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So, what do you think of New Zealand? | Jul 05, 2005 11:40
So what exactly did yesterday's OECD report say about New Zealand's economic position and prospects. Depends who you ask. In the Dominion Post, Vernon Small's story leads thus: "The economy has won a strong report card from the OECD, which says New Zealand is on track to meet the Government's goal of a return to the top half of the rich nations club."
In the Herald, on the other hand, Brian Fallow detects a gloomier tone, saying the report "sounds a warning on tax cuts and suggests there is scope for some liposuction in Government spending."
Philosophically Made's Labour-friendly Stephen Cooper sees a ringing endorsement of Michael Cullen.
The perspective from less interested observers is relatively upbeat. Australian papers are running the Agence France-Presse report from the OECD headquarters in Paris, which notes that the report says "the country's prospects are bright", but sees a need to boost our long-running low productivity growth. The Forbes story takes a similar tack, and also notes praise for changes to business taxation in Cullen's 2005 Budget (and if there was a feature in that Budget that was blown away by the backlash to the raised expectations on personal tax, that was it).
Bloomberg's Wellington reporter, on the other hand, offers a view more pleasing to the Opposition, noting the report sees "little success in counter-balancing increases by pruning back lower-priority activities," and suggests a review programme aimed at nudging back such spending.
Although there has been some consternation behind the scenes in Wellington about what the OECD might say about the high marginal tax rates implicit as income-earners move out of the reach of Working for Families, its comments and the coverage seem relatively muted in that respect. The report's fretting about labour market flexibility (against a background of the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD?) and keenness for further privatisations can safely be taken as the sort of thing economists will always say.
Apart from the productivity conundrum - answers on a postcard for that one, please - the key point in the report seems to be this: the economy has been running beyond capacity for several years, creating inflationary pressures. The Reserve Bank's tight monetary policy seems to have done the job for now, but there is little or no room for fiscal loosening, either in the form of new spending, or tax cuts not matched by spending cuts. Say it again: not new government debt, but actual spending cuts.
Ooooh … this is creepy but compelling: a sex offender in America, who abducted a little girl and killed her family - and has been captured thanks to the smart work of a Denny's waitress - turns out to have been keeping a blog. The Fifth Nail (the name relates to a Crucifixion myth).
Today In Iraq has a massive second anniversary post. (Warning: graphic and disturbing photographs.)
After all the denials, Bush's evil wizard Karl Rove turns out to be right smack-bang in the middle of the Valerie Plame story. Lawrence O'Donnell broke the story for The Huffington Post. Rove could conceivably be charged not just with blowing Plame's cover as a CIA agent, but with perjury. Cool.
Greg Wood reported on watching the test match away from home:
The atmosphere at Father Flanagan's Fake Irish Pub in the old convent school in downtown Singabore on Saturday was not much different from the Cake Tin by the sounds of it; about half Kiwis, half Lions, with the Britpack (full of, as you say, faces only a mother could love; british bulldogs to a man) doing most of the yelling but the Kiwis (all recognisable; all very Carter-looking) doing all the jumping up and down and pointing. Freaking brilliant. The only thing that ruined it for all of us was a bloody POM won the trip for two (biz-class, too!) to Auckland this weekend. And he calls himself my FRIEND... baaaaaaaastard!
And, inspired by the Kiwi standards belted out at the stadium on Saturday, Rod de Lisle sent in an "adulterated" version of the Dance Exponents' 'Victoria':
The All Black haka was how they were greeted
Lions riposte that can't be repeated
Tana looked for a quick resolution,
prepared his prey like an execution
Umaaaga,
what do you want from him, want from him?
Umaaaga
don't you go mess with him, mess with him.
He's up in time to bugger O'Driscoll,
Kevin helps with a very quick fistful
It is the fire that Bryan has been through
he's got a mind but it's the shoulder that they seeing to
O'Driscoll,
you won't get much more from him, more from him?
Wilkinson,
what do see in him, see in him?
