Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Truck Off, etc | Jul 04, 2008 10:47

The trucking companies have done a magnificent job of getting most of us to cheer for their right to shift road maintenance costs off their bill and onto ours. I don't claim to entirely understand it, but over at that haven of deep thought and reason, the Herald's Your Views pages, people are lining up to back the truckies.

The paper's editorial advances the view that there may well be a sound case for the increase in the road user charge, but if people are being irrational and unreasonable, then that's the government's fault.

At any rate, the Road Transport Forum has done a magnificent job of organising a nationwide protest in 48 hours (anyone who thinks that Tony Friedlander and his chums might actually have done some advance planning for the increase they knew was coming some time this year is clearly a cynic) and of avoiding any detailed discussion of the size of the actual increase.

As the Herald editorial notes, Annette King says the Forum's own study indicates that a 10% increase in the RUC (which is rather less than that recommended by officials) adds up to a 1% increase in annual costs, or an additional $500 a year for a five tonne truck that travels 100,000km. Friedlander hasn't explicitly denied that analysis, and he was so evasive about actual costs in conversation with Sean Plunket this morning that Plunket eventually just cut him off.

But the thing that occurs to me is this: although the impact of the truck blockades has been notably uneven (Great North Road was almost empty at 8.30 when I dropped the boy at school), there will be small businesses which have dropped the additional annual cost of the RUC in just one morning. No one will be compensating them. (For everyone's sake, I hope there wasn't someone trying to get to hospital past the all-lane blockade the truck drivers put on the Southern motorway around Greenlane.)

But that doesn't matter. Because my unfocused sense of grievance and resentment is worth more than your fancy facts and numbers any day.

Anyway, cheerier things for a Friday. There are embedded clips and links for the 48 Hours festivity here in OurTube.

You could join the global celebration of independent music on Independents Day by purchasing the limited-time Independents Day compilation for only $19.95 from Amplifier (it features local artists including Tiki and Shapeshifter, plus four from Britain: Prodigy covering the Specials, the Charlatans covering New Order, Devendra Banhart covering Oasis, and the Infadels covering the Raconteurs).

At the Independents Day site, there's also a public poll where you can choose your personal top 10 independent albums since 2000.

You can even place a bid in the Independents day auction on eBay.

On the local front, it's all brought to you by Independent Music New Zealand.

Also, I've finally worked through my pile of bonus downloads at eMusic. If you were interested in joining eMusic -- monthly subs start at $US11.99 month for 50 tracks -- then you could email me and I'd do the tell-a-friend thing and get 50 free downloads. (You'd still get the usual freebie introductory offer.) Excellent releases to arrive there recently include the Ladytron album, the simply gorgeous new record from The Watson Twins, and a big swag of quality back-catalogue reggae and jazz releases. And, if you want the inside of your skull scrubbed out, Fake Blood. All in DRM-free high-quality MP3 format.

Also: Spare Room catches Telecom making shit up again. The happy company in that new TV ad doesn't exist. Ana also has some choice links.

Jack White joins Beck onstage for a cover of '99', Barbara Feldon's ode to her own character in Get Smart. Freaky. There's an MP3 here.

And, finally, Hamilton's very own robot band The Trons have become an internet sensation. Truly, this is good news for hard times …

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More light than heat | Jul 03, 2008 10:28

I watched this week's Media7 about the media and drugs this morning (I was out Drinking Liberally last night) and I'm really pleased with it. It's in the nature of the hosting role, particularly given the way we try and pace the show, that I tend to have to watch it back to remember exactly what was said and how.

But I think we got this one right. It would always be nice to have longer to talk, but Ross Bell's final point was well made. We're revisiting the 32 year-old Misuse of Drugs Act this year, at the same time as the United Nations is embarking on a first-principles review of its own approach to illicit drugs. We owe ourselves an intelligent, honest debate about this: the usual mantras and the drive-by scare stories won't do it.

We thought there might be some fireworks out of sitting Greg O'Connor and Tanczos together, but, as seems to often be the case, we got more light than heat. When you see the two of them exchanging cards during the break, you think, well, that can't be bad.

