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Do the right thing | May 30, 2003 12:08
While Murray McCully is loudly declaring that "separate funding for Maori [broadcasting] should stop", it might be worth recalling that not only was he part of the National government that established Te Mangai Paho in 1994, he was a member of the Cabinet that agreed in 1997 "that TMP should be strengthened in its present form rather than abolished or merged with another organisation."
But he and his chum Rodney Hide (a joint statement quoted the pair of them in such a way as to conjure the idea of them singing in chorus, which is a scary thought) are right in saying that if it weren't for them, the conflicts of interest repeatedly embraced by Tame Te Rangi might have escaped attention.
It's a tragedy for the Maori broadcast funding agency which has, I understand, enjoyed excellent audit reports in recent years. Essentially the same problems are at play as was the case when National set up TMP. Back then, the government was so concerned about conflicts of interest that it appointed a board full of people with no interests in Maori broadcasting - which also they meant they didn't know anything about Maori broadcasting.
But it's also the same old story for Maori television: there's always someone who spoils it for the others.
If it wasn't Tuku Morgan trying to charge $20,000 for an interview about his use of public money, or paying himself more than the Prime Minister to "oversee sports coverage" at the fledgling Aotearoa Television Network, it was Joanna Paul's unusual use of Maori TV production money. In every case, someone's self-interest hurts the people who just want to do the right thing - like the poor folks on the floor at ATN (who earned little more than the dole) and Paul's partners at Aroha Productions. This has to stop and only Maori can stop it.
Anyway, getting offside with the Americans doesn't seem to be hurting the popularity of Helen Clark's government, according to today's NBR poll.
A senior British intelligence official appears to be saying that Tony Blair's office lied about the now somewhat-debunked "dossier" on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Blair is denying all, but the Americans are much more brazen: deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz has told Vanity Fair that the alleged weapons threat was really just a convenient excuse for war.
And Spinsanity is sifting through the "myths, misconceptions and unanswered questions about the war in Iraq", including the presence or otherwise of banned weapons, links between Saddam and al-Qaeda and the saving of Private Ryan.
There's an eerie absence of top rugby this weekend, but it's only a couple of weeks until the All Blacks take on England at the Caketin. Isn't it nice to see an All Black team that the public is quietly thrilled by?
So I'm off to see some of my fellow auld buggers - the Blams, the Newmatics and the Chills - play True Colours at the St James tonight, then moving on to catch Britain's wonderful Soul Jazz sound system at the Wyndham Bowling Club. Enough for anyone's weekend, I reckon, especially after the Incredible Film Festival's big opening night party last night. I got out fairly early, but I could see where it was all heading. Late-night 80s retro karaoke on K Road indeed...
Foreign affairs | May 28, 2003 12:13
We've heard the familiar chorus of whingeing this week about Phil Goff's decision to meet with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but the fact is we're not the only country whose foreign policy Israel is attempting to dictate at the moment.
The French foreign minister is, of course, meeting Arafat - and so has the Japanese foreign minister, at the cost of a meeting with Ariel Sharon, it seems. Bulgaria's minister eventually cancelled his meeting with Arafat - but also decided he would not meet the Israeli Prime Minister either. Bizarrely, the Israelis and the Americans, have even been trying to stop their anointed favourite, Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas, meeting with Arafat.
If The Americans are as committed to democracy as Denis Dutton contends in his latest embarrassing brain fart (read the Cato Institute's comment on The National Security Strategy of the United States of America after reading Dutton if you like) then they really ought to start respecting it. For all his failings, and for all the shortcomings of his election, no one really doubts that it is Arafat who has the popular mandate amongst the Palestinians. Trying to quarantine him from his own Prime Minister might seem expedient, but it will not work.
An analysis from Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper examines the 14 reservations issued by the Israeli Cabinet with regard to the US road map already accepted by the Palestinians:
In one fell swoop the reservations do away with long months of negotiations during which the Quartet, and then the U.S., rejected most of them. The authors of the document apparently assumed that President George Bush was only asking for the formal approval of the Sharon government to the road map, and to hell with the implementation.
In the document, not the slightest effort at moderating the reservations is made, nor is an effort made to hide the intention of neutering the road map. This is like thumbing one's nose at the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the UN. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians flared up yesterday when they heard the reservations.
Meanwhile, the Chilean government has caved into US pressure by removing Juan Gabriel Valdes as its ambassador to the United Nations. This is universally seen as a concession to get Chile's free trade deal with the US back on the table. Sound familiar? And a bit creepy?
A Herald poll today finds New Zealanders still staunchly behind their government's stance on Iraq, but, polite to the last, believing Helen Clark did the right thing when she apologised over the Al Gore thing. Meanwhile, John Armstrong provides a useful perspective on Jim Anderton's possibly ill-advised sally forth in the defence of the Prime Minister against American "bullying": his support for the coalition government's commitment of New Zealand troops to Afghanistan destroyed the Alliance - and this is the American way of saying thank you? Problem is, there is no brownie points system being operated by the Bush administration: minor (and not so minor) nations will do as they're told all the time, okay?
The extent to which the action in Iraq has yet to play out has been spelled out by a deadly string of attacks on US troops in the past week. Freelance military analyst Phil Carter has some interesting comments on what mistakes were made. The dissolution of the Iraqi army has been hailed by British diplomats as a sign that the new American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, has a better grip on the job than his predecessor, but others are concerned at the risk created by the enforced unemployment of 400,000 young male Iraqis. The purge on armed forces within the country has even taken in the militia that the Pentagon bought for its pet Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, but the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution isn't playing so nice.
Salam Pax has posted a lot of new material to his Baghdad blog, Where's Raed?, and it remains not only the most direct, but the funniest source of on-the-ground information from Iraq. If you read nothing else, read this. A UPI story quotes Salam from his trip south, endorsing the widespread view that the British have made a vastly better job of Basra than the Americans have managed anywhere else.
Another very good commentary has been written by returning Iraqi exile Kana Makiya:
Yet, there was another sense in which the landscape was deeply familiar. In a surreal way, the Beltway has transported its bureaucratic wrangling halfway around the world. I came to Iraq last week to attend a conference at Ur, near Nassiriyah, of 80 Iraqis to discuss the postwar political situation. The meeting, held in the supposed birthplace of Abraham, yielded a broad consensus among the Iraqi participants: In the immediate term, we need law and order, humanitarian assistance, and an all-Iraqi, secular political authority. Yet many, if not most, of the decisions necessary for implementation of these goals remain deferred, victims of what is known in Washington as the "interagency process." Competing agencies - the State Department, the CIA, the military's Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Pentagon - have different agendas for postwar Iraq, and, therefore, different Iraqis whom they seek to promote. These warring agendas have stalled the distribution of aid and the promotion of security and have led to what every Iraqi I have spoken with considers his or her deepest fear: anarchy.
Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs rounds up the sleaze on Richard Perle.
Death camp plans for Guantanamo Bay: no jury, no right of appeal.
Alternet rounds up the latest on Saving Private Lynch.
Sweet! | May 26, 2003 14:05
I was so happy after the whistle went. I felt dizzy - I think I was hyperventilating from shouting at the top of my lungs. Then I felt a bit emotional. I hugged my friends. We'd won the final.
Saturday night's match at Eden Park wasn't the prettiest game of rugby you've ever seen - it was a clash up the middle of the park, in which the Blues eventually beat the Crusaders at their own forward game. I watched the Blues, as raging favourites, win the first two Super 12 finals, but this game was different. There were a couple of attempts to try and get up a Mexican wave, but it wasn't really the night for that. It was just too intense.
Indeed, I have been to only one sporting occasion to compare with it for atmosphere and tension, and that was the 1988 FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium, when Sanchez scored to put Wimbledon up 1-0 over Liverpool in the 37th minute, and Wimbledon hung on till full time to win the Cup, with Dave Beasant saving a penalty in the second half. There was the same mixture of relief and elation afterwards.
Naturally, I was a bit excitable for the rest of the evening. We went to Galbraiths, where we ran into my old friend Bevan Rapson, who, despite being deputy editor of Metro, the magazine for Aucklanders, quite probably wears black and red undies. He was very gracious about the loss, and even admitted that he'd pick Carlos Spencer in his All Black side. I, in turn, agreed that I'd have MacDonald as my fullback and not Cullen. Turns out we both got our way. I'm delighted that Mils Muliaina has made the side - if anyone's played their way into a black jersey this season, it's him. Now they just need to appoint a minder to keep him out of trouble after the game …
We wound up at Galatos, which was a bit quiet, but after being at a rugby game with nearly 50,000 people, that was okay. Lady6 performed both with her own group, Verse 2, and later on with Wellington's 50Hz. She sings, she raps, she has a real bearing and presence on the stage, and it's surely only a matter of time before she achieves higher honours. It was a delight to see her, and I thought to myself, still flushed with pride, elation and that strong Trappist beer they serve at Galbraiths: I love Auckland.
Anyway, the Herald stuck with - or possibly got stuck with - its "death knell" story on Saturday. Turns out its anonymous "official" source was a known loudmouth at the US embassy in Wellington, and most people took the press release the embassy issued on Friday, after the Herald's "death knell" headline as being something in the nature of a calming of the waters that left the way open for talks in future. The Dom Post, for example, had it that the statement had "breathed a glimmer of life" into hopes for a free trade deal with the US.
The Herald, on the other hand, said that "The US embassy in Wellington yesterday gave the clearest indication yet that the door has been firmly closed on New Zealand's hopes of free trade talks." Well, that's what the story on the Herald website said. By the time the paper made its final print edition, two words had been added to the end of that opening sentence: "for now".
There are a few other differences in the body of the story. For instance, the original sentence: "But it is also the clearest indication yet that non-trade issues such as New Zealand's position on Iraq were key factors in the decision," became "But the statement is the clearest indication yet that non-trade issues such as New Zealand's position on Iraq were not quarantined but were, in fact, key factors in the decision. It is also the firmest statement yet that the US has firmly closed the door on New Zealand for now."
Did they lose confidence in their somewhat extravagant angle some time in the wee small hours?
Pique performance | May 23, 2003 13:56
Wow. Shades of 'Economy in Nosedive' or what? The Herald today takes a story that even NBR relegates to page three and devotes its entire front page to this: 'PM's comments death knell to trade deal: US'.
This story has already been raked over this week by the Dominion Post, among others, but the Herald's exclusive angle was an interview with an anonymous "US Government spokesman" who blamed Helen Clark's "personal attacks" on George W. Bush for the fact that a bilateral free trade deal with the US is no longer on offer - if it ever actually was.
US trade representative Robert Zoellick told the US House of Representatives this week that a trade deal with New Zealand was unlikely because of opposition from American farmers. The International Herald Tribune and NBR led with this angle, going on to note Zoellick's comment that there had been "some things done recently that would make [a trade deal] harder to carry."
The Herald's source claimed Clark's (perfectly accurate) comment in an interview that Al Gore would probably not have invaded Iraq had be been president was the "coup de grace" for the relationship between the two countries:
"When already-hoped-for co-operation isn't there and comments get increasingly more strident about 'it has to be the UN, it has to be the UN, it has to be the UN' and then the most responsible person in that Government all of a sudden comes out and sort of personally attacks the President, it's that one step beyond."
It might also be seen as an indication that Bush, in an extended fit of what USA Today called "presidential pique", has mistaken himself for America. The paper has provided a handy list of those countries whose leaders have been granted an audience with Bush since April 9: Slovakia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Colombia, Australia, Denmark, Singapore, Spain, Qatar, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea and Norway.
Few of those countries have provided anything like the practical assistance in the US-ordained war on terror that New Zealand (or, for that matter, Germany) has, but they all acknowledged which side their diplomatic bread was buttered on by endorsing the war in Iraq. Some of them don't actually have great records on little things like human rights, but you get that on the big jobs.
Before we leave trade, it's worth noting that the recent deal with Singapore (which poses no threat to heavily-protected US farming interests) was under negotiation for three years. And that one part of the fine print in Australia's prospective trade deal - inserted at the behest of big pharmaceutical companies - could mean a doubling in the price of prescription drugs. Michael Costello explained today in The Australian why he believes Australia should say no to an FTA anyway.
Meanwhile, American authorities have acted to keep America safe from the grave threat posed by French television journalists. Reason.com reports that half a dozen French journalists who had arrived to cover the big E3 video game expo in LA were subjected to body searches, handcuffed, fingerprinted, incarcerated and eventually sent back home. This pathetic, vindictive action - based on an unheard-of application of the visa waiver rules - was presumably ordained from above.
It became something of a pro-war cliche to point out that anti-war protestors in democracies would not enjoy the right to such public dissent in Saddam's Iraq. Well, they won't in Aznar's Spain either, if an astonishing proposed law makes the books.
Draft changes to the Spanish military criminal code propose that participation in public acts opposing military intervention in a situation of armed conflict could lead to prison sentences of between one and six years for the people involved, if convicted of "defeatism". Civilians could find themselves before military courts.
According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, the sanction would not apply only to actions against direct Spanish military involvement, but also to actions carried out "against an Allied power". It is also proposed that the bar should be radically lowered on exactly when the law applies. The old code effectively required either a war to be declared by the Spanish Parliament, or Spain to be invaded. The new one could see public protest like that raised against Spain's support of the US action in Iraq punished by between one and six years' prison.