Woodhead is a man that sees only money
Losing his captain and the series ain't funny
he's in bed but he's not sleeping
It this a job that he will really be keeping?
Umaaaga,
what do you want from him, want from him?
Umaaaga
don't you go mess with him, mess with him.
Henry is not only the rugby head master
Sundays are for bone-sets and doing the plaster,
after killing the Lions he's back on the phone
another jerk rung up who won't leave Tana alone
Umaaaga,
what do you want from him, want from him?
Sir Woodhead
what do see in him, see in him?
Rod, you clearly have way too much time on your hands …
Anyway, I'm going to the Auckland-Lions game tonight. Damn shame the weather looks like it will be appalling. And if you'd like your own digital video keepsake of Saturday's historic test match, there's a fairly lively torrent available for it right now.
The National Arena | Jul 04, 2005 11:25
The Wellington Stadium is a marvellous place to watch rugby. It is an arena in a sense that other New Zealand grounds are not, in that its shape and symmetry have the effect of concentrating atmosphere. And my God, was there some atmosphere on Saturday night.
Huge washes of red splashed across the stands by kick-off time. By hook or by crook, Lions fans appeared to have grabbed around half the seats, and their team did not lack for vocal support. Some New Zealanders appear to have taken the view that the Welsh, Scottish and Irish are good sorts, but not the English.
I thought they were all good value, and the English lads had a nice line in toilet-queue humour - if also a marked preponderance of faces only a mother could love. Surely they can't all have played prop?
The vigour of the Lions support drew New Zealanders out of their shells. If you weren't shouting and singing, you weren't really there. Singing? Yes. Cultural nationalism via the pop charts. 'Loyal', 'Victoria', 'Bliss', 'Haere Mai', 'I Got You' and 'Slice of Heaven' all got an airing in the breaks and were largely sung with more gusto than the national anthem. (Face it, you feel comfortable singing 'Why Does Love Do This to Me?' in a way you don't singing 'God Defend New Zealand'.)
You may note that Dave Dobbyn had a hand in no fewer than three of those tunes. And, after the post-match interview with Tana Umaga played on the big screen, as the stadium slowly emptied, his lovely new song, 'Welcome Home' ("Out here on the edge, the empire is fading by the day …") rang around the oval. It was an appropriate and fulfilling moment, and testament again to Dave's ability to deliver great spirit through his best songs.
The coaches have said that the Lions management's attempts to vilify Tana Umaga in the past week helped galvanise their players. They certainly galvanised the supporters. In some sense, most of us felt there were values at stake here. As David Kirk pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, "New Zealanders respect and respond to grim determination, they believe in people who shut-up and put-up, and they react rather badly to sore losers and wimps."
But the game. Oh, the game. I felt viscerally connected to the All Blacks that evening. And how sweet was it that Umaga ran in the first try? The All Blacks were swift and ruthless exploiters of turnover ball, thunderous tacklers and tireless toilers (Tracey Nelson's All Black game stats for Saturday make interesting reading). Dan Carter had such a game that the claim in one of the Sunday papers that his was the greatest individual performance in an All Black jersey was not actually unreasonable.
Clive Woodward appears to have clung to the misguided belief that the All Blacks would display mental weakness under pressure. In fact, it was the Lions who were, at key moments on Saturday, mentally unfit. When Wilkinson's first penalty shot hit the post and they regained the ball, they simply needed to display purpose and composure and would probably have scored a second try for a 14-0 lead. Instead, one of their forwards lost the plot, dived over the ruck and the All Blacks were out of jail. Later, Wilkinson squandered a huge overlap with a misdirected drop goal attempt; a really remarkable failure of vision.
I've never subscribed to the view - popular with the florid prose merchants who write about rugby for the British press - that it's all about passion. Or, as one Lions player had it last week, about hating the All Blacks more than the All Blacks hate them.
