Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Worlds collide | Sep 12, 2003 11:36

By Jove, I've found it! The common ground between Normal and the United Future party, that is. And it's … smoking! Chris Fowlie of Norml has been in touch to explain the pro-marijuana law reform group's position on coffeeshops and the law.

I thought I had to point out that the Greens do not support our coffeeshop model. Their policy only goes so far as to legalise use, possession and cultivation of up to 5 [cannabis] plants.

Norml believes such a policy will do little to reduce the size and influence of the black market. It won't separate cannabis buyers from dealers who sell drugs such as P. Only a properly regulated legal market such as Dutch-style coffeeshops could do that, but this would be impossible if the outright ban on indoor smoking is introduced.

We believe a "clean air" standard such as what the Smokefree amendment first proposed would satisfy the concerns of both sides - smokers would be able to smoke in designated areas in bars and cafes, but only if the air ventilation systems were good enough to keep non-smokers happy.

We've found ourselves in the curious position of for the first time ever agreeing with what Peter Dunne has been saying! Our website has an article further explaining this.

The electorate secretary of UF's internal affairs spokesman Marc Alexander has been in touch to clarify his party's stance on the Gambling Bill, and why it variously supported and proposed such significant amendments after the select committee stage. Unfortunately, the RTF documents I was forwarded don't open in any way known to me. (Although they did trigger one of the best error messages I've ever seen: "Word cannot edit the Unknown".)

But I did hear Alexander talk to Damian Christie on The Wire yesterday, and he had the decency to acknowledge that his ebullient memo last week about the amendments was inappropriate. He basically made a fairly cogent harm-minimisation argument: gambling is here to stay, you're not going to stop people doing it, so you might as well manage it.

I didn't find his rationale for thus backing Internet gambling (it ought to be noted that the Lotteries Commission's proposal is much more like Kachingo than an online casino) and allowing pokies to accept $20 notes particularly convincing. But more to the point, why only gambling?

Marijuana has been in common use in New Zealand a lot longer than the pokies, and more widely so. Its health effects remain a matter of debate, but they extend at least to a similar risk of lung damage similar to that from tobacco smoking. It is not addictive in the clinical sense, but some young people do become dependent on it, as they do with alcohol. A majority of New Zealanders use it at some time, but almost all cease or cut down of their own accord. Pokies don't damage your health per se, but they are intimately associated with activities - alcohol and nicotine dependence - that do.

On the other side of the ledger, marijuana offers conviviality to those who like it. It has played some part in the creative process of everyone from the Beatles to Bob Marley. It has inspired literature and film, and, of course, it provides symptomatic relief to some seriously ill people.

Pokies and some other forms of gambling do contribute to community welfare through levies and subsequent grants - and that starts to look like a community addiction in itself - but that's about it. Pokies are - and I am not being snobby about this - a particularly insidious form of gambling. They are clinically addictive because - like methamphetamine, cocaine and nicotine - they trigger dopamine releases in the brain. They are no more than a socially ordained means of relieving the vulnerable of their money. Go and watch some glassy-eyed punter pump money into a machine at a bar if you don't believe me.

There seems no rational basis for legislating exclusively to protect the vulnerable in the case of marijuana, and not doing so in the case of gambling. The Gambling Bill was meant to be a harm-minimisation law (it will, for example, prevent any more casinos opening, and limit the number of pokies that can be installed in a bar), but neither the government or United Future seems to have fully explained why amendments to the opposite effect were added so late in the piece.

But the National Party's current sermonising on the bill is, to anyone with a memory, absurd. That would be the same National Party, would it not, that introduced casinos in the first place, and constituted the Casino Control Authority so it was almost incapable of rejecting an application, even if it was overwhelmingly opposed by the local community? It would.

Staying with harm minimisation, it will be interesting to see whether our government is minded - or obliged - to follow some Australian state law and ban the various highly popular BZP-based dance pills, which are now even available at my local Liquorland. These are being explicitly marketed as a legal, and safer, alternative to methamphetamine, and with some justification.

