Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Twinked in | Jun 25, 2004 11:40

The speeches on the first reading of the Civil Union Bill were as interesting as they always are on a conscience vote. Our elected members are obliged at these times to depart from the script and speak their minds.

The bill passed by 16 votes which may or may not be there at the business end of the legislative process. Listening to the speeches, I actually found myself more sympathetic with the hysterically homophobic Bill Gudgeon ("this bill is an abomination to mankind!") and the quaint and unreconstructed Dail Jones (who declared that "as an old-fashioned chap", gay for him meant happy), and even Peter Dunne, who said that he and some other United Future MPs would vote in support of the omnibus bill but not for civil unions, than I was with the opposing speakers who sought to play semantics.

At least the former sounded like they believed what they said. On the other hand, Stephen Franks' speech was obtuse and disappointing - not much more than legal grandstanding in the end. I think Franks is an asset to the Parliament - as he said himself, somebody has to actually read the bills. But his only real points were (a) that marriage itself has been able to manifest as a civil ceremony for decades, and that (b) the Civil Union bill was "just the Marriage Act with the word 'marriage' twinked out".

Well, duh. How else would you - accepting that a significant sector of society believes marriage is and can only be between a man and a woman - go about creating a broadly equal alternative than by drawing on the institutional knowledge about how such laws ought to look?

Franks held out the promise that he and his Act colleagues might vote for the final reading of the bill if profound - but curiously unspecified - changes were wrought on it at select committee stage. The implication was that Franks himself might support gay marriage, but he unfortunately seemed to run out of time to confirm for the House either way. If you're going to take a stand, it helps to actually say what stand you're taking, doesn't it?

National MP Judith Collins' speech was probably the worst in this regard: she opposed the CUB because it was marriage by stealth, implied that it ought to be gay marriage or nothing, and then twice informed the House that she had no view for or against gay marriage itself.

The speakers in support made more lyrical, but effectively simpler, cases. I thought the most confident and relaxed of them was NZ First's Brian Donnelly ("You don't make your own candle glow brighter by blowing out someone else's"). Moana Mackey quoted from Public Address and paraphrased me, which was fine - happy to help.

If some of the other backers sounded a bit tense, that was understandable. Over the past week, many MPs have received hundreds of anti-CUB emails, some of them (particularly those to the gay MPs) vicious and abusive.

In such circumstances it would have been spectacularly easy for National's leader, Don Brash, to have played politics, but he voted with his conscience. The same certainly cannot be said for some of his caucus.

Anyway, the fundamentalist churches behind the anti-CUB campaign have certainly demonstrated their ability to mobilise. It's just a shame that the love of God appears to have gone missing for them. The select committee stage will be interesting, especially as regards the omnibus bill, which is as complex as the CUB is simple. I haven't read it in full, and it may well be that elements of it will be found to need changing. I just hope that what transpires is human and sensible.

Meanwhile in Auckland, Mayor John Banks is back to claiming credit for things he didn't do - in the case, State Highway 20, the extension to the southwestern motorway via Mt Roskill. This road hardly bears comparison with Banks' pet Eastern Corridor project. Its route has been earmarked for 30 years, it displaces only 80 dwellings, it is (with some exceptions) support by locals, it offers substantial benefits to Auckland City ratepayers (it will vastly speed up many journeys to Auckland Airport) and it will cost a fraction of the grandiose Eastern Corridor proposal. Most significantly, it is actually clear how it will be paid for and by whom. This cannot at all be said for the Eastern Corridor.

It's debatable whether Christine Fletcher is being fair in accusing Banks of having "stalled" the State Highway 20, but it's simply not Banks' gig. Like the work on Auckland's inner-city motorway junctions, it has been planned and delivered by Transit New Zealand with funding announced by central government two years ago.

There was more bad news for Banks this week with the TNS Global poll which found that two out of three Aucklanders want upgraded rail services ahead of an Eastern motorway between Panmure and the central city. Support for the motorway fell to 14 per cent when supporters were asked whether they would change their minds if the environment was shown to be adversely affected by the construction of a road. Brian Rudman wondered whether the result would "bring local body politicians to their senses". This assumes, of course, that they currently have any.

I know too many people who work in the music industry to believe, as some do, that it is home to unfettered evil - it's not unreasonable in principle to defend your copyrights - but EMI's latest stunt is simply despicable. The latest Beastie Boys CD secretly installs an application when it is inserted in either a PC or a Mac. The secret driver prevents any tracks from being copied to the hard drive. EMI is effectively installing a virus. If EMI really wants legislators to go ahead and forcibly remove its copyrights, it's going precisely the right way about it. Don't you dare, ever install anything on my computer without telling me, okay? Bastards.

