Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Forward humans | Aug 08, 2007 09:45

Well, that felt good. We launched David Cohen's A Perfect World in Wellington on Monday night to a solid house of supportive punters, and raised about $20,000 for the Autism Intervention Trust. When I spoke to the people from the trust, it wasn't actually the money they were most excited about, but the fact that their issues were being aired in such a forum. Those people work so hard for their kids.

The first order of business was to launch my new website for autism support and advocacy, humans.org.nz. I've posted an introduction to the site, and why it exists, and a few thoughts on Bill English's impressive speech about David and his book.

I'll post the first (of many, I hope) of our Stories on the site tomorrow. There are a few bits and pieces to be fixed up (we don't have the titles of posts displaying on the home page at the moment) and I'm still learning my way around WordPress, but I'm excited about the potential. Thanks are due to everyone who has helped, but most especially Matt Buchanan of CactusLab, who gave up his weekend so that we could meet the launch deadline on Monday.

Yesterday morning was fun too: I got to go and visit Mu at the Lyall Bay HQ of Fat Freddy's Drop, to interview him and the Freddies' manager Nicole Duckworth for a magazine feature I'm doing. The house is right on the water -- we had to close the door while we ran the tape recorder because the surf was so loud.

And, because I gotta run, just one more thing. My next computer was unveiled over night. Tasty.

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Feckless Solutions | Aug 06, 2007 07:58

I'm against child abuse. I just thought I'd say so, because so many people in the past few days have been letting us all know they're against child abuse that there's a risk that anyone who doesn't pipe up might be taken to be, y'know, in favour of it.

John Key's totally against it. So is Simon Power.

You might want to put out a press release saying how totally against it you are too, before anyone starts to look at you funny. Lyndon Hood at Scoop has helpfully created an interactive child abuse press release generator to help you with the job. It has been described by Act's Heather Roy -- in a press release -- as "an exercise in poor taste".

But Roy, Deborah Coddington, Michael Laws and Jim Hopkins all know what the problem is. It's the welfare, clearly. If only the government had the gumption to cut off the bastards' benefits until they could prove they were fit parents. Simple as that.

None of them seem unduly troubled by the fact that Nia Glassie's mother, Lisa Kuka, was not a beneficiary. She worked long hours in a kiwifruit factory in Te Puke; six days a week, leaving the house at 5am and sometimes not returning until 10pm. For $600 a week. That's why she left her daughter in the care of the rabble who abused her. She might perhaps have left her daughter in the care of her own mother, but she too, at the age of 71, worked full time, at a timber factory.

This is not to suggest that Kuka adequately fulfilled her duty of care as a mother -- it appears she did not. But the commentariat's reflexive refrain about welfare dependency rings hollow this time. Perhaps Heather Roy could put her hand up for some babysitting duties after she sends all those welfare mothers out to work.

Roy and Coddington find ample room in their respective efforts to write admiringly about themselves, but Hopkins' column -- given an admiring link by David Farrar ("My fingers almost got burnt blogging that," DPF observes, then leaves his readers to scratch each others' eyes out as usual) -- deserves special mention. Even by Hopkins' lamentable standards, it's smug, pompous and sneering.

After mocking the new hospital screening questionnaire on domestic abuse (and indeed, sliming basically everyone involved in trying to prevent abuse), Hopkins trumpets his own solution: spend the money instead on "rewards for any information that might spare a child and convict its abuser". Oh, right. A bounty system. There's no way that could go wrong, is there?

Michael Laws also, of course, has more feckless solutions than you can shake a stick at. Here's his prescription:

Don't give second chances. One conviction and they automatically forfeit their chances to have children again. That they must prove their fitness, their sobriety, their changed attitude or every child they produce is whisked away for adoption.

And a sidebar: a drug conviction and you similarly lose your children. Automatic.

When you're clean, and proven clean - then we'll talk. But you must earn your way back into parenthood.