I'm only aware of one BZP-related death, and that was a "dry-drowning" associated with Ecstasy. Just as important, the piperazines don't appear to reward excess dosage: one capsule of Rapture will probably procure a better result than three, and certainly less of a hangover. This is a handy social attribute. Are dance pills good for you? No, but they're a lot less bad than the alternatives. I'm told by someone familiar with the dance scene - which was almost killed off by P - that people are starting to come out again, and they're on the dance pills. Interesting.

Anyway, if you haven't read Jolisa's September 11 meditation yet, you should do so. Meanwhile, Latin American media in particular have focused heavily on "the other September 11" - the US-backed coup that overthrew the elected Allende government in Chile in 1973. Freshly-declassified documents have shed light on the extent of US government involvement in the coup - which included a CIA proposal for a terrorism campaign to destabilise the country.

The rather irritating Professor Jane Kelsey is in Cancun for the World Trade Organisation Round, and filing reports. One, Indigenous And Peasant Farmers Mobilise In Cancun, accompanies the familiar calls for the abolition of everything with the demand for "taking agriculture out of the WTO".

It's hard to imagine any action that would do more to secure the interests of rich, developed countries and damage the economic prospects of less powerful nations - including New Zealand - than taking agriculture out of the WTO. Do Kelsey and friends really want a world in which Europe and America can continue to pay their farmers to dump agrichemicals on their lands?

The Herald's Fran O'Sullivan had a more interesting - and much more relevant - story, on the stern line laid out by The Group of 20, a new grouping of developing nations led by Brazil, China and India, which has called the rich nations to account on agricultural protectionism, amplifying the message of New Zealand's club, the Cairns Group. She quoted our agriculture minister Jim Sutton: "What we're doing is we're coming together because we face a common enemy and the enemy is dumped surplus of subsidised exports from the rich industrialised nations." Amen.

So the Auckland NPC team is now running onto Eden Park to the strains of 'R U Ready?' by Dub Asylum (aka occasional Public Address contributor Peter McLennan) - does this mean we have finally departed the era of risible radio jingle-rock as a rugby accompaniment? If so, allow me to propose next year's Canterbury Crusaders' theme tune: 'Not Many' by Scribe.

Yes, he's a rapper, but he's from Christchurch, his forthcoming album is called The Crusader, and the tune in question ends with lusty shouts-out to all points of the Canterbury region - which is presumably a first for the entire hip-hop genre.

More to the point, Scribe truly flows, and P Money's ominous, prowling bassline is a cert for the mood of expectation you want to create before a game. They'll probably want the original version on the 'Stand Up' CD single, rather than the album version, but I'm sure Scribe and Pete would be happy to knock out a special mix. Enquiries should be directed to Mr Ashbridge at Festival Mushroom Records. Seriously.

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The Moral Lottery | Sep 10, 2003 09:59

What kind of family-friendly party uses its limited political leverage to procure changes in gambling laws that will, without a shadow of a doubt, destroy a few more families? United Future, apparently.

The new Gambling Bill, which passed another stage in Parliament yesterday, has caused "very grave concern" in the Labour Party council, which according to a memo leaked to Sue Bradford of the Greens, is concerned about amendments it believes were forced on the government by United Future.

In Who's Driving the Gambling Bill?, Scoop's Sludge Report pondered yesterday how a bill that was intended to curb the harm caused by the gambling industry came to help it in some significant ways. The Government Administration Committee's report, from which various recommendations have been overturned, is here.

United Future's Internal Affairs spokesman Marc Alexander was quickly on the defensive yesterday, issuing a press release implying that the only significant changes his party had inserted to the bill were "the strengthening of mechanisms for helping problem gamblers" and the blocking of the Green-backed plan to centralise the distribution of money from pokies. He specifically denied any role by his party in ushering in Internet gambling:

"There is all sorts of political humbug and not a little confusion flying around at the moment, so for the record, once again, United Future did not bring the amendment to the Bill that would allow Internet gambling."