It's not like that. There was certainly passion (in his after-match interview, Byron Kelleher twice declared himself "proud to be a New Zealander"). But passion is not enough, and it is no more important than the other elements: focus, skill, the desire for excellence and the ability, in the cauldron, to enjoy what you're doing.
Afterwards, I met up with my friends Kerry and Simon and enjoyed the atmosphere of a thronging Courtenay Place before moving uptown to the Havana bar, which was full of boisterous, bug-eyed kids, and a nice place to be. From there, it was home to watch Live8, sometimes with the sound down. I was mildly shocked at finding Pink Floyd to be actually quite good.
I'm afraid I can't quite muster the expected hand-waving enthusiasm for Live8. I'm unconvinced when I see Mariah Carey, her life awash with money and waste and the demands of a diva, pleading for an end to poverty. Or when performers in Philadelphia get $US12,000 goodie bags for their trouble, or wristbands carry the branding of sweatshop giant Tommy Hilfiger.
People like to feel they're involved somehow in a good thing - and what more pleasant and less onerous way to get involved than going to a concert in Hyde Park, or wandering around Edinburgh on a sunny Saturday afternoon? I hope it has some concrete effect, but I'm not sure it actually will.
I had to get up on Sunday morning to do a phone interview with Garry Ward of Newstalk ZB Wellington, one of several interviews about Great New Zealand Argument I did while I was in town. The one I enjoyed most was with Oliver Driver on Frontseat, which was also occasion for my first visit to Avalon in about 20 years. Avalon is vast. The corridors are cavernous, the makeup room could serve the cast of a feature film. It actually reminded me more than anything of an old film studio I visited once in eastern Poland; a kind of monument to a socialist cultural past.
Speaking of the past, we screened 20 minutes of the Lange Oxford Union speech at our launch at the Film Archive on Sunday, and it was a good thing to see it again after all these years. The audience seemed to like it and - contrary to no fewer than three warnings about Wellington book-launch audiences I was offered earlier in the day - they almost all stayed for the duration of a useful panel discussion on ideas in the book with Jim Traue, Gemma Gracewood and Che Tibby. It was a very good do (Scoop's Alastair Thompson took some nice pictures of proceedings), if not quite a Great Blend (Wellington, hang in there - we're bringing you a show this year).
Earlier on the Thursday, my publishing partner Martin Taylor and I paid courtesy-and-signing visits to Unity Books and Dymocks. That Tilly from Unity is a hard case. But perhaps the best bookshop moment was the following morning, when I stopped in front of Bennett's on Lambton Quay. In the front window, by the door, there was a display of six titles. Three of them were Great New Zealand Argument, Graham Reid's Postcards from Elsewhere and David Slack's Civil War and Other Optimistic Predictions. Public Address is culturally in the house.
A note about getting the book: we've had some issues getting the book out through the big chains. If you can't find it, ask for it (and ignore anyone at Whitcoulls who says it's not out for another month) or try a good independent bookstore. I'm not quite ready to open up local retail sales yet, but if you're overseas, or you really can't find the book locally, you can buy it though our shop at Amplifier here.
I also did my usual trawl of the second-hand bookstores, and came up with an unusually rich haul, including Keith Sinclair's Pember Reeves biography and a veritable swag o' Fairburn: the 1966 reprint of his great satirical poem about Michael Joseph Savage, The Sky is a Limpet, the original printing of Three Poems (including 'Dominion') with Denis McEldowney's name inside and The Woman Problem and other prose, whose dust jacket bears a wonderful sketch of the author's character:
The peripatetic school of Greek philosophy involved a lot of gesticulation and walking around Acacia Grove. In this we have never had Fairburn's equal. Right or wrong, he would argue the hind leg off a cow and bite a camel's bum. What he has to say is not so much to convince us that his is the only thinking … as to make us think about these things for ourselves.
Fairburn would have made a great blogger.
And that's about it. My passions for rugby, cultural nationalism and nights on the town have been served, I've done a lot of talking and people seem to like Great New Zealand Argument. I've come back bearing old books and new ideas. It has been a thoroughly satisfactory trip to the capital.