Christ. Remind me what we were fighting for again?
Not America's national security, according to Sen. Robert Byrd in a rare show of spine by a US Democrat. To quote from the USA Today report:
He accused the president of constructing a "house of cards, built on deceit" to justify the war.
"There is ample evidence that the horrific events of Sept. 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who masterminded the Sept. 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein, who did not," Byrd said.
The senator said that instead of weakening terror groups, "we have given them new fuel for their fury."
He accused Bush of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam, bungling the peace and giving contracts to rebuild the country to "administration cronies."
Halliburton, an oil services company that Vice President Cheney headed for five years, could get up to $490 million for work in Iraq under an Army contract awarded without competition.
The U.S. postwar administration of Iraq is failing, the senator said. "The smiling face of the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier," Byrd said. "The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand of freedom."
It has become "painfully clear" that Iraq posed no immediate threat, he said. Searches for weapons of mass destruction have "turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons and the occasional buried swimming pool."
Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor reports that evidence on the ground is growing that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the war - making it the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. So much for "historically low casualties".
Paul Krugman dishes it out on the shambles in Iraq:
Hussein wasn't a threat to America. He had no important links to terrorism, and the main U.S. team searching for weapons of mass destruction has packed up and gone home. Meanwhile, true to form, the Bush team lost focus as soon as the TV coverage slackened off. The first result was an orgy of looting -- including looting of nuclear waste dumps that, incredibly, we failed to secure. Dirty bombs, anyone? Now, according to an article in The New Republic, armed Iraqi factions are preparing for civil war.
That leaves us facing exactly the dilemma war skeptics feared. If we leave Iraq quickly, it may well turn into a bigger, more dangerous version of Afghanistan. But if we stay for an extended period, we risk becoming, as one commentator put it, "an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land" -- just the recruiting tool al-Qaida needs. Who said that? President George H.W. Bush, explaining his decision not to go on to Baghdad back in 1991.
Meanwhile, the medical situation in Iraq is getting worse and worse.
Before they got Security Council consent for the lifting of sanctions, the US and Britain indefinitely postponed their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month.
And the White House is asking Congress to boost the maximum it can borrow by nearly a trillion dollars, to avoid the government going into default. This only a year after Congress had to raise the cap by half a trillion. And, as the Washington Post points out, there is no prospect of the insane federal deficit problem improving.
They need to borrow the money, of course, for really important things like funding advertising campaigns against medical marijuana…
Anyway, best wishes for the Black Caps, what with Daniel Vettori bowling like a prince of the game. Oh, and GO THE BLUES!!
Old rockers | May 22, 2003 11:53
There was much talk of a bold new era at last night's launch of TVNZ's six-part local rock 'n' roll history, Give it a Whirl. And even though most of the people doing the talking - Tony Holden included - have been around for ever, it just might be true.
It's hard to imagine a series like Give it a Whirl being made even five years ago, let alone it being screened in prime time on TV One. A group of old hands (lately more often employed on makeover shows and the like) has converged on this project as a labour of love, and, judging by the 15-minute trailer shown last night, it really looks the business.
The previously-unknown rock 'n' roll film from mid-50s Wanganui - the first known footage of Johnny Devlin - is a real taonga. (Wanganui, although you might not know it, has a certain cult status with rock 'n' roll obsessives, having spawned 60s garage rock outfits The Top Shelf and The Cresendos, as well as the contemporary would-be Datsuns, The Have. The town also had a song named after it by Croatian surf rock aces the Bambi Molesters.)
Further suggestion of change comes with this story from the Dom-Post. Ignore Murray McCully's well-worn allegations - if the odious house style at "our" One News really is being slashed back then I'm all for it.
Meanwhile, in our "apparently" section, a free trade deal with the US is off, according to a US trade official, and it's all Helen Clark's fault, according to the Opposition. Leaving aside the current American petulance (that's the "angry drunk" approach to trade and foreign policy again) the greater problem actually appears to be that the US Congress will not buck its vested interests in big farming. Perhaps someone in the local press could explain to us exactly what good a trade deal would be to us without agriculture? That is, what other tariffs or barriers currently apply to our non-agricultural exports?
And anyway, official US opinion on anything to do with trade - or economics for that matter - is nigh-on incoherent at the moment. New Zealand's dollar soared earlier this week, along with a number of other currencies, including the Euro, largely because of a slide in the greenback prompted by comments by US Treasury Secretary John Snow indicating a relaxed attitude towards the weakness of the US dollar.
This was an apparent indication that the "strong dollar" policy is no longer considered sustainable in the face of America's deepening deficit problems. But no! Evidence to the contrary, first the White House, then the US Treasury subsequently insisted that there had been no change at all to the policy. But neither seemed to be able to offer any explanation of exactly what a "strong dollar" was. On recent form they will probably continue to insist that black is in fact white for the foreseeable future...
The Power Plan | May 21, 2003 11:12
It's funny how pragmatic big companies can be when they act as consumers rather than producers. The corporate-funded Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand has campaigned for years for the government to bring Telecom to heel. TranzRail customers would love to see the government wade into rail. And, this week, big electricity users appear to be welcoming the government's new power plan.
The plan, it must be said, is an odd-looking beast, designed to cover the electricity market's failings without, if possible, stepping on the market's toes. It would all have been much easier had the industry not been privatised in the way it was. So generators will pay a levy (which will inevitably be passed on to consumers) to cover the cost of fossil-fuel emergency generation that will kick in in "very dry" years like the current one. Spot prices will be allowed to go high (this is the ostensible point of the market) but, um, not too high …
Bill English was on Morning Report today honking away about it, and maintaining that all the government needs to do is get out of the way of generators who want to build new capacity. But the whole point, surely, is that there isn't a business case for private generators to build reserve capacity that might go unused for five or 10 years at a time, which is what the new plan aims to do. If things get tight, they get better prices on the spot market anyway. It's the customers, not the generators, who have a problem.
A John Roughan editorial in the Herald makes a reasoned case for the government continuing to stand back and let the market "mature" - even though in years like this that means potentially ruinous cost increases for many businesses. But the fact is - as if there were some vestigal memory of the days when it was the government's job to build dams and power stations - the punters have been quite clearly looking for the government, not the market, to do something about it all.
Anyway, methinks it can be no accident the government can change, that a whole ministry can change its name - Commerce to Economic Development - but a letter from Bill Birch and Max Bradford trumpeting National's electricity reforms can still be available for viewing: "The Government's overall energy policy objective is to ensure that: Electricity is available when required by consumers; Electricity is produced at the lowest possible cost to the economy as a whole; and Harm to the environment is minimised." Hilarious.
