Recent Posts...
Page 50 of 262
Archive
I, Bloke | Jul 30, 2004 12:46
I'm a heterosexual male, me. And the last time I saw some, my blood was definitely red. I'm proud of it - to the extent that one can can feel pride in an accident of birth - and very definitely comfortable with it. Like the ad says, it's great to be a guy. I'm not threatened by anyone who isn't like me, whether by virtue of gender or sexual orientation. Why on earth should I be?
I certainly don't have a problem with the fact that we've had two female Prime Ministers in a row, that we have a female Chief Justice, or that a woman the same age as me runs Telecom. They all got there on merit, and, given the history of 150-odd years of nationhood, they represent a welcome evening-up of the batting average. I like the way that John Tamihere habitually refers to his party leader as "The Boss": prosaic, gender irrelevant. I might note that the women I've worked for have probably been, if anything, better managers on average than the men.
Whilst I am irrevocably male, I have certainly had the opportunity to be non-heterosexual - indeed, as a young man I received one or two very specific invitations to (literally in one case) go down the path. I thought about it and was obliged to politely decline, on the basis that I just didn't fancy guys. Women, on the other hand ... don't they look great? Aren't they such a great shape and everything?
My preference has been for strong and intelligent women (like, why would "weak" and "stupid" be attractive anyway?) and, happily, I've been shacked up with one for many years.
All of which is a means to getting to the fact that I think John Tamihere's allegedly controversial speech on men and manhood (there's also an accompanying op-ed piece covering similar turf) was quite admirable - with one main exception, which we'll get out of the way now. He declared that "the pendulum of political correctness has swung too far" and implied that this was something to do with the problematic social statistics about men that he went on to list.
Tosh. Young men aren't five times more likely to cause a fatal road crash or 22 times more likely to be imprisoned than women because of "political correctness". You get that because young men are stupid and always have been. Don't get me wrong: male stupidity is as much a blessing as a curse. Our biological willingness to shoot for the moon, to embrace risk and forge out further than reason would dictate has been an engine of social and technological progress. It just also happens to get us killed and locked up sometimes.
I do recall a time, in the early 1980s, when perhaps there was more in what Tamihere said. It was called being "politically sound" back then, and one particular house I found myself living in was absolutely brimming with it. You had to be careful about how you used the word "girl", and a few guys were so consumed with guilt about oppressing women (including by having sex with them) that they actually tried to be gay. (Although one nice guy, who went on to some prominence, somehow managed to parlay not-being-oppressive into getting up a threesome with his girlfriend and another politically-sound young woman. Bastard.)
In this large household, the chaps would once a month be asked to clear out so that a women's evening could be held, and the local rad-les-fems could attend without having to breathe the same air as blokes. I didn't mind this at all - but where I drew the line was the idea of a corresponding men's evening, where we would all get together and, presumably, discuss how we might improve our sorry selves and avoid oppressing women. I figured I already had more positive ways of getting together with other chaps.
We've moved on from that now. Men are different to women, and have different needs. Male bonding over a beer, at the rugby, or on a stag night, works real good for me. At the same time, I've always enjoyed the company of women (tip for young blokes: being a sensitive new-age guy is actually a great way to meet girls).
On the other hand, we shouldn't understimate the degree of change in New Zealand male culture in the past two or three decades. Kiwi blokes once did not embrace beyond a handshake - now the All Blacks barely seem to stop hugging each other long enough to play rugby.
A good deal of what Tamihere was talking about revolved around fatherhood, which, ideally ought to provide the impetus for the men who encounter it to be more focused, more responsible and less selfish. It's the most important thing that most of us do, and it demands a sense of strength and guardianship that goes beyond mere muscle. And when you consider that for women parenthood involves having your genitals split asunder, it's actually not a bad deal.
It's far less common now for New Zealand men to treat their wives as surrogate mothers. The overwhelming majority of men now attend the births of their children. Some of us cook up a storm. This doesn't make us "metrosexual" or "just gay enough", just genuine partners in love and life.
More controversially, I think even gay men often have a fathering, or at least mentoring, role. Being gay doesn't mean you don't need role models, and for every old poof cruising K Road for boys, you'll find many more who have a kind of caring role for young men going through the still-fraught business of being young and queer. It is - and I know this might outrage some people - a kind of family.
But, returning to the red-blooded heterosexual mainstream, the social issues facing men in modern society, as outlined by Tamihere, are important. They aren't necessarily new - men have been doing most of the crime and wiping themselves out throughout human history - but there is great social merit in addressing them. Indeed, many of them are addressed by, say, the same politically-correct public health officials who routinely get a bagging for targeting resources to such risk groups as Maori also target resources at young men.
Some of the apparent failure of boys in the school system is simply a matter of the relatively better performance of girls in that system. In other respects, we may well have a problem. So what to do? More male teachers would be a fine thing: in their collective 10 years of schooling, my two boys have had one year with a male teacher between them. You could address that by paying teachers more (for all the mourning of our status, men still earn more than women, and still have broader employment options) and by specifically addressing the needs of boys in education. These are intelligent responses.