A Very Big Day for Me | Jun 29, 2005 12:00
This is a very big day for me. My first book, Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves is officially on the shelves. Some of the material will be familiar to Public Address readers, from the web feature that started it all. The online versions of the works by David Lange, Keith Sinclair, Bill Pearson, Robin Hyde, Bob Gormack and Jim Traue have been tidied up and checked against originals for print, and new introductions have been written.
There's also an introductory essay by me, a first-ever written commentary on the Lange speech by the author of the original notes, Margaret Pope, and Tze Ming Mok's Landfall prize-winning essay, 'Race You There'. The works all revolve around the idea of national identity.
The book itself is beautiful. I like books as objects, and this is a good way to launch our new publishing imprint, Activity Press.
Now, to retail. I've been writing Hard News in some form since 1991. It's always been free to receive, and I don't see that changing. So if you've ever felt you'd like to toss a coin in the hat, this is your chance. You are warmly invited to buy Great New Zealand Argument for yourself, friends or family. If it goes well, we can reprint, and also begin planning and compiling future volumes. There is no shortage of our argument to bring to life. (I'll also resume the publication of new arguments online soon - I've been a bit busy lately.)
We are selling the book online, but, for the first few weeks, only for delivery outside New Zealand. I appreciate the support that independent booksellers in particular have extended to us, and I want to reward that support. It would be nice to get Whitcoulls to re-order within the week, too (and perhaps to order a few more, frankly ...).
So expats, by all means, place your orders. If our new arrangement with Amplifier.co.nz goes well, I'll work it up into a proper online store, selling David Slack and Graham Reid's books, and perhaps some merchandise for Christmas. But we'll get to that.
As I noted yesterday, we have a launch event with the Book Council, tomorrow (Thursday) evening in Wellington. It starts at 6pm sharp at the Film Archive, 84 Taranaki St. I'll give a brief speech, we'll screen the Lange speech, take a break for drinks, and then discuss issues arising from the book with former chief librarian and author of the resonant 'Ancestors of the Mind: A Pakeha Whakapapa', Frontseat producer (and sister of Jolisa) Gemma Gracewood, and our resident PhD, Che Tibby. It should be fun - and of course I'll be signing and selling books afterwards.
You can just bowl up tomorrow evening, but to guarantee entry you may wish to contact the Book Council: by phone (04) 499 1569, fax (04) 499 1424 or email: events@bookcouncil.org.nz.
It's been interesting doing press for the book, and the response to it has been gratifying (actually, it's the kind of book journalists should like). David Cohen's Metro story on me is lucid, lengthy and kind, although there's one misunderstanding I ought to clear up: I was never a born-again Christian.
I did dally with one of those Youth for Christ-type groups at school, and went on one of their ski camps. But the moral is that, in the end, I couldn't buy it. The salvation business made no sense to me. The final straw was going to one of those Jesus-palooza things at the Town Hall and being appalled at the intolerance being peddled from the stage. I tend to compare it to the first and only time I went to a filming of Big Time Wrestling; once you got up close, it didn't look so good.
Anthony Hubbard has also interviewed me for the Sunday Star Times. I realised in the course of our 70-minute(!) phone conversation that we were discussing not only the contents of the book, but - in quite a demanding way - the ideas it contained. That was great.
I also did Breakfast this morning, I'm doing Wayne Mowatt tomorrow and Frontseat for Sunday, and you may well hear me on your regional Newstalk ZB station.
But for now, there are the usual beasts to be fed before I can get on the plane to Welly. I'd like to thank my business partner Martin Taylor, our editors Fiona Rae and Linda Cassells, and most especially Matt Buchanan of CactusLab, who not only made a lovely job of designing the book, but burned the midnight oil last night getting the sales page ready for showtime.
I'm busy as hell in the next couple of days, and then I have the Mother of All Nights Out planned for Saturday, by which time I will deserve it.
In the meantime, you are very welcome to buy my book.
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