And, as a matter of interest, here are a couple of old Hard Newses, archived from 1998 (the Auckland power crisis) and 1999 (Bradford and the line charges fiasco). Amazingly, the popular drama 'Deregulating Electricity' has been running roughly as long as Shortland Street …
PS: 28,000 tickets for Saturday's Super 12 final sold out in under two hours. After 30 or 40 fruitless attempts to make a transaction on the Red Tickets website, I queued for an hour at the Point Chev Post Shop and managed to get my crew into the North East stand (after it had apparently already sold out), and my butcher and his mates onto the terraces. When I gave him his tickets he very kindly handed me a nice roast of organic lamb, which I cooked last night with apricots and thyme. Life could certainly be worse …
A queer business | May 19, 2003 12:19
The dismissal of Queer Nation presenter Jonathan Marshall and his director David Herkt after they tailed TVNZ frontliner Mike Hosking in search of paparazzo pictures from his private life has excited sympathy in some quarters - notably from the Act party's eternally available Rodney Hide, who is no doubt trying to bolster his liberal credentials after that unfortunate business on Waiheke Island.
Sacking from the show - via the independent production company for which they worked on Queer Nation - was certainly at the heavy end of the scale, but, really, what did they expect? Herkt bragged about his escapades with Marshall in the nz.soc.queer newsgroup, thus:
"... I also know that Jonathan is vaguely tempted to use his cellphone and report Mike's speeding. I'd be tempted. You'd at least get photos of Mike being pulled over... by the time we are at the bottom of Anzac Ave, by Beach Rd, I am sure Mike knows he is being tailed ... 'You really need two cars,' Jonathan comments, 'with cellphones on ... Mike is really going fast and just over the Strand has to swerve to avoid another car and we are up into Parnell... but at the end of the street there is a roundabout and Mike goes right round it and goes back the way we came. I laugh. He has really got us now... We continue following him until he pulls into a Mobil service-station. We go down the street and pull into a side-road... 'There he is,' I say, as Mike seems to be heading into the service station."
Uh-huh. So they provoke a chase and then speculate about calling the cops so they can get shots of Hosking being stopped. But what say something else had happened? What say Hosking, in his effort to evade a car tailing him for unknown reasons, had hit someone else? Wouldn't that have been hilarious?
Herkt's enthusiastic diary postings in the newsgroup appear to have been a significant factor in his own dismissal - they were noted by a lawyer from Simpson Grierson acting on TVNZ's behalf. He's been back there since bleating about the lawyer who had "been trawling through my life with a yellow highlighter". And yet, he had done nothing wrong in chasing Hosking because "the only photographs taken were taken on a public street". Pardon? So reading his freely-offered posts to a public Usenet newsgroup is a terrible invasion of his privacy - but the physical pursuit of a Hosking (who might technically be regarded as a fellow employee) isn't?
I know people who know Herkt and he doesn't seem to be a bad guy. Marshall, on the other hand, seems utterly self-interested (memo to Darren McDonald: that furtive figure trying to take your picture recently through the window of Jervois recently was Jonathan Marshall). The two of them are welcome to brazen it out - if Herkt does take his own legal action, it'll be an interesting test of the new "disrepute" clause in TVNZ's contracts. What neither of them is entitled to do is go begging for the kind of personal sympathy they never thought to offer Mike Hosking.
PS: Jay Bennie's excellent GayNZ.com has the stories.
Temperance man | May 16, 2003 11:45
One of the curiosities of our era is the way political conservatives have become fiscal lunatics while the erstwhile looney left pitches itself as the soul of stewardship.
In the run-up to Michael Cullen's Budget speech, Richard Prebble became particularly amusing. Unless I misheard him, when he was talking to Damian Christie on 95bFM's The Wire yesterday, Prebble seemed to completely lose the plot and demand that this year's entire $4 billion "overtaxation" be immediately returned to the public in the form of permanent tax cuts.
To make, as conservatives like to do, a comparison with private business: if a CEO coming off a decent year - but facing a recession of unknown severity - screwed his cash position like that his board would want to know when he planned to stop smoking crack.
Oh, but it's not really cash anyway, as Cullen has been explaining in a patient, slightly patronising tone that had the effect of making Sean Plunket shout at him on Morning Report today. Accrual accounting has that effect on people. It was also hard not to notice that Cullen referred disapprovingly to the reckless deficit policies of the US administration not once, but twice. We will not, said the neo-Keynesian, be carrying on like the drunk in the corner over there. We're going to have our 2.5 standard drinks and go to bed early.
So, if hadn't been facing Sars, global recession and a power crisis, would Cullen have tossed out a few more lollies instead of being so notably cautious? It's hard to say, but it's clear that one thing this Finance minister won't do is endanger his revenue base. The lollies flagged for next year seem set to come entirely in the form of income support and taxation measures targeted at families. A break is well overdue for the poorest families, but it did get me wondering that if all the breaks continue to go to the breeders, will the Labour Party's non-breeding gay support base start to feel a bit left out?
Anyway, the students are outraged that after a three-year freeze on student fees, the cap has been raised and will henceforth be indexed to the CPI. But the sad fact is that unless the Greens join a government, this is the best deal anyone's going to give them.
Not in the Budget but jolly interesting is the government's promised response next Tuesday to our scary little shortage of generating capacity. Judging by a Star-Times interview with Pete Hodgson, it will be something a little like what goes in telecommunications, where all parties are required to chip in to the cost of the universal service obligation - or in this case, otherwise unprofitable contingency generation capacity. It's worth noting that this current lack of stand-by capacity is exactly what people worried about when National first started deregulating the industry.
Meanwhile, southerners can get that chip off their shoulders: the reason Aucklanders can't save so much electricity is because we use less in the first place. Of course, having Leighton Smith and Garth George behaving like hyperactive children and urging everyone to use more electricity to show the bastards what's what doesn't help.
Salon has an interview with Eric 'Fast Food Nation' Schlosser, whose new book I'm about to review for The Listener. Short version of the review: another fascinating book, and just the tonic for lefties feeling alienated by Michael Moore's unfortunate liberties with the facts.
Speaking of which, how about this? The saving of Private Jessica Lynch is turning out to be yet another golden media moment from Iraq that just wasn't what it seemed.
The Toronto Star has been able to interview the hospital staff and discover that not only was there no call for a "daring raid" - there no Iraqi soldiers at the hospital - the staff had actually tried to return Private Lynch to the American lines the day before she was "rescued", but had to turn back after their ambulance was fired on by US troops! But what turned up on the world's front pages is, sadly, probably the version that history will record.
