Public Address - Hard News (Home)

"We have plunged into darkness" | Aug 20, 2003 10:26

It seems that most mornings now, you can count on getting up and turning on the radio and hearing about another atrocity in Iraq. So the bombing of the United Nations compound in Baghdad was both business as usual and something much worse.

The UN operated in Iraq for years with the broad goodwill of the locals, and in relative safety, despite the unpleasantness of the regime. Now, it appears that there are more terrorists, more death and more danger.

My first thought was to check Salam Pax, to see if he was alright, if he had a report, how he was feeling: he is, he does, and very bad. "I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? Is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point?" he says, before concluding, "We have plunged into darkness."

And yet, in this week in which we now have seen the worst attack ever on a UN facility, and, in a single day, serious attacks on oil and water infrastructure, at least six Iraqis killed and dozens wounded, one soldier killed and seven more wounded, and a veteran cameraman shot dead by panicky US troops, the White House is displaying Operation Iraqi Freedom - A White House Special Report. This incredible presentation is composed of glossy little passages like this:

Liberation Update
News accounts today paint a vivid picture of joy and relief inside Iraq. American and coalition troops are being welcomed by smiling Iraqis. Their voices have been silenced for too long, but now they are heard inside Iraq and around the world.

Nowhere does the "report" note that more than 50 US troops and many more Iraqis have died since victory was declared. The New York Times has had a crack in an editorial headed White House Fantasies on Iraq.

But according to Cursor.org, one change has been quietly slipped in to the report. The headline 'President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended' has been amended to read 'President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended'.

Back home, I'm pleased to see that the likes of NZPundit haven't gone into knee-jerk mode over yesterday's foreshore plan. Gordy even links to a NoRightTurn post which, so far as I can see, gets it quite right in saying:

Objections from National and United Future have focused on the government placing the beaches in the public domain rather than asserting ownership. I think this is a brilliant move, precisely because it makes it vastly more difficult for the crown to alienate our beaches in the future. We'll be enshrining the principle of open access in law in a way that is very difficult to go back on, no future government will be able to privatise and sell the beaches (or charge usage fees, or hand over exclusive title to Maori, for that matter), and the next time a wealthy foreigner comes demanding riparian rights, the government can say "we cannot give you what we do not have". It's a great way of ensuring that open access remains open and free; the fact that it's sticking it to propertarians by reinstating the commons is icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, too many of the people getting air on this at the moment are idiots; notably the Marlborough mayor Tom Harrison. Harrison, whose rhetoric has been consistently inflammatory since the issue arose. Today on Morning Report, Harrison, an English immigrant, had to gall to blame the establishment of the Treaty process in 1985 for his problems. In 1993, I wrote a long story about the tenth anniversary of Te Hikoi for Planet magazine. In the course of interviews and other research for that story, I was surprised at quite how close to the brink of severe and violent racial unrest we came in the last year or two of the Muldoon era. Some people, it seems, want to take us back to that brink.

Meanwhile, further evidence of what I said yesterday: base populism on the part of Bill English is serving only to deliver votes to Winston Peters, whose party is the natural home of the embittered and the ignorant. National can do better than this, surely. Jane Clifton's column in The Listener this week also looks at the limits of grievance politics.

Anyway, on a lesser plane, Sunday's Mediawatch interview with former TVNZ public relations head Aline Sandilands about the genesis of the local celebrity culture - which has brought us to the current pursuit of Mike Hosking et al - has been transcribed quicksmart and is on the Mediawatch website. Well worth reading, as is the interview with Malcolm Evans, the cartoonist dumped by the Herald because he wouldn't agree to a condition that he refrain from drawing anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The rest of Tracey Nelson's All Black game stats are up now on Haka, and they demonstrate an amazing all-round effort by the AB forward pack, as well as strongly bearing out the impression that McCaw, Thorne and Mealamu had huge games. This is a bloody good All Black side.

And, finally, the NetGuide Web Awards are on again for 2003. The new category structure looks quite good, although the categories where I figure the Public Address crew has a shot - Best New Website/Relaunch, Best Personal Blog and Best Web Designer - are all to be decided by a judging panel, rather than public vote. You are, of course, most welcome to get us on the judges' radar by clicking through to vote and nominating us in those categories.

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On the beaches | Aug 19, 2003 11:09

So the foreshores are to be in the public domain, but not owned by the Crown. It's an interesting solution to a really nasty problem - and apart from anything else, one would think a few libertarians would be excited by the idea of a public commons that isn't vested in the state.

But, of course, there is politics to be played out. National has tried to work the politics of resentment for all it's worth - and succeeded only, according to the latest One News poll, in delivering votes to New Zealand First, which does resentment better than anyone else and always will.

Some out-and-out racists - like the no-neck from Nelson on 3 News last night - are getting air, the most irritating activist in the country, Ken Mair, has been reactivated, and almost everyone seems, or claims, to be angry, apart from the government, which claims to be fairly levitating with the spirit of nation-building.

Frankly, we want to be careful here. This issue is important, and, thrown to the wolves of populism, it has the potential for to be deeply socially corrosive.

Basically, IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer, for those of you who don't speak Usenet), but the idea of land being in the public domain, although new here, is not unknown in other jurisdictions. In California, where various undesirable titles were acquired in the settlement rush, it has been used to reclaim stretches of foreshore for public use, providing inalienable access rights, without actually extinguishing title.

The government has been variously accused of both dangerous dithering and rushing the issue - sometimes in the same programme. On The Last Word last night, the news bulletin began with the words "The government finally came up with its solution to a problem that's been dividing the country for months." Well, given that the Court of Appeal handed down its decision on June 19, and the government outlined its approach to the issue on June 26, it's more than one month and just shy of two. A few minutes later, Pam was demanding to know of John Tamihere why the planned consultation period of six weeks was so short.

So now we're in the endurance phase: that is, enduring the shouting of the odds from various usual suspects. Like Titewhai Harawira, who claimed on Morning Report today that that all the beaches belong to "the Maori nation". No they don't, and that's not what the Appeal Court said.

The court allowed that specific groups who believed they could prove a continuous customary use of the foreshore and seabed in a certain area could go to the Maori Land Court to seek a vesting order, the effect of which would be "to change the status of land from Maori customary land (held according to tikanga Maori) to Maori freehold land." That is, plain old European-style private property.

Maori groups still have the right to go to the Maori Land Court to assert and explore customary rights which may, in the end nearly amount to title, in which case the government will enter discussions which could lead to some compensation. It seems a reasonable middle path to me; less overtly a land grab or confiscation than declaring the land Crown property would have been, but equally protective of public access.

One problem for the government is that in the week after the Appeal Court decision, the attorney general Margaret Wilson actually did say that Crown ownership would be asserted. For both practical and political reasons, that is not to be the case.

Anyway, the Herald has a very good editorial on the topic this morning, but it has not, for some reason, been posted to the paper's website. It declares, correctly, that:

The government's dilemma is clear: while there was never much doubting the state of public opinion, this is a society based on law and property rights. When no less an authority than the Court of Appeal finds a property right exists, the Government should not simply expunge it. The proposals the government announced yesterday steer a delicate middle course.

And it concludes:

If these proposals seem to Maori to expunge a potential property right, it should be remembered that the claimants were a long way from establishing the case in the Maori Land Court. Ironically, they might find it easier to do so if customary ownership does not amount to exclusive title. If the mana of iwi and hapu can be recognised without alienating ownership of the coast, the foreshore and seabed saga will have a happy conclusion.