Anyway, be my guest and watch. The ondemand version is here, the podcast is here, there are Windows Media clips here, and of course there's our totally worldwide YouTube channel.

The Media7 blog has some relevant links, including to a discussion of the drug harm index we should have had, and to a compilation of Montana Meth Project scare ads, if psycho-horror movies are your thing.

I can also say that the show is travelling well: so much so that you're not going to get rid of us for some time to come (not that I am suggesting, dear readers, that you do want to get rid of us). It's a pleasure working with everyone involved.

But one continuing disappointment: the New Zealand Herald's refusal to engage. The paper's editor, Tim Murphy, told our researcher Sarah Daniell this week that "it is just not a priority for us to spend time chatting about stories on another medium" and that "by and large the paper will let its stories speak for themselves."

The policy isn't targeted at us: it's rare that anyone else can get Murphy to answer a question, and his refusals are polite. But I wonder what his response would be if TVNZ or MediaWorks refused to speak to Herald reporters on the same basis. Anyway, we'll keep politely asking the question every time it's relevant. You never know.

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You want some politics? I've been somewhat appalled by both major party leaders in the past couple of days. Clark's attempt to slime Key in the House yesterday was unpleasant, counterproductive and inaccurate. And Key's own evasiveness over, well, pretty much everything this week has been equally unattractive. Talking to Havoc this morning on the radio, he was effectively invited to demonstrate that he was his own man, rather than the spin doctors' creation. And what did he do? Burped out a string of message lines about himself. He actually said "I'm ambitious for New Zealand".

One despairs.

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But hasn't the weather been good? Not in the sense of being fair and pleasant, but certainly in the sense of being interesting. Yesterday's storm over Greymouth sounded like a cracker.

I popped along to the Greymouth webcam in the hope of a lightning shot, but there wasn't one. No matter: I thought these two images were almost magically pretty:

Just before dawn.

And just after ...

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Mo' Indexing | Jul 02, 2008 11:01

Reading the news, a person could be forgiven for thinking that New Zealand had the world's second-highest rate of cocaine use. Hardly. Zealand was second for lifetime incidence of cocaine use amongst the 17 countries covered in Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys.

But our cumulative lifetime incidence of 4.3% for cocaine is not only far behind the US (16.2%), but well behind the rate for countries not included in the WHO survey, but for which good data exist. Britain, for example, and Italy and Spain.

Cannabis is a different matter: we're genuinely right up there: behind, again, the home of the War on Drugs, which leads the survey in substance abuse. The Netherlands, whose liberal drug policies attract the ire of the prohibitionists, has less than half the lifetime incidence of cannabis use of the US, and one eighth the rate of cocaine use.

As the authors put it: "countries with more stringent policies towards illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies."

Other points of interest: rates of lifetime use of tobacco and cannabis in New Zealand are converging (51% vs 42%); use of all the drugs covered in the survey was linked to higher personal income everywhere; drug use is increasing everywhere; and, at 12,790 the New Zealand sample for the survey was far and away the largest for any of the 17 countries -- does anyone know why this is?

This is the kind of turf we're covering in Media7 tonight, Freeviewers. I'll link to the online video tomorrow morning.

And one thing that didn't make it into the show but popped out of the research: the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs has advised that another substance be added to Schedule 4 of the Misuse of Drugs Act -- the slot formerly occupied by BZP.

That being salvia divinorum, the special-interest psychedelic herb that has been sold unrestricted in New Zealand for several years now. Assuming Schedule 4 isn't simply being used as a holding pen for prohibition, this is a good thing; especially now that the MoH finally has some proper guidelines ready: the most important of which is presumably an R18 restriction on sales.

All bets are off, of course, under a National government. Whatever people think of Anderton, he does listen to evidence. I don't think the same can be said of National's would-be drug tsar, Jacqui Dean.

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And to another kind of index altogether: the Atlas of Socioeconomic Deprivation in New Zealand, which visualises Statistics New Zealand's index of socioeconomic deprivation.

There a smaller versions of the maps on the Herald site, and large PDFs at the MoH page for the Atlas.