Very big mess | May 14, 2003 11:56
So rumours of the demise of al-Qaeda have, clearly, been greatly exaggerated. Barely has victory been claimed in Iraq than murderous millennial terrorism is back on the agenda.
A series of recent news stories have held that al-Qaeda - like any well-organised gang - has simply retired one set of footsoldiers and replaced them with another. The attack in Riyadh makes last week's unseemly post-war bragging by US intelligence officials look pretty sick.
The Saudi-based Arab News expressed shock, revulsion and outrage at the attack, and called on Saudis to "face up to the fact that we have a terrorist problem here ... There is much in US policy to condemn; there are many aspects of Western society that offend - and where necessary, Arab governments condemn. But anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism for their own sake are crude, ignorant and destructive. They create hate. They must end. Otherwise there will be more barbarities."
The Christian Science Monitor, on the other hand, said that "Americans are stuck in the middle of what is essentially a civil war - a monarchy vs. Mr. bin Laden's drive for an Islamic state - because of their dependency on the largest oil reserves in the world."
The Riyadh attacks pre-empted what was to have been the first speech by America's new man in Iraq. The Americans have replaced their previous senior civilian in Iraq after a stark failure to restore public order and services to the country for which they are now responsible. Iraqis are still dying needlessly in ravaged hospitals in Baghdad. And there is speculation that locals may be suffering radiation poisoning after US forces' unaccountable failure to safeguard Iraq's nuclear facilities, which have been looted. An Arab News editorial put it this way:
It is an irony that a nation so often accused of imperialism should prove so incompetent when it comes to playing the colonial administrator; the French and British are still so much better at these things, even decades after their empires have gone, as the latter have demonstrated in Basra. But those who gloat at American failures should examine their own consciences. No one should want the US to fail in Iraq at this point in time - because the people who suffer all the more if they do are the Iraqis. Better that they do the job of rebuilding the country quickly and well, and then get out as soon as possible. Those who want it all to go pear-shaped self-evidently do not care anything about the well-being of the Iraqis.
Frankly, if the White House does care for the welfare of the people it so noisily liberated, it should get with the damn programme and make way for an organisation with some skills in nation-building: the United Nations. (The gulf in competence between America's war-fighting and peace-making efforts tends to endorse Norman Mailer's assessment of the US military leadership as "intelligent, articulate and considerably less corrupt than any other power group in America".)
Unfortunately, Clare Short seems to believe that the UN has already been stitched up and says her resignation from the Blair government is a consequence of that.
Meanwhile, the estimated toll of civilian dead in Iraq is steadily heading for twice that suffered in the September 11 attacks. Add in the slaughter of the hapless Iraqi soldiers - for which you can start the counting at five figures - and it's starting to look like a lot of blood.
The main US weapons inspection team is preparing to give up and go home. Regardless of whether someone will eventually find something banned it is now clear that the daunting arsenal described before the war by Bush and Blair - literally tons of chemicals and biological agents, able to be deployed against a foreign power within 45 minutes - simply does not exist. Was it a dangerous distraction from the real threats?
While the Republican Party tries to engineer what can only be seen as a cynical gerrymander in Texas (aimed, like a similar move in Colorado, at cementing their hold on Congress) its very good friend Richard Prebble continues to conduct himself as a man with no discernable principles, having this week heartily endorsed the new US policy of using trade as a weapon. So what happens when, say the Chinese, start tying foreign policy demands to trade concessions? Do we really want, as our Prime Minister asked last week, to go back the nineteenth century? Apparently some people do. As The Guardian pointed out:
Against richer rivals, Mr Bush views trade as war by other means. Washington faces a trade battle with Europe over illegal $4bn tax breaks for big US exporters such as Microsoft and Boeing. Last year, Mr Bush imposed plainly illegal tariffs on steel imports, hurting Chinese and European companies.
What the world is witnessing is America as a mercantilist power - protecting domestic industries while pursuing free trade abroad. Britain, which advanced this concept in the 19th century, built an empire which rested on incomparable military and economic might.
Yet US trade policy now seems not only capricious but confused. The White House is behaving like an angry drunk over trade issues. Is the administration for the Latin American free-trade region or not? And if the plan is still on, why did the White House so merrily stick it to Mexico and Chile last week? And shouldn't they decide on that before they hare off and declare a free trade zone in the Middle East? The Times correspondent, meanwhile, noted that the fanfare for the Middle East proposal was coming exclusively from one side, and that Middle Eastern countries were struggling to work out what it was all about:
For the US, it is all so simple. Arab states should open the door, privatise and stop running countries like corrupt family businesses. Saudi Arabia must admit foreign investors and diversify from oil. From the Arab perspective, it looks more like a poker game with a loaded deck and an opportunity for the subsidised Israeli economy to make further land grabs in the Middle East.
Unless, America shows [it is] willing by making sacrifices. One of Egypt's exports is cotton but last year it had to cut prices to remain competitive. Egyptian and other African cotton farmers struggled last year because 25,000 US farmers receive $4 billion (£2.5 billion) in subsidies, a sum 30 per cent larger than the value of the cotton produced. Hardly free trade.
At the same time, the US has launched a WTO case against Europe over GM regulations which The Times points out looks more like a political than a commercial move. Canada has joined the US action but is simultaneously preparing to work on a new trade deal with the European Union. And the US's second-highest monthly trade deficit ever - $US43.5 billion - is, according to some American commentators, merely a symptom of the US economy's rude health compared to the rest of the world. But no one seems to know what the US "strong dollar" policy actually means.
No doubt the Bush club's cheerleaders will keep on wittering about leadership and decisiveness. The evidence suggests that a more humble virtue - simple competence - wouldn't go astray. This is all looking like a very big mess.
Maximum Respect | May 09, 2003 13:56
Des Dubbelt died this week, aged 82, after a short illness. Friends of mine knew Des far better than I did. Indeed, I only actually met him once, in 1994, at his home in West Auckland. I interviewed him for a story in Planet magazine, which I was editing at the time, and had a great afternoon in the company of this kind and clever man.
Whether they know it or not, many people in publishing here owe a debt to Des. For 13 years he was the editor of Playdate magazine, New Zealand's first - and for a long time, only - pop culture magazine. At a time when the national culture was tweedy and conservative, Playdate was smart and sexy. Among those who passed through it were Roger Donaldson, Bob Harvey, Kim Goldwater and The Listener's venerable chief sub-editor, Tom McWilliams.
The first time I recall seeing a copy of Playdate was in 1989, when I was back from London for the summer. Yoh, the old drummer from the Screaming Mee Mees, was working for Rip It Up, and went to dump a load of paper for recycling. He noticed a pile of interesting old magazines and brought them back to the office, where Murray Cammick was delighted.
