Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Since I last blogged | May 31, 2004 11:48

So the Sunday Star Times' follow-up to its "shock" story on the supposed lowering of the age of consent came in the form yesterday of a brief, pompous editorial offering "congratulations" to Justice minister Phil Goff for ditching the age-gap defence in the Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill but wishing "shame" on him for "trying to blame the messenger - and this paper in particular for allegedly misrepresenting the import of the proposed law change to an excitable public."

The SST's editor didn't feel obliged to correct, or even acknowledge, the numerous errors of fact in last week's "age of consent" story. Having a newspaper means never having to say sorry, as the Herald demonstrated with a story headed Papers show Goff decided against explaining sex-law move - a remarkably tenuous headline given that the story reveals that the proposed amendment, formalising the existing police practice, was put to 18 government agencies and organisations (the majority of whom considered it wise) and specifically explained (by David Cunliffe) during the bill's first reading in Parliament six months ago.

As Tom Frewen pointed out in an excellent comment on Mediawatch yesterday (you can hear the audio here) - describing the SST's lead as "the worst story of the year" - it was also specifically highlighted on page four of the bill. It went unremarked by either journalists or Opposition politicians until the SST's hysterical "shock" story last weekend, at which point the country's newspaper editorial leaders blared forth with little idea of what they were talking about.

And yet in - as most of them did - conjuring imaginary conversations where kids would quote Section 134a of the Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill to their parents and each other to justify having sex, the leader writers were, as Frewen pointed out, "assuming that young people are better informed about the law than they were".

They weren't alone. The normally sensible Rosemary McLeod wrote a column on the issue for the Dom Post this week which suggested that she understood neither the existing law or the new one to come. Raybon Kan had even less idea about it in the Star Times. They will all presumably now be happy that the situation will be thus: children will be liable for 10 years' imprisonment for touching each other, but it's okay because the system will say one thing and do another. That's what the law's about, kids.

Anyway, back to the crusading Sunday Star Times, where the cover of yesterday's Sunday magazine section features Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, along with the words "Darker sexier scarier: Harry Potter grows up". The headline on the story itself is 'Sorcery gets saucier'. The intro says "The new Harry Potter film is darker, more sophisticated and has a controversially sexy new director".

Phew. Well, we've got the sex angle, then. But oddly, the only things in the story that might conceivably justify all the sweaty headlines are the observation that the director of The Prisoner of Azkaban, Alfonso Cuaron, once directed the "sexually explicit coming-of-age film" Y tu Mama Tambien and a bashful Radcliffe offering that "Personally, I can't actually see this heartthrob stuff. I don't feel like a sex symbol."

It gets even more curious when you look at the way the story was presented in the paper for which it was originally written, Britain's Daily Telegraph. You'd hardly know it was the same story. It headline is the more mundane 'Growing up with Harry Potter'. The intro reads: "In the new Harry Potter film, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger emerge from the boy wizard's shadows to become substantial characters – while the pair who play them are becoming talented performers and assured youngsters."

So why is the SST trying so very hard to sexualise the new Harry Potter film, whose stars are - ahem - 14 years old? Policy, you'd have to guess. The cover of yesterday's Auckland-only About Town section is a full-page picture of a prostitute on a bed, carrying a whip, with the heading 'What lies beneath? Take a tour of Auckland's sexual underground' (the story is a nice, whimsical description of various Auckland sex shops and strip clubs by Peter Malcouronne).

Meanwhile, the main feature of the section, Bridget Saunders' gossip pages, leads, for the second week in a row, with the alleged secret sex tape allegedly featuring Charlotte Dawson in the apartment rigged up for Sky TV's tacky reality show, The Player, a "story" hitherto ignored by all media but Fairfax's two Sunday papers, which seem to have been very keen on promoting a show whose premise is that of a competition to procure casual sex with strangers.

Two pages in, Saunders' pointless 'We live in a small town' section covers the "proctological inclinations" of "a new tele-blonde"; a female sportscaster allegedly snapped with a camera phone by a rugby player while she was "clad head to toe in leather on a bondage swing"; the same woman allegedly seeking casual sex with rugby players, "while others took photos"; a "liberated ex-choir boy" who "treated himself recently to an act which is illegal in the UK if you are under 16, illegal in Singapore full stop and illegal in California even if you are married"; another plug for The Player; and the question "Which 40-something millionaire has someone's mother complaining he tried to hit on her 15 year-old?" Hilarious.

Was that a newpaper or a swingers' newsgroup? I'm sure it all sells papers, but it seems a bit odd coming from a paper lately so fond of sermonising about "messages" being sent to children, doesn't it?

Anyway, Bridget Saunders was fortunately nowhere near the party thrown by Flying Fish on Friday night on occasion of its FishnClips subsidiary having made its 100th music video. Yes, there was the strikingly pretty Kayte Ferguson from Serial Killers, Barney from Pavement and the members of Elemenop, but mostly it was just a large crowd of folk of various ages hurling themselves into the tasks of dancing to DJs (Stinky Jim, Zen and Ned Roy amongst others), fetching bottles of wine from the bar and raving at each other. It was messy and crowded and great entertainment and I'm grateful to BK for the invite.

I found it, I confess, a lot more fun than the Qantas Media Awards earlier in the evening, at Sky City's vast and confusing new conference centre. I got my name up on the screen - finalist for best IT column - but by the time I'd got around congratulating most of the winners for whom I was most pleased - John Roughan, Rod Oram, Nicola Legat, Gilbert Wong, Bruce Ansley, Paul Brislen and the talented young man Matt Nippert - I'd had my fill and got a taxi home to change into my hipster threads and head for Fish House. (Happily, I discovered a taxi chit in the inside pocket of my Strangely Normal jacket …)

It had been a big week, what with John Pagani, Phil Goff and Roger Kerr on my Wire show (Cate Brett was invited on but declined) and then getting up at 5.45am on Thursday to knock off some work before flying to Napier to record an episode of the Off the Wire for National Radio. The locals seemed nice, especially the charming and talented panellist Helen Shea, who led us afterwards to a restaurant called Caution, which is attached to a bar called Shed 2 in an old freight shed by the waterfront. It was bloody good. The saffron risotto had been in the pan a little bit long, but the two(!) big fillets of snapper draped over it were fresh and delicious, as were the Clearview Estate chardonnay (a local taonga, one would think) and the Montana Virtu sticky. Our joy was, as you'd expect, unconfined when someone picked up the tab.