And, to conclude, the best of wishes to Hugh Sundae, who hosted his last 95bFM Breakfast show this morning. I like Hugh a lot - as one of the listeners who called in this morning said, "thanks for always being good-humoured and personable". I'm sure he'll go on to greater things - indeed, it seems that you can expect to see him on the television sooner rather than later. Best wishes also to his replacement, Camilla Martin, who will be breaking new ground in a number of ways. And I'm really looking forward to the party tonight …

PS: I've interviewed David Slack for Mediawatch this Sunday. Not my idea as it happens - I'd never have dared suggest it - but it's nice to get to talk about weblogs, the media and applied writing.

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Whatever happens tomorrow | Jun 23, 2004 11:33

Whatever happens tomorrow, history will not fondly regard the Labour MPs who vote against the Civil Union Bill. If it passes its first reading and eventually becomes law, they will be seen as having stood against an act of social justice whose apparently dire implications - shades of homosexual law reform - will be quickly eroded by reality.

If the bill fails at its first step - and it now looks a much tighter thing than had been supposed - a number of them will be seen as people who welshed not only on a policy pledge carried by their party into the last election, but informal undertakings to the bill's backers to at least let it proceed to select committee and be democratically debated.

So what has changed for those who might flip? Not society. The difference is that the debate has been entered by richly-funded religious multinationals who have, literally, put the fear of God in some waverers.

The New Zealand Herald, as it was eventually always likely to, came out in favour of the Civil Union Bill and its accompanying omnibus bill in an editorial today. The paper has dutifully operated a tit-for-tat policy on opinion pieces on the issue, but for all that it has not been equal. Generally, the agenda has been set by an opposing opinion, which is subsequently rebutted.

And some of those opposing opinions have been unusual. On Monday, the Herald ran Homosexual unions not morally equal, a comment by Samuel Gregg, who was described as "director of research at the Acton Institute, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States." Which he is: but it might have been helpful to, at the least, use the full title of his organisation: The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty.

You wouldn't know from Gregg's text that Acton is a conservative Christian pressure group: part of the tactic here is to play down such an angle in favour of apparently logical, secular arguments. Some of these arguments (notably that that gay civil unions would somehow diminish other "non-procreative relationships … such as an unmarried son caring for his invalid father") are far-fetched in the extreme, and were effectively addressed in response by lawyer and former Fulbright scholar David Friar, but that's not the point.

The point is, why was Gregg there in the first place? Why have we allowed our debate to be colonised by a foreign religious organisation whose values have little to do with us as a society? Do we ask the imams of the Middle East for advice on how we treat women? After all, we manage to get through our own discussions on environmental law without inviting Acton to advise us (the institute has long campaigned against environmental regulations and is a special friend to its corporate donor, the oil company Exxon Mobil). Actually, like our own Maxim Institute, Acton derives most of its funding not from corporations, but from less transparent private interests. (Craig Young noted recently that Maxim's sugar-daddy, the Derek Corporation, doesn't always apply the standard of ethics its pressure group preaches.)

It is true that both sides of this debate have tried to argue at times from each other's turf. Thus, the civil union lobby has cited a number of essentially conservative arguments - not least that the two bills will prevent millions of dollars worth of double-dipping on benefits by same-sex couples - and Maxim has frequently euphemised its God into "the absolute" to avoid frightening the horses.

They're a little less guarded on friendly turf. Maxim's Amanda McGrail engineered a divorce between marriage and love in her comments to the church-based meeting we documented here recently ("marriage itself is not a human right. It's an institution and it's not about whether you love somebody or not ...") and Maxim's director, Bruce Logan, was not holding back at all in his recent speech to the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards: human rights should not guide the law and they ought not pertain to groups. We should never have dispensed with our old, rather cruel divorce laws. Our legal bedrock was handed down to us by God (this belief, it should be noted, has historically been deployed in support of slavery, the treatment of women as property and a few other things we now regard as a breach of human rights). And "the legal privileges of marriage are not awarded because the partners are in love, or even committed to each other, but because their relationship is of public consequence."

The problem here is that it simply isn't what the vast majority of people believe about their own lives. Why do people get married? Because, New Zealanders will tell you, they love each other. What is the overwhelming precondition for marriage? Love, they will tell you. If we are, as Maxim commands, to engineer a divorce between love and marriage, then what's to stand in the way of arranged marriages? If marriage's status as a source of social stability is to trump all other considerations, would it not be appropriate for families to prevent their offspring from entering socially unsuitable unions, however much they think they love each other?

But that is not the way we act, and civil unions are not marriage. There are 300,000 people in New Zealand living in de facto relationships, our household among them. Although our status is a personal, rather than political matter, I can't help but feel that it has become politicised by the moral conservative lobby. And I could do without Judith Collins MP informing me that I am less "committed" to my home and family than she is (if she genuinely had the courage of her convictions, she would be railing against one or two of her fellow MPs, and leaving my house alone). Perhaps, one day, we'll go and get ourselves a civil union on principle.

