Public Address - Island Life (Home)

My way or the highway | Jan 30, 2007 13:43

One phrase from Don Brash's Orewa barnburner makes a cameo in the speech delivered today by John Key.

In 2004 Dr Brash pushed the alarm button on the "dangerous drift towards racial separatism."

John Key, being a uniter rather than a divider, has plumped instead for a cause behind which no right-thinking Kiwi would not rally. We are seeing, the speech declares, "a dangerous drift toward social and economic exclusion."

So far, so uncontroversial. If there is anyone in New Zealand who warms to the notion of families that have been jobless for more than one generation, or families destroyed by alcohol and P addiction, or kids going to school with empty stomachs, they're being awfully quiet about it.

It is, nonetheless, a sound enough political strategy for a leader of the opposition to identify a glaring problem and then excoriate the government of the day for failing to tackle it. The government "mish-mash" of policies, Key tells us, isn't working and naturally, the answer does not lie in "just throwing more money at the problem". In the best Simpsons style he gets in a Montgomery Burns line or two about those bureaucrats down in Wellington, and just to reinforce the Dubya persona as the outsider with no taste for politics-as-usual, he declares:

Yes, the government has a hugely important role in creating opportunities. But no government sitting on high will ever come up with the grand solution to all New Zealand's problems. After all, even the most experienced and intelligent Cabinet will still be made up of politicians!

But let's get a look, as they say in less refined circles, at the money shot. What will the leader of the opposition do that is better or different?

One argument seems to be this: perhaps businesses in the private sector and the non-profits can do a better job, with the support and encouragement of government (furnished, one presumes, by a better class of bureaucrat than the kind presently formulating a mish-mash of policies.)

The "mission of my leadership' he declares, "will be to invigorate and support us all to do our bit."

As far as specifics go, there are a few tasters: he suggests we could encourage some public-spirited businesses to help provide school lunches. Presumably not the ones who are presently running soft drink vending machines on school properties.

He likes Project K. He likes Big Buddy.

None of it is especially startling, but it may well be sufficient for his purposes. The strategy seems to be: damn the current lot as incompetent and wasteful, promise a better tomorrow as the motivator-and-aspirer-in-chief, and tip your hat to the talented people of the private sector as the people who can do a superior job of providing prosperity than you, a humble politician.

Overlying it all, however, is something more intriguing. The title of the speech is "The Kiwi Way." In defining this he talks first about how foreigners see New Zealanders:

They typically say we are friendly and modest people; we are inventive and empathetic; we are proud of the natural beauty of our country; we believe in working hard and getting rewarded for it; we think no one is born superior to anyone else and that everybody deserves a fair crack in life.

Developing this idea of a universal New Zealand perspective, he says:

As New Zealanders, we have grown up to believe in and cherish an egalitarian society. We like to think that our children's futures will be determined by their abilities, their motivation and their hard work. They will not be dictated by the size of their parent's bank balance or the suburb they were born in.

We want all kids to have a genuine opportunity to use their talents and to get rewarded for their efforts.

These, too are sound enough politics. Any good leader tries to find some common ground we can all agree upon. But there is a discouraging facet to it. The phrase 'The Kiwi Way' is then deployed through the speech as a kind of veiled threat. Disagree with this proposition and you are denying the Kiwi Way. In that respect, it has the same hegemony as the Mainstream New Zealanders argument.

This may in fact be the true distinction between the two major parties. On the National side, difference has been something to approach warily, with a sharp stick. They seem to fret about anything they perceive to be a threat to the cohesion of the nation. Labour, by contrast, has consistently championed diversity, identity politics and cultural variety.

This 'Kiwi Way' is all very well, but it seems dispiritingly similar in tone to 'My Way or the Highway'.

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Dick Headley: noun or adverb? | Jan 24, 2007 09:30

Around today's news in sixty seconds.

1. Jayden Comes Home. Continuing last week's hard line on criminal justice theory: did you notice how much weight Jayden's Mum lost in prison? Join the dots.

2. The Elephant In The Unaffordable Room. Let's run a sweep: how many more news stories will we get this year about the unaffordability of houses without hearing the dreaded words Capital Gains Tax?

I see some momentum gathering for the argument that the solution might be to stop the artificial land-rationing imposed by planners in cities such as Auckland. "Look at Houston," they say "It just keeps expanding outwards, without limitation, and houses are much more affordable there." Cities like Houston, however, have no waterfront. Are we allowing for that important distinction?

3. Telecom: From Bad To Worse? An idle thought: does Telecom happen to have any investment interest in Venezuela's biggest phone company?

4. State of the President. George W Bush is clearing his throat to deliver a speech that must sure as hell have been hard to write. Here, as a scene setter, Letterman's Top 10 George W. Bush Moments.

5. That's UnAustralian. If thugs were to use an Australian flag to roll up Lebanese women and abduct them from the Big Day Out, and the organisers were then to announce that they were thinking of banning the use of flags, would John Howard and his baying supporters finally grasp the point?

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All those in favour, raise your hands | Jan 18, 2007 17:06

2007: the year of law and order. Those Saudis don't pamper their criminals. Never mind fourteen convictions for drink-driving before you go to jail, or three strikes and you're out. They just go for the doctor. You pinch someone's purse; you get your hand lopped off.

And guess what? They might be on to something.

Look at this story from last Sunday's paper:

Graeme Burton will be the first new amputee in the prison system in at least 30 years.

I hope I understand the report correctly: not one amputee has been sent to the Big House in this country in thirty years.

Thirty! That would make it 1977. I was still in High School. I couldn't count how many amputees I've met since then, but it seems to me there are plenty of them about. I can't think of even one I didn't like.

So what are we dealing with here? Nature or nurture? Do only well-behaved people encounter the misfortune of losing a limb, or - assuming it sometimes happens to an evil-doer, does the loss of the limb make them well-behaved?

