Opposable thumb

Occupational hazards

2012-01-24T19:17:00.002+13:00

What—now whales are occupying beaches? When will this occupy madness end?

Nail scissors

2012-01-23T21:49:00.003+13:00

'So what can we do to prevent child abuse in New Zealand—or at least minimize its incidence?' Thus Graeme McCormick, a retired Family Court judge, in a long thinkpiece in the December North & South. He goes on: 'I strongly advocate early identification of children at significant risk… Resources could then be targeted at the parents and caregivers… I envisage existing domestic violence coordinators would make a referral to the organization most able to assist in the particular circumstances…'

And so on. There is a great deal more in that vein. All incredibly worthy and well-intentioned, and if that sounds like sneering, it's not, because Graeme McCormick, like countless other unsung people, will have done much in his career to combat or ameliorate child abuse, and will know what he's talking about.

But I find this kind of contribution to the debate terribly saddening, because as I said yesterday, child abuse will never be truly prevented or minimized unless fundamental economic changes are made—changes of a kind neither major political party is willing to address. (Mike Williams put it simply on Nine to Noon this morning when he said we just need to help poor people get wealthier.) So anything short of that may make a little bit of a difference here, and a little bit of a difference there, but will not stem the horrific incidence of child torture, abuse and murder. It would be like trying to empty a river with a teaspoon, or hack back old man's beard with nail scissors.

Am I being naively idealistic in believing it's possible to completely put a stop to child abuse and murder? Before a chorus of 'Yes, you are, you mug' rises to a crescendo, I will just cite two examples of what a society can do if it really puts its collective mind to it: the extraordinary reduction in smoking in the course of just one generation, and the dramatic drop in the road toll by means of a sustained and determined campaign. The fact that we can't apply the same determination to tackling child abuse tells me that, at bottom, we have somehow resigned ourselves to it as a 'fact of life'—a belief made all the more palatable if we allow ourselves to see the abuse as a symptom of moral failure. Maybe it is in some cases; but the pattern of abuse coincides remarkably with the patterns of disadvantage, unemployment and low income. And when you see the problem in those terms, nail scissors just don't cut it.

No hand unflapped

2012-01-22T10:31:00.003+13:00

News item: Deputy prime minister Bill English and Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia are setting up a ministerial committee on poverty under the Maori Party's post-election agreement with the National Party.

News item: Labour's social development spokesperson Jacinda Ardern says with poverty and child abuse so interlinked, the committee could be an opportunity for parties to work together.

News item: Children's commissioner Russell Wills says attacking child poverty should be the first of seven goals in an action plan arising out of the government's green paper on vulnerable children.

News item: Spurred into action by Bryan Bruce's television documentary on child poverty, Whangarei schoolgirl Jazmine Heka plans to spend the summer collecting signatures for a children's rights petition that she hopes to see translated into law.

What do all these plans and statements have in common? Good intentions, yes; familiarity too—how many times have we heard them promoted? That they are being promoted, again, tells us how little progress has been made on tackling 'poverty' and/or 'child poverty' (to borrow the usual definitions for the moment).

But what they most have in common, I'm sorry to say, is their futility and, in the case of the politicians, their hypocrisy. The only honest-to-goodness approach is Jazmine Heka's, because it comes out of idealism, compassion and hope. Good luck with that. Sometimes, just sometimes, public pressure pays off. In this case, however, I don't think a law change is going to cut it.

The politicians' plans are futile and hypocritical because they know perfectly well that child poverty, or any kind of poverty, will never be 'solved' or 'eliminated' or even dramatically improved without fundamental economic changes of a kind neither major party is willing to contemplate, let alone embrace. The very fact that 'poverty' and its close relation 'child poverty' are defined the way they are gives the game away. They're like 'unemployment.' (Sorry about all the inverted commas, but we're dealing with the toy bricks of economists' and politicians' playpens here.) Unemployment, as a mass phenomenon, is not something that happens in spite of the economic system we have: it happens because of it. It's built in; it's no accident. Similarly with poverty, the main driver of crimes like child abuse.

Already a small child has died this year from non-accidental injuries and nothing is surer than that, by the end of the year, the roll of severely abused and murdered children will have risen to at least a dozen. The direct connection between such cases and the social and economic circumstances of the perpetrators is often acknowledged, but when it comes to tackling the root causes of those circumstances, all we get, if we get anything at all, is resource reallocation, greater frontline funding, committees, reports, anguished declarations etc. Hand-flapping, in short. Meanwhile the rich get rich, the poor get poorer and the killings go on.

Solution (or should I say 'solution'): change the system, really change it; don't just fiddle with a few knobs and levers. That doesn't require revolution; it doesn't even, in my view, require the wholesale rejection of capitalism. An example of genuine and far-reaching economic change would be the abandonment of growth as the be-all and end-all of national achievement and the adoption of a genuine progress indicator (GPI) that measures all the factors involved in economic activity. This is hardly a new idea; it has gained a little traction in recent years—even the Treasury has canvassed it; but National and Labour appear to regard it as the political equivalent of Ken Ring's moon meteorology.

Switching from GDP to GPI won't bring people out of poverty overnight, but I'm willing to bet it would be a big step towards practising economics as if people mattered (as E F Schumacher subtitled Small Is Beautiful) and therefore away from the aggressive growth-at-all-costs materialism that inexorably widens the gap between rich and poor. Like a capital gains tax, or amending the Reserve Bank Act to make full employment the main goal, it would start the reorientation of the economy away from its current principal purpose, which—let's be frank—is to serve the interests of shareholders and investors, not working people.

There are many things we could do; but given the persistence of child abuse, child murder and child poverty in our society, you'd have to be very obtuse to believe that simply repeating what's already been tried is going to succeed this time. As Einstein famously said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.'

Yet in his foreword to the government's green paper, the best the prime minister can come up with is: 'We will all need to work hard across a number of fronts and develop new, integrated solutions to improve outcomes for young people.'

That sounds like business as usual to me.

A greater distance

2012-01-21T21:59:00.003+13:00

Reading the old writers, one is constantly struck by the simplicity of their moral attitudes. We seem such craven, complex characters by comparison. Yet were they so simple? Of course not. Less tormented explorers of the ego, perhaps; they knew themselves at a greater distance.

In old music one hears a greater distance between the self and the song.

‘The Thou is older than the I.’—Nietzsche

That makes two of us

2012-01-20T14:43:00.002+13:00

As threatened a few blogs ago, detecting some disturbing implications in an article published in the New Zealand Herald by Josie Pagani, Labour's Rangitikei candidate at the November election, I had intended to write about them. But Chris Trotter has stolen whatever thunder I had by saying pretty much exactly what I intended to say. So I'll take the rest of the day off and let him say it for me here.

Don't ask

2012-01-19T20:00:00.001+13:00

I had to go back and listen again this morning when I thought a BBC news item said: 'At his annual press conference, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov...'

I heard right. He has one a year. Suddenly I feel better about New Zealand politicians' relative accessibility. All right, they may not actually say much of value at their media conferences, but at least they have them regularly.

It was only after a year in office that Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh gave his first media conference. I'm not sure if he has had any since. Nestor Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, gave no media conferences at all during his four years in power. And those are both democracies, not dictatorships.

Loose talk

2012-01-18T08:53:00.002+13:00

Television New Zealand and TV3 are coming under fire for their controversial decision to screen weather reports in the run-up to last year's election.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority says it is deeply concerned that some of the reports could have influenced voting.

It has had a flood of complaints from National Party members who claim that repeated references to a depression moving onto New Zealand were clearly prejudicial to National's election chances.

Many complaints have also been received from Labour Party members objecting to forecasts that a large high would soon cover the country with fine spells increasing.

The Green Party has formally protested about the use of the term 'blue skies,' pointing out that at no stage did any presenter refer to green skies.

The TV networks say they are giving consideration to running neutral weather reports in which presenters do not commit to a particular forecast but give viewers balanced options instead.

The funding agency New Zealand on Air says it doesn't fund weather programs but if it had done so, it would now be really, really worried about its own reputation and would probably want to run and hide and put its head in a toilet bowl.

Meanwhile, the police in Auckland are interviewing a man about an incident on a city street the day before the election. The man is understood to have been saying something out loud that sounded like it was political in nature, as a result of which several women fainted and two men had nervous breakdowns.

Include me out

2012-01-17T14:23:00.003+13:00

Something has been happening to the word 'include.' For reasons I don't understand, its meaning has begun to shift, or at least to widen. Up to now, if you prefaced some statement with the word 'include' or 'includes,' whatever came after it would be partial. For instance, if I began a sentence with the words 'The list includes...,' what followed would by definition be some of what was on the list, not all of it.

Like, 'The Beatles' line-up includes John Lennon and Paul McCartney.' If I said or wrote that, no one once would doubted that there were others in the line-up too.

Yet it is not uncommon now to read, as one could in the New Zealand Herald the other day, something like this:

The shortlist for the 2012 New Zealander of the Year includes Dame Suzie Moncrieff, visionary and founder of the World of Wearable Art Awards, Weta Workshop's Sir Richard Taylor and Dr Sharad Paul for his medical breakthrough in skin cancer treatment.

Reading this, I wondered who else had been shortlisted, and why only those three were mentioned. Then I found it that they were it: they're the whole list. In that case, why not just say 'The shortlist is...'? A curious and seemingly unnecessary shift in the meaning of a word has occurred.

Lying low

2012-01-16T14:13:00.003+13:00

Halfway through January, the political temperature is starting to rise, but still the parties are lying low. And up to a point, that's fair enough: most politicians work bloody hard all year, and for the party leaders, ministers and major spokespeople especially, the relief of three or four weeks out of the public glare must be sanity-restoring. Just meeting their families again—'Hallo, which one are you?'—can only be life-enhancing, if not ego-humbling. Wellington anniversary day (this year, the 23rd) is usually the day when the cabinet has its first meeting of the year and that's when the politicians come bounding out of their boxes again, like greyhounds after the lure.

Having said that, it still seems remarkable that virtually none of them have said a word about the Ports of Auckland dispute. The dispute is no petty squabble; quite apart from its economic significance for a major Auckland employer and the people of Auckland, who (you might have forgotten this) actually own the port company, it raises urgent questions about workforce casualization, worker rights, union power, the privatization debate and the nature of business competition and productivity. Yet no government minister to my knowledge has even passed an opinion on it, let alone proposed a way out of the impasse.

Some will say it's no business of theirs, but by that criterion no minister would ever say anything about anything. Even during these holidays Gerry Brownlee has popped up to comment on government departments relocating out of the Christchurch city centre, Nick Smith fronted the media when the Rena broke, and Phil Heatley has ventured a view on oil exploration. It seems they have all sorts of thoughts, but not of ports.

There is, it's true, a perceivable political rationale for the National Party government staying out of this. Not so with the Labour Party, or at least not a rationale that reflects very well on a party whose very name, if it still means anything, suggests—no, insists—that it should take a stand on the dispute. New leader David Shearer has now been in the job for five weeks, but has said not a thing (about pretty much anything, actually, let alone the port dispute).

Extraordinarily, over at Kiwiblog, David Farrar argues that if Shearer spoke up in sympathy with the Maritime Union workers involved, 'it would just pigeonhole him as captive to the unions which fund the Labour Party... He is the leader of the parliamentary Labour Party and of the Opposition—he is not a union spokesman.'

Eh? A party leader can't comment on a major issue without being seen as somehow compromised? To buy this line would be to accept that politicians should be bland neuters above the fray; spectators in their own country.

One Labour person who has said something at length in public during the past two weeks—Rangitikei candidate Josie Pagani—says Labour will get nowhere if it doesn't reconnect with working people and their aspirations. Leaving aside some disturbing implications of Pagani's article, which I hope to revisit when I've fully digested them, her argument begs the question why Labour has not visibly connected with the Auckland watersiders. If they're not working people of the kind the party claims to represent, then who are?

At the very least, Labour MPs need to counter the kind of spin being put on the dispute by one National politician, albeit a very junior one, who has commented: the new Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross, who argues for a 'significant overhaul' of legislation to stop unions occupying a 'privileged position in New Zealand’s employment law.' Even the Labour MPs' blogsite Red Alert has not responded to that.

One can accept that the Labour Party collectively is having a Very Big Think about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and its place in the scheme of things, but I'm not sure that staying shtum on the big issues of the day is entirely the right way to go about it. All very well to speak out boldly against 'asset sales' but that's a bit like being anti-whaling: a relatively safe stance to take. Engaging vigorously in more contentious, complex debates is the real test of a party. To paraphrase E M Forster, one might say to Labour: how do we know what you think until we see what you say?

ps If it's true, as Farrar says, that Labour's labour spokesperson Darien Fenton at one point joined the Maritime Union's picket line, then I apologize for implying she hasn't taken sides in the dispute. But we still haven't heard from her this year.

2011 in quotes

2012-01-15T20:12:00.003+13:00

Having just come across someone else's list of the most memorable one-liners published or publicly uttered last year, I remembered belatedly that I'd kept my own running list. Here it is.

The underarm incident should be taught as part of the national syllabus. [Sean Plunket, column, Dominion Post 1.1.11]

Young folk love John Key they way they love an American Idol judge. [Tumeke 26.1.11]

Asking Treasury to advise on the wisdom of selling minority stakes in state businesses is like asking kids if they want cabbage or ice-cream. [Vernon Small, Fairfax 27.1.11]

There is no lesser life form. You’re either a plodder with ambition or a plonker with ambition. [Michael Laws 30.1.11 on being a backbench MP]

TVNZ is a dinosaur whose asteroid has already been sighted. [Jane Clifton, Dominion Post 4.3.11]

‘Nobody will question someone in a bright orange vest.’ [Auckland apartment building manager, New Zealand Herald 23.3.11]

‘He wanted to be leader. I said the way you become the leader or co-leader is to join the party and work your way up.’ [Rodney Hide on what he told Don Brash, Herald on Sunday 24.4.11]

‘Last weekend, I was standing behind my leader. This weekend, I will be standing behind my leader.’ [Hilary Calvert, Otago Daily Times 29.4.11]

His basic pitch to the electorate is that he is a nice guy who can be trusted to take the pain out of politics—and, to some degree, the politics out of politics. [Bryan Gould on John Key, New Zealand Herald 17.5.11]

‘While people wish to have continuity and certainty, life does not work that way. Everything passes on in due course and business activity which seeks to protect itself from change simply destroys value, as does government or other social activity which does not embrace impermanence.’ [Rob Campbell, Dominion Post 8.6.11]

'I am absolutely satisfied with the performance of the agency. That’s not to say we can’t do things better.' [EQC chief executive Ian Simpson, online interview, Listener 21.6.11]

'She has a great knowledge of New Zealand. I talked to her before Prince William came out to open the new Supreme Court building. She not only knew a lot about it, she also seemed to know where all the major shops were on Lambton Quay.' [John Key on the Queen, North & South, July]

Appealing to people's better judgment when it comes to paying an extra tax is risky stuff. [John Armstrong, New Zealand Herald 15.7.11]

'We're not going to spend all sorts of money on hair highlights, face waxing, eyebrow plucking and lip gloss for John Minto.' [Hone Harawira, Stuff 8.8.11]

'There are times when you are swimming with the tide, and times you are swimming against it.' [Phil Goff, Dominion Post 27.8.11]

'Why do people do stupid things? People who are in a good paid job don't do stupid things.' [Far North mayor Wayne Brown on a spate of arson, Sunday Star-Times 4.12.11]

What's not there

2012-01-14T17:42:00.001+13:00

What is not there is often more instructive than what is there. The eye ought not to be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. A word never heard in the thousands and thousands of pop songs: student.

The people speak

2012-01-13T17:42:00.001+13:00

Jean Davis, in a letter to the editor of the New Zealand Herald yesterday, writes: 'How many former teachers remember the days of trying to motivate their pupils during the heat of February and early March?' The education minister, she says, should give serious thought to rescheduling the summer school holidays so that they run from mid-January to early March, with Christmas becoming a four-day break, like Easter.

This is exactly what I have argued in two posts already this year, and not only Davis but other correspondents, bloggers and columnists (eg, John Roughan) have argued the same. Clearly there is a growing mood about this matter. I don't think anyone is about to occupy city centres demanding immediate action from the government on it, but by the same token it's no longer an idle theory but a genuine issue of public interest.

If it ever comes to it, changing the school year will probably not be the biggest obstacle; after all, the length and timing of school terms have been a lot more fluid in recent years. No, the thing that will be hard for many to swallow is the apparent diminution of Christmas to the rank of public holiday followed by a return to work. But Christmas is already doing a pretty good job of diminishing itself; and Matariki is on the rise. Fifty years ago, calendar events like Lent and Advent were far more prominent—who knows anything about them now? Fifty years from now, I predict, Christmas will still be observed but all the nonsense about snow and sleighbells will have gone, and the religious significance will be minimal. It always was a hit-and-myth business anyway.

Quakewash

2012-01-12T19:30:00.002+13:00

Probably the most significant news about Christchurch since the February earthquake seems to have slipped out of sight astonishingly quickly. No doubt it's in the interest of the government, the recovery authority and the city council to downplay its significance, but there should have been more media follow-up and analysis than we've had. The news in question is the decision of the IRD and the Ministry of Social Development to take a nine-year lease on office space on the western edge of the city, at the airport business park on Russley Rd.

This is big. This is huge. For all the fine talk and 'consultation' and planning for the rebuild of central Christchurch, here is a hard-ass actual practical decision not to go back there—for obvious reasons. Even if the central city is rebuilt within, say, two years (unlikely, but let's just say), for seven years beyond that we're talking about 500 workers who will no longer have their lunches and coffees or do their shopping or banking in the CBD but in western Christchurch instead.

I was out that way a few weeks ago. Western Christchurch is booming. There is a tremendous amount of commercial development along Russley Rd and a giant mall at Hornby further south. The area can only boom. Will only boom; as will Riccarton and Addington (where it has been reported that ACC has taken a six-year lease on office space).

A Stuff news report tells us that the draft plan for rebuilding Christchurch's central business district says the government is expected to contribute by 'committing to return all government operations and departments back to the area.' Yet the earthquake recovery minister, Gerry Brownlee, has made light of the departmental moves, saying it won't have a big impact because it's only temporary and 500 workers are only a small proportion etc etc.