I borrowed an issue from Murray for one of the ads in it: a brilliant op-art idea for Clearasil, featuring a model in a skin-tight white hood with big black dots, against a background of white dots on black. Stuart Page, Grant Fell and I swapped out the black and white for flouro orange and green and turned it into a giant poster for Housequake II, the second of the big dance parties we put on that summer. It should have won an award, that poster. It was incredible.
It was also an example of how stylish and enduring much of what Des did in Playdate was.
I've always been fascinated by the legacy of magazine publishing in New Zealand, especially where it touched on the fringe. I tried to put it in some context in the 1994 Planet story below (big thanks to Fiona for retyping it), part of a special feature on the history of New Zealand fashion, which contains some familiar names. (It's probably safe now to reveal that I was Wayne Washington - and Steven Spencer too.)
Des will no doubt receive tributes from those who knew him well, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to remember him too. He was one cool cat.
Des, as we used to say in London: maximum respect.
------
The Rag Trade
[Planet magazine, summer 1994]
RUSSELL BROWN digs up the ancestors of today's indigenous street press and finds out that some things haven't changed.
We tend to think of "street style" as the property of today's fashion culture - or, at least, the creation of the style press with which it's so closely linked. History, in this view of things, means last month's issue.
But that's not the way it was. The first New Zealand publication which addressed style as lifestyle, as a matter of week-to-week observance and, crucially, as the property of youth was called Playdate - and it ran the length of the 1960s and into the 70s.
Let's get this straight - Playdate was not a fashion magazine. But the way it chucked fashion in the same cultural sack as pop music, movies, art and simply being young and alive represented a major break with the past. It had a lot in common with today's "street press" - a symbiotic relationship with the boutique sector, acres of fashion industry advertising and even - especially, perhaps - any old excuse for a bit of semi-nudity.
The magazine began unprepossessingly in 1960 as a puff sheet for Kerridge Odeon films called Cinema. Des Dubbelt, who would edit the magazine for the rest of its days, arrived in 1961, just before it became Playdate. Founding editor Sid Bevan left shortly after and Dubbelt approached the imperious RJ Kerridge about broadening the mag's scope.
"We had to include the Amalgamated cinema releases for one thing. RJ was much more far-sighted than, say, the accountants in the firm, who thought, 'oh God, we're not going to publicise the opposition'. He agreed immediately and we moved into fashion, showbiz and feature articles about people doing things that were of interest to kids in general.
"By the time the Beatles thing arrived we were very well established as the magazine for that generation. In its heyday, Playdate sold about 120,000 copies a month.
"Up to that point, the successful magazines like Woman's Weekly had been so fuddy-duddy it was unbelievable. One interesting thing was the response we got from tradesmen at the Auckland Star, where Playdate and the Weekly were printed - they said 'this is so much more interesting than what they're doing at the Woman's Weekly'."
Dubbelt is sixtysomething and retired now - but he remains strikingly interested in the new.
"I remember the first copy of The Face that I saw - I thought, well, this is the revolution. Overnight it made, say, Vanity Fair, look fuddy-duddy. What was his name? Brodie? He was a real pioneer."
He admits to knowing nothing of the computer technology which makes the youth press possible now. The technological leap in his era was the advent of photo-offset printing.
"That was great. Being able to bleed all around and through the gutter and overprint with different tones. It was a big breakthrough from the old letterpress days - and from the very conventional sort of layouts that the local magazines had then. As big a breakthrough as what you've made at Planet, say, from The Listener."
Indeed, some of Dubbelt's "layouts" wouldn't look out of place today, 30 years on. He was also the first to start drawing photographers for his fashion shoots from Elam's fledgling photography course, rather than trusting in the establishment.
"I was taught that you've got to hit people visually. A good fashion spread, especially out on location, not like the formal shots you'll see in Fashion Quarterly, is very visually effective. Formal fashion photographers weren't good at it. I think we used Des Williams once and that was enough."
Instead, Dubbelt gave a start to young photographers like Max Thomson, Roger Donaldson and Kim Goldwater. Thomson has since become a fashion photographer of note, Donaldson is on our honour roll of film directors and Goldwater now makes fine expensive wine on Waiheke Island.
"The likes of Roger, rather than looking back and saying 'my God, you exploited me', seem to be very appreciative to this day that they had that opportunity and that elbow room to work for peanuts as they did," Dubbelt muses, a note of wonder in his voice.
As it is today, all the find editorial ideas could be wrecked if the paid advertising didn't measure up. The prime mover back then was a young ad man called Bob Harvey, now the mayor of Waitakere City. Harvey's "hot shop" handled accounts like Maggy Knitwear, which introduced the miniskirt to New Zealand girls. His groovy campaigns paid the bills while Dubbeslt ran four-page features on tiny boutiques like Chaos and Annie Bonza.
Maggy was pretty much a mainstream line. So, certainly, were other regular Playdate advertisers like Summit and Lane, Walker Rudkin.
"Those firms had youngish marketing people and were shrewd enough to throw their hats in the ring too. I don't know if that happens today."
Eventually, the Playdate profits began to wane. With "RJ" at the top, Dubbelt couldn't follow the zeitgeist into drugs and Woodstock - and no amount of daring nipple shots could bridge the gap. Kerridge sold Playdate to the Star in 1972, putting it in the same bed as the newly-ascendant Eve and assuring its rapid demise.
Eve and its competitor Thursday took magazine fashion in another direction, hitching it to the newfound freedoms of women. They were racy - too racy to last under establishment publishers in the end.
Street style had to wait until 1983 to get another run in the media - and it was perhaps no coincidence that the new venture was independently published and partly inspired by Max Thomson, who had cut his teeth on Playdate. It was ChaCha -- and it's regarded as the grandma of today's street press.
Ngila Dickson was, back then, running a boutique in the decaying Corner complex on Queen Street. It was a struggle, even though she was paying dead-cheap rent to share a room with Murray Cammick's Rip It Up magazine. So when Thomson suggested they approach Cammick about publishing a new magazine, Dickson jumped. Cammick also was looking for something which would give him a few more visual kicks than the crammed-up RIU.
So ChaCha began as a spacious newsprint tabloid. And suddenly, things were happening. A new kind of fashion photography emerged, fully-formed. The bizarre lens dreams of Philip Peacocke spilled over the pages and the work of Thomson's assistant, a skateboard dropout called Kerry Brown, started to attract attention. New Models like Rosanna Raymond, Megan Douglas and Maree Jephson were everywhere. Bold designers like Soo Kim had exposure.
ChaCha's distance from the mainstream was emphasised in a sneering story about the "attic press" by Robyn Langwell for More magazine. Langwell sniggered into her sleeve about the strangeness of the fashion, about the grassroots nature of the publication - were these people serious? It wasn't long, of course, before More was falling over itself to follow ChaCha.