You have to feel a little bit sorry for the MPs who have come into possession of the affadavit sworn by Yvonne Dossetter, the former partner of Ross Meurant. The original document was given to TVNZ by Dossetter in the course of its investigation into Winston Peters' conduct during the scampi business, and part of it has been seen to have at least some substance: Ross Meurant, accused of working for both Peters and Suminovich Fisheries, resigned to escape a conflict of interest, and save his boss the embarrassment of an inquiry. But we now know what TVNZ did: that Dossetter had also alleged that Meurant had received "substantial payments" from Suminovich for delivery to Peters.

A more serious allegation against a sitting MP could hardly be imagined - and , having been unable to verify it, TVNZ did not bring it to air. The MPs on the select committee who received the affadavit - the Greens' Ian Ewan-Street was handed it anonymously and passed it on to National's David Carter - probably did not have the same latitude. Carter passed it on to the Speaker, who batted it back requesting specific grounds for an inquiry. So Carter - who looked highly uncomfortable on TV last night - must either let the matter drop or make an allegation that Peters will regard as no less than a declaration of war. Labour will happily sit on the sidelines for this one, feeling that it will only bring New Zealand First closer as a potential coalition partner next year. Perhaps Ralston was right when he told me the scampi story was "a slow burner".

Meanwhile Slate's Jack Shafer gets stuck into Michael Moore - not for his film Fahrenheit 911, which appears to have been well enough fact-checked for a work of opinion - but for Moore's off-the-ball actions. Specifically, hurling around libel threats which he would not wish on himself. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie; less impressed, as ever, by Moore's personal demeanour. He's not the only one of course: Ray Bradbury needs to get over himself and Christopher Hitchens is in full-bluster mode about it all. Anyway, the film's already on the P2P networks if you can't wait.

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Clive TV | Jun 21, 2004 10:58

So the wicked Eden Park crowd should be prevented from seeing replays of foul play, according to England's coach Clive Woodward, lest they intimidate weak-willed referees. He appears to have forgotten what turning up to a big game is all about.

Eden Park's crowd does not, it should be noted, have a reputation as a mean one: quite the reverse, actually. But when the ground is full - for a big test match, or for last year's Super 12 final - it can get pretty noisy. That's our job. I was certainly on my feet politely requesting a dismissal when, 10 minutes into Saturday's night's return test match, English lock Simon Shaw dropped his knee into the back of his All Black counterpart Keith Robinson, and was shown the red card for his trouble.

As every man and his dog has noted, Shaw's effort was hardly the most violent of test rugby incidents, but his intent was malign and cowardly and he was unfortunate enough to get caught. Given that Shaw was also responsible for a nasty (and unpunished) king-hit on All Black hooker Keven Mealamu in last week's test at Carisbrook, he got what he deserved.

It was hard to avoid the feeling that even if Shaw's indiscretion had been missed, he or a team-mate would eventually have been banished for some act of petty thuggery off the ball. As it transpired, his locking partner Danny Grewcock was lucky to remain after stamping on the head of Daniel Carter (the judiciary has banned him for six weeks after the event), and, under other circumstances, the taking-out of Justin Marshall right on the English try-line would have occasioned a yellow card.

There have been other cheap shots in the recent history of the two teams - Martin Johnson's cynical blindsiding of Justin Marshall, which left the All Black halfback dazed and deaf in one ear for the remainder of a match; Lawrence Dallaglio's despicable knee to the head of Jonah Lomu after the big fella had scored a try - but this time it actually appeared to be a tactic: one for which the coach has to take responsibility.

But if England's coach didn't get it, the England fans sitting behind us at the game certainly did. "Just leave it out," sighed one as another England player took a swipe at a subsequent scrum.

The worst thing about the sending-off was that it gave England's cheerleaders an out: perhaps it might all have been different if England had kept 15 players on the field. No, it wouldn't. England lost two tests at an aggregate of 72-15, and conceded eight tries without scoring one. They are the World Cup champions; they are not, as the coach would have it, "still the better side."

Woodward got a right old rogering in a Herald editorial this morning, and the paper's sports correspondents were no more sympathetic. It was left to dear old Stephen Jones in the Star Times to declare that "we still know nothing for certain" as to the relative merits of the two sides. Er, really? Paul Ackford took a more sensible view in the Daily Telegraph, and the fans argued the toss on Planet Rugby. Yamis at Blogging It Real was pungent as usual.

Still, it was a great night out at the park, even if Joe Rokococo did work all his lightning magic on the other side of the pitch from where we were sat. Before the game, the Canton Café was as brilliant and bustling as I'd hoped, and the bill, when it came, was almost an embarrassment: more than 13 of us could eat for $119. Even after we chucked in a 20% tip it was crazily inexpensive.