That is pure quakewash. Of course it will have a big impact; the chamber of commerce is already getting antsy about it. It can read the writing on the earthquake-damaged wall. But Brownlee is like the mayor of Amity, the town in Jaws, who kept minimizing the shark threat for fear of discouraging tourist business. Brownlee (and Christchurch mayor Bob Parker) wants to send the message that everything is going to go back to nice and normal. In effect, they are saying 'Read my lips: no more quakes.'

Who is going to believe that? The brutal reality—the one being acknowledged by IRD—is that central Christchurch will never again be what it was, and may not even be able to function as a genuine city centre. The true centre may move west, or south, or even north (Amberley and Rangiora are a lot busier than they used to be). One can entirely sympathize with Brownlee and the government; naturally they don't want to be seen to be giving up on the thriving city that was pre-quake Christchurch. But I wonder if they wouldn't win more respect if they got more real about the actual situation on (and in) the ground.

A further curious aspect to all this is that, while the government would not be expected to dictate where private business locates, surely it should be able to say where its own ministries, departments and agencies set up shop? As Labour's Grant Robertson says of the IRD's decision, 'It's hugely symbolic because the one thing that the government can control is where government agencies go.''

Yet when asked whether other agencies are likely to set up outside the central city, Brownlee is on record as saying that he cannot say, because those are operational matters for the departments concerned. Hallo?

Neither um nor ah

2012-01-11T18:08:00.004+13:00

The Labour Party's silence on the Ports of Auckland dispute is getting louder. Robert Winter has drawn attention to this in an excellent post: he says the dispute has become, potentially, the first defining moment for Labour under the new leadership of David Shearer, and they have to 'step up and come out swinging on this issue.'

We wish. What is already remarkable about the dispute is how depoliticized it is, with not just Labour but all political parties keeping well clear of it. It's a far cry from the days when ministers personally intervened in industrial action and Labour politicians sided with striking workers, even joining them on the picket line. Market ideology so controls the commanding heights of this country's politics now that no one wants to get offside with business, or dare to do anything that implies 'the market' can't sort out everything out by itself.

I don't know if anyone has approached Shearer for comment or asked, um, wait a minute, who is Labour's spokesperson on labour issues? I just looked it up: it's Darien Fenton. Who knew? She may well be intensely credible on industrial relations but I don't believe we've heard from her yet on the ports dispute. The only Labourish public figure to even put a fingertip over the trenches so far is Auckland mayor Len Brown, and he has come down on the woolly side of woofterish by declaring resoundingly that he supports both sides.

There is an unhappy echo there of Walter Nash's infamous response to the 1951 waterfront dispute when he was Labour's leader: asked whether he supported the watersiders he said he was neither for nor against them. I have a horrible feeling that Shearer, if he ever does comment, will say much the same thing. Yet, thanks to some useful reporting by Bernard Orsman of the New Zealand Herald, there is much in this dispute that ought to concern a party with the very word 'labour' in its title.

I can no longer deny that every time I think of the current state of the Labour Party the image of Richard Pearse's convertiplane comes into my mind. Long after his failed attempts at sustained flight in South Canterbury in the early 20th century, Pearse devoted all his energy to perfecting this strange aircraft, which though visionary in some respects was clearly never going to get off the ground. It seemed to have far too many moving parts and, in repose, looked like a giant insect with an identity crisis. It drove him mad and he ended his days in Sunnyside mental hospital.

So perhaps I'm being unfair to Labour; maybe, while the rest of us sun ourselves by pool or beach, in between downpours of rain, the shed down the back of the Labour section is actually humming with activity. Let us picture the busy scene: amid the hand-mowers, garden tools and half-used cans of paint, the party's most progressive thinkers, and Trevor Mallard as well, are beavering away on a new model. Never mind that most of the electorate no longer has any idea what Labour stands for: party strategists are convinced that with Kiwi ingenuity, No 8 wire and lashings of aviation glue they can design a convertiparty capable of soaring into the political firmament. Unlike the old model, this baby will fly!

So there it sits in the Labour shed—the convertiparty, still half-built, not yet capable of sustained flight, but a potential world-beater. Above all (and here is the fiendish cunning of the thing) it will be all things to all people. And you thought the Labour Party had lost its way! The only outstanding issue, I understand, is reconciling the aerodynamics of the right wing with the tendency of the left wing to lurch. But technicians are working on this even as we speak.

M without the fat

2012-01-10T20:55:00.007+13:00

Chief executive John Allen is understood to have indicated to staff he expects more than 200 jobs to go as the ministry is restructured under Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully's plan to create 'a leaner, more adaptable organization, better able to meet New Zealand's future needs.' [NZ Herald 9.1.12]

The transformation of Mfat (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade) into Mlean (Ministry of Low Expectations Among Nations) is well under way, and I'm sure I'm not the only New Zealander excited by the change. It has never been clear to me why we need so many diplomats and ministry staff, many of whom waste their time learning foreign languages and studying the customs and culture of other nations in order to represent New Zealand abroad. I think I would be right in saying that Murray McCully himself didn't get where he is today by learning other languages; a smattering of English generally gets the job done for most New Zealand politicians overseas, and if foreigners fail to understand what we're on about, well, that's their loss.

My only criticism of McCully, as he wields his mighty axe like the Norse god he sometimes resembles, is that he has been too timorous in retaining the ministry at all. Keeping in mind that its chief executive formerly headed NZ Post, we should abandon diplomatic posts altogether and replace them with diplomatic postshops, minimally staffed but with stylish decor and interactive displays. I also support the idea, advanced last year by my old mate Johnny Globe, of a reality TV show in which ordinary Kiwis with potential international appeal compete for the right to represent New Zealand overseas. Contestants would be required to sing, dance, crouch, touch, pause, engage, look good in a swimsuit and know where places are on the map—though some latitude (and indeed longitude) could be granted in that respect. That'll widen the talent pool.

On the scene

2012-01-09T21:10:00.002+13:00

Brian Edwards rightly takes the New Zealand Herald to task for publishing an interview with a clinical psychologist speculating on what might have been going through the minds of the 11 people in the hot-air balloon as they faced certain death.

'The events,' he writes, 'are simply too raw for the relatives and friends of those who died to see such horrific scenarios canvassed in the media.'

I agree. Needless comparisons with 9/11 are made in the interview and exaggerated into the desperate headline EXPERT SEES 9/11 LINK IN DECISION TO JUMP.

Please.

Having said that, I don't think it is entirely morbid for people to wonder what exactly happened when tragedies like this strike (in fact, it's very human—we all do it), and it is often because of the dearth of definitive information that speculative scenarios start to run rampant. Up to, say, 30 or 40 years ago media could often get close to the scene of a terrible accident and report what they saw. Old newspapers teem with extremely vivid descriptions of crashes, disasters and crimes. These days, disaster scenes are swiftly sealed off by the police, reducing journalists to picking up what details they can around the edges, while relying on the authorities to hold media conferences or make statements. Of course there are very good compassionate and forensic reasons for this, but I sometimes wonder if on behalf of all media a single, senior, pooled reporter shouldn't be allowed into a disaster scene to describe soberly and responsibly what she or he sees, without being offensive or insensitive. No pictures or film need be taken, though even that might be possible, within strict limits. Such a policy would help—in such cases—to satisfy the public hunger for information, which I don't believe is necessarily ghoulish; on the contrary, I think it is part of the instinctive sympathy we feel for the victims of tragic disasters. Responsible, controlled coverage just might avert the irresponsible stuff that arises in its vacuum when all we have is the 'official version of events' to go on.

Art and history

2012-01-08T19:37:00.003+13:00

To an exhibition of work by Harry Watson at Aratoi, the Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in Masterton. Watson's work certainly fits the gallery's brief: it marries art and history in a stunning series of meticulous wood carvings, most of them drawing on 19th-century colonial imagery. For example:

Yes, it's our old mate Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Actually, I don't recall seeing him in the show today, though he has been used to promote it. But he's typical of Watson's cast of Maori and Pakeha characters—some of them actual historical figures—depicted either naturalistically or surrealistically as stand-alone statuettes; in beautifully framed miniatures; or, in two or three cases, as tableaux set into magnificent wooden cabinets. Some hold guns but many offer flowers or feathers of peace. Watson seems to be satirizing the Europeans in particular while relocating them in an alternative narrative. Viewers of the exhibition will each have their own ideas about what that narrative might be; to my eyes it suggests the essential absurdity of the colonial enterprise while not being entirely unsympathetic to the players caught up in it. And they were players too, condemned to act out the parts dictated for them by British imperialism. One feels that they might just as well have been made of wood, so inflexible were they in their stuffed shirts and tight uniforms, so convinced of their own rectitude. Yet Watson is not unkind to them. As the exhibition's title says, That Was Then: This Is Now.

If this superb show comes your way, or if you're visiting Masterton, I urge you to go and see it. It's on until 11 March.

A terrible day

2012-01-07T18:22:00.003+13:00

As it happened, we were coming over to the Wairarapa from Wellington today. Just before we left, we saw the news of the hot-air ballooning tragedy. We passed the road leading to the site of it at about 1pm. We had stopped in Carterton, which the TV1 report tonight described as a town in shock, but of course many people were going about their business as usual. What else do you do? Life goes on, as Auden memorably told us, even while terrible things are happening close by. I was also sorry to see TV1's reporter call Carterton a 'close-knit community,' because this silly cliche is wheeled out every time there's a tragedy in any place smaller than a big city. But it's petty of me to quibble about things like that at this time. Out of a clear blue sky, something unbearable to imagine happened in a field outside Carterton early this morning; and I think, like everyone, I am in shock about it. In Masterton we talked to a woman who has family in Somerset Rd, where the burning balloon came down, and I heard enough then to make me not want to know more. This is a terrible, terrible day.

Wise up

2012-01-06T17:21:00.003+13:00

'Holiday misery drags on as more storms loom': thus the Herald this morning, rubbing in the point made here five days ago. Many holidaymakers have reportedly abandoned camp and gone home, and Weather Watch head analyst Philip Duncan says there'll be rain and cloud for at least another couple of weeks.

Further confirmation, if it was needed, that the true New Zealand summer has abandoned its washed-out camp in December-January and relocated in a drier, sunnier spot a few weeks further on. This actually happened some years ago and the pattern is well established now. Yet the insistence on starting the school year at the end of January condemns families to take their holidays just when the summer weather is worst.

'Keep in mind,' Duncan advises Herald readers, 'that February and March are often very settled.' QED. He knows, we know it. When is the Department of Education going to wise up?

Hard done by

2012-01-05T13:50:00.002+13:00

In industrial disputes like the current one at the Ports of Auckland the media are almost always at pains to tell us how much it costs the employers when workers strike. We learn today, for instance, that the industrial action at the Ports of Auckland 'has cost the port $2.82 million in lost revenue.' Quite how such figures—usually supplied by management —are arrived at is never explained, but let's take them in good faith. If normal businesses is impeded for whatever reason, naturally you're going to lose money.

But how come we never, never hear how much money the workers lose by going on strike? Reporters should ask. It would not be so hard, I imagine, for a union to provide the total amount of pay lost by its members over a given time. (Maybe in this case the Maritime Union has an arrangement whereby its members still get paid when they go on strike, and if so, I'd happily stand corrected; but I doubt it very much. They certainly lose pay when they get locked out, as has happened at the ports).

The net effect of this imbalance in reporting is to put the weight of sympathy on management's side. They're losing income, they're inconvenienced, they can't get on with what they want to do. What about the other side? Workers' incomes in the first place are lower and more vulnerable to depletion, and by striking, they also jeopardize their employment prospects. One doesn't have to take sides in the ports dispute to feel that there's something wrong about a scenario in which only the employers are portrayed as being hard done by.

Anarchy from the UK

2012-01-04T22:43:00.002+13:00

The death of Ronald Searle, announced today, brings memories not so much of the St Trinian's illustrations for which he was perhaps most famous but of the Molesworth books he illustrated for Geoffrey Willans. For a boy like me growing up in the 195os they were part of a staple diet of British schoolboy fiction; others on the menu included the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge, Richmal Crompton's William and of course Billy Bunter, who though dated by then still did the business for me anyway. I believe I read dozens of these kinds of books, which in their own way probably did for my generation what the Harry Potter series (another variation on schoolboy fiction) does for its.

The Molesworth books were more anarchic, though. Nigel Molesworth was a brute of a child who took no prisoners and was forever plotting evil schemes aimed at the downfall of teachers or fellow pupils. His withering characterization of the hapless Fotheringay ('He is utterly wet and a weed') stays with me still. He was also a shamelessly bad speller, as any fule kno. Searle captured his essential thuggishness brilliantly with a savage spiky style of drawing that was clearly a big subsequent influence on Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

When I read in the news what I hadn't know before, that Searle was imprisoned by the Japanese at Changi during the Second World War and worked on the Burma railway, I remembered that someone else with an extraordinarily anarchic imagination—Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast books—was one of the first civilians to enter Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and his mind was seared by what he saw. On the same spectrum would be the ultimate anarchist, Spike Milligan, whose Goon Show creations were very much a product of his wartime experience. There is no pattern here. Millions of men went to war and didn't create brilliant works and memorable characters as a result. But these three did, and I thank them for it.

Light years

2012-01-03T20:16:00.002+13:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged among the Patagomanian people (an alien species who monitor the human race's antics from a distant planet) that the New Zealand fixation on the road toll is a form of psychological substitution. Unable to cope with addressing truly complex social problems—so the Patagomanian reasoning goes—the New Zealanders find satisfaction and even pleasure in simple numerical reduction. A falling road toll signifies progress, suggests collective responsibility, conveys a sense of the nation working together to save lives. Fair enough, as far as that goes (as an old Patagomanian proverb has it). Yet on that planet, where life is lived in an indeterminate, oblique fashion, they reckon the New Zealanders have no idea what to do about the problem they call 'child abuse,' and would rather, for the sake of not having to think too hard, reduce the number of road deaths than reduce the number of children's deaths at the hands of violent adults.

Actually, the Patagamonians are troubled by the very term 'child abuse.' On the planet where they live, the name of which is never the same two days running, to define something is essentially to destroy the meaning of it. To them, the term 'child abuse,' while useful in some respects, has come to be a convenient catch-all for a wide range of behaviours and conditions, enabling it to be isolated from the ever-changing activity systems that give rise to it and shape it. The term even has the curious effect of seeming to diminish the worst crimes of all—murder and torture—by lumping them in with everything from bullying to bad language.

Leaving that aside, however, what mainly disturbs the Patagomanians, among whom no hand is ever raised to a child, is the inability of the New Zealanders to recognize the economic connection with 'child abuse.' They would roll their eyes (if they had them) at the idea that the murder and torture and beating of children could be 'solved' by setting up a committee or commissioning an inquiry or putting more resources into frontline programs. They marvel at the wilful refusal to perceive that the way an economy operates is inseparable from the way the people who are part of it live. Though they hold no particular brief for the New Zealanders, many of them wish that perception could be politically acknowledged and acted on. As one Patagomanian elder (her words are translated) has said, 'The day I hear a New Zealand politician mention GDP growth and child abuse in the same breath, that's when I'll believe they're beginning to understand.' In fact, incredible as it may seem, one team of Patagomanian observers has traced a connection between the selling-off of state forests in the late 1980s and the brutally violent death of an Auckland toddler 20 years later.

Incredible. Patagomania is light years away from New Zealand.

He sleeps across the sea

2012-01-02T19:26:00.003+13:00

All that summer, the people of Aotearoa New Zealand—a proud, fierce, independent people—waited for him to come. They knew he would. He had come before, and moved among them, offering opchunities, and it was good. But now he had flown away to the ancestral home of Hawaii-key. 'He sleeps across the sea,' mothers told their children. 'He is at peace with his ancestors. But one day, when the white foam is flying, and the godwits skim the ocean, in search of their hunting grounds, he will come.'

And so it will be. One morning he will awake at dawn, go down to the beach and push his canoe out into the surf. He knows that, far to the south, there is work to be done. Through the pounding breakers the canoe will lift and surge, driven forward by the muscular arms of the Young Nats, powering their leader towards a destiny greater than will ever be known by those who have served one term only. There is a second term, and he will serve it.

From Hawaii-key he will come, the redeemer, the smiling one, the welder of coalitions, the prophet of the mixed ownership model. And the great volcano of Media-o-Brouhaha will rumble and smoke, celebrating his return. And the people of Aotearoa New Zealand will go forth and seek the opchunities he offers; and if they are not there, great will be the lamentation thereof. But he will be quite relaxed about that.

Here comes summer

2012-01-01T14:35:00.001+13:00

Every year, without fail, between Christmas and New Year campgrounds are flooded, wind wrecks tents, sodden holidaymakers pack up and go home, festivals turn into seas of mud. Yet still the plucky New Zealanders set out on their holidays at this time, headed like lemmings straight for the cliff. Some hereditary instinct, deeply implanted, tells them that once the last of the Christmas dinner has been slept off, and the kids have exhausted the novelty of their new toys, then it must be Summer. And Summer means Holidays. Long spells of Glorious Hot Weather. Not a drop of rain in sight. Get in the car and go.

Probably, eventually, by a Darwinian process of natural selection, a new kind of New Zealand holidaymaker will emerge who realizes that true summer has shifted. Maybe once those long spells of GHW did happen around Christmas/New Year—in fact, my memories of a 1950s childhood tell me they started even earlier—but for at least 15 or 20 years now it has been plain that the weather in late December is more likely to be wet and even cold than warm and dry. Even early January can be moody with cloud. The better summer weather (azure sky, baking heat) rarely kicks in before the middle of the month, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that the really hot stuff these days happens in February and even March.

Something's out of whack. The summer solstice may be fixed at 22 December but true summer peaks in February now. Just when the kids are back in school.

There is a way to fix this, and it will take the same kind of boldness Samoa has just shown by arbitrarily shifting its time zone west of the international dateline. It goes like this:

(a) Treat Christmas as a long weekend, like Easter.

(b) Everyone goes back to work and school after that.

(c) New Year's Day could be a one-day holiday but not necessarily: in many countries it's an ordinary working day.

(d) School breaks up mid-January and the school holidays run from then to the end of February (that's when universities already resume: why not primary and secondary schools?).

This way, everyone, especially children, gets to enjoy the best summer weather, instead of gazing longingly out of classroom and office windows during the burning heat of February. And (by the way) stop starting Super 15 rugby in February when the grounds are at their hardest. No wonder so many players get injured. Happy New Year.

