Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Surely not ... | Oct 14, 2004 11:06

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In this time of peace and reconciliation in local body Auckland, it would seem a little tacky to be in possession of the infamous Hubbard-NBR PDFs, wouldn't it? Yet if you go to Aaron Bhatnagar's blog, click on the link marked My personal photos, then go to his Mac.com Public Folder, you will find a directory called Hubbard.

In the event that the link has unexpectedly become inoperable, a description: the file NBR_Hubbard_Story.pdf is page 13 of the September 17 Hubbard special. Also there, 14.pdf and 15.pdf. Page 13 has the original spot colour, and the photographs on all pages are of much higher quality than those on the actual newsprint pages. Clearly, the PDFs are those taken from the original digital layouts.

Of course, we must take Aaron at his word in saying on September 27, after John Banks' campaign manager, Brian Nicolle, resigned over PDFgate, that: "I would like to put on the record my sadness at this. Brian is a very smart campaigner and a nice guy. While it appears that he has fallen into temptation to campaign in 'black ops' …"

Quite right. For shame. Back at the blog, a fairly whiny post from Aaron, who was tipped out of his place on the Hobson community board, ruminates on the C&R rout:

I believe in the first instance that we became increasingly associated with distasteful messages and thoughts. Much of this perception was unjustified …

Of course. There's nothing distasteful about the message in this file from Aaron's public directory, is there?

As it happens, I agree with Aaron on one thing: that Hubbard already seems more convincing as mayor than he did as a candidate. The campaign brutality does genuinely seem to have unnerved him. I interviewed him on my 95bFM Wire show yesterday. Among other things, Hubbard said that the path ahead for the V8 race was straightforward - it would go through due process and then the promoters would decide if they still wanted to play. He acknowledged that people had discussed alternative course locations with him.

He was a bit iffy when I asked him if he was a moral conservative, but flatly denied one of the campaign rumours - that he had donated money to the Maxim Institute. He said he had never had any involvement with Maxim.

Speaking of bFM, I think Don Brash's Thursday chats with Camilla work well for him, and not only because he largely gets his points away unmolested, but because he is so earnestly polite. Much more polite, as Camilla pointed out this morning, than the Prime Minister …

Meanwhile, who would have thought that this year of reckoning would have extended its reach to Fay and Richwhite? The Securities Commission yesterday filed High Court action over $83 million in share trades in early 2002 - before the bottom publicly dropped out of TranzRail. David Richwhite personally, and Midavia Rail Investments, the private investment vehicle for himself and Michael Fay, are among the defendants. So are two former senior company officers.

Fay and Richwhite's exit from TranzRail was an extraordinary final chapter to a very sorry story - if anything ever needed investigating, it was that. I hasten to add that it is now a matter for the court to decide, but the fact that action has been brought will do me just fine for now. Capitalism shouldn't need many rules, but it relies on what rules there are being universally applied.

Fran O'Sullivan's call? Can of worms.

Meanwhile, Advertising Veterans for Truth have posted a fascinating video clip to illustrate their claim that President Bush is suffering presenile dementia. There was a time, they point out, when he could form entire sentences …

And Trey Parker and Matt Stone talk to The Guardian about Team America: World Police - and the pompous and embarrassing open letter it drew from Sean Penn, who clearly is taking himself much too seriously ..

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Weird War | Oct 13, 2004 09:49

The news that during the occupation that followed the war to stop weapons technology falling into the wrong hands, equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons have been steadily vanishing would seem to be taking irony just a bit too far.

While US command has prevented IAEA inspectors from conducting on-the-ground inspections since March 2003, entire buildings appear to have mysteriously gone walkies.

Meanwhile, a "precision" strike on an alleged insurgent safe house in Fallujah actually hits the city's best kebab restaurant and kills two security guards.

Meanwhile better news in Afghanistan. But it was always going to be better news in Afghanistan …

Whichever way you want to see it - nutty conspiracy theory, kind of interesting, or story-of-the-campaign - Bulgegate is turning into lots of fun. It's way better than that stupid secret-pen thing the Republicans tried to pin on Kerry. Some people are spending a lot of time scrutinising video on the Internet in pursuit of evidence that Bush has been wired for sound during the first two presidential debates.

Since the original Salon story, even Cryptome has entered the fray, with, as you would expect, lots of time-coded videograbs and information on wireless audio systems purchased by the government - and the White House itself.