Afterwards, we decamped to the London Bar, just ahead of several coachloads of happy fans, for a debrief and some beer. From there, my friends Phil and Renee and I strolled up to the Verona café, which was, after more than a decade as a K Road institution, having a party to mark a change of ownership. We were keen to pay our respects to the place and to Janet and Hilary, but were denied entry on account of not being in fancy dress. That was okay by me - I didn't want to be the only one not wearing a tutu. And anyway, fancy dress makes me uncomfortable.

So we popped around the corner and into Seventy Six, which proved quite agreeable. After about half an hour, the DJ suddenly turned the music down and a big, bald bloke and a woman stood up in front of the booth. "Jodie and I would like to announce," he said. "That after seven years together, we're taking the next step. We're getting married."

They embraced. Had we accidentally stumbled into a private engagement party? If so, we didn't appear to be the only ones. Did it matter? No. Deep into an Auckland night, we applauded madly.

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The northeast gales | Jun 18, 2004 12:08

November has come to visit in June. Stroppy northeast winds are buffeting Auckland, casting sprays of drizzle before them. The temperature in Grey Lynn is a balmy 16 degrees. But it's alright. It'll lift before tomorrow's test match.

This is the point where right-thinking ratepayers feel good about the money that has made Eden Park drain these days like a shingle bank. If there's any place we don't want to play a return match against England, it's in a bog.

The various juddering collisions of last Saturday have left the All Blacks minus Doug Howlett and, probably, a concussed Richie McCaw. Still, at least we have two class openside flankers where England has none, and that might be the difference. The youthful Nick Evans at fullback for his first shot in a run-on All Black side can expect to be catching quite a few high balls, one would think.

I'll be there with a dozen-odd comrades from the XRSRU mailing list. It's our annual get-together, and we'll be the party scoffing it up at the Canton Café beforehand. I'm pretty sure the All Blacks will win again - if the weather holds.

Judith Collins MP has sent me a lovely email with respect to yesterday's civil unions post headed 'Your rantings'. It says: "Thanks for the free publicity. I just love the way the diversity friendly people like yourself are so opposed to any view contrary to your own. Keep it up."

I'm opposed to views contrary to my own? Guess so - although I did run several hundred words of same yesterday, so it's hardly uninformed opposition. I actually owe Ms Collins an apology, however: she was correct to say that the omnibus bill is a conscience vote. It was altered from a party vote on Tuesday night by the Labour caucus, and reported yesterday morning, but I missed it. Ooh, it's always when you're a bit cheeky, isn't it? (While we're at it, I mixed up the two current affairs items I praised this week: it was Sunday which produced the Porirua Hospital story - months of work apparently - and 60 Minutes which did the Cambridge High story.)

As for the rest, I haven't changed my view that Collins' arguments against the civil unions legislation were faulty, misleading and somewhat cynical.

There are doubtless various conspiracy theories about the change of status for the omnibus bill, but I'm happy enough to see it. The civil unions issue gains nothing from inter-party scrapping. It's just a matter of people standing up and saying what kind of country they think this is.

There are few doubts on that score amongst Public Address readers, it would seem. The Rev Margaret Mayman sent me a statement from the first meeting of Christians for Civil Unions, in which she said "A small section of New Zealand Christians has been very vocal in its opposition to civil unions, but tonight it is clear that there is also a lot of considered Christian support." She noted one of the key problems that the Civil Union Bill will resolve.

That same-sex couples do not have the same next of kin status as married couples. Currently they can not make decisionson behalf of one another when one partner is incapacitated due to illness or dies.

Another speaker supported the Bill because for two reasons: the separation between church and state; and the right of all people to decide their own stance on moral issues based on their conscience. The Bill removes the obvious discrimination in favour of married couples, while protecting the rights of religious groups to maintain their tradition's view on marriage.

Petra emailed to say:

I can only scoff at those who refer to the "sanctity of marriage", claiming the Bible as an authority on matters of marriage. Online, I have argued with many people who say that any legislative change with regard to gay marriage or de facto marriage is a Bad Thing(tm), and is not what marriage is all about - ie: that marriage, according to God, is one man/one woman and should not be messed with.

These people seem to think that marriage has not evolved since the early days of the old testament! Never mind that women and children are now protected, and no longer merely chattels to do with what one wishes. Divorce is a popular option for those who find themselves in unhappy marriages. Are divorcees debasing the sanctity of marriage? Probably more so than civil unions or gay marriages, yet you don't hear much about that, do you? I wonder how many of those who contest civil unions or gay marriages, under the pretext of destroying the sanctity of marriage, are divorced?

Kathleen Cain had a similar view:

More damage is done to the institution of marriage by some selfish or unfaithful or greedy heterosexual husbands and wives than could ever be inflicted by the gay couples who seek to declare their love and commitment to each other in a formal way. Call it 'civil union', 'marriage', or what you will.
I find it heartening that couples of any sexual orientation want to embark on a journey that requires love, loyalty, generosity, sacrifice, integrity. Far from threatening the institution this can only reinforce and enhance it.