Media release

2011-12-05T11:05:00.002+13:00

I must confess to being mystified by the fuss about the release of dotterels that have been looked after at a wildlife centre for the past few weeks until the Rena oil spill cleared in the Bay of Plenty. Fifteen were set free the other day to join the 17 released earlier. The news media were there, and the birds were blessed by a kaumatua. I don't wish to decry the effort that went into this, but surely it was just a matter of joining up the dotterels?

Low turnout

2011-12-01T08:38:00.000+13:00

The low turnout is still one of the talking points of the 2011 election. Many commentators have drawn attention to it. The questions are always the same: what can have made people so apathetic? Why couldn't they be bothered? Have they no respect for democracy?

One can well understand why young people in particular are asking such questions. It seems inexplicable to them that the politicians didn't turn out for the election. The major parties especially failed to show. Apparently they just couldn't be bothered advancing relevant, realistic, unpatronising policies that spoke to where people are actually at in their lives.

A group of gang members on an Otara street corner were baffled. They couldn't understand why political parties would adopt such a stay-at-home attitude. They found it very discouraging. 'Honestly,' said one, 'you'd think they would care about what happens to this country. But apparently not.'

Two Wellington students were disgusted by the politicians' attitude. 'Democracy is wasted on those people,' said one of them. 'Just once every three years they could at least show up in recognizable human form. It's not a lot to ask.'

Another said she'd expected a big turnout of stimulating ideas but there were none to be seen on the day. 'Doesn't anyone care?' she asked in despair.

Several unemployed twentysomethings who took part in a major current-affairs debate on TV said they thought politicians had issues with reality and should go easy on the drugs.

Just why are political parties so apathetic? It seems they don't see democracy as relevant to their lives. They'd rather play games among themselves and ignore what's happening in the street—or on the planet, for that matter. None of them even mentioned climate change and global warming during the campaign. The world financial crisis scarcely got a look-in. All they ever talked about on Twitter and Facebook was their relationships with each other and the media and who was better-looking or smarter.

It doesn't bode well for future elections.

Game-changers

2011-11-22T08:30:00.003+13:00

As the election campaign enters its final few days, we asked a panel of expert commentators to reflect on the key points of the campaign so far. Here is a transcript of the debate, which was chaired by veteran broadcaster Rory O'Really.

O'Really: Well, let's get straight into it, shall we? On my left I have the exciting young blogger Vlad Lenin, who has been breaking new ground with his blog Trained Seal. Vlad, you're on record as saying that Labour's capital gains tax policy was a game-changer. Would you like to elaborate on that?

Lenin: The changing of the game is an essential component of the expropriation of the propertied classes, but only under the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard. The deviationist elements must be ruthlessly eliminated. Parekura Horomia has to go too, no question about that.

O'Really: Well, you could be onto something there, Vlad. Let's—

Lenin: And that's Sealed Train, not Trained Seal.

O'Really: Oh really? Good to get that cleared up. Let's hear now from TV1 political editor Jean-Paul Sartre. J-P, do you think the tea-tape controversy was a game-changer for Winston Peters?

Sartre: Existence itself is a game-changer. To paraphrase Descartes, I exist, therefore I change my game. Man makes his own being, but what lies between being and nothingness? I think that is a question for Don Brash. Oh, by the way, hell is other people.

O'Really: Allen Ginsberg, I'd like to bring you in here.

Ginsberg: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked—and man, that was a total game-changer.

O'Really: Right. For a wider perspective I'm going to ask Elizabeth Windsor to come in on this one. Liz, you've seen a few game-changers in your time, haven't you?

Windsor: My husband and I wish all peoples of the Commonwealth the very best in changing their game, and have a lovely Christmas too, with lots of prezzies woof woof.

O'Really: Nice touch. Now—

Lenin: We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. I don't know how many times I have to say this. Are you people stupid or what?

O'Really: Yes. Well, moving on, we've got Conrad Murray, direct from the Los Angeles County Jail. Conrad, what's your take on the Green vote as a game-changer?

Murray: Anyone can change their game, any time. I recommend propofol, lidocaine, ativan, valium and a spot of ephedrine—just a soupçon, really. Use as directed by your medical practitioner. Or not, as the case may be.

Windsor: Could I say something about world peace here?

O'Really: No, fuck off. We're almost out of time, but I'd just like to ask Vlad if he regards last night's TV3 debate between John Key and Phil Goff as a game-changer.

Lenin: Sorry, I was watching Shortland Street. That Brooke—what a woman! Phwarrr! I'd go to the barricades for her any time.

Sartre: Has anyone seen my pipe?

League tea tape call

2011-11-17T11:13:00.000+13:00

A summit meeting of Arab League leaders in Morocco has called for the release of the secret recording of the conversation between John Key and John Banks.

In a special communique the leaders say the present impasse is endangering hopes of progress towards free speech and democracy and stuff.

Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, says it has been distressing to watch Mr Key hoist himself on his own petard.

He told reporters the Arab League cannot rest easy while a major international leader pisses in his own pocket.

International experts say self-petard-hoisting is a form of torture akin to waterboarding and can be extremely painful, especially if the pocket is pissed in at the same time.

In a related development, league secretary-general Amr Mohammed Moussa says he was disturbed to hear that National Party president Peter Goodfellow had pulled out of a Morning Report interview after earlier agreeing to appear on the program.

'I know him,' said Mr Moussa. 'He's a good fellow. These are troubling times.'

The Arab League says tea should always be drunk in moderation.

Key tea vow

2011-11-16T11:10:00.002+13:00

The dashing young New Zealand prime minister John Key told a news conference this morning that he knows he has a problem with tea, but he's vowing to give up drinking it and to get his election campaign back on track.

Mr Key says he doesn't remember exactly what happened when he had a cup of tea with Act candidate John Banks but he knows it was not the behaviour expected of a professional politician.

'I have to accept that tea and myself don't mix,' Mr Key says. 'It switches something inside my head. I think I've got it under control and then things just get out of hand.'

It's alleged Mr Key ran into an Auckland café naked and attempted to have sex with Mr Banks while drinking copious quantities of tea.

The gifted politician with the boyish smile admits the occasion was 'a bit of a blur.'

'I thought John was Liz Hurley,' he confesses. 'It's a mistake anyone could have made.'

Health experts blame New Zealand's rampant go-on-have-another-cuppa-another-one-won't-harm-you tea-bingeing culture and say public figures must do more to promote responsible tea-drinking. Choysa has withdrawn its bid to sponsor the All Blacks at the next Rugby World Cup.

PM in daring raid

2011-11-08T13:58:00.003+13:00

Defence chiefs were tight-lipped today about whether there will be a repeat of this morning's daring incursion by Prime Minister John Key into Radio New Zealand's Morning Report studio.

With SAS backup Mr Key was parachuted into the studio on a mission to take out three RNZ interviewers, identified only as 'Marx,' 'Lenin' and 'Trotsky.'

It's understood the mission—codenamed Operation Hot Mic—was months in the planning, amid fears that Mr Key would be exposed to hostile action in uncharted territory.

Defence Force spokesperson Lieutenant-Sergeant Bing Bang said the PM had had intensive combat training on the basis that anything could happen in an unscripted three-on-one interrogation-type scenario involving radical extremist warlord hacks capable at any given moment of asking reasonable questions.

Showing incredible courage in boldly going where no leader of comparable stature has gone before, Mr Key accomplished his target objectives in the teeth of sustained attack and left the studio a smoking ruin.

The mission has been pronounced a success. 'That's SUK'SEHS,' said Lt-Sgt Bang, pronouncing it.

Save the ships

2011-10-28T12:47:00.001+13:00

Locals at a remote bay on the East Cape have rallied to save a pod of container ships that have come ashore and flung themselves onto the rocks.

At least seven ships have beached at Brownlee Bay and desperate attempts are being made to get them back out to sea.

The people of Brownlee Bay have formed chains and are pouring buckets of water over the container ships to keep them hydrated.

"We're hoping to refloat them at high tide," says local man Chuck Iti, "but it's touch and go. Some of these fellas have just about had it."

As he spoke, one of the container ships sank even further into the sand and gave a faint toot of its foghorn before falling silent again.

There appears to be no single reason for ship strandings but DoC spokesperson Woody Ballance says it may be a seasonal thing connected with tidal currents and changes in the Earth's magnetic field.

Another theory is that this particular pod has lost its way from its traditional breeding ground in the sheltered waters of Liberia.

Mr Ballance says it's important to save them because one day container ships may be extinct and then we'll all be very, very sorry.

Into their own hands

2011-10-11T19:03:00.003+13:00

The 'authorities' tell Bay of Plenty people not to go on the beaches and try to clean up the oil deposited there by the leaking Rena. You won't do it properly, they say; leave it to us, the experts, to do it in our own way in our own time.

Yet dozens of citizens are still going onto the beaches and scooping up blobs and globules of oil themselves. I link this repudiation of authority to Pike River and even to the Christchurch earthquake. Since the mine disaster, especially, the credibility of the 'authorities' has collapsed. They said there that they would do things their own way in their own time, and that they had the expertise and the knowhow. Yeah right. No wonder the people of Tauranga and Papamoa are taking matters into (literally) their own hands.

In a wider context, one might also consider the view taken of authority by the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria—not to mention those currently occupying the streets of New York's financial district.

Ring them bells

2011-09-14T14:39:00.001+12:00

Bells are being rung in Auckland today as the first Rugby World Cup chickens come home to roost.

These graceful migratory birds have taken more than two years to get here. Veteran birdwatchers say their arrival could have been predicted from the day Murray McCully was made Rugby World Cup Minister.

On the Auckland waterfront, crowds gathered to see thousands of chickens landing on Mr McCully's head and shoulders.

They will stay there for some time to come, along with the albatross already around his neck.

In some cultures the chicken is considered a bird of ill omen.

An anthem for our times

2011-09-08T09:44:00.001+12:00

On the eve of one of the most momentous events in New Zealand history, it seems right to pause, reflect and—yes—pray for the men about to go into action, bearing the hopes and dreams of a nation on their shoulders. I know that tonight, and indeed every night while the Rugby World Cup is on, men and women will gather and pray to whatever gods may be for the safe return of our boys, bearing the necessary silverware. Around many a humble hearth tonight, hands will be joined and voices raised in songs of acclamation. But what will they sing? The words of our national anthem, though rich in lyric resonance, don't seem quite appropriate for the occasion. Humbly, as just one New Zealander wishing to play his part, however small, in the quest for imperishable glory, I offer this new version.

God of Nations, if you're there,
Now's the time to show you care.
Hear our Rugby World Cup prayer:
God defend our All Blacks.
Keep them safe from injuries,
Guard their hamstrings and their knees.
Till the final's over, please,
God defend our All Blacks.

Men of every other team
Think that they can steal our dream.
Help us prove that we're supreme:
God defend our All Blacks.
Put more power in Carter's boot,
Make our scrum beyond dispute,
May our tactics be astute
In the forwards and the backs.

God of Nations, get this straight:
Failure we just will not tolerate.
If you really are our mate,
End this 24-year wait.
Help the ABs go for broke
Or they'll be a worldwide joke.
If you're such a decent bloke,
God forbid the All Blacks choke.

Amen.

Happy Phil

2011-09-05T11:45:00.001+12:00

The nation's eyes were on the Southern Ocean today when Labour leader Phil Goff was given back his freedom and released into the sea.

Thousands of New Zealanders have taken this plucky little chap to their hearts since he was found stranded at the top of the Labour Party.

Bewildered and lost, he kept making flapping motions that—scientists say—were a desperate attempt to get people's attention.

Dubbed 'Happy Phil' because of his fixed smile, he survived for months on a diet of dead rats.

But his keepers inside the party were growing increasingly concerned about him.

When they said it was time for him to go, the navy came to the rescue.

The frigate Helen's Legacy weighed anchor at 51 degrees south earlier today and Happy Phil was brought on deck.

Though a little reluctant to go at first, he was soon walking along a specially designed plank, helped by a few encouraging nudges from keepers equipped with long poles.

A final prod, a last smile, a splash—and he was free.

'It is a far, far better place he has gone to,' said skipper Captain Ahab Cunliffe.

Happy Phil has been fitted with a GPS tracking device so we can all follow his progress. First he went left, then right, then left again before doubling back on his tracks, then standing on his head. Scientists say he may never be the same again.

The Helen's Legacy was last seen wallowing in heavy seas, with a terrible list.

The expedition to the non-prominent area

2011-08-29T17:48:00.002+12:00

'The alcohol display area must not be in a prominent area of the store.'—Parliament's justice and electoral select committee recommending changes to supermarket and grocery stores under the Alcohol Reform Bill, in the hope of making the purchase of alcohol less attractive and more difficult for young people

The first night

We've camped tonight, Jason, Jarod and me, at the southern end of aisle 2. It hasn't been too bad getting this far, but we know that the hard part lies ahead. It's important to get some rest. The old maps have turned out to be useless; familiar landmarks are just gone. The major display of DB that used to be near the entrance is no longer there, and all the way down aisle 1 we saw no sign of the shoulder-high stacks of cask wine that usually dot the landscape. Instead, we had to pick our way through some rough country that took us past the tinned tomatoes and creamed corn, before abseiling safely down to a ledge beyond specialist teas.

The second night

Good progress today—we're camped halfway down aisle 9—but I'm worried about Jarod. He seems listless, pale, and tires easily. Jason and I keep having to wait for him to catch up. He keeps licking his lips; I think he's in Steinie withdrawal mode. Not far to go now, mate, I say, encouraging him. The trouble is (and I don't tell Jarod this), to be quite honest I don't exactly know where the liquor shelves are now. The last guys to make the attempt got as far as aisle 14 and had the delicatessen counter in sight before pulling back out of sheer exhaustion. They told me they reckoned the booze was somewhere beyond the deli but had to admit they hadn't actually seen it.

The third night

It's just Jason and me now. I think Jarod knew he was holding us back. He left the tent last night saying 'I'm just going outside for a while, dude,' and we never saw him again. He was the bravest guy I ever knew. We didn't say much today, Jason and me, just slogged on past cake, buns and confectionery. We left the deli behind us late in the afternoon and since then we've been in no man's land. It's fucking dark, man, and a sort of mist has come down. I thought I heard a wolf howl. But we've got to get through. They're counting on us back at the party.

Editor's footnote: the diary was found in a sleeping bag halfway down a ravine several metres west of organic nut bars. Two bodies lay nearby, dead of dehydration. Unbeknownst to them, the first Tui lagers were just around the corner of the next aisle. The last scrawled lines in the diary read:

'The piss, man, it's out there somewhere. Some day, some way, it will be found. In a non-prominent area. If we have blazed a path to it, if we've done anything at all to make the going easier for those who come after us, then our sacrifice won't have been in vain. Sink one for us when you get there.'

Cot case

2011-08-25T11:59:00.001+12:00

Police investigating a serious disturbance in Dunedin three days ago say they're making progress with their inquiries and expect to make an arrest soon.

They're releasing few details at this stage but it's understood the incident in question involved toys, and a cot.

Inspector Kevin Plekhanov says he can't comment on speculation but there were several unsavoury aspects to the case.

'The toys were thrown with some force from the cot,' he says.

Police are seeking a middle-aged woman wearing a cloth cap and carrying a hammer and sickle. She has a large chip on her shoulder and a mote in one eye. Other identifying features include an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

A Ms Clare Curran is helping police with their inquiries.

Operational matters

2011-08-15T11:44:00.001+12:00

The Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson, said today that she was not responsible for the Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson.

Questioned in Parliament, Ms Wilkinson said Ms Wilkinson's actions were not something she could comment on. 'That is an operational matter,' she said.

Ms Wilkinson would neither confirm nor deny that she was a cabinet minister and a member of the current government.

Approached by reporters outside Parliament afterwards, Ms Wilkinson referred all further questions to the Minister of Labour.

The Minister of Labour's office said the minister was unable to comment on matters relating to her portfolio.

Asked when the minister would be back, a spokesperson said that was commercially sensitive information.

Ms Wilkinson later issued a statement saying she was not at any time and never had been, nor could she, and in any case, whatever.

Asked if she actually existed, Ms Wilkinson said that issue was still being worked through by a committee of inquiry and it was not up to her to intervene.

So young

2011-08-11T18:47:00.001+12:00

There's a group called Youth for Act? Holy Christ. Who are these people? Where did their parents go so wrong? What can be done to save them? We need rescue missions, fund-raising campaigns, ways of offering them a better life. There may yet be hope for these unfortunate youths. It breaks my heart to think that they may be growing up regarding Don Brash as an object of veneration. Is there anything at all that we can do to help?

Mixing it

2011-06-09T13:05:00.003+12:00

This just in: the Greens are a political party. It ought not to be news, but it seems to be having that effect on Sue Bradford, John Pagani and some other commentators. They’re throwing up their hands in horror at the idea that the Greens might, just possibly might, enter into some kind of agreement to work with or support a National-led government.

The Bradford version goes something like this: when Rod Donald was alive, the Green Party was unflinching in its resolve not to have anything to do with National. Then he died and other counsels began insidiously to prevail—to the point where, says Sue, ‘The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand has now joined the majority of Green Parties around the world who believe that in the struggle to save the planet Greens should support any party in government with whom they can cut good enough deals.’

To this extraordinary statement, there is only one valid response, and I’d like to give it now. Be patient for a moment while I get it ready. Okay. I think I’ve got it together. Here it comes. This is it:

So?

If a deal of any sort (ranging from memorandum of understanding to full coalition) was ‘good enough’ for the Greens, why on earth wouldn’t they sign up to it? They’re a political party, for goodness’ sake (I don’t know why I have to keep saying that), and the aim of all political activity is to make your ideas happen.

Of course there are always tradeoffs between principle and practicality; as my old mate T S Eliot was fond of saying, ‘Beween the idea and the reality falls the shadow.’ Sue Bradford knows that as well as anyone. In a democracy nobody gets everything they want, not even governments, and least of all minor parties. Australian Green leader Bob Brown made this plain at the New Zealand Greens’ conference when he said his party would inevitably have to compromise on the nature of a carbon tax (‘We are responsible about this’).

There seems to be a deep wish on the part of some people for the Greens to remain pure, pristine and uncontaminated by the mucky business of making compromises and deals in order to get power or influence those who have it. Some journalists parrot this nonsense: ‘It's hard to imagine them stooping to grubby politics as their big party rivals often do,’ writes political reporter Adam Bennett in the New Zealand Herald.