I think the issue isn't, as Tamihere had it, just society's perceptions of men, but also young men's perceptions of themselves. I've just done an interview with Yvonne Densem about the fall-off in young men seeking to enter journalism, for next week's Mediawatch. She found in a study that while young men held the profession in relatively high regard, they often saw it as too studious and too responsible a job for them. The positive media role models they identified were men who might sometimes be a bit risque or surprising - the likes of Martin Devlin and John Campbell (they seemed to like John much more for the fact fact that he utters the odd "bugger" or "bloody" than for his excellent grooming or journalistic style). This is fine in a way - I like to be a bit risque and surprising myself, y'know - but focus can be fun too.
It might have been useful for Tamihere to acknowledge that for a fair stretch of his adult life he didn't himself meet the admirable standards he was recommending. We all grow and learn and we don't always get it right.
So anyway, it was a good speech, mostly - and Sean Plunket's forlorn attempt to get Tamihere to say something dumb about "The Boss" on Morning Report today was an exercise in completely missing the point. Men, in particular as fathers, need to learn that they can be leaders by example rather than social demarcation, be responsible without having to run the show, and be strong without being violent. Just leave "political correctness" out of it.
Spooky | Jul 29, 2004 09:23
National MP Nick Smith has promised an end to the "spiritual nonsense" he says is being forced on New Zealanders by Christian churches. He says his party will end "bizarre" restraints on legitimate commercial activity on such days as "Good" Friday.
Smith described as "fantasy" the popular Christian belief that an ancestor called Jesus Christ came back to life two days after dying whilst nailed to a wooden cross.
"We won't stop there," Smith said, saying that the attention paid to objections from Christian churches to the Civil Union Bill "shows just how politically correct and stupid" Parliament had become: "Why, when medical science quite clearly demonstrates that homosexuality is simply an element of human diversity, should the country be held to ransom by people holding the hocus-pocus view that it is somehow sinful? I mean, are people with freckles 'sinful' too?"
Smith said National would "remove any references to the spiritual world" from legislation, and end the "credibility" extended to Christian beliefs by such customary practices as opening Parliament with a prayer.
He was joined by the Act Party spokesman Ken Shirley, who attacked "the nonsense of allowing spiritual and metaphysical considerations to creep into our laws". Shirley said his party wanted urgently to curb the right of Christians to object to the placement of legitimate businesses such as brothels near their sacred places.
Yes, the paragraphs above are satire. Smith and Shirley would never be rash enough to mock the spiritual beliefs of Christians. The spiritual beliefs of Maori, on the other hand, are always fair game. The actual releases from Smith and Shirley were attacking the response of the Environment Court to claims by local Maori that land specified for a housing project near Thames was tapu - as evidenced, apparently, by what would be known in Western belief systems as poltergeist activity. You'll note that their comments and choice of language are frequently identical to that I've used above. The Environment Court's crime in this case has been to suggest that the developer meets with the iwi concerned, Ngati Maru, to discuss the tapu at the building site.
There is no real evidence for Shirley's claim that the iwi is seeking leverage - financial or otherwise - over the consent process. Indeed, Ngati Maru's actions over a very similar application in the Auckland region strongly suggest otherwise. As reported a few days ago in the Herald's Business section, Ngati Maru and the developer have agreed on a plan to highlight the "sacredness and exceptional history" of the land - in which umbilical cords and afterbirth are buried - as part of a settlement.
Both sides are adamant that no money changed hands as part of the settlement. The High Court judge who prodded the developer with the observation that "the relationship between Maori and their ancestral land is not a mere verbal formula, but a value to be given serious weight because of its expression of the sensibilities of actual people," showed a degree of respect that seems quite absent from the minds of Smith and Shirley.
As it happens, I don't subscribe to any of the above belief systems - although, as I have previously noted, I find Tangaroa a more convincing theoretical presence than an all-purpose God when I'm standing on a roaring ocean beach. Both National and Act aim to fix the Maori hoodoo problem (which has not actually prevented the building of a motorway or a prison) by gutting the Resource Management Act of any cultural content. I think Tariana Turia might have to stop pretending she'd be able enter a coalition with either of them.
Shrum vs. Shrub | Jul 28, 2004 11:05
The brilliant Michael Wolff has a great essay on "Kerry's Karl Rove" - senior campaign adviser Bob Shrum - in the current issue of Vanity Fair. Wolff was unable to secure an interview with Shrum, but he draws a fascinating and convincing picture of the man whose job it is to deliver John Kerry to the White House.
Kerry represents Shrum's third - and probably last - presidential run, his opportunity for immortality, the final success required to secure a personal legend. But, as Wolff points out, the Democrats who hire Shrum are prepared to overlook the fact that he "by most accounts, is not, but a long shot, the best strategist in the game, nor the best ad guy, if they can get a Shrum speech. It's almost a kind of Democratic Party currency."