Matthew Cavanagh commented on my note that I was less bothered than some people at the fact that civil unions aren't marriage, which perhaps is owned by the institutions that have nurtured it:

I couldn't help but wonder if that is exactly the position from which the government is approaching for this legislation. One description of the current philosophy of the Labour government is that they see the role of their government as providing the formal institutions through which they hope to encourage positive social and economic trends such as the 'knowledge economy'.

The Civil Union Bill seems to reflect this philosophy. My understanding of the bill is that it creates a legal relationship very similar to marriage. In doing so I think the government is promoting equality in two ways. Homosexual couples having their legal rights promoted through civil union is one, the other being that group rights for religious organisations are also being promoted. That is to say that religious groups are entitled to their own conception and application of marriage. This protection of cultural or group rights is entirely consistent with, for instance, the rights we accord Jehovah's Witness's to reject blood transfusions. I have a big thumbs-up for the government's approach to this issue.

Such equable notions were absent, naturally, from yesterday's Maxim opinion piece (yes, another one) in the Herald from the institute's Amanda McGrail. Her examples of tolerance were illuminating: "We display true tolerance every time we restrain ourselves from denting an idiot's car, or from giving some smart-mouthed teenager a piece of our mind." Some of us, Amanda, find tolerance through regarding other people as human beings, and not cardboard stereotypes. Still, humanity isn't Maxim's strong suit at the best of times …

Staying with the Herald, the paper quoted a letter from Sunday Star Times editor Cate Brett to Sandra Simpson in response to Sandra's complaint about the acres of full-frontal nudity on page three of Sunday's paper. It was lifted without credit from Hard News, but I don't really mind that. But Sandra's head is fairly spinning:

Boy, what I did start?

The only place I sent the copy of Cate Brett's apology to me re the Sunday Star Times' naked haka picture was Hard News ... This morning, a version appears in the NZ Herald as part of the story under the heading "TV draws a line on nudity as Sunday paper receives complaints".

I say a version because it describes me as a "subscriber" (I'm not) and said that I rang to cancel my subscription (I didn't) and that I was told there had been a spate of complaints (impossible, see above).

I did e-mail the SST and was pleased not only with the thoughtful response from editor Cate Brett but the time taken over it ... and I will continue to buy the paper most weeks.

The lazy journalism of the Herald writers (grabbing something off a website and disguising it as their own news gathering) is unfortunately becoming all too prevalent. I should know, I work in journalism.

When I discovered the cock-up, I e-mailed the Herald and received a nice reply quite quickly to the effect that they will correct the errors in tomorrow's edition - mind you, no admission was made of using your weblog as a source, it was down to journalists in different parts of the country not communicating clearly, or something.

In the meantime, though, the story has been filed, with the incorrect information concerning me, on NZPA! Oh dear, I hope this isn't my 15 minutes of fame ...

Indeed: one would hope for something a little more salubrious than willy-waving in the Sunday papers. But is this what we in the profession refer to as "making stuff up"? The Herald's delicately amended story is here.

Crikey! Channel 4 on the telly and the odd game of cricket: Kabul is no longer the worst place in the world.

The Washington Post has a solid story on the September 11 Commission's finding of "no credible evidence" of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. The Centre for American Progress traces the whole sorry story in Anatomy of a Myth.

And finally, I should note that this post is the first via my new Ihug Connect service, which uses the Wired Country network based in the Sky Tower. Several other ISPs are retailing the same service, although I think only Ihug has the swish next-generation phone service. First impressions: 2Mbit/s, flat-rate (although they'll crank you down to dial-up speed after, um, 20GB for the month), low latency … it rocks.

PS: I've interviewed Bill Ralston for Mediawatch on Sunday morning on occasion of his first year as news and current affairs chief at TVNZ. Worth a listen, I think.

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Not a freakin' clue | Jun 17, 2004 10:53

Could National's families spokesman Judith Collins please refrain from going to the media until she has a freakin' clue what she's on about? She was on Morning Report today declaring that the Civil Union Bill "takes away the choice" of couples as to whether they want to get married or not. It does not.

I can only assume that Collins was confused and was in fact referring to the accompanying Legal Recognition of Relationships (Omnibus) Bill, which aims to remove "unjustifiable" discrimination on relationship status from various statutes, in line with the Human Rights Act. It's not the same as the Civil Union Bill - for a start, it's a whipped party vote and not (as Collins seems to think) a conscience vote.

A brief outline of the kind of things it will change (such as the Cremation Regulations 1973, which doesn't include a non-married life partner in its definition of "family members" who can request a cremation for the deceased) and the things it won't change is available here.