A cynic might even say that someone like John Pagani has a vested interested in keeping the Greens pegged in their ‘pure’ corner, well away from any prospect of supplanting Labour as a major party. ‘The Greens,’ says Pagani, apparently while gazing down from some Olympian height, ‘are trying to have it both ways, and in doing so they risk having neither.’

Like, Labour never tries to have it both ways? Never ever tries to strike a balance by deciding on policies that please some constituencies while not wholly pissing off others? Come on, John. Why not come straight out and say that it suits Labour to keep the Greens from growing?

The fact is, sooner or later the Green Party has to start mixing it. Whatever value was once extracted from being seen to somehow stand apart from the normal ruck of politics is long past its use-by date. They have to enter the arena and horse-trade like any other party (which they do already anyway, at a less visible level). There will be failures, of course, and embarrassments, and keepers of the sacred green flame will cry foul. But it’s time to—the horror, the horror!—get down and dirty (with good organic soil, of course).

It makes political sense at voter level too. if there’s one thing about the Greens that gets up people’s noses it’s this constant banging on about how different and special they are. If they are ever to become the government, which I believe is entirely possible, then they won’t do it by being holier-than-thou.

In any case, having said all the above, the Greens have hardly rushed madly towards National’s arms, all dewy-eyed and panting at the prospect of a sniff of power. Far from it. Both co-leaders and the party’s annual conference have been at pains to stress that going into coalition with National remains highly unlikely. And it is. Frankly, given the current state of the Labour Party, I’m not sure they’re much more of an appealing option anyway.

A lighter shade of jail

2011-06-07T16:58:00.002+12:00

Holy restorative justice! Someone must be putting something in cabinet ministers’ tea. First it was Bill English raising eyebrows left, right and centre—but mainly left—by declaring that prisons are a ‘moral and fiscal failure’ and the Government will build no more of them. Now Judith Collins is saying the same thing. Is this a pitch for the liberal lovey-dovey vote or what? Okay, so they haven’t exactly explained what their alternatives are, enlightened or otherwise, and what’s going to happen to all those people being sentenced to longer terms under the Government’s (up to now, anyway) get-tough penal policy, but it’s a start. We’ll take it. We just need some reassurance that in their eyes the real failure is moral, not fiscal, otherwise the whole thing might look like just another excuse for cutting state spending. Or, worse, a reason to unload more and more responsibility for incarceration onto the private sector. Can moral failure be privatized? Probably.

Tina redux

2011-06-06T15:49:00.002+12:00

Nick Smith has kindly confirmed my view of his so-called environmental protection law by saying: ‘It is inevitable...as the pressure on land-based resources grows, that there will be more activity out in the ocean environment, for petroleum, for mining...'

Inevitable? We hear here the ghost of Tina ('There Is No Alternative'), the poster girl of Rogernomics, who was used to excuse every policy from floating the dollar to sinking the state sector. Nothing is inevitable in politics, Nick. Some things may be less possible than others, that's all. You're in government to tell the difference, not to shrug and walk away.

Your mate Steven Joyce, for instance, has no problem not regarding peak oil as inevitable. He's building roads and motorways as if all transport options remain on the table, unchanged since the day the first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line. Take a tip from him: go on, laugh in the face of 'inevitability.'

New Zealand's choice for the kind of country it wants to be may be limited but they're not so narrow as to resemble a tunnel. With our abundant hydro, tidal and wind energy sources, for instance, there is absolutely no reason why, in the long run, we couldn't become a country entirely free from dependence on fossil fuels.

Which, by the way, aren't going to last forever, or even for the rest of this century. And that's inevitable.

Option block

2011-06-03T14:27:00.002+12:00

Let us go back, back, back in time to that misty day last November—was it only then?—that the Dominion Post told Wellingtonians: ‘Five options to fix traffic woes around the Basin Reserve—including three flyover proposals—will be released later this month.’ The paper also quoted New Zealand Transport Agency regional director Deborah Hume saying that public consultation on these options would start ‘within the next month.’

Curiously, no such consultation took place, and curiouser still, the Transport Agency has now announced that there are only two options, and they’re both flyovers.

Clearly, in the spirit of the great age of motoring, the agency has taken its cue from Henry Ford, who said you could have his cars in any colour you liked, so long as it was black.

Equally clearly, in the spirit of the great age of mass manipulation, the agency is treating the people of Wellington with contempt. It has stalled and stalled on revealing details or even broad plans for what it would like to do around the Basin Reserve, and even now is still withholding maps and graphics of the proposed flyovers. As for the other options that might have been—no sign of them and no opportunity for anyone to be ‘consulted’ about them, for whatever that may be worth. And even if there were, the whole issue has been framed in such a way as to exclude consideration of whether major new roads are needed at all.

Anyone with a working knowledge of this issue knows that the Transport Minister and the Transport Agency privately made up their minds a long time ago that a flyover will be built no matter what the objections and, indeed, no matter what the cost/benefit ratio. Similarly with a second Mt Victoria tunnel. And with a four-lane highway through Hataitai to the airport. All done and dusted, no question of that. The only question now is whether they can brazen it out publicly long enough to make each of these Think Big projects a fait accompli. People of Wellington, your fait is in your hands.

Apologic

2011-06-02T19:52:00.003+12:00

McDONALD'S SAYS SORRY FOR QUALITY OF COFFEE
—news headline

Does this qualify as a mea cuppa?

Licence to drill

2011-06-02T16:45:00.002+12:00

At first sight it looks like good news for the oceans around New Zealand: Nick Smith announces legislation that will make the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) responsible for approving and monitoring drilling activities offshore.

The new law, which Smith wants to take effect on 1 July 2012, will cover not only the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which extends from 12 to 200 kilometres offshore, but the extended continental shelf beyond that.

This, he says, will ensure we have robust laws in place to protect the marine environment, and what’s not to like about that?—given the concern over Petrobras’s exploration of the seabed off the East Cape, which triggered serious protest action.

Unpacking Smith’s statement, however, it’s not too hard to argue that, far from putting in place ‘robust laws’ to protect the environment, this move will make it even easier for oil companies to do precisely what they want in the waters off New Zealand.

Smith gives the game away, in fact, when he acknowledges that the existing guidelines on offshore drilling are ‘unenforceable.’ Meaning, the Government’s currently on shaky ground—or rough water—when it seeks to defend what the likes of Petrobras are up to. It might even find that, if taken to court, it could not defend such activity. It needs to be able to tell protesters (and voters) that what the drillers are doing is legal.

How nice it would be to believe that no ocean will be harmed in the implementing of this law. But so much depends on the body responsible for administering it, the EPA, and the very reason this government created the EPA in the first place was to give ‘major resource consent applicants’ a fast-track way of bypassing the Resource Management Act—an act considered by National to be so obstructive to developers that it passed a law specifically aimed at ‘simplifying and streamlining’ it. It was under his act that the EPA was established.

Some protecting of the environment will undoubtedly take place under the new authority’s aegis, but it exists above all to make straight and quick the way of those wishing to exploit the environment for economic ends. As outlined by Smith, it will be charged with a ‘general duty to avoid, remedy or mitigate adverse environmental effects,’ a provision you could drive a fifty-foot pipeline through. The EPA is National’s way of saying to developers and drillers: ‘No need to queue over there and then sit through months of boring old consent hearings; just step this way and we’ll have you processed, approved and on your way in no time.’

And if you still prefer to think it will be a nice neutral independent body not beholden to the Government or pro-development lobbies, just look at its board membership, announced today: not one of the eight comes from a purely ecological perspective, and no one with a genuine track record in environmental protection is represented—unless you want to count Richard Woods, a former diplomat who was parked at the head of the Environmental Resource Management Authority after running the SIS for a few years.

Most of the members have business backgrounds; and the chair of the new board is that noted greenie, former Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast.

The only thing green about this board—which, by the way, is also charged with managing the Emissions Trading Scheme—will be the green light it gives the world’s oil and gas companies to set up their rigs within spilling distance of New Zealand.

As Smith helpfully reminds us, ‘This area of ocean, 20 times New Zealand's land area, offers significant economic opportunities.’ Believe it. The legislation is designed to expedite, not hinder or cramp, those ‘opportunities.’ Already the managing director of one firm (Chatham Rock Phosphate) has said it will help them explore for phosphate on the Chatham Island rise. This bill is a licence to drill.

Greenpeace in our time

2011-04-13T16:47:00.002+12:00

What Greenpeace wants is for us all to go back and live in
caves and thatched huts and scrub ourselves in the creek
with a rock.

The minute we all understand that Greenpeace doesn't
want progress, they want retarded economies, then the
sooner we can make the giant leap forward to all agreeing
or most of us agreeing that we actually do want to dig up
minerals, we want open-cast mining, we want to drill for
oil off the coast and we hope to damn hell that we
discover it.

—Leighton Smith, Newstalk ZB

They don’t want progress, they don’t want jobs, they don’t
want economic expansion—they want none of the things
the rest of us want, they're out to lunch, they're flakes.
Greenpeace was once the friend of the animals, of the flora
and fauna, but they’ve morphed into this ugly extremist
political machine that is increasingly out of step with the
majority...

They have no answers. Not real ones. Oh, they'd come up
with us having, you know, a vege plot and a goat and
wearing hemp (that’s if we weren't smoking it as well) but
none of it's realistic, they're out to lunch, they're against
everything and for nothing.

—Mike Hosking, Newstalk ZB

We want a strong economy. We want more jobs. But even
when you look at [the] draft energy plan, that is all focused
on oil, coal and gas, which are where the big emissions
come from in terms of greenhouse gases and where future
liabilities are going to be huge for this country. We are a
country that has enormous opportunities in terms of
renewable energy. Where are the options? There was no
economic analysis done that looked at all the options.

—Bunny McDiarmid (Greenpeace), Close Up

Shock window

2011-04-08T15:42:00.001+12:00

The most disgraceful piece of journalism this past week
remains the New Zealand Herald’s top story of Monday
morning, the one headlined

CRIME SHOCK: NZ’S LITTLE THUGS.

This was the story that said ‘Criminal assaults by children
of primary school age soared last year… Crime statistics
show the number of children under 9 apprehended for
assaults last year was 64, almost double the 33 recorded
in 2009.’

It was disgraceful first because of the headline, which
branded 64 young children ‘thugs’ without providing a
shred of evidence for the claim. Apart from stating that
44 of the 64 were boys and that four children were
apprehended for serious assaults causing injury and 52
for common assault, the story provided no further
breakdown of the statistics, so Herald readers were left
in the dark as to exactly what sorts of assaults occurred,
in what circumstances, whether each one was an
isolated incident and for that matter whether, following
'apprehension,' any charges were proved.

It’s not even clear whether these assaults were child-on-
child or child-on-adult, or indeed—so lazily are the
statistics presented—whether there’s been a rise in the
number of discrete assaults as well as a rise in the
number of children committing them.

It was disgraceful second because how a rise in recorded
offences on such a small scale could be said to be soaring
(or to warrant a sensationalized front-page headline in
the first place) defies comprehension and insults
common sense. The most recently available figures for
the number of children aged nine or less attending
school show a national roll call of 289,203. Sixty-four is
0.02212% of that, or a fiftieth of one per cent. The
nation’s primary-school playgrounds and classrooms are
clearly not being inundated by a tide of juvenile violence;
the only thing juvenile about the situation is the Herald’s
attempt to beat its chest with moral indignation.

(Further proof of that is the citing of the figure for assaults
in the 10-13 age group: 827 apprehensions last year,
compared with 770 in 2009. That’s a statistically
insignificant increase of 7.4%. Needless to say, the Herald
saw no headline in that.)

And it was disgraceful third because the story made no
attempt to locate the incidence of assaults by children in
the context of the tougher economic times the country has
been going through, other than to quote a psychologist’s
reference to breakdown of parental control. If there really
is a growing problem with children becoming more
physically violent (and despite the latest moral panic
about bullying, no serious evidence of it has yet emerged),
then a responsible newspaper would not be treating
examples of it as if they’d occurred in a parallel universe
stripped of context and meaning.

The use of the word ‘thugs’ comes out of that universe—a
place beyond the real world’s gravitational pull and visited,
if not inhabited, by the headline-makers at the Herald.

As I said in my media comment on Radio New Zealand
National on Tuesday the Herald still publishes a great deal
of quality journalism. A day won't go past that I don't find
something of value in its pages or on its website.
Unfortunately, virtually none of it now appears on the front
page or at the top of the site, where stories about sex, crime
and violence now predominate. It's like entering a
bookshop like Unity, knowing there's good stuff on the
shelves inside, but first having to get past a shop window
that's promoting war games, action toys and soft porn.

It may be argued that it's only one page, and worth putting
up with for the sake of the rest of the paper, but the
contagion has spread to page 3, now often given over to
lurid court cases and gossip about the stars—and if page 3
falls, can pages 4 and 5 be far behind?

The only shred of comfort one can take from Monday's
desperate beat-up in the Herald is that no other major
media, as far as I have been able to tell, thought the story
worth repeating or following up on.

Way to go

2011-04-05T20:04:00.002+12:00

Well, when turning one's back on high office and nobly
spurning the temptations of political power, one may
as well do it in as statespersonlike a way as possible.
So when Judith Tizard put out a statement that, after
much self-righteous throat-clearing, declared...

'I have, now, recovered from the hepatitis that has
caused me to be so sick and exhausted. I am sure
there are many rewarding ways I'll be able to use
all my experience, in future, but it won't be as a
Member of Parliament.'

...it's entirely understandable that she would channel the
words of the late great David Lange, who in August 1989,
after a considerable amount of suspense-building at a
media conference, announced that he was walking away
from the top job thus:

'I have taken a great deal of counsel from a variety
of sources. I am looking forward to a very healthy
future. It will not however be as Prime Minister.
I intend to step down.'

It's a wonder she didn't say she could smell the uranium
on Phil Goff's breath while she was at it.

Rate moments in history

2010-09-16T19:32:00.002+12:00

All day the battle had raged; Napoleon’s troops had surged
again and again, forcing the Duke’s men back to a barely
defensible ridge. The field below lay littered with the
bodies of the slain. It seemed that, come the morrow, the
Bonapartists must triumph when they renewed their
terrible onslaught. But with nightfall there came a lull, and
the Duke, withdrawing to his tent, brooded on what
possible manoeuvres he could devise to withstand the foe.
Then came a messenger, who had ridden like the devil
from the capital far behind. The note was pressed into the
Duke’s bloodied hand. He took it. He read it. It said: ‘The
Reserve Bank Governor has decided to keep the official
cash rate on hold.’ A glimmer of hope dawned in that
famous face. 'Tell the men,' he said softly to an aide, 'tell
the men that we will fight and fight again.' In that instant—
as history has since recorded—the battle was won.

For the birds

2010-09-15T17:43:00.001+12:00

I wonder if people are actually thinking about what they
are saying when they use the phrase ‘kill two birds with
one stone.’ If they thought about it for a moment,
they’d realize what a grisly image it evokes. It’s a worn-
out old cliché handed down for several generations but
now utterly meaningless and inappropriate. Yet there it
is again in a headline in today’s Dominion Post: HOW
THE GOVERNMENT MIGHT KILL TWO BIRDS WITH ONE
STONE. Yecch. Many terms once in common use have
been dumped because, as times change, they come to
seem offensive or silly; along with other ugly phrases
like ‘room to swing a cat,’ this is one of them. With a
little imagination it could easily be supplanted by, say,
‘sew two buttons with one thread’ or ‘score two goals
with one kick.’ Whatever. But leave the birds alone.

Fruitless

2010-09-10T23:04:00.002+12:00

Another glorious example of the tyranny of unregulated
exchange rates, the kind New Zealand has, the kind that
make a mockery of what ought to be the straightforward,
fair and honest business of making money out of what a
nation produces and sells to other nations. I quote Rick
Curtis, speaking for the citrus growers of New Zealand,
who said on Radio New Zealand the other day that it’s
getting harder to sell fruit like lemons and mandarins on
overseas markets because competition is getting tougher
and, guess what, fluctuations in the exchange rate of the
New Zealand dollar—that bauble—make it virtually
impossible to judge how profitable a market will be. ‘It’s
like playing Russian roulette,' said Curtis. 'except you've
got no gun and no bullets.' Actually, now that I look at it,
the extended simile doesn't really make sense; but we
know what he means. 'You have,' he added, 'absolutely
no control.' Thus do we penalize and handicap our
exporters while rewarding faceless currency speculators
sitting in front of screens in foreign cities.

Walk the pork

2010-09-09T19:58:00.002+12:00

I’m sure the Mad Butcher deserves his knighthood for the
charity work he has done but it’s hard to listen to him
rasping away on commercial radio telling us over and
over that the price of the pork he sells can’t be beaten
when you know that the pigs the pork came from must
spend part if not a good deal of their lives indoors. That’s
the only conclusion you can draw from the deafening
absence in his ads of the words ‘free-range.’ The other
conclusion you inevitably come to is that the meat’s so
cheap because it’s the product of no-frills industrialized
pig-farming.

Say it isn’t so, Mad B! What a power of good you could do
if you sacrificed a little of that much-vaunted cheapness
for the assurance to consumers that any pig slaughtered
to provide pork, ham or bacon for your shops has lived its
life in the open, snuffling about, mud-bathing, rootling
around or whatever it is that pigs do to occupy the
unforgiving minute. I am not a vegetarian. I like eating
meat. But I won't buy chicken or pork products that are
not clearly certified 'free-range' because I think farmers
and producers who don't qualify for that label are treating
chickens and pigs in a way that goes beyond the humane,
the sensible and the sane. A mad butcher could nail his
colours to the mast of humanity and sanity here. What
about it, Sir Peter?

Gone in 30 seconds

2010-09-08T14:03:00.003+12:00

Sean Plunket’s farewell to Morning Report this morning
was a slightly cloying affair; many a listener will have
been close to wincing at the syrupiness of it. Fact is,
Sean was never the most-loved guy on the RNZ block,
and it’s hard to get warm and fuzzy about him at the best
of times. They got it right in the last 30 seconds, though,
with a great quick-cut montage of the Plunket interview
style (‘Just answer the question!’), and hit the 9 o’clock
pips with a voice purring ‘Radio New Zealand National’
just as it does after each bird call. So the booming hoot
of the Plunketbird will be heard no more on Radio NZ,
and Morning Report will be the poorer for it. I know
many people don’t like him (a fellow journalist whose
views I respect simply despises him) but for some years
now he has been possibly the only journalist in New
Zealand capable of making politicians nervous and
flustered when being interviewed. They all have far too
soft a ride, controlling the news agenda with ease, so
any journalist who can discomfort them is pure gold in
my book. Newstalk ZB have already snapped Plunket
up as their morning talkback host but it wouldn’t surprise
to see him turn that show into more of a challenger to
Nine to Noon, with less talkback and more interviews.
Radio New Zealand, in the meantime, needs to let us
know soon who his replacement will be—and it must be
someone with a sharp edge and a highly developed shit
detector.