A Shrum speech, a former Democratic staffer tells Wolff, "is like the theme music on The West Wing." By these lights, the candidate's convention speech this week will be not just the most significant event in the campaign so far, but probably the most significant scheduled event between now and November. There would seem to be quite an onus on Kerry to live up to the stirring populist words he will be given.
He should probably forgetting even trying to live up to the standard of Bill Clinton's address to the convention, which was a reminder of the former president's staggering charisma. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that if Clinton were allowed to stand again - and no matter have much the conservative base loathes him - he'd take the White House at a stroll.
I've tried to catch a bit of the convention coverage on the Sky Digital channels, but it would have been nice to have been sitting channel-surfing in an American hotel room, just to get the range of flavours. It appears that novelty is something of a theme - Larry King had a comedy reporter and Ben Affleck (quite good, I thought) on his rotating panel.
USA Today had what probably seemed a good idea: a 'Crashing the Party' feature, for which the paper would send Michael Moore to cover the Republican convention, and the seriously unbalanced Ann Coulter to spray bile on the Dems. Unfortunately, as Coulter herself observed, they apparently hadn't actually read any of her writing. Her first column was rejected as "unfunny" and "unusable" and she was eventually replaced with another conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg. Moore will still go to the Republican convention.
Coulter subsequently posted her rejected column on her own website, where you can read it for yourself. I wouldn't have used it either if I'd been the USA Today editors: it's mostly meandering, self-obsessed, irrelevant drivel.
A major news angle apart from the convention action itself is the Democrats' decision to offer press credentials to bloggers - to treat them, in effect, like proper journalists. The Washington Post's Filter column looks at The Blogger Circus, and Dave Winer has a running record of the blogosphere (well, the part of it that has mastered XML) at conventionbloggers.com.
I used to use, and like, Symantec products, but don't do so any more - the company has slipped well off the pace on the Mac platform since the shift to MacOS X, and Norton Utilities can in some circumstances be positively toxic to system health. Unfortunately, Symantec's anti-virus and security software has a strong grip on the corporate and personal PC market.
I say "unfortunately" because Symanetc has done something very, very stupid with its Norton Personal Firewall/Internet Security 2004 product. The latest firewall from Norton goes way beyond security and blocks nearly all web ads and affiliate links by default. It disables Google AdWords and even removes some title logos from pages. It actually strips out source code from web pages before they can be displayed.
So, unless someone has the wit to actively turn it off, the new Symantec product will wreck any plans that Public Address - and hordes of other sites - might have to even partially earn their keep. We have, as you might have noticed, a fairly strict creative policy on this site. Ads have to fit in with the overall feel, and you will never see half-page banners or (Lord forbid) pop-ups. We do this as a matter of respect for readers. But Symantec's product will pay no heed to that. Employing the metaphor of the print world, it will only let its customers read the magazine after all the ad pages have been torn out. It's moronic and destructive.
Stephen Mahaney, president of Planet Ocean Communications, has a furious rant about Symantec's action here. Network World's Mark Gibbs wrote a "so what?" response - the irony being that that response was surrounded by the kind of ads that Symantec's firewall removes or disables without asking. Gibbs might be okay with it - I suspect his publisher will be thinking a little differently.
I hate pop-ups too, and they've become a little more malign with the news some pop-ups can now contain a malicious Trojan. So sure, target them - and put pressure on Microsoft to fix yet another woeful security hole in Windows and Internet Explorer. But please leave the management of general Internet advertising to be managed by the user, at the browser level.
Anyway, I'm quite pleased with the Listener revamp. The debut issue is the strongest in a while, and Gordon Campbell's latest investigation of the Zaoui saga is a genuine scoop that further lifts the lid on a very strange business. You can also read my inaugural Wide Area News column.
So I'm off to Wellington on business tonight, and there probably won't be a blog from me tomorrow (feel free to check in and see whether some of the other regulars have coughed one up though). I'll be staying long enough to take Mum out for a birthday lunch on Saturday - meaning that I miss The Food Show in Auckland, and a free lunch on Friday to boot. But, hey, that's okay …
Fresh air | Jul 27, 2004 11:15
I like the look of the New Zealand Institute, if only because we do need some fresh intellectual energy. Face it: if you don't know what Roger Kerr or the EPMU are going to say about anything by now you haven't been paying attention for the last 15 years - and the fact that an organisation as far out on the philosophical perimeter as Maxim gets so much air suggests that it's past time for a vehicle for some more mainstream thought. The intellectual firepower seems to be there too, although the fledgling weblog needs a scrub-up. Put a name to it - Skilling's perhaps - to give it some personality, and update it two or three times a week. That's how blogs work.
Rod Oram, who has frequently been perplexed at the focus on ideology rather than issues in our intellectual culture, led out the cheerleading for the institute on Sunday. But are they clearing the copyright on these news stories they're re-publishing in full?
The Ha'aretz column which claims that Helen Clark stepped in and refused to allow Mossad to arrange a cover-up of of the passport scandal with the SIS is here. It also says that Mossad ventured onto another agency's turf in running the operation in the first place. Clark offered no comment to the Herald.