Had it been a slower news day, would the opening of the Local Government and Environment select committee inquiry in the Corngate allegations have been more widely reported? It's hard to say. But I would have thought we would have heard more of the evidence given by Donald Hannah, the Erma scientist everyone wanted to hear from when Corngate was raging. National Radio reported his evidence - that there was "confusion" over tests, but he did not believe there was evidence of GM contamination, and there was never a tolerance level - and the Dom Post has a story. The Herald's story isn't online for some reason, but the One News story is on NZoom.

But, weirdly, TV3, which ought to be owning the story, barely acknowledged it - no report, just a few seconds of video and the comment, in script, that "officials were defending themselves". If it's good enough for a gotcha, surely it's good enough to report the inquiry?

Speaking of scandals, the underlying cause of last week's Northeast American power blackouts seems pretty clear. If you run a network - any network - at or near capacity for long enough, it will eventually bite you in the arse. That was the warning to the US Congress two years ago. Why was the network running so close to capacity? Because, as this story points out: "Deregulation of the power industry has left energy companies with insufficient incentive to invest in new transmission lines or enough generating capacity." Frankly, the model hasn't worked, and the Bush administration - especially after those secret policy meetings with Enron - has been there long enough to own the problem.

The Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of the British weapons scientist Dr David Kelly has been fascinating. It has exposed some embarrassing fault lines in the BBC - these perhaps are common to public broadcasting organisations - particularly through the evidence of Newsnight's Susan Watts, in which she said she had been pressured by management, which wanted to use her interviews with Kelly to corroborate Andrew Gilligan's story. But I thought her statement that, yes, Kelly had mentioned Alastair Campell and alterations to the weapons dossier in the same breath, she hadn't thought to include it because it was a "gossipy aside". You what, love? Anyone in a private media organisation, especially in the competitive British market, who walked past a story like that would probably have been fired.

Anyway, documents released to the inquiry now show that the dossier was hardened up in the days before its publication and that intelligence officers were very uneasy about what the government was saying about it. Former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings has an interesting column about what it means for journalists.

Tracey Nelson was too busy getting back from having it large with our rugby gang in Auckland to complete her excellent All Black game stats in a timely manner this week, but the replays on the lineouts have been analysed and make interesting reading. Mealamu seems largely to blame for the first three lost lineouts, but, really, you have to forgive him given that the rest of his game was truly outstanding. There are midfield backs who'd like to be able to step through the gap and unload to Howlett the way he did for the first try.

Yet Carlos, who I'd expected to be right at home on Eden Park, had a 'mare. It wasn't just the three missed kicks at goal, it was the very average (with the exception of his pinpoint chip for Howlett's second try) kicking from the hand. What happened to those huge touchfinders he was banging up the sideline right through the Super 12 season? Is he under instruction to play a different game plan? And if so, is it the right one?

It is now clear that this is a team designed and built to play on hard grounds in Australia in dry, Spring conditions. It can clearly prevail, at home in the wet, but without the same dazzling style it displays on fast tracks.

So it was with relief as much as jubilation that we greeted the the reclamation of the Bledisloe Cup. It wasn't so much that winning it was great as that not winning it would have been awful beyond belief.

And on, we went into the night: thanks to Gina's for keeping the kitchen open for us: the food and ambience were as fabulous as usual. It was a shame later on that a great bill at the Galatos birthday party was completely messed up when the PA overheated, delivering blasts of full-spectrum white noise and reducing the Goldenhorse set to about four songs and delaying Che Fu so long that I was off out the door. I understand Goldenhorse will be playing a free gig to make up for it. Aren't they nice?

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Power and people | Aug 15, 2003 11:13

Is there an equivalent to karma in Islam? The literally powerless people of Baghdad and Basra might be seeing some grim justice in today's massive power outage in Northeast America. But why Canada? And for that matter, why poor old New York?

At least Salam Pax has some good news - a book deal with The Guardian, no less. On the other hand, his friend G - presumably the G who also has a blog - has been beaten up by American troops ("His sin: he looks Iraqi and has a beard").

It's easy to snigger about Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor of California, but it must be said that his recruitment of the world's second-richest man, Warren Buffett, bolsters his credibility considerably.

Like Schwarzenegger, Buffett does not sign up the 19th century social agenda that has colonised the Republican party - indeed, he's often regarded as a liberal sort of Democrat, and in May he wrote a widely-quoted column in the Washington Post that described the Bush administration's waiving of the tax on stock dividends as welfare for the rich.

Schwarzenegger has a website, on which the closest thing to a philosophy - let alone a policy - is a namecheck for a legendary former governor, Hiram Johnson, the "progressive" Republican who sought to curb the power of special interests in the legislature through direct democracy, and thus fathered the very recall process that brings Arnie into the spotlight.

California's manifold ballot initiatives have achieved a few notable things in the name of people power - and a few more in the name of wealthy interest groups. They have also, along with the extreme requirements demanded of the California legislature to just set a budget (a two-thirds "supermajority" is required) made the state difficult to govern and administer in any rational way.

So, you have a Democrat whose only real skill seems to lie in campaigning, a recall election only nine months after a normal one, procured by campaigners paid by a millionaire who wants the governor's job, that will almost inevitably lead to a new governor with a minority of votes. And, still, a $US38 billion deficit. As a test case for direct democracy, California tends on balance to look like a good advertisement for the old-fashioned, representative kind.

So, anyway, about 180 of the top 200 search terms which people typed into a search engine to reach Public Address so far this month have been some permutation of the words "Hosking", Marshall", "tabloid", "pictures", "Herkt", "queer", etc, etc. Fully 30 per cent of the searches were on the phrase "Mike Hosking". Sheeeit. I'm coming around to the view that it's time to turn off the oxygen of publicity here. But before I do, two things:

(a) The Being Jonathan Marshall website has been taken down, apparently at the behest of Marshall's lawyers, who said, among other things that its contents "are grossly defamatory of our client and must be removed from the world wide web within twelve (12) hours of this cease and desist order." Meanwhile, Marshall is continuing to actively solicit sleaze about Paul Holmes on his website. What a sorry little man Marshall truly is.

(b) We have a great interview about celebrity culture on Mediawatch this week. It's a killer show, in fact. So that's Mediawatch, after nine on Sunday morning, on National Radio …

And there remains only the rugby. Tracey Nelson didn't come up with stats for last weekend's Bok game - I think she must have been too excited about our mailing list reunion for the Bledisloe Cup decider tomorrow night. There are people flying in from the States and everything. Shame about the weather, though. If you have no pressing business, I would recommend staying the hell indoors in Auckland this weekend. It's already mental out there on the roads: I got rear-ended by a four-wheel drive on the way into town this morning, and it can really only get worse.

See you on the terraces then …

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Jonathan, Brian and Hone | Aug 13, 2003 11:29

I know I said I wouldn't be pointing people to Jonathan Marshall's "tabloid" website, but that's effectively what I'm doing in pointing you to Being Jonathan Marshall. I guess you can still look at that site and not Marshall's.

