only people with any say happen to be Americans, and look how their decisions have shaped the world of late.

That little obstacle is not something to stop the Guardian though.The Guardian, through their G2 supplement, devised a cheeky way for all the concerned citizens of the world to make known their horror at the idea of four more years of a Bush-led America.

They had, in a very clever and slightly smarmy way, worked out a one-way involuntary pen-pal plan whereby our concerned citizens could join up and get the home addresses of registered independents in a place called Clark County, a small area in the incredibly important swing state of Ohio.

The conventional logic goes that whoever wins two out of the three of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania takes the election, what with that quirky and quite incomprehensible Electoral College Voting system and all.

So this plan to match up anti-Bush types with people who can actually vote really might make a difference. What hadn't been quite so well thought out was what kind of difference they would make, and if it was really their place at all to be making that difference.

Because of their strategic importance the people of Ohio have been subjected to more than sixty state visits between the two contenders, and one report states that more than 300,000 yard signs declaring allegiances have gone up.

Having ones’ State turned into an eyesore and media circus is small beer really, well at least when compared to the threat of receiving well-meaning letters from Guardian readers advising you that you shouldn't be voting for George W Bush in your election to choose your president.

Predictably, this scheme has gone the way of most paths paved with good intentions.

The backlash from America is classic, and, I'd say, deserved. Most of the correspondence back was negative to say the least with a lot of it reminding the Brits that the last time they meddled in American Politics it caused a little thing called the War of Independence. And although a wee bit of time has elapsed since 1776 they are no better inclined to English interference, thank you very much.

The other big theme was teeth, as in this very funny reply

Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit.
Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.
Wading River, NY
And so on and so nastier.

It would appear that the only thing that got the Guardian to back-peddle was the fright it caused Kerry's campaign, who wisely and quickly worked out that letters from foreigners advising Americans how to vote were really not going to help.

Well, they should have known better. Sending missals into fortress America was never going to be a good idea. Perhaps they will increase the specifications for the Son of Star Wars to also include left leaning letters……..

Because really, no matter what the world wants it isn’t up to them. That is the thing with democracy, as the saying goes: people get the government they deserve. So as with Wanganui having Michael Laws as Mayor, maybe the US deserves Bush.

That last line was stolen part and parcel from David Farrar. Ta for that, perhaps I will one day grow fat on other peoples wit.

Also - I found all of the links there off aldaily - where I find near everything I enjoy and just wish I could take credit for.

Although I did feel pretty clever finding this site - I hope you like it too!!!

And if you find yourself near a TV at ungodly times on Saturday morning watch Agenda. Some funny looking guy with a brand-new chin-complex might just pop up. I love the charter - they'll employ anyone to get that local content up.

State of AIDS in NZ

2004-10-26T23:12:00.000+13:00

This also first appeared in REMIX - and once again you should buy this months issue.

Aaron found out he had HIV almost by mistake. About two and a half years after contracting the disease he was being tested for a blood condition, and after they narrowed down the likely causes it turned out to be HIV. He was diagnosed in January 2001 and was in his early thirties. The initial stages of infection – which often take the form of a flu-like illness – had gone unnoticed – so at 31 Aaron suddenly had to adjust to life as an HIV positive man.

Aaron had been active and out in his city’s gay scene since the late 80s. As a gay man he was aware of the risks and assiduously practiced safe-sex. At some point in the mid-90s Aaron says that he “became complacent and stopped practicing safe-sex and that led me to become HIV positive.”

Last year over 150 people in New Zealand received the news that they were infected with HIV, the precursor illness to AIDS. This is a larger number than any other year, and of that 154, more than a third were infected heterosexually. As the numbers are rising and the statistics starting to disprove any notion that AIDS is a homosexual affliction HIV/AIDS ought to be in the news. But instead AIDS education and reporting seems to be taking a lower profile than at any time since AIDS was first recognised as a problem in New Zealand in the 1980s. But what is the situation? Have we forgotten, or have we stopped taking AIDS seriously?

AIDS is still seen by some as a predominantly gay disease, but the numbers around the world do not bear this out. Internationally AIDS is 75% heterosexually transmitted. In NZ however it has traditionally been prevalently homosexually transmitted between men. This is still the case here with the majority of new cases arising as a result of unprotected sex between men, and the majority of these occurring domestically. In the heterosexual category 90% of the new transmissions in the past year were contracted overseas. Although this shows that the highest risk group remains as it has been – men having unprotected sex with men – it also suggests that as more heterosexual people carry the disease in New Zealand the likelihood of heterosexual transmission is rapidly rising. Although it will be some time until New Zealand has anything like three-out-of-four cases originating from heterosexual contact we are getting further along that road with every year. The real danger is that the entire pool of HIV positive people in New Zealand is increasing. This year saw the highest numbers of new cases ever. Also this is only reported cases. The New Zealand AIDS Foundation estimates that up to a third more people are infected without knowing it. As the pool increases so too does the risk to all sexually active people.

Why then as things are becoming more serious does the media not seem to make AIDS an issue? Steve Attwood of the New Zealand AIDS Foundation believes it is “more difficult to get mainstream media to pick up stories on domestic AIDS these days, they just do not seem to pick up on it unless there is a heterosexual angle.” So while it is still prevalently a minority concern it appears that is where it stays in terms of media coverage. No matter that if you are sexually active you are much more likely to contract HIV in any given year than you are to be murdered by a stranger. Stranger-danger rules the news while the more real and pressing dangers stay on the fringe.

Attempting to address the inequalities in coverage and to lift understanding of the situation we face with HIV/AIDS in New Zealand is Steve Attwood’s job. He hails from the NZ AIDS Foundation, a registered charity that is funded by the Ministry of Health but is also reliant on donations to continue their work. The Foundation grew out of a gay community organisation, originating out of gay men’s response to the illness. It now provides support, testing and care to anyone living with HIV/AIDS. But interestingly, considering the changing state of AIDS, they are only funded for gay specific campaigns for the prevention side of things – advertising risks, educating about the dangers and all other ambulance at the top of the cliff stuff. They are funded to target the biggest risk group, men who have sex with men, and no one else. The reason that the advertising is so narrowly focused is a simple case of best use of limited resources. Bang for your buck as Steve says “the biggest risks are to those having unprotected sex with many partners.” And to get across the message to these men “we focus on gay media because we are able to say things that we might not be able to say otherwise to people we might not otherwise reach.” Even considering what is a small pool population-wise a number of strategies are employed; packages at saunas or cruising clubs, print advertising, editorial contributions and brochure distribution. But on top of this Steve maintains that “it is important to be responsive – we are now coming up with ways to target Internet cruising and to get messages about safe sex out there in what is a relatively new high-risk activity”.Although no one is disputing the efficacy of targeting the most high-risk sector through these outlets it is also important not to leave the rest of the population without campaigns to publicise risks. “There is a role for mainstream media in this, and we are working towards this.”

But when this happens will depend on funding. Dr Doug Lush, Acting Director of Public Health is the man who oversees this funding. He is entirely supportive of the work the NZ AIDS Foundation is doing. “They are very effectively targeting where the burden of disease is.” But he also sees the importance of wider campaigns targeting other at-risk groups provided by specialist organisations. To this extent the Ministry of Health funds “the Prostitutes Collective, Migrant and Refugee Services and Family Planning among others.” The 13-18 year old group is also about to be addressed with a large campaign to try to cut down the overall rate of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS of course is targeted as part of this education and prevention campaign. Dr Lush and the Ministry are not taking AIDS lightly and reject any suggestion that HIV/AIDS are any less of a priority “it is of great concern, it is becoming of increasing priority and this is one of the reasons for the safe sex campaign that is coming up.” His concern especially rests with the increase of cases amongst older men who appear to be disregarding the safe sex message. He warns against a relaxing of vigilance against infection. “We have to be careful to retain these messages and avoid things like condom fatigue and viewing this as a less dread disease.”

The dread associated with AIDS in the 1980s has left the issue to a large extent. This benefits people living with the illness by reducing prejudice and stigma. But a lessening of the fear must not lead to a lessening in care taken regarding sexual activity. New Zealand has some of the worst rates of STIs like Chlamydia and Gonorrhea in the world and an increase in care taken needs to be seen across the board if we do not want to see AIDS become a more serious problem. Steve Attwood has noticed this relaxation in attitudes and his organisation has found that advertising risks in a way to capitalise on anxiety does not work. “We can not run fear based campaigns as fear can not be faced by people for long before it becomes normalised.”

Everyday is difficult when living with HIV. “It affects your whole life in many areas, mentally and physically.” For Aaron it involves taking 22 large pills a day. The added danger is that you have to take your medication on time every day or else your body can build a resistance and the medicine becomes useless. Even if you follow the proper regime you will develop a resistance over time. In New Zealand 13 medications are funded. And not all of these may be compatible with patients. If you run out of medicines you run out of options. Side-effects and toxicity of dosage are further concerns. Nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting are standard, diabetes is a common side-effect. “But there is no choice, you have to take the tablets if you want to remain well.”

New Zealand is lucky to be where it is. By dint of its geographical isolation we have managed to keep our overall numbers low. But as more and more cases come in from overseas we will see increasing rates of infection in all communities unless safe-sex messages get across. Steve Attwood sounds this warning “thanks to medical advances there may not be so many people dying of AIDS as there used to be but we haven’t cured this virus, we’re never likely to. It still is a very serious life length and life quality reducing illness. People live under the constant threat of discrimination, prejudice and the death threat of the medicine not working. People must not forget that.”

Aaron, in his early thirties, has no idea how the illness is going to affect him next, how many more medications he may go through or what science might turn up. One thing, however, is certain “my life is not the same as it was. My life is not as good as it was. I am not as well, I sometimes struggle to get around, I often feel weak. It is hard to live with every day.”

Buena Vista Tinted Glasses

2004-10-23T22:50:00.000+13:00

If you are quite so stubbornly ill-read that you enjoyed the Motorcycle Dairies film read this.

On seeing the film I felt sick at the sentimentality, and left bruised after having been beaten over the head with blunt messages and supremely simplistic characterization.

The only thing the film had going for it was the scenery.

I vaguely thought that I'd run through and compare the film with the actual diaries and Che's later accomplishments - then again few publications in New Zealand would be interested.

Now I don't have to, this is fantastic, so read it. Especially if you have reservations about the cult of Che. But more so if you are a fan.

I would go slightly further than the author and also point out that Guevara died taking the Bolivians a revolution they did not want and dwell more on the murderous crimes and extracts from Che's writing. I might also have observed that every thing they gave Che to run in newly Communist Cuba he did such an abysmal job that even Castro realised he was incapable - quite a feat in the kind of 'utopia' with no accountability.

REMIX pieces

2004-10-22T18:16:00.000+13:00

There is a new REMIX out that has an excellent bfm co-presented Indie Rock CD for free with it, also it contains 6 stories by me in there so I reckon you should all buy it and help keep me in employment.

These pieces below appeared in last months issue.
In My Father's Den comes highly recommended - an actually excellent NZ film that is not tourism calender writ large or sentimental pap (sorry Whale Rider - you suck)
The Moore thing, although not bad, is now hopelessly out of date - but I post it here because, well, I can.

Michael Moore

Michael Moore is a man who has made a career out of being the guy people cannot ignore. With his ample girth, ever-present cap and scruffy average-Joe persona he has become an unlikely counter-cultural hero, forever jamming himself and public debate where the powers that be would rather they weren’t.

And far from being the voice of dissent out in the cold Moore has succeeded in bringing the world-according-to-Michael mainstream.Moore’s latest offering, the political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, has broken all of the records his last documentary, Bowling for Columbine, set. The film has cleared US$100 Million just within America, picked up the Palme D’Or at Cannes and is going a long way toward setting the agenda for the upcoming American Presidential election. All unprecedented stuff for a documentary, especially in a country where only half the population bother voting.

Michael Moore has emerged as a new kind of patriot for an America weary of seeing their boys come home in body bags and disheartened by the cost in blood and money of occupying Iraq. At least that is the image that he has carefully constructed for himself. More and more people are questioning his motives and even his honesty. Although there have always been critics of Michael Moore’s style and politics the severity of the current anti-Moore backlash is something new.

Michael Moore’s last film, Bowling for Columbine, won the best documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards. Soon after it was the focus of a campaign to have that award stripped. It turned out that Mr Moore had played hard and fast with the truth in certain parts of the film. Even the title, which referred to the belief that the Columbine High School killers went bowling prior to their massacre, turned out to be based on a falsehood. In spite of, or perhaps because of this controversy Bowling for Columbine went on to gross more than any other documentary ever had at the box-office, and helped make docos cool again.

But while it was accumulating receipts, Michael Moore was accumulating detractors. Nowadays for every standing ovation he receives at Cannes there are articles and entire web communities dedicated to discrediting him. But how did it all get to this? Can we trust the guy?
As a response to the debacle over detail in Bowling for Columbine Moore has set out to make sure this isn’t about to happen to his latest offering. Moore has gone so far as to claim: "Fahrenheit 9/11 is the absolute and irrefutable truth. This movie is perhaps the most thoroughly researched and vetted documentary of our time.” All the same a database of 59 deceits has been compiled by David Kopel, research director at the pro-market Independence Institute. Michael Moore’s war room has responded to many of these claims but, regardless of which side has more points in this slugging match, the question remains: with all this smoke around are people missing what Moore is actually saying?

The criticisms Moore levels at the Bush administration in Farenheit 9/11 are in many cases the same as those he makes in his two recent bestselling books Dude Where’s My Country and Stupid White Men. In the main the material may not be new but the power of the big screen and the attendant media circus certainly is. Often, however, the reporting only focuses on the associated hoop-la, the wars of ego and the claims and counter-claims that follow the film. Mike’s messages are lost amongst all this white noise. And he does have some powerful, and some, by now, well canvassed messages.

Some you’ve heard often – Bush stole the election with a rigged Supreme Court, claiming to go to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction was dishonest, that big business has close ties to military spending and the Republican Party. These reasonably well known points are artfully made, and rarely is political propaganda this entertaining. The parts Moore excels in are those where he uses his selective editing to make very funny character assassinations – he rips into Bush for his manner, work-ethic, business acumen, eloquence and overall ability to run the show.
The best sections are those that show the extent of Saudi Arabian influence in Washington. Although this section is riddled with factual errors the overall points stand absolute. Saudi Arabia’s powerful families, Osama bin Ladens included, have long and deep links to Washington’s elite, especially the Bush family, and this needs scrutiny. And scrutiny is exactly what Moore delivers. Not air-tight, not masterfully- exposed-for-the-first-time, but brought to the public eye in a way you can be assured Bush would rather it wasn’t.

The film never purports to be objective or balanced, and in reality it need not be. It is a political polemic. Point-of-View filmmaking writ large. As long as it is not treated as gospel or picture-made-truth, then it is a valuable and necessary addition to the political landscape. Although, of course, it helps if you have a balanced diet. In the film Moore presents mainstream media as incompetent and cowed, unable to bring the truth as he can. And this is really the whole root of the Michael Moore conundrum. If you look at the mainstream media as junk food then Michael Moore would be like cashews – delicious, natural, more-ish. But you have to remember that a diet of junk food and cashews will make you just as sick, or just as ill-informed in this sense, as a diet of only junk food.

In My Father's Den

Emily Barclay looks at once excited, drained and surprisingly different to her character Celia. Last night, lit-up two stories high in Auckland’s Civic Theatre, Emily enchanted the audience for the New Zealand premiere of In My Fathers Den.
In a film laden with heavy intensity, dealing in the way dark histories seek people out, Emily provided, through Celia, a moving shaft of light, innocence and hope. And last nights premiere had gone very well indeed. Prime Minister Helen Clark helped introduce the film and every creative trough-keeper and drawer was in rapturous attendance.

Not bad all in all for a film full of firsts. In My Fathers Den was the first New Zealand film chosen to open the Sydney film festival. It was an honour that is of special note as it is the first feature film from director Brad McGann. The film, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Maurice Gee, is also the first major film lead for Emily Barclay.

Not that this is a case of overnight success for the 19 yr old Aucklander. Emily has always wanted to be an actor. In learning and honing her craft Emily has run the normal gamut of New Zealand TV work with parts in Spin Doctors, and Mercy Peak and also, in what is fast becoming the other mainstay of New Zealand’s acting community - bad American TV work.

So although comparisons can be drawn between recent kiwi success Whale Rider and In My Fathers Den - both are adaptations of books by iconic New Zealand authors and both rest largely on the performances of their young female leads - they are different in that Emily was not plucked from obscurity like Kiesha Castle-Hughes. In fact she has been working towards a role like this for years. “I fell in love with acting when I was thirteen and have wanted to be an actor since” although the roles aren’t always as good as the one writer/director Brad McGann wrote for this film “I’d rather people don’t see some of the early stuff, if they’d like to think I’m an unknown that’s fine by me.”