But haven't the children been "whisked away for adoption" already? And has Laws even thought about what he's saying? Does a drink-driving conviction mean the state comes and takes away your children? Does he actually know how many people between the ages of 30 and 39 get a marijuana conviction every year? (It's between 6000 and 7000. Laws doesn't venture on how many children that would see taken away from their homes and schools and put up for adoption under his bold new scheme.)

Laws' pen-portrait of abusive parents concludes thus:

They don't give a shit what any government official or law-enforcement agency thinks. They'll look after their kids their ways, f--k off.

Oh, like this you mean?

We "correct with force" because we love, we occasionally smack so that we may save.

And we have a very simple message for the Bradfords, Pillays and Riches of this world. We don't tell you how to raise your kids. You don't tell us how to raise ours!

Michael Laws said that. But that's different. Of course.

The Dom Post today recalls another home where they had their own way of disciplining naughty children:

An Auckland High Court jury was told the youngster was beaten with weapons including a baseball bat and an oar. Ngati would punch her son in the face, hit him with a stick and whack him on the head when she thought he was naughty.

For all the put-upon middle-class yelping about rights from the likes of Laws, it does seem that "don't hit your kids at all" has, at least, the virtue of message simplicity.

But that, of course is not the whole thing. And there's some truth amid the braying. We don't want families rotting and robbed of ambition. It may be that CYFS should have monitored Kuka's children after an earlier incident. There is some evidence that sentences for serious assaults and homicides on children have been shorter, although not a lot, than those for offences against older victims. But whatever satisfaction harsh sentences may bring after the fact, don't bring back dead kids, and they probably don't stay the hand of abusive parents.

The New Zealand child most at risk of homicide is less than one year of age, male, and Maori. The child is most likely to have died from battering, sustaining head and other fatal bodily injuries inflicted by one or other of his parents. The overall rate of such deaths has not changed significantly since the 1970s, although it rose among Maori children and fell among non-Maori. There is a correlation between child maltreatment deaths and other forms of domestic violence. Kids die violently in violent households.

(Heather Roy and her fellow preachers of blame-welfare lines might care to consult the equivalent figures in the US before they trumpet US-style "welfare reform". They are three times as high.)

The hospital abuse screening programme will inevitably raise hackles -- being asked an embarrassing question is a small sacrifice in the circumstances, but it will be too much for some people -- but its trial in Auckland does seem to suggest that it is doing the job it has been designed for: picking up abuse within a secure, structured environment. No one should care what Jim Hopkins has to say about it. He doesn't matter.

I'm trying not to pretend I know more than I do here, because I don't know what it's like in these families. I have the deepest respect for the professionals who have to intervene. It does amaze me the way that our child welfare agency is vilified.

But in the end, the state can't be in every home. It can't forcibly remove thousands of children without creating a whole new catastrophe. But family members -- and they're not all failures; there's a doctor in the whanau around this household -- can bring pressure to bear. They can walk into a house and remove a battered child. They can not stand for it any more.

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Some things you may not know | Aug 03, 2007 10:02

Something you may not know: the Council for the Humanities has been quietly working away on the development of a set of Creative Commons licences for New Zealand. The project has included the creation of a stage-one website for Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, which looks very nice. Congratulations are due to Brian Opie and all the others involved in the project, which began with a meeting at the National Library exactly a year ago.

Brian advises that the project has received funding for a second stage of website development, which is great news. The licences are at draft stage at the moment. There are more details and a link to the CCANZ mailing list on the site itself.

You may also not know that the 30th anniversary of Rip It Up magazine is being celebrated. I played my small part in the story back in the early 1980s, and a few of my words have been excerpted for the very large anniversary issue, including excerpts from three 1986 interviews of which I have fond memories: Nico, Shane McGowan and Adrian Edmonson. Nico said:

A poet at some stage has to be poor. And somehow money spoils poetry. It does, it takes away, it changes your original intention. I always become nasty when I have money.