In the course of collecting information about Marshall, the site's author has done what I did: run a simple "whois" on Marshall's domain and discovered what appears to be a contact address in Kathmandu, and further determined that the site is hosted by a company called P4Host in Texas. But s/he has gone a step further and opened the atlas …

So has John got cohorts in Nepal of all places? Would a legal move to have his site shutdown have to go there? Not likely as this information seems fairly fake. As far as we are aware Kathmandu is in the Bagmati region of Nepal , there is no "BoTiang" in Nepal.

This address seems doubly madeup when BoTiang it appears as the street name as well as region. The Only BoTiang found anywhere in the world to us is Cape Botiang which is far away in Papua New Guinea . It appears Marshall has just made up a hard-to-verify but incorrect address. Likewise with the phone number, the country code given of +880 is wrong, Nepal's country code is +977. With Kathmandu having an area code of 1 and phone numbers then being 7 digits long. The one John has given does not fit this format at all. Nepal is a red herring!

This is interesting, because it means that Marshall (and Herkt, assuming he was involved) have deliberately breached the Terms and Conditions of the company with which the domain was registered. Unsurprisingly, the T&Cs require names and contact details to be accurate:

You hereby represent and warrant that the data provided in the domain name registration application is true, correct, up to date and complete and that you will continue to keep all the information provided up to date. Your willful provision of inaccurate or unreliable information … shall constitute a breach of this Agreement.

How terribly unfortunate. Still, it could have been worse: a bill up before the US legislature will make lying on a domain registration a federal offence.

Anyway, we're getting hits from all over on the Marshall stuff, and all the top 10 search terms logged for the month so far are permutations of Marshall-Hosking-Herkt. Which is fine, but can I make a request? Please, if you link to us, can you link to the normal page rather than the printable one? (Just generate a URL with the "link" button rather than the "print" one.) The printable pages are very nice and clean - for your printing pleasure - but that means they don't have any of the usual navigation or features, or any of our tasteful ads.

So Rodney Hide - who has presumably decided that his noisy public support for Marshall and Herkt is now politically unwise - has moved on and put a match under the Brian Edwards luvvies debate by producing a three year-old unsigned letter in which Edwards pitches the then Broadcasting Minister Marian Hobbs to extend eligibility for NZ On Air funding to Prime TV - because he, Edwards, is lining up a show on Prime. Now, there is some merit in breaking the two big networks' lock on programme funding. And Edwards has as much right as anyone to try and get a show up. But writing a highly familiar letter to the Minister of Broadcasting - a recipient of your media training services - seeking a policy change in one's own personal interest is simply off.

Anyway, it appears that the minister's office has no record of actually receiving the letter, and the policy has never changed. But Edwards, who says the letter was just a draft, says he doesn't know if it was sent or not. Pardon? I'm damn sure I'd know if a letter I had written had been sent or not.

We don't know where Hide got the piece of paper from, and it seems none of our bold media warriors has bothered to ask him. Wouldn't that add quite a bit to the story?

The story has a contemporary resonance in that it appears to add some substance to mutterings about Edwards' wife, Judy Callingham, being on the NZ On Air board which agreed to fund his Saturday night chat show, Edwards at Large. But Callingham stood aside while the decision was made. And, more to the point, the connection would have had no bearing anyway. The key factor in NZ On Air TV funding decisions is virtually always the willingness of the broadcaster to schedule the programme. There are exceptions - Back of the Y, Mo' Show - but if TVNZ said it wanted to run the Edwards show at 9.35pm on a Saturday night, it would almost by default have been funded. So blame Ian Fraser if you like, but beyond that this is a non-story.

Both networks' news programmes reported the story last night, and it's probable that the One News team, currently grieving over the Ralston budget cuts, took more relish in it than it might otherwise have done. But 3 National News's snippy little closing comment about Edwards' ratings last Saturday was silly and unnecessary. The show was, after all, competing with test match rugby that evening. 3 News would look better if it got the chip off its shoulder and just got on with it.

The Brian Edwards story has been also rather strangely bundled up with that of "the other Edwards" - Hone - whose appointment as TVNZ's Kaihautu was announced this week. The two have precisely nothing to do with each other, and the flap over this looks to me like Maori-bashing, plain and simple. Fraser is the chief executive. If he decides that appointing a senior manager - at head of department level - with responsibility for Maori broadcasting will help TVNZ meet its Charter obligations, that is his business.

Hone Edwards, who does not, to my knowledge, warrant criticism on any reasonable grounds, does not deserve to have been dragged into this. He has worked for TVNZ before without comment. My only misgiving is that the talent is arguably needed more at the Maori Television Service, which is currently hiring but still seems as loose as a goose. But until Edwards actually does anything wrong, he really ought to be left to get on with his job.

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Celebrity | Aug 12, 2003 11:00

If you haven't discovered the address of Jonathan Marshall and David Herkt's "tabloid" website - essentially a staging post for their creepy stalking project on Mike Hosking - I'm not going to tell you.

The power to publish is the great joy of the Internet - it costs almost nothing to reach the world. But you still need the mainstream media to market your stuff, and the dodgy duo have certainly got that part of the deal right.

There are three items on the site: some fuzzy and frankly, lame, pictures of Bronwyn Fitzpatrick gardening in a sarong; a claim that several MPs who voted against prostitution law reform are keen brothel-goers, a story in which there is substantial public interest, or would be if the authors had done any real work on it; and the Hosking stuff.

Most of the mainstream media attention has focused on a picture of one of the Hoskings' twin daughters through a car window. Given that the Appeal Court is about to hear a challenge to an earlier decision that New Idea has the right to print pictures of the twins over their parents' objections, that would seem a little silly. But, in truth, the child is unlikely to be identified through that picture alone.

Of vastly more concern is the material from an email - apparently printed out, discarded and retrieved by Marshall from Mike Hosking's rubbish - outlining some requests from the children's mother regarding the conditions of the children's care when they are with Mike.

If this document was in any part of a Family Court process, then Marshall and Herkt are in contempt and should have action taken against them. The proceedings of the Family Court - an arena which deals with strong and normally private emotions - are confidential for good reason.

Even if the email is not covered, you would have hoped that Marshall and Herkt might have had the plain decency to stay the hell out of somebody else's parent-child relationship. There is no public interest in this, no potential for good in its exposure, no place for us in other people's families.

Marshall reminds me of nothing so much as one of the teenage hackers I have occasionally had to speak to as a computer columnist; lacking both the maturity and moral sense to accord himself responsibility for his own actions, seeing himself as the victim. God knows how Herkt explains it to himself.

And yet, as Michael Laws pointed out on Holmes last night, the mainstream media is complicit. It has suited TVNZ in particular to make its presenters not just celebrities but part of the family, when the fulfilment of their duties actually demands neither. Is it any wonder that some members of the public subsequently fancy themselves to have a right to intrude?

Some people, indeed, take the view that anyone who gets up in front of a camera wants to be celebrity and thus must surrender their privacy and get what they deserve. But I hate the idea that it is impossible to do some jobs in my profession without becoming public property, and I have enormous respect for John Campbell's consistent effort to avoid selling up his family life - or having it taken without permission - by the celebrity press.

Hosking, it must be said, has hardly gone about whoring himself and his family on the covers of women's magazines. He has in fact done very little to invite the level of intrusion he has suffered.

That's not to say that his sudden change of lifestyle isn't the stuff of good gossip. I used to see Hosking every Friday, back when he was The Squarest Man in the World, and the transformation into Cool Mike was pretty remarkable. I've talked about it, you've talked about it. That's fine, and, within reason, fit for print.