There are some fairly obvious quirks (how do you measure the socio-economic status of Mechanics Bay, where no one lives?), but the maps show Counties Manukau to be a more variegated place than Michael Laws (or Bill Ralston, who should know better) would have us believe.

Just as interesting as the maps are the researchers' notes, which warn against mistaking measurements for underlying reality, and then very frankly state:

The NZDep projects are, of course, not value-neutral. NZDep is informed by a public health action philosophy, incorporating, among other things, a commitment to a fair distribution of society's benefits and wealth and community mobilisation as a means of achieving social change. NZDep was created by health researchers with three specific purposes in mind: for use in resource allocation formulas; as a tool for community groups to advocate on behalf of their constituencies; and as a research tool. In short, it was created as a tool for public health action. It is in this respect that this edition of the atlas adopts DHBs as the mapping framework, but by including the data CD we implicitly recognise there is more than 'one deprivation landscape', so empowering users to explore alternative deprivation geographies.

An important, and perhaps more covert, aim of the maps was to introduce into policy and planning an easy way for people to see inequalities – to make more visible the socioeconomic divisions that characterise our society. Insofar as the maps have the capacity to shape people's understanding of our social fabric, they are intended to challenge policy makers and planners to see afresh the divisions in our socioeconomic landscape, and to 'de­ normalise' our sometimes uncritical acceptance of these divisions. The most important inequalities have, in many respects, become so familiar to us that they are invisible. They have become normal features of our social landscape, and as such often fail to register. Our social radar screens are attuned to picking up abnormalities.

However, as is clearly illustrated in publications such as - Hauora: Maori Standards of Health IV (Robson and Harris 2007), inequalities are not abnormal in New Zealand; rather they are an aspect of the national landscape that we live with and, for the most part, tolerate.

Take that!

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Improving quality by cutting service | Jul 01, 2008 10:40

Fairfax Media is making appropriately soothing noises about its plan to "review" the positions of as many as 50 sub-editors on its stable of print publications, but the equation is clear enough: it aims to improve quality by cutting service. That service being a quarter of its local sub-editors.

The plan -- for the moment at least -- is to create "subbing hubs" or "centres of expertise", where world and business news and feature pages are prepared for the use of all Fairfax newspapers. Executive editor Paul Thompson is promising that local and sports pages will stay with their respective papers, and that those papers will stay under the control of their editors.

One the face of it, this is a less-bad move than APN's move last year to sack 70 subs and outsource a great part of their work to the third-party company Pagemasters, which has been a disaster for the staff who remain and now have the additional task of rescuing their employers from Pagemasters' work.

But the pleading of hard times for newspapers is a little hard to swallow given the bold noises David Kirk made about Fairfax's New Zealand business (not just Trade Me rolling on, but a solid "recovery" in the print business) in announcing the company's 2007results.

It's tempting to suppose that Fairfax looked at APN and thought ""well, they got away with it …"

Even this month, Fairfax's Australian parent was talking up the company's position, and announcing a major new online newspaper initiative in Western Australia.

Still, at least Fairfax is acknowledging that some fool dropped its plans onto the company intranet, rather than blaming The Invulnerable Secret Super-Hacker With Da Mad Skillz. National is again implying that it's not a leak, it's a cyber-crime. Really.

(Also, I can confirm that the tip that led The Standard to an interview last year in which John Key appears to tell a porky about the party's use of Crosy/Textor did not come from the Beehive. Or even Wellington.)

For Aucklanders, Steve Abel has the lowdown on what you can or can't put in those big new recycling wheelie bins.

Mr Litterick provides a helpful guide to the requirements of becoming a nuclear weapons state -- preferably without boiling one's liver -- and also wonders why a prospective attack on Iran isn't considered more of a news story.

A ZDNet blog says just enjoy Steve Jobs while you've got him.

And, finally, I popped along to last night's launch of the New Zealand Science Media Centre.

The centre is being run by the Royal Society, the successful tenderer for MORST funding to provide sound, timely and useful science information and support to New Zealand media.