The now-notorious CNN clip of a press conference with Chirac where Bush appears to be following a voice prompt - unexpectedly audible - is here (WMV). For all the talk about this one, I'm sure that the explanation here is correct:

"I think the Bush - Chirac clip is pretty simple to explain. Many networks run a text-service for their live programming, where they use a speech-recognition engine and a re-speaker to dictate to that engine what is said by whoever speaks in the program. The text is then fed to be overlaid the "live" programming in progress. Live here means delayed so that the timing of the text is more or less matched with what is going on on-screen. The re-speaker needs to be a second or two ahead of the "live" feed for the recognition engine to be able to generate the text. What I think you hear here is the voice of the re-speaker that has for some reason been overlaid the "live" voice-feed."

The proof, of course, is that the journalist's question is also pre-voiced, so unless we're talking about a really big conspiracy, sorry, but no.

On the other hand, speculation that Bush and possibly other White House officials have used audio-prompters isn't new. Former AP and ABC radio reporter Michael Hoffman is claiming to have been told by a Reuters correspondent last year that that it was widely known, or assumed, amongst the press corps. And if you fast-forward to the relevant point (from about 13:25) of the video linked to in this Washington Monthly post, he looks like he could be stumbling and listening to an audio prompt for a correction. He has a weird moment at this press conference too. If nothing else, these little moments do indicate that he's quite a space cadet when he doesn't have a script to follow.

See also the bulge photo album from BushWired, and Mystery Bulge for a roundup of mainstream news stories. Does this mean that even if Bush isn't watching his back in the third debate, everyone else will be? Tee hee …

On a serious note, the seizure of European servers for Indymedia, at the behest of the FBI and with the assistance of the UK Home Office is troubling. There is speculation that the swoop has something to do with the publication of these pictures, allegedly of Swiss undercover cops, but that would hardly seem to justify such an action. I have my issues with Indymedia, but this is nasty.

Josh Marshall has many observations and links with respect to the Sinclair Broadcasting Group's extraordinary order to its stations to scrap their scheduled programming a couple of days before the presidential election in favour of a dodgy "documentary" attacking John Kerry's war record.

Least edifying spectacle of the week: Don Brash dully repeating the phrase: "Full and final has to mean full and final" with respect to the impending Rotorua lakes settlement (which was news, like, last year, or even 2001).

At the same time, of course, he has to grapple the embarrassing fact that it was National that started this signing-over-title-to-lakes thing - and, according to the government, made a hash of it. I still wonder if the government didn't get wind of National's plans to scare up a fuss about Te Arawa and thus allowed the Herald to get wind of negotiations to try and remedy the Taupo deal.

The issue around the Rotorua lakes is whether the government took possession of the lakes through a conventional purchase in 1922 or just ran Te Arawa out of time and money in a legal dispute.

This Suzanne Doig paper from 1999 backgrounding the Taupo story is interesting.

I see the Woman's Weekly has a Mike Hosking cover exclusive - now there's a good little earner you don't have to leave the house for. He's gone a bit more grunge - perhaps to finally see off those gay rumours. The Dolce and Gabana shirt is a bit of a shocker, but that World jacket looks nice. Can you ask to keep this stuff?

But I'm a tiny bit puzzled. Is his Touchdown news quiz show happening after all? Reports to the contrary notwithstanding? It apparently has a name - Out of the Question - but there's no screening date given. Has Fraser relented? Will Holmes and Julie Christie fall brawling to the floor the next time they're at the same lig? Or is the story a tactical thrust? I'm fascinated. Sort of.

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Toast | Oct 11, 2004 10:44

The Eastern motorway - whichever of the multiple versions you're talking about - is toast. There can hardly have been an Aucklander who didn't know it was an issue when he or she voted in the local body elections, and to take anything other than a huge rejection out of the weekend's result is daft.

The trick for Auckland's new centre-left council will be to take its thumping 13-7 majority in stride, and avoid appearing as bigoted as the last council. I hope - and trust, actually - that the new council won't behave with the spite and arrogance that the CitRats did three years ago. Brian Rudman is concerned that there are now too many academics on council. He may have a point.

But this doesn't mean the end of road-building in Auckland - far from it. If the centre-left stance is to be gauged from Bruce Hucker's pronouncements, then the State Highway 20 extension will proceed, along with various other projects which (unlike the Eastern motorway) have met state funding criteria. I wouldn't even bet against the widening of the Victoria Park flyover.