The Herald's lead story yesterday on doctors being pressured to approve the long-term unemployed for the sickness benefit, where they won't be bothered with work-testing, is interesting, but it rather fails to state the obvious - that it's much harder now to stay on the dole than it was in the 1990s. Ask your friendly local bludger.
If Work and Income staff really are suggesting to the chronically workshy that they just go and get a doctor's note then that's a matter for concern - but the story presents no actual evidence that that is in fact the case. And the claim in the accompanying editorial that the story "casts a shadow over recent unemployment statistics" is bogus.
Do the math: the unemployment benefit roll was down 24,708 in the year to March, while the sickness and invalids benefit roll rose 7683. The department says only 7% of those who came off the unemployment benefit went to a sickness benefit - that's 1730. If we If we buy generously into the theory and say that as many as half of those people were scamming, that's about 860, or 3.4% of the overall reduction in unemployment.
Of course, that's a fairly imperfect calculation without knowing how many went onto the sickness benefit direct from employment, how many people transferred from the sickness benefit to the dole (Steve Maharey's claim that in recent years it has been as many as six times as have gone the other way suggests that most of the growth in the sickness benefit roll has actually come from people hitherto in work), the number of long-term unemployed who actually should have been on a sickness or invalid's benefit but haven't been troubled until relatively recently with the obligation to get work, how long people are actually staying on the sickness benefit, etc, but a sense of proportion would seem to be in order here.
A follow-up story this morning, in which National promises to "get tough" on welfare and Katherine Rich suggests that those with depression and stress-related illness should just "box on" also includes this paragraph:
A report by the Ministry of Social Development, investigating growth in sickness and invalid benefits over the past 10 years, found almost half the growth was a result of demographic changes and the rise in the age of eligibility for superannuation.
The "shadow" theory looks pretty dodgy to me …
Tainui couldn't just let some welcome financial news lie on the table for a while, it appears. The two co-chairmen of the iwi executive got rolled yesterday: Hadyn Solomon for double-dipping on Corrections Department contracts and Tuku Morgan for claiming, without authority, that the tribe was backing the Maori Party and not Labour.
As the US Democratic convention swings into action, the role of the Nader campaign is coming under scrutiny. This story is interesting:
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader's quixotic presidential campaign says it submitted about 5,400 signatures to get on the Michigan ballot, far short of the required number of 30,000. Luckily for him, approximately 43,000 signatures were filed by Michigan Republicans on his behalf, more than meeting the requirement.
The Republicans certainly get the picture: it might only take Nader picking up two or three per cent in a couple of key states and it's another four years of the Bush White House.
Salon's War Room has good coverage of early convention action, by David Talbot himself, and Kevin Drum comments on a comment on Bush's woeful record on the environment.
Slashdot has an unruly thread on the theme "What's the strangest place you've ever read Slashdot from?" Feel free to let me know the strangest place you've ever read Hard News from …
Long Days | Jul 23, 2004 11:37
With the 9/11 commission report offering, as these things tend to, a little something for everyone, the public and commentators will presumably be urged by the White House to move on from all the unpleasantness. It's hardly that simple, of course.
Nobody will be truly moving on until the news from Iraq improves considerably, and there seems little immediate prospect of that. The Today In Iraq blog provides daily tallies of deaths, attacks and other unhappy events in that country - and it's been very lengthy lately.
US Army prison abuse investigators have now totalled 94 "aberrations" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US military has spent most of the $US65 billion approved by Congress for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is scrambling to find $12.3 billion more to get through to the end of the fiscal year.
Meanwhile, ways to keep people in the US Army: free cosmetic surgery, including breast enlargements (patients must supply their own implants) and liposuction. Weird.
The conservative Christian movement - with wide-boy pastor Brian Tamaki to the fore - is rather feverishly (I've seen the emails) gearing up for its own Hikoi in Wellington, basing the project around its Enough is Enough website. Its "vision" is expressed thus:
The cornerstone of society is the family - the cornerstone of the family is marriage. Marriage is a lifelong covenant commitment between a 'man' and a 'woman', which provides the best possible environment to raise and nurture our children – tomorrow's generation.
Sadly today our nation's leaders have disregarded these simple yet profound truths. The institution of marriage is under unprecedented attack by politicians who wield an agenda to advance the privileges of an extreme [homosexual] minority over the rights of our society and our children.
Yadda-yadda, democratic right to protest and all that. A casual browse through the site will turn up a number of claims best characterised as lies (child prostitution is "now the accepted norm" apparently) but the thing that really annoys me is the prominent quote from Martin Luther King on the top page ("Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"). It's not the first attempt to rope King into homophobia - his fundamentalist Christian niece tried it several years ago and was slapped down by the great man's widow, Coretta Scott King. Although King never put his views about homosexuality in writing, his former wife was adamant that he was concerned about discrimination against gays and lesbians, and one of his close confidants in the 1960s, Bayard Rustin, was openly gay. The Google Answers page on the matter has further information.