I think they have the right people: former Herald technology writer Peter Griffen is the centre's manager, and Idealog publisher Vincent Heeringa chairs its board.

Among the centre's activities will be the development of a database of competent scientists who will be available to journalists, and media-train them where necessary. In some cases, it will also publish attributed quotes for use in breaking news stories.

I told Peter last night that Public Address would be delighted to source guest blogs via the centre, and I hope that starts to happen sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, via the new website, Landcare Research scientists may have settled the mystery of the kiore's arrival in Aotearoa.

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"Evil called: Can you make a meeting at 11?" | Jun 30, 2008 08:46

Oh cool. National is using Crosby/Textor again. According to a Star Times story by Nicky Hager, the political strategists that focus groups are most likely to associate with the word "evil" have been on board with the John Key project from the beginning:

Straight after becoming National Party leader on November 28, 2006, as he was publicly distancing himself from the Brash years, Key contacted the firm and asked to meet them in person. A week later, on December 7, he had a trip scheduled to Australia paid by the Australian Government to meet government ministers. He asked his staff to change the schedule to include a meeting with Crosby and Textor in Canberra and quietly signed up the Australians to work for him. National under Brash had hired Crosby/Textor for only 10 months before the 2005 election; Key hired them for the full two years leading up to the 2008 election. Their focus: his personal profile.

A sense of perspective is worthwhile here. Political strategy is a cynical business by its nature. Labour's people were not appealing to higher ideals when they ran the "slippery" campaign against Key this year. Even the Greens once (in 2002) hired themselves an electoral shitkicker from Australia.

And when Hager says that "the detail of Textor's advice to Key remains secret," well, yes of course it is. Much as we'd love to know what component of the Zeitgeist had its seeds in a memo drawn up in Canberra, we're not going to.

I'm not sure if the same principle extends to the fact of National actually hiring the company. National has declined to respond to a written question about the party's use of Crosby/Textor. Crosby/Textor's clients do not tend to brag about the fact that they have summoned its sulphurous presence, but a straightforward question warrants an answer.

According to Hager's book, The Hollow Men, Don Brash flat-out lied to New Zealand Herald journalists when asked about National's use of the firm (something the paper has been jolly sporting about since, it must be said). By his account, it fell to Hager to forward the Herald journalists a copy of some 2004 party board minutes that "made it impossible completely to deny that the company was involved in the campaign."

Richard Long is said to have subsequently advised Brash to try and avoid answering questions about the firm; and, if pressed, to fudge. So it will be interesting to see what Key's response is if it's put to him. I am assuming it will be put to him, on camera.

As it happens, the Herald's editorial voice has turned impatient with respect to Key. This morning's leader, referring to last week's small burp of imprecision over New Zealand history, says:

If this seems a small thing, the position he seeks is not. A Prime Minister should not depend on the public's ability to presume what he meant or did not mean and finish his sentences for him. His political opponents certainly will not give him the benefits of any doubts, and nor will the media. Their job is not to presume anything and to expose any shortcomings he may have. And he will be running against an incumbent who speaks exceptionally clearly.

Whatever opinion may be held about Helen Clark's utterances, she seldom leaves the slightest doubt about their meaning. Off the cuff, she is quick, considered and concise. Head to head in the campaign, Mr Key will have to match her. If he has not sought some tuition already, he ought to do so. Verbal precision is not only vital in the job to which he aspires, it is a useful mental discipline too. Loose talk bespeaks muddled thought.

Quite. Key can take on all the message discipline the experts can provide; it will likely win him the election. But it won't save him afterwards, and it's hard not to feel, as you hear Key meander and "y'know" his way through unscripted interviews (in general, the longer the interview goes, the more likely that his concentration will dissipate), that he'll get creamed if and when he has to answer the really hard questions as Prime Minister.

PS: This week's Media 7 should be a goodie. We're discussing drugs and the news media with a panel comprised of Ross Bell of the NZ Drug Foundation; Police Association spokesman Greg O'connor; and Nandor Tanczos. If you'd like to join us tomorrow evening at The Classic in Queen St, hit "reply" below and let me know.

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