But would you like somebody trading in clandestine pictures of your infant children?

The Hoskings' attempt to prevent the publication of the New Idea pictures was always doomed - a public place is a public place, after all. But I can't help but feel that the line on the New Idea case from many of my media colleagues - including one who has been indignant about being photographed himself in the past - has been heavy on the media's rights and rather light on its responsibilities.

We in the media need people to be celebrities, just like we need them to screw up, and to win things, or we'd have empty pages and dead air. We depend quite often on the vulnerability of individuals.

Anyway, I'm not agin the culture of celebrity at all. Good luck to the A-listers who get flown to Queenstown for charity events. Although I'd rather they didn't come back with gushy puff-pieces like the one Cameron Bennett delivered on the 50k of Coronet for Sunday. I was flown down for that event a couple of years ago - "relationship building" with a computer company, you understand - and I had a brilliant time. Food, wine, skiing, the works. All laid on.

But by the end of the trip I was having some serious reservations as to what it was really about. Sure, they came up with a cheque for $140,000 for research into childhood illnesses. But the overall budget for the event - hundreds of people flown in and put up, BMWs for the celebrities - would have been perhaps 20 times that. Vastly more money went on corporate branding than on saving sick children.

It was by no means all bad. The kids themselves were great, and their bond with some of the visiting ski racers was genuine.

But it seemed that some people involved with the event were too busy congratulating themselves on doing-it-for-the-kids to notice that the kids might have been quite troubled by repeatedly being wheeled out to tell well-liquored audiences how terribly bloody ill they were.

On the last morning, one of the children, a boy of about 10, clearly couldn't take it any more - he went to pieces on stage. But still they tried to push him up to the microphone. It was awful. I had to wonder whether the sick kids were a good cause, or simply a good pretext.

If the author of yesterday's New Zealand Herald editorial in response to the Health select committee's report on its Inquiry into the public health strategies related to cannabis use and the most appropriate legal status (PDF document) actually bothered to read the report, it certainly doesn't show.

"It is known," thunders the editorial, that cannabis is "a gateway drug - a stopover on the road to the likes of heroin and cocaine." Actually, according to the committee's report, it isn't "known" at all and, on the evidence, isn't true. The report notes that in the Netherlands, which has long applied a tolerant approach to pot, hard drug use is lower that that in the US, Italy, Britain, etc. "This was a stated aim of the Dutch government's policy of separating the cannabis market for hard drugs," the report says.

The sad thing is that, at a time when kids are going to tinny houses for pot and coming away with P, that forceful separation is something we should be seriously considering. But lord forbid that the real world should intrude on the Herald's glorious, unfounded, irrational certainties. You will learn nothing from reading the editorial - but the report is really worth studying.

While nasty stovetop methamphetamine operations in Auckland continue to turn out God-knows-what for sale to kids, it almost seems unfair that a couple of chaps in Napier face a serious lag for building their own very professional facility for the manufacture of ecstasy and speed.

Yet Reuben Martin breached the trust placed in him as a schoolteacher to obtain chemicals, and the fact that he and his buddy had spent nearly $50,000 on set-up indicates they weren't just going to be knocking out a few pills for their friends. Big prison sentences are what you get on the big jobs.

I was somewhat amused by the prosecutor's comment, though: "He said the drug, which was popular in the dance, nightclub and rage scene, acted on the central nervous system. It affected sight, hearing, smell and touch, 'allegedly enhancing insight and enlightenment'." The rage scene? Isn't there enough anger already?

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Risk | Aug 08, 2003 11:54

I knew I shouldn't have had that kebab. King's Cross, 1987, I think it was. Or possibly Elephant and Castle. I really don't mean to be flippant, but the news that a Waikato man has suspected CJD reminds me why I can't donate blood.

Like many New Zealanders who spend time in Britain, I was largely vegetarian in my five years in London. High-street meat products in Britain always seemed a bit dodgy. But there's no denying the allure of a curry or - more worringly - a kebab at a certain point of an evening out. Your worst assumption about the contents of those thick, fatty blocks of reconstituted kebab is probably correct.

The actual number of those who have contracted variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease through eating beef products is relatively small - it's the long, quiet incubation period that's scary.

We don't know if the 26 year-old farm worker has vCJD, or the hereditary or spontaneous forms of the disease, or even something else altogether, just that he's very sick. It is wildly unlikely that he contracted whatever he has through animal contact. But that didn't stop a rumour - of foot and mouth, rather than mad cow disease - flashing to the other side of the world yesterday, and knocking a full cent off the New Zealand dollar. Such is the perception of risk.

Speaking of which, Dross, my cousin's husband, was at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta when the bomb went off this week. He had been in the foyer only 10 minutes before the blast. As you might expect of a country general manager, he was composed and articulate in his media duties yesterday, even managing a little self-deprecating humour. As you would expect of a human being, he was shaken up and emotional behind it. Fortunately, he and Hannah are now on a break, and they deserve it.

It was interesting to see, as the attack was reported, how much more American media played up Jemaah Islamiya's links with al-Qaeda than the press of other countries, and in particular that in South Esat Asia. That's not to say that JI doesn't have historical and, probably, current connections with al-Qaeda, but that wasn't generally the lead angle outside America. There appears to be a similar pattern emerging over the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, where motives so far are profoundly unclear. It would be wise to remember, in contemplating the worldwide conspiracy of evil, that there is usually a local angle too.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez acknowledged from Baghdad that the US forces' own conduct might be their biggest problem: "It was a fact that I started to get multiple indicators that maybe our iron-fisted approach to the conduct of ops was beginning to alienate Iraqis."

This would seem to be strongly borne out by some alarming recent posts from Salam Pax, who is as extraordinary and as human as ever. "You know something has gone really wrong in your country when you start having discussions with friends on what is the event that will make you decide to leave," he says. And this from a man who had the guts to write a clandestine blog from Saddam's Iraq …

Anyway, further news on the ever-so-slighty GM corn that found its way onto pizzas. As it happens, someone who would know was also in touch recently with a perspective on a potential link between the corn in this case and the potentially GM corn at the centre of Corngate, which came from the same company:

"Do the Corngate and Pizzagate crops have anything in common? The Corngate corn variety was Jubilee LotNC9114 grown in Boise Idaho originally. The Pizzagate corn variety was 'Krispy King' and was grown in Chile. MAF is also looking at a nearby crop of 'Sovereign' which is a rust resistant variety of 'Krispy King'. Also grown in Chile. Obviously neither variety is transgenic according to the breeders/exporters/MAF import analysis. So they were both shipped by Syngenta but Syngenta is the major supplier of all imported corn in New Zealand. Apart from that they were both grown in America, but Boise Idaho is some way from Chile."

And one last perspective on TV3, Corngate and the BSA:

"The difference between the Dave Hilliard interview and the Helen Clark interview is that Hilliard was the primary mover in a deliberate campaign which he should not have been involved in, given his position as CEO of Timberlands. Helen Clark had no direct involvement in the process (she attended no meetings, signed no letters that have been made public) and given the 18 month gap, she had no precise grasp of the information. Others have no precise grasp despite being intimately involved. Hilliard must have known exactly what he had done and said that was wrongful. Clark had (as far as history has found) done and said nothing wrongful and was not aware of the nature of the accusation. The similarity between the Hilliard and Clark interviews (Hager/Campbell/Election) is largely superficial."