The scale of the film snuck up on Emily. “At the time of the first audition we were not told it was a joint New Zealand/British production” but she did know she wanted to be involved, “I was really impressed from the start with how well written and fully constructed the characters were.” Work ended up involving extensive auditioning, rehearsals, a semester away from University study, two months filming outside of Otago, a trip to Sydney for the festival there and now the publicity gauntlet.

But it was the character that drew her in “I loved the fact that she wasn’t your typical on screen 16 year old girl - she was strong, interesting, intelligent - it was really important to do her justice.” Emily plays Celia, an outward-looking, yet isolated girl with a number of secrets to be discovered. Celia and the den of the title are central elements in a movie full of mystery; they bind everyone, and the film itself, together. To say how would be to say too much, and in playing the role Emily never gives anything away. It is a controlled, tight performance - similar in a way to the small town setting and mindset that informs so much of the film.Emily was able to bring an understanding of this constriction - even being a very free and open person herself. “Living in New Zealand many people have the idea that they want to get away, see the world, just living in NZ, in a small country, gives you an insight into a small town mentality.”

And were there similarities between you and Celia? “She had a strong sense of who she was, Celia is a character that it is easy to empathise with because her situations are real and the things she deals with are prominent issues in our society” further than empathy though, Emily was “attracted to the brightness, but the darkness underneath, the thinking about things deeply and the frustration of trying to break out and understand the world.” There aren’t many roles that want all this from a 16-year-old female character, and there aren’t many actors pulling them off.

To a large degree the movie depends on the relationship between Celia and Paul Prior (Matthew McFadyen), an international war photographer and one time boyfriend to Celia’s mother. Paul, back in New Zealand for his father’s funeral, accepts a request to teach at the local school and has Celia in his class. Their friendship, while seemingly familiar - with the male older teacher/younger female student - steers clear of cliché or easy categorisation and is the richest element of the film. “With the relationship with Paul it was important to avoid the Lolita type relationship - we needed to show the complexities of her character, being a 16yr old girl in a small town of course she will be drawn to him but it was more than a girl’s crush on a man of the world. That might be there but more importantly it was an intellectual connection and an intellectual escape route.”

Being able to tap into a rich acting tradition via this cast of accomplished international players was one of the highlights of working on In My Fathers Den. Matthew McFadyen comes in for special praise and is a pick for big things to come: “ Matthew was so supportive and inspiring. The ability of very well trained actors to keep so much going, and to carry the whole film with them, but to stay natural take after take was an inspiration.” Look out for Matthew in future, word is that is “he has been cast as D’arcy in a remake of Pride and Prejudice” and with the general predilection for D’arcy among women he is sure to go far “I mean how else do you explain Colin Firth?”

In a way, and without giving anything away, Celia in the film embodies many of New Zealand’s guilty secrets. The film is a beautifully rendered nightmare, a picture-perfect recrimination. It manages to be populated with things rather ignored but stays well clear of being prying, sentimental or sensationalist And much of this is because, according to Director Brad McGann “Emily brought a whole lease of life to Celia, although they are different Emily managed to make them one and the same.”

And finally, what next for Emily Barclay? Having loved acting for 7 years are you still going strong? “Yes, basically I want to keep being involved in the creation of films - jesus I hope that doesn’t sound wanky - but I figure I’m lucky to have found something I love doing”

- thanks to REMIX Media - where these first appeared.

Academia, painful academia. Just one letter off a nut.

2004-10-12T14:46:00.000+13:00

I received an e-mail from a student, here is my reply, all mixed in with the original. Seeing Derrida has just died it seemed appropriate to get all Sociologist on it, so read this as a polysemic text, or something equally incoherent. I wonder if this little hobby warrants all this attention. My bits are are in italics

Hi there,

Sorry to take so long to get back, I didn't think I could be bothered, but then I figure what kind of a cock takes that attitude. I also never figured that my random purges were worthy of the title blog, or of any particular interest. But anyway, I hope this is some help

Hi,

I'm a Honours student in Mass Communications at the University of Canterbury.I'm currently researching blogs for an essay. I've been following your site and I would appreciate it if you could answer some short questions related to my research. The questions are:

Questions
1.Do you feel you are part of a wider public debate through putting your views on your blog?

Not really. More of a narrower, yet more aware, community. Things you do can come to the attention of the 'agenda setters' or whatever other awful mass comm terms you want to use, like editors, journalists etc. So sometimes there is the possibility and othertimes it feels like some form of endless self-reflexitivity.

2. Do you believe your blog is more personal than other media, such as newspaper or television
journalism?

Yes in that the responses can be immediately attached to the primary material, errors can be
quickly altered, and the community (awful fucking term) is small

3. How would you describe your writing style? Is it entirely your own voice or do find yourself adopting a persona?

Pretty difficult that. Some of the pieces I post are written to be delivered on the radio so are written to that style, some have appeared in other media, and have the commensurate restrictions, some are meant to be well put together, and some are simply short observations. So I'd say that I adopt many voices, but hopefully a consistent persona, I'd rather lose track of myself if I didn't

4. What are the most important sources from which you draw material and topics?

Scoop, Herald site, other blog-keepers, radio,

5. Bloggers discuss a wide range of topics including issues of public importance. How do you explain your right to discuss a topic in a forum where others can read it?

Why on earth would I have to explain it? Someone would have to do some very serious explaining if I couldn't. This is not Communist China, though I'm well aware that post-graduate students in communications-y things perhaps wish it were.

6.Are there any features or criteria that make a good blog?

being able to write is a plus. A lot of time on your hands. And a sense of humour and or indignation helps.

And because I sympathise for anyone in a media class, how about I post all this so you can write something about the postmodern hall of mirrors? And the immediacy of the medium or some other painful contortion.

Regards
Simon

Poor bastard. Catching that kind of rubbish back. As if he hasn't enough problems, what with living in Christchurch and doing Honours in Mass Communication.
John, I'm sorry.

Who Ate All The Pies?

2004-10-12T13:23:00.000+13:00

Brilliant, I thought very much the same myself, but wasn't pithy enough to sum it up like sagenz - 'I guess he had a dump'
That news of course is that, so far, Horomia has only lost 3kg on his slim-down.
I worried back in August that Horomia was dreaming when he decided to lose 30kg. Best of luck to him.
Apparently half the problem is that he spends too much time at huis. Remember those figures that came up about how much was being spent feeding participants of huis on prisons and the foreshore and seabed bill.
$20 goes on Horomia having tucked into a fair bit of those thousands or millions or whatever it cost. Oh hang on, $20 of my cash probably already has.

Anyhow, how funny are these three. This is from 12 May 2004

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Has the Deputy Prime Minister considered putting some funds and resources aside so that certain members of Parliament, who are running around the country misleading—

Gerry Brownlee: Here we go. The white knight.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Did the member say the “wide” one?

Mr SPEAKER: Please be seated. I have warned members. Mr Brownlee does happen to be in a certain privileged position in this place, and he knows he should not have interjected at that point. On this occasion I will ask him to stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Gerry Brownlee: I withdraw and apologise.

Mr SPEAKER: Please start again.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I ask the Deputy Prime Minister whether he has given consideration to setting aside resources and finances to enable certain members of Parliament, who are running around this country, misinforming the public, to be properly educated on the provisions of this bill, which is clearly not the case now?

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: No, but in just over 2 weeks I will be presenting a Budget that is both prudent and is spending significant sums on assistance for low to middle income families. Unfortunately I do not have any money left over for the impossible task of trying to educate members of the National Party.

Best Website Ever

2004-10-08T15:51:00.000+13:00

Thanks to NZ Pundit for pointing out this.

It is a brilliant piece of writing, that has one of the strongest voices I've read (think Hitch before he disappeared up his own righteousness and still had fun with language, instead of wielding it as a defense mechanism) cleverly and in a way few would attempt today. A refreshing lack of PC from an anthropologist with a finely attuned sense of humour.

The website it is from, that of Roger Sandall, is one of the most endlessly engaging sites I've stumbled across. The best discovery since The Atlantic Monthly stopped being free, and I'm still waiting for my long promised subscription to it.
This site made my week. It features an article comparing Lawrence of Arabia (my pet obsession, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is, as Churchill had it, one of the finest works in the English language) and Mohammed Atta. Exploring his failings and dangerous fatalism exquisitely.

Damn. I feel like a dirty fetishist stumbling upon something that rings all my bells quite so.

In other news, how funny is the intellectual ping-pong between Cohen, Nippert, and the ice skating rink?

Barbs flying like a battle on the Nation's letters page, except none of the writers involved are wet and sanctimonious. It is almost like a freestyle battle, not too distant from the breakdancing that may have sparked it all....

It keeps getting wittier at each turn, I thought Matt was hilarious, and then the rink came back hard. All in jest though?

Apologies for the pompous Iraq post the other day. I had a half-hearted desire to write something worthy, with half-hearted results.

On the plus side my flippancy on the drug policy, in a piece written to be read out on attention-deficit breakfast radio (an indictment of my writing, not the station or the listeners, before I raise any more heckles) has managed to rile up some Greens.

Glad to see someone is out there. Although no-one has disagreed with calling Kedgley a relentless I-know-better-than-you-type. Funny that.

I like the Greens, especially Nandor. The last thing I'd ever want to do is give them a country to run, as they are McGilliguddy Serious Party in drag, in that they also want to reverse everything to some form of pre-industrial paradise that never existed, but they call it protectionism. But I like them. They have very sensible ideas on things like drugs and justice, if you are sufficiently broad-minded to accommodate them. Their worrying love for regulation and prescription means I couldn't vote for them, but it is lovely to have them there. Sue Bradford is brilliant - one of the few in Parliament who actually is there too serve rather than push barrows.

Perhaps, like all of ACT and NZ First's formerly rubbished policies (remember the scorn Labour and National used to pour on Treaty time limits, ending Race-Based funding, longer sentences.....et al) now becoming the legislative timetable, well perhaps like that we might see restorative justice and harm assessment health based drug policies come back on the upswing in a couple 0f years.

If only there was a way to make them appeal to the New Zealand version of the Soccer Mum, and all those other big unaddressed constituencies pollsters do so enjoy discovering. That for us, just quietly, is the Inner Redneck. You could call it the "none of that Maaaaaaarri bullshit" vote. Just a thought.

Progressive Review Findings

2004-10-05T17:51:00.000+13:00

This is fascinating stuff. And I'm sorry - it is all a bit serious today.
See I found this report that is at the bottom of this post. And there is nothing funny about it.

I have reprinted it in full because every sentence is worth reading. Then check out the link, and the Progressive Review in general for more black and white evidence that this whole endevour has been a disaster across every known measure.

Then again, if Saddam was about to kickstart the change of the oil-dealing currency to the euro and I was President, I would have had to have done the same thing. But I would have been a bit more upfront. This is not some X-files type conspiracy, it is incredibly dry economics. Check out that link. So simple.

The most powerful country on earth was not about to let its power slip. It is the pure politics of power. It is not pretty but both simple and sensible. Anyone who pretends power has morality is a fool, if it was not the States doing this then it would be China or Russia or whoever could.
It has all been nothing more complicated than strict competition for scarce resources. Any economist or historian would see that this war in Iraq has been nothing more than that, and that it was the only course the most powerful nation on earth could take if it wanted to stay at the top.

And I, even with this colossal mess, would prefer a Western-Values dominated world. Not exactly like America, well, perhaps if it were without the religiousity and failure to subscribe to their own principles, and corporate double standards, and PATRIOT ACTS etc.............. we can all dream.

Sure. But it is disgusting. Look at these costs.

UNDERNEWS SPECIAL:COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR OCT 4, 2004
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW EDITED BY SAM SMITH Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source1312 18th St. NW #502,
COSTS OF THE IRAQ WARhttp://www.fpif.org/pdf/reports/IPStransition.pdf

Prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy InFocus
KEY FINDINGS

1. U.S. Military Casualties Have Been Highest During the "Transition":U.S. military casualties (wounded and killed) stand at a monthly average of 747 since the so-called "transition" to Iraqi rule on June 28, 2004. This contrasts with a monthly average of 482 U.S. military casualties during the invasion (March 20-May 1, 2003) and a monthly average of 415 during the occupation (May 2, 2003- June 28, 2004).

2. Non-Iraqi Contractor Deaths Have Also Been Highest During the"Transition": There has also been a huge increase in the average monthly deaths of U.S. and other non-Iraqi contractors since the "transition."On average, 17.5 contractors have died each month since the June 28"transition," versus 7.6 contractor deaths per month during the previous14 months of occupation.

3. Estimated Strength of Iraqi Resistance Skyrockets: Because the U.S.military occupation remains in place, the "transition" has failed to win Iraqi support or diminish Iraqi resistance to the occupation. Accordingto Pentagon estimates, the number of Iraqi resistance fighters has quadrupled between November of 2003 and early September 2004, from 5,000 to 20,000. The Deputy Commander of Coalition forces in Iraq, British Major General Andrew Graham, indicated to Time magazine in early September that he thinks the 20,000 estimate is too low; he estimates Iraqi resistance strength at 40,000-50,000. This rise is even starker when juxtaposed to Brookings Institution estimates that an additional 24,000 Iraqi resistance fighters have been detained or killed between May 2003 and August 2004.

4. U.S.- led Coalition Shrinks Further After "Transition": The number of countries identified as members of the Coalition backing the U.S.-led war started with 30 on March 18, 2003, then grew in the early months of the war. Since then, eight countries have withdrawn their troops and Costa Rica has demanded to be taken off the coalition list. At the war's start, coalition countries represented 19.1 percent of the world's population; today, the remaining countries with forces in Iraq represent only 13.6 percent of the world's population.

HUMAN COSTS TO THE U.S. AND ALLIES

U.S. Military Deaths: Between the start of war on March 19, 2003 and September 22, 2004, 1,175 coalition forces were killed, including 1,040 U.S. military. Of the total, 925 were killed after President Bush declared the end of combat operations on May 1, 2003. Over 7,413 U.S. troops have been wounded since the war began, 6,953 (94 percent) since May 1, 2003.

Contractor Deaths: As of September 22, 2004, there has been an estimated154 civilian contractors, missionaries, and civilian worker deaths since May 1, 2004. Of these, 52 have been identified as Americans.

Journalist Deaths: Forty-four international media workers have been killed in Iraq as of September 22, 2004, including 33 since President Bush declared the end of combat operations. Eight of the dead worked forU.S. companies.

SECURITY COSTS

Terrorist Recruitment and Action: According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, al Qaeda's membership is now at 18,000, with 1,000 active in Iraq. The State Department's 2003"Patterns of Global Terrorism," documented 625 deaths and 3,646 injuries due to terrorist attacks in 2003. The report acknowledged that"significant incidents," increased from 60 percent of total attacks in2002 to 84 percent in 2003.

Low U.S. Credibility: Polls reveal that the war has damaged the U.S. government's standing and credibility in the world. Surveys in eight European and Arab countries demonstrated broad public agreement that the war has hurt, rather than helped, the war on terrorism. At home, 52 percent of Americans polled by the Annenberg Election Survey disapproveof Bush's handling of Iraq.

Military Mistakes: A number of former military officials have criticized the war, including retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who has charged that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, the Bush Administration made the United States less secure.

Low Troop Morale and Lack of Equipment: A March 2004 army survey found 52 percent of soldiers reporting low morale, and three-fourths reporting they were poorly led by their officers. Lack of equipment has been an ongoing problem. The Army did not fully equip soldiers with bullet-proof vests until June 2004, forcing many families to purchase them out of their own pockets.

Loss of First Responders: National Guard troops make up almost one-third of the U.S. Army troops now in Iraq. Their deployment puts a particularly heavy burden on their home communities because many are "first responders," including police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel. For example, 44 percent of the country's police forces have lost officers to Iraq. In some states, the absence of so many Guard troops has raised concerns about the ability to handle natural disasters.

Use of Private Contractors: An estimated 20,000 private contractors are carrying out work in Iraq traditionally done by the military, despite the fact that they often lack sufficient training and are not accountable to the same guidelines and reviews as military personnel.

ECONOMIC COSTS

The Bill So Far: Congress has approved of $151.1 billion for Iraq. Congressional leaders anticipate an additional supplemental appropriation of $60 billion after the election.

Long-term Impact on U.S. Economy: Economist Doug Henwood has estimated that the war bill will add up to an average of at least $3,415 for everyU.S. household.

Oil Prices: U.S. crude oil prices spiked at $48 per barrel on August 19, 2004, the highest level since 1983, a development that most analysts attribute at least in part to the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Economic Impact on Military Families: Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 364,000 reserve troops and National Guard soldiers have been called for military service, serving tours of duty that often last 20 months. Studies show that between 30 and 40 percent of reservists and National Guard members earn a lower salary when they leave civilian employment for military deployment. Army Emergency Relief has reported that requests from military families for food stamps and subsidized meals increased "several hundred percent" between 2002 and2003.