I had watched the Budget speech sitting on the bed in my unit at the Palm City motor inn. Well, Labour can't be accused of either ignoring its constituency, or of fiscal recklessness, although the argument over whether it would have been better to return a dividend to the public with some form of tax cut is a valid one. (Business, as usual was after tax cuts, but from what I can tell, Cullen's actually right when he points out that while the headline rate of company tax in Australia is lower than ours, their payroll and capital gains taxes actually make the overall tax burden on businesses higher there.)

Anyway, Cullen decided he could wear the deadweight cost of redistributing the money via what is effectively an extended benefit system because it gave him a much better bang for his buck in actually targeting low and middle income families. There are no brilliant Budgets any more, but this is one of quite surpassing competence. Cullen must now demonstrate that the financial outreach to families can be done in a manner that isn't too clumsy, complex or costly.

I'd worked it so that I'd get back to Auckland on Friday morning just in time to pre-record Mediawatch. It was a good plan until we discovered that Napier airport was fogged in. Never happens, apparently. Eventually, thanks to the driving skills of Te Radar, I made the studio with about five minutes to spare. I got home meaning to write a blog and then perhaps finish my slightly overdue Unlimited column, but was suddenly confronted with my own tendency to overcommit and decided to chop some wood, get clean and listen to the recording of the recent Flying Nun pub quiz (which might have had something to do with that taxi chit) instead. It sounded raucous but quite funny. Happily, my editor at Unlimited, Rebecca Macfie, hadn't actually noticed the absence of the column by the time I ran into her at the awards that evening.

So Saturday was quiet, apart from an hour with the masses at St Luke's because the kids wanted to spend their pocket money on trading cards. I checked out the new Jamie Oliver cookware range, which looks quite good. I can't vouch for the Tefal surface (that red dot thing is naff) but the pans themselves are attractive and pleasingly heavy-arsed. Cheaper at Stevens than at Living & Giving, as you'd expect.

That evening was, of course, National Anthem - 24 hours of New Zealand music live on TV from four centres. The presenters' earnest cheerleading for "Kiwi music" - Jackie Clarke should be banned from doing theatrical accents - got tiresome pretty quickly, but the technical achievement in the event was remarkable.

Still, the programme served as notice that New Zealand music isn't good per se, because some of what snuck in in the small hours was pretty awful. And it seemed unfair that the likes of the Checks (I told you they were good) and the Verlaines (a revelation!) should get only two songs when an empty vessel like Zed got to drone on for four, but that's pop music I guess.

Whether or not the event is staged again - and it would be hard to justify solely on the basis of the money raised - it did show what is possible when TV ventures offsite and into the world (not many people trekked out to Aavalon, unsurprisingly). There's no reason that TVNZ couldn't collaborate on another show at the St James, say, and bring it live to the nation. When you consider how good this was at times, and how bad TVNZ's recent efforts at in-studio light-ent have been, you'd think it would be the thing to do.

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Stranger still ... | May 26, 2004 09:51

Hey, what say America was duped into invading Iraq as part of an intelligence scam by another nation? No, not Israel - Iran. That's the theory being canvassed by The Guardian, based on interviews with disgruntled US intelligence officials.

The theory rests on the unusual role of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon favourite who provided a stream of what now appears to have been bogus information about Iraqi weapons programmes. Chalabi's fall from grace was completed with last week's raid on his house in Baghdad, but his connections with Iran have been the topic of muttering for some time - especially as he has tried to reinvent himself as a Shia leader:

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.

The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Who knows? But anyone who thought this war couldn't possibly get any weirder was wrong. Newsweek has another look at the Chalabi saga, and in the New York Review of Books Peter W. Galbraith's How to Get Out of Iraq takes an unflinching look at the background to Iraq (he believes that a multinational force should have moved on Saddam back when he was committing genocide and major Western governments were trying to play it down), the stark failure to plan for the post-invasion period (which almost immediately started to go "catastrophically wrong") and the troubling mess now unfolding. Long but very lucid.

Meanwhile, Abu Ghraib comes to New York - on iPod billposters. Yikes.

I got quoted by Phil Goff in Parliament yesterday, along with Lindsay Perigo, in response to a series of almost comically loaded questions from Tony Ryall - or, rather, somewhat brutally paraphrased. Am I unduly sensitive about having words put in my mouth?

I've had a couple of thoughtful emails on elements of the Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill from Deborah Russell and Gordon King (who, as the father of a daughter, has some reasonable concerns about the gender equity in the new law) but I still think that in the context of the bill the age-gap defence was simply prudent. Sensible enough, indeed, to have sat there for six months without alarm, until the Star Times "shock" story.

While recognising their concerns - perhaps it's me who's not being practical - I still despair of the coverage of this issue. The Herald published a remarkably butt-headed editorial yesterday, which in several hundred words of fuming and farting advanced only one argument: that establishing the age-gap provision would send an unhealthy moral message. And yet none of those rallying behind the present criminal law actually want to see it enforced. Or perhaps they want police prosectors to do quietly out of sight what they can't bring themselves to do in law.

One Herald journalist has been in touch to express support, but the paper itself has carried on the issue by polling teenagers on whether they support a more "permissive" law on sex between 12 and 16 year-olds, which - surprise! - they don't. But I don't think the establishment of the defence would have been "permissive", any more than a defence of insanity is "permissive" of murder (let alone "legalising" it) - it simply means that it is not appropriate to enter a criminal conviction. (Credit to lapsed lawyer Damian Christie for that example - and profuse apologies for probably nicking the best line from his next post.) Anyway, I'm over it now, save to quote Eric Schlosser: "fewer laws, more rigorously enforced."

Finally, Richard Easther recently brought me the disarming news that the girl-on-a-motorbike-in-the-Chernobyl-zone website was a hoax - well, mostly. I kind of don't mind being scammed so beautifully, but as Richard points out, most of the alarm amongst the Slashdot crowd seems to centre around the fact that motorcycle girl has a husband …

PS: I've got Budget previews with John Pagani (12.20pm) and Roger Kerr (1pm) on my 95bFM Wire show today if you're interested ...

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Sense and sensibilities | May 25, 2004 11:25

Plenty of reader responses, then, to yesterday's post picking through the falsehoods and faulty logic of the Sunday Star Times "shock" lead story on the Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill. With a single exception they have all been roughly as appalled as I was.

It was discussed quite usefully in the local blogosphere too - lending weight to the idea that you get a more rational discussion these days in blogland than in the overly-spooked mainstream press. Unfortunately, people tend to believe what they read in the papers.