Apart from trying to hijack the image of the civil rights leader, the Enough is Enough campaign is following the line of the Destiny New Zealand political party in looking to establish an appeal to Maori. There's a page complaining about the seabed and foreshore legislation, and the "Stand En Mass" (sic) will feature a haka. I wonder whether, given the signals chucked out by the Maori Party, we're shaping up for a battle for the conservative Maori vote.
Anyway, the enough.org.nz domain is registered to a Raymond Greenfield of Hamilton, who is presumably not the same Raymond Greenfield as this one. It would have been a laugh though, wouldn't it?
Israel's cheerleaders tend to hold that there is no action that cannot be justified in the defence of the state - hence we ought to be more understanding about its need to penetrate and abuse our passport system. It was something of a relief to read this column in Ha'aretz in which Gideon Levy ponders what the response might be if some of the state's recent actions had been perpetrated by Palestinians on Israeli citizens:
What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if it then turned out that the dead man's wife had tried to dissuade the terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the usual screaming headline: "Buried alive in his wheelchair." The terrorists would be branded "animals."
A reader has pointed me to the video clip in which Michael Moore notoriously green-lighted file-sharing of his movie. It's at a press conference, but I still can't tell where or when.
The Guardian has a rare and very funny interview with an out-of-character Sacha Baron Cohen about Ali G's adventures in America.
Interesting story in the New York Times about where the Bush and Kerry campaign war chests will be spent.
Salon has an interview with comics genius Alan Moore. I still have my signed copy of Watchmen.
Rod Oram took a typically sensible look at the latest focus for screaming business hysteria - the Resource Management Act - pointing out that the survey quoted by Nick Smith - which placed New Zealand last among 60 countries for its environmental laws was not based on actual data (many of the countries rated at the top of the survey actually have stricter protections), but just "New Zealand business's unrealistically negative view of the RMA." No Right Turn, who is in fine form lately, offers a similar view.
Tom Bennion, who, along with Rebecca Paton and Malcolm Birdling, has a book on the seabed and foreshore issue out imminently, offered this comment on the government's largely ignored announcement that it may consider a time limit for the processing of historical Treaty claims:
The government announcement is not as revolutionary or politically fraught as it might have been a few years ago. All players in the treaty field are moving in the same direction. The Waitangi Tribunal realised some time ago that it would be unjust to have some major tribal groups awaiting settlements more than 10-15 years from now, given the "head start" which groups like Ngai Tahu and Tainui have into a post settlement era. There are also risks of "settlement inflation" over time - and related to that, the relativity clauses in the Tainui and Ngai Tahu settlements effectively requiring the government to keep all settlements within the fiscal cap (or pay the relative extra amount above the cap to those two tribes).
For several years the Tribunal has been trialing options to speed up claim hearing and resolution. Claimants (now grouped into large hearing districts) have the option of a fast track hearing, involving one short (2-3 week) hearing of generic evidence for a district, and then going straight into negotiations. You may note also that the foreshore and seabed bill has a cut off date for applications of December 2015.
Tracey Nelson has stats for last weekend's Bledisloe Cup test. I must say, I'm feeling less confident about the Springbok test tomorrow than I did before the Bledisloe game. For one thing, a glance at the stats suggests that Greg Somerville will have to do very well to match the workrate of the man he replaces in the front row, Carl Hayman.
Righto. That's more than enough for today. It's my birthday, and I'm fixin' to hit the streets and shake off the vague intimations of mortality that have been lingering like a bad smell all week. Just watch me.
The motorcade sped on ... | Jul 22, 2004 11:41
It's hard not to feel that the time was when a Prime Minister speeding to make a crucial rugby test match might have been hailed as a true New Zealander. In 2004, it becomes another do-we-really-not-have-anything-better-to-worry-about flurry of headlines.
Since the story of the PM's high-speed escape from Waimate emerged, after a concerned citizen of Temuka made a report, we have seen the summoning of a police inquiry, Stephen Franks comparing Helen Clark to a South American dictator "scattering peasants", National's Tony Ryall depicting her as "Vladimir Putin speeding to the Kremlin", Act's Muriel Newman claiming in a release entitled Rugby And PR Not Worth Lives that Clark had "undermined the good work done to reduce speeding on our roads" and TVNZ discovering that she could have made a later flight from Christchurch airport on which there were nine spare seats.
What we're still not clear on is exactly how long her journey took and how fast her motorcade actually went. The Herald this morning is comparing an identical courier journey in keeping with speed limits ("2 hours 20 minutes") with the possible duration of the Prime Minister's journey ("80 to 120 minutes" - why not just say "two hours" for the higher figure?). But doubtless democracy will out and the system will provide us with a result.
Amazingly, this story has travelled as far as Britain, Australia and South Africa, where it will no doubt have fostered the impression of New Zealand as a idyll where people don't have enough to worry about. Perhaps it'll boost tourism or something.
An employee of the PM's office managed to give the story some extra legs by claiming that the haste was on account of a death threat against Clark that day. Indeed, a man was arrested in Canterbury that day and charged, among other things, with threatening to kill the Prime Minister - but it was nowhere near where she was, and even the police say that had nothing to do with the conduct of the motorcade. Exactly what the spokesman thought he would achieve by offering up such a provable porky is unclear.