This is disingenuous bordering on deceitful. And to see how, you only have to go back a week, to United Future's last press release on the bill, where Alexander and his party leader, Peter Dunne, were bragging about their influence on the new law:

Other key changes secured by United Future include:

* The Gaming Commission, as an appellate body, will be totally independent of Internal Affairs gaming authorities and report directly to the Minister, and not the department.

* The overturning of the Government Administration Select Committee ban on note-accepting gaming machines, with maximum $20 note-acceptor machines permissible, in line with Australian standards.

United Future's internal affairs spokesman Marc Alexander added that the party was very happy with a number of Labour amendments agreed during negotiations and contained in the SOP.

"We're particularly pleased with the changes allowing the Lotteries Commission to move into Internet-based gaming."

In truth, the Commission's proposals for interactive gambling seem relatively modest, and I suppose if any organisation is granted the right to do it, it should be the Lotteries Commission. We could all have done without it though. But in what possible sense is a tenfold increase - from $2 coins to $20 notes - in the rate at which pokies can suck away money from the vulnerable "family-friendly"? (NB: this isn't quite right - see the PS at the bottom for correction.)

Alexander was up in Parliament yesterday asking "what kind of signal" a judge's granting of leave to appeal for home detention for the hapless Darren McDonald was sending. Well, Mr Alexander, what kind of signals have you been sending lately? And do you plan to take the rap when some family's food money is spent in a pokie machine?

Anyone who knows anything about addiction treatment knows that gambling addicts, alcoholics and other drug addicts very often are treated in the same facilities. According to ALAC, last year 18 per cent of new clients at the Auckland Regional Alcohol and Drug Service met criteria for problem gambling. Eleven percent were probably "pathological gamblers".

A certain sympathy towards the interests of the liquor, tobacco and gambling industries has, of course, been a hallmark of Peter Dunne's Parliamentary career. Norml listed his form thus:

Dunne has a history of giving political support to both the liquor and the tobacco industry. In 1991, he lobbied for investment certainty for the tobacco industry. In 1997, he voted against raising the smoking age from 16 to 18 and defended the voluntary advertising code between the Government and the tobacco industry. In 1999 he voted for the Sale of Liquor Amendment Act No. 2, which lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18. He opposed putting health warning labels on alcohol vessels; and in July 2001, labelled tobacco control laws a failure, despite the fact that for 10 years now New Zealanders have reduced their tobacco use by over 30 percent!

And, of course, a little tobacco industry hospitality that Dunne accepted a few years ago continues to haunt him.

Yes, of course The Greens are vulnerable to criticism that they look too fondly on marijuana, but at least their harm-reduction philosophy is fairly consistent (although it's hard to see how they could support Norml's coffeeshop proposal and banning smoking in bars).

But United Future - a party which has raised moral panic about everything from video games to medical marijuana in this Parliamentary term - seems morally, philosophically and practically conflicted. More than that, it just looks weird.

PS: A friend of mine has just called to point out that pokies in some bars and RSAs have been accepting banknotes for a while. Forgive me for being unfamiliar with the latest practices for relieving the vulnerable of their money.

So it was the select committee's recommendation that the machines henceforth be limited to coin operation that United Future managed to overturn. But the point stands. Dunne has, in the past defended the public's right to have a "harmless flutter" on the pokies. With $20 notes? I don't think so.

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The Role Model | Sep 09, 2003 10:54

Lock 'im up, demands this morning's Herald editorial on the disgraced TV3 newsreader Darren McDonald, who displayed insufficient "remorse, contrition and acknowledgment of guilt" to be allowed to apply for home detention.

McDonald's star appearance on Sunday was exactly what his erstwhile colleagues at TV3 have been fearing since he was arrested about 18 months ago - a chance for TVNZ to have a go. He certainly seemed happy enough to be there talking about his secret life and wistfully remembering the times he read the news on drugs. It was all very showboaty, very gay-male-transgressive.