David Farrar, who was, until fairly recently, working for the National Party, points out that the SST's scoop "is somewhat amusing, considering the bill was introduced six months ago on 9 December 2003." In a useful and well-informed post which I would recommend reading, he goes through what the new law would have meant, and what the present law actually says:

The current law actually states it is not a crime, if the boy is younger than the girl. So currently a 14 year old boy can sleep legally with a 15 year old girl. What is illegal is if the boy is 15 years and 2 months and she is 15 years and 1 month.

The proposed law extends the defence of being younger than the other party, to give a range of being no more than two years older. This is incidentally the law IIRC in Germany. So this means it is still illegal for an 18 year old to sleep with a 15 year old, but not for a 16 year old to sleep with a 15 year old.

Personally I think the change is generally sensible, as criminalising someone for being a day older than their under 16 year old partner is stupid, but I would have it apply to 14 and 15 year olds only. So any sex with someone under 14 is illegal, but it is not illegal for a 16 year old and a 15 year old to have sex.

No Right Turn wondered "what is Tony Ryall on?":

Contrary to his assertions, the government is not planning "to legalise older men having sex with 12-16-year olds, if they can prove they took reasonable steps to ascertain the age of the young person and believed them to be 16-years-old or over." That's already legal. In fact, as David Farrar points out, the government is significantly tightening legislation in this area. There is already a defence of "reasonable belief" that someone was over 16; now you have to actually have asked ...

He's referring to this press release issued yesterday by Ryall:

"However, parents and grandparents will still be alarmed by Mr Goff's proposal to legalise older men having sex with 12-16-year olds, if they can prove they took reasonable steps to ascertain the age of the young person and believed them to be 16-years-old or over."

Mr Ryall says Mr Goff should ditch this dangerous proposal as well. The Government should be focused on looking after our children, not making them more vulnerable.

No mystery, I'm afraid. Ryall knows very well that what he's saying is untrue - and scurrilously so. But having successfully nailed the government (in an area where it is currently notably vulnerable to being nailed) by bringing the story to the Star Times, he just looked to milk it a little bit more. Perhaps some karmic justice awaits him further down the line, but for the time being he'll get away with it. Labour simply couldn't countenance a scrap like this taking over Budget week. You could just see the resignation on Phil Goff's face when he announced that the age-gap clause would be removed.

Goff will know, as a couple of readers have pointed out, that the removal of the clause to some extent makes an ass of this important piece of legislation. Youth law advocate Anthony Trenwith had this to say:

Congrats for finally picking up the ball of common sense and running with it! I've been fuming at the stupidity of journos in NZ since reading the SST's leader. What you've done is actually give a rational statement of the law as it was in the beginning, has been and (now) never shall be!

As far as prosecuting under-age sex goes, as one who works in criminal defence law, I can tell you that this would be next to impossible. Both partners would have to be jointly charged and tried together. Here's the kicker - neither would give evidence against the other as it would incriminate themselves! Presuming no one else was present throughout (yeah, right!) then any hope of prosecution goes out the window! No evidence, no witnesses, no case!

Philip Wilkie considered Stuff's follow-up poll on the new law and declared himself "dismayed at the inability of 88% of New Zealanders to think past the end of their hypocritical noses":

The proposed Ammendment Bill has several fundamental changes; one it treats all sexual offences in gender neutral terms, and two it removes time limits on prosecutions.

OK, so my 14 year old daughter has sex with a 13 year old classmate, well the law makes them BOTH liable for a High Court criminal prosection with a maximum sentence in the order of 10 years. It doesn't even have to be penetrative sex, just about anything remotely sexual can be trumped up as "sexual connection" or "lewd conduct". OK so they probably won't go to prison, but it will cost you $30 - 100,000 to defend it in the High Court.

Worse still, there are no time limits. Most of us have under the proposed laws have committed a serious criminal sexual offence at some time in our lives before we were 16; are now all these cases are open to retrospective prosecution? Are we to anticipate queues of honest citizens lining up at their nearest Police Station demanding to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, because 40 years ago they had a session of "doctor" with the next door kids? I guess not, and yet 88% of them vote for a law that mandates this.

And leaving it to Police discretion is not an answer. Increasingly they are under pressure to "kick for touch" and send all sexual offence allegations to the Courts, so why should we expect them to make a distinction for consenting underage partners? Police Constables are trained to apply laws in a systematic and "tick the boxes" manner. Making fine judgements about consent, morality and compassion is not their core business.

Let me put it this way ... if as a male adult I consensually fondled the breasts of a 14 year old girl, I can rightly anticipate a prison sentence; but if the same girl touches the breasts of another girl her age, the proposed laws expose both her and the other party to the same penalty. If it was your daughter how would you feel if she faced charges in this situation? A question that the Tony Ryalls and Peter Dunnes of this world would never give a straight answer to.

Aaron Oxley pointed out a timely story by George Monbiot which compares the outcomes in terms of sexual health and abortion rates in "permissive" countries such as Sweden and Denmark with those in nations, like the US, that consider themselves more morally upright.

Rob Stowell said this:

Thoroughly agree with your outrage about this "scandal" which has quickly overturned a well-conceived piece of legislation. I wanted to kick Linda Clark on the radio this morning for so wilfully misrepresenting the facts but had to swear at the radio instead.

It did lead me to think about what laws mean. I also think it's stupid to make something criminal if you don't intend to do anything about it: marijauna is an obvious case, but there are others. The law should (I think) draw a line in the sand that we are mostly prepared to toe. If we have the law but don't apply sanctions - or think it desirable to - what are we saying? I'd argue we're saying, in effect, the law is an ass - and undermining its effectiveness overall as a means of publicly drawing the line. Others are arguing it "sends a message", and the message will be that teen sex is okay. (As if teenagers don't get this message- it's like legislating against earthquakes ...)

But what is the message? That it's illegal to do it- but don't worry, you won't get prosecuted? This is classic "bad-parenting" - say it's bad, (but good for us grown-ups) but when it happens, don't apply the sanctions (which no one is arguing we should apply - and no one seems to quite notice that they are being INCREASED in this legislation, which is precisely why the legal dept want it clear that they won't be applied).

Anyway, I know like and admire Cate Brett, but of all the controversial front pages in her short reign so far (and there have sure been a few ...) this was the most misconceived and damaging.

Nick Melchior said this:

Thanks for some sanity in the debate. As someone who lost his virginity at age 15, too young in my reckoning now, I would have been appalled if someone had tried to prosecute my 16 year-old partner, or in fact me, for it. The SST article was some of the worst journalism NZ has produced, and the standard isn't that high to begin with.