But even that doesn't seem to tally with Collins' curious sounding-off. If anything, she was thinking of the 1999 Property Relationships Act, which governs the division of assets when married or de facto couples (including gay couples, to the consternation of some of those affected) break up. In general, the act seems to be working, and providing a fairer deal for those (usually women) who fared badly in separations. But it does sometimes, as was widely anticipated at the time, "marry" people who didn't necessarily want to be.

Denis Welch recently had a good story in The Listener about it (offline-only, unfortunately) and I certainly have some sympathy for the idea of an amendment like that proposed by Stephen Franks that didn't require a full property split where it could be shown that neither partner had made any sacrifice, suffered any detriment or otherwise changed their position in the course of the relationship. It's all very well to say that people can always formally opt out, but that's not the way people actually behave. On the other hand, as Vivienne Crawshaw pointed out in a disturbing Herald opinion piece, in an abusive relationship, even opting out can be forced to the disadvantage of one party. Yet it's undeniable that under the 1999 Act, the vulnerable are better protected than they were before.

But this is a different issue and Collins was either woefully out of touch or simply engaging in cynical politicking. I respect Don Brash for (it seems) taking a morally and politically consistent stand in supporting civil unions. It would be nice if a few more of his caucus stood up and did the same. Who knows, perhaps the closeted MPs on his side of the House - and no, I'm not about to out them - might one day find themselves able to emerge?

Then again, my profession hasn't exactly been flushed with courage on this one. I had a search done on newspaper editorials on the Civil Union Bill and there ain't many of 'em.

It appears that The Press is the only metropolitan paper to go there, in an editorial that said, in part: "For the bill to prevail, one key argument which must be refuted is that the bill threatens the institution of marriage. It does not. Not altered by one iota by the bills is the situation of those who tie the knot because they value the special social or religious significance of the marital commitment … the debate over civil unions should not, as Dunne would argue, focus on a threat to the institution of marriage. Rather, the core of the issue is discrimination."

Out in the regions, the Nelson Mail said "this is a bill appropriate to the times, recognising the reality of relationships instead of attempting to deny their existence," but a rather sour effort in the Waikato Times said "there are plenty of ways to enshrine anti-discrimination laws, without going as far as creating a second class of marriage."

Timaru Herald: noted the "inevitability" of the two pieces of legislation, and said that the tradition of marriage "does and will for some time carry the edge in the commitment stakes. No matter how sincere civil union couples are, they will not be seen in the same light as a married couple … stop denouncing civil unions, and start promoting the value of marriage."

The Daily News of Taranaki was positively paranoid in its editorial, declaring that "a commitment has been made by Labour to try to advance the gay (including lesbian) cause another step, and the sector's lobbyists are certainly not going to go away … if that were the limit of its influence, the broader society - which scarcely raises an eyebrow at cohabiting gays these days and is generally more benign to them than they are in return - might offer no resistance to the intended legislative change."

But that, it says, "will not be the end of the matter, only a new beginning. The next step in an ongoing campaign of de-stigmatisation will be 'equal marriage', along with the rights of adoption and artificial conception … Marriage and child-rearing deserve the special status worthy of a bedrock institution that offers the best hope for all - not just a fringe few - involved."

The New Zealand Herald will, I expect, opine next week when the bills get a reading, but did advance a perspective in an editorial defending its Bishop Vercoe story and the "a world without gays" headline that accompanied it:

The community has come to a more open view of homosexuality not by the efforts of a censorious conspiracy but by the force of factual argument. Surely most people now recognise that homosexuality is simply a variant of human nature, as elemental to gays as their gender or ethnicity. And, yes, we would have given the same prominence to the views of someone in Bishop Vercoe's position if he had advocated a world without Jews or Maori. Most definitely.

Alright, then. Actually, I'd really rather not be banging on about civil unions all the time, but I am concerned that what I regard as a timely recognition of human rights will be shouted down by privately-funded moral thugs and opportunist politicians. On a personal level, I am not about to abandon my good gay friends.

I'm less exercised about the fact that civil unions aren't marriage, or fall short of it, than some people on my side of the argument are. Perhaps "marriage" is owned by the institutions that have nurtured it, perhaps it does only refer to heterosexual partnerships, to a husband and a wife. Maybe you do call same-sex unions something different. If the rights in society are equal, that doesn't really bother me.

Simple biology dictates that most same-sex civil unions won't involve children, but some will. However trad it sounds, I think women are in general better equipped to care for children. So should the system weigh in favour of women where children are involved? News flash: the Family Court already does just that. But the idea that any conventional family, married or not, and no matter how troubled, unhappy or abusive, is intrinsically better for children than a home with one or two caring dads (or mums) is absurd and irrational.

Anyway, like the campaign says: love doesn't discriminate, and neither should the law.

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The scary philosopher | Jun 16, 2004 10:09

Q: Why did the neocons lie? A: Because their in-house philosopher declared that it was not only permissible but necessary to mislead the "unintelligent majority".