Speaking of which, The Listener's Gordon Campbell has launched a blog, which is the first online-only content on the Listener website. This is excellent news. Topics in the first post range from Ahmed Zaoui to Harry Potter to, er me.

So anyway, I've been pounding away under a variety of deadlines this week - the inevitable result of having recently started to say "yes" more often to offers of work. I don't mind having a lot on - I like having a headful of ideas - but bringing them all in is a bit like air traffic control. Sometimes you have to instruct one of the planes to circle the airport for a while …

So, no Food Show to go to this week: just Exotica, which isn't quite my bag. Top products turned up in an exhaustive bout of wonder, sampling and buying: the new Exalt fruit drinks, the amazing Food By Chefs range of chutneys, and the 42 Below products, especially their new gin, South, which was good enough to sup neat. Nice bottles too …

It's the excellent Eddie Izzard tonight, and dinner at Chad and Debra's tomorrow, where we will eat curry and finally get to meet Jolisa and Richard. How exciting!

PS: That George Joffe interview isn't far off, thanks to some sterling transcription work from Fiona. In the meantime, you could fill in your Friday afternoon by clicking on the ad on this page and bunging some money to Amnesty International.

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Cans of worms | Aug 06, 2003 10:12

Buy this week's Listener. Read it. That'll be a pinot gris thanks, Finlay. But seriously, the wry feature by Bruce Ansley and a typically diligent analysis by Steven Price represent your best chance of grasping just how difficult and complex the seabed and foreshore issue actually is.

Along with the Weekend Herald's lead story - which revealed the finding that a third of our coastline is in private hands and we have no automatic right to walk on it - it shows quite clearly why the government, having jumped the gun when the Court of Appeal found that Maori had the right to seek title to parts of the seabed and foreshore through the Maori Land Court, subsequently pulled its head in. It wasn't just the Maori MPs putting on the squeeze. It was the opening of a very big can o' worms.

Chief among the ironies explored in Ansley's story is the story of how National MP Nick Smith was kicked off a local beach. Smith has, with Bill English, fronted the campaign to defend public access to our beaches from the threat of Maori title raised by the recent Appeal Court decision. But it wasn't Maori who ejected Smith: it was a Pakeha farmer. And then there's the case of the German steel magnate who has the same right to eject trespassers from the island she bought on the same estuary. Are foreign millionaires to have rights denied to Maori?

So National's "policy" is, yet again, a hopelessly conflicted mess. The front page of the party's Beaches For All website states, unequivocally: "The Government must legislate to confirm Crown ownership of beaches foreshore and seabed. This is what National would do."

But then we get to yesterday's press release, where suddenly National is campaigning "to ensure that the remaining foreshore and seabed was safeguarded for all, regardless of race, by means of legislation to preserve exclusive Crown title." The remaining foreshore and seabed? That's quite a difference, isn't it?

Act's position has been more consistent, but nowhere near as much as it likes to pretend. Its Justice spokesman Stephen Franks appears to have acknowledged in the media that the Appeal Court's judgement was quite orthodox - and then issued press releases like this one, bitching about "activist judges". Franks's view is that the incorrect - and racist - precedent established in 1963 should be upheld because to do otherwise would be, well, too upsetting.

Richard Prebble, in this June 27 press release, said that Labour could have simply declared that the foreshore "like the Queen's Chain, belongs to us all and no claim will be considered." Note that: the foreshore belongs to all of us, which is, Prebble said, "what the Appeal Court said in 1960, and what Parliament thought was the law for 150 years."

This itself appeared to be something of a backdown from a press release only four days previous from Franks, in which he said he would be urging the Act caucus to "vote with the Government if it brought in a package along the following lines: 'The law should confirm that foreshore and seabed are the Crown's, or held on grant from the Crown'."

Fast forward, then, to this week's statement from Act's deputy leader, Ken Shirley, which declares the Queen's Chain to be "mythical" and appears to say that any move similar to that which Franks was urging on the government in June would be "a new assault on property rights". Confused? You have every right to be.

Franks, meanwhile, is saying that property rights are absolute, and that "if land is to be taken for our collective use, then we must pay collectively." He conveniently doesn't venture a guess as to what it might cost to compensate the owners of a third of New Zealand's coastline in return for public access.

But, like too many people who have waded into this debate, he appears to employ "one law for all" as code for "a different law for Maori". The Maori property right, he says, lacks the "certainty" of other rights. And, then there's this: "No access, use or control privilege should be decided by race or ethnic inheritance." So when, say, Doug Myers, passes on both his ethnicity (it would be hard to do otherwise, wouldn't it?) and his property to his descendants, that's okay. But "ethnic inheritance" for Maori is "racist". Quit while you're ahead, Stephen.

Meanwhile, the background to SIS's unease about Ahmed Zaoui is becoming clearer. This story in the Dom Post includes speculation that Zaoui was on a list of 350 Islamist militants known to be abroad and suspected by Algerian intelligence of having links to Osama Bin Laden that was provided to Washington just after the September 11 attacks. The problem is that it was provided by the same Algerian government which, according to Human Rights Watch, has been responsible for the "disappearance" of more than 7000 people, "more than the number recorded in any other country during the past decade except wartime Bosnia." Whatever the military government might have said about joining the war on terror, these are not the good guys and can't really be trusted.

But neither, of course, can the country's Islamic militants, who have committed grotesque atrocities on their own people. And even if Zaoui is - as the better evidence suggests - a member only of the non-armed FIS, what values did he sign up to there?

Rodger Donaldson pointed out by email that the FIS's expressed attitude to women and democracy is alarming.

"While I haven't been able to unearth much on the FIS' attitude toward homosexuality, Jews (or other non-Islamic faiths), or censorship, the picture painted is of nothing so much as a viper New Zealand appears to be clasping to its bosom," Roger says.

"New Zealand faces the same problem many liberal European nations are now wrestling with - what do we do about immigrants (whether Muslim refugees or rich American Christians) whose value system is marked by a desire to reduce the very diversity and openness that allows them to move into society in the first place?"

And yet, other evidence about Zaoui paints a picture of a tolerant man, one of pluralist beliefs and actions. I understand that the 250-page refugee authority report has some interesting material in this respect - I haven't had a chance to read it yet. But it's not hard to see, with complex cases and conflicting imperatives like those in play here, why some people find it easier to retreat into certainty, whether that certainty is warranted or not.

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Taking care of business | Aug 04, 2003 10:55

You will notice that at the top right of this page there is an advertisement; our first. It's a freebie for Amnesty International's Freedom Week, and if you click on it you can donate to the appeal via a form on Amnesty's secure site.

We are now selling commercial advertising in the same tile format as the Amnesty ad, and rates start at $100 per week, which we think is pretty cheap. Public Address drew 30,000 visits from about 11,500 unique visitors last month, and we expect those numbers to grow once we actually do some marketing.

We're trying to be accessible to retail advertisers and smaller companies, and we're particularly keen to advertise records and books and deliver sales through to Real Groovy, with whom we have an affiliate relationship. Anyway, if you're interested in advertising with us, email me via the Feedback link on this page and I'll happily refer you on to our salesperson, Renee Jones.

The choice of Amnesty to kick off isn't an accident - Amnesty is an NGO in which it is possible to have maximum confidence. You'd be surprised at who does donate to their cause.