ChaCha had words, too. It addressed that crucial issue, coffee, and endorsed only the strongest the town had to offer. It noted the emergence of Pacific-inspired fashion, featuring a tapa-clad cover model a decade before Pasifika took the stage. Fledgling style hack Wayne Washington interviewed the new mayor of Waitakere City, Tim Shadbolt. (Politics! In a fashion magazine!) As it went to an A4 glossy format, a young man called Chad Taylor exercised his well-sharpened pen.
Eventually, the strains of independent publishing told and ChaCha, lacking advertising support and with Cammick distracted by his new record label, folded. But the careers, fashion businesses and the inner-city identity it helped to foster have lasted longer. In an era when Fashion Quarterly sources almost all its material from offshore, we should be thankful for that.
Salam is safe! | May 08, 2003 12:21
It's funny, the idea of becoming attached to someone you don't know and had never heard of until relatively recently, but I am so glad to be able to tell you that Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, is safe, and has had an extensive new post added to his now world-famous weblog.
A quick read reveals what you'd expect: the mixed and conflicting emotions flowing from liberation and the horror of the war that brought it. Anyway, just read it yourself.
Production error | May 06, 2003 11:51
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland has very kindly got back to me regarding the "law of the jungle" interview with our Prime Minister. Seems the dread phrase was meant to appear in single quotes in the intro, but a "production error" meant it appeared in full quotation marks, making it appear that she actually said it.
This is fair enough as it goes, and I know very well about the various imperatives in the trade of written journalism, but I can't help but feel that Freedland - who is one of my favourite British journalists - pushed the envelope of implication just a little too far in this case.
Anyway, here's the correspondence:
Hi Jonathan,
I run a New Zealand weblog community called Public Address (http://publicaddress.net). Your interview with our Prime Minister has made headlines here, especially the phrase "law of the jungle".
I wonder if you can confirm for me whether she actually used the phrase "law of the jungle" in a direct quote or whether it was simply implied in the quote you did use in the story ("... who wants to go back to the jungle?"). I'm assuming it's the latter.
Cheers,
RB----
Russell
Thanks for that note -- and yr assumption in your message to me is bang-on and correct. If it helps, here's the letter Charlotte and I have sent to the Dominion a few hours ago:
Dear Sir
Since our Guardian interview with Helen Clark seems to have stirred some controversy, we thought we would take this opportunity to clarify matters.
As the transcript released by the Prime Minister confirms, the quotations attributed to her in the body of our article are 100% accurate. Moreover, we believe the entire article represents a fair and accurate account of the argument she set out to us - namely that the invasion of Iraq without a UN mandate has created a dangerous precedent.
Now, to the controversial phrase "law of the jungle." It is quite true that Ms Clark only used the last two of those four words, but it was clear to us that 'law of the jungle' was precisely the idea she had in mind. Indeed, as the transcript shows, that was clearly the meaning behind our use of the phrase in a question to her - which she embraced in her answer. It is hard to imagine what else she could have meant when she asked, "Who wants to go back to the jungle?"
To reflect that fact, we used the phrase in single quotation marks in our original version of the article - to convey that this was the figure of speech invoked by the PM, if not uttered by her in its entirety - but, due to a production error, it appeared in full quotation marks in the paper.
We hope that clears things up.
Yours,
Charlotte Denny, Economics Correspondent
Jonathan Freedland, Columnist
Desperate need for attention | May 06, 2003 11:04
Really, it's bad enough that we in Auckland have to endure John Banks without him being inflicted on Wellingtonians. His foray into the debate over the Lord of the Rings world premiere - suggesting that Auckland should host it instead - was more about his desperate need for attention than anything else.
That said, who should pay $7 million for the refurbishment of the tatty old Embassy Theatre? As a Wellington ratepayer, I'm sure I'd be a bit nervous about underwriting the cost of doing up a theatre the council doesn't even own. Anyway, apparently the council contribution is now set at $2 million. I have a feeling that we can expect more unfortunate headlines by the time Return of the King rolls up in December.
Meanwhile, in Auckland, we're one step closer to getting that downtown SuperDome, meaning we'll never have to miss out on a Billy Joel concert again. The trickiest piece of the whole downtown puzzle still looks like getting trains to run into that fine new station in any useful or consistent way.
Jonathan Freedland hasn't responded to my email, but the government has come up with a transcript of his interview with Helen Clark, which appears to confirm my impression that, no, she didn't say "law of the jungle" - indeed, Freedland introduced the j-word into the conversation - and she didn't "warn" the US and Britain about unleashing said law either. It was, basically, a classic beat-up.
Staring at Blurry Photographs Part 4: the Evening Standard has admitted to manipulating and replicating sections of crowd in the BBC TV still used as its late edition front-page picture on April 9 - but only a little bit:
"The image was a video grab ... as is customary practice, the TV station's small logos were removed and a replicated part of the background inserted. A transmission error led to a tiny blurred patch, no more than 1/30th the size of the picture, appearing on the top of the frame.
"The Memory Hole website alleges the Standard intended to deceive readers by inflating the size of the crowd. Wrong. It also claims we put together two different still-frames. Wrong again ... the Standard stands by its use of this page one picture."
I don't know about the format used by BBC News in the UK, but live coverage on BBC World carries logos at the top left and right of the screen, with the larger logo on the left. And this is actually exactly how the picture looks.
But the Standard has replicated a fairly large section of the crowd in obscuring the logos, in such a way that the replicated faces (everything above the big, winding smudge created with the blurring tool) fill up the frame, making for a more compelling picture. Were there people there before? How many? We don't know. All we know is that the picture the Standard ran is not real. You don't have to sign up to The Memory Hole's florid language (I thought the Stalin thing was a joke, actually) to find that unacceptable.
Meanwhile, some sign of a return to order in Iraq (there'd better be - we don't really want New Zealand troops going in to keep the peace in a hellhole) and a depressing survey of the prospective influence of the Israeli and American far right on Middle East peace plans.
Junglist | May 05, 2003 09:08
So, according to the Dominion Post and One News Helen Clark has told Britain and America they might live to regret unleashing the "law of the jungle" through their war in Iraq. But, oddly enough, she didn't. She didn't even tell the Guardian that.
My first thought on reading the Guardian story after it made the TV news last night was that she didn't appear to actually have said "law of the jungle", even though it appeared in the headline in quote marks and subsequently created all the fuss. She confirmed such to journalists this morning. So what she actually said was:
"New Zealand has always argued for the rights of small states," she said - one of her predecessors, the wartime Labour prime minister Peter Fraser, helped to write the UN's founding charter.