Themselves

2010-09-07T22:27:00.004+12:00

Commenting on a Tri Nations game in Melbourne a few
weeks ago, a British sports columnist wrote that the All
Blacks destroyed Australia 49-28 in a 'mesmerising game
of such bewildering running, passing, immaculate
handling and implacable ferocity, it did, quite literally at
times, take your breath away. It was a sport unlike any
other we get to see up here, in the northern hemisphere. I
know it always get said, and is always wrong, but who can
stop these All Blacks from taking next year’s World Cup?'

Well, golly gee and shucks. That was Roger Alton,
executive editor of The Times, writing in the Spectator of
7 August. But I'm not sure whether we should regard his
rave as thoroughly deserved praise or the kiss of death,
because unfortunately there is an answer to his question
'Who can stop these All Blacks from taking next year’s
World Cup?' and the answer is: Themselves. But thanks
for asking anyway, Rog.

Come again

2010-09-06T21:38:00.002+12:00

To the launch of David Grant’s biography of Ken Douglas
at the Brierley Theatre, Wellington College. Yes. I never
got to say hallo to the biographer or shake hands with the
biographee, and left before the formal part of proceedings,
on account of a congenital condition that prevents me
from standing for hours on end with an empty glass in my
hand listening to people make speeches, or even, in some
horrifying cases, read long extracts from their newly
published work. I was there long enough however to clock
a large and varied crowd of launchgoers ranging from old
lefties to new righties, all giving the impression that
whatever hard-fought struggles there had been in the past,
that was all over now, and all that remained to be done,
politically speaking, was a tweak here and a top-up there
and Rodney’s your uncle. The hegemonic domination of
the centre-right is almost total; as one former cabinet
minister said to me, he was blessed if he could see much
difference between the major parties these days. He’s
right. There isn’t. Much difference. There never was,
actually, not since 1935, and it’s the same across the
Tasman, where Gillard’s Labor and Abbott’s Liberals are
really only factions of the same party. Can the left—a real,
thriving, thought-through, rambunctious left—ever come
again? Don’t doubt it. History isn't finished with us yet.

Truth to power

2010-09-05T20:27:00.001+12:00

A gathering at Te Papa: for the first time I meet Judith
Binney, whom I interviewed by phone a few weeks ago
for the Listener. She was in Menorca, Spain, and I was
in Wellington. I had read her book Encircled Lands in
a kind of white heat in order to interview her about it.
The book, which has since won the supreme award in
this year’s national book awards, tells in relentlessly
clinical detail how Tuhoe were stripped, cheated and
robbed of their land by the predatory Pakeha in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Binney is still
dismayed, as she was in the interview, by the Prime
Minister’s about-face on granting Tuhoe authority over
Te Urewera National Park. Much has changed, and
improved, in the past 30-40 years in terms of Pakeha
recognition of what was done to, and what is owed to,
Maori—when she and Binney were young academics,
Claudia Orange told the gathering, Maori were all but
invisible—but John Key’s abrupt announcement
seemed to kick us right back to the 1890s. Binney’s
book is, however, not only a landmark but a lighthouse,
and I believe that the illumination it casts will shine so
strongly that, in time, it will help to change attitudes.
It will last longer than Key or any government; it will
never stop speaking truth to power.

Workers are human too

2010-09-04T12:09:00.003+12:00

In view of my criticism of the New Zealand Herald for
milking cheap emotion out of the Auckland hospital
radiographers’ strike it’s only fair to record that two
days later the paper belatedly published a report
explaining precisely why the workers were planning to
strike, backgrounding the issue and interviewing a
radiographer who said how distressed she and her
colleagues felt about the effect the strike would have
on patients and people expecting surgery. ‘To come to
a decision to go on strike takes huge emotional effort,’
she is quoted as saying. As I said, these decisions are
never made lightly where public services are involved.

Significantly, this story was written by regular health
roundsman Martin Johnston, whereas the tear-jerking
front-page lead wasn’t. The Herald should have run it
up front right at the outset.

Little slack can be cut, however, for TV1 and TV3, both
of which ran reports about the strike last night, and
both of which went unerringly for the ‘human’ angle of
the patients who would suffer because of it. Both Garth
Bray (TV1) and Melissa Davies (TV3) focused on the
problems the strike was causing, which is fair enough
up to a point but, reported in isolation, carries the
inescapable message that the people doing the striking
are heartless bastards. Both gave airtime to the head of
the health board but neither deigned to put the strikers’
side of the argument. Davies said she’d tried in vain to
contact the union but that was just to get a reaction to
the case of guess who? the same family featured on the
front page of the Herald on 31 August.

A cynic would be strongly tempted in this case to modify
the old media saw ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ to ‘If it weeps, it
keeps.’ Neither reporter necessarily set out to
deliberately cast the striking workers in a negative light
but that's what happens when you take the easy option
and tell your story simplistically and one-sidedly. You
want a 'human' angle? Workers are human too. The
radiographers in Christchurch instantly called off their
strike there because of this morning's earthquake.

Country sides

2010-09-03T15:59:00.002+12:00

To read some Australian media reports you’d think that
any rural resident west of Sydney despised the Green
Party as tree-hugging, latte-sipping urban wankers, out
of touch with the gritty realities of living on the land.
Yet Bob Windsor, one of the independent ‘country’ MPs
holding the balance of power across the Tasman at the
moment, had this to say yesterday:

‘A lot of people in the country are concerned about the
Greens, I'm not. In fact over time I've developed a
good relationship with [Greens leader] Bob Brown.

‘We've got to recognize that every environmental policy
is not necessarily bad. I don't agree with everything the
Greens do, but I'm not petrified about the circumstances
of them being in the Senate.

‘I say to the farm groups that these people are going to
be in a very prominent position in the Senate for some
years. Rather than just write them off as being just anti-
agriculture, which in my view they're not, go and talk to
them, go and raise the issues.’

ABC News, reporting a Sky News interview, also says
that ‘even self-described anti-Green Bob Katter (another
rural independent MP) said there were areas of policy
that he agreed with the Greens on, such as restricting
food imports, biofuels and the power of the major
supermarket chains, and quotes him as saying: ‘I was
surprised that there was common ground—and very
aggressive common ground.’

Well, how about that. Fact is, for all the negative
imagery peddled about them, and for all the sad
nonsense spouted by Federated Farmers’ current
leader, the Green parties in Australia and New Zealand,
both countries with strong pastoral sectors, have by
definition a lot in common with farmers and rural
people generally, and I have watched with interest the
way this commonality has been developing in recent
years. The New Zealand Greens have certainly not been
shy of getting involved in the practical side of
agriculture and making constructive suggestions about
farming methods and care of the land and animals.
Despite, as I say, Don Nicolson’s obstructionist bluster,
my feeling is that many farmers are not averse to taking
a greener approach. Most farmers are in fact ecologists
at heart, but the industrialization of agriculture and the
corporate pressure to keep ramping up profits has
driven some of them into taking damaging shortcuts
and ignoring the downstream (literally) consequences.
But every day in the media you will see or hear reports
of farmers adopting or considering more sustainable
and ecologically responsible practices. The Greens are
well placed to capitalize politically on this in a country
like ours, and notwithstanding some misgivings about
their current leadership, I believe Russel Norman and
Metiria Turei are the ones to take the Greens forward.
They both just need a couple more years on them; the
sense of shrewd maturity projected by Bob Brown is
clearly a big electoral asset for Australia's Greens.

By the numbers

2010-09-02T19:56:00.003+12:00

Judt, whose book begins with the words ‘Something is
profoundly wrong with the way we live today,’ is
particularly strong on ‘economism’—the reduction and
compression of virtually all political debate to matters
of profit and loss, growth and gain. The way we live now
is essentially by the numbers. It has become very
difficult, if not impossible, in current conditions to
sustain any kind of argument about, say, the care of the
aged or early-childhood education without being forced
back onto purely financial calculation (and made to feel
as though you are naive and woolly-headed if you don't
think purely in dollars and cents). This, in a large sense,
illustrates the atrophy of our conception of the state and
the triumphalism of the ‘market.’ But it is not, Judt says,
an instinctive human condition; there was a time when
we ordered our lives differently, and were no worse for it.
Taking my cue from him, I believe that one of the most
fundamental challenges for the left is to confront the
blatant and insidious permutations of economism, and
thus shift the ground of debate from ‘Can we afford it?’ in
a narrow accounting sense to ‘Can we not afford it?’ in a
fully contextualized ecological sense (which is also an
economic approach in the truest sense of the word).
A very challengeable recent example would be the report
of the Welfare Working Group, which seems to have
emerged from a hermetically sealed space
uncontaminated by the real world in which people work
and live. It also means addressing the role of the state,
which, like it or not, remains the best counter to the power
of globalized capitalism, because, as Judt says, it embodies
notions of collective trust, communal identity and social
cooperation that no 'market' will ever truly reflect or
answer to.

Illfare state

2010-09-01T18:29:00.003+12:00

I have just read Ill Fares the Land, the last book by the
British intellectual Tony Judt, and, for two reasons, a
painfully sad one to read. First, because it’s a lament
for the lost values of what Judt settles for calling
social democracy—the worldview of the broad left, if
you like, in westernized societies. Second, because
Judt was dying as he wrote it, dying from Lou Gehrig’s
disease, which he contracted in 2008. He has since
died, aged 62, on 6 August; though paralysed from the
neck down, he continued to the last to dictate essays
and intensely affecting memoir pieces that have been
regularly published throughout this year by the New
York Review of Books.

His last book takes its title from a couplet in Oliver
Goldsmith’s 18th-century elegy The Deserted Village
—a poem that captures the irreversible shift of labour
in Britain from country to city as the Industrial
Revolution applied its crushing weight to a way of life
previously unchanged for centuries:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Judt’s thesis is that the Keynesian social contract that
underpinned and defined Western society for about 30
years after the Second World War has been smashed
by the rise of the neoconservative right. He is horrified
by the recrudescence of 19th-century ‘individualism’
and, while striving not to succumb to sentimentality
about the ‘good old days,’ which weren’t all that good,
argues that we need to revive and articulate the values
of social democracy—otherwise we are condemned to
continue our lives as little more than atomized,
depoliticized consumers—living proof of Margaret
Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society.’

So far, so disenchanted liberal-left baby-boomer. But
what is to be done? That indeed is the title of Judt’s fifth
chapter (and didn't some other bloke write a book with
that title?), but unfortunately he loses his way, never
quite answering the question outright and putting forth
no political program other than something like ‘Let’s
talk more boldly about what we believe in.’ Still, given
the hegemonic dominance of global capitalism and the
relentless chorus of its acolytes, there are worse things
to do. The left is intellectually stagnant at the moment,
desperately in need of clear thinking and clearer
speaking. The only left-wing energy of any genuine
meaning and relevance is coming from the green side
of politics but that has yet to be integrated into a wider
movement such as those for which the labour and
social-democratic parties of the ‘West’ became the
parliamentary vehicles in the first half of the 20th
century. There needs to be a crucible of ideas and
debate, and maybe, in lieu of town-hall meetings and
the tired rhetoric of street marches, the blogosphere is
it right now. In New Zealand anyway I certainly don't
see any significant left-wing exchange going on
anywhere except in the blogs of people like Bryce
Edwards, Gordon Campbell, Chris Trotter and No Right
Turn. Those are flames that must keep burning. We
need to hear, as Judt says, the 'resurgent language of
civil society.' Above all, he says, ‘We need to learn to
think the state again,’ and stop letting it—by default of
our silence—be vilified as a lumbering, incompetent
source of economic dysfunction.

No violin unscraped

2010-08-31T17:43:00.005+12:00

Like Brian Edwards, my heart sank when I saw the front-
page lead in today’s New Zealand Herald: there’s only
one term for this kind of journalism and it’s ‘cheap shot.’
For the record, under the tear-jerking banner headline
STRIKERS’ HELPLESS VICTIMS, the Herald chose to angle
its report of the strike by Auckland radiography and
hospital laboratory workers this way:

The parents of a baby girl are devastated after being
told long-awaited surgery to help her to eat without
a tube has been postponed because of hospital strikes.

Seventeen-month-old Rebecca Jones has cerebral
palsy and was to have two surgical procedures this
Thursday to ease constant pain and sickness, and
help her take solid food.

What I am about to say has nothing to do with this little
girl’s particular situation. Who among us would not feel
the parents’ distress and identify with it? But by the
Herald’s own account, the strike has forced the
cancellation of 500 operations and among them there
would undoubtedly be other cases of personal distress.
This case, involving a little girl in pain, was clearly
singled out for the front-page story in order to make the
point that the strikers are real shits who should feel
guilty as hell. Note, however, that all the cancelled
operations were for elective surgery (a fact buried deep
down in the story); in other words, many patients were
waiting for operations before this strike came along and
many would still be waiting if it hadn’t happened at all.

Not only does the Herald bias its report against the
workers from the outset, it makes no attempt, as
Edwards correctly notes, to explain, analyse or even
report in any substantive way the reason for the strike
and the case made for it by the workers involved. This is
all too common in reports of industrial action. In one of
my Nine to Noon media comments last year I criticized
the Herald for angling its coverage of a strike by airline
cabin staff on (of course) the disruption to flights and
travel plans. The implication of this kind of reporting is
that workers in public-service industries should never
strike, because it will always be inconvenient or
upsetting for someone. Perhaps the Herald would be
kind enough to advise them of a suitable time, if indeed it
can bring itself to perceive that sometimes the breakdown
of wage negotiations leaves workers with no other option.

I think we can safely say that the radiographers and lab
workers would not have taken this action lightly. To
suggest otherwise, as everything about the Herald's
story suggests—indeed, screams—is to imply that they're
a pack of heartless bastards, when in fact they spend
their days taking care of more people's health than the
entire editorial staff of the Herald ever do.

The Herald is by no means the only offender in this
regard, though, and I repeat, as I said on air today, that
it's still a paper that publishes a great deal of excellent
journalism—which makes it doubly disappointing that
it should resort to violin-scraping on the front page.

Columnar

2010-08-30T17:49:00.004+12:00

Another good column by Tapu Misa in today’s New Zealand
Herald, this one about the danger of re-victimizing victims
of crime by trying to give them, as Chief Justice Sian Elias is
quoted as saying, a ‘sense of ownership of the criminal
justice processes.’ I won’t re-rehearse the arguments—you
can read them here—but will say again that Misa is one of
the best columnists currently writing in New Zealand. In my
closing media comment for the year on Nine to Noon last
December, in fact, I named her columnist of the year. She is
no great stylist in the sense of being a flashy user of words
—a metaphor in a Misa column is quite an event—but has a
terrifically well-ordered mind that enables her to drive to
the heart of any issue, however complex, and write about it
in a simple, direct, sensible, human way. This is an ability
not given, alas, to many columnists, most of whom, not
having enough to say, or not knowing how to sustain what
they say over the length of a column, soon lapse into tired
rhetorical postures or, worse, anecdotal ramblings. To draw
on all that you know about something and write coherently
and interestingly about it for 500 words or more is not as
easy as it may sound, and certainly not if you have to do it
every week without fail. Tom Scott once said to me that
anyone can write one brilliant column in three—the trick is
faking the other two. I spent eight years trying to cultivate
that trick myself, when I followed Tom as the Listener’s
political columnist, and by the end I’d been wrung dry.

Shit hits land

2010-08-15T19:30:00.001+12:00

This caught my eye in the Listener’s cover story (by the
redoubtable Rebecca Macfie) about the damage being
done to our old friend ‘the environment’ by the
dairying boom: ‘Dairying wouldn’t stand up to any
analysis of the total costs.’—Canterbury sheep farmer
Brian Deans. Good point. The total costs. The usual
measures of growth and productivity take no account
of what economists, with a delicate elegance, call
externalities. When building a highway, for instance,
air and noise pollution are externalities that rarely
figure in calculations of the highway’s economic
worth (though the money spent on fixing the damage
done is counted as a plus when the ‘growth’ sum is
done). Similarly, until recent times, and not even
properly now, what happened to cowshit was of no
concern to the farmers pasturing and milking cows.
Finally, one might say, the shit is hitting the land. For
the first time in the agri-industrial age attention is
being paid on a national scale to precisely where this
shit goes and what it does when it gets there. That
explains why (you’ve noticed, haven’t you) words
like ‘effluent’ and ‘run-off’ are appearing more and
more in the public prints. Incredibly, there are still no
serious laws in place for penalizing farmers who let
cows wander into streams or just let the manure wash
into the nearest river; something called the Clean
Streams Accord is entirely voluntary (though moral
pressure to sign up to it is growing). Intriguingly, I
note from Macfie’s article that Environment
Canterbury is experimenting with ‘restorative justice’
programs whereby farmers found to have offended,
effluent-wise, have to front up and apologize to the
public. Such people clearly need to get their shit
together but not take it on the road.

I find that, without ever setting out to, I return in blog
after blog to what’s going on in the nation’s paddocks.
The fact is, as Macfie astutely says, ‘For all the
knowledge-wave conferences and high-tech industry
taskforces, we’re more dependent than ever on our
ability to turn cheap grass into cheap milk, to suck the
water out of it using cheap electricity, and to flog it off
around the world.’ Whatever the issues are for China
or Europe or the United States, this debate is central
for New Zealand. Get your gumboots on and join it.

Take the bus

2010-08-09T18:41:00.003+12:00

Details of credit card expenses released this
week show state sector bosses have racked
up almost $30,000 on taxi fares. Only a few
took trains, and only on overseas trips.
None claimed for a bus trip... Other than
airport shuttle buses, there were no claims
for public transport in New Zealand.
[Dominion Post 7.8.10]

I’ll tell you what, it’ll be a great day when a chief
executive or any other executive, state-sector or
private-sector, takes the bus anywhere, let alone
catches a train. Let alone walks. Or bikes! (We can
dream, can’t we?) Okay, I’ll let them off the bikes,
but just to imagine a departmental head getting on
a bus to go, say, from a meeting in one part of town
to a meeting in another is to recognize how deeply
embarrassing and demeaning they would find it.
And that, in turn, tells us how so much more
important than the rest of us they think they are,
and how they regard their time as more valuable
than ours. Sure, we all take a cab now and again,
but always? Every single time?