The plan was to line up some accompanying editorial for the week, and I had intended to finally transcribe my interview with George Joffe, conducted while he was in the country to give evidence at the hearing of Ahmed Zaoui.

But unfortunately, the tape has proven to be a bit of a nightmare - the café where we talked was not a good room in which to operate a condenser mic. I wound up importing the audio onto my Mac and EQing out as much of the noise as I could. But bouncing it back down onto microcassette (I have a microcassette transcribing machine with a foot pedal) just wouldn't work, so it might take a day or two more to transcribe. (BTW: does anyone know of either an affordable hands-free transcribing solution for MacOS X, or of a foot pedal to work with a MiniDisc recorder?)

So what to make of Mr Zaoui? Frankly, he appears to have been promptly ushered into the "too hard" box on arrival in the country, which is perhaps understandable. No one wants to make a horrible mistake. But, judging by the tone of the Prime Minister's comments to Hugh Sundae on 95bfm this morning, there will be no further airy dismissals of the lie-in-unison comments as mere flippancy. If Lianne Dalziel hasn't had a bollocking yet, she's presumably due for one today.

Anyway, we are now in the unsatisfactory position of seeing the decision of the Refugee Status Appeals Authority, which found that Zaoui is a refugee rather than a terrorist, subject to a secret review process based on SIS information that can't be revealed. It's to be hoped that the SIS information is of better quality than that it has made public so far. I've yet to see firm evidence that Zaoui is a danger to us, although, of course, in Winston Peters' world, being a "suspected" terrorist is the same as being guilty.

In line with the policy that Fairfax inherited from INL of deterring people from coming to its website, Donna Chisholm's fascinating SST backgrounder on the Zaoui case - which suggests that Zaoui was subjected to abuse during his New Zealand prison internment - has been removed from Stuff after one day. If you want to read it online, you'll have to sign up with ArchiveStuff and pay $5 - or more than twice the cover price of the entire Sunday Star Times.

Speaking of the SST, they've quoted Tracey Nelson's All Black game stats on page B2 of yesterday's paper, and attributed it to Public Address, but haven't credited Tracey for her work! Most ungentlemanly…

We had two interesting illicit drug stories in the media over the weekend. The first, the Herald's A Deadly Diversion, was a backgrounder to last year's student GHB deaths and it was excellent. The stark, fact to stand out: that these nice, middle-class young people had become blasé about GHB's unfortunate occasional side-effect - sudden and profound unconsciousness. Hey, people always woke up. Except this time. The story's reality was in its mundanity.

The same could not be said for last night's Sunday special on the so-called Methamphetamine Makers Co. Ltd, which was dressed up in all the usual TV drug probe daftness - kooky prismatic lenses all over the place. But it was a fascinating story, not least in the way it showed how P addiction can turn even the most hardened criminal brain into a sieve.

It's understandable that media reports will focus on the handful of P-heads who become homicidal, but the broader reality is, again, more mundane: P just turns you into a freaking idiot.

For decades, people in New Zealand have been making and consuming substances to keep themselves awake, but it has been a relatively stable subculture. Smoked methamphetamine - with its ruinous combination of the instant hit and the 12-hour high - has blown that all apart. It has already been and gone from any kind of hip scene in Auckland; it's out there in the 'burbs now. I was told over the weekend that marijuana growers are having trouble shifting product at the moment: it appears to have been substituted by the P. Now that's scary.

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Weighing up | Jul 31, 2003 13:58

Told you so. The rugby union and player negotiators have, with a deadline looming, settled exactly halfway between their original positions on a World Cup win bonus for the All Blacks: $80,000 per player.

It's rational to feel some sympathy for both parties here. The union is prudently looking to build a big war chest before the 10-year Sanzar deal with News Corporation ends, mindful that any new deal will almost certainly be less generous. And the players can't be blamed for measuring their lot against that of the other leading sides in world rugby.

The villain, if any, is the International Rugby Board's company Rugby World Cup Limited, which has a history of covering up its own underperformance by changing the rules for all the other stakeholders in the game. Its change of mind on prize money has a lot to do with the player payments problem - effectively it is obliging country unions to pay prize money themselves, for the IRB's tournament. As Joseph Romanos points out this week, player eligibility is another complete shambles for the IRB.

So, it turns out that the taxi driver Winston Peters claimed couldn't speak English has lived here five years and studied at secondary school and two universities. His account of their late-night dispute, frankly, rings truer than that of the New Zealand First leader, who has now been sent on his way by police after paying the $15 fare (with a taxpayer-funded chit!). It's hard not to wonder whether a member of the public would have enjoyed such sympathetic treatment.

Peters wasn't apologising on Morning Report today, nor making a lot of sense. And his apparent attempt to threaten his interviewer, Sean Plunket, who quite reasonably asked Peters how much he had had to drink at the time of the incident ("given who you are and what I know about you, you shouldn't be asking those questions") was simply extraordinary. This is the man who routinely comes second in preferred-Prime-Minister polls …

Peters was once on Off the Wire, the comedy news quiz show I do for National Radio. Like Richard Prebble, he was pretty much able to walk in, sit down and be witty, which was impressive. Like Prebble, he had a slightly distant, defensive air away from the mic. It was quite a change then, with our third guest party leader (fourth, counting the Libz' Peter Cresswell), United Future's Peter Dunne.

Ladies and gentlemen, we witnessed the Peter Dunne effect. He's just a really nice bloke. He was good-humoured without being scorchingly witty, and his answer to an ambush question about the foreshore issue was so utterly, pathologically reasonable that nobody could bear to even give him a bit of curry afterwards. By the time he left, the audience was waving him goodbye. Interesting …

Anyway, Salam Pax is currently beside himself with frustration and anger at the incompetence of the US occupying authority in Iraq, and over the moon at being namechecked by William Gibson. Gibson himself makes a point that had occurred to me amid the flap over the Pentagon's bizarre-sounding terrorism futures market, which Wolfowitz suggested was a result of the Defense Department getting too imaginative: "The last time DARPA got too imaginative, we wound up with the Internet."

Steven Price has a couple of comments on yesterday's critique of Gordon Campbell's critique of the Broadcasting Standards Authority's Corngate decision:

It's not really accurate to say that the BSA didn't "reach back" to the Timberlands case. The BSA did talk about the Timberlands case, but distinguished it, not entirely convincingly, on the grounds that Hilliard had made an incorrect denial in an earlier statement, so the line of questioning was okay. I think I agree with Gordon that the PM did much the same in the Corngate interview. But I think the Timberlands case was capable of being distinguished on sounder grounds. For a start, the BSA in the Timberlands case came damned close to upholding the fairness complaint (the BSA criticised the interview as deceptive). On woolly issues like fairness it didn't create much a precedent: additional small factors could easily tip the balance next time, I thought. Secondly, the BSA in Timberlands emphasised that John Campbell's questioning was okay because it was largely about *general* issues. The Corngate interview was much more specific, and therefore, more readily thought of as unfair.

As I might have said before, my analysis is that the BSA's reasoning about unfairness is odd. Why would a quick introductory sentence saying "PM, Nicky Hager is about to publish a book and we've just interviewed him about it..." have made the interview fairer? What about (as Gordon mentions) sources you need to protect for more convincing reasons than a deal with an author? Would the BSA have still regarded this as unfair if the PM had been given much more detail about the allegations before the interview, but still hadn't mentioned Hager's book? (I think that would have made it fair.) I prefer a line of reasoning that says the lack of info before the interview was unfair, but as it happens, it was justified in the public interest on this occasion, though only just. The PM said some revealing things about her knowledge of the incident (things she never subsequently acknowledged), and was put under pressure in a revealing way.