No one should really admire McDonald. He has blown TV careers on both sides of the Tasman, financially ruined himself and, through being The Party Guy Who Could Score for Everyone, got himself nailed with a conviction for offering to supply ecstasy and conspiracy to supply methamphetamine. His party friends, inevitably, stopped calling the moment he was busted. This might all have been a mercy: if he was really chugging through a gram of P a week he was going to be another pathetic P basket case before long anyway.

But what appears to have annoyed the Herald is that he turned down several invitations on Sunday to play the victim. He could presumably have delivered a Darren's Drug Hell speech, blamed his sexuality or something, and cracked on like it had all been perfectly ghastly. But no, he said, he had taken drugs because he liked to party and to dance and "it was just a whole lot of fun". This is, just quietly, the reason that people actually take recreational drugs.

McDonald was picked up in the course of a broader police investigation into the activities of his own dealer. He wasn't convicted of any actual supply, and his offending was, as they say, at the lower end of the scale. Yet a brown kid from South Auckland might not have been granted the same latitude: two months out of prison to parlay his eight-month sentence into home detention.

The reason the court gave for this latitude was that he would be in danger of re-introduction to drugs if he went to prison, which as Greg Newbold pointed out, was really a way of saying that he seemed like a nice chap and shouldn't really go to jail. It was a bit tenuous - but, on the other hand, it could be argued that there was little benefit to be had in spending taxpayer's money incarcerating him.

Yet McDonald, who "smiled" and "smirked" throughout the programme, and "whose job as a television newsreader made him a role model, should receive no special treatment," the editorial thundered. A role model? In what sense is a professional reader of the autocue a role model? He has been convicted of criminal offences. The Herald seems to want to send him to jail for being insufficiently contrite.

The ceaseless and repetitive linking of P to a couple of nasty crimes - rolled out again in the Herald's argument for McDonald to be harshly dealt with - is in danger of becoming just as counterproductive as the Herald believes McDonald's chipper demeanour on TV to have been. Middle-class P users know that they are not going to shoot innocent people in the course of armed hold-ups. They don't recognise themselves in that scenario. It's all a bit too easy to ignore. The appropriate scenario for them is more prosaic: that they have become embarrassing idiots with no money and other idiots for friends.

If TVNZ has banned its onscreen staff from shopping themselves around the women's magazines, it's still apparently happy to stoke celebrity culture on its own terms. Last night's Documentary New Zealand programme, Celebrities' Wives, sought to redefine "celebrity" as "anyone who has, or has had, an onscreen role in a Television New Zealand programme" and thus an eager public was delivered a compelling insight into the challenges fame has brought the families of, um, the Leishman brothers. Oh really …

Stuck for an opinion about Corngate at cocktail parties? Finlay Macdonald outlines your three basic options in this week's Listener editorial.

Spinsanity says Michael Moore has removed one of the more egregious falsehoods from the DVD version of Bowling for Columbine, but is still tossing around libel threats at anyone who disputes his claim that "absolutely every fact in the film is true". It wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't made that "non-fiction" Oscar speech, really …

The Nation takes issue with Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice's characterisation of Iraq as being like post-war Germany, where dead-enders held on in guerilla operations for some time after the war was one. Big difference: no US troops died in post-war Germany: "In fact, zero is the total of all combat casualties from the US occupations of Germany, Japan, Haiti and the Balkans. Compare that to the 67 US soldiers killed in straight-out combat since aviator action figure George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1 (bringing the American death toll to 285 since the war began)."

So what happened to the weapons, then? As noted by reporters in this CNN transcript, George W. Bush's speech on Iraq almost wholly ignored the reason his administration gave for going to war in the first place: the imminent threat posed by "the deadliest weapons known to man".

This Reuters story compares rosy predictions from Rumsfeld and others with the grim reality of the new speech, and its requests for a breathtaking $US87 billion from US taxpayers.

There is no polite way of saying this: the American public continues to present as dangerously deluded - in the polls, anyway. A new Washington Post poll finds that seven out of 10 Americans still believe it "very or somewhat likely" that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. However could they have formed that impression?