SOCIAL COSTS

U.S. Budget and Social Programs: The Bush administration's combination of massive spending on the war and tax cuts for the wealthy means less money for social spending. The $151.1 billion expenditure for the war through this year could have paid for: close to 23 million housing vouchers; health care for over 27 million uninsured Americans; salaries for nearly 3 million elementary school teachers; 678,200 new fire engines; over 20 million Head Start slots for children; or health care coverage for 82 million children. A leaked memo from the White House to domestic agencies outlines major cuts following the election, including funding for education, Head Start, home ownership, job training, medical research and homeland security.

Social Costs to the Military: In order to meet troop requirements in Iraq, the Army has extended the tours of duty for soldiers. These extensions have been particularly difficult for reservists, many of whom never expected to face such long separations from their jobs and families. According to military policy, reservists are not supposed to be on assignment for more than 12 months every 5-6 years. To date, the average tour of duty for all soldiers in Iraq has been 320 days. A recent Army survey revealed that more than half of soldiers said they would not re-enlist.

Costs to Veteran Health Care: About 64 percent of the more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq received wounds that prevented them from returning to duty. One trend has been an increase in amputees, the result of improved body armor that protects vital organs but not extremities. As in previous wars, many soldiers are likely to have received ailments that will not be detected for years to come. The Veterans Administration healthcare system is not prepared for the swelling number of claims. In May, the House of Representatives approved funding for FY 2005 that is $2.6 billion less than needed, according to veterans' groups.

Mental Health Costs: The New England Journal of Medicine reported inJuly 2004 that 1 in 6 soldiers returning from war in Iraq showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, or severe anxiety. Only 23 to 40 percent of respondents in the study who showed signs of amental disorder had sought mental health care.

COSTS TO IRAQ

HUMAN COSTS

Iraqi Deaths and Injuries: As of September 22, 2004, between 12,800 and 14,843 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and ensuing occupation, while an estimated 40,000 Iraqis have been injured. During "major combat" operations, between 4,895 and 6,370 Iraqi soldiers and insurgents were killed.

Effects of Depleted Uranium: The health impacts of the use of depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq are yet to be known. The Pentagon estimates that U.S. and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of weaponry made from the toxic and radioactive metal during the March 2003 bombing campaign. Many scientists blame the far smaller amount of DU weapons used in the Persian Gulf War for illnesses among U.S. soldiers, as well as a sevenfold increase in child birth defects in Basra in southern Iraq.

Rise in Crime: Murder, rape, and kidnapping have skyrocketed since March 2003, forcing Iraqi children to stay home from school and women to stay off the streets at night. Violent deaths rose from an average of 14 per month in 2002 to 357 per month in 2003.

Psychological Impact: Living under occupation without the most basic security has devastated the Iraqi population. A poll conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies in June 2004 found that 80 percent of Iraqis believe that coalition forces should leave either immediately or directly after the election.

ECONOMIC COSTS

Unemployment: Iraqi joblessness doubled from 30 percent before the war to 60 percent in the summer of 2003. While the Bush administration now claims that unemployment has dropped, the U.S. is only employing 120,000 Iraqis, of a workforce of 7 million, in reconstruction projects.

Corporate War Profiteering: Most of Iraq's reconstruction has been contracted out to U.S. companies, rather than experienced Iraqi firms. Top contractor Halliburton is being investigated for charging $160 million for meals that were never served to troops and $61 million in cost overruns on fuel deliveries. Halliburton employees also took $6 million in kickbacks from subcontractors, while other employees have reported extensive waste, including the abandonment of $85,000 trucks because they had flat tires.

Iraq's Oil Economy: Anti-occupation violence has prevented Iraq from capitalizing on its oil assets. There have been an estimated 118 attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure since June 2003. By September 2004, oil production still had not reached pre-war levels and major attacks caused oil exports to plummet to a ten- month low in August 2004.

SOCIAL COSTS

Health Infrastructure: After more than a decade of crippling sanctions, Iraq's health facilities were further damaged during the war and post-invasion looting. Iraq's hospitals continue to suffer from lack of supplies and an overwhelming number of patients.

Education: UNICEF estimates that more than 200 schools were destroyed in the conflict and thousands more were looted in the chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Environment: The U.S-led attack damaged water and sewage systems and the country's fragile desert ecosystem. It also resulted in oil well fires that spewed smoke across the country and left unexploded ordnance that continues to endanger the Iraqi people and environment. Mines and unexploded ordnance cause an estimated 20 casualties per month.

HUMAN RIGHTS COSTS

Even with Saddam Hussein overthrown, Iraqis continue to face human rights violations from occupying forces. In addition to the widely publicized humiliation and torture of prisoners, abuse has been widespread throughout the post-9-11 military operations, with over 300 allegations of abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo. As of mid-August 2004, only 155 investigations into the existing 300 allegations had been completed.

SOVEREIGNTY COSTS

Despite the proclaimed "transfer of sovereignty" to Iraq, the country continues to be occupied by U.S. and coalition troops and has severely limited political and economic independence. The interim government does not have the authority to reverse the nearly 100 orders by former CPA head Paul Bremer that, among other things, allow for the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and prohibit preferences for domestic firms in reconstruction.

COSTS TO THE WORLD

HUMAN COSTS

While Americans make up the vast majority of military and contractor personnel in Iraq, other U.S.-allied "coalition" troops have suffered 135 war casualties in Iraq. In addition, the focus on Iraq has diverted international resources and attention away from humanitarian crises such as in Sudan.

DISABLING INTERNATIONAL LAW

The unilateral U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq violated the United Nations Charter, setting a dangerous precedent for other countries to seize any opportunity to respond militarily to claimed threats, whether real or contrived, that must be "pre-empted." The U.S. military has also violated the Geneva Convention, making it more likely that in the future, other nations will ignore these protections in their treatment of civilian populations and detainees.

UNDERMINING THE UNITED NATIONS

At every turn, the Bush Administration has attacked the legitimacy and credibility of the UN, undermining the institution's capacity to act in the future as the centerpiece of global disarmament and conflict resolution. The efforts of the Bush administration to gain UN acceptance of an Iraqi government that was not elected but rather installed by occupying forces undermines the entire notion of national sovereignty as the basis for the UN Charter. It was on this basis that Secretary General Annan referred specifically to the vantage point of the UN Charter in his September 2004 finding that the war was illegal.

ENFORCING COALITIONS

Faced with opposition in the UN Security Council, the U.S. government attempted to create the illusion of multilateral support for the war by pressuring other governments to join a so-called "Coalition of the Willing." This not only circumvented UN authority, but also undermined democracy in many coalition countries, where public opposition to the war was as high as 90 percent. As of the middle of September, only 29 members of the "Coalition of the Willing" had forces in Iraq, in addition to the United States. These countries, combined with UnitedStates, make up less than 14 percent of the world's population.

COSTS TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

The $151.1 billion spent by the U.S. government on the war could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years. As a factor in the oil price hike, the war has created concerns of a return to the "stagflation" of the 1970s. Already, the world's major airlines are expecting an increase in costs of $1 billion or more per month.

UNDERMINING GLOBAL SECURITY AND DISARMAMENT

The U.S.-led war and occupation have galvanized international terrorist organizations, placing people not only in Iraq but around the world at greater risk of attack. The State Department's annual report on international terrorism reported that in 2003 there was the highest level of terror-related incidents deemed "significant" than at any time since the U.S. began issuing these figures.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS

U.S.-fired depleted uranium weapons have contributed to pollution ofIraq's land and water, with inevitable spillover effects in other countries. The heavily polluted Tigris River, for example, flows throughIraq, Iran and Kuwait.

HUMAN RIGHTS

The Justice Department memo assuring the White House that torture was legal stands in stark violation of the International Convention AgainstTorture (of which the United States is a signatory). This, combined with the widely publicized mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military and intelligence officials, gave new license for torture andmistreatment by governments around the world.

Absolutely astounding. Every single thing you ever needed to know about what this reliance on oil is costing us. I hope they aren't the type to sue, those good people who prepared this report at the Progressive Review.

News Digest - Drug Policies are Bad, hmmmm 'kay

2004-10-01T02:30:00.000+12:00

This first goes out on 95bfm on a Friday Morning - around 8 10am

Remember Nandor? You know that alternative guy with the dreadlocks and the hemp suit. The one who blazed into parliament on publicity overload. Who fearlessly fought for dope decriminalisation?

Well he is back in the public eye. But those long years of select committees and bank bench sitting have taken their toll on the radical of old.

Because now Nandor, who, I reckon, is a thoroughly good bloke and a very intelligent advocate who, incidentally, is embarrassed at being seen as a voice for youth seeing that these days he is closer to fifty then twenty, anyhow, now Nandor has come out co-fronting the new Green Party drug policy. And what once would have been pretty sexy news has been a fizzer. Because where once Nandor would be saying free the weed, man, he is now saying lets build an integrated framework where harm management and risk assessment allow us to monitor more effectively the consumption of psychoactive substances.
Well, not such good copy is it. And it’ll harm the Greens too. Because there are a number of things in this policy that will ensure that it never gets made law, even by dressing it up in such boring Jim Anderton speak.

In real English, the kind the Green Party supporters would have liked to have heard, the major change this approach seeks is to bring all the things you take to get wasted, well, those that aren’t currently B Class or higher, and sticks them under one umbrella, law-wise. And instead of always locking people up for possessing, using or abusing these things we get them medical help if they need it, don’t let kids get hold of the stash and pretty much let everyone else alone, to have at it.

But they couldn’t put it this way because they are trying to appear responsible, serious and reasonable. And it probably has a bit to do with the fact that he is co-fronting it with relentless busy-body and I-Know-what-is-best-for-you type Sue Kedgley. But, anyway, even if they did manage to sneak cannabis in under the radar by hiding it in such a dull sounding proposition, this thing would still fail.

Because they picked the wrong fight. They want to make booze one of these harm-monitored psychoactive substances.
There is, of course, a mountain of irrefutable proof that alcohol is the most dangerous drug to our society. And it would be better for all of us if we treated it with more care, thought of it as a drug, like.
But alcohol, which is so much worse for people than things like pot, is also resolutely ingrained in the culture. We just love drinking too much and we don’t want to see it regulated any more heavily than it is now. And we certainly don’t want to be chucked in rehab if we get caught with more beer on us than can be explained away as for our own personal use.
Picking a fight with the national pastime is bad politicking. Not to mention that you are also picking a fight with some of the largest and most well entrenched lobby groups to boot.

There is a lot to this law that is timely, clever and necessary. An actual attempt to acknowledge something that isn’t going away by criminalizing it. A real effort to remove gang strangleholds on cannabis supply. An approach that treats substance abuse as a health problem. A lot of stuff that will probably never see the light of day. Because the Greens are coming at this with good intentions, with, unfortunately, the normal destination that implies.

So, cruelly really, this policy will disappoint everyone. Not radical enough for the pro-liberalisation crowd, of which I am one, and too radical for all the rugby clubs in the country who might otherwise have had a bit of sympathy for a little ease-up on the illegality of the old wacky-backy.

And, by stripping new ideas about drugs of excitement they are getting pretty grim coverage relating to their efforts. Normally Nandor talking about ganga makes good news - seeing that TV and radio and newspapers love setting the conservative types alight by having this out-there looking dude talk drugs – but no-one is being set alight when it is a polite earnest guy in dreadlocks who jumps up and says lets build an integrated framework where harm management and risk assessment allow us to monitor more effectively the consumption of psychoactive substances. They don’t even follow.

But, just maybe, this is the plan. Say they purposefully made it sound tedious and worthy, which, to be fair, is exactly what good ‘well-being-minded’ law must be, say they purposefully did this in order to lull the public into thinking it is a reasonable idea at heart. Then they wave a big red flag that says booze to distract everyone’s attention. Then, again just maybe, they might magnamaniously offer to remove booze from the ambit of the act and then see if it will wash. Aye? Aye? That would be a cunning plan, probably still wouldn’t work but it is heartening to think that this isn’t the best they’ve got. Looks like we’d better not hold our breath for more realistic drug laws any time soon.

Straight Eye for the District Court Guy

2004-09-29T03:53:00.000+12:00

I said a while ago that I'd try to get round to posting about a brilliant morning spent at the District Court.
It comes highly recommended by this attendee, combining as it does two of my favourite interests: absurdity and strife.
The visit was occasioned by some over-exuberance on the job from a doorman I used to work with. He excluded someone from the bar, was called a 'nigger faggot" and gave the smartmouth guy such a slap that the Police came back hours later to see that they hadn't left behind any fragments of his jaw.
Just another night in hospo.
Anyhow, in the presence of many witnesses something had to be done and unfortunately for the very good, but occasionally too handy for his own good, man in question, they arrested him.
And so in a moral support capacity, although the morality of heading along to support that is questionable, I found myself for first time at the District Court.

It was absolute gold from the moment of arrival. Two very harried looking court officials were manning (personing?) a metal detector. Just like in airports or Dangerous liaisons or whatever that god awful film with Michele Phiffer in the badass school was called.

Anyhow, after losing my belt, contents of pockets, etc to clear the quite seriously taken security I found myself in a building that managed to personify (buildingingfy?), well epitomise maybe, 'drab'.
Everything was shades of awful. Impersonal scale, escalators like bad shopping malls from the seventies, the soul and countenance of begrudgingly provided public goods, the kind of place where ugly and unwanted shades of brown go to die.

And it only got better. Accompanying my escalator ride were the battle cries of the soon to be sentenced but resoundingly, and kidding-themselvesly, indifferent.
"Eh whatever, eh. Fuck da system, fuck da piggies, fuck da judge, can't do shit to me cause I'm keeping it real, I'm living the thug life"
Honestly. It was awesome, I haven't heard the like of it since Mt Roskill Grammar School and even then most of it was self-deprecating.
Not this guy.
Talking to, I hope, himself, because otherwise it was me, and streaming soon to be absolutely disproved bravado. If it wasn't the exact opposite about to happen to him then what was he doing in court, looking for all his life like this was the most presentable he has been in years.

Which was the other fascinating thing about the place. Every single person there was doing themselves a real disservice by how they tidied themselves up for their big days.
We are talking about a bunch of the roughest looking dudes trying to look Sunday best and ending up looking worse for it because it makes it all too apparent that if that is the best they can do then they really are bad-eggs indeed.
Now I'm not trying to do a queer eye for the off-the-straight-and-narrow-guy, (let us call it then a straight eye for th........) but these guys need help.
I saw, as an example of what constituted as dressed up, a Maori man in his late fifties, obviously homeless, missing all his front teeth, wearing tight-as black jeans, a well worn out tee-shirt, boots older than me and a cap. This was all with that distressed look that may well be fashionable right now but generally not if you achieved it by sleeping rough. But that was not the worst of it. For a homeless person to turn up to court is fair enough. The man has enough problems without having to attain sartorial accomplishment while on the hunt for food, cardboard boxes and got-a-dollar-bros. That I grant him. Problem was he set off his look with a single nod to surroundings: an electric blue tie. The most incongruous eighties fluro tie I have ever seen. It made, I am sad to say, my day. I am a bad person who will in future try not to laugh at homeless people, even privately, unless they are at least as funny as this guy was.

But he wasn't the end of it. Every defendant there came off looking worse for the fact that they had tried and failed. It made all of them that little bit more intimidating too, like the nine-foot Tongan guy who was staring at me with a just-you-think-about-smiling-about-my-too-small-dress-shirt-tucked-in-to-my-too-big-dress-pants-that-are-still-two-feet-too-short-for-my-legs-so-you-can-see-my-whole-socks-rising-out-of-my-Burgundy-winklepickers-just-you-think-about-smiling-and-I'll-break-your-neck-look. Add to that the fact that he looked just like the guy who killed Murray Stretch and I didn't even think about smiling. Not even now, safe at home.

Cause some things aren't funny. Which is completely not what the kids there with their fuming parents were. They were hilarious. Angry, angry, angry mothers and 17 year old sons trying to explain that they thought they were allowed to paint on that fence and take the car-stereo -'the car was not even locked mum."
Classic.

The worst presented, and ultimately scariest person in this whole scenario was this one guy wearing a polyester suit so shiny it was actually reflective. To top it off he was wearing big black and purple basketball shoes with big shock-absorber type things at the heel. He was running around madly, so we called him Speedy. At one stage he ran off without a tie and came out of the toilet with one on, inexpertly tied. Thing was that now his belt was undone and flapping everywhere, and as he circled the waiting room again I looked on in interest to see if any of his clients might point it out to him. That is right, clients. This man, looking after no less than six of these poor souls, was a legal-aid lawyer, a very real Lionel Hutz type ambulance-chaser-looking lawyer.
The very saddest thing of the day. Apparently no-one worth their salt looks after minor legal-aid cases because they earn a third of their normal wage.