This also gives the lie to all the fine talk about the
nation reducing its carbon footprint. Our MPs are
no better; to go by car and/or plane is absolutely
automatic with them. As for the private sector, just
look at the car sections and supplements of business
papers and magazines: they are thick with the latest
high-speed luxury models. Whatever debate about
'the environment' is taking place in the real world, it
has completely failed to enter the pampered,
cosseted and resource-greedy world of the business
executive.

The ex-files

2010-08-03T18:13:00.002+12:00

Time was, in the vast vault that houses my hard-copy filing
system, I used to have files labelled AGRICULTURE,
ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT etc. What a simple childlike
world that was. With every passing day it becomes harder
to separate material out into such neat, discrete categories.
I hold a clipping about the Emissions Trading Scheme in
my hand: in what manila folder should it be filed for future
reference? ENVIRONMENT? Well, yes; but also ECONOMY;
and AGRICULTURE; ENERGY; TRANSPORT… Everything
leaches into everything else now. As indeed it should,
whatever challenges it presents for the finicky filer. This
breaking down of clear sharp categories is a necessary
stage in the shift of our consciousness away from world as
fractionated and finite and towards world as contextual
and interdependent. The philosophers have been saying
this, like, forever; but politics is a terrible laggard.

I think the first dawning in my own consciousness of this
truth was the 1970s ‘environmental’ slogan that you can’t
throw anything away on this planet: there is no ‘away.’
Forty years later it is dawning on all of us, however
reluctant we may be to acknowledge it, that everything,
from cowshit to plastic bags, from BP to TV, from plankton
to post-modernism, is consequential and interconnected.
Once you know this, and live accordingly, you will either
(a) never know peace again or (b) go out and join the
nearest revolution.

Long ago and Faraway

2010-08-02T20:04:00.002+12:00

I would be sorry to see Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books
sanitized, as reported here. Her publishers propose to
‘update’ her books to make the language in them less
old-fashioned—so it’s out with all those jollys (jolly good,
jolly rotten) for a start, and apparently even ‘mother and
father’ will become ‘mum and dad.’ Nor can ‘dirty tinker’
be allowed to survive. Well, okay; of course there was
racism and classism, subtle and not so subtle, in Blyton’s
writing, and attitudes taken by Julian, George, Dick and
Anne (and probably Timmy for that matter) that now
seem insufferably priggish; but where does this stop? Do
we remove the antisemitism from T S Eliot’s poems?
Rewrite Moby-Dick so that Captain Ahab saves the whale
instead of harpooning it? Books, like anything made by
human ingenuity, are of their time and speak to the
future beyond it—warts and all. No one would dare do this
with authors of adult classics, so it’s hard not to see the
tinkering with Blyton as an over-concern with the
supposed sensitivities of children—who, I suspect, are
much more robustly capable of coping with historical
distinctions than Blyton’s publishers think. Even as a child
in the 1950s myself, devouring Blyton by the shelf-load, I
could tell that she was already becoming out of date. But
she worked her magic then, and survives now, as Lucy
Mangan writes in this perceptive piece, ‘because she
serves perfectly the purely narrative appetite of a child that
precedes more sophisticated tastes—and which must be
stimulated and satisfied if those tastes are ever to develop.’

Speaking for myself, Blyton’s Enchanted Wood was central
to the forming of my imagination in childhood. It is one of
the pebble-beds over which the mind’s stream still flows. I
shall always be grateful to Blyton for this (and for her other
masterpiece, The Secret of Killimooin). Down below, how
deeply colonizing it was: that wood, those glades, not this
bush. Up above, in the cloudlands passing over the top of
the Faraway Tree, I floated free from all earthly geography.

Decision makers

2010-07-23T19:45:00.003+12:00

Ever notice how often people in business are referred to
in the media, and refer to themselves as, ‘decision
makers’? You gotta love it. I get that businesses want to
talk themselves up as decisive, bold, robust, confident
and shrewd (I think that covers most of the bases) but do
the rest of us have to buy into it too? Here’s something
we could do by way of countering this ‘business-knows-
best’ mentality that so infects and indeed corrupts our
social thinking. Every time you see or hear the word
‘mother’ in relation to, say, some story about education
or children, substitute ‘decision makers’. For example:
‘Decision makers are up in arms about funding cuts to
preschools.’ Or: 'Most of the unpaid work in society is
done by decision makers at home.' I would hazard a bet
that, when it comes to decisions that really matter in
life, far more of them are made by mothers than by
businessmen. Conversely, when it comes to business
news, try replacing ‘decision makers’ with ‘people who
don't matter as much as mothers,’ eg, 'A survey shows
that 85% of people who don't matter as much as
mothers think the Reserve Bank should hold the line
on interest rates.’ I suggest this stratagem purely for its
educational value, not wishing to imply for one moment
that really serious stuff like breaking down trade
barriers and creating investment opportunities isn't
being dealt with maturely and responsibly by people who
don't matter as much as mothers.

Suck it up

2010-07-16T22:45:00.003+12:00

Soft pop on the radio and singing along while doing the
vacuuming: it doesn’t get much better than this. Then I
saw her face… It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday… Pretty
flamingo... You know that’s all you ever were… Even
(ulp) Good morning starshine… Of all the films I ever
saw in my life there’s only been one, just one, in which
a character sings along to the radio while doing the
vacuuming. That was Dennis Hopper in The American
Friend. I felt a jolt of recognition: yes! Let us have
more of this fundamentally human and intolerably
joyful behaviour depicted across all media platforms.
Altogether now: Glibby glubby glooby, nibby, nabby
nooby, la la la lo lo… Tooby ooby wa-la... (feel free to
extemporize from this point on; and don't forget the
windowsills and ledges).

Four into six won't go

2010-07-14T19:48:00.005+12:00

Outrageous Fortune’s as good as ever, says Jane Clifton in
today’s Dominion Post, as the sixth and last season of this
great Kiwi comedy-drama begins. Much as I respect
Jane’s writing, I must sadly disagree with her on this one.
Essentially, Outrageous Fortune—sublimely brilliant for
the first four series—passed its use-by date a couple of
years ago and should have been laid to rest with honour.
Now all we get is the same old characters doing their same
old shtick over and over again, and boy, is it tiresome.
What once was fresh and sharp is now stale and outworn.
The dialogue between, say, Van and Munter positively
creaks: they might just as well get robots to say these
lines now. The core problem, I think, is that not one of the
main characters has grown or changed for the better or the
worse. Maybe that’s OK for a half-hour sitcom, no matter
how many seasons it runs, but with a more wide-ranging
drama like this you need some serious character
development after a while. The problem is compounded
by the fact that everyone looks older, as indeed they are;
yet they’re still carrying on like 14-year-olds. Outrageous,
yes. Fortunate, no. It’s a classic example of not knowing
when to quit while you’re ahead.

Past passive

2010-07-14T16:14:00.000+12:00

What is this curious tense that the police use when
talking about criminal or suspected criminal activity?
Preliminary research suggests that it’s the past passive.
They will say, for instance, ‘The suspect has driven off at
high speed’ rather than ‘The suspect drove off at high
speed.’ There are more examples in today’s paper, eg,
from Western Australia, ‘He has attempted to sit on its
back and the croc has taken offence to that.’ I know of
no other sphere in which language is used this way. It
lends what the police say a stilted, formal quality—
which may indeed be why they use it. It puts just a little
distance between them and the event; makes the
description just that little bit less absolute. I think. I
dunno, really. The blog has been written in a state of
some mystification.

Off-camera

2010-07-04T12:29:00.004+12:00

For all the damage it's doing, not another word should be
published or report broadcast about the Gulf of Mexico
oil spill until at least twice as much coverage is given to
similar but far more devastating disasters in countries
like Nigeria. These are all too easily ignored or under-
reported because they don't happen in richer countries
where all the best-resourced and most influential media
organizations operate. As for the New Zealand media,
not having a single foreign correspondent worthy of the
name, and none at all in a non-Anglophone nation, it
inevitably gives disproportionate space to American
and British news. Thanks to the papers like the Guardian
and the Observer, though, some stories from poorer
parts of the world still get through; and I'm grateful to
the New Zealand Herald for reprinting this:

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian
village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava
plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into
the warm tropical water and began swimming,
cameras and notebooks held above our heads.

We could smell the oil long before we saw it—the
stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation
hanging thickly in the air. The farther we travelled,
the more nauseating it became. Soon we were
swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the
best-quality oil in the world.

One of the hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that
crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed
oil for several months...

The rest of this eye-opening report by John Vidal is here.

The ETS explained

2010-07-03T13:51:00.002+12:00

Imagine (if you will) an ocean oil slick creeping ever
nearer the coast of a country. In this scenario, the oil
is leaking from several wells owned by a number of
different companies. Wildlife habitats, fisheries and
estuarine waters are threatened by the black ooze;
already there are pictures in the media of oil-soaked
seabirds. Something must be done. The government
of the country comes up with a solution. It will divide
the quantity of oil that is leaking—at least six billion
litres a day—into tradeable units. Anyone wanting to
pollute the coastline with oil will thus be able to do so,
provided they then buy credits from a company that
is not polluting the coastline with oil. The second
company can then trade those units on a pollution
market for others to buy and sell as they choose.
There is an exemption, however, for really big oil-
polluting companies: they don't have to buy credits
or indeed do anything at all about the oil their wells
are leaking. They have been advised that they can
expect to be brought into the scheme in 2015 or
thereabouts but that the deadline may be extended
when the time comes. Payment for the pollution is
required, however, from wage-earning individuals
onshore whose regular purchases of petrol help to
keep in business the oil-polluting companies: that
would seem to be eminently fair. Meanwhile, more
oil, lots more oil, keeps coming ashore. Some people
say this scheme is flawed. But it's a start, isn't it?

Name it

2010-06-30T20:08:00.004+12:00

In Encircled Lands, her new book about Tuhoe between
1820 and 1921, Judith Binney finds ‘evidence of the
inability of human societies in general to accept that
different forms of tribal, or even communal, self-
government can coexist with the nation state, without
challenging national sovereignty. This,’ she goes on, ‘is
the essential, and repeated, issue in the relationship of
indigenous communities to the larger polity within which
they live.’

Frankly, it would be nice if the larger polity could even
accept that correctly spelt Maori placenames can coexist
with the Pakeha nation state. The resistance to the correct
spelling of Whanganui speaks volumes about that. Now,
thanks to a report in today’s Dominion Post, we learn that
some people—including the ubiquitous Michael Laws
bleating inanely ‘Where does the political correctness
end?’—are scoffing at the Waitangi Tribunal’s
recommendation that Rimutaka, the long-established
name of the range of hills between Wellington and
Wairarapa, should be corrected to Remutaka.

'The story behind the area's name,' writes reporter Tanya
Katterns, 'is that a Maori chief, Haunuiananaia, an
ancestor of the Te Ati Hau a Paparangi people of the
Whanganui region, left his home in southern Taranaki to
pursue his errant wife Wairaka, who had run off with a
slave. During his journey, he sat down to rest on a
mountain and think about his quest. He named the
mountain Remutaka—which means to sit down.'

Fair enough. Good story. As a Wairarapa boy who has
crossed those hills hundreds of times in his life I’m
ashamed to say I never gave a thought to why we called
them ‘Rimutaka’ or, more commonly, ‘the Rimutakas.’
I guess I thought it had something to do with rimu trees.
Doh. So if Remutaka is what it should be, then bring it on.

Incredibly, this simple, sensible and unarguably right
idea is too much for former South Wairarapa district
councillor John Tenquist, who is quoted as calling it
ludicrous. 'Once again we are pandering to a minority,'
he says. 'We have some European heritage in this country
and, rightly or wrongly, it has been Rimutaka for over
150 years, so if it ain't broken, don't fix it.'

Rightly or wrongly? I guarantee that if people went
around persistently spelling Masterton (named after a
real historical person called Masters) Mawsterton or
Mesterton, Mr Tenquist would soon have something to
say about it. But of course I'm forgetting: all rights are
equal but majority rights are more equal than minority
rights. Doh.

Advice for beginning mystics

2010-06-29T19:09:00.001+12:00

'Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the
tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that
the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something.
Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if
somebody tells you it’s an old-fashioned notion,
laugh loudly and serenely. Don’t trust priests of the
postmodern religion of absolute playfulness.'
—Adam Zagajewski

Oaths of office

2010-06-25T17:15:00.003+12:00

What can one say by way of encouragement to incoming
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (keeping in mind
the experience of her predecessor)?

Well, Julia, let’s just say that the career of anyone taking
top office consists of two phases.

First you’re sworn in.
Then you’re sworn at.

Good luck.

Sorry seems to be the easiest word

2010-06-22T21:08:00.003+12:00

Out there in talk radio land, Russel Norman is getting a
roasting for his part in what happened outside
Parliament last week. The mood has unquestionably
turned against him, as those who never liked the Greens
anyway use the incident as a fresh excuse for venting
anti-Green spleen, only this time with a fine ring of
self-righteousness. As if they’d been waiting for Norman
(that insufferable prick who keeps making sense, damn
him) to slip up, and now it’s Gotcha! Yes, a merry sense
of Schadenfreude pervades the scorn of talkback calls.

There’s a rich irony, too, in the frequent citing of how
well behaved Rod Donald was when he protested at a
previous Chinese state visit. He got permission, he stood
well back, he didn’t shout. Nice Rod. Good Rod. As if he
wasn’t regarded with equal contempt when he was alive.
The only good Green’s a dead (or retired) Green?

It’s also amusing to the point of hysterical laughter that
critics are calling what Norman did a ‘publicity stunt.’
Well, yes, if you like. So? Everything in politics is a
publicity stunt of one sort or another. Rodney Hide has
built a career on being one. You could just as easily say
that the entire visit by Xi Jinping was an elaborate
publicity stunt, orchestrated so delicately that the least
ruffle, like a man standing holding a Tibetan flag, could
threaten to send it spinning out of control.

As an aside, has anyone noticed that Vice-President Xi
did not utter a single word in public during his three-day
visit? Certainly not one recorded by the media that I can
find. Nor did anyone attached to his entourage, except
for the briefest statements. Naturally not a squeak came
from the guards who manhandled Norman; nor has the
Chinese government even deigned to respond publicly
to John Key’s ingratiating apology for what over the past
four days has somehow, by a rather sinister process of
Beltway elision, come to be called a 'scuffle.'

In all this, and by no means accidentally, the serious
question really raised by the incident—namely, how come
Chinese security guards were able to do precisely what
they liked on New Zealand’s Parliament Grounds and not
be called to account for it?—has been swept under the red
carpet, while the focus swings onto Norman, who has
gloatingly been scapegoated for doing something that
would scarcely have crept in at the bottom of a news item
had he not been assaulted by members of an official
foreign state entourage.

Let me get this clear. When our politicians go to China on
official visits they have to conform to the Chinese way of
doing things, out of politeness if nothing else. And when
Chinese politicians come to New Zealand, we have to
conform to their way of doing things here as well—and
apologize to them if we don't. Have I got that right? Just
so we're all on the same page about this.

Far from the land

2010-06-20T12:04:00.003+12:00

A good article by Amanda Cropp in yesterday's Your
Weekend magazine about the employment of migrant
workers, mostly from the Philippines, on Canterbury
dairy farms. It's clear from what Cropp writes that the
bigger the farm and the less linked to the land its
owners—ie, if it's a foreign-owned 'corporate farm'—
then the more likely that workers will be exploited
and the animals ill-treated and neglected. She quotes
a farmer saying that '500 to 600 cows is still a family
operation, but once it's 1000 it's a completely
different ball game.' Some of the new farms being
proposed for places like the Mackenzie Basin are for
thousands and thousands of cows. What I found
most chilling in the article, though, was a passing
reference to a '14,000-cow indoor dairying unit' in
Saudi Arabia. Unit? Unit? That is battery farming,
plain, simple and barbaric.

Changing your books

2010-06-19T16:09:00.003+12:00

Coming across a reference to ‘changing your books,’ I am
intensely reminded that when I was growing up in
Masterton in the 1950s and early 1960s, we didn’t go to
the public library to borrow books or take out a book, we
went (every Friday night, as a rule) to change our books:
the unspoken understanding being that you would always
have one or two books on the go, there would never be a
time when you weren’t reading one, and that therefore
you would change them regularly (it may have been that
you were only allowed to have them for a week in those
days, I can’t remember). And Friday night, late shopping
night, a special, almost magical couple of hours each week
in the life of a provincial town in the sequestered 1950s,
was invariably when it happened—the changing of at least
one book for another (I'm fairly sure, actually, that there
was a limit of three allowed at a time—for kids anyway).

The public library wasn’t the only one in town, though.
The big department store, the WFCA (Wairarapa Farmers'
Cooperative Association), later Wright Stephenson, had a
small lending library in its basement. This would be
inconceivable now—though video shops are the modern
equivalent. The WFCA’s poky little library stocked mostly
thrillers, romances and crime fiction, and you paid for
what you took out, of course—possibly threepence or
sixpence a book. In my teens I must have borrowed
hundreds of detective novels, working my way through
writers like Anthony Gilbert, Miles Burton and Erle
Stanley Gardner, as well as virtually all of Agatha Christie
and most of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris. I even
read westerns. Hundreds of books a year, gobbling them
up with the indiscriminate appetite of the young. In a way,
I'm appalled—why wasn't I into Dostoyevsky at 14?—but
on the other hand it got all that stuff out of the road early
on, so that I've never felt the need to spend time on it
again. Yeah right. So how come I still haven't read Proust?
And didn't I, for the sheer nostalgic comfort of it, revisit a
Biggles book earlier this year? Some books never change.
Maybe some readers don't, either.

Overwritten

2010-06-16T20:44:00.004+12:00

I am not sure about writers any more. I begin to think
they make too much of themselves. It’s not entirely their
fault, the poor sods: publishers and publicists are at
them all the time, demanding that they do tricks, jump
for fish and balance balls on the ends of their noses. The
book is in danger of being supplanted by the writer,
because the book qua book is just too hard for us to take.
As Rilke said, beauty is only the beginning of a terror we
can barely endure. Art, unmediated art, is a tough call in
these times: we need the backstory, the creative process,
the press release, the launch. We have to know that an
individual who could have been us did this thing. Thus
the writer, a cringing creature at the best of times,
someone who, as Colm Tóibín says, ought never to get
out of their mental pyjamas, is thrust forward blinking
into the light and told to hustle product. Some do it well,
of course, but the inexorable effect of writerization is the
diminution of the work.