Jonathan Bowen said this:

I'm sorry, but I had to forward a copy of today's blog and send it to the SST. Having on a number of occasions experienced fictional reporting first hand, it's tiresome at times to absorb a report only to wonder at the end what actually is the situation being reported on.

Conor Roberts saw a trend:

I read your latest post and it brought home to me a sense that the mainstream news media is across the board out to hammer the Labour government in any way, shape or form.

It is getting scary - we are seeing any policy suggestion coming from the government as some kind of attack on NZ. Stories that paint the government in a good light (such as the record 4.3% unemployment rate) are largely glossed over. Lets hope for more balance and indeed truth in news reporting in the run up to the next election.

There were a few too many other correspondents to quote here, but Deborah Russell was the only one to take issue with the view I expressed yesterday:

Of course morality and the law are not the same thing - it's a trivial point that gets covered in any first year law or moral philosophy (ethics) paper. But the law does serve an important signalling function. Even in a jolly nice society, where people are just plain nice to each other, we would still want to have laws, in part to co-ordinate our activities, but also to signal to people what being jolly nice entails. So telling people that they won't be prosecuted for having sex at a certain age sends an important signal about what we think their behaviour should be.

Personally, I'm not interested in telling people what their sexual behaviour should be - I but right into the 'consenting adults' criterion. And there's the rub. Twelve year old children are not consenting adults. I don't know when people become adults, and it's highly likely to be a gradual and variable process anyway. Some people will be adults at age 15, others at age 18, others not until they are 25. None of us want to conduct in-depth interviews with every single teenager to determine whether or not they are adults, so we deem people to be adults at a certain age (16 for sex, 18 for most other things) …

As you point out, kids will do it anyway, so what's the point of prosecuting them? All that happens at the moment is that sometimes, kids get prosecuted, and sometimes they don't. So the law is applied very capriciously. I don't think the 'people do it anyway' argument is very good - there are lots of things that people do anyway that we still criminalise, like drink driving, and speeding, and whatever. The capriciousness in the application of the lawis worrying. It's one of the reasons that I am glad about the recent police crackdown on speeding - at least they are now being consistent, and driving a nice car and speaking with the right accent won't get you off anymore. I don't know what the solution is here, except that like the drink driving and speeding cases, it probably lies in serious funding being put into sex education rather than just random prosecution.

Of course, this whole thing is about adding a defence, not lowering the age of consent. But I think that all that will happen is that a 15 year old will add pressure to a 13 year old, saying, "Well, it's not illegal, so let's do it." As it turns out, we have a bit of experience with how defence clauses work. The notorious Section 59 gives adults a defence when it comes to disciplining children. This section is meant to work by giving your average parent a defence for hitting their children as punishment. But, it has been used, successfully, to defend people who have beaten their children with blocks of wood and hosepipes and left bruises that can still be seen three weeks alter. That's the sort of assault on an adult that would see the attacker convicted and given a serious sentence. Parents, however, can use the Section 59 defence ...

I think that the 'she was only 2 years younger than me' defence won't work in the way it is supposed to. It won't fix the problem of capricious enforcement of the law. All it will do is send a very strong signal that it is okay to have sex at a very young age. And that will result in even more pressure for children to have sex when they don't want to.

I understand this view. The problem is that there's just no evidence for it - the contrary, in fact. The laudable erasure of gender anomalies in the Bill actually makes the law an ass without the age-gap defence. And the comparison with Section 59 (which, incidentally, is largely supported by the same people who were up in arms about the age-gap clause) seems arbitrary and inappropriate to me.

Anyway, teenagers are all over the news, it seems, with TVNZ's poll last night revealing that 71% of New Zealanders want the drinking age put back up to 20. I'm in two minds about this. New figures suggest that kids are now drinking more, sooner. But I go out in Auckland and see 18-20 year-olds enjoying themselves moderately - on licensed premises.

It seems that the binge-drinking problems relate almost entirely to alcohol consumed away from licensed premises. Which brings me back to a question no one seemed to be able to answer for me at the time the age was lowered: why can't there be an age differential for the sale of liquor to be consumed on licensed premises - where host responsibility is mandated in law - and off?

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Facts are out of fashion | May 24, 2004 11:09

The Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill aims to clear up our updated and contradictory laws on sexual offending. It introduces a new offence of drug rape, markedly toughens the area around predatory behaviour by adults towards children and aims to remove a screaming anomaly whereby women could escape penalty for certain sexual offences - most notably having sex with an under-age boy - because the old law failed to recognise that such offences were even possible.

The Bill would also change a anomalous provision where it is illegal for any man to have sex with a "severely subnormal" woman or girl - effectively denying intellectually handicapped women any right to a legal sex life at all (which is, as, Sue Bradford pointed out in a submission on the bill, "a fairly fundamental abrogation of one of the most basic of human rights").

It also removes a shocking loophole whereby some offenders could escape prosecution if the age of the child could not be established; makes it no defence for an adult to argue that an child consented; and brings us into line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Penalties for trading in child pornography will be increased tenfold and convicted paedophiles will be supervised for up to 10 years after release.

While you're doing all that, it would be illogical not to look at whether we're also criminalising people we shouldn't - specifically, children. You'd ask: is the law being applied? (only if the police feel like it, which they almost always don't); is it effective? (no - or as the New South Wales Commission for Children and Young People put it, "There is no evidence that age of consent legislation influences young people when they make decisions about when to begin sexual activity. Most young people make their own decisions about when they are 'ready' to have sex, regardless of legislation")'; is it contradictory? (when under 16-year-olds already have access to contraceptive advice, yes); and it is counterproductive? (yes, if, as is easy to imagine, criminalisation deters young people from seeking or using contraception or advice).

In that light, the proposal is - or, now, probably, was - that it will be considered a defence if two people under 16 are having sex if they are older than 12 and the age difference is less than two years. The issue has become more acute with the proposed removal of gender anomalies - meaning that unless it is changed, two 14 year-olds have sex would both be criminally liable. It does not alter the "age of consent".

Miranda Sawyer dealt with the same issue in The Observer late last year, pointing out:

The stark truth is this. Though the age of consent can frighten teenagers into not seeking help when they need it, it doesn't stop them having sex. Cross-European comparisons of sexual health, carried out by Rox Kane and Kaye Wellings at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, show that the age of consent has no bearing on the age of first sex. In Spain, the age of consent is set low, at 13: yet the average age of first sex for girls is 19 and for boys, 18. In Mali, the age of consent is 16, but most young people wait until a year later. In California, the age of consent is 18, but most have sex between 16 and 17. The age of consent in France, Sweden and Denmark is 15. In Italy and Canada, it is 14. In Japan, 13. In Chile, it's 12. In Portugal and the Netherlands, teenagers between 12 and 16 can have consensual sex with their peers (often called age-gap legislation), otherwise the age of consent is 16.