I had been vaguely aware of the late Leo Strauss, of the University of Chicago, but my curiousity was piqued recently by a lovely essay by Earl Shorris in this month's issue of Harper's magazine on "the accidental father of the worst in American politics", whose disciples "methodically infected and then corrupted the government of the most powerful nation on earth."

Harper's only rarely puts its key stories online, so I can't link to Shorris's story (you can subscribe locally to Harper's here), but it has been widely noted in the blogosphere, and there are short excerpts here and here.

Strauss was a Platonist who held virtue above liberty and prized the idea of natural law and immutable values (you may recognise elements of the Maxim schtick here - not least in that the immutable values tend to conveniently align with the prejudices of the believers), although in Shorris's essay he comes across as a scary, paranoid elitist. His intellectual influence on the cold-eyed men of the current US administration - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cambone and company - has been the subject of much analysis over the past couple of years. Examples include John G. Mason's Leo Strauss and the Noble Lie: The Neo-Cons at War. The Economist looked at the developing commentary around the dead professor last year, and declared it was "stretching it" to say that the Straussians in power in Washington had deliberately lied about Iraq's WMDs, but the more that emerges about the secrecy and subterfuge of the Bush administration, the more apposite the theory seems.

Anyway, Wikipedia has a solid entry on Leo Strauss, with plenty of links, so you can draw your own conclusions.

I was a little bit wrong about the provenance of TV One's Bring It On documentary on Helen Clark yesterday. It wasn't written by Simon Dallow, but by its producer Julian O'Brien and director/interviewer Colin McRae, both former members of the Assignment team who were restructured out of the Sunday programme last year. Murray McCully was a late replacement for Jenny Shipley (a shame - her comments would probably have been quite interesting), and comments from a Ngati Kahungunu representative and Doug Graham didn't make the final cut. The PM was apparently far more relaxed and animated out of the house and meeting people than she was at Parliament.

Meanwhile, Sandra Simpson-Frentz forwarded me what she thought was a "surprisingly contrite" response from Sunday Star Times editor Cate Brett to her letter about the surprising willy-waving action on page three of Sunday's paper:

Dear Sandra Frentz,

Thank you for your feedback on Sunday's Photosport photograph of a group of Otago University students performing a haka before their annual naked touch rugby competition.

As editor I would like to extend a personal apology to you for any offence the photograph may have caused you. The photograph was not intended to offend or shock readers but rather as a light hearted element capturing the escapades of Dunedin's student population in advance of the test against England last weekend.

We did discuss whether or not to obscure the genital region but felt, on balance, that the areas were clearly not the focus of the photograph. Certainly, in the past, I have rejected images I considered to be lewd or sexually explicit, however I felt this news picture did not carry any such overtones and that in the innocent context was unlikely to offend readers.

Your feedback indicates that for some readers at least, that judgement call was wrong. Editors are accountable to their readers in matters of taste and so a lesson has been learned about where the boundaries lie for a section of our readers.

Please accept this apology and I assure you we will not repeat the mistake.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Cate Brett
Editor
Sunday Star-Times

No Right Turn has beaten the print publications with his review of David Slack's Bullshit, Backlash, & Bleeding Hearts: A confused person's guide to The Great Race Row. He likes it. I hear the book is selling well.

Ronald Reagan's family seems to be getting pretty angry about George W. Bush's attempt to hitch a ride on his legacy. There has been no love lost between the Bushes and the Reagans for some time, it appears.

The Civil Union Bill will, as you heard here a while ago, pass its first reading in the House next week, with Peter Dunne and Winston Peters likely to be the only party leaders to vote against it. I'll look at the analysis of the issue so far (or the lack of it) in the country's newspapers later in the week.

And a lovely picture of Christchurch from space.

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Her Indoors | Jun 15, 2004 11:57

Simon Dallow ought to be grateful to have been relieved of newsreading duties at TVNZ, because he is proving to be far more useful in the more challenging roles of making and fronting other television fare.

I confess, I struggle to catch Agenda, because the TV belongs to the children at 8.30am on a Saturday and I am too busy scoffing chocolate croissants at the breakfast table, but Dallow got an outing at a more viable time last night with One News Insights: Bring It On, which he voiced and, I presume, wrote.

The temptation would be to regard this doco as part of a pair with Hurricane Brash, but they are actually very different programmes. Hurricane Brash was a fly-on-the-wall effort to which the Clark government would never have agreed (and, indeed, to which National agreed only because it had bugger-all to lose), and which at times made Don Brash look doddery and his key advisors cynical and machiavellian.

Bring It On tracked Clark through the week of the hikoi, but at a more formal distance, and with liberal use of after-the-fact commentary from friend and foe. Where they converge is that each was a distinctly mixed blessing for its subject.