The whole interview was like that. It was so cool. Two years later, she died of a head injury sustained when she had a minor heart attack while she was riding her bike around the hill of Ibiza in the blazing sun, as part of a fitness kick. Never one to do things by halves.

The frankly hopeless attempts by bFM listeners this morning to name the author of the song from which Rip It Up got its title -- The Cure, FFS? Don Henley? -- put me in mind of the day I first met Murray Cammick, in Timabloodyru. Keen to demonstrate that I was a hip young man deserving of the deputy editor's job, I brought Murray around to my flat and stuck on Orange Juice's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever album: the one with the wonky version of Al Green's 'L.O.V.E.', and much beloved of John Campbell.

Little did I know that Murray, as a genuine soul fan, loathed the record, and that cover version in particular. "Could you please take this off?" he asked, eventually. Whoops.

Anyway, Satellite Media has kindly offered me five year-long subscriptions to Rip It Up to give away. Just click the reply button below to email me with your name and address and I'll pass the first five on to the proper people. (NB: This offer is closed and wildly over-subscribed. The five winning emails arrived between 10.09 and 10.15am. The power of free stuff, huh?)

Meanwhile, just so it's not all about teh L.E.D.s, Ed Muzik has posted us a guide to the Christchurch electro-indie scene, with links to all the MySpace pages and stuff. Feel free to come up with a catchy name for the scene.

And, as festering burger chains try to own rock 'n' roll, I'm off to The Food Show, because, frankly, I deserve a break for an hour or two.

PS: Wellington readers: another remind about the Hustlle for Autism on Monday night, which will launch David Cohen's book, A Perfect World and my new autism website, Humans, and raise money for the Autism Intervention Trust.

I'm MCing, the Bonnie Scarlets are playing the auction lots include the spiffy one-off wall-hanging of the last ever Hard News radio script, which was purchased by Microsoft for $1800 at the Hustle for Russell and very kindly handed back.

So: that's Monday August 6 at the San Francisco Bathouse,
171 Cuba Street, Wellington from 6.30pm.

We're expecting a good walk-up crowd, but it would help if you were to email rsvp@peadpr.co.nz to reserve $10 tickets at the door, or purchase them at Working Style Wellington, 8 Woodward Street, ph 04 472 2194 or Millwood Gallery, 291b Tinakori Road, Thorndon,
Wellington ph 04 473 5178.

Also, is someone able to lend me a longish (up to 15m) VGA cable for a projector for the evening? I'd be deeply grateful. Get in touch with the Reply button below. Ta!

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Idiotic and lamentable behaviour | Aug 01, 2007 17:45

For Audrey Young, blogging seems to have meant licence to be pissed off the politicians. And she does it so well. Her very forthright post this afternoon followed her Herald story this morning, in which she reported that "John Key says he will sign up to the two-tiered compromise proposal on a transtasman therapeutics agency, a breakthrough that could see legislation taken off ice and passed by Christmas."

But after the story was published, Key released a press statement in which he said:

"Today's NZ Herald story misrepresents our position. The story correctly quotes me as saying 'If they came to us now with that proposal, we will sign it.'

"I was, of course, referring to the Trans-Tasman Therapeutic Goods regime - not the proposal put up by NZ First. I repeatedly made that clear to the NZ Herald yesterday.

"National has never received a copy of the NZ First proposal, to the best of our knowledge.

"Our position is simple: If complementary medicines are removed from the regime, National will support it."

Young, naturally, is furious at being accused of deception. And handily, she has colleagues and a tape recording to back up her case.

I don't know what to make of this. I had planned to write an introduction to today's post along the lines of "You have to give John Key his credit: when he flip-flops, he generally contrives to do so in the right direction."

Until, clearly, he flips back the other way.

Worse, National's position is intellectually empty. When presented with what is a reasonable compromise, on a very important piece of law, it just isn't good enough to ignore the detail and repeat your position. National knows damn well the havoc it will procure by refusing to play ball. And presumably that's the point.