My friend got his case put off for another day, and as we left I noticed that the metal detector that we had all filed through, that they had taken so seriously just an hour before, was gone. Vanished completely.
A funny day, unless Speedy was defending you. I like my legal professionals to pay attention to detail, little things, like whether their pants are slowly coming-down, as his were, exposing more and more of his novelty xmas boxers.

New Look

2004-09-27T18:05:00.000+12:00

Nice aye, new design so that comments are available. And I've now worked out how to post photos - such as this test one below,............ So please feel free to comment on all back pieces too... most are still relevant.

2004-09-27T15:42:00.000+12:00

Me, Kareoke-ing.

News Digest

2004-09-23T18:57:00.000+12:00

This first goes out on bfm on Friday Morning........

Now for this week I thought I’d have a quick look at a couple of papers for rather different reasons, the Guardian Weekly and the NBR.

First up, because it is always good to start with something positive first thing in the morning, The Guardian Weekly, that fine and venerable English institution that, in good news, is now being printed in Australia and as such has become both affordable and timely.
In the old days you had to shell out a packet for the air-freighted edition or wait an age for it to arrive by snail mail, by which time of course the writing, no matter how good, was well out of date.
Ironically now that we can get our hands on it so readily we don’t need it so much because of the excellent Guardian website, but surely these great sites will soon start to cost moolah so I guess we’ll just have to enjoy them for free while we can.
Although, no matter how good a website is it can never replace that satisfying feeling of having a good newspaper in your hand.
And my, it is a good newspaper. Nice compact size and packed full of well-informed stories, commentary and debate – as only the most influential left wing weekly could achieve, hailing as it does from the home of the great newspaper tradition – mother England. And, incorporating as it does the best writings of the Guardian Daily, its sister paper The Observer and also Le Monde in France (thankfully for those like me without a wide ranging classical education, it does so in English).

Though this publication never started life as an establishment creature. Indeed for the first, many, years of its life it was known as the Manchester Workers’ Guardian, and was far, far, far left of where it rather respectably sits today.
And also surprisingly for a venerable left wing institution it is missing the standard Achilles heels of the left. Instead of being humourless, sanctimonious, preachy and totalitarian as most leftist publications are it is, in fact, lightly cynical, slightly knowing, genuinely concerned and does not advocate class-warfare as a solution for everything from student-loans to the common cold.
Not of course that the vast majority of right-wing publications are any better but we’ll save that scorn for a couple of minutes until we put the hooks into the NBR shortly.

Sooooooo. In this weeks Weekly we can find a host of interesting and illuminating things. One of the best packages I’ve picked up in ages.
For example, there is a wee story on the Fathers4Justice Batman guy who scaled Buckingham Palace to raise awareness for Father’s rights to visit their children. Turns out that this pompous git in the silly costume and the ill-fitting speedos is so enamoured of his, admittedly often valid cause, that he has no time to see his own kids and his last girlfriend left him, taking their child, because he was always out protesting and never at home with them. Classic. What a nonce.
And that is not the worst of it, there was another little cracker tucked away amongst all the serious worthy stuff that most people would buy it for that just made my week.
The European Union, newly enlarged, and the corresponding European Parliament are, it reports, buckling under the pressure of translation duties. The 25 current members are spending a billion Euros a year just on trying to understand each other and apparently are failing miserably. This latter-day tower of Babel is in a real mess which is only getting worse because in three years Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria are going to join and they haven’t a hope of finding enough interpreters in time. It is always pleasing to a bad minded bugger like me to see a paternalistic and prescriptive organisation buckle under the weight of its own bureaucracy. But that’s just me. I also like to think what Bulgarian or Czech scrabble must be like – they probably all sit round going – oh shit, I’ve only got vowels.

Anyway, as so often tidily happens with these radio things, it just so happens that the Guardian Weekly and the mighty b are pooling some resources. At the moment it is to the pretty small level of them sending us two free copies a week (at a not to be scoffed at saving of $4.95 an issue) and us getting access to their journalists in the field. So watch this space, the opportunity to tap into some of the best writers in the world at the scene, so to speak, is a great coup.

Annnnnnnd soooooo the NBR. Another weekly and about as far away from the Guardian as you get. Known to a large degree to the non-business reader for the high calibre of some of their stable, in particular Deborah Hill Cone and David Cohen, and also for the annual Rich List, which is sort of a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous for accountants. In short the Review is kind of like a paper of record for business establishment views. To say it is right wing is boring, but in the limited sense most people understand right wing, true. It is very economically dry and no friend of the Labour government, and, until Dr Brash’s ascendancy, no great friend to National either.
And now the NBR has squarely landed in the broader public view for their frenzied character assassination of Auckland Mayoral hopeful Dick Hubbard.
Now Dick Hubbard was never a fellow traveller to this paper. Goebbels once stated that when he heard the word culture he reached for his revolver. Similarly, the NBR is the kind of organ that reaches for the revolver when it hears words like sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. But it is also not the kind of rag to immediately jump into bed with someone who made their millions peddling something so airy-fairy as bee-pollen supplements, as in the case of incumbent John Banks. So why did the paper effectively weigh in behind Banksie by devoting nine stories to discrediting Hubbard?

I suppose that to the NBR Banksie is the devil they know, and by now, as he certainly has an odd car-crash charm, quite like. Well whatever it is one thing I do know is that it has led to the running of such an ill-conceived, vaguely hysterical and overall grasping hatchet-job on Hubbard in the latest issue.

The importance of such an all-out assault by what is in effect a minority reach paper became apparent to this speculator only yesterday. It turns out, and perhaps I really should have known this already, that businesses also receive a vote in local body elections, excluding District Health Boards. Once again, if you already knew this readily available information please do excuse me but how fascinating.
The logic goes, as I found out from David Smith, Chief Executive of the eye-poppingly innocuously named Society of Local Government Managers, that as businesses pay rates they should get a say in how councils are populated.
Again, fascinating. Were this entirely reasonable-sounding logic extrapolated out to the General Election then Businesses, as taxpayers, ought also to receive a vote. I know one-person one-vote is not going to be replaced quietly but it is not too far fetched to foresee this kind of argument creeping in sooner or later.
So anyway, so as to try to adhere to some sort of traditionally understood democratic ideal if a business owner is also a resident voter in a local body election they are supposed to proxy their vote to a nominated staff member who lives outside the area…….. but they can still, I’d imagine, direct who that vote would go to. It all sounds remarkably murky to me, a smoke and mirrors approach to transparency.

But finally, in light of this, it makes a lot more sense to me that the NBR would try so strenuously to have a go at Hubbard’s credibility. If, as the respected business paper, they get behind a candidate then the business vote may very well swing the election his way.

Interesting huh. Though I still can’t for the life of me work out exactly why the NBR are so keen to back Banks.

King Canute

2004-09-22T17:31:00.000+12:00

This is my take on David Irving. It was written for Fuse, but by a quirk of their deadlines will not appear till next Thursday. Hard to stay relevant with a week and a half between writing and printing -they didn't make it easy for themselves......

So David Irving is not allowed in the country and another inbred moron desecrates a Jewish grave, odd how actions in Los Angeles and Wanganui can be seen to be linked.
It was in Los Angeles that Irving tried to board a plane and our immigration departments fancy new unwanted-visitor software alerted the officials that he wasnt welcome. Not that I think for a second that it was really only left up to the computer program, but that is beside the point. The important thing was that this man, regularly, no - invariably described as the Holocaust Denier was deemed too incendiary to be allowed in the country.
On the face of it he was disallowed because of a safety check in our immigration law that allows us to turn away people who have been deported from a country. Because this is rather a broad provision that does not take into account the circumstances of the deportation its use is optional that is the government of the day exercises the right to exclude someone by not exercising the right to overlook it. Sounds circular but simple really. Say a journalist was deported from an evil country for revealing evil truths, as the stock example goes, then they would be allowed to come here, regardless of that deportation. David Irving however is not a journalist and is most certainly not associated with truths. Though what he is associated with is ugly; ugly ideas, ugly methods and ugly results.
The oddest thing about Irving is that if his ideas that the Holocaust was not a systematic attempt to wipe out Jewry and that Hitler had no idea that it was carried out and that the numbers were much, much smaller than accepted were, in fact, correct there was no-one in the world in a better position to introduce them. Just ten years ago David Irving was one of the most respected writers on the Second World War and the prominent players like Churchill and Hitler. He was a bestselling author who also enjoyed kudos from academic historians for his unparalleled knowledge of the German archives. He was a media darling and the very picture of establishment credibility having helmed the definitive Churchill biography, volumes of which he is still working on, and interestingly were the actual reason for his desire to travel here to work on New Zealand war Prime Minister Peter Frasers archives (the invitation to address the National Press Club came later).
But even from this position the bulk of his revisionist views and assertions have been rubbished and his good-name, reputation and livelihood destroyed. Answer enough as to their validity, well to anyone but him.
Because still he fights, writing history no longer for our generation he says, but for the future. As a self-styled battler for free speech his fight now includes the New Zealand Government as adversary following from the rebuff at LAX. And to his ever-decreasing circle of well-wishers every moron in Wanganui who smashes a grave stone is seen as further evidence of that great Jewish conspiracy to them it is not some redneck, unemployed, bored, drunk and stupid who smashes the headstone for attention, no it is Mossad fermenting discontent so Irving may not travel.
In the end free speech is the most important thing and the only way to stop hate crimes. Simply put, if Irving was allowed to come and his views warranted the scant attention needed to discredit them then no stones would be smashed and no ill-minded bigots empowered.

Talking to Irving was one of the most interesting things I've had the chance to do and has had interesting flow-on effects.
Like appearing here as Simon Pound ? and also on this site, a well known anti-Israel clearing house. Uncomfortable lodgings but at least the unflattering interview appears in full - unflattering to those positions at least.
If you'd like to check out the interview try it here I recommend it as it is by far and away the best interview I've done. If you listen to it and don't like it then may I also recommend you stay away from bfm on Thursday afternoons - you'll like my normal standard less again!

Like Canute and the sea, you can't stop free speech. Corny I know, but when will Helen lose the Crown.........It is this infernal fear of collateral damage to her Government that leads to these acquiescent weak decisions. Let the man in and he'd have far less attention payed to him - you are feeding his possible persecution delusions otherwise.

Jobbing

2004-09-22T11:18:00.000+12:00

This appeared in Fuse - though the buggers scrapped the last, and only funny, line.

Imagine this: first up we’ll presuppose that you’re all-powerful, and for the sake of argument your name is Helen. You have a son, lets call him Air-Force – not so catchy, but being all-powerful means you can call him whatever you like, anyway he has a whole lot of planes, which you own but he controls – some are really cool - they go real fast, look mean, can blow stuff up and they impress his mates, and some, well some are purely practical - slow, noisy, dowdy and boring.
Now, imagine that you scrap your son’s cool planes, with the result that none of his friends want to play with him anymore. And then, to really rub salt in the wound, you demand more lifts from him in the crap planes that make Air-Force feel like a dick when his ex-mates see him driving his mum.
Sounds pretty pants really, well at least if you’re the son. But as Helen knows, another thing about being all-powerful means never having to say you’re sorry.
Right, done with the imagining now, I’m sure you get the picture.
Back in the real world the Air-Force really are unhappy, and that decision by this Labour Government to scrap the Air-Combat wing must be one of the least thought through moves they’ve made.
Although, to be fair, in terms of economy they have achieved a great deal by the simple act of abandoning the combat wing; they’ve pissed off Australia who feel we are not keeping up our end defence-wise, further alienated America as we aren’t buying more of their planes, diminished our world-class reputation as pilots and provided an exodus of talent to the RAF, and in the process have incurred near $9 Million in storage costs as they wait to find a buyer for the rejected Skyhawks –which, believe it or not, they are now mooting the selling of for scrap. That certainly is a lot to achieve with one decision, but it probably isn’t quite what they had in mind.
And now, on the back of this brilliant planning, management and treatment of the Air-Force Helen really has expressed a wish to get more rides in their remaining (crap) planes. It makes you wonder why they bother.
Perhaps I’m biased by the fact that I like things that look cool, go fast and blow stuff up, but I reckon that it’s bad form to take away all the fun toys and then expect more rides. But on the flip-side, this being all-powerful thing looks like a sweet deal. I’m beginning to understand why the Fijians like coups so much.

I post it here because I was approached at a party by someone who had read it and I was lambasted for advocating a combat wing. Which I didn't, I didn't really advocate anything - 400 words doesn't allow much persausive language. What she should have had me up for was the juvenile and laboured metaphor - but then again she was either wasted or as thick as pig shit. Actually, perhaps both. Anyway....
What I would advocate would have been the gifting of the skyhawks to the Australians and the continued joint use of them by NZ and Aussie pilots.
To mothball and sell them to the detriment of a cosy status quo of shared training with Australia is churlish pursuit of idealogical policy.
If the chips ever go down the first people we throw our lot in with will again be Oz. Simple really.

Missionary Golden Arches

2004-09-14T17:48:00.000+12:00

Been a bit quiet of late. Suffering from a fair whack of the old financial imperative. And as a certain Damian Christie pointed out, blogs are little idea factories and when your thoughts are elsewhere, like on finding dinner, they atrophy.
To this end I'm on the job hunt.
As a result I've had an interesting visit to a recruitment agency and have whored the old CV around. The bites are coming, most humorously in a new gig as kareoke MC at Shadows on a Wednesday night. Humorous for my occasional singing, and my not knowing a single song a punter chooses. Hero? Linkin Park? Who are these people and why could 6 separate Indian men sing it so well? Disturbing to say the least. As a weather vane for how the world is going the console has only one song by David Bowie (China Girl) and six (!) by Jessica Simpson (who cares what they are).

Had a brilliant visit to the District Court, which deserves it's own post, in the fullness of time. It is highly recommended as a pick me up.

Anywho I submitted this as my weekly Fuse flagellation. After the whole affair is over I might explain my motives for submitting to the much reviled mag. In the meantime it would look unproffesional. I told Matt Nippert, maybe he'll out me........

Apparently the Pope has criticised New Zealand for becoming too secular. Symptoms of our degeneration, according to his Holiness, include The Civil Unions Bill, the Decriminalisation of Prostitution, the domination of Sundays by entertainment and sport and, most seriously, the decline in numbers attending mass.
Although fire and brimstone are traditionally attached to those first, rather commonplace, laments it is really the attendance they are worrying about. These words, or warnings, can perhaps be seen as little more than an advertising ploy, and what better spokesperson than God’s voice on earth?
Thing is, without bums on pews the church loses its most important strengths: numerical legitimacy and financial power.
Those masses are the time when people come together before god, and the collection plate is passed around before the people. Lose that customer base and lose those cathedrals.
Financially the Catholic Church is still sitting pretty in NZ as a result of some impressive property speculation while the Country was in its infancy, so there is not too much to worry about yet. Except, perhaps, the legal troubles that have a nasty habit of following on from when infant beings are placed in the Church’s care.
No, it is less the loss of money they are worried about, more the loss of market share.
With little things like liberalism, science and freedom of expression having taken the sting out of the Church’s traditional hold on consumers they are flailing around trying to turn a famously closed-minded, written-in-stone kinda entity into a responsive, relevant creature.
Interestingly, the concerns of this aged and tarnished brand are not dissimilar to the position held by that other great cultural institution, McDonalds.
McDonalds and the Catholic Church are two of the worlds leading property owners and cultural Trojan horses, and while serving burgers and salvation may seem far removed, that isn’t quite so. Both are petrified about losing market share. Both once benefited from near monopoly positions. Both aggressively target and grow new markets. Both offer a standardised product. And both face increasing difficulties from lawsuits and changing consumer attitudes and awareness toward nourishment.
The problem that both these venerable institutions are facing, and have never had to face so before, is that the ‘rocks’ in our lives can not change too readily or their flocks are left confused.
Then, if all this follows, it is maybe through this comparison that we can best try to understand the new Healthy Choice menu. It is simple really. McCafe and the Healthy Options menu are McDonalds’ Vatican Two.

I was just warming to it as I ran out of words. 400 doesn't give you much.

The starting point came from this article. Which contains some of the funniest lines I've seen in print:

"Prime Minister Helen Clark today told reporters the Pope had strong religious views and he was entitled to express them."
phew - enlightening stuff that.

"She was sure the pope had people on the ground in New Zealand and they made their views known to him."
yes - the people on the ground are known as Catholics - must be the SIS earning their wages making sure our PM knows what is going down - 'on the ground'........

News Digest

2004-08-26T18:05:00.000+12:00

This first goes out on 95bfm at 8 10 on a Friday morning

It’s funny how things can get taken out of context. Or not so funny.