In light of the Bush speech - and its fine words about the United Nations - Cursor.org dug up this bit of bile from White House insider (and liar and war profiteer) Richard Perle, in which he gloated over the well-deserved "death" of the UN in March.

So anyway, no contact so far from anyone at Air New Zealand to try and ease the pain of my unfortunate online booking experience - but plenty from people who have had a similarly unhappy time. Roger wrote in to say:

The last half dozen times I have gone overseas [I swear I am not exaggerating], I have tried to use the Air NZ website to pick and book flights - with a total lack of success for one reason or another. I am yet to get success on any electronic booking with them. My wife has tried a similar number of times on domestic flights; with a similar success rate; and every time she has fallen back on their phone booking system they have found her a cheaper flight than those offered on the webpage.

It seems that your choice is a web based system that does not work, or waiting an interminable period in a phone queue!!

Christopher Dempsey raised an interesting theory - any comment out there on its likely validity?:

My brother had exactly the same problem. He managed to figure it out; when offering cheap seats, AirNZ sells them online ... and each one is snapped up. However, if you book a seat and all the cheap seats have gone, the software is programmed to continue accepting your booking, asking for details etc again and again (as happened with my brother). This is to stop competitors from somehow 'counting' the cheap seats on the flights by booking ALL seats to see how many cheap ones they can get. Nice of AirNZ isn't it - cause, being fustrated is everything. :)

Brent Jackson knew where I was coming from:

I had a very similar experience to your own. I was booking return tickets for me and my family, so had to enter bleems of info before being rejected with Card Declined. So I retried with my wife's card - same result. Rang the bank - no problem with cards, and no declined auths. Ring AirNZ. "Oh yes, our website link to the bank is down at the moment, but I can take your booking now if you like. Unfortunately I will have to charge you a $15 booking fee." After discussing my options with her (pay $15 extra for their stuff up / retry every so often until it works / ring AirNZ every so often until they can tell me that it is back online), I decided that it would be much simpler to fly QANTAS (even though I'd much rather be on AirNZ - I do not like being treated like shit!).

I duly complained to AirNZ, and got a rather glib reply about it being a one-off fault, and the booking fee would have been waived, and giving the overall impression it was somehow my fault that I couldn't book with them. How they can afford to treat customers like this I do not know ?!?

I assume that you'll probably get a barrage of similar complaints from other people as this "one-off" problem has probably occurred numerous times.

It appears so - although I must say I've used the Air New Zealand website happily enough in the past. And Jarrod reported a similar experience booking online with Qantas in Australia.

I had a similar experience to yours when trying to book a domestic airline ticket with Qantas (within Australia). The booking process choked at the payment stage a few times, and my flight options seemed to dwindle as it did so.

I finally rang Qantas, and found that the cheap seats I wanted were actually still available, but their booking application was hanging on to them - as far as it was concerned, the booking process was incomplete. The customer services rep I spoke to was able to delete these partial bookings out of the system, and I could then start over.
Different airline, and presumably a different web app - but maybe same problem?

Brian Kassler of Flying Fish had a solution - wait till the last moment then go Qantas:

You should try flying Qantas!! As a bloke that lives in Wellington, but spends his life in Auckland, I do that trip a lot. Go online 24 hours before you want to travel and you will get a seat for 75 bucks. The 24 hour thing is important. You also get a half decent tucker, friendly service, don't have the long queue and a far superior airline. Trust me.

Hmmm …

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Friday frustrations | Sep 05, 2003 11:14

So Sunday won't now be making its behind-the-scenes story on the launch of the Maori Television Service - last week's softly-softly item on Derek Fox was it. Which is a shame: given what we now know, it would have been better than The Office.

Imagine the fun we might all have had in trying to read the body language, in watching closely for eye contact or analysing the chat. Is there a reel going around then?

There's a good page of pictures of yesterday's Fart Tax protest by farmers at Parliament. Am I the only one who feels that the cockies are a little half-cocked on this one? In principle, the research levy is a straight-up polluter-pays tax, and a modest one at that. Unless you're a global warming denier - and that's getting to be a pretty hard position to sustain, given the weight of expert opinion - it is being applied in the right place.