Even if you buy the line being repeatedly pushed by a certain weekly political columnist -- it's all because Annette King is such a cow -- the "it hasn't been presented to us" argument is lame. You read the papers, don't you? Pick up the phone and ask for it.

It is worth noting both that Labour says the compromise proposal was put to national by Michael Cullen. And that Gordon Copeland is on record as having said he'd approached National about it, and been denied permission to vote in its favour.

Also, that Annette King told Young she would be prepared to stand aside from any negotiations if her relationship with Tony Ryall proved to be an obstacle.

And, just as I'm writing this, National Radio is reporting that National is prepared to hold "urgent talks" with the government on the bill, whilst continuing to insist it had never seen the document until five minutes ago.

FFS, is this the way they plan to run a government?

Update: Felix Marwick offered the following helpful information in the discussion for this post:

FWIW Winston put out his compromise option on the Bill about six weeks ago and did promote it to all and sundry as the perfect compromise.

However it turns out he did not show a written version of his SOP to any political party. I did a ring around the week before King put the Government's Bill on hold and was told by every single one of them that they'd not seen it. This includes the Government.

It was seen for the first time this afternoon by National, and the Greens only saw it because Sue Kedgley happened to come into our office as we were reading it.

As far as SOP's go it's not a very substantial one. It's just a smidge over half a page long and had the distinct air of being banged together in one almighty rush.

Am I the only one who finds almost everyone's behaviour inexplicable here?

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A lot of money and a bit rich | Aug 01, 2007 09:42

I'm still not clear on exactly what TV3's plans were when it bid for the Rugby World Cup rights, knowing (they did know, right?) that the three major games would air in the few hours on a Sunday morning when the Broadcasting Act forbids TV advertising.

But Brent Impey has quite a cheek blaming the government for Media Works' own decision to use a loophole that may exempt advertising broadcast from overseas:

Impey has also tackled the Government for forcing TV3 to fly special equipment and staff to France to broadcast the advertisements, a strategy he said would cost the company "tens of thousands of dollars".

"We are dealing with a piece of legislation that is so antiquated and discriminatory towards television that it's farcical that we have to take steps like this, flying equipment over to France, to deal with something the Government wouldn't deal with.

"We had asked the Government to introduce legislation for an exemption for the Rugby World Cup because it is an important event, but the Government took no action so we are going to these additional costs to comply."

In truth, nearly all of us would just wear advertising around World Cup games if it came to it, but it's pretty rich making the top bid then demanding a law change so you can cover it. I await the flood of congratulatory press releases from conservative Christian organisations more used to condemning the government for its godless ways.

Personally, I'm more concerned about the state of the coverage, which will be entirely in the hands of those most eccentric of sports broadcasters, the French. Expect regular arty shots of blades of grass and beautiful women, probably while someone's taking a quick lineout.

And, of course, the big games will be called by TV3's own Hamish McKay, who has been variously described on the local internets as mentally impaired, the worst commentator, the world's largest talking penis, truly retarded and "a person who will feature highly on the 'most despised' list of TV presenters."

On the upside, Grant Fox will be doing comments and Murray Mexted won't.

Meanwhile, some congratulations are in order. To Lloyd Jones, clearly, for taking out the top prize in the Montana Book Awards -- onwards and upwards -- but also to the winner of the best first book prize, Rachel King, who showed grace and good taste in paying tribute to Paul Shannon, the author of Davey Darling. It's a good year when two authors like that emerge.

Big ups also to Otis Mace, who is presently topping the charts at the British-based online store Music Uncharted.

Feel free to note anyone else who needs congratulating.

PS: We're now selling David Cohen's A Perfect World from the Public Address Store. You could also pick up books by myself, David Slack and Graham Reid while you're there. I have some plans for the store, whose fruit will hopefully be evident sooner rather than later.

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