There are the simple practical explanations, to be sure: You can't get caught with your fingers in the till if you don't have any.

Losing a leg is clearly going to slow Burton down. Again from the Sunday Star Times:

Above knee artificial limbs extended up to the person's hip and were almost impossible to run on because of discomfort.
"I think even the slowest cops would be able to catch him," said Mitchell.

Let us now dip our toes in a tributary of the great policy river known as Eugenics. Who's up for a little ambulance at the top of the cliff in our law and order policy? How about an ambulance at the top of the cliff that could lop off a limb or two?

Pre-emptive intervention is what I'm talking about. It could be just a trial, to begin with. You pick out a few really bad buggers, and lop off a hand or a foot or something, and then track them. See if they don't straighten up and fly right.

This could be huge. You could see the crime figures just plummet.

Perhaps I'm a little more permissive in this area of policy - I was considering an elective shortening of a body part of my own last year, after all - but I see an opportunity here and frankly, I have a dream. I see empty feather-bedded prisons in Ngawha, Paremoremo and Mt Crawford, prison doors all swinging in the gentle breeze, the occasional LCD TV tuned to the Sky Arts Channel. Not a crim in sight, just Simon Power and a TV crew traipsing forlornly around the site, rooting around for signs of departmental ineptitude and waste.

I have given this some careful study and by that I mean I have just spent five minutes on Google, and it has been most instructive. Amputees and prison really are like oil and water.

In Phoenix, my browser tells me, Deborah Lynn Quinn is the envy of 26,000 convicted criminals doing time in Arizona prisons.
She was sentenced to a year inside for violating probation on a charge of attempting to sell marijuana, but now the state's top corrections official wants to kick her out of prison and send her home.

Why? Because she is almost entirely disabled. She has no arms, no right leg and a partial left leg, and she needs a battery-powered wheelchair to get around. They can't afford to keep her in there.

The answer is there for a bold politician. And look: if you take it up as a platform, even God will be on your side. Click over to this site where you will find the answer to that question we must all surely have pondered at some point: Why won't God heal amputees?

It's a revelation.

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Impeccably Groomed | Jan 17, 2007 08:54

Hey kids, come in here for a minute. I want to tell you something while Mum and your 'Uncle' Paul are watching Big Brother. I don't want to frighten you but we need to talk about something a little bit scary.

Has anyone told you about an 'electoral predator'?

It's a bit like stranger danger, only for grownups.

There are some very sneaky people out there who want to get something very special and private out of mum and Uncle Paul and all the grownups. Do you know what it is?

No, not exactly, Jayden, but you're close. It's called their 'vote.'

When a man or a woman really likes someone, they go into a private little cubicle and they give their 'vote' to that person.

But sometimes they can be tricked into giving them their vote when they never would have done that if they'd known what that person was really like.

Does that sound fair to you?

So if someone tried to trick mum or Uncle Paul into giving them their vote, do you think that would be right?

Well that's what's happened to them quite a few times since they became grownups. There was a man called Richard who promised he would save the railway and all the jobs of the people working on the railway, and then do you know what he did when he got their votes? He took all their jobs away.

And there was a man called Jim who told all the nanas and the grandads that if they gave him their vote, he would change the rules so that they weren't made to give back some of their pension.

So they gave their votes to him and do you know what he did? He said "sorry, we don't have enough money, you're going have to give it back anyway."

Well, very soon a whole lot of people just like Jim and Richard are going to be coming back from their holidays and they will be trying to do it again.

There is a lady called 'Helen' who says to Mum and Uncle Paul that that they should give their votes to her because she is popular and competent, and that if you were in a lifeboat with her, you would be okay. But mum and Uncle Paul are worried that it might not be safe to go to sleep in her lifeboat if there wasn't much food left.

And there is a man called 'John' who says that even though he lives in a house with three plasmas even bigger than Mum and Paul's one, he is really just like them, and he likes the footy and the Maoris and the greenies and the ladies who wear overalls.

But your Uncle Paul thinks that maybe John might be pretending, because last week when there was an argument about the war that America is fighting, John said that Helen and her flunky should have pretended that the war was going really well and that it's a really good idea, even though it isn't, because we want America to be our friend and let us sell them more hamburgers.

Uncle Paul thinks that 'John' might have got the idea from his Australian friend 'John' when he visited him last month. The other 'John' is really good at tricking people into giving him their votes, and so New Zealand 'John' might have got the wrong end of the stick about what people in Australia think, compared to what people in New Zealand think about wars that don't make sense.

Anyway, your mum and 'uncle' are really confused, because they think that 'Helen' might not be who she really says she is, and they're not sure whether 'John' is really who he says he is either.

And then there's another man called 'Rodney' who is probably exactly who he says he is, which is really scary, and there's also one called 'Winston' and nobody can really tell who he is pretending to be any more, so it makes it all very confusing for Mum and 'Uncle' Paul, and that's why they drink so much rum and coke and spend so much time changing channels on the TV.

So I want you all to know that something bad might happen if any of these people get to trick Mum and Paul into giving them their vote when they shouldn't, and I want to give you a very important job.

Do you think you could do a very special job for me?

Good. Well here it is: you need to make some rules around here.

First of all you need to make Mum and Paul agree to keep the computers and the newspapers and the TVs and the radios in the lounge, and not tucked away in their bedroom.

You need to let Mum and Paul know that if anything they hear from 'John' or 'Helen' or 'Rodney' or 'Winston' makes them feel a bit yucky, or if they've been asked to do something they don't think they ought to, they can always come to you.

Now, you might feel like you're snooping, but you're not. This is for their own safety.

So do you think you can do that?

Good. Now: whose turn is it on the PS3?

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