Thursday saw the first day of the Auckland round of submissions on the Foreshore and Seabed bill.
The Parliamentary select committee was sitting in session at the Alexandra Park Raceway. Interestingly, this venue was also the scene for a NZ First Convention – which was held in the then wonderfully named Delightful Lady Lounge.

Unfortunately, since the NZ First do the Lounge has been renamed the Rutherford Room, which perhaps better suits the dry and boring duties of a select committee.
Except on Thursday it was anything but dry and boring.

The Police were in attendance, secretaries complained of intimidation, separatist flags were kinda flown – or at the very draped prominently over tables, ejections were threatened, and civil war was apparently warned of.

Pretty heady stuff, though we shouldn’t be too surprised over what this Foreshore and seabed Bill manages to throw up – it has already spawned a Hikoi of over 10,000 marching on Parliament, a brand new Maori Party, some strife with technically apolitical public servants – although that seemed to be more a case of Labour beliefs are okay everything else no way – not to mention feeding ugly race based campaigning by National and ACT.

Sooooooo. The big news in the Papers and on the telly was that Head of Maori Studies at Auckland University, Professor Margaret Mutu had asserted that instituting this legislation would lead “inevitably to Civil War.”
That, you could say, is a very big call.
Dr Wayne Mapp, a Nat on the committee, certainly thought so. He seized on this single comment out of Ngati Kahu’s entire lengthy submission that was in reality mainly concerned with the fact that Mana Whenua is being overlooked.
Mana Whenua is loosely the idea that Maori are joint stewards of the land, and having the best, longest and closest relationship to land, they have a responsibility, and a right, to know what’s best regarding that land.
The concept is of course more complex than that but then again isn’t everything?

Well no, at least not if you’re Dr Wayne Mapp. Instead of paying attention to this concept Mapp seized on Professor Mutu’s passing comment that past warnings of civil war may well not be Hyperbole – that is unless these issues are addressed.

Fair enough comment, but still pretty unnecessary to start talking civil war.
The very idea of civil war is fraught with trouble, the country barely has an Army, and what it does have is disproportionately Maori. It is so unlikely that it only throws up questions.
Who would be fighting who? Where? Over whether the Crown should own the land? Didn’t this all happen in the 1800s? Isn’t land confiscation so last millennium? And most importantly aren’t we still paying for mistakes like those through Treaty Claims?

It is all beyond my simple mind. And evidently beyond Dr Mapp’s when he labelled the civil war claim as Treason.

Perhaps if everyone stopped playing the thoughtless exaggeration game this would be a whole lot easier. One thing is for sure - it really has to get sorted soon. It is evident, and dangerous, that just as certain groups become more militant, pretty much everyone else is well bored of the Foreshore and Seabed debate.

ACC and Response, or lack there-of

2004-08-25T15:34:00.000+12:00

Sooooooo. It has now been over 11 weeks since I sliced my hand whilst at work in a small yet brilliantly disabling accident.
The accident occasioned a week odd in Hospital, a five hour operation and the loss of the use of my dominant hand for two years.
While most everything has been fine - people have been helpful, girlfriend closest to saintly that she is ever likely to get, learning to write with other hand etc - the inability to work and corresponding lack of money is not fine.
Which is where ACC comes in handy. I read with interest that Diana Wichtel received home-visits from her case worker. Which hurts really - in my ten weeks of having a case worker I have received ONE letter.
That is it. Not a cent. Not a phone call. Certainly not a home visit.
Better still, the letter was to say that she could not return my calls. I've been leaving one message a week with her answering machine and in reply I've had one letter saying she could not raise me by phone. WHY DON"T YOU TRY FUCKING RINGING IT?

So Yvonne Thompson of the Auckland branch I here make a formal complaint over your inept negligence. I have not received any help or income assistance from you and am sick of living on $20 a week and the dwindling kindness of friends, and the dwindled kindness of my long suffering parents.

I don't believe that after paying $2000 in ACC levies in the past financial year that I am not eligible for a single cent.

I'd love to hear from you Yvonne............

Which brings to mind Dr Paul Hutchison's claims that the abandonment of the Market model for ACC has led to a rise in accident numbers.
Dr Hutchison is the National Party spokesperson for ACC. Many may never have heard of him but he is seriously saying that "Competition and individual risk rating in accident insurance provides better incentives to cut the number of accidents."

I can understand the wish for a no-profile MP to fire out press-releases at anything moving, but surely linking re-nationalisation and workplace deaths is at the best gauche, at the worst sick.

Anyway now for something a little different.

This correspondence followed from the 'Poisoned Pot' piece that appears below.

Have a read.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR - FOR PUBLICATION

Dear Fuse,

I'd like to clarify some comments made in your inaugural edition by Simon Pound in his "In for a Penny" column regarding police cannabis operations.
Pound has his wires crossed with his statement: "Apparently police are warning cannabis consumers to watch out for the (poisoned) weed", in reference to the aerial spraying operations carried out on the Coromandel Peninsula.
To set the record straight, NORML issued a press release to all newspapers in the Coromandel area, warning smokers to be aware that some unscrupulous dealers were dipping the dyed cannabis in food colouring to mask the bluespray. NORML also raised issues of possible poisoning or health concerns that may result from smoking the sprayed cannabis. As a consequence of that, newspapers approached police for comment. Our message to the community was simple: If you're going to play with illegal drugs, you take the risks.
Pound is right to highlight this issue. As our society overflows with more toxic, chemical-based "recreational" drugs, a thriving industry is emerging. Be under no illusions - drug dealers and manufacturers are out to make money, not to provide a community service. A drug-related fatality is of no concern to them. There's plenty more customers out there.

KRIS McGEHAN
Communications Manager Waikato Police

Apart from a minor reading error - that NORML issued the warning and not the police, who by implication welcome the extra risk to pot-smokers - Kris doesn't disagree with any substantative points in the column.

Can you, for bonus points, actually work out what exactly she is trying to say? It reads as if it were concocted with a checklist - get the message out regardless of relevancy or how it reads.

Thing is I'd figured it was pretty non-inflammatory from a police perspective. To enter in and clarify is, of course, fine but if reefer madness language was missing, it is no longer. This section here warrants ominous background music and to be voiced by the guy who does all the movie trailers:

As our society overflows with more toxic, chemical-based "recreational" drugs, a thriving industry is emerging. Be under no illusions - drug dealers and manufacturers are out to make money, not to provide a community service. A drug-related fatality is of no concern to them. There's plenty more customers out there.

dun du dun da.........

Putting aside the regrettable grammar - 'There are plenty more' perhaps..... - I'm disappointed because I consider myself almost rabidly pro-police.
This is because the police receive the bum-rap in terms of reportage. With a few recent exceptions. In the case of the Iraqi man shot fatally by a police officer the headline was further towards the favourable, while still a little sensationalist: Knifeman's wife saved by cop's fatal shot.
In this case a cop managed to shoot a man who had just stabbed him in the arm, from 7m, to save the stabber's wife. Even better, he managed to, from 7m, hit the guy in the leg three times. When this did not stop the offender from still attempting to cut his wife's throat he had to shoot him in the head. Not what he wanted to do but absolutely heroic. And incredibly difficult.
Yet, when this man should be getting medals, he instead gets to be subject to three inquiries.

Why do cops bother. Even on the best day at work a policeman can expect to deal with car-crashes, dead bodies, domestic violence, drunks, thugs, thieves and worst of all - myriad innocent victims. Everyday they are putting themselves in situations we'd rather avoid and you don't see their success on the front pages or leading the news - only when something goes wrong.
We're beyond lucky to have an honest force though you don't hear much gratitude.

Though some policies that police are obliged to enforce bug me, such as this poisoning of weed, they are not the baddies. I thought that came through in the piece, but if it didn't, it does now.

The column this is all about first appeared in Fuse, the Herald Student supplement. Unfortunately, fuse has been met with resounding indifference from those in the know.

Matt Nippert provided illumination as to the financial set-up of the paper, which was especially interesting to this contributor who signed up to have something in all six issues for the paltry sum of $300 for 2500 odd words.

Not that I'm complaining, regular readers will be aware I sustained an injury that led to an end for all of my conventional means of employment, and as a result I really have to take what is going. Though this doesn't take the sting out when it gets rubbished - even if for very good reasons.

Russell Brown has mentioned Fuse a bunch of times, mainly vaguely disparagingly as in this instance, although he seems to have overlooked the presence of at least one redeeming feature...........

Fuse Pieces

2004-08-20T14:12:00.000+12:00

These first appeared in fuse, the NZ Herald Student mag. They were accompanied there by an embarrasing mug shot. Anyhow, here they are:

Poisoned Pot

It has been an odd week in the news. In the absence of speeding politicians or party formations things have taken a turn for the strange.

We're talking about the poisoned pot warnings. Apparently the police are warning cannabis consumers to beware of the weed.
Turns out the cops conducted an aerial spraying campaign over Coromandel growing regions. Unlike conventional crop-dusters though they have been spraying pesticide. This poison makes marijuana harmful if smoked.
Luckily, as the cops aren’t evil in this country, the pesticide also turns the plants blue - so you’ll know what not to smoke.
Sounds simple really - avoid the blue buds. Except growers, ever-resourceful people that they are, appear to have been using yellow food colouring to turn the blue plants back to a more conventional green.
Which leaves smokers in a bit of a sticky situation, if you’ll excuse the awful pun. You’d think it would be easy enough to avoid the danger by just making sure you avoided Coromandel green. Putting aside the sacrilege this statement might represent to devotees of such, the problem is you can’t always be that sure where that pot you just bought came from. There is no buyer beware in an underground market. It is very hard to trust your supplier when he or she touts their product. It doesn’t matter what low-grade food-coloured cabbage they might be getting for you because they are always going to tell you it is the meanest, cloned, northern lights skunk, bro. Just look at those crystals. Or something like that - it has been a while since I was last doing that but I’ll bet it still holds true.
Oddly enough this potentially dangerous fiasco is good ammo for those wishing to see cannabis laws relaxed. The police never intended to hurt the smokers, only the producers. If the current approach to policing pot starts endangering normal occasional users it might provide a good moment to step back and have a think about what it was they were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Not only are pretty much law abiding citizens being criminalized by the laws at the moment - both through the kind of associations they have to tap into to get hold of weed and the risk of conviction they face by indulging, but now they are also being endangered because the lack of an above board supply system means most people will have no idea where their hitherto harmless joint came from.
Blue weed and Crop-dusting cops - it’s either Monty Python or Reefer Madness. But lets just hope no one gets hurt in the process.

That was piece no1. apart from looking like I was trying to be down with those crazy pot smoking kids it wasn't too painful

HOROMIA

Parekura Horimia has announced that he intends to shed 30 kilos by Christmas. You may have seen the photos of him in half undress, showing us the before to what he hopes comes after.

I haven’t seen so much flesh since my first flurries on to the Internet. And I was left with the same feelings of unease and that this wasn’t the kind of image I wanted to be found with on my computer.
Turns out the Minister for Maori Affairs is new to Weight Watchers and is losing puku to highlight obesity amongst Maori.

Fine project. And good on him too, it has to be in his health’s best interests. However it is a dangerous move to put your belly on the line - if, right in the glare of the public eye, he doesn’t make the target, then he’s cooked politically.

You only have to remember Donna Awatere Huata. Ms Huata lost a lot of weight. Heaps in fact. And incidentally, though maybe not coincidentally, she also gained some omni-present wrap-around sunglasses the made her look like a bad guy out of the Fifth Element. But just as her husband told the world how much better their sex was as a result (thanks Wi, much appreciated mate) it emerged that it wasn’t her sterling will power that had cut the girth, but was in fact a stomach-stapling operation.
Which wasn’t what she’d told the Women’s mags. And like Samson losing his powers with his hair, everything went quite to custard for Donna afterwards.

Since then she has been heading through half the Courts in the Country fighting fraud charges and an ACT party attempt to have her booted from Parliament. You’d think the accompanying stress may have lost the weight for her, but it was too late - the operation, and the integrity-damage, was done.

So it is a brave man who makes his personal the political. Especially seeing that Horomia is mainly known for two things- being fat, and mangling his words when he speaks in Parliament. Perhaps cutting out the one would serve to highlight the other, and he wouldn’t want that.
Although I sincerely do wish him the best it really doesn’t look good for him. Apparently to help him through the Weight Watchers programme he is relying on the decidedly un-svelte Annette King to help him count his points. Better not throw out the Mu-Mus quite yet.

It is more difficult than I'd imagined to say anything at all in a 400 word limit. But that is an economical way to take a swipe at Horomia, Wi Huata, Donna Awatere Huata, Annette King......

We want Dick.......

2004-08-19T18:07:00.000+12:00

This goes out on www.95bfm.com at 8:10 am on a Friday Morning

NEWS DIGEST

In some of the best news the anti-John Banks brigade has had in a long time the muesli-millionaire Dick Hubbard has announced that he is entering the Mayoral race.

Although he may not yet have any real policies as yet, what he does have is a good, vote-worthy image and, incidentally, an annoying predilection for exclamation marks - if you saw his full page ad in the paper yesterday you will know what I mean
He is famous for being a socially responsible businessman – whatever that means - and for flying his staff to Samoa. Hubbard certainly has the feel-good factor.

It was largely this amorphous feel-good factor that got Christine Fletcher elected Mayor in the first place. She was riding high in public opinion for her spirited activism in Parliament on Auckland education issues and was seen as more colourful than Les Mills.
Putting aside the fact that even with a fitness-factory named after him the Waikato River was more colourful than Mills doesn’t help her case.

However, on taking office Fletcher proved to be ineffective, wishy-washy and a very average manager of the council. Try to think of one thing she did – I can’t.

So along came Banks. A cowboy on his Harley. Larger than life with Bentleys, Jetskis and very un-Grey-Lynn opinions.

And, in the absence of a better candidate, he handsomely won.

How did someone with Banks’ past, well publicised, rotten outbursts win? I mean this is a guy who fought tooth and nail against the Homosexual Reform Bill, who once famously said that Asian people ate everything with four legs except tables and chairs, and so on and so nastier…. Simply a man who was the bane of Liberal New Zealand.

Well he won because the bulk of the people who bother voting in the postal-ballot council elections are the elderly, the wealthy and traditionally the right wing establishment types.
Turnout in the last election was somewhere around 40%. So all of the very vocal anti-Banksers can not possibly have voted. If you don’t vote you can’t complain.

The problem is that Banks didn’t just win – he creamed Fletcher by a stonking 15,000 votes. Although were there a better candidate and a more motivated electorate that is not an insurmountable figure to turn around.

But until Dick Hubbard put his hand up there simply wasn’t.

I mean look at them.
Bruce Hucker is well-intentioned, well-meaning, has good left wing politics, is caring and a pretty effective councillor but most importantly he is even less exciting than that description suggests.
And as far as Fletcher goes, as has been noted, there are around 15000 reasons she isn’t about to top Banksie.
So Hubbard may be just the man for the job, a candidate people might vote for. This is opposed to what Fletcher was offering which was pretty much – a vote for me is a vote against Banks.

But unless people start actually bothering to vote in these elections Banks is going to cruise back in. Honestly – even if everyone who wants Banks out manages to back one candidate it’ll still be his to lose.

First step is to make sure you are on the electoral roll at the correct address – the quickest and easiest way is to go to www.elections.org.nz because unless the postal-ballot arrives in your mailbox there is no-way you can have your say. I think there is a slogan in that.

For what it’s worth I like Mayor of Auckland John Banks – he has made my world a more colourful place – but then again as a news-junkie I’m amoral, perhaps even immoral on these things. So perhaps don’t bother and, as Banksie puts it –keep the dream alive.

Slap on the Wrist

2004-08-19T10:51:00.000+12:00

The best thing, the very best thing about this whole internet opinion indulgence is when someone sends a reply in that makes your day. This correspondence followed on from the pro-smoking rant below. Gold.

Read your blog on smoking in hospitals and felt I should drop you a line, being a public health doctor at Counties Manukau DHB and someone who helped develop the smokefree policy at Middlemore. As you note having public health system premises smokefree makes great sense in theory. Smoking is the single biggest cause of premature mortality and ill-health in the land and any DHB that didn't do what it could to reduce the harm due to smoking would not be doing its job, nor serving its public well. In practice it is supposed to make sense too - rather than being pushed off the grounds to smoke in the train station you are _supposed_ to be offered nicotine replacement patches. Which should take away the cravings, improve your lung function for anaesthetics, give you an idea of being able to live without cigarettes, etc etc. All good in theory but if no one actually offers you the patches then not much good in practice. You did choose the busiest time of the year to try our hospital (July/August) but that shouldn't stop us doing things right.
And sorry that the rest of your stay was not better - hope you are on the mend now.
Regards
Gary

And so I, feeling a bit silly, had to send a reply. I mean this guy and everyone else working in that hospital are saints really - they work like dogs and my complaining is the thanks they get. He even hoped I was on the mend. Chastened. Though if they'd tried to give me a nicotine patch I fear I would have completely lost my rag. The blog of course had some exaggeration for effect. Anyhow - this is what I sent back.