So let's turn to yesterday's Sunday Star Times front page lead story and play spot-the-difference.

Let's start with the headline: 'Sex at age 12 okay under law change'. Okay? No one is saying it's "okay" - the question is whether the kids who do it should be regarded as criminal offenders. We don't think it's "okay" for people under 16 to smoke cigarettes, but we don't prosecute them for doing so - we prosecute the adults who supply them with cigarettes.

Then the first, thrilling sentence: "Sex between children as young as 12 will be allowed under a shock law change, horrifying teen pregnancy experts, educators and counsellors". Or, actually, some of the above: the SST story did manage to squeeze in, three paragraphs from the end, a comment from Carol Shand of Doctors for Sexual Abuse care welcoming the proposed change as sensible.

The story continues:

The change would give New Zealand the dubious reputation of having the most liberal stance on sex in the developed world. Most western countries set the age of consent at 16, except France where it is 15.

Have the facts gone out of fashion or something? Alright: the age of consent here stays at 16: higher than that in Mexico and Chile (12), Japan and South Korea (13); Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Iceland and Liechtenstein (all 14) and the Czech Republic, Poland and Sweden (15), among others. The age is actually 18 in France.

Okay, let's go through this again: the proposed law would not change the age of consent in New Zealand - it would provide a defence where sexual activity takes place between two people who are between 12 and 16 who are less than two years apart in age.

This would see us follow, among others, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and Malta, who make precisely the same distinction in their law (Italy makes the distinction with a lower age limit of 14, and France 15). All of those countries, by the way, have lower teen pregnancy rates than New Zealand - and the lowest in the developed world is Japan, where the age of consent is 13. The highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world - by a country mile - is that in the US, where "abstinence only" sex education is pushed by the government.

The same woeful logic and poor attention to the facts continues in the paper's lead editorial, which twice states, incorrectly, that the age of consent is being lowered.

The author (presumably SST editor Cate Brett) opens with a dubious comparison with the lowering of the drinking age to 18. Access to alcohol is, and always been, regulated by restricting access to licensed premises. Underage people who attempt to obtain alcohol from such premises are liable to prosecution. We don't prosecute underagers for merely possessing alcohol, although the law takes a dim view of adults who supply it to them, especially in an irresponsible manner. The law specifically says it is "okay" for 18 year-olds to enter licensed premises and drink there. The Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill doesn't say that about underage sex - simply that it is not sensible to treat those doing it as criminals.

Elsewhere, the editorial makes a dazzling job of arguing against itself: it says there is "there is huge confusion among teenagers over exactly what consent involves. In some, it is plain that terror can lead to a point where a child's mind 'freezes' so she cannot respond rationally in a sexually charged situation." Uh-huh - and in what way precisely does that justify making the girl criminally liable for her actions?

But wait: there's more. People having underage sex, it says, should not "be regarded as criminals". But that is presently exactly what the law says.

The editorial quotes a survey revealing that 70% of teenagers have not had sex by the age of 17 - meaning, of course, that 30% have. The Ministry of Youth Development quotes other surveys suggesting that that 10-30% of young New Zealanders have had sexual intercourse by the time they reach 15 years of age, and about half have had intercourse by the time they are 16 or 17 years old. I don't think this is desirable, but the point is, are you seriously saying they should all, tens of thousands of them, be criminalised? That's what putting something in the criminal law means for goodness sake.

It comes down, I guess, to what you believe the role of law to be. I realise there is a constituency that regards the criminal law, especially in moral issues, not as something to be actioned, but as a kind of moral beacon. Martin Elliot, the Hamilton headmaster quoted in the Star Times story as saying that Minister of Justice Phil Goff "deserves a lobotomy" and should never have been born, was on the radio this morning saying describing the amendment as "a subliminal message being sent out across the country".

I don't see it that way: call me a pedant, but I think that if you only have something in the criminal statutes if you actually believe it's desirable to prosecute that offence. That it is unwise to pass laws that you can't or won't enforce. And that you should put what you actually do want to do in your law - not leave it up to faceless and unaccountable prosecutors.

The SST's "shock" story isn't a work of investigation. It has been debated in select committee, from whence National's Tony Ryall brought it to the paper on a plate. But what arguably makes it more egregious is that it sits under a banner touting the story of "the blonde, The Player and the missing video". Apparently, a couple of female celebrities screwed one of the contestants in Sky 1's dodgy reality show The Player in view of cameras in the Player house, and a videotape exists.

Charlotte Dawson is happily denying she was involved, and breathing deep of the oxygen of publicity, as ever. It actually reads like a tawdry publicity stunt for the programme (and an effective one, given that the SST's sister paper, the Sunday News, led with it yesterday) - and apparently that makes it alright to trumpet a private porn video across the front page of a family newspaper.

For the government, it's a calamity: adding as it does, to the impression that it is set on dismantling all social standards. Goff is already saying he won't die in a ditch over it, so we'll probably wind up with the status quo: an ineffective, contradictory and counterproductive law that nobody wants to prosecute. I sometimes despair of our ability to have a rational discussion in this country.

Anyway, I was a little dazed when I picked up the SST yesterday, having stayed up late enjoying the delightful spectacle of a cricket test beamed direct from Lords. Things were looking a little dodgy until the English tail collapsed, then took a turn for the dodgy again when Stephen Fleming was dismissed early in the Black Caps' second innings, then looked up when Brendon McCullum was drafted in at first drop - hurried by some short bowling, he played boldly and with composure. He must have been gutted to miss out on his debut test ton - at Lords! - by only four runs.

There was also, of course, the FA Cup final in which Millwall got the expected towelling from Man U (is Ronaldo the club's new gay icon now that Becks has gone?) and, earlier, in front of a rowdy and somewhat intoxicated gang at Dubwise Towers, the Super 12 final, which was surely one of the most bizarre games of rugby I've ever seen, with the Crusaders coughing the ball repeatedly to be down 33-0 after 20 minutes. How on earth did it end up so close?

Some good stuff in the Guardian and the Observer at the weekend, including an interesting encounter with Michael Moore in Cannes:

It is also, with a couple of exceptions, a triumph of editing. Indeed, Moore is arguably the most ideological and emotive editor since Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet propagandist who developed a kind of didactic montage. Juxtaposing heroes and villains, he cuts between political comedy and tragic reality with intoxicating glee. There is no information that is vitally new, nor are there any images that are more shocking than those from Abu Ghraib prison, but such is the cumulative force of the film, with its kinetic humour and insistent sentiment, that it is hard to come away from it without concluding a) that George W Bush is not fit to be president of a golf club let alone the world's most powerful nation and b) the war in Iraq was woefully misconceived. In the year of an election that could well prove close, it's the kind of film that could make a historic difference.