But the farmers who were shouting about creeping socialism yesterday seem to be saying that you and I ought to pay the research costs, because farming is such an important export earner. Which is pretty much Rob Muldoon's argument for farm subsidies, isn't it?

Actually there is a sound grievance: that farmers can't offset their ruminant methane belches with carbon credits for their trees, because forestry carbon credits have been nationalised. Apart from that, the farmers ought to calm down a bit and talk.

A Mr DM Praecox has been in contact to say that he knows a bit about Judith Aitken's speech on Official Information Act principles, which I mentioned last week. There's an interesting background to its section on the Danks committee, which eventually spawned the OIA:

It seems that the Danks committee, which was set up by Muldoon right before an election to take the heat off him on demands for an OIA, managed to avoid reporting until about 6 months out from the following election. He (Muldoon) then tried to bury the report (no OIA then!). Somehow, unaccountably, the report found its way into the hands of the opposition. Outmanoeuvred! Love it when that happens.

The funny thing is that the speech I pointed to on the Education Review Office website has gone - indeed, the whole speeches directory seems to have disappeared. Never mind. Here's the Google cache version.

I'm giving a little talk at the New Zealand Skeptics conference in Wellington on Saturday, September 20. Should be fun, and the conference looks interesting. But earlier in the week, I booked a return flight (cheap and non-refundable, they have a limited budget for the conference), travelling down on the Friday. And then last night I realised that the Friday night happens to be the B-Net New Zealand Music Awards, which I can hardly miss (today's the last day to vote, BTW).

The only option was to write off the original outbound booking and pay for a Saturday flight at my own expense, which I did this morning. Or tried to. The only cheap flight left south on Saturday which would get me there in good time for my early afternoon slot was at 8am, which was a bit trying, but do-able.

But for some reason, the Air New Zealand website choked on a perfectly good Business Mastercard, which I have used before for booking flights. First it told me that it couldn't recognise the card details (which were correct), and then that the card had been declined (it has plenty of credit available). I started again and got the same sequence of results.

By the time the secure connection had timed out three times and I was onto another credit card, I was screwed. The seat on the 8am flight was gone, replaced by one at 7am, which I had no choice but to take. So I'm getting up at 6am on the Saturday morning after the B-Nets, and I can hardly stay up all night given that I've got all those skeptics to talk to. It's ugly.

This is where I try and marshall all my blog fame: is there anyone out there at Air New Zealand who can do something about this? Click that "Feedback" link and I'll, I dunno, put in a word with the Commerce Commission or something …

Actually, while I'm on the blag, it's past due time for booking the family summer hols. After last summer's epic, we're thinking beachside motel, not too far from Auckland. I have visions of well-kept 60s-style units, willow trees, a trampoline, a breeze-block barbecue and a beach, but I'm flexible. Any ideas?

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Meanwhile on Planet Whacko | Sep 04, 2003 11:05

I'm sorry, but this is getting silly. In Parliament yesterday Bill English accused all 35 chief executives of government departments - many of them appointed under the last National government - of corruption. They had, he claimed, colluded to prevent the release of a memo from State Services Commissioner Michael Wintringham in the wake of the original Corngate allegations.

This is an extraordinary allegation, and one that ought not be made in pursuit of mere political mileage. I managed to get a copy of Wingtringham's memo, which is dated 4.18pm, July 12, 2002: two days after the launch of Nicky Hager's Seeds of Distrust and the accompanying TV3 broadcast, a day after a media conference in response to the book and several hours before the 1800 pages of internal documents relating to the Corngate events of November and December 2000 were publicly released as per the Prime Minister's undertaking.

Never mind whether it was suppressed as part of a conspiracy embracing the entire public service, it's actually hard to see how it could have been released along with all the other documents, given that at the time it was sent (let alone read), those documents had been collated and were actually being photocopied for that evening's release. When Steven Price made an OIA request four months later, for his Metro story, it was released.