It is central government, and not the mayor's office, that has driven these projects and it follows that the change of governance at Auckland City will not derail them. You can't go anywhere in Auckland at the moment without seeing a crane or a grand excavation, and the city will not - as the mayor frequently seemed to suggest - grind to a halt without John Banks chivvying it along.

Anyone who travels into the Auckland CBD - and that's more than a quarter of a million people a day - will be aware of the work in progress to remedy the city-fringe choke-points. It would be wise to see what effect, say, the widening of Spaghetti Junction has before rushing into a multi-billion dollar spend an another motorway - especially one whose effect would be to create another choke-point.

The other key question, which was never answered by the last council and its mayor, was how the eastern motorway would be paid for. Anyone who thinks tolling was going to do the trick might want to have a look at what's happening to a relatively modest project in Tauranga. Tolling and congestion charging (much on the mind of the Herald's editorial writer this morning) ought to be regarded as a separate issue from that one, doomed road. It is not necessarily anathema to a centre-left council - it was, after all "Red" Ken Livingstone who introduced congestion charging in London - but it would be useful to dispense with the idea that it will make buckets of cash magically appear. It won't.

The new mayor, Dick Hubbard, already appears to have had a lesson in political reality - in that he might yet be able to contrive that elusive cost-benefit analysis to save face, but 13 votes say that the motorway plan won't be proceeding. It is reasonable to say that he didn't win the election, Banks lost it, and therefore, he has a lot to prove. Where he and his new councillors do agree is that genuine steps have to be made towards building Auckland a better public transport infrastructure.

The V8 race is also history - unless Hubbard can offer an early demonstration of consensus and creative thinking by working out a plan to stage the race in a slightly less lunatic part of Auckland. I'd be happy with that - hell, I even spent too long watching Greg Murphy win Bathurst yesterday - but really, the middle of the Auckland motorway system was just not the right location.

In his concession speech, Banks displayed the sort of grace that was rarely on offer during his mayoralty. Perhaps if he hadn't spent so much time as mayor spouting contempt for his political opponents, and for his peers in other cities, he might have had more of a shot.

I also think he was correct in saying the election did not turn on the Brian Nicolle affair. It was patently a bit bigger than that. The result ought to provoke a crucial rethink in Citizens and Ratepayers, which has allowed itself to become a debased political brand. The arrival of Action Hobson has demonstrated to Auckland's wealthier suburbs that they have choices apart from the same old firm. If the current council screws up mightily, the CitRats will be back next time - if not, they'd better start thinking about what people actually want.

Finally it's perfectly in character for Banks to muse to reporters about a return to national politics with the National Party. It's a bit more curious that Don Brash should be making cooing noises back on Morning Report today. Banks has been trounced after a single term by a political novice. He has presided over the centre-right's worst result in 70 years; a result so bad as to have implications for the next general election. And National wants a piece of that? Helen Clark will be delighted.

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Golden Weather again | Oct 08, 2004 10:50

As the light now falling on the sorry history of bullying and abuse at the Waiouru cadet school finds its most grim artefact yet - allegations of pack rape - we should bear in mind that it is a mark of our times that these stories can finally be told.

Various lobbies, from the moral authoritarians at Maxim, to wistful interventionist lefties in academe like to believe that we have somehow lost a Golden Weather dream-time in New Zealand. Yes, once upon everyone had a job, everybody's kids walked to school and the official crime rate was lower than it is now.

And yet for such a long time, it was just a "domestic" when a man beat his wife behind closed doors. And it's only now that we deal with Lake Alice and Porirua Hospital and Waiouru; or that we finally confront dioxins in the ground and in bodies. Next time you fume over the RMA or about prisoners being compensated for abuse, think about how you'd really rather have it. We are a more open society, and we face the problems that open societies face. There will be more saying-sorry to come.

End of sermon.

You can still donate to the civil unions newspaper ad here.

National apparently bitten on bum by history. It would be interesting to know where the Herald got its original tip about the Tuwharetoa airspace claim on Lake Taupo (which the government quickly claimed to be the direct result of National's "sloppy" deal with the iwi in the 1992 settlement) - because it looks for all the world like Don Brash was meant to walk straight into this one.

Bad news for Rush Limbaugh as a judge says prosecutors had a right to seize his medical records in investigating his "doctor-shopping" for prescription drugs. I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a screaming hypocrite.

The final farewell from John Banks - spam. How appropriate.

And how odd that the first winner of a Little Brother t-shirt for the best email feedback should be such a naked attempt to win a t-shirt. But - notwithstanding a number of thoughtful commentaries on pressing social issues - that appears to be what has happened. So, please be in touch Garth Gregory:

Funny thing really. Until last week I had never heard of Little Brother. Well that's not quite correct as I do have a little brother ... but in actual fact he is more like a younger brother.

