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The Trophy Hunter | Jan 30, 2009 11:33

As I recall, the theory was that National's old ministerial hands would provide stability and experience in John Key's new government. In reality, Murray McCully's can't-you-see-I'm-trying-to-have-a-holiday performance as foreign minister has been embarrassing. And Tony Ryall's trophy-hunting this week at the Otago District Health Board is simply a disgrace.

The ODHB suffered a $17 million fraud at the hands of its former CIO and his accomplice. Both men have been brought to book and await sentencing. But Ryall on Wednesday night called the ODHB's chair, Richard Thomson and suggested he resign from his position.

This doesn't seem, on the face of it, to make a lot of sense. Thomson became chair well after the fraud began and was subsequently instrumental in bringing it to the attention of police.

But here's the thing: why was the minister making this private call in search of a resignation anyway? If he truly believed there was a public case for Thomson's departure, why not publicly say so? Why not, with all due attention to process, actually sack the guy?

Thomson, rather admirably, hasn't been willing to play this as a private game and yesterday challenged Ryall to sack him. Ryall belatedly confirmed to journalists that he was "considering" dismissing Thomson.

Thomson, who still expects to get the chop, has every right to have it happen transparently, and no obligation to roll over to give his minister a trophy -- especially given that he seems to have the very strong support of his own board.

The irony, of course, is that Ryall has also made great play of reinstating seven dismissed Hawke's Bay District Health Board members; reversing what he claimed was the unacceptable political interference of his predecessor, David Cunliffe in sacking them. But at least the HBDHB had demonstrably lost the plot: reports were commissioned into its dysfunctional performance; the minister issued a public warning to the board. It looks like a model of process compared to this shemozzle. These people need to raise their game, and soon.

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I rather suspect the word "tramp" means something different in today's secondary schools to what it did when I was a lad. Perhaps my suburban Christchurch high school simply had an unusually large group of teachers with bushcraft skills, but there seemed to be a cultural assumption that we needed to be able to look after ourselves in the bush.

Tragically, a teacher did die one year, after falling during a river crossing with a student group. But the danger we were warned about most often wasn't river-crossings: it was hypothermia. We were repeatedly told about the symptoms of exposure, and how people might act under its influence.

I can't say I recall seeing Such a Stupid Way to Die, but the vibe is familiar -- if loaded up here with proto-Blair Witch dread and wild, spooky music (check out the 'Day in the Life' crescendo at the beginning of part two). NZ On Screen has uploaded this 1971 public heath classic, and it's really worth a look.

Also very popular on NZ ON Screen at the moment: the full-length upload of Backyard Visionary, the 1993 John Britten documentary.

On Screen's Screentalk section also has video interviews with Rena Owen, and Rob Tapert, who talks about meeting Sam Raimi and making The Evil Dead, among other things.

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Also for viewing: the Media7 programme that screened last night -- the first of our new 47-minute format. I'm really happy with how it went. There are two panels, one on Obama and the media (Tim Watkin, Tracey Barnett and John Dybvig) and the other looking at the future of the book (Nicola Legat, Graham Beattie and Stephanie Johnson). It's here on ondemand, and the other versions of the video, including the podcast, as are available via our TVNZ microsite.

Oddly enough, the day after talking about books, I got a six-monthly royalty cheque for Great New Zealand Argument. It translated into a 15 year-old Springbank (which tastes bloody gorgeous) with some change. Who says you can't profit from the book trade?

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I've mentioned whisky, so I should mention Dramfest, which is on again in Christchurch from Feb 27 to March 1. I'm still not sure if I can arrange to get down there this time, but I'd certainly like to. They're good people, the Dramfest folk. Here's a video:

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If you saw a slightly worn-looking dude in a green Mazda pumping some phat beats out into the city streets yesterday, it may have been me. I do certainly enjoy playing Young Jeezy's 'My President'; the more so since it has scandalised the wingnut media in the US.

Over at Fox News, they were shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- at the am-cam video of the Young Jeezy show in a Washington nightclub the night before the inauguration. So shocked that they had to excerpt a tiny bit of the duet with Jay Z on 'My President' as evidence of the tide of black racism for which Obama must take responsibility. So shocked that they had to bring in Michelle Malkin:

Me, I looked at the full clip and thought …

… wow. It would have been good to be there …

You can sample the tune here and buy it from the iTunes Store.