Wintringham's memo concerned the previous day's media briefing, at which a number of senior civil servants spoke. Now, no one in Opposition parties or the media objected to that conference taking place. Quite the reverse - there was a clamour for people to front up.

But, said Wintringham, one public servant had been uneasy that the conference had taken place. He quoted the official's exact wording in an enquiry to his staff:

I understand that public servants have to be seen to be politically neutral and that this applies even more during an election campaign. Do you think it is ethical to have the current government request senior public servants to reject assertions in a book, when these assertions are damaging to the government? The appearance may be that that these public servants are no more than political puppets, especially since what they are now saying is different to what official papers at the time said.

In his memo, Wintringham further quoted "the substance of the reply" to the official's email, for the reference of his department heads. This is the part that Bill English, um, suppressed in Parliament yesterday, and it went as follows:

Explaining the work of Government departments is a normal role for senior Government officials. You are right that this needs to be handled with particular care in a pre-election period and you'll have seen that the State Services Commissioner provided the "umbrella" for yesterday's media conference. This was precisely to ensure that the briefing was limited to the provision of full and accurate, but non-political, information from the Public Service to to the media and other enqurirers (including interested political parties). The briefing did not include the participation of any politicians, nor did it defend or criticise any particular party policies. In addition, the Commissioner saw merit in providing a platform for officials to explain their own actions: the Hager book contains unfair and ill-founded criticisms of public servants.

Okay, so what does Steven Price, the journalist who actually requested and obtained the documents on which National is basing its conspiracy theory, think? I asked him this morning:

I wouldn't have expected the document to have been released. My interpretation of what the PM said was that all the information relating to Corngate from November-December 2000 and early 2001 would be released, even though she said "release everything." I got the rest of it because I specifically asked for documents relating to the handling of the issue when it emerged after the election. About half of the 184 documents released to me related to that period rather than 2000-2001, and many of those that related to 2000-2001 were drafts of documents that had been released and fairly inconsequential emails (though there were some very significant documents, I thought, including the memos to the PM, and some other things that have yet to be "released" by National.)

At least one public servant was uneasy about the media briefing, a possibility that, Steven points out, was flagged at the time by commentator Colin James. I still can't help but feel that had the officials not fronted for the media, people would have been crying "cover up!". Anyway, Steven says:

I think it's ridiculous to suggest that there was some collusion between all the departmental heads over this email. (I do note though, that none of the officials involved in any of the relevant departments were permitted to talk to me, including Ruth Wilkie, when I asked to interview them for my article. I can't help but think there was some coordination going on there.)

I think the government deserves to take a hit for the way it handled Corngate, including its blanket denials during the election, but National is suggesting wrongdoing on a galactic scale that just isn't supportable by the documentary evidence. It's really very clear from the documents what went on during Corngate. Incredibly, the political debate doesn't seem to be getting near it.

Last word?

The whole debate has spun off onto planet whacko.

Frankly, I'm with Trevor Mallard and the Public Service Association on this one. English's stunt yesterday was disgraceful.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we all depend on the rest of the media to report this stuff. Unmediated access to the documentation - a la the Hutton Inquiry website - would have helped a lot.

Speaking of which a - safely retired - intelligence official appears to have explicitly borne out the claims in Andrew Gilligan's original BBC story: intelligence officials were uncomfortable with the language in which the weapons dossier had been re-written, particularly that relating to the infamous 45 minutes claim. David Kelly would, he said, certainly have been aware of misgivings amongst intelligence staff.

Whatever games the BBC and Gilligan played subsequently - and Gilligan tipping off an MP as to the source of his colleague Susan Watts' report was incredibly unprofessional - the original report was not inaccurate.

Anyway, it appears that the New Zealand Army engineers in Southern Iraq will be depending on the competence of an amateur-hour "army" under the command of a couple of thousand Polish troops and featuring the noted military expertise of El Salvador and Mongolia. The Polish commander featured on BBC World last night seemed nonplussed, as well he might. This isn't a multinational peacekeeping force in any modern sense, it's playacting.