And an amusing collection of celebrity reminiscences of dear old Glastonbury Festival. Oh, I could tell you some stories about that ...

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Without wishing to be a spoilsport ... | May 21, 2004 11:53

I confess, the spectator appeal of motorsport pretty much eludes me, so I'm not coming to the issue of Auckland's seven-year contract for V8 supercar racing as a fan. But - deja vu all over again - Mayor Banks seems to be writing verbal cheques he'll have trouble cashing.

If it were merely a matter of closing off a street or three, who'd care? But key elements of this idea simply don't make sense. The route - along Fanshawe Street, around Victoria Park and up Victoria Street to Nelson Street - will occupy several crucial stretches of road, most notably, Hobson Street, which carries traffic coming off the Southern and Northwestern motorways to the Auckland CBD; and the major route on and off the Harbour Bridge.

There will be some disruption to traffic for about 20 days around the race (and you can forget using Victoria Park) and the route will be completely closed to traffic for three days, from Friday to Sunday. Given that the bridge carries 160,000 vehicles a day, this is, clearly, something of a problem - and the city council's proposed solution has so far failed to impress Transit New Zealand.

No wonder: A letter in the morning's Herald by Neil Binnie points out that the council's helpful suggestion that the occupants of half of all those cars could transfers to buses involve some very wishful thinking: "At 50 people a bus, that amounts to 1600 bus loads. If each bus does four peak-time trips a day, we need 400 extra buses. Anyone with a spare 400 buses?"

It won't just be the Friday traffic. To turn a dollar, this thing is going to need to attract more than a hundred thousand spectators ($30 apiece for access to the area), who would normally be coming in on the very access routes that are shut off by the race. The council is suggesting … um, boats, but has not, so far as I know, let anyone in on the secret of where those who do drive might actually find a park.

Now let's look at who's on the route. Well, residents for a start: but they're the most easily ignored of the stakeholders. There's a major New Zealand Post depot which will be completely cut off by the race route. There's a huge church at the top corner of the park, overlooking the course. There's a popular New World supermarket on the other corner, whose business is largely composed of North Shore residents on their way home from the city. There's the vast Les Mills Fitness Centre.

It's probable that all of these, plus all the other Auckland councils, will be objecting at the resource consent hearings - and that mollifying them, if it proves possible, will involve financial compensation. Simply fronting up to the hearings will cost plenty of ratepayers' money. Consider all the other costs to which the council is already committing itself and it seems that John Banks' claim that (apart from the interest-free loan to the promoters) the council's total exposure will amount to $175,000 annually looks like platinum-plated bullshit.

The Herald's editorial today raises further doubts; noting that the feasibility study used by the council to tout the race's benefits was actually conducted by and for another city: Brisbane.

Banks gets space across the page to put his arguments, among which are the idea that "striking a deal with the likes of Stagecoach and Fullers" (um, what kind of deal, exactly?) will sort out the transport issue. He also compares the traffic management issue to those of Apec, which went off fine. This is just fatuous: Apec involved less crucial routes for less time, and it came off because everyone avoided the central city for three days. This thing is predicated on many thousands of people coming into the city.

Auckland thrives on events, and I certainly don't want to spoil anyone's fun, but approving of the race at this point involves a degree of trust in Auckland's civic leadership that it would be hard to warrant. As Brian Rudman pointed out recently, the council's chief executive deliberately withheld from the full council a letter from Transit New Zealand urging against the race when the vote to approve it took place. It made, as Rudman noted, "a mockery of the democratic process".

Meanwhile, Dubber has some musings on CanWest's ties to the biggest tax dodge in New Zealand history.

That story has been most keenly pursued by the NBR, which, happily, has also made my letter the letter of the week. Jolly good! I think I remember how to use a pen …

Morgan Nicol has some further comment on the telecommunications unbundling decision - or lack thereof - and on reflection he's plainly right about the Woosh objection:

My take on the Woosh objection was somewhat different to yours, far from being worried about having to share their own network, I thought it was a sign that they knew that the current system minimise real competition with their products. They've gone around the problem, so they don't now want the problem to disappear.

Or something like that.

Representatives of an ISP I've spoken with about this are delighted about the outcome, unbundling for them would have been a diaster, it costs massive amounts to get gear into the exchanges, and such, and hence they'd rather just do the wholesale deals which Telecom are currently putting together for homelines and such (even with the incredibly tight margins).

And another thing, what with the actual competition in the tolls space, have you noticed that it costs less to phone the UK than Wellington? Have you noticed that is costs less to phone a mobile in Korea than a mobile in Manukau? What the fuck is going on?

The FBI has hit US e-voting activist Bev Harris with a grand jury subpoena, in pursuit of the logs of her website, Black Box voting. The circumstances are not reassuring. Slashdot has a discussion.

The battle for hearts and minds in Iraq is not being won by the coalition, but by a hardline Shiite cleric, according to a poll being previewed by the Financial Times.

Yesterday's coalition raid on the house of Ahmed Chalabi - formerly the fine champion of democracy who fed the Americans all that false information about WMDs, but now apparently a budding insurgent - would be funny, if Iraq wasn't so unfunny. Andrew Cockburn on Salon.com has claims that Chalabi, who has extracted millions of dollars from American taxpayers, was reinventing himself as a Shiite nationalist and planning to overthrow the post-handover Iraqi government.

Still, at least Chalabi still has a friend in dear old Christopher Hitchens. See Lay Off Chalabi: Iraq could do much worse.

Finally, I'm sure Andy Kaufman would approve of the resurrection hoax currently being staged in his name by persons unknown. Kaufman joked before his death of lung cancer that, if he was in fact faking it, he'd return in 20 years time. And now he has: apparently. The Andy Kaufman Returns weblog is here, and the Snopes.com page on the whole thing is here.

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Not unbundling | May 20, 2004 11:44

It didn't take a genius to predict that Paul Swain wasn't going to impose local loop unbundling on Telecom. Even if the Telecommunications Commissioner's recommendation had been to unbundle, it might not have happened.

But the funny thing is that the commissioner, Douglas Webb, did produce a preliminary report that surveyed all the evidence and did recommend extensive local loop unbundling - giving Telecom's competitors access to its network and allowing them to install their own equipment in Telecom exchanges so they could compete on service delivery to residential customers. But then, for reasons that remain unclear, Webb changed his mind.