But at the same time, the furore rebounded on National when the Dom Post led this morning with news that "National leader Don Brash was rushed to Saturday's Bledisloe Cup in a police motorcade that swept through Wellington running red lights and at times driving on the wrong side of the road."
Clark claims to have been too busy working in the back of her car to notice the exact speed of her motorcade, while Brash told Camilla this morning on 95bFM that while he was positive his motorcade hadn't exceeded the speed limit on its one-kilometre journey to Wellington Stadium, he simply couldn't recall going through red lights or travelling on the wrong side of the road. Oh whatever …
Meanwhile, while it excitedly leads with the latest on the motorcade story (and mentions it in two other stories on different pages), this morning's Herald has no follow-up story on yesterday afternoon's announcement by Margaret Wilson that the government is considering "streamlining" historic Treaty settlements, possibly with a cut-off date some 10 to 15 years hence: a statement, one would think of great consequence, especially given responses from both National and Act. Go figure.
Glass Houses | Jul 20, 2004 11:40
I finally got around to downloading and watching Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend. I had planned to take up the offer of a ticket for tonight's New Zealand cinematic premiere, but I can't go. And, y'know, Michael said I could download it - probably. It's as you'd expect - a highly persuasive work which does much of its persuasion by dint of video innuendo - but I ended up liking it more than I thought I would.
The film's greatest flaw is Moore's focus on what he hints might have been a Saudi conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks, and its implication that the guilty were protected when Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, were evacuated from the US. But even once you sift out the dubious elements, you're still left with the feeling that it makes a case to answer for the Bush administration and its chums.
Meanwhile, Dave Kopel's "57 Deceits" page has been upgraded to "59 Deceits" and now notes rebuttals from Moore's "War Room", some of them less convincing than others. Kopel quotes frequently from Moore's most trenchant and articulate critic, Christopher Hitchens.
Yet Kopel and Hitchens' tracts would be much shorter had they confined themselves to what is actually in the film rather than hauling in blurts by Moore in the past three years which would seem to contradict his own work. That Moore can be quite a critter in his unguarded moments isn't news, but it's also true that Hitchens wouldn't emerge terribly well from similar scrutiny.
As Yellow Times pointed out, Hitchens' ability to scream blue murder over the Bush administration's ill-fated appointment of the "obfuscator and falsifier" Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission ("the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy") whilst simultaneously maintaining his line that the same administration had been noble and honest in its prosecution of the war on terror is quite a contortion. A contortion, indeed, worthy of Michael Moore.
Kopel's hardly immune either. Take this oddly conflicted comment - on why he was voting Nader in 2000. By the standards of evidence he applies to Moore (ie, with much recourse to official reports), his dismissal of climate change as a "dystopian fairy tale" is simply absurd, and his claim that "Gore wants to outlaw the internal combustion engine" is, well, deceitful. Gore said in his book that "the elimination of the internal combustion engine by 2020" - and, logically, its replacement by more sustainable technologies - could be a "strategic goal". This is nothing like the implication in Kopel's comment that Gore as president would legislate to take people's cars away - and, indeed, is exactly the sort of insinuation for which Kopel so energetically damns Moore. So, yes, people in glass houses …
Doubtless you could spend forever on this sort of thing. In the end, I think it's best to take Moore's work and his critics' rebuttal as of a piece. One doesn't play properly without the other.
Meanwhile, with the news in Sunday's Observer that Downing Street has admitted that its repeated claim that coalition forces had discovered "the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves" in Iraq was untrue - the actual number appears to have been more like 5000 - you start to wonder if anything is true.
Given the extraordinary impact it had on our national history - not just the economic reforms but the setting in motion of the Treaty settlement process - it's surprising that there hasn't been a more vigorous public examination this year of the 20th anniversary of the fourth Labour government's arrival. Are we at peace with it, or just ignoring it? Anyway, Jane Clifton has a good story on the economic angle in this week's Listener. Reading it, I was surprised at how much I agreed with what Gareth Morgan had to say:
Morgan recalls that economist Brian Easton, for one, was always arguing that the sequencing of corporatisation and privatisation was all wrong. "And he was right. You have to make sure that you have the capacity for fair competition first – that new entrants can get into the marketplace. That there is a marketplace. Then you corporatise/privatise. But that wasn't done."
Instead, Morgan says, the "privilege" of a state monopoly was simply transferred – either to private companies like Fay, Richwhite, or a whole new aristocracy, the state-owned enterprise (SOE) honchos, who got to run monopolies, and pay themselves princely sums. The public was revolted by the SOEs' antics.
I think Morgan's also right when he goes on to claim that the public's experience of privatisation has effectively precluded talk of, say, further opening the education sector to the private sector. After experiencing some of the lousiest privatisations in the developed world, why would we want to have a big ol' punt with education or health?