I should do some work …

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Trading Trade Me? | Jan 29, 2009 10:00

One of the more notable things about the phenomenon we know as Trade Me is that it distinguished New Zealand as one of the few Western territories in which the local auctioneering upstart shut out the giant eBay. So how would you feel if, after all, eBay was to come in and just buy Trade Me?

That -- offered here without warranty -- is roughly the rumour that has been doing the rounds of New Zealand's little internet publishing industry: that Fairfax and eBay have been talking. Is it possible that Fairfax, in need of cash now, would sell the golden goose? Certainly. Is it probable? Wouldn't know.

The other chat -- not so much rumour as a fact yet to be announced -- is that Yellow, the sold-off former Telecom directories business, is in the process of acquiring Finda. I'm not sure what their plan would be. Nobody I talk to ever seems to understand what Yellow is doing.

Meanwhile, Tony O'Reilly has abandoned his attempt to sell the 39% of Herald and Listener publisher APN currently held by his company Independent News and Media. Nobody wanted it in the current market. What has befallen O'Reilly's company is remarkable INM's share price has fallen 95% in the past two years. Its more pressing problem -- and what motivated the failed attempt to sell its APN holding -- has been a €200m bond repayment looming in May. Its total debt runs to €1.4 billion. Investors have now rewarded INM's announcement that it would stage a garage sale of some other stuff it owns.

NBR's Mitchell Hall is speculating that the historically profitable Herald itself might still be broken off and separately floated.

As it happens, the Herald also has happier news this week. It's 10 years since the New Zealand Herald went online. Its launch was not auspicious. Wilson & Horton had entered a "special" relationship with Telecom -- and for its pains, got its corporate website developed by Telecom's basket-case Brisbane developer Digital Video Productions, which created the original Xtra site.

By the time the website got to air, the Cold Fusion-based mess had been handed on to a local company, Clearfield, to sort out. There wasn't a whole lot of budget floating around for a while afterwards. I covered it in my story of how Telecom met the internet for the debut issue of Unlimited:

The story of Xtra's subsidiary, Digital Video Productions, is a lesson in poor partnerships.

While Xtra's designers were quietly finding ways to work around DVP's original X-ville design, the Brisbane-based subsidiary began touting for local business, recommending an "initial budget range" of $95,000 to $295,000 for corporate Web sites. It was pricey.

The company bid for the job creating Yellow Pages Online, but according to a Telecom Directories manager, "they had no idea of how little they knew" and the job eventually went to Webmasters. Another job, for Tourism Auckland, was never completed.

DVP was then directed to Wilson and Horton to create a corporate Web site as part of Xtra and W&H's "strategic alliance". Knowingly or not, Telecom sold a pup to its most important media partner.

By July 1997, every element of the job had been taken away from DVP and given to other firms. W&H IT manager Tim Barrable told Computerworld that his company was "still reeling from the repercussions" of DVP's "poor quality work". Since then, W&H has left behind its alliance and begun developing its own Internet presence.

DVP, once the key to Tyler's would-be media empire, was passed back to its management in September 1997. By that time, it had acquired a new name inside Telecom: "DDT".

Anyway, since then, the Herald website has become a phenomenon that sees more than two million unique visitors a month. I'm very grateful that the website is there for me every day, not least for the opportunities it offers for robust debate about the paper's editorial stances.

One disappointment, though. The obvious thing to do would be to bring up a 1998 nzherald.co.nz page in The Wayback Machine to remind everyone how version one looked. But when I tried, I got this message. Someone at APN has opted to use a robots.txt file to exclude the Herald site from archiving. You can see Stuff, you can see the New York Times. But not the Herald. I hope there's a technical reason for this, because if not, it's pretty silly.

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Meanwhile, TV advertising dipped 1.1% last year. While that doesn't sound like much, the numbers to look at are the 3.1% increase in value in the first half of 2008 -- and the 4.4% slump in the second. That's quite a slide.

And, as predicted, a year ago, the US is not ready to make its analog-digital TV switchover, which the new administration has opted to delay until June.

And finally, we recorded the first of the new season of Media7 last night, and I'm really happy with how it went. The new 47-minute running time allows us more flexibility (I'm tempted to push for a juggler in Part 3, just for the hell of it) and really helps make the programme more of an event. We have panels on the media and Obama, and the future of the book (set up by a highly enjoyable report by Simon Pound) and a new feature from Sarah Daniell.

It screens on TVNZ 7 after the 9pm news tonight. I'll link to the online version tomorrow.