I'm not entirely convinced that sweeping unbundling would have been the right call anyway. Unbundling is essentially a response to monopoly incumbency, and if you're going to do it, you ideally do it at the time you deregulate your telecommunications industry, not 15 years down the line. There's a very real issue of property rights here (although probably only the Business Roundtable has publicly expressed sympathy for the rights of both Telecom and Maori foreshore claimants); and since it was floated, Telecom has been valued on the basis that it enjoys exclusive access to its own network. It would not have been trivial to wade into that. Those now building new networks - such as Woosh Wireless - also don't want to have to share them, and have strongly opposed unbundling.

What can be said is that New Zealand threw away a great opportunity when Telecom was privatised. The most damning indictment of the "light-handed" regulatory environment installed in the early 1990s can be found in OECD figures on telecommunications investment. Apart from the couple of years either side of Telecom's privatisation in 1991 (when the infrastructure was substantially upgraded: digital connections between exchanges, fibre to roadside cabinets) our national investment in telecommunications has been - pretty much any way you care to dice it - about half the OECD average.

By the mid-90s, Telecom's capital investment had fallen below the rate of depreciation. Meanwhile it positively hurled money at investors in the form of dividends, and exercised a brutal and obstructive attitude towards the competition. It had no reason to do anything else. It was the regulatory environment - the one Maurice Williamson used to tout as an example to the world - that failed.

It hasn't all been bad. Telecom responded better than many telcos to the network pressure that resulted from the rush to dial-up Internet from 1996, developing an IP backbone that handled the load pretty well. And it has done a reasonably good job of rolling out DSL capacity - just not of selling it. It's the fizz of real competition that's missing. And that's where the solution proposed by Webb falls badly short.

Telecom's competitors will be able to sell DSL service to us over Telecom's network, but the designated service - 256Kbit/s downstream and 128Kbit/s back up - can barely even be called broadband, but because it's where the commissioner has placed his flag, that's where the market will stay. We'll see a greater uptake of DSL, which is good - and a painfully limited choice of service, which is bad.

Yes, full unbundling might have fixed it, but another factor has been influential in economies, such as South Korea, where unbundling has been a raging success: public investment. The grim fact is that ever since TelstraClear got jerked back on the leash by its investors, no one has really looked like building a major network: yes, there's some action on the wireless front, but wireless simply isn't a total solution. For the future, it has to be fibre. The government has a chance to get the ball rolling by investing in the "advanced network" being proposed by MORST and others, and I think it should do so. In the meantime, the level of service designated by the commissioner should be revisited before we become an international joke.

The new Molesworth & Featherston extends some sympathy to the government over the "gone by lunchtime" debacle - and I'd have to agree to the extent that I think everyone comes out of it rather poorly.

The government, clearly, for the breach of faith in airing an MFAT official's notes from the meeting between Don Brash, Lockwood Smith and the six US congressmen, thereby compromising the role such officials play in future. Brash and Smith for their unfortunate and rather surprising failure to remember what was said about the highly important issue of the nuclear ships ban - important enough, it should be noted, to warrant National's specially-commissioned internal review of its policy stance (extra demerit points to Brash for urging the government to release the MFAT official's notes and complaining when it did so). And the New Zealand Herald, for following a stern editorial on the topic with a pompous and self-serving one that wriggled all around the fact that, as a story in the news section of the same edition of the Weekend Herald said, a published excerpt seemed to confirm the government's claims ("Dr Brash made the throwaway comment, 'If the National Party was in government today, we would get rid of the nuclear propulsion section today - by lunchtime even'.") - the day after the paper ran a report headed US senator shoots down PM's claim.

The Herald editorial made much of the official's description of Brash's statement as a "throwaway comment", and airily declared that the congressmen "did not take it as any sort of assurance". Which, really, isn't quite what Herald was saying the day before ...

Lots of Public Address readers appear to have visited greylynnweather.net in the past week or so. Ben Gracewood has also pointed out an online weather station for Auckland easties too. Steven Fox has run the site from St Heliers since 2001.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how long the White House and the Pentagon can maintain the fiction that blame for the Iraqi prison abuse scandal falls solely on a handful of rogue soldiers. ABC has joined a procession of damaging investigations with an interview with a former military intelligence analyst who says the sexual humiliation of prisoners began as a technique ordered by the interrogators from military intelligence - and bluntly alleges a cover-up. If anything, this is going to get worse as court-martial hearings unfold and defence counsel for the soldiers start hauling in commanding officers - ABC has already run an interview with one of the accused soldiers, who says he was acting on the direct instructions of military intelligence officers.

Older stories - such as the US Army's imprisonment and abuse of Iraqis working for Reuters and NBC - are re-emerging in a new light. And the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, has given an interview to the Boston Globe about his star reporter, Seymour Hersh. And one-time Bush cheerleader Christopher Hitchens responds to Hersh's story with a column that doesn't make much sense.

And, in the interests of concluding on a brighter note: the cricket's on from tonight! Given the lack of build-up and the absence for now of Shane Bond, my hopes for the Black Caps' first test against England are modest. But I think they'll gain momentum and, hopefully, have an historic tour.

PS: Depending on your ISP (particularly if you're not in New Zealand) you may have found your attempt to use the feedback form on Public Address has bounced back to you with a note saying that the site has been blacklisted. The new US-based outgoing SMTP server that the mail bounces off has inherited a blacklisting on the Spamhaus blacklist. It's incorrect, and the CactusLads are presently trying to get the listing deleted. It will be interesting to see how long it takes.

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Regrettably, spoiled for choice | May 18, 2004 11:11

So what's the lead in Iraq today? Head of Governing Council assassinated? One not-very-mass WMD turns up? Pentagon denial of New Yorker claim that accountability for prison abuse goes all the way up followed by another investigation that says the same thing? News junkies are, perhaps regrettably, spoiled for choice.

Seymour Hersh's The Gray Area continues his remarkable contribution to reporting on the Iraq war and its trappings. It opens thus:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

The Pentagon swiftly denounced Hersh's detailed and apparently well-sourced story as "journalistic malpractice" - only to see a separate investigation, by Newsweek, come up with virtually identical conclusions (backed up, according to Newsweek, with copies of memos and reports). In the case of the more delicately-couched Newsweek story in particular, I suspect some conservatives will be quietly muttering "so what?". The belief behind the interrogation policy isn't exactly a new one: that September 11 and the future threat of terrorism changed everything: even the Geneva Conventions.