The programme had some notably successful elements, including the use of the taxi-driver cliché in a way that was actually quite informative, and the reprising of Clark's controversial comments in the context in which they appeared that week. It was at pains to display the Prime Minister as a ruthless hard-headed loner (in contrast to the way the earlier programme allowed Brash to look like a puppet at times) preoccupied with staying in power.

But it sidestepped the central contradiction in perceptions of Clark and her government. The two main external criticisms of this government are (a) that it is a bunch of ideologically-motivated nutters looking to socially engineer New Zealand in its own image, and (b) that it is a bunch of managers with no guiding principles. Are these two mutually exclusive? It would surely have been worth discussing.

David Lange was easily the best of the outside commentators, not because he was relatively sympathetic, but because he brought a genuinely useful and informed perspective to the role. On the other hand, if I had a dollar for every time Chris Trotter used the word "ruthless", I'd be out shopping right now: and he really does veer perilously close to misogyny when he talks about "the sisters". And was there not anyone else from National but Murray McCully? Frankly, if McCully told me my bum was on fire, I'd want to check the research first. And I think it's a bit rich for the man who architected National's dumping of its entire Treaty policy heritage of the 1990s to be crowing about poll-driven u-turns.

It was irksome that, having chosen to explore the opinion-polling question, the programme dutifully fell in with TVNZ's party line that its Colmar Brunton poll is the sole source of political truth (it even wheeled out Mark Sainsbury to say so). The fact is that while Colmar Brunton consistently has National miles ahead, NBR's Philips Fox poll has Labour in the lead. I'd have liked to have seen someone talk about why that might be so and what it means. (After all, NBR was man enough to ask the question itself in an interesting look at the poll variations, and another story in which the polling companies themselves were of no help at all in unravelling the issue.)

It might also have asked whether Clark isn't quite as controlled and hard-headed as she likes to seem. For all that she subsequently went out to the press claiming that the "haters and wreckers" comment and the quip about Shrek the sheep being better company than the marchers on the hikoi had all been part of a cunning plan (a view endorsed by several commentators), it just didn't look like that. They both functioned as counterproductive blurts, and not the first of such to be uttered by Clark as PM. It was telling that by the end of the week she was saying what she should have been saying at the beginning of it: that the hikoi was "peaceful democratic protest".

I think it's more likely that Cullen and the Maori MPs fronted the foreshore and seabed issue because (a) they had been working on it directly, and (b) they were likely to make a better job of it than Clark was - and not (as Richard Prebble proposed) that she cynically chose to send her junior officers over the top into a hail of fire.

Still, it was well-written and worth watching, and that has not always been the case in TVNZ's 8.30pm documentary slots. With TV3's recent 60 Minutes story on the historical horrors of Porirua Hospital and Sunday's follow-up and the nastiness and deceit at Cambridge High School (both of which I thought served as notice that foul things can be going on behind golden-weather narratives) perhaps current affairs TV is getting better lately.

Staying with the media, one or two readers have sought my opinion on the revamped Sunday Star Times. Well, pending a deeper consideration, there's certainly a lot of it - if not always enough to usefully fill it. I can cope with Mike Hosking's personality column (he seems to write cheery enough sentences) - but a wine column? That was desperate. And the new glossy British-type Sunday mag had a lot more style than content. I mean, a feature story on curly hair versus straight hair? They'd have been better to fill the pages with a free ad for a charity or something. And, of course, the SST, which is ever so keen to shelter our kids, chose to fill much of Page 3 with full-frontal, willy-waving nudity. What is up with that?

There might be one or two businesses a bit nervous about yesterday's bust of a family company that sells hydroponic kits for cannabis growing. Certainly, the key charges involve the cultivation, manufacture (including boiling their cabbage down into grass oil) and supply of pot, but they have also been charged with selling the equipment. There has been a delicate truce over this in recent years - and the Switched-On Gardener is respectable enough to be Warrior Brent Webb's personal match-day sponsor - so it'll be interesting to see whether better-behaved equipment vendors get leaned on too. The unintended consequences of cracking down on the supply of wardrobe grow-kits for pot-smokers is, of course, that it hands a chunk of the market back to real organised crime. There's always a consequence …)

The Reagan re-revisionism is emerging. Slate has Reagan's Osama Connection, and Democracy Now offers Ghost Wars: How Reagan Armed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.

Further confirmation that the Iraq torture scandal is about to lurch into something even worse in this Daily Telegraph story, which says that "new evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration" has been passed to a US TV network and will shortly be news. The Washington Post has published some of the memos it has in hand - redacting part of one for use in a pending investigative story.

Christiaan Briggs pointed me to a blog post from Baghdad by Dahr Jamail, headed It Has Begun ("And the news of more assassinations continues to roll in"), and a story by Jamail on the dubious loyalties of the local security forces.

And, just to finish on a cheerier note, the fans at Planet Rugby get stuck into the sorry Stephen Jones.

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