I completely agree with you about it being wrong to say that the BSA the "cleared of allegations that the story was factually wrong".

I cast doubt yesterday on TV3's approach, rather than the claims themselves, in looking at the story's basic failure amongst the wider media and the public - I think the secretive way the book was launched backfired too, along with the knee-jerk designation of any other opinion as "spin". Steven says:

My impression of the coverage has been that it was almost uniformly lacking in any initiative. Laura Sessions, a scientist and Fulbright scholar who's researching science journalism at Canterbury, who's closely studied the coverage, and with whom I corresponded closely while I wrote the Metro piece, agrees. Given the large numbers of unanswered questions after the book was published, the obvious channels through which to pursue them, the significance of the issues, and the fact that Hager had damning source documents that made a prima facie case, I still find this utterly astonishing. Frankly, I didn't much want to do the Metro piece. I thought I was too close to the thing. Someone else should have done it - but then no one did.

I absolutely agree (and have said to anyone who will listen) that the way TV3 handled the story unfortunately meant that its merits were not properly tested - and in particular, that the PM never had to face a searching interview having been properly prepared, which I would have found fascinating.

So, I really will tune out from this for a while. Unlimited, for which I'm doing a power of work at the moment, has invited me along for a few free drinks at the sold-out Greg Johnson show at Coast tonight, so I'd better be getting some paying work done …

PS: If Bill Ralston can make simple, effective fixes to other TVNZ news programmes the way he has with The Last Word then he's well worth his salary. The integration of the programme's news and entertainment components at a single, bare desk, and (presumably) the instruction to Pam Corkery to calm the hell down and keep it simple has made the programme not just bearable, but (last night) actually quite good. I never thought I'd be saying that ...

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Balancing acts | Jul 30, 2003 10:15

I don't mind being called a conspiracy theorist in Gordon Campbell's critique of the Broadcasting Standards Authority's decision on the Corngate broadcast in this week's Listener, although it was really more in the way of an observation.

As it happens, I have had a small correspondence with Nicky Hager recently. He feels that I have been snide and unfair towards him, and that my analysis of the BSA decision was selective. I hope and trust he will find the following more measured.

An alternative view is laid out in Campbell's four-page commentary, which is a strong and persuasive piece of writing. His comparison of the Corngate decision with the BSA's 1999 dismissal of complaints over TV3's outwardly very similar interview with Timberlands CEO Dave Hilliard over allegations in Hager's book Secrets and Lies, before that year's general election, is fascinating. It is odd that the BSA would have made a comparison with the Holmes "brain drain" complaint, but not reached back a couple more years to the Timberlands programme.

But it is … selective. Campbell says that TV3 was "cleared of allegations that the story was factually wrong", but my reading of the decision was that the BSA declined to determine the facts, which is different. Having interviewed Judy McGregor of the BSA and Sir John Jefferies of the Press Council on precisely that issue, I'm fairly sure I'm right.

Campbell is also happy to invoke Steven Price's "painstaking" feature in Metro magazine, in which Price largely endorsed the case made in Seeds of Distrust; but didn't note Price's quite favourable opinion of the BSA decision. It would seem fair to have included both.

And nowhere does Campbell mention TV3's recording-over of the field tape of the interview with Hager, which "astounded" the BSA. That action had no bearing on the programme itself, as it presumably occurred after it went to air, but it was highly unusual and, on the face of it, obstructive. If Campbell thought it was irrelevant it might have been better to say so, rather than simply ignore an issue so clearly flagged in the decision.

I suspect there will be a letter or two of complaint about what Campbell says about journalistic objectivity - that it ought to have its limits - but there's a case there too. Yet there's something to be said about his concluding argument that the Corngate gotcha was the most effective means of airing the facts.

What actually happened was that within 24 hours, TV3 was recasting its cast-iron facts as "allegations", even though they had substance, and within 48 hours, it was beginning to back away from the story. The mainstream media, as Campbell notes in his piece, dropped it, in some cases derisively. It cost the Green Party several points on its vote, and possibly a role in government. Most of the public probably regard it as a conspiracy theory. The government has consented to a select committee inquiry, but nobody seems to be reporting it. The Opposition finds no mileage in it. No one has resigned. It is not a great result for a tactic designed to block out government spin.

I think that, for whatever reason, both lay people and others in the media did sense an unfairness in the Corngate programme. Many of them were probably already feeling that the election campaign had been hijacked by GE. The emergence of the apparently trustworthy scientist Russell Poulter didn't help either. I'll shut up about this until the select committee comes back. But for now, I just think there was a better way than "gotcha".

Anyway, it looks like it's TV One news that will be troubled for the next wee while, with Ralston apparently obliged to wield the budgetary machete on arrival. So it's Hosking off Sunday and fronting Breakfast on his own, Kate Hawkesby back to reading news, and Assignment apparently for the chop, or at least a folding into a revamped, more journalistic, Sunday.

I suspect Ralston will see fat to trim in the travel budgets too - flying Sunday reporters to America so they can stand in front of buildings doing pieces to camera is a poor use of resources. Perhaps they could take a lead from the best bit of field reporting to appear on Sunday all year: Richard Driver's brave handycam foray into Zimbabwe. That wasn't newsclerking and it wasn't expensive.

Part of TV3's news appeal is that it looks like it costs less, they know it and they don't care. Perhaps some rations would do the same at TVNZ.

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Fare go | Jul 29, 2003 10:58

There's nothing quite like Karangahape Road at 3am. I strolled out of Oonst, early, as these things go, but quite late enough for me, and up around the corner onto the strip.

There was the usual bustle, if not the crazy jungle that pertains some nights in summer: kids queuing to get into nightclubs, the all-night dairy selling Frenzy dance pills, people heading in and out of town.

I always like to walk right up to the Mobil station at the Ponsonby Road corner before getting in a taxi. You see more, and it's dark but not really dangerous.

A middle-aged Samoan couple, both drunk, cuddled up on a bench on the overbridge; kids having their IDs rejected by a bouncer; some P-head types bustling past with their upright, uptight gait; a hooker resting outside Joy Bong (a Thai restaurant), who bid me a weary "goodnight" that had enough warmth in it for me to feel rude for averting my eyes as I passed her. "Night …" I called, belatedly, five paces past.

There's always a taxi on the rank outside the Mobil station, the driver perhaps too frail to drive in and do battle in the logjam outside Kiss and Baccio. Mine was Indian, and he put on some bhangra, which I always like: if the other choices are robot format radio and silly talkback, I'll keep taking the tablas, thanks.

"Point Chevalier thanks, driver."

"Would you like to go on the motorway?"

I thought briefly about who else was likely to be on the motorway at this time of night.

"No thanks. Great North Road is fine."

The buzz of some debate between drivers was bubbling around on the dispatch radio, behind the bhangra. One riposte, in an Indian accent, jumped out: "Why don't you have a house in Howick!?" My driver and I both laughed.

I usually have to direct the driver for the last couple of turns when we get to the Point, but that's okay. I know where I live, he doesn't. I'm always careful to enunciate the name of our little street, so that he might know it next time. I topped up the fare, telling him the tip was for the music. He liked that.