"We saw the UN as a fresh start for a world trying to work out its problems together rather than a return to a 19th world where the great powers carved it up ... Who wants to go back to the jungle?"
This is, of course, the same argument for multilateralism that Clark and her government have been making for more than a year, although the bit about China was arguably a bit risqué. The Guardian, a notably Clark-friendly paper, describes her "one of Tony Blair's closest foreign political allies."
Its business section also quoted her this week talking up multilateralism after she chaired an OECD meeting that delivered "a joint plan yesterday for tearing down tariff barriers on manufactured imports in an effort to reinvigorate deadlocked global trade talks and heal the transatlantic rift over Iraq."
The New Zealand Herald, to its credit, seems to have moved past the cringe phase and instead has an actual news story based on Clark's trip - claiming that we might send troops to Iraq "under a top-secret stabilisation scheme being worked out by the British." Fran O'sullivan, who appears to have some good sources, provides an interesting commentary and the paper even weighs in with an able and intelligent defence of multilateralism in its editorial column.
If you've felt a little uneasy about the style of US liberal superguy Michael Moore, your instincts are right. On Mediawatch yesterday, Steven Price delivered a good commentary on the dubious constructions of Moore's award-winning film Bowling for Columbine. I'll get that up on the Mediawatch site as soon as I can get a transcript, but in the meantime, here's the website Steven referenced. The lawyer who adeptly unpicked the editing, David Hardy, believes the whole premise of the film is fraudulent, but he's a second-amendment enthusiast, and thus inevitably at one extreme of the gun debate. This site provides a more measured reading. Whatever view you take, it seems clear that some of the editing in the film - especially that used to fit up the NRA - is strikingly cynical. Here's the usually reliable Spinsanity's take on errors of fact in Moore's hugely successful book Stupid White Men.
A couple of readers (only one of whom is Neil Morrison) are up in arms over my noting of what appears to be another form of manipulation in the London Evening Standard.
Righto. It's not the end of the world, but what it looks like to me is this: it's Saddam statue day, and as history is made in the Baghdad twilight, the Standard, a tabloid-format afternoon paper, wants to headline its April 9 late edition 'FREEDOM: Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad' but the only available picture it can get by deadline is a screen-grab from the BBC. And even that doesn't do it. Not enough thronging. So they fatten out the background with a standard technique - replicating it. That's what it looks like. (This kind of technique has been applied to at least one other Iraq war photograph, earning the lensman responsible a dismissal from the books of the Los Angeles Times.) The story might have been broken by Indymedia, but it and a subsequent update appeared at The Memory Hole, which is usually accurate. And until someone can show me that that isn't the photo that appeared on the front page of the late edition, that's what I think.
Firdus Square fascinates me because the events there were so symbolic, and because I did feel a little duped by the coverage. I woke up that morning, saw a statue fall, heard somebody mention the Berlin Wall and that was it. Only it wasn't, entirely. Reputable media commentators, like the Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson, mused along the same lines the next day. Among other things, Johnson pointed out that by the end of the big day, one US network, MSNBC, had not only begun telling its audience that Iraqis had pulled down the statue themselves, but was showing video of the statue's fall "edited into one seamless fall, rather than the herky-jerky, two-part process it had been." Thus are myths made …
How Bizarre | May 02, 2003 12:00
The annual New Zealand Music Awards has had its share of bum notes over the years. Deep down it was your Dad's awards ceremony and it was usually at its most awkward when they tried to package it for television. Last year's split ceremony was particularly clunky. How bizarre then, that it should re-emerge this year as such a slick, engaging and impressive event.
Dinner was always a bit of a problem. While the Silver Scrolls, in keeping with its warm, clubbish atmosphere has simply put on an everyone-muck-in buffet and kept the drinks flowing while the bands played, RIANZ, which stages the Music Awards (aka, lately, the Tuis), usually seemed to get it wrong - never more so than the year at the Town Hall where they served drinks for four hours and finally, at 11pm, delivered doorstep-sized slabs of steak to everyone. So this year they scrapped the dinner, and most of the speeches too.
The other grand tradition - the pre-match scrap over judging - was retained, as it emerged that the new academy-style system meant that nominated recordings would not be sent to the new, enlarged judging panel, which also would not meet to discuss its choices. There was no way of ensuring that the judges had heard all - or any - of the contenders, and asking Wayne Mowatt to decide whether Rhombus or Subware had made the best dance music album was quite surreal.
As it turned out, there were no really perverse results and the surprise winners pleased most people. The successive delivery of David Tua (with King Kapisi), Jonah Lomu, Lawrence Makoare and Temuera Morrison to the stage didn't just provide rather more star quality than usual, it underlined the remarkably important role that Maori and Pacific Islanders now play in the local industry at a creative, if not yet an executive, level. Quite a number of presentation and acceptance speeches were made in Maori (and Samoan) and nobody minded.
There is also, it must be said, a bit more star quality about in the industry itself these days. RIANZ has been churlish in the past about actually letting the musicians into its industry do, but they were there in force on Wednesday night. And for once, the production and performances were on the money. Among them, Blindspott are - well, let's say, better than the Feelers - but their team-up with Deceptikonz was engagingly energetic, Goldenhorse were magic (I wanted Kirsten to win best female vocalist but she didn't) and the D4 stormed through their Letterman tune, 'Get Loose'.
There was one memorable standing ovation - the crowd of 1500 rose unbidden in sustained applause when a Lifetime Achievement Award was given to the late Dylan Taite. Afterwards, doubtless concluding that Dylan would have wanted it that way, those present paid further tribute through energetic application to a range of social behaviours.
To say this was the best Music Awards ever is rather understating the case - it was just on a different planet to its predecessors. It was also, clearly, a far more expensive production than in the past - Microsoft presumably picked up a reasonable slice of the bill in exchange for all that Xbox branding. With, hopefully, a few refinements - they should just make a hip-hop category and be done with it - the new model Tuis will presumably be reprised next year. And it's not your Dad's awards any more.
PS: Special mention must be made of the mOnstavision hi-res LED screens used through the evening and stacked across the stage for the D4's performance. Either these things really work or those drugs were much stronger than I thought …
PPS: More from the staring-at-grainy-photographs department. Seems the London Evening Standard's editors figured the crowd in Firdus Square when Saddam's statue fell wasn't big enough - so they faked their front-page photo to make it appear much larger than it really was. And, following up on recent posts, the Bush administration is keeping secret almost all of a Congressional report into almost all of a Congressional report and may yet withhold key information from its own investigating commission under "executive privilege". And further evidence of a bid to make the world safe for US copyright law. The RIAA is apparently already helping rewrite Iraq's perfectly reasonable copyright legislation to its satisfaction.
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