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A Weird Day in the Hood | Jan 27, 2009 10:15

It was almost as if madness had rippled out from the events at the foot of our local motorway offramp on Friday. Drivers, banished from the Northwestern as police closed the scene, crushed into first Great North Road, then Meola, by the harbour. They tried to make up time through the streets of Pt Chevalier, which connect the two.

A white van rounded a corner so fast I thought it was going to roll. I honked my horn and shouted at the driver to slow the fuck down. A dead kid on top of whatever bad thing had happened on the motorway would be horrifying.

I had unwisely embarked on what was going to be a long trip to the supermarket in Grey Lynn. A woman stopped westbound, allowing me to turn right onto Meola: and stayed stopped. She finally moved on as I drew level with her, and I could see the object of her attention had been an elderly man in some distress. He tried to show a passer-by a piece of paper then abruptly keeled over backwards onto the footpath.

I couldn't have turned to help if I'd tried. Meola was crawling in the Friday heat. I compared notes with the bloke in the opposite lane. He'd come from Penrose. I didn't hurry at the butcher or the supermarket -- where the motorway crisis was all the talk -- but still ran into a queue to get back onto Meola.

The little car in front was full of young adults yelping and smoking ciggies out the windows. The driver kept not moving up as space cleared in front and eventually a woman (someone I'd met professionally, as it happened) swooped up the wrong side of the road to pull in ahead of them. The occupants yelled at her. She jumped out and yelled back at them, then drove off, thunking over the island of the roundabout as she turned right.

It was a pretty weird day in the hood. It eventually became clear how weird. RNZ's reporter broke the news that the dead man on the motorway was not the armed fugitive the police had been chasing. The Herald website reported the man as having been shot by police, then changed its headline.

On One News, a young reporter struck a monstrously wrong tone: "This chaotic car chase -- which some have described as scenes that came straight out of a Hollywood movie." He bragged about how closely One News' "airborne camera" had been able to peek at the victim: "close enough to show his chest covered in bandages. So close in fact, that it's too disturbing to put to air." Right.

He finished with a profoundly inapt bridge from the Friday traffic chaos to what was " also a crime scene -- a homicide for someone whose journey is over." Ouch.

Wendy Petrie then helped with the coup de grace: "Alright Adrian, you've been at the scene all afternoon: how stunned are the people you've been talking to?"

"Well Wendy, people are very stunned …"

Sweet Jesus.

By Saturday morning, police had acknowledged that 18 year-old father Halatau Naitoko had become the first bystander to be killed by a police bullet in New Zealand.

Yesterday, Stephen Hohepa McDonald's lawyer told reporters yesterday that his client had no memory of Friday's events -- or indeed of the five days previous -- and was shocked to learn that a young man had died as a consequence of his actions.

If the further claim that Macdonald was acting under the influence of drugs is true, then it sounds like a particularly nasty case of methamphetamine psychosis. Alcohol might still account for many more incidents of violence, but it's P that produces the real showstoppers. I don't regard it as a defence, and I do not think the courts should either.

If anything, the clamour got louder as the days passed. On Campbell Live last night, the new police minister Judith Collins started well but proceeded to mention herself so many times that a person could have been forgiven for thinking the story was actually about her. Close Up last night featured Richard Neville, who swore that his life had been saved when Armed Offenders Squad officers had fired on McDonald as he pointed a gun at Neville from the deck of his own truck. Police Association spokesman Greg O'Connor piled in as if this was manna from heaven.

O'Connor needs to shut up for a while. Neville is clearly a legitimate, shocked witness, but he can speak for himself. The Police Association PR can wait. By the same token, I was fairly shocked to see Poneke wading in on Sunday to describe the police shooting as "unforgivable beyond belief". It does seem strange that three marksmen could fire five shots from close range and not hit the offender (who seems to have a shrapnel injury, rather than a direct wound). But it also seems more than possible that poor Halatau Naitoko was struck by a ricochet. In those circumstances, I'm prepared to wait before pronouncing on forgivability.

Naitoko's family have the right to speak as they wish on this: it is their own, painful loss. But I don't need to hear from Ross Meurant, and still less from the talkback hordes (yes, I listened to some), especially those putting up racial conspiracy theories. The police didn't choose to kill a brown kid on a hot Friday afternoon. There are three separate investigations now underway into what happened, and they will judge the actions of officers.

Perhaps they will find culpability on the part of the police. But surely, no sane person will debate that the blame for this tragedy will rest overwhelmingly with 50-year Stephen Hohepa McDonald.

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