We readers (consumers) are also terrified of our own
judgments and crave guidance on what to like and what
not to like. Imagine the sheer horror of picking up a new
book and knowing nothing at all about it. Panicking, we
turn to the flap for information on the author; rush to the
internet and google up some reviews; anchor ourselves in
the sheltered harbour of the already. Whew. Could have
got drowned out there.

All White on the night

2010-06-15T18:54:00.002+12:00

So. The whole world will be watching tonight when gallant
little New Zealand, the nuggety no-hopers from nowhere,
take on mighty Slovakia in the World Cup in South Africa.
Showing a shameless lack of national chauvinism, I must
admit to feeling somewhat dispirited about the All Whites’
chances till I read yesterday’s editorial in the New
Zealand Herald headed GOALIE’S GAFFE SHOWS THERE’S
HOPE FOR NZ. Yes. The Herald, in its magisterial way, has
seized on the English goalkeeper’s fumble in the game
against the United States—an error that, observers say, is
already up there with Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the
maiden voyage of the Titanic as one of history’s most
shocking blunders—as a beacon of hope for Kiwi fans. It
proves, according to the Herald, that ‘once a team make
it to the World Cup, they can upset predictions with grit,
teamwork and undeserved luck.’

This is the spirit, by God, that allows New Zealanders to
hold their heads high in the world: the unswerving belief
that Kiwi pluck, skill and ingenuity will prevail just so long
as someone else cocks up somewhere. Never doubt it. Did
Hillary get to the top of Everest on nothing more than
guts and determination? No: he got there first because
others had failed to do so before him. Why did Russell
Crowe become a Hollywood superstar? Because, in a
once-in-300-years phenomenon, several American
producers simultaneously had a brain explosion that
momentarily prevented them from detecting real talent.
Anything of note that any New Zealander ever achieved in
the world has been the result of accident, screw-up or
undeserved luck. I need hardly mention the famous case
of Ernest Rutherford, who only split the atom because he
accidentally dropped one on the lab floor while trying to
put it in a test-tube.

The All Whites, then, deserve all the undeserved luck they
can get. A 4-1 thrashing of Slovakia is perfectly possible,
given freakish atmospheric conditions, a mid-European
existential crisis 10 minutes from time and a sniper in
the top row of the stands. As the Herald, in its wisdom,
says: ‘Stranger things have happened.’

Prep talk

2010-06-14T16:40:00.004+12:00

I’m not sure I agree with my old colleague Terry Snow,
who expostulates fulminatively in last week’s Listener
about the tendency to drop prepositions from news
reports, eg, ‘The high exchange rate has impinged their
profit’ and ‘British families are grieving loved ones lost
in Iraq.’ The English language didn’t get where it is today
without tightening, abbreviating, welding, fusing two
words into one, shedding wasteful words, getting ever
cleaner and crisper. ‘Grieving loved ones’ seems just as
good to me, if not better, than ‘Grieving for loved ones,’
and I also have no problem with ‘He appealed the verdict’
instead of ‘He appealed against the verdict’ and ‘They
protested the decision’ without the need for ‘against.’ If
the meaning is indisputably clear, as it is in all these
cases, then let’s not fret if the odd preposition misses the
cut. They still have a pretty good life, those preps, with at
least a walk-on role in just about every sentence ever
spoken or written.

By the same token, I've long been a fan of the American
custom of dropping superfluous letters from words, eg,
program for programme and traveler for traveller
(though, perversely, Americans cling to fulfill and willful).
I think also that the inventive abbreviations of txting
enrich, not impoverish, the language. A good acronym
gives me untold pleasure. The only form of abbreviation
that irks me is the growing media tendency to run the
initials of people's names together, so that C K Stead,
say, becomes CK Stead. Instead. As it were.

Bloody foreigners

2010-06-10T14:10:00.003+12:00

‘Tonight is about democracy in Auckland where we are
presenting for the good people of Howick.’
—Botany MP Pansy Wong

‘This is a good day for Howick, Pakuranga and Botany.
They have a government that listens.’
—Local Government Minister Rodney Hide

HOWICK BE THY NAME
—front-page headline, Howick & Pakuranga Times

What was being trumpeted here last week was the success
of an amendment to the Auckland super-city legislation.
For the south-eastern ward of the new council, the Local
Government Commission had proposed the name Te
Irirangi, but local people (some of the non-Maori ones
anyway) rose up in wrath at what one of them called an
‘appalling name’ that was difficult to pronounce. The
Howick & Pakuranga Times ran a campaign against Te
Irirangi, promoted a petition that went to Parliament and
won the day: the ward will be known as Howick.

The name is that of a 19th-century English aristocrat, the
third Earl Grey, who before he succeeded to his father’s
title was known as Viscount Howick, that being the name
of the family’s stately home in Northumberland. Grey was
Colonial Secretary in the British government at the time
eastern Auckland was being occupied by white settlers.
He never came near New Zealand, let alone the part of it
that bears his name to this day.

Tara Te Irirangi was the paramount chief of Ngai Tai, the
tangata whenua at the time the settlers arrived. According
to Brian Rudman in the New Zealand Herald he was a
‘friend to the newcomers, learning their language and
supporting the new settler government.’ Nice of him. He
got a street named after him, and Otara’s name derives
from him too. But the Local Government Commision’s
proposal was clearly a suburb too far for some. ‘The name
has come from nowhere,’ thundered the editor of the
H & P Times. ‘It doesn’t mean anything to people who
have lived here for a long time.’

Go figure. Rudman wrote an excellent column about it here.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, the Invercargill
City Council has roundly rejected the idea of calling a new
street Ti Kouka Way, as suggested by a council officer, and
opted for Kakariki Way instead. Not so egregious, you
might think, but Ti Kouka (the cabbage tree common in the
area of the street) missed out because, according to the
Southland Times, ‘councillors agreed it might be difficult to
pronounce.’ One said it sounded like ‘coconut.’ Another said
it would be a hard one to explain to a call centre in Delhi.

That's the trouble with these pesky foreign languages, which
is what te reo still clearly is to many Pakeha: they're just
not English enough.

The good news

2010-05-21T19:34:00.002+12:00

A state house in South Auckland. Fish and chips for
dinner. Again. The phone has been cut and the power has
gone out because the family can’t afford to pay the bills.
By candlelight a woman gasps for life: the end is near, as
a bronchial condition brought on by years of living in a
damp underheated house takes its toll. She was supposed
to be getting home help but the district health board
stopped funding that service. Suddenly the sound of a car
pulling up in the driveway. It’s young Malo, just home from
an (unsuccessful) job interview on the other side of town.
He rushes in. ‘Mother,’ he cries. ‘The news—it’s just come
through—the tax cuts in the Budget. People earning
$70,000 or more are going to do really well out of it! Many
of them will get hundreds of dollars more a week!’
Exhausted by the fight for every breath, the dying woman
somehow musters the strength to give a grateful smile.
‘Thank God,’ she murmurs. ‘Thank God for that. And the
business community, the corporate investors? Please tell
me they will suffer no more.” Malo’s grief-torn face is, for
a moment, lit up by a tremendous smile. ‘It’s all right,
mother,’ he says softly. ‘Company tax has been reduced to
28%.’ The sick woman struggles to rise from her bed.
She’s clearly excited beyond her ability to contain it. ‘But
that’s…but that’s—‘ ‘Yes, mother,’ replies Malo. He's
almost crying now. ‘Yes. That’s even lower than Australia’s
company tax rate.’ She sinks back into her pillows. Her
strength is almost gone. ‘And John Key? That nice Mr Key?
Tell me he’ll be all right.’ She feels her son’s hand on her
brow. ‘You need worry no more, mother,’ he says proudly.
‘Thanks to the tax cuts, John Key and people like him will
get $350 more a week.’ She gropes for his hand, squeezes
it with her last ounce of strength. She can die happy now.
There is peace, and justice, and goodness in the world. The
rasp of breath grows fainter. Malo weeps helplessly. The
candle flickers, and goes out.

Mean to say

2010-05-18T19:43:00.003+12:00

The older I get (and I am now 63), the less art works its
its magic on me. Is this typical for a sixtysomething or
is it just me? The poets, the writers, the musicians I
once worshipped now seem more like people with
problematic personal lives, who, unable to cope with
reality, found solace in invented worlds. Gorgeous,
enchanting, brilliantly embroidered worlds, but
artificial nonetheless. Well, that’s what art is, isn’t it?
Artificial. And fair enough too. In the great cosmic
wash-up quadrillions of years from now, it may be that
art will be all that the universe remembers us by—that,
and certain inexplicable acts of kindness. I hope human
beings will go on getting as much out of art as I have in
my life—and still do, but with a growing jadedness.
Why, I find myself wondering as I try to embark on a
new novel, would anyone go to the trouble of creating
this fantastically elaborated fictional world? Have they
failed so soon, I muse out loud as I toss the book aside
halfway through page 10, to cope with reality? Even a
phrase in a non-fiction book can try my churlish
patience, such as this from Country Driving: Three
Journeys Across a Changing China by Peter Hessler.
In Beijing, he writes as early as page two, it was a ‘gray,
muggy morning, the sky draped over the city like a
shroud of wet silk.’ Once, I would probably have thought
this a fine turn of phrase, and, indeed, would have
written one just like it myself. Now, like Bertie Wooster
bewildered by Types of Ethical Theory, a book foisted on
him by a ghastly girl called Florence, I can only respond
helplessly, ‘Well—I mean to say—what?’

Bulldogs and berets

2010-05-07T19:01:00.003+12:00

Memorable ad placements of our time: on page 75 of the
March issue of the American monthly magazine Harper’s,
politely and unobtrusively placed in a column of small ads
for, among other things, European berets, English
bulldogs and a CD of romantic piano music, we find this:

NEW ZEALAND WARNING:
Poisoned environment.
Toxic Landscape. Ecotourism Fraud.
www.stop1080poison.com

I’m impressed that they should care so much—even a four-
ad in Harper’s would appear to cost about $US100—but
also dismayed that 'they' (these anti-1080 campaigners)
should be so fanatical about their cause that they are
prepared to condemn the whole of New Zealand to the
rest of the world on the basis of it. Whether it will deter
well-heeled Harper’s readers from holidaying in New
Zealand is anyone’s guess. Probably, given the hazards of
modern travel, ranging from volcanic ash to passengers
strapped with explosives, a little possum poison isn't
going to be the No 1 disincentive for leaving home.

Confession of a tragic New Zealander

2010-05-06T10:32:00.005+12:00

Even more baffling is why some tragic New Zealanders
are passionate followers of English teams despite
having no parochial connections to them, but that’s
another story.—Karl du Fresne blog

In early adolescence, probably when I was about 13 or 14,
and at my sexual and intellectual peak, I began taking a
keen interest in the English football league, and would
check the results weekly, as fascinated by the names of
the clubs, I fancy, as I was by racehorses’ names (about
which I have written elsewhere). Those were the days
when the results—all of them, all four divisions, as there
were then—were not just published in the papers but
read out on radio. Burnley 1, Huddersfield 2; Nottingham
Forest 0, Sheffield Wednesday 0—that sort of thing, on
and on for a good few minutes, chanted sonorously, like
a litany, by a newsreader just after the news at (if I
remember rightly) 8 or 9 o’clock on Sunday morning.
For reasons unfathomable to this day but possibly simply
because I liked the look of the word, I adopted Chelsea as
my favourite team and, alas, they have stayed that way in
my affections ever since, through decades of vicissitude
and disappointment, leavened only by the occasional
triumph, eg, the FA Cup in 1970. Unlike my old colleague
Steve Braunias I’m not a particularly enthusiastic fan of
soccer, much preferring to watch rugby—though I once
lived quite close to the Stamford Bridge ground in London
I never went to see a game there—but to this day my eye
still strays to the English football results to see how
Chelsea are doing. In recent years, of course, they have
become a super-club, always near the top of the league
and winning trophies regularly. The fact that they have
done so by spending squillions of pounds on buying star
footballers from other countries, to the extent that the
current team can scarcely contain a single player born in
London, let alone Chelsea, has not weakened my
kneejerk reaction to the word Chelsea, nor will it cloud
my satisfaction when, this coming weekend, Chelsea
wallop Wigan Athletic at Stamford Bridge to win the
premier league for 2009-10. Such is the enduring power
of words, certain of which can cast a lifelong spell on us.

Hilarious

2010-04-29T17:50:00.001+12:00

In a recent Spectator former editor Charles Moore writes
‘What phrase on a news programme promises the
greatest boredom? I would say "awards ceremony".’ He’s
not far wrong either. I'd add only that a strong contender
for the title would also be ‘comedy festival.’ The spirits
sink at the very words. There is something profoundly
wrong with a civilization that insists on having so much
‘comedy’ together in one place at the same time. Stop me
if you’ve heard this one, but the whole idea of comedy as
a discrete genre imposes an oppressive expectation that
one will be amused, and in the stranglehold of that very
expectation the laughter dies on one’s lips. The best
humour comes at you sideways or out of context; the
term ‘stand-up comedy’ is actually an oxymoron. Comedy
as we now know it was invented to fill a market niche.
How funny is that?

No, no, Neo

2010-04-21T20:08:00.003+12:00

Many people were shocked last year by the images of pig
maltreatment shown on the TV current affairs program
Sunday, after comedian Mike King was smuggled into a
Horowhenua pig farm by animal-rights activists. But not
shocked enough, apparently, to stop buying pork and
bacon products coming out of such farms. The last I heard,
sales of New Zealand pork had hardly been dented by the
exposure of practices like putting sows in narrow stalls in
which they can’t even turn around. Despite noises of
appalment from the Minister of Agriculture after the
program aired, nothing has happened to change such
practices, and indeed, the pork industry is dragging its
trotters, calling for more time (like, several years) before
the introduction of a pig welfare code outlawing sow stalls
and farrowing crates. The only thing that will hurry the
industry up is a consumer backlash. Just as many of us
now make a point of buying free-range eggs, so we must
buy only free-range pork and bacon if we want pigs to be
treated humanely in this country. There’s precious little
of it on the supermarket shelves but it can be found if you
look for it (and are willing to pay a bit more). We also
need restaurants and cafes to get the message. In a
Wellington café the other day—Neo, on Willis St—I felt
like ordering one of their tasty-looking bacon/egg snacks
but when I asked if the bacon was free-range, the girl
behind the counter looked at me as if I’d just landed from
Mars. The assistant she called over also had no idea what
I was talking about. I gave the snack the swerve, and won’t
be eating at Neo again. I’m sure they’re not exceptional,
but it would take them very little (a few dollars more) and
gain a great deal of goodwill if they went to the trouble of
ensuring that any pigmeat they use is from a free-range
farm. What about it, guys?

Boom boom

2010-04-21T18:18:00.000+12:00

Just after noon in Wellington today, the sound of a
booming gun disturbed the air. Not just once but
several times. I had to think for a moment; then I
remembered that it was the Queen’s (real) birthday.
How quaint. So long as archaic rituals like this persist,
let us sit back and savour the irony of the chorus
coming from those who keep telling us that it’s way
past the time when the state should have stopped
saying sorry to Maori and making reparations for the
crimes of British colonialism in the 19th century. This
absurd business of the 21-gun salute—the officially
sanctioned method of tugging a forelock—is a grubby
little reminder that, while Maori are expected to
‘move on,’ the predominantly Pakeha state is quite
happy to stand still in the name of imperial tradition.
There is also a grubby big reminder of this: the
grotesque nonsense of retaining at great pomp and
cost a ‘governor-general,’ on the doing up of whose
Wellington residence $43 million is currently being
lavished. Roll on the republic.

Two things wrong

2010-04-21T14:49:00.002+12:00

The New Zealand Herald’s front-page lead story today
begins with the words ‘A woman cyclist killed after being
struck by a train is believed to have been distracted
listening to an iPod-style music player.’ From a
journalistic point of view, there are two things badly
wrong with that statement. First, why a woman cyclist?
Think about it. Would the reporter say ‘a man cyclist’?
Of course not. This is soft sexism, perpetuating the
antiquated (but clearly persistent) notion that women are
not as fully human as men. Then there’s that ubiquitous
word ‘after,’ often used lazily by journalists to give a
heightened sense of chronological narrative to a story.
Think about this too. She was killed after being struck by
the train? I don’t think so. If that was the case, who or
what killed her and how? Obviously she was killed when
struck by the train, but in today's media ‘when’ is
increasingly being driven out of reportage by ‘after.’ Such
an awful accident deserved better reporting than this.

Scott's word

2010-04-12T21:17:00.003+12:00

Here we go again. In today’s paper, a news item about
the screening of film taken on the Scott and Amundsen
expeditions to the South Pole in 1911–12. It recalls how
Scott’s diaries recorded the ‘famous last words of
comrade Lawrence Oates, who stepped outside his tent
with the words "I may be some time".’ Well, maybe.
Only earlier today I was reading a review by Max
Hastings in the New York Review of Books in which he
expresses scepticism about what he calls the ‘modern
cult of oral history.’ Reasonably enough, Hastings points
out that human memory is wildly selective, yet compilers
and editors ‘decline to mar the vividness of eyewitness
narratives by identifying errors.’ So what is remembered
by people many years later, especially if they lived
through dramatic or dangerous times, is often treated as
if it must be true. Similarly with diaries: we have
absolutely no way of knowing whether what Scott wrote
in his last diary, on that terrible return from the Pole, is
true, embellished or even a pack of lies.

Naturally the imperial British establishment of the day
had a keen interest in treating it as gospel truth, as it
made Scott and his men look like heroes and obscured
the fact that their deaths could have been avoided, had
more common sense prevailed in the planning of the
polar trip (as it did with Scott’s successful rival
Amundsen). The extraordinary thing is that most of us,
to this day, still prefer to believe the official version,
based on the diary found in the tent that was the last
resting-place for Scott, Wilson and Bowers. I have no
doubt that most of it is true, and have no wish to sit here
in my comfortable chair and mock these men who for
weeks in the ice and snow endured hardships that would
do for me in hours, if that. But will we honour the past—
with all its irksome shades of grey—or not? I take my cue
again from Hastings, a veteran writer on military matters,
who says: ‘No US or British regimental war diary that I
have ever seen explicitly admits that soldiers fled in panic,
as of course they sometimes do.’ By the same token,
brutal as it may be to say, we have only Scott’s word for it
—the word of a failed leader striving to put his doomed
expedition in the best possible light—that Oates behaved
as gallantly as he did, sacrificing his life by walking out
into the blizzard because, so frostbitten he could hardly
walk, he knew that he was holding the others back. It
could equally be that he went mad and started attacking
his companions, and had to be killed, or ran out
screaming rather than nobly (and perhaps a touch too
perfectly) announcing ‘I am just going out and may be
some time.’