I can see no point whatsoever in being rude to late-night taxi drivers, especially immigrants. You know they'd rather have a normal job; and be at home with their wives and children instead of ferrying around drunks and bug-eyed twentysomethings in the middle of the night. They're probably scared half the time.

Perhaps when you've been a Minister of the Crown and you've been ferried around as a matter of course, you lose the ability to navigate home. Or perhaps that's just the way you behave at the end of a late one.

It's not yet clear whether Winston Peters did leave a taxi on Thursday night without paying the fare - which is an offence - or whether the taxi had been paid for. The Somali driver was sufficiently moved by abuse from Peters to contact the police, who are investigating the matter. The Dom-Post's story contains a rogueish quote from a "senior" police source, who described the leader of the New Zealand First party as "the MP for Courtenay Place."

Peters is probably guilty only of being a prick, which is not a criminal offence, although it is arguably a qualification for some forms of public life. But the next time he storms out of a taxpayer-funded taxi, he might wish to consider his own privilege.

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Calling in the experts | Jul 28, 2003 13:34

Hi folks. It's a day for key information from informed third parties. That is, more on the issues around Scoop's developing story on the flaws in electronic voting machines, and what actually happened in the rugby on Saturday.

Duane Griffin has been in touch with more information on Scoop's voting machine scoop. He says:

While everyone is focussed on the extremely serious flaws in the Diebold system, there is a much wider point which I believe is being overlooked. Pretty much every respected, independent expert in the field considers computerised voting systems to be an appalling idea, a disaster waiting to happen. This is not just because of the inevitability of bugs, although that in itself would be enough, but because of the fundamental problems involved in trusting computerised systems. Even if the Diebold systems were not buggy, these machines still could not be trusted!

An excellent website collects information related to these issues - the author is probably the world's foremost expert in these systems. Her PhD thesis (available from the site) is entitled "Electronic Vote Tabulation Checks & Balances". Bruce Schneier, arguably the most influential cryptographer/computer security expert working today, summarised the issues in a readable, non-technical way here, in the December 2000 issue of his crypto-gram newsletter.

I have written a short blog entry about this at, which has a couple of other links, notably to the RISKS archive (which should be required reading in schools from the age of about 12 up).

It will be interesting to see how the momentum develops in the debate. The forthcoming recall election in California - already bizarre in its own right - will be an interesting test of the will to pursue democracy with defective technology.

Now that Uday and Qusay Hussein have been taken out, there appears to be fresh momentum in the search for their despotic Daddy. But the form the hunt is taking, like the siege of the sons, says something about the American military mindset on the ground in Iraq.

After using 200 troops, missiles and a helicopter gunship to take out three men and a child in the house in Tikrit, US forces stormed a villa in Baghdad during the weekend. Afterwards at least five people, including a child, were dead and eight were injured: "An Iraqi policeman said all the dead had been in cars fired on by troops as they drove through the area."

And guess what? Wrong house. If Saddam had ever been hiding there, he wasn't any more. The house belonged to a tribal leader, Rabeeah Amin, who said he knew nothing of Saddam's whereabouts. So who gave the tip? Was it malicious? Shouldn't somebody be pausing for thought occasionally?

If nothing else, a more measured approach might have permitted the capture of Uday and Qusay, assuming that it is what the US actually wanted anyway. For now, there will be scornful articles such as this one in the Arab press:

We must learn from this that US military strategy, doctrine, tactics and whatever else you can think of have reached a point of total bankruptcy. They are simply incapable of fighting real battles against real people who do not roll over and play dead on cue.

Then there's this one from the Toronto Star's Harroun Siddiqui:

Despite improvements in recent days, essential services are yet to be restored to even pre-war levels. But the real sleeper issue is cultural: American soldiers know how to kill but not how to make and keep peace.

They have a particular knack for escalating ordinary situations into Wild West shootouts.

They barge into homes in the middle of the night, kicking doors, pushing and shoving women - the worst sin an outsider can commit in Arab society - and placing bags over the inhabitants' heads.

This is no way to win friends, especially since the soldiers, acting on faulty intelligence, often end up at the wrong address.

It also does not help that dozens of innocents have been casually killed in three attempts at assassinating Saddam.

Then, of course, there was the rugby. For the first time ever, the All Blacks scored 50 points against the Wallabies, having also cracked the half ton the previous weekend against the Boks. Both victories took place at the opponents' traditional strongholds. They involved a kind of rugby that no other team in the world is presently capable of playing, and they showed that there is life beyond the defence-first philosophy that has dominated top rugby in recent years.

And yet, knowledgeable New Zealand rugby fans will be tempering their excitement, worrying about what the hell went wrong with the lineouts, whether Spencer kicked well enough for goal to justify keeping the current backline (I think he did, especially when Carter only managed one from three in his stead - the main problem is that our brilliant wingers score in the corner a lot) and whether the run-on selection is exactly right.

To that end, Hard News exclusively presents, hot off the press, Tracey Nelson's All Black Game Stats. The numbers in brackets show the split for each half. Commentary is Tracey's:

FIRST 3 TO BREAKDOWN

Thorne 30 (14+16)
Hewett 24 (15+9)
Collins 22 (10+12)
Williams 21 (14+7)
McCaw 20 (13+7)
Jack 20 (10+10)
Mealamu 19 (10+8)
Somerville 19 (14+5)
Thorn B 6
Meeuws 3
Hammett 3
Holah 2

Points to note: big effort from Williams this week, remembering he was subbed early in the second half. Better effort from Jack too. Lower work rate than usual for McCaw at this phase of the game, but I was amazed at how he was keeping up with the wingers because he kept popping up at those breakdowns. This was one of the areas that I thought Thorne hadn't performed well in, until I went back through the tape (so there you go, even I miss his work sometimes).

RUNS WITH BALL IN HAND
(significant meterage/go-forward gained)

Collins 5 (3+2)
Mealamu 3 (3+0)
Jack 2 (1+1)
Hewett 1 (1+0)
Williams 1 (1+0)
Meeuws 1
Thorn B 1

TACKLES

Mealamu 12 (2+10)
McCaw 11 (6+5)
Thorne 8 (2+7)
Umaga 8 (1+7)
Mauger 8 (2+6)
Collins 7 (1+6)
Marshall 7 (2+5)
Carter 5
Williams 4 (1+3)
Jack 4 (2+2)
Hammett 3
Holah 3
Thorn B 3
Somerville 2 (1+1)
Hewett 2 (0+2)
Rokocoko 2 (1+1)
Spencer 1 (0+1)
Muliaina 1 (0+1)

NOTABLE MISSED TACKLES
(as they occurred)

Marshall, Rokocoko, Howlett, Hewett, Spencer, Thorne, Carter, Ralph, Howlett.

LINEOUTS
A total of 30 in the game (very high)

First half (14)
NZ: 3/9, stole one Aussie throw
Auz: 5/6,stole 5 NZ throws

Second half (16)
NZ: 3/6, stole two Aussie throws
Auz: 7/10, stole two NZ throws

SCRUMS
Only 11 all game.

First half (6)
NZ: three feeds, last scrum a bit wobbly.
Auz: three feeds.

Second half (5)
NZ: two feeds
Auz: three feeds, the third scrum is monstered by the AB pack

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