Hi there,

Thank you for your considered reply.
You will have to excuse me, I am just being the same petulant ungrateful sod I was when I was in your hospital. It is meant to be taken lightly and I'm sorry if you took it seriously as a reflection on the institution. I could equally have written a piece on the good experiences - though that would be less fun, and quite a bit shorter.
Smoking is my weakness and bugbear

Cheers
Simon

Cancerous Performance

2004-08-17T14:54:00.000+12:00

This originally appeared in the Herald here I reproduce it in full because it is so short. Yet so rewarding.

Hospital smoking room for terminally ill
17.08.2004

Terminally ill patients at Hawkes Bay Hospital will soon have their own smoking room, despite the health board's recent adoption of a non-smoking policy.

The 14sq m room will be for the sole use of terminally ill patients who have obtained written permission from their doctors.

Absolutely brilliant.

Sets me thinking like. I recently spent a heavily sedated week at the mercy of the Public Health System. I'm not sure I'd normally capitalise those words but anything that manages to distinguish itself so by such rank awfulness certainly merits the upper-case approach.

During my brief incarceration at Middlemore Hospital I encountered the full force of the smokefree policy that, while making perfect sense in theory, is an unworkable arse in the all-important practice.

While I waited 5 days for an evermore delayed operation on nil-by-mouth (after, incidentally, losing packets of blood and sustaining some not inconsiderable trauma) I was not allowed to smoke anywhere in hospital grounds.

Yes, smoking is bad. Awful, pointless, to be discouraged etc. But it is at your more difficult times that the incendiary crutch comes in most useful. Like when, through an act of god or some other bad-minded higher force, you are confronted with the news that have lost use of your dominant hand for a number of years. And lost the use through a grisly, quite frankly shocking, little accident. To add insult to this injury I was also put into this phenomenally inept institution, known affectionately amongst healthcare professionals as Muddlemore, put in here against my will or wish and denied leave to smoke.

The salt in the wound bit is that the cravings to do so were mainly brought on by the very inadequacies that the hospital foisted onto me. To catalogue all the shit I waded through here would be boring, and besides everyone who has been through a public hospital would have stories as good if not better, but it'll suffice to say that the nurse was distressingly overworked; the communication between medical staff and patient was distressingly non-existent; the food, when I was finally allowed to eat some, was simply distressing; the noise, all night, all day, all morning, was you-get-the-picture.......

To single out some of the mal-practice-suit-worthy mishaps by my nurse would also be unfair. It is not really her fault that her endless shifts, patients and lack of English conspired to provide her with a dickensian ineptitude.

Not that I forbore at the time. At one stage, directly after my operation, drugged out of my guns and officially still under general anesthetic, I awoke and let them have it. Awake in the recovery room twenty minutes out of the O.R I caused quite a commotion. After setting a new record for morphine administered I was still not asleep as, by rights and physics, I ought to have been. My friends and family, longer suffering than even the pompous I, entered the ward to find me yelling abuse at the nurses who, by now legally no longer able to give me any more morphine for risk of killing me, were offering me panadol. Not a pretty scene ensued, with a charmingly euphemistic and flattering eye-witness account likening my juvenile and solidly medicated performance to Winston Churchill had he found himself in a Nazi POW Camp Hospital.

But before all this, perhaps leading to all this, there was the not being allowed to smoke.

On the first day there I was instructed, by a none too interested security guard, that I was not to light the cigarette in my mouth. I had managed to steal five minutes outside, feeling weak in body and mind as a result of interminable waiting. So there I was, a drip connected to my arm, it, in turn, connected to an unwieldy wheeling device and my mouth very much connected to the smoke. And he, in no uncertain terms, was not going to let me smoke it. My closest option for complying with the no-smoking in the grounds policy was to cross two roads, get my way through a hedge and then over a railway line.

Which, although I didn't do it then ,was what I spent the next 4 days doing. And quite a picture it makes too - a bunch of hospital-gowned, drip-adorned mal-contents smoking in Middlemore Train Station out in the open in the middle of winter. Surely there is some line to be found with a little more compassion for those in the throes of nicotine addiction. This certainly did not look to me like public health, the actions of a benevolent bureaucracy. It looked like a good-intentioned state-sanctioned fuck-up playing out, and to hell with the people who fall outside the rule-making. Well, to hell or the train station (I would have picked hell for the warmth - nothing is worn under those hospital gowns and it is unforgivingly cold on those platforms in June).

So good on Hawkes Bay Hospital for that ounce of flexibility. Though it still isn't such a good deal - in order for the great bureaucracy to allow you to exercise your legal right to smoke you have to be terminally ill. Talk about setting the bar high. And more worryingly you need a note from your Doctor to let you in the room. As if hospitals were already not condescending enough to their patients.

Ah well, it is the small clawing back of rights that lead to the bigger......I hope.

A River in Egypt

2004-08-12T15:04:00.000+12:00

The magic thing about being in the bfm orbit is that it can provide you with the opportunity to talk with some very interesting characters.

Not many would enjoy the prospect of, for example, getting up at 6am to interview Michael Cullen about Foreshore and Seabed legal intricacies but, for me, I'm ecstatic that there is such access. These people are in no way obliged to give up their time and I feel very lucky that listeners are good enough to, well, bother. We never pay the subjects, nor, for that matter, do bfm pay me - probably for very good reasons.

Today, to get to the point, was certainly one of the feeling-lucky days.
Intrigued by all of the arguments over the proposed visit by disgraced historian David Irving, I thought it was worth a try to see if he'd come on the show.

The result of which is available here - or here

I hope you find it interesting. It quite knocked the stuffing out of me.
I'm interested to hear what people think - how does he maintain this veneer of being reasonable when he so patently is not? Or what do you reckon?

Lifejackets Optional

2004-08-06T08:57:00.000+12:00

Tomorrow sees a free Zaoui concert happening at the Cityside Baptist Church at the top of Mt Eden Road. The afternoon kicks off at 3 30 and Don McGlashan will be playing. There will be poetry too, perhaps even a reading of a poem Zaoui wrote.

Later on a candlelit walk will take place, heading down to the gates of Mt Eden jail, the candles – according to the University students who organised this - will be a symbol of shared commitment to justice, equality and a world without fear.

This will be a protest to draw attention to the fact that a year has elapsed since Zaoui was granted refugee status, but as the SIS have gone about compiling a risk certificate - and trying to find someone who can keep their bias to themselves for long enough to review it - Zaoui has languished in jail.

In the course of this year that Zaoui has been treated, and locked up, as guilty until proven innocent his supporters seem to have gone back in time.

Poetry readings, candlelit walks and protests in general are not very now right now. Actually giving a shit is not very in either.

Embarrassment and apathy seem to have risen to the degree that someone mentions this kind of event and all you can think of is earnest sandal-y types talking about class war. Which is a shame because there are very serious problems with the way NZ is treating Zaoui that need to be addressed.

But you don’t see any serious assessments of it in the Herald until they weigh in with the Government line – that France and Belgium have their reservations – and they weighed in with this line before we even knew it was the Government line.

And now the Herald is going to print pictures of this as some kind of fell-out-of-the-sixties protest with glee – further marginalizing the issue into some kind of irrelevant hippy hobby horse.

The issues in the treatment of Zaoui are in fact tremendously dry. And tremendously numerous. There are whole websites, and one suspects lives, dedicated to compiling these so I shant try to canvass them – head out and have a look – but what I will assure you of is that every other country Zaoui has been to – even the ones that found him guilty of low level criminal association type charges - treated and housed him better than we have.

For 11 months he was in solitary confinement at Paremoremo – we don’t even do that to rapist murderers. But to a man claiming refugee status – and recieving it - we treat him with Napoleonic justice, guilty until innocent, when even the French managed to treat him better.

Maybe this is because NZ felt snubbed – he came to us via a handful of countries and ten years, and our being last to catch the political hot potato has left us angry. I mean before NZ came Burkina Faso, a snub enough to put sensitive Kiwi noses out of joint

But in any event if you are concerned about the way we are treating Ahmed Zaoui and how this reflects on our country it would do well to head along to the Cityside church. I’ll be there in spite of the planned candles and poetry. I can’t help but wonder how the flames will keep alight during such a wet action. Even so, regardless of your feelings about his guilt or innocence it does well to remember that the most sensible slogan in all this is ‘Free Zoaui or Give Him a Fair Trial” – because the ugly reality of this is that we wont even let him or his lawyers know what we are accusing him of. It is like something out of the dark ages

2004-08-05T11:35:00.000+12:00

Hang on, Where is Bruce Willis?

2004-08-02T17:45:00.000+12:00

Here is a little something that got my blood up. At first I thought it might be an April Fool. Apparently it is serious. It originally appeared in the Independent, and I first saw it in the Weekend Herald.

Below I reproduce the story, as it appeared, and if you'll allow me I'll run through it with you, commenting at will. Should be fun.

British children to get jabs against drug addiction
26.07.2004
By SOPHIE GOODCHILD and STEVE BLOOMFIELD

A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by British ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

Jesus. Hold up. Come again?

A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by British ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

What exactly are British Ministers doing thinking that their mandate extends to deciding physiological characteristics of future humans?

Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.

Who would be at risk? Poor people, kids unfortunate enough to have criminal parents, pretty much the dark and oppressed Ill bet.
Royal love rats and Parker-Bowles offspring are pretty unlikely to be jabbed. Theyre white, rich and into coke. Important difference.

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

Protection from the euphoria. What kind of protection is that? Where is our protection from the kind of people who wish to protect people from euphoria?
This is, if you'll pardon a touch of hysteria, the kind of condescending and controlling evil wrapped up in professed good intentions that informed eugenics and the Holocaust.

What if these kids want to have the chance to experience euphoria, even if illegal? Anti-drug laws are one thing but Governments are not there to decide what future citizens are going to be permitted to experience.

Further, surely not all the euphoria one experiences when taking these drugs is unique to taking the drugs. To vaccinate against euphoria might have effects on euphoria released by other legal activities.

Pre-programming the responses of humans to substances smells draconian. And it continues.. it appears that a lot of people are pushing this along:

The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a special project to investigate ways of using new scientific breakthroughs to combat drug and nicotine addiction.

A national anti-drug immunisation scheme is one of the proposals being put forward by the Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs project, an expert committee of scientists appointed by the Government earlier this year.

Professor David Nutt, a leading government drugs adviser who sits on the committee, told the IoS that anti-drug vaccines for children are likely to be among the panel's recommendations when it reports next March.

This, Greenies and Christians, is a panel of government appointed people playing God. Not with tomatoes but with people. Deciding what they will be permitted to experience. If you are a God squader or an anti-GE type this should be infuriating to you. But the issue is not even on the radar.

Professor Nutt, head of psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol and a senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, said: "People could be vaccinated against drugs at birth as you are against measles. You could say cocaine is more dangerous than measles, for example. It is important that there is a debate on this issue. This is a huge topic - addiction and smoking are major causes of premature death."

It is important there is debate. I'd like to debate just what you think you are doing Nutt.
Actually, Professor Nutt? They're taking the piss. Surely. I mean Psychopharmacology? Listen to this - Prof Nutt of the madey-uppy-namey-discipline says "cocaine more dangerous than measles!" But, ridiculuos as it seems, this is on the level. In any event I'm certainly developing a psychopharmalogical response - I feel very angry and in need of a drink.

Im not sure if cocaine is more dangerous than measles, but Im certain that the war on drugs becomes more dangerous than drugs when these science fiction dystopia solutions are being seriously mooted.

According to the Government's own figures, the cost of drug addiction - through related crime and health problems - to the economy is £12bn a year. There is a strong incentive for the Government to find new ways to halt spiralling addiction.

Last week, the IoS revealed that cocaine use had trebled in Britain with increasing numbers of users switching to highly addictive crack cocaine.

So it is popular. And expensive. And illegal. Perhaps if it were popular and inexpensive and legal 80% of the problem would disappear and the 20%, to give a generous figure, that have trouble with drugs could be better helped and focused on. But all these noses in the money trough that is constantly replenished to fight the war on drugs would be put out. And we cant have that. No, better to extend government powers.

Scientists are already conducting trials for drugs that can be used by doctors to vaccinate against cocaine, heroin and nicotine addiction.

Xenova, the British biotechnology firm, has carried out trials on an anti-cocaine vaccine which showed that 58 per cent of patients remained cocaine-free after three months.

58%? Just by stopping their pocket money you could have better results.

Meanwhile, experts at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, have developed a super-virus, harmless to humans, which produces proteins that can block or reduce the effects of cocaine.

Oh come on. This is a bad movie script. We know how this goes, Evil Corporations engineer super-virus to control behaviour. Society enslaved. Freedoms crushed. Some dickhead reads out some Orwell quotes. It is so familiar it is cliché. But one thing is missing. Where are the good guys to save us from this fate? Bruce Willis would be nice, or a mid-80s Arnie.

The team at Scripps tested the virus on rats by injecting it into their noses twice a day for three days. On the fourth day, the rats were given a shot of cocaine. The researchers found that cocaine had more effect on the rats not injected with the virus than those that were.

Shit, I'll settle for Stallone if I have to.

Scientists hope the virus will help stop the cravings experienced by cocaine users for the drug by
blocking the pleasure they normally associate with cocaine.

This seems way too close to female circumcision for my liking. Clitorises make woman unruly and lustful. Cocaine makes the proles unruly and troublesome. Cant have that.
Lets chop off their pleasure sectors to make them pliant. Sure it denies the pleasure their bodies were built for, but this is for their own good.

In fact this is exactly what this is. Female circumcision writ large.

This anti-drug medication is expected to be available to users within the next two years in the form of a nasal spray.

Well, slightly less intrusive maybe. Anyhow, it is coming soon. But where are those good guys? How is the reception?

Proposals to introduce a national anti-drug vaccination programme have been greeted with a cautious welcome by MPs and experts.

What? Where is the caution? They have funded this along every step of the way. This didnt just happen, this is known as planning.
Problem is no one wants to be seen as soft on drugs. If only the same stigma was attached to soft on civil liberties. Being anti drugs and soft on human rights puts you in good company; Hitler was a notable example of this thinking and, in fact, all totalitarian regimes take this line. Pol Pot's Cambodia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Blair's Britain.

Ian Gibson, head of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, said the Government would have to carry out public consultation.

That is good. The public need their say. Just so long as you have an open mind Dr Ian Gibson.

"There is no reason to think this would not be a starter or beneficial," said Dr Gibson, Labour MP for Norwich North.

It would appear not.

"But ... proper consultation with the public needs to happen well in advance."

So what is he saying? - this is a goer but we do need to undertake consultation. Itd look bad otherwise.
It augers well.

David Hinchliffe, chairman of the Commons Health Committee and Labour MP for Wakefield, said: "This could have a huge impact on society in terms of preventing damage to others and dealing with addicts. [But] the ethical perspective does need to be looked at closely."

Wonderful. Someone talking about ethics. Lets see how this article goes on to address this important issue:

The National Treatment Agency, which manages drug-addiction programmes, welcomed any new ways of treating addiction but said there was no "magic bullet".

And that is, quite seriously, the full attention payed to ethical considerations. That is how the article ends. Brilliant.

Is anyone asking these questions?

Am I the only person who thinks this is sick?

Dance of the Two Veils

2004-07-30T15:43:00.000+12:00

Something strange is afoot. Leighton Smith and lawyers are in agreement.

We are talking here about the fuss over the burka-ed Muslim women declining to unveil to give evidence in a Court case. This is a good one for talkback land. ‘Either play by our rules or go home’ is pretty much the cry that has been going up from all of our long-time listening, first time calling friends.

The part where it gets odd though is when the bulk of the legal profession find themselves in agreement with the gist of this argument. Strange times indeed when the ultra-careful lawyer types and the exuberantly offensive talk backers see eye-to-eye.

What’s the problem? Don’t we live in a tolerant society were people are free to do what they want, even if what they want to do is be hidden head-to-toe bar a gap for the eyes? Shouldn’t these people, whose right to religious expression New Zealand protects, be allowed to go to Court without stepping out of their customary garb?

Well yes and no. The consensus call seems to be that you can do this anywhere and anytime you want except if you are giving evidence in a trial.
The ability for a Judge and Jury to assess the reliability of a witnesses’ testimony from their delivery - especially how they look how they present it - is an established and vital tenet of our Justice system. And in a country run like ours where an independent Justice system is part of the state apparatus then if you are in this country you have to play by its rules. No choice about it. No person can avoid doing so. It isn’t like choosing between swearing on a bible or taking a non-religious oath, it is an integral part of ascertaining the truth in a case. Part of keeping the just in the Justice System if you will.