Don't get me wrong: big chunks of the vast public sector did need to be broken out and sent to the market. There were business in which the taxpayer had no need to be, and practices in some public entities that were just crazy. Our economy had to be significantly restructured and deregulated. But the way in which those entities were butchered and the nature of some of the deals - particularly under the National government of the early 1990s - is something that's still hard to grasp. How could this have happened?
Brian Gaynor's lucid 1999 analysis of the fortunes of Michael Fay and David Richwhite, through the Winebox deals and the privatisations of New Zealand Rail and Telecom, is still disturbing reading. Fay and Richwhite enjoyed a series of transactions in which they benefited hugely, not only at the expense of the New Zealand public, but their own shareholders. They are not heroes but rogues.
Meanwhile, foul odour continues to emerge from that most rotten of the privatisations (see another Gaynor analysis from 2000), that of New Zealand Rail, with the Commerce Commission standing by its description of the actions of Tranz Rail management in destroying documents and emails in 2000 as "Enron-like". Sigh …
Take That! | Jul 16, 2004 11:29
No, it won't have done Helen Clark any political harm domestically to have been able to lay down the law to the Israeli government on live TV last night. The sentencing just before 6pm of the two Israeli agents on charges of fraudulently attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport was the cue for a series of interviews, fresh off the plane at Auckland Airport in which she briskly ticked off a list of diplomatic sanctions against Israel, until such time as its government formally acknowledged and apologised for its outrageous actions.
Clark has spent months in the mode in which she is least appealing: firefighting and fending off personal attacks. The spy scandal gave her a chance to do something she's good at - the sharp and statesmanlike response to an external challenge. Watching her on One News, Holmes and, later, BBC World News, it was hard to avoid to feeling that you couldn't imagine Don Brash doing it like that.
The Australian's Clare Harvey, the only Australian newspaper staff correspodnent based in New Zealand, picked up on the political relief angle, but it will be hard for the Opposition to criticise the firm response, even in those terms. And, more to the point, this was an entirely appropriate response to an outrageous attack on New Zealand's sovereignty. The unfriendly actions of Mossad, or whichever agency it was, stood to seriously damage the credibility of the New Zealand passport system, and to potentially affect every New Zealander who travels internationally.
NBR has a rapid roundup of the ensuing news stories this morning, and the Christian Science Monitor has a fascinating backgrounder which notes claims that Mossad had been systematically working to abuse our passport system for years. Israel's Ariga describes the passport case as "another battlefront" for Israel's troubled leadership and Ha'aretz quotes Foreign Ministry sources as saying that its refusal to acknowledge the New Zealand government's protest was "imposed" on them by the Prime Minister's Office and Mossad. The right-wing Jerusalem Post quoted New Zealand Jewish leaders who said they were "embarrassed" by the scandal.
Readers may recall that I recently grumped about a Sunday Star Times editorial that complained, waywardly, that the government had "introduced a ban on alcohol in a public place" and "turned everyone who put a bottle of plonk in the car on their way to a BYO restaurant a criminal."
This was not, of course, the case. What the government did do was in the Local Government Act 2002 provide local authorities with the ability to pass bylaws establishing liquor bans in such places and at such times as they felt it necessary to protect public order. The new law specifically stated that such a ban could not apply to someone simply buying or taking liquor to another place.
Auckland City already operates a liquor ban on some central city streets between 9pm and 6am from Thursday to Saturday nights. This has generally been a good thing (although it has been a surprise to some visitors to Auckland, including, one night last year on K Road, the editor of Scoop). The streets late at night are better for the absence of yobs sucking on alcopops.
But in April this year, the Auckland City Council announced that under its new powers it would be introducing liquor bans in 10 locations, including the Mission Bay Reserve and a considerably extended CBD zone. Gordon McLachlan wrote, with some justification, about council wowserism, but councillor Noeline Raffills assured everyone that the bans would be an after-10pm affair. Surely, you thought, they'd be sensible about this.
But oh no. This is the Auckland City Council we're talking about and its capacity for rank silliness ought never to be underestimated, especially under a tory majority. So take a look at the council's liquor ban proposals, which include a 24-hour, seven-day ban on the consumption of (or even loitering with) alcohol in public throughout a wider Auckland CBD stretching from Upper Queen Street right down to the water and from the far edge of Victoria Park to Symonds Street.
This takes in the university precinct (but not the university grounds themselves), the area around the student halls of residence, and Albert Park, where it will now be illegal to settle down with a cold one on a hot day or to have a picnic and a glass of wine. Time-honoured student activities of the dinner-on-a-traffic-island type are also to be outlawed - or at least subject to case-by-case begging for an exemption. The AUSA is now trying to negotiate. Read the council's page on the bans and you will not find any real justification for such a draconian move, or an explanation of how and why the proposal changed between April and now. The most likely explanation is that the council wants to move the city's handful of tramps and dossers somewhere - anywhere - else, and it's prepared to wade as far into citizens' lives as it has to achieve that. Surely this is "political correctness gone mad"? No, can't be: it's a centre-right council isn't it?