Small point of interest: the print version of the Herald carries the Newsweek report today - or, rather most of it. The Herald's version of the story concludes thus:

As his other reasons for war have fallen away, President Bush has justified his ouster of Saddam Hussein by saying he's a "torturer and murderer." Now the American forces arrayed against the terrorists are being tarred with the same epithet.

But, make of it what you will, there are actually two further sentences at the end of the Newsweek original, removed, no doubt, by the agents of appeasement at the Herald:

That's unfair: what Saddam did at Abu Ghraib during his regime was more horrible, and on a much vaster scale, than anything seen in those images on Capitol Hill. But if America is going to live up to its promise to bring justice and democracy to Iraq, it needs to get to the bottom of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Riverbend has thoughts on the beheading and news of more refugees drifting into Baghdad, from the south this time. And Raed turns out to have another blog, this one shared with an Irani called Niki,

Meanwhile, Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 gets a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Time takes a look at the film, which as ever, seems in places to run off with the facts (his Saudi conspiracy is tenuous) but which will likely deliver some provocative snippets of video to TV news this week.

Oliver Driver would seem to be a good touch for a drink at the moment, what with an acting role in Serial Killers, a creative director gig on Havoc: Quality Time and, now, the presenter's spot on Front Seat. I like the fact that his edges are rather more frayed than is customary for a TVNZ presenter. I hope he's allowed to have a raging argument with someone at some point. That might be quite entertaining.

With various chancers (Titewhai Harawira and Donna Hall) already declaring themselves candidates in this or that electorate for the new Maori party (likely to be named, with admirable simplicity, The Maori Party) its leaders had to (a) confirm their own roles, and (b) impose some process. They did just that, with Professor Whatarangi Winiata and Dr Pita Sharples named yesterday as president and co-leader respectively, but, interestingly, it was Tariana Turia who laid down the law on Morning Report yesterday: candidates, she said, would be chosen through a transparent process laid down in the party's constitution. She sounded quite impressive.

Reining in freelancers and showponies is going to be quite important to the party's prospects, I suspect. The problem with Tame Iti's performance with the hikoi at Parliament wasn't really the fact of him evacuating his nostril - a good enough piece of theatre - but that he had promised the hikoi organisers he would stand back in the crowd and do nothing of the kind, but then went ahead and did it anyway. A political party that ran like that would soon be creamed. Prediction: if Annette Sykes takes a prominent role in the party, Turia will be bailed up in Parliament over Sykes' old, but still notorious, warning to foreign investors that "they will have their forests burned down and hydro dams destroyed."

Peter Griffin unravels the spin on an OECD report that Telecom is claiming shows we're really getting a great deal on broadband in New Zealand. First flaw in the OECD study: it only counts services offered by monopoly incumbent telcos - clearly, rather narrowing the field. Further, it pretty much ignores the radically different standards of service enjoyed by customers in markets where the monthly fee charged for a DSL connection is slightly higher: "Most of the other countries benchmarked have much higher data caps or operate flat-rate unmetered services that are much faster than Telecom's."

As it happens, our house dropped down to Telecom's $70 flat-rate 256k (128k upstream) service last week, from the financially ruinous full-speed JetStream account. The 256k service is fine (mostly) for ordinary web browsing, and we've certainly been enjoying not having to count megabytes as 20 cents apiece - but when the child on the other computer starts downloading a 200MB game demo it all turns to sludge. I can't help but resent the lurch backwards: even 500k would be alright, but no such JetStream account exists. Unfortunately, unless the government pulls a surprise and demands a sterner unbundling solution this week, 256/128 is the service designated by the Telecommunications Commissioner, and therefore the one around which the market will cluster.

Chris Thompson directed my attention to this fascinating story about a failed economist who stumbled onto an intriguing idea: that "platinum pieces" - the currency in the virtual world of Everquest - had, through being traded in online auctions, attained a real-world value:

When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game — the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.

Several people have asked me what I thought about David Cohen's rather unusual column about me in the National Business Review last week. One NBR staffer advanced the theory that Cohen has a "crush" on me. Who knows? I have sent the NBR a polite note listing some of the sillier errors of fact in the column, and I trust they'll publish it. Apart from that, I really don't want to get into some public feud.

But a couple of things in the column are worth commenting on, although I won't attempt to match its frenzied tone. One concerns an error on my part: I said recently that David Young of the Business Roundtable had lunch with Tim Barnett (not a "top secret" lunch, just a lunch for goodness sake) and Lindsay Perigo to discuss the Civil Union Bill. Obviously I misunderstood Barnett, because David Young is still, of course in Denmark, as he promptly reminded me ("I'm by no means embarrassed by the suggestion that I would lunch with Tim - we have met to discuss the CUB before - but, in the interests of accuracy, I thought I'd point out that I'm out of the country"), but I forgot to make the correction the following day. Consider it made.

The other issue is something people have occasionally asked about in the past: why don't we have Comments columns on Public Address? It's not because, as Cohen trills, "your opinion is all readers need". We could have had a comments forum attached to each blog - the part of SuperModel on which Public Address runs was originally created for a discussion board - but I've been there before. I'm a web publisher, and responsible to some degree for what appears on the site, whether I wrote it or not. Running a comments board properly would mean constantly keeping an eye on it for offensive or defamatory content, and none of us have the time to do that. Neither did the Herald, which shut down its discussion groups in the late 90s when it was unable to stay on top of offensive postings and was facing threats of legal action.

I'm a huge fan of the forums at Slashdot, but without that site's registration and user-moderation system, comments columns frequently fill up with me-too dittoposts, or sniping matches that generate more heat than light. So we all regularly quote reader feedback in a conventional editorial manner - and sometimes offer readers guest posts of their own (there are a couple of those coming, when I get the time to format and post them) - and it seems to work quite well.

Righto: work to do. I didn't post yesterday because my morning began with a chat to Deborah Telford's communications students at AUT, which was quite fun (I immediately spent my book vouchers on Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and the Michael King collection Tread Softly For You Tread on My Life).

Tomorrow evening, if you fancy a laugh - or at least a giggle - feel free to come along to the The Inaugural Flying Nun Pub Quiz at the Kings Arms Tavern in Auckland from 8pm onwards. Oliver Driver - yes, him again - is the MC, Hat Meier is the quizmaster, and I am captain of The Oddities (fellow team members Grant Fell and Alan Holt), who will duel with The Sally Army (Lesley Paris, Chris Knox and Russell Baillie). If you can't make it, National Radio is recording the thing and putting it to air at 1pm on Saturday.

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