A possible parallel, one which follows talkback language, would be a woman from New Zealand heading into a Shar’ia law court in a halter-neck top and mini-skirt - it just simply could not be done. The difference here is we agonise over whether to compel these two women to unveil while there our western dressed woman wouldn’t make it into the room.

So even if it offends inclusive sensibilities it is best not to make the established Justice system bend to accommodate a small group of new citizens. It would be churlish to expect countries you visited to alter to fit your mores, rather than the other way round. But try finding a Judge here with the bravery to say this. According to Defence Lawyer Colin Amery he has been through three Courts looking for a Judge with the mettle to rule either way on whether the veils have to go. Tricky political situation apparently. I hope it isn’t political correctness in play, mainly as it has actually become physically painful to hear the knee-jerk dismissals of such behaviour. I’m actually developing a pre-emptive flinch in response to the torrents I know will follow from an inanely wet action. In fact the usage of ‘politically incorrect’ has become so cartoon-ish that the term itself is in danger of being stripped of what little meaning it had in the first place and becoming an oxy-moron.

Best to remember then that no one is being nasty, no one’s being insensitive, they are just applying the set of rules that run the country to everyone in it. Actually I’d better stop now. This is starting to sound like a one law for all argument. Although you’d hope that this would be the case, ugly politicians have, as with political correctness, made one law for all into an ugly sounding idea.

How to Train Terrorists and Other Dogs

2004-07-28T17:42:00.000+12:00

How to train terrorists and other dogs.

If you have ten people sitting around a table and one person feeds a dog from the table then the dog will continue to come back for more.

Simple really, but evidently not simple enough for the Philippine government or populace to grasp. This idea is at the heart of the dilemma Manila faced over the abducted man, Angelo de la Cruz.

The story so far - a group of AK-47 wielding aspirant murderers kidnapped de la Cruz. They shot a home-movie with him, except in this amateur theatrical they wear masks on their faces and he wears unspeakable fear. They demand, against a backdrop of a rallying flag, that the Philippines withdraw their troops or they will behead Angelo de la Cruz, who has the unfortunate accident of birth of hailing from that country.

Right, so that was the face of it – head off or head off.
Never mind that the Philippines had only 51 troops stationed in the country. Never mind that they were there to bring stability to the country. Never mind that the troops were due to leave in only one months time anyway. Never mind that Angelo de la Cruz was working for companies that are trying to reconstruct the country with international money. Never mind that it is not the fifteenth century and that pretty much the only people barbarous enough to behead anyone anymore are America’s favourite ally, Saudi Arabia.
No, regardless of all this these dogs too low to show their faces issued this ultimatum. And the Philippines reacted how?

No matter how many times the other nine people do not feed the dog it will keep coming back and be a nuisance to all.

They fed the dog from the table. They promised to speed up the withdrawal of their troops in return for the safety of their citizen.

This entire issue is one outside of whether the Philippines should have been there in the first place. It is well beside the question of if America should have gone in there. A million miles away. It is a simple, painfully, blindingly simple – you cannot give in to terrorist demands.

By dealing with these terrorists the Philippines has unwittingly accomplished two things; they have made the deaths of other hostages whose Governments did not acquiesce to demands worth nothing and they have further endangered the lives of every foreign national in Iraq who now all face a higher likelihood of abduction and death.
This may sound drastic but is not. Again, beside any question of the legitimacy of foreign nationals’ presence in Iraq this is a matter of policy. Do you, as the Australian Foreign Minister put it, let gunmen dictate a nation’s foreign policy? If just one country does then you will find, just as with the dog at the table, the gunmen will keep trying it.

It takes all ten people not feeding the dog to stop the cur from annoying you at meal times.

Not that the Philippines are alone in callous short-term self-interest. The Spaniards got the whole thing started.
It has all been downhill since the Madrid bombings altered the course of the Spanish elections. The catastrophic campaign advertisement from an al-Qaida affiliate granted the Socialists a greater majority than they had expected and brought about the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.

To step back and look at this transaction the Spanish accepted a very bad deal. At the cost of 191 mostly Spanish lives and the injury of another 2000 Spain did what the perpetrators of the act wanted. And what, past embarrassment, did Spain get back?

They got, if you remember the habits of dogs and terrorists, the chance to have the same horrors threatened or used against them next time unscrupulous people don’t like what they are doing. And further to this they get the special consolation of aiding and abetting the spread of terror tactics.

The kind of people who make a living out of making condescending cover-all statements, glasshouse notwithstanding, like to say that the Arab world detests weakness in its leaders and sees compromise and nuance as signs of this detestable weakness. Quite apart from attempting to speak for a world, as these are the actions of disparate elements that happen to be mainly Arab, I don’t think this mantra-like incantation fits in terrorist cases. No, it is more a case of terrorists loving weakness. They see weakness and they exploit it as unthinkingly as a dog. Way to give a dog a bone.

2004-07-22T17:58:00.000+12:00

Mossad.madness

Huge things are going on in little old NZ. You know this is the case when you turn on CNN and there is Helen Clark (our Helen!) drawling in nuu zeelund to all the world. A quick switch of the remote and there she is doing the same thing on BBC world. In fact she is all over my brand new SKY Digital platform. Which disturbed me really, because when our flat first decided to get SKY this most certainly was not the kind of female over-exposure we had envisaged.

But what was going on? She was, as far as I could tell, giving Israel a telling off.
That’s right, Israel. The guys with an estimated 200 nuclear weapons. The guys who on three occasions have beaten off a handful of armies from more populous countries and taken their territory. The same Israel that has a nasty habit of sending helicopter gun-ships to clear up arguments. Something was up.

Turns out Israel’s secret service had been trying to procure New Zealand passports. And not just any passport, the passport of a wheelchair bound cerebral palsy sufferer. Not cricket in any jurisdiction. At least that is what our Government reckoned. I’m staying out of pointing the finger on this one – Mossad have a track record of pursuing enemies to the end of the earth, or South America depending on whatever is closer, and making their displeasure known. Down Mossad. Nice Mossad. Anyway they wanted these passports because we are known to be such an unthreatening nation that carriers of such get an easy reception around the world. To read into this we are known as being so impotent that dangerous people, wolves if you will, want to dress up in our sheeps clothing. Which makes it even odder for Helen to be ticking off Israel. What are we meant to do about it?

Well in the time honoured tradition of scorned people everywhere we are not going to invite Israelis over to our place anymore. Honestly, the lynchpin in our sanctions on this rogue nation was to un-extend the possibility of an invitation to their head of state to visit us when he visits Australia later in the year.
To which, and you may think I’m making this up, but I promise I’m not, the head of state has responded with something along the lines of: “well I didn’t even want to, or plan to, come to NZ anyway”.
Way to go New Zealand: cancel a trip that wasn’t happening - you can’t snub someone who is already snubbing you. But it isn’t like we can do anything else.

Which is the thing really. We have a bad track record of ‘showing them’. Once the French came along and blew up a boat in one of our harbours killing a man in the process. A rugby field up north was also dug up to hide the dynamite beforehand and that garnered similar outrage. To show the world how angry we are about this terrorist action we call it the Rainbow Warrior Incident. That’ll scare them. Maybe we can call this passport case the Moonbeam Vegetable Incident or perhaps the Sunshine Cripple Case.

Further to our shame when we caught those French murderers we caved in to French government demand after French government demand until, and you’re excused if you stop believing me here, we toyed with the idea of extraditing the killers to a Club Med Resort Island. And then we went ahead and did so.

On the back of all this it is no surprise that the Israelis thought us a soft option. The best thing to come out of it all would have to be the lengths to which one of the passport fraudsters – Urie Kelman - went to in order to keep his appearance secret. He wore ski masks, balaclavas, beanies, hats, glasses, in fact everything up to a Groucho Marx mask. In court he had his hand over his face for the entire 125 minutes. Israel, however, will still not confirm that they were their spies that got caught. If they aren’t spies then maybe they should stop acting like they fell out of a cheap cold war thriller.

Which is, last of all, the craziest thing in the whole process – we caught their spies. Little old NZ. Big Bad Mossad. And NZ, like a little David killed their Goliath. Alhough we can’t take that metaphor too far – David was the Jew in the original.

Go Helen though. Seeing there is very little else we could do except bluster at Israel you really let them have it. And, might I add, at some danger to yourself, considering Israel’s propensity to deal to dissenters by gunship or bulldozer. Come to think of it you weren’t speeding to get to the rugby at all where you? …………………

2004-07-16T14:24:00.000+12:00

It's Party Time

So Tariana Turia has been delivered back into parliament bringing along with her a brand new Maori Party.
Even though only 9 thousand or so bothered voting in this by-election, and that National and Labour did not even bother contesting it, this birth of a new voice for Maori is one of those real big significant moments you hear about. Historical like. Although so far those it purports to represent are not receiving much of a service.

This Maori Party is an odd beast. The Te Tai Hauaura electorate voted it into being site-unseen. In a novel twist on the electoral process the party did not actually present any policy for people to vote on. None at all. They promised, however, that once they were voted in they’d set about working out what they stood for. People may suspect that this is how politics really works but parties are rarely, if ever, this open about it.

The reason they could do this is because the electorate was actually voting to let everyone know what they didn’t like. They didn’t like how Tariana Turia had been treated by that Helen Clark bully, (making her lie down in limos – the indignity) and they didn’t like the Foreshore and Seabed legislation.

So The Maori Party was voted into being not because people knew what it stood for, but because they knew what it stood against.

Simple really and fair enough too. Except, now that they are a party in Parliament they seem to have already forgotten what it was that they were busy standing against.

In some of their first public pronouncements as a living breathing political entity they have gone to serious lengths to assure the country, and Maoridom in particular, that they aren’t very happy with Labour. No surprises there. What is surprising is that they’ve repeatedly stressed that they are very open to working with National after the next election.
Aye? Come again?
It pays here to take a couple of steps back and do some obvious-stating.

The Maori party is there, principally, because Turia’s electorate did not want the Foreshore and Seabed Bill passed. Neither, come to mention it, did the National party. But the rather important detail they differ over is that Turia’s support base didn’t like it because they thought it took too much away from Maori, while National did not like it because they thought it gave away too much to Maori.

Not natural partners by any stretch of the imagination. In fact National were probably more surprised by these statements of intent than the Maori electorate. I am glad I am not on the Maori roll because if this was the first sentient actions of my best option for parliamentary representation I’d be declaring myself jedi on the next census.

There is in fact a touch of the mythical to the whole process. Just the action of calling yourself The Maori Party is to deal in fantasy. If someone were silly enough to set up the Pakeha Party they wouldn’t necessarily get my vote. The very idea that someone could presume to speak for a large group with something so arbitrary in common would guarantee they didn’t. That someone already has set up the NZ Pakeha party only serves to prove the point – I won’t be voting National anytime soon, well not until I’m older and richer anyway.

The Maori vote, however, is not mythical like a dragon. I say this because it evidently does exist – there are seven special electorates, and because it doesn’t hoard treasure - if you don’t believe me just look at the Tainui Treaty settlement and where all the money in that has gone.
Although it isn’t dragon mythical the Maori vote it is still taken to flights of fancy – as in electing NZ First in a clean sweep a couple of elections ago.
This action of electing seven NZ First MPs in 1996 conclusively proves a couple of things about the Maori electorate:
Firstly it shows that it is a lot more exciting than the General electorate. The only comparable behaviour found in the General electorate is the rise of United Future. The difference being that while no one can remember who is in United Future, no-one will ever forget the NZ First Maori MPs. Especially not Tuku Morgan and his brother-in-law Tau Henare. Indeed Winston Peters, no shrinking violet himself, was so badly burnt by the whole experience that after that debacle he decided to no longer contest the Maori seats, and later decided he wanted to do away with the seats altogether.

And the second thing the NZ First clean sweep proves is that the Maori electorate is not stupid: the very next election it didn’t return a single one of those seven MPs.

But what about The Maori Party’s mixed or still to be made-up messages? It isn’t, strange as it may seem, too much to worry about. By the next election they will, hopefully, have things like guiding principles. Though of course to survive for long they’ll want to stick to them. It might pay to remember that the electorate that just voted Tariana Turia and The Maori party in, Te Tai Hauauru, has the same name as the place Tuku Morgan first stood.

So what, finally, to make of the Maori Party’s counter-intuitive advances to National?

Well it seems to be a severe case of sour-grapes. Turia and company are still livid with Labour. Even so the party probably don’t seriously believe they could work with National. They’re trying to indicate a willingness to do so, basically, to piss Labour off and make them do the wooing. Not a big and clever tactic but a tactic none the less.

In any event, for The Maori electorate’s sake this had better not be a bit of the old my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend philosophy. This approach would hold up fine, except The Maori Party seems to have forgotten, or not realised, that in this case their enemy’s enemy is also their natural predator.

2004-07-15T15:25:00.000+12:00

Prison Style

There has been a lot of bruhaha recently over Dr Don’s speech to the Sensible Sentencing Trust. After the reversal of the National Party’s fortunes brought about by the now infamous Orewa race-relations speech there was a more than a wee bit of expectation riding on this, the second effort in the Brash big five.

So how did it go down? What did he say? Why do we care?
Firstly – not as well as they’d hoped
Secondly – lock them up then lock them up some more
Third answer – because if we’re not careful he is very likely to be the next PM.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am in fact a fan of Dr Brash. I love the idea of a libertarian in charge of the only big conservative party. It is great news.

Dr Don is all for letting people be. He has a good track record too - he voted for the Civil Unions Bill, he voted for Prostitution Reform, he was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; he is genuinely tolerant of other creeds, races and sexualities, and, lest we forget, he has a wife from Singapore.

With the exception of his wife’s origin, which doesn’t really prove anything, this is all the best news you could hope to hear. It could easily be worse – you only have to look so far as Australia, a country pretty similar to our own to see how.
In party political terms Brash is in the same position here as John Howard is there, and look at Howard – nuke-mad, ambivalent at best to homosexuality, the man is conservative in the worst sense of the word.
Howard is a guy who doesn’t know how to say sorry on behalf of Australia’s past to their first people, the Aborigines. He can’t or won’t say sorry for little things like removing their land and killing a huge number in massacres and, believe it or not, hunting trips. Then there is the little matter of not having Aborigines as citizens right up until the late sixties.
Oh yes, and John Howard wants to be America’s Sheriff. Quite apart from the camp overtones, I don’t know if anyone thinks that such a good idea.

Right. So even if this might say more about Australia in general than Howard in particular it is luckier than we often credit to have someone so socially liberal as Dr Don Brash in charge of the Conservative forces.

Until, that is, he starts coming out with the kind of Old Testament solutions to social problems that would make John Howard blush. Which is pretty much what this speech on Law and Order, or rather Crime and Punishment, was all about. Actually that could be revised again – Order and Punishment were at the heart of it.

Dr Don signalled in this speech that he wants to lock people up for longer. He wants to offer criminals fewer second chances – none if they’re violent offenders. Also he’d like to lower the qualifying age to be a criminal, maybe introduce some hard labour and build more prisons to house all of these criminals serving longer sentences.

If these seem like overly simplistic reductions then that is because they are overly simplistic policies being advocated; Dr Brash likes things to be as simple as black or white. Which is odd when you consider that in these policies he is particularly quiet about colour. When you are outlining plans to double the prison population it might just pay to have a look at who it is going to affect. If you did you could find yourself wondering aloud why 80% of the people in jail are Maori and Pacific Islanders. Wondering about or trying to work out ways to reduce these numbers would, you’d think, be priority number one. But, just as in the Orewa speech, professing colour-blindness is a much simpler solution.

Deciding 12 year olds are adult criminals is plain scary. It’s a special kind of politician who tries to lower the age that a child can be tried as an adult. Tough gig really to be 12, not able to vote, smoke, drink, have sex, get married, have a credit card or see The Day After Tomorrow at the movies, but under Dr Brash 12 year olds can feel free to be tried and punished as adults.

Hard labour is a goodie. In order to introduce hard labour New Zealand would have to repeal a United Nations convention. This would have the effect of putting us is in the company of such natural partners as North Korea, Soviet splinter republics and despotic regimes aplenty. Although the United Nations is, in general, a toothless talk shop and about as effective as United Future, these conventions are about the human rights of prisoners. Enforced vocational training is one thing, breaking rocks on a chain gang is quite another. Apparently the National party strategy room has decided that international opprobrium is a small price to pay for a couple of percentage points in the polls.

When delivering a speech on public security, which is what this speech was billed as, maybe you’d want to concentrate on how best to stop these thing happening. I’d hate to seem a bit naive, but it seems silly to discuss solutions to crime without looking at causes and methods of prevention: who is doing it and how to stop it. These questions are especially important when you consider that it costs 50,000 dollars a year to house an inmate. And that approach doesn’t seem to be ridding us of violent crime all that successfully at the moment. But what people want to hear, it appears, is how many more are going to be locked up and for how much longer. Brilliant.