It might have been a good idea to get well-known Treaty naysayer Chris Trotter to review David Slack's Bullshit, Backlash & Bleeding Hearts for The Listener - perhaps he could bring a fresh and lively perspective - but the subsequent review is a bit bizarre. Trotter pots Slack, as a former prime ministerial speechwriter, as part of "a cosy circle of bureaucratic, academic, ethnic and political elites" that has locked everyone else out of the Treaty debate and his book as "little more than a description of, and justification for, elite consensus formation." This seems an excessively paranoid, and insulting, description of a group of New Zealanders from both sides of the political divide who were obliged to address an issue that could not be ignored and - although mistakes were made - acted in the best of faith and largely did the right thing.
It may be valid criticism of the book that it proceeds from the assumption that the attempt to address Treaty grievances has generally been A Good Thing, and that it largely consults people, including former National minister Doug Graham who share that view. But Trotter deploys a boilerplate grumpy-right tactic: largely ignoring what anyone actually has to say in favour of totting up ideological profiles. He actually went through the book and counted the words in every indented quote, of which there are quite a few, then sorted them into his own classifications of whether the people being quoted were personally "wary of", "antagonistic to" or "neutral" about the Treaty, and "those who were broadly in favour of either entrenching or enhancing the role of the Treaty in New Zealand life." Unsurprisingly, members of the Trotter's Treaty-hugging "elite" feature strongly.
On the other hand, "nowhere in BB&BH," says Trotter, "does Slack interview, or quote extensively from the writings of, such scholarly Treaty critics as Jock Brookfield, Andrew Sharpe, W H Oliver, James Allan or Kenneth Minogue."
Well, there's very little quoted from any academic writing - it's not that sort of book. But works by four of the five (excepting Allan) are listed in the book's bibliography. Brookfield concluded his book Waitangi & Indigenous Rights: Revolution, Law & Legitimation by stating that New Zealand needed constitutional reform (a "quiet revolution") that included the recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi and provided for the place of Maori in the constitution and sharply criticised Brash on the foreshore issue in an essay this year - which would seem to make him more part of the conspiratorial "elite" than an overlooked critic.
Minogue, emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics, has, so far as I know, written only one book on the topic, Waitangi, Morality and Reality, published by the NZ Business Roundtable in 1998. It hardly seems an act of dizzy liberalism to, on the other hand, allow Dame Anne Salmond "generous" space (that is, twice as many words as Don Brash gets) to comment on matters on which her work has been copious and widely recognised.
So much of the full-page review is devoted to this fevered number-crunching that there is virtually no mention of what Slack himself has actually written. Are the pop-history chapters notably flawed? Is he on the money in the chapter where he says that the unworkable concept of Treaty "partnership" (as opposed to "co-operation"), which got loose amongst a well-meaning bureaucracy, is to blame for many subsequent misgivings and problems? We wouldn't know from the review.
I do occasionally see Chris Trotter, and get on perfectly well with him. But I wonder at his branding as a left-wing commentator lately. All this bellyaching on the apparent behalf of the rank-and-file New Zealander (including a frothing "eight out of 10" verdict on Don Brash's law-and-order speech in the Star Times) seems a bit odd to me.
Anyway, I've found a couple of offshore media stories particularly interesting this week. One is the controversy about Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Truth, which takes on Fox News and makes the case, with the assistance of former Fox journalists, out-take video clips and leaked memos, that Fox isn't just right-wing, but a purveyor of systematic political bias and frequent falsehoods.
NewsMax responded with a story pointing out that Murdoch actually did Al Gore a few favours during the last presidential election campaign, so how could he really be a Republican bigot? Good point: I think Murdoch does have beliefs, but few so firm that they can't be put aside for financial advantage, as the Chinese government was happy to discover. He's amoral, basically: but that doesn't make the unethical behaviour of Fox News management - and the out-and-out lying of star hosts like Bill O'Reilly - any better.
The other story has been the fallout from the Butler report in Britain. I've done The Mediawatch Blog early this week so I can point you to it. It has lots of links relevant to those and other stories, including many clips from Outfoxed, whose marketing is almost as interesting as its content. The O'Reilly interview with James Glick is an absolute must-see if you feel like using some of the boss's bandwidth this afternoon.
And on that tip, I should point out a few changes in the nature of my mainstream work from here on in. The Computers column in the issue of The Listener published tomorrow is my last, after 10 years. From now on, I will be writing a Listener column called Wide Area News, which will take a broad view of the media. At the same time, my role at Mediawatch has changed a little: I will continue to contribute as part of the Mediawatch team, with weekly interviews, comments and work on the website, but most weeks it will be presented by the very able Colin Peacock. I'm happy with it all, and looking forward to stretching out in the new, larger column.
PS: for a couple of hours today this post carried the unhappy - and indeed wholly inaccurate - news that W H Oliver was deceased. Clearly, he is not, as is evidenced by the entry of his autobiography in last year's Montana Book Awards. I was thinking of something else altogether when I wrote that. Also, the link to Jock Brookfield's unpublished essay on the foreshore issue was broken and is fixed now. Cheers, RB.
Page 50 of 262
Archive