I’m not saying he did or didn’t, but neither can anyone
say that Scott’s version is the unvarnished truth. And
we now know that Oates, whom Scott called an ‘English
gentleman,’ got a girl of 12 pregnant before he left
England—not, one would think, the act of a gentleman
of any nationality. As Hastings says, reviewing a book by
Margaret MacMillan called Dangerous Games: The Uses
and Abuses of History, most people cherish their
national myths ‘too much to want mere facts, or even
assertions of historical doubt, to besmirch them. They
prefer a nursery view of their past to an adult one.’
Perhaps, then, it’s time to make a maturer view of the
Scott expedition and accept that, while we will never
know what really happened as those poor frozen Brits,
those mad men of an earlier generation, dragged their
way back across the Barrier, it’s naïve to believe that it
necessarily happened the way a dying man said it did.

Haneke's choice

2010-04-10T11:44:00.003+12:00

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon is one way of
attempting to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable
opposites described in my last blog—opposites made
emblematic in the image, true to life, of well-fed, well-
dressed Germans listening to Schubert in, say, 1943 while
fellow Germans (often following the orders of the
Schubert listeners, who knew perfectly well what was
going on) committed mass murder in death camps
situated in some cases no more than a few hundred
metres away. Haneke simply depicts the life of a German
village in the years 1913–14 and, without belabouring the
point, or even overtly making it, says, in effect, to the
audience: this is what Germany was like then—you know
what Germany was like immediately after that—make
the connexion. And in the narrow, enclosed world of the
village, dominated by feudal economics and Lutheran
religion, where male authority is paramount and
unchallengeable, where children are rigidly repressed
and adults abuse them at will, where atrocities occur in
dark places, it’s all there to be connected. Choose, if you
will, to see the seeds of Hitler, Nazism, the two world
wars, the Holocaust behind the walls and in the woods
of Eichwald, c1914. It’s your choice, Haneke is saying.
Clearly, in making this film, he has made his.

Enemy action

2010-04-09T19:42:00.003+12:00

The seemingly unstoppable flow of books, films and
television programs about the Second World War tells us
that, though it ended 65 years ago, it still casts a long
shadow over our lives. It might not even be an
exaggeration to say that, in a psychological sense, the war
never ended; it is still going on; the battlefields have
shifted, that is all—from physical locations to hearts and
minds. I think there may be three reasons for this. One is
the patently obvious fact that such a seismic event in
human history—the biggest war ever fought—is not going
to politely take its place in the history books as if it were a
building collapse or a by-election: it hugely affected not
only the people who lived through it but generations
thereafter.

Second, the war enclosed another event that, largely
hidden from the world at the time, has come in many
ways to eclipse the war itself—an event, if that’s an
adequate word, so horrific that the mind still balks at
grasping the entirety of it. It was Theodor Adorno who, in
1949, said that the idea of writing poetry after the
Holocaust was barbaric; and George Steiner, I think, who
had difficulty believing in the meaning of progress,
indeed, of history, after Auschwitz. I’m sure he’s not alone.
Certainly it was he who once wrote that we will never be
fully human until we can, without going insane, hold in
our minds simultaneously the two images of (a) smoke
rising from a concentration-camp gas chamber while a
few hundred metres away (b) supposedly civilized
Germans listened to Schubert quintets. It may be that
humanity wrote its own epitaph in the death camps of the
Nazi regime, and that whatever cosmetics we apply to our
civilization now, we are essentially lipsticked ghouls in a
graveyard.

Third, those of us whose fathers died in or survived the
war are now of an age when, more urgently than ever, we
want to know more about our parents’ generation, and how
they coped with the aftermath of war. Partly, by having us.
Partly, unconsciously, no doubt, by carrying on the war,
lest the peace corrupt them. The men, certainly, went on
fighting, because how can you live through what they did
and then just settle down overnight to tea and biscuits and
a nine-to-five routine? The diary of a New Zealand soldier
coming back from the war in 1945 concludes, after the
berthing of the troopship, the flags, the bunting, the bands,
the speeches, the women on the wharfside, the train
upcountry, the cheering crowds at every platform, the
arrival at his hometown, it concludes—and there is no
more after this—with the words ‘Tears etc.’

Coming back from the war
was like being lowered
from a hot-air balloon.
At first the view was tremendous—
we felt like kings, with so much
earth to survey—but the closer
we got to the ground,
the more things rushed up to meet us.
Fields became blades of grass;
the sky went back to where it was;
and instead of the smell of death
there were stations, and faces,
and children thrust into our arms,
the old life reclaiming us,
tea, cups and saucers,
the sound of a single car in the street,
a plate held out with the future on it,
looks; unbridgeable silences;
tears etc.

I may have quoted Dan Davin before, that observation of
his that, once the excitement of war was gone, ‘A man’d
soon have to start up again all the old fights within himself
that used to go on in the days when there was no danger
to his skin.’ Often, then, the enemy became the women
and the children in the ex-soldiers’ lives. ‘When their war
ended, our war began’—this, quoted in the British book
Stranger in the House by Julie Summers, was said by a
woman whose husband had been demobilized. Many a
wife lived life on the frontline for years afterwards,
perhaps for all her life; and many a child grew up to the
echo of gunfire and the imprint of barbed wire. The war
goes on, and the more books and films about it, the
better—because it shaped our world, and it made us. I am
not sure any of us will live to hear the last shot fired.

Family secret

2010-04-07T16:06:00.008+12:00

While the environmental consequences of dairy-farming are
currently gaining a great deal of attention, and rightly so,
and while the prospect of Chinese ownership of dairy farms
is exercising the minds of many, a titanic struggle is going
on for the heart and soul of the New Zealand dairying
system, namely, its co-operative structure, by means of
which virtually every dairy farmer has a stake in the
company that collects and on-sells the milk produced by
their cows. This company, which in its former incarnation
was known for much of the 20th century as the Dairy Board,
itself a co-operative made out of hundreds of smaller
co-ops, is today a global force called Fonterra. And
Fonterra wants—as global forces do—to grow. Already the
world’s biggest exporter of dairy produce, with farms and
factories in several other countries, it lives in mortal fear of
being overtaken or even swallowed by competitors and
therefore, according to the imperious logic of capitalism,
must expand or die. To do so, however, it needs more
capital—a lot more. The usual way of going about this is to
list as a public company (plc) on the stock exchange and
invite investment from anyone from Canadian pension
funds to what are tiresomely called ‘Mum and Dad
investors.’ Alas for Fonterra’s power-hungry executives:
the 10,537 farmers who already co-operatively own it don’t
like that idea. When, three years ago, management tried to
change the company’s capital structure with a partial public
listing, the farmers said no. Now the executives are having
another go. Last year they succeeded in boosting the
potential share capital by getting farmers to agree to a
system whereby they, the farmers, can buy 20% more
shares in Fonterra than their milk production would
normally entitle them to. Now the executives are pitching to
the farmers the idea of share-trading among themselves,
which, by creating a sort of internal market within the
company, rather like the stock market outside it, will
enable Fonterra—according to chairman Henry van der
Heyden—to manage its cash flows better. The real agenda,
however, remains the executives’ desire to open Fonterra
up to the world; for all their honeyed words about
‘protecting and strengthening the co-operative’ they clearly
regard the co-operative structure as a creaky old brake on
their accelerating ambitions, something even embarrassing,
like a family secret, out of keeping with the polished world
in which they move, a world where money is supposed to be
free to do whatever it wants and go wherever it will. The
farmers, for their part, are highly suspicious, because they
know that once Fonterra is floating free as a plc, it's wide
open to all sorts of investor machinations; before long, one
feels certain, it would become an amorphous transnational
entity owned by big anonymous money and taking milk
from any old where, with New Zealand dairy-farmers no
better than unprotected suppliers subject to the vagaries of
owners and/or investors in Baltimore, Berne and Bangkok.
Federated Farmers, for once, is right on the money when it
rejects outright any public listing of the company that,
whatever its international reach now, owes its entire
existence to thousands of anonymous New Zealanders
who, over the past 170 years, have laboured to make farms
and milk cows and who don’t want to see their livelihood
become the plaything of the global money-go-round. There
are few enough major New Zealand companies still owned
purely by New Zealanders; if Fonterra goes, you can just
about kiss goodbye to the already tattered prospect of this
country being in any sense master of its own economic fate.

Paperback reader

2010-04-04T15:41:00.002+12:00

I am trying to remember the way I felt about paperbacks
when I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Though not exactly a new thing then, they were still new
enough to have about them a nimbus of specialness that
set them apart from hardbacks; to their thin pages and
flimsy covers, to their very slightness in the hand, clung
a quality of concentrated power. That so much could be
packed into so little! Or maybe my excited pleasure in
them simply reflected the fact that they were among my
first points of entry into the world of books. But I see
and feel them now, smell them now, the Pans and
Penguins and Picadors, or even those American Dells
that seemed to come from another planet compared
with the British titles that dominated the paperback
market. I still have some on my shelves, notably
(strictly for sentimental reasons) three of the yellow
Hodder & Stoughton Saint books written by Leslie
Charteris in what now seems an alarmingly florid style
and two versions of one of the Second World War true-
life tales I loved so much, indeed, took in like milk from
my mother’s breast—Enemy Coast Ahead by Guy Gibson
and The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill. Plus a mottled,
yellowing Pan edition of A G Macdonell’s England, Their
England, with its immortal description of a village-green
cricket match. When I seek to recall others no longer in
my possession, into my mind for some reason comes
Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley; or is it Windom’s
Way by James Ramsey Ullman? No, no, it’s neither of
these, it’s Campbell’s Kingdom by Hammond Innes.
Little books, so light to hold, so easily bent and crushed,
and yet as durable as stone! I treasure you.

An unreasonable sense of entitlement

2010-04-01T14:40:00.002+13:00

Paula Bennett also speaks disapprovingly of those people
she thinks have an ‘unreasonable sense of entitlement.’
I wonder if, say, Mark Weldon, chief executive of the New
Zealand Stock Exchange, whose pay-packet last year went
up from $895,566 to $1,390,000, could also be
considered to have an unreasonable sense of entitlement.
Of course he has a high-powered job but a pay rise of
nearly half a million dollars? On top of a salary already
stratospheric by most people’s standards? Depends on
your definition of ‘reasonable,’ I guess. But it’s funny how
the large amounts of money ‘earned’ or accrued in the
form of profits by those at the top of the private-sector
heap attract no government opprobrium, indeed, are
happily supported, directly or indirectly, by the whole
ethos of government as we know it. Yet these ‘earnings’
are made on the back of lesser-paid people’s labour and
investment, and sometimes at the cost of the latter’s jobs
and livelihoods. Perhaps it would help to correct the
balance if cabinet ministers occasionally made it clear—
ever so politely, of course—that the barons of the
boardroom are the ones with the really unreasonable
sense of entitlement.

Standing in the doorway

2010-03-31T21:27:00.002+13:00

‘Every dollar that is spent on welfare has to be earned
by a hard-working New Zealander.’ Thus Paula Bennett,
who by fronting the latest ‘welfare reforms’ has probably
wiped out in one hit whatever goodwill she brought
with her into the job of Social Development Minister.
All the evidence is that, apart from a tiny minority, the
kind of people who get welfare benefits move from
work to welfare and back to work again, depending on
the state of the economy; the average stay on the
unemployment benefit is less than a year. In other
words, the hard-working New Zealanders who earn the
dollars that get spent on welfare are also the people
who gratefully accept that welfare when they need it.
They themselves have helped to pay the taxes that make
this possible. With remarks like the above, Bennett
contrives to paint a picture of two New Zealands, one
industrious and responsible, the other leechlike and lazy.
In fact, we are all in this together, as one people: today’s
‘hard-working New Zealander’ (it could be you) is
tomorrow’s beneficiary, and vice versa.

Politicians, particularly those on the right, commonly use
the failings of a few as a stick to beat the many with; to
see government ministers like Bennett doing it now is
desperately depressing. At a time of high unemployment,
where exactly are the jobs for those who will be forced off
welfare by these 'reforms'? Maybe there are two New
Zealands after all, because the picture this paints for me
is of one standing in a warm well-lit doorway driving the
other out into the snow.

The light of a burning forest

2010-03-30T19:57:00.002+13:00

Driving through Wairarapa I see with fresh force what we
have done to the land. The early European colonists
called the stretch from Masterton to Pahiatua the Forty
Mile Bush. Little trace of that remains: just the odd stand
of native trees and manuka scrub. All now on either side
of the highway is pasture for cows and sheep. Here is your
open-cast mine, your quarry: the trees were extracted
from the land, leaving a scarred surface fit only for grass.
From 1840 on, New Zealand has been mined for milk,
butter, beef, mutton and wool. I wish I could remember
who wrote the following, but I copied it out of a magazine
once and it goes like this:

The Wairarapa had once been a great lowland forest
and now it’s gone. And gone with it is the humus in
the soil. Once we had a 30m canopy going down
through a succession of canopies to a 30cm depth
of humus. Now there’s nothing but 12mm of grass
and the climate of the Wairarapa has gone up by 12
degrees at ground level.

Your question is, of course: so? Humans were supposed
to arrive here in their hundreds of thousands, looking to
make a new life, and not disturb a branch or a leaf? No.
But we need continually to acknowledge that the impulse
that brought them from (mainly) the British Isles was
both a destructive and constructive one, and that their
legacy is our life here today—just as we bequeath to
future generations the consequences of every major
ecological decision we make. We may not know better
than they did but we know different; possibly, we have a
more developed view of consequences, if only thanks to
the fires they lit. Strange how one sees better by the light
of a burning forest. W P Reeves did:

The axe bites deep. The rushing fire streams bright;
Swift, beautiful and fierce it speeds for Man,
Nature's rough-handed foeman, keen to smite
And mar the loveliness of ages. Scan
The blackened forest ruined in a night,
A sylvan Parthenon that God will plan
But build not twice. Ah, bitter price to pay
For Man's dominion—beauty swept away!

That's from his poem 'The Passing of the Forest,' written
in the 1890s and subtitled 'A Lament for the Children of
Tane.' It took fewer than 50 years for a threnody like
that to be quarried from the guts of a poet aghast at what
he saw—'the fire's black smirch, the landslip's gaping
wound.' How much have we learnt since then? Your
mission now, should you choose to accept it, is to think
of New Zealand as the Thousand Mile Ecosystem and
work with that.

Thousand-page Reich

2010-03-26T19:59:00.004+13:00

I have just emerged, somewhat groggy, from the oppressive
experience of reading Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly
Ones, in which a former SS officer recalls his Second World
War experience on the Russian front and back in Germany
as the Third Reich crumbles. It’s a thousand pages long and
so densely detailed that the eye cannot help but skim at
times. But the detail is necessary to Littell’s purpose, which,
as far as I can tell anyway, is to get us inside the Nazi mind
and show us how it accommodated the idea of killing
millions of Jews, Poles, gypsies and other lesser breeds
without any single individual ever feeling, or having to feel,
fully responsible. There are so many committees and
councils and multi-layered operating procedures that the
book might well have been subtitled The Bureaucracy of
the Holocaust. The Jews were herded into concentration
camps not by humans but by acronyms, and gassed and
burnt there by a process of documentation. In triplicate.
Such, at least, was how the Germans under Hitler justified
or excused what was happening. A lot of it was apparently
done in the name of efficiency too. Personally, whenever I
hear the word efficiency I reach for my sense of history.

The Kindly Ones is not just a thinly disguised documentary,
though. It succeeds as a great novel should—as a
masterwork of the imagination, illuminating reality by the
force and scope of its conceptualization. Coleridge said of
the actor Edmund Kean that seeing him act was like reading
Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Reading Littell’s novel
is like seeing the Nazi war that way, with sickening claps of
thunder to boot. Through the torturous twistings of the
mind of his narrator, Maximilian Aue, we witness, indeed
virtually experience, every possible shade of degradation of
the human spirit. The last hundred pages or so are a tour de
force, from the abandoned country house in western
Poland where Aue acts out, as it were, the history of the
Third Reich as a copro-erotic tragi-comedy, through his
flight across country ahead of the advancing Russians, to
the final days in Berlin—including, even, a previously
unrecorded encounter with Hitler in his bunker.

Many scenes remain engraved in my mind, but for some
reason the words I can’t shake are those—almost certainly
taken by Littell from a true event—on a sign hung around
the neck of a disembowelled farmer by Russian soldiers
who, having repelled the German invasion of their
homeland are now swarming unstoppably towards Berlin
to get this war over and done with: YOU HAD A HOUSE,
COWS, TINNED FOOD, it reads. WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU
WANT WITH US?

Exercise of benefits

2010-03-23T18:22:00.002+13:00

Ah, the heady aroma of welfare reform: conservatives love
to drag it up their nostrils and inhale deeply. Nothing is
quite so satisfying to the political right as the pleasure of
telling the poor where to get off. The rest of us can only
envy the moral authority thereby asserted, as the righteous
remind the underprivileged and the unemployed that they
should be grateful for what they’re grudgingly given by the
state. It allows these moral giants to exercise their dogs,
those rhetorical rottweilers with names like ‘Handup-not-
handout’ and ‘Safety-net-not-trampoline.’ We can also
only gasp in awe at the legerdemain by which the pittance
the poor get from the state is called a ‘benefit’ and the
advantages enjoyed by the not-so-poor (the regressive
nature of GST, for instance) are so taken for granted that
they don’t have a name at all, least of all ‘benefit.’ For the
connoisseur of irony, there is pure delight in seeing the
victims of our economic system victimized over again:
how could anyone feel this to be unfair, knowing, as we all
do, that however inadequately these wretches manage
their lives, at the end of the financial year they will still get
a whopping bonus? Personally, I can't conceal a sneaking
admiration for the reactionary right when it rises from the
trough, stands on its hind legs and brays about
beneficiaries ripping off the state: assuming this semi-erect
posture is often the only real exercise it gets, and we all
know the benefits of exercise.