The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland has a withering commentary on the Iraq adventure.

I clearly wasn't the only one to feel let down by Telecom's long-awaited announcement of its new JetStream products recently. An online petition asking that Telecom "provide New Zealanders with a more substantial and competitive service in the 'fast' (a.k.a. Broadband) Internet connection market" has attracted 2500 signatures. Paul Brislen has a story about it in Computerworld.

And, finally, I trust you're enjoying the speed of Public Address this morning: we're now on CactusLab's brand new server - dual Xeon 2.5GHz processors - and it's totally bitchin' …

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WTF? | Sep 02, 2003 10:25

What on earth was all that about? The Prime Minister's broadside yesterday at the Green Party - and in particular, its co-leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons - looks not only unwise, but quite unjustified.

Fitzsimmons' offence appears to have been voting with Opposition MPs to ask Helen Clark to appear before the Corngate select committee inquiry. There was no chance of that happening - Labour and United Future members on the committee had a majority in voting against it - and it simply does not answer the description of the smear campaign Clark implied that Fitzsimons had been running against her.

Let's get this straight: National Nick Smith has wandered in very late in the piece and had notable success - especially given that his "new" documents were released last November - in embarrassing the government over the events of late 2000 and early 2001. Act sniffed blood and piled in with a frankly warped "letter" that seems to deliberately confuse several issues. Even Winston Peters - sniffing the kind of fear that delivers him votes - has wobbled over into calling for a moratorium extension.

But the Greens? Gimme a break. They asked for, and were granted, the inquiry. They didn't set the terms of reference, but were consulted on them, and declared themselves happy. Fitzsimons seems to have conducted herself with a degree of measure missing from the Prime Minister's conduct over this matter. If, as committee chair, she has taken a proprietorial interest in the inquiry, well, she's hardly the first member to do that.

Yet yesterday Clark even re-heated the suggestion that senior Greens were in on the publication of Nicky Hager's Seeds of Distrust. This was a reasonable question to ask in the heated weeks after the book's contrived, explosive launch last year, and at least one Green Party member, the book's publisher, Craig Potton, knew the book was coming. But I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests the Green leadership was in on it, and if the Prime Minister has any, she ought to produce it.

Assuming there is a strategy behind this - and not just an attack of bile (and that there isn't some dastardly Green action we don't know about) - it's obviously one of dealing with the issue by going on the attack. Perhaps there's some longer-term, post-moratorium aim. Perhaps the focus groups say that people love it when the PM enters talking-about-herself-in-the-third-person mode. But the short-term effect of bashing the Greens for something they haven't done has just been to increase the impression the government is protesting too much.

Here's a good one. At the same time as US copyright law is being used for force ISPs to hand over its customers' private information to the RIAA, and as the USA Patriot Act allows federal agents to seize things like library borrowing records without a warrant, the American government is funding the use and distribution of software that offers individuals anonymity on the Internet: but only if they're Iranian.

More on Scoop's scoop on the Diebold voting machines. A letter from Diebold's CEO that says he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." At the least, this is a rather tasteless promise for a man selling voting machines to make ...

The Dutch get all sensible over medicinal marijuana and make it available on prescription in pharmacies, along with instructions for brewing it as tea and using it with an inhaler. Anarchy in the streets looming? Hardly.

Reports of a planned Australian launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store before the end of the year. Over here, Apple's local people have talked to the record companies, but the chief obstacle is our limp uptake of broadband Internet.

An extraordinary and inspiring announcement from the BBC that has been lost in all the Hutton headlines. The corporation is planning to digitise and offer for download, for free, as much of its back catalogue of programmes that it can legally do, from the earliest radio reels to nature documentaries to educational programmes. Anyone will be allowed to re-use, re-edit, mix and share this material with their own, provided it's for non-commercial use. The project is called the BBC Creative Archive. Rock on.

And finally, thanks for coming. Public Address logged about 35,000 visits from 15,000 unique users last month, our best yet. Cheers!

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