Anyway, I was shooting the breeze at one of the Wellington Ministries with the CEO's PA. We were talking fashion, cool brands and good Wellington clothing stores. Yes, they most definitely do exist. And we got around to Little Brother, who I had obviously never heard of...stoic Southern man and all.

Well, I was just flicking through the newly released FQ Quarterly for Men later in the week. And sure enough there was Little Brother clothes and what's more there was the mention of the Little Shit brand as well, the new kids brand.

And so, much later in the week I am standing on Dixon Street waiting for my bus, well any bus really. Across the road I am checking out the brand labels on the window of Area 51, which just so happens is the only stockist of Little Brother in Wellington. Of course...Little Brother beamed across at me. Tuesday morning back in the Ministry...and low and behold...Little Brother is back...this time on this blog. So I race over to tell my CEO's PA…guess what...Little Brother is up on a blog. And she has to ask...what is a blog?

It won't work again!

Not so far behind was Stuarts interesting memoir in response to the current silliness about drugs in the hospitality industry:

Lets freeze frame back to July 1984 when I moved into what was once called Rodean, part of the infamous White Heron Hotel complex. For a number of years beforehand, I had drunk (mainly on Sundays at the Pool Bar, home of drug/boat/car dealers/crook lawyers and socialites from the Inner Eastern Suburbs) and the famous Train Ride Bar actually a converted train carriage that was inserted through a wall into the upper lounge area just past reception.

I happened to live just up the road in Brighton Road from the early 80's. When I first moved into the Auckland urban area in 1968 I lived in Mission Bay for 10 years followed by a year and a bit in "Nappy Valley" home of Rachael on the dreadful (then) Shore.

Anyway, I needed to spread my wings a little and moved into the big white house which we used to call Southfork (remember this was the time of JR Ewing and crew). The other inhabitants of the house were various chefs from the hotel. Upstairs, there was a project manager from the construction crew from the then in construction Regent Hotel. Mr Ng (?) used to always bitch about the noise from below.

Me, I did not care. For 2 or so years I had been drinking with the staff at CATS club (caterers) in Albert Street and also the Entertainers Club in Fort Street (both totally illegal and open to members only). These clubs were open till around 7.00 in the morning. Anyway, not long after I moved into the hotel to live I spoke with the chef Rick Nielsen and offered to fill in helping in the kitchen if there was a staff shortage.

One night I was called in to wash dishes and this lasted right through till 1991. Oh, we drank (after work), we smoked weed and did all the debauched things that today would be regarded as either non pc or harrassing. I remember a chef (as a joke) one night dry humping a young chef who was antigay.

We also had this very strange Maitre D' who we used to call "teapot" God knows why. The waitresses used to be drawn to tears on most nights. Let's be basic, the hospo industry is a pressure industry and the workers or players in it need to let their hair down. Imagine the waitperson having to deal with awkward customers and also deal with surly/bad ass chefs, of course they are going in many, though not all, cases turn to drink or drugs to cope.

All the chefs I worked with in those halcyon days were either pissheads or mullheads. You could not get much of an intelligent conversation out of them, but their work quality looked pretty good. Today everybody and things are so protected and delicate …

And that's yer lot for this week. I've got a meeting later with the Newmarket connections (yes, there are some things that will draw me to that torrid strip) and a keynote speech to write for the eXpo Conference for Macintosh Computer Users, which takes place tomorrow at the Northcote campus of AUT (as far as I know you can still roll up to the door). Yeah, a keynote, y'know, like Steve does keynotes …

And, finally, whisky, of which readers will know I am quite fond. A wee while ago, a PR company sent me a bottle of the Grant's Sherry Cask Reserve, which I thought was quite agreeable. I figured it must be retailing around the fifty dollar mark. But no! I popped into a Grey Lynn bottlestore and bought another one (on the way back from seeing Auckland crash out of the NPC reckoning on Saturday night) and paid: $31.99! Crikey. That's easily the most convincing impression of a proper whisky at a budget price that I have ever seen. Keith Stewart thought much the same thing about the Grant's Ale Cask Reserve too. Good trick. Advertise with us! Or just send more …

PS: Voting has nearly closed for the NetGuide Web Awards 2004. I think the weblog category is judged, but feel free to pile on over, nominate us (again) and vote like crazy …

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