Around about here it might be fair to wonder if there isn’t something ugly in Wellington’s water. All the parties in Parliament, with the exception of the Greens, who believe in cuddling to cut crime or something like that, are competing to show us who takes the toughest line on crime, whose punishments are meaner and who wields the biggest stick. Generally people who spend too much time touting their stick size are desperately trying to compensate for something.

Quite beside all this you have to wonder how National’s poll rise is being sustained. I might be a bit slow on the uptake here, but as far as I can work out it runs like this: National under Brash is literally plundering the policies of ACT and NZ First. And on the back of stealing the unattractive ideas of the two most unattractive parties in parliament they have pretty much doubled their support in 6 months. Go figure.

So that was big speech number two. Report card - poor to middling, must do more homework and stop stealing the sweets off the other parties.
But then again that was the report card to speech number one and we all know that did National very little harm at all, thank you very much.

The further three speeches we have to look forward to, if that is the right expression, are going to be on welfare, education and economics. Now I’ve no crystal ball and freely admit that I am the last person to be able to tell you what is happening in Dr Don’s head but I think it is safe to pick the likely tenor of these next speeches:

Welfare – get the buggers on the dole to do some bloody work
Education – In my day we learnt our three Rs and so should you
Economics – If you work harder, save more and if you don’t have to pay so much bloody tax you’ll have more money.

So there you go. You heard it here first.
Actually that’s not quite right – you’ve heard it all before – it is exactly, spot-on, entirely the kind of thing your redneck uncle has been saying all your life – and, bang there we go, that mindset, on current polling, might just be our next government. Food for thought indeed.

2004-07-14T17:35:00.000+12:00

The following is a transcript of the last broadcast interview Michael King gave before his untimely passing. It aired March 25, 2004, on 95bFM. The interview was conducted by Simon Pound and transcribed by Matt Nippert.

Simon Pound: It must have been a hard time of late with Janet Frame's death, but perhaps there's some consolation your biography helped cement her place in the New Zealand imagination.

Michael King: Well I'd like to think it had that effect. At least it means Janet got the degree of recognition and appreciation that she deserved before she died. Because if Janet had died 30 or 40 years ago she'd always be known as that crazy old woman who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and wrote some funny books. It's really only been in the last 10 years that her reputation has consolidated and been fully recognized in New Zealand.

SP: And it must have been quite a wonderful occasion to receive the Prime Minister's Award for services to the arts in her company.

MK: In her company, and in the company of Hone Tuwhare, it was marvellous. They were the other two winners, and they were two writers who are a generation ahead of me, and who I absolutely revere and respect. It was wonderful, yes.

SP: You've said that the reason you write books for a general audience, rather than academics, is that you feel people need to hear the stories and you need to get the widest access possible.

MK: Yes, I still think that's a scholarly function, because my books, I hope, are written in a scholarly way. The point I've always made is that I'm writing for a general audience, rather than just for an audience of academics or fellow historians.

SP: The best thing history can provide, I guess which is a sense of context for New Zealand readers.

MK: I hope so, and indeed in current affairs or history, like the seabed and foreshore debate, only make sense in the context of history, so you need that background.

SP: That's one other things that you've been known for over the years, taking a sociological viewpoint and examining what it means to be Pakeha in New Zealand. What do you think, now, today, what it means to be a New Zealander in general, and a Pakeha specifically?

MK: A huge change has taken place in my lifetime. When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British. That of course has changed. I doubt if you'd find anybody now who would see the New Zealand identity in that way. So what's happened is that since that time we've become conscious of the fact we've got two major cultural streams. The Maori or indigenous one, and the other one that I chose to call Pakeha, and I've got no problem with that particular name. I'm astonished that some people do.

SP: By that you mean all other immigrants, not just a purely white term?

MK: No, no, no. Pakeha can have two meanings in its Maori usage. It can refer to people who came in origin from Europe, but it's also used in the sense of Maori and non-Maori. So that anything in New Zealand that is not specifically Maori would, in the Maori language, be identified as Pakeha. So I would use that word now for mainstream New Zealand culture. And I would regard it, as I've said in other forums and at other times, I don't regard it anymore as an imported culture or tauiwi, foreign, culture. I regard Pakeha culture now as a second indigenous culture. Although it has its origins in Europe, it's vastly changed in the 150 years or so that Pakeha have been in New Zealand. It's changed in interaction with Maori culture and in interaction with the land. Most New Zealand Pakeha people now when they go back to their countries of origin, they may feel some sense of affinity there - but they don't think that it's home.

SP: In saying that, identity is still emerging, it's still coming together. It's a very positive tone, your book, it seems to be saying "look there are troubles, but we're all in this together and we're not doing that bad a job." Do you think [that with] the divisiveness stirred up by the Orewa speech, we do need to appreciate the fact we're all together in this?

MK: Yes, of course we do. I also think you can't measure the seriousness of the problem by the intensity of the rhetoric. It's less than a decade ago when there was a huge argument going on over the National Government's fiscal envelope proposal, when they were saying they would restrict Waitangi Treaty settlements to a total of a billion dollars. That caused an uproar at hui up and down the country, it caused Sir Charles Bennett to say that he would advise Maori not to fight for New Zealand again. And yes, it was one of those issues that was talked through and eventually laid to rest as I'm sure this one will be. I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

This interview transcript has also been posted on Fighting Talk

2004-07-14T17:15:00.000+12:00

This is an older story I did on a trip turbodating - originally appeared in remix magazine

Our Man Goes Turbodating.
Are more people alone these days? With the huge divorce rates and the ever shrinking marriage numbers it would certainly seem so. One truism is that there is always someone around to make a dollar out of that basic human wish to cohabitate. As a result there are classified ads, dating agencies, table for six and other even older professions.
And now something about our career and entertainment driven lives has thrown up a new mutation. Recently we have seen the emergence of the marriage between the game show and the search for love. Reality TV does have a lot to answer for, but not nearly so much as those who watch these shows and make them popular. Shows such as Joe Millionaire and The Bachelor have taken elements from Survivor, It’s in the Bag and Blind Date chucked them all together and altered the face of dating. It would seem that although we’d love life to imitate art, it in practice resembles crap TV.
Turbodating is one such attempt to cater for the enthusiasm rich and time poor. It is the perfect example of the acceptance of Reality TV premises as a way to live your life. Anyway, the general idea is that you take ten woman seeking men, add ten men seeking women and run a series of seven minute dates. You rate each other as you go, and if you made the right match you progress to the second round.
In practise they spread the women around the room to ten stations, and have the blokes traipse around like travelling salesmen. You meet, chat, sparkle, and charm if you can and then at the end of your seven minutes move to repeat the process. Every participant is furnished with a scorecard listing the names of all the members of the opposite sex, with a corresponding blank box. To say scorecard is misleading though as no scores are recorded, only a very direct Yes or No. At the end of the evening the cards are collected by the organisers, and only if both man and woman have indicated Yes do any numbers get swapped. To increase safety, and one suspects the relevance of the organisers, this is done by e-mail on the following day. In cases of one party saying Yes and the other No then no numbers will be swapped. This last situation is referred to with a lovely euphemism as a partial match.
Well it is all very good in theory, seven minutes isn’t too long if the person is abominable, and is only a teaser if you are interested. It is safe, there is free flowing booze and all quite novel. But to really know if it is any good you’ve really got to go. So I did, fortune favouring the brave and all that.

I’d like to say I turned up without any expectations, with an open mind, no preconceptions. However, the fact is that I had spent the preceding week speculating and pre-judging terrifically. It went so far that I actually had money riding on meeting an overweight Dental receptionist from Botany Downs.
The event was held early in the week at a suitably innocuous inner city suburban Bar, which I will identify only as having a name so improbably and absolutely 80’s so as to make me wonder if this wasn’t a candid camera type set up. In fact between the internet-only contact with the organisers, the credit-card billing and the final disclosure of venue and time just 24 hours before the event the whole affair had a tinge of skull-duggery or at the very least felt as if it had arrived in discreet brown paper packaging.
The evening I selected catered for those between 25 and 35. Unsurprisingly the crowd was at least 75 percent That side of thirty. Still, I felt my youthful male vigour wouldn’t count against me… and perhaps something about a woman’s sexual peak being around thirty also passed through my mind.....
There was something amusingly schoolyard about the initial awkward atmosphere. Before the festivities began everyone turned up, one by one of course, and the boys chatted to the boys while the girls also stuck to themselves. Body language in these situations is always telling. The men stood with that curious blokes-around-the-barbeque stance that men unknown to each other always assume. You know the one, the hand in the pocket, the beer firmly grasped, the conversation strictly sports or work. The ladies seemed to be commenting on clothes and much polite laughter and soft shoulder touching paired with significant craning of necks was going on. I say seemed as too open a gawk would have broken the subtle rules of engagement that had emerged. To look too closely at this stage of proceedings you would seem to be either over eager or reminiscent of a lion searching out the lame gazelle. That’s not to say no appraisals were going on as the whole process resembles a job interview and performance review rolled into one.
In keeping with the schoolyard feel a bell was rung and our attention required. The organisers then set out the Rules for the evening: no talking about your jobs, no mention of last names and nothing unsavoury thank you very much. Toilet breaks were promised and play lunch was provided in the form of roving trays of nibbly things.
The pitfalls of food then. As ever these morsels were badly matched to well mannered consumption. I’m sure that somewhere there lurks a secret covenant between event caterers everywhere. Something that sets out that all snacks, nibbles and canapés must have poppy seeds to lodge between teeth, crumbly biscuits to attach to woollen clothing, inappropriately sized portions that are just to big to politely wolf in one but too small to reasonably bite twice and of course grapes with plentiful pips. Then they never provide anywhere to dump napkins, skewers or any other associated debris. It doesn’t matter what type of occasion it is the food always presents an embarrassing obstacle. This was no different. Whilst in the company of one of the ten she took something from the proffered tray while I declined. Embarrassed, she then murmured something like I was ‘not to think her greedy’. I hadn’t thought her greedy but I now certainly thought that comment inane. Perhaps we should dispense with food all together and stick to alcohol, justifiably known as the social lubricant. The other benefit being that which Groucho Marks maintained – ‘I drink to make other people interesting’.
That’s not to say the Turbodaters were not interesting. Whenever I’ve spoken with people about the evening the first question has always been on the calibre of the participants. There seems to be a deep seated curiosity and suspicion over who actually goes to these things. A couple of factors in the way Turbodating is put together work to weed out the less desirable. Firstly it costs $75 bucks. That may not seem like much but you have to have the available disposable income to part with that amount on what is literally a site unseen basis. This means that you are serious enough to pay for the privilege of taking that risk. And more importantly, that you are so confidant of appearing attractive and interesting to others that you’ll effectively bet money on it. Also not that many people are happy putting themselves into a series of potentially awkward seven minute appraisals where they will then be given a pass or fail grade. Just to ten times break the ice takes a bit of courage and for that reason the scared and socially inept would tend to give this particular dating scenario a miss. Perhaps it is this group, unable or unwilling to make actual human to human contact that trawls the internet sites.
Now I’m not wishing to appear rude, but the blokes just didn’t inspire that much confidence. They were all solid, upstanding blokes. No significant or at least obvious disfigurements, no facial tics. No fatties, no shorties, no Hawaiian shirts. All very standard. Hell they even looked the same, thanks to that awful kind of inept youthful smart casual wardrobe that afflicts those around thirty. Between the pants that look like cargo pants without all the pockets and the striped or block coloured shirts that are made to be worn out, they looked like they all lived near the same shopping mall. Though I suppose these days shopping malls are so generic that everyone sort of does. The general feeling was that this was a bunch of good guys, beta males. But I guess Turbodating isn’t where you go to meet Clark Gable.
From what I could gather of their jobs they all pulled in a reasonably good wicket. Amongst them one was a stockbroker; one looked honestly like the most stereotypical accountant; one travelled regularly between here and Australia. They all were well spoken, seemed intelligent enough and there were no louts. As you can see as a cross section of men in general they failed abysmally but as for men you may wish to have 2.2 children with they shaped up admirably. One of the ten men got a case of cold feet and failed to show, earning all women present a ten dollar refund. And unwittingly emphasising the basic reliable impression these blokes radiated. Cruel material for the undercover journo seemed in very short supply here, though I’m sure these guys would have a thing or two to say about the ponce in the fashionable suit and baby blue shoes.
The women were much more interesting. As with everyone it would be lovely if I didn’t immediately compartmentalize, rate, sort and generally check people out when I met them. But I do, you do, we all do. So, one was hot by any standard. Two more were highly attractive and the rest were as entirely defect free as the blokes. As with women in general their clothes styles varied, much as their overall attractiveness, from the fantastic to the frumpy. Another group of successful professionals amongst which there was to be found: a singer, a lawyer, a café owner and a marketing manager.
Because of the restrictions on conversation every mini-date seemed to start with questioning how they heard about Turbodating or why they came. With the first person I spoke with the question was very much why. I left thinking she may have been a plant of some sort as she was pretty much the opposite of any preconception you could have had. When you first meet someone in a place like Auckland, that is smaller than we can ever give credit to, the first thing you do is try to find common ground. What do you do, What School, when at Uni, worked where, go to which bars. This is always followed by Do you know so and so? And chances are if you don’t know so and so you do know their brother. That’s just how it goes. But to try to follow the rules and to preserve anonymity all such approaches were out of bounds. Which left a lot of questions about travel, general interests, What is on your reading list? Tame stuff, but as a weeder-outer it certainly works.

At the end of the evening the cards were collected and we were invited to step into the bar next door and enjoy an informal. Pretty much everyone did move next door to the new, restriction free environment. Again schoolyard rules prevailed and an anxiousness over whom to address and how. After having just emerged from the heavily structured nature of Turbodating everyone was at a bit of a loss. The desire to not offend was strong. Everyone felt that they were in effect giving up some pride in attending an organised dating event and were therefore acutely aware of peoples’ sensitivities. Add in the fact that everyone in the room had in the last two hours either passed or failed everyone else and you don’t know yet whether you were a passer or a failer in their eyes and the element of the unknown became somewhat oppressive.
Enter alcohol. It turned out in the free form conversation that we then cautiously picked our way through that pretty much everyone had had a stiff drink or two before coming along. Funny this, but that made everyone feel a bit better, to know that everyone was nervous, that no-one was at any advantage or impervious to the nerves. Even among a group of competent professionals who probably hadn’t been in an environment of such spoonfeeding and awkwardness in years. We’ll do odd things to ourselves if we think the gains are worth it.

And were they? Having entered into this evening with a story and an off the beaten track experience as my objective I was pleasantly surprised. It was quite fun. No seven minutes was too long, no partner uninteresting, no male or female objectionable. I can see that for some people this could be a very useful way to meet new people.
Perhaps for people that have reached or are in a static period in their social life. As in they have been in the same job for years, their social circle has shrunk, they are not meeting many new single and interested people. In any of these cases it would be great. Personally I found the whole event far too contrived, and try as the organisers might have to avoid this, patronising. The only way to have made this experience any less organic, natural and real would have been to have cameras rolling, and in a way I guess, this article is that camera. So if we do want dating and who knows what other elements of our lives to take on the same feel as being a Big Brother inmate this really is perfect. To be fair no-one there was looking at it in these terms; they were sincerely interested in meeting people in a different way or determined to have a bit of fun, not take it too seriously.

On the day following the event I received a call from the organisers. Attending as I did on somewhat false pretences I hadn’t indicated Yes or No for anyone. This, they informed me, was not good enough. I was to furnish them with my favourites or that would not be fair to those who entered into the event innocently.
Apparently somewhat more than half of them were charitable enough to send a Yes my way, which may bring the taste of the assembled ladies into significant question. Suitably chastened I picked three, as much to not be rude as of seriousness. I’d got a bit inventive you see when in my mini dates, all in the purpose of self-amusement, and I haven’t a good enough memory to make it as a polygamist liar. Between fudging my age and glossing over insincerity I didn’t feel it would be quite right to pursue anything, as interesting as the people may have been.
Then my big mouth, not for the first time, dropped me in it. I ended up talking Turbodating with a friend, live to air on Auckland’s’ best radio station, b. I only mentioned one of the participants in enough detail for her to identify herself. One who also happened to be one who I had ticked, who therefore had my e-mail address. With characteristic charm and tact I think I described her as hot or stunning or something equally cringe worthy, and then proceeded to doubt her story that friends had paid for her to go as a birthday surprise. Smooth, I know. The next day checking my e-mail one single worded subject line leapt out – Sprung!
None too impressed was she either. Having just listened to me blow my cover she thought she’d give me a piece of her mind, though not without a flirtatious tone. What are the odds? I hadn’t contacted anyone for the reasons above, but, as my return email said, having caught me out, you’re now entirely fair game. Numbers have been exchanged, who knows; maybe this Turbodating doesn’t have to be entirely inorganic.