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I feel your pain, Parekura | Aug 29, 2003 12:19
I feel sorry for Parekura Horomia, whose absence from the house was so prominently noted the week. He has apparently had treatment to relieve fluid retention, dropped five stone in weeks, and suffered a consequent attack of the gout.
It's generally difficult to perceive any great emotion beyond the fluent bureaucratese that Horomia usually speaks, but he sounded bloody angry in the House yesterday. As well he might.
As an occasional sufferer, I can testify that a serious attack of gout is a shit of a thing. The last time I had a proper one - it's hereditary, honest, and I only cop it large every couple of years - I was on my own in a hotel room in Wellington, and I woke up pretty much whimpering with pain.
As it happens, the goat has come to visit me this week, and it's entirely my fault. Chad and I and one or two other people of good cheer supped on Tuesday evening with Mr Atkins of the British Council, who is as much of a gentleman as anyone I have met. He called for a bottle of the Porter's pinot noir, and then another one - they only had a magnum left -and I wound up drinking a glass and a half.
Drinking red wine is something I shouldn't do, because it fairly reliably brings on a touch of gout. Indeed, the Porter's is the reddest of red wines and would probably ensure your passage to Hell if you drank enough of it.
So I still have little gouty razor pains shooting around my feet and wrists. But it could be worse. And the wine was fabulous. Sometimes, you just have to do the hard yards, don't you?
Anyway, this private weblog from a member of staff at Canterbury University provides an interesting - and robust - alternative view to the prevailing wisdom about the case of Thomas Fudge.
And, just to finish on a happy note, if you skated in the 70s - or since - you simply must check out Skatopia '78, The Summer Years, the new website for Andrew and Phil Moore's work-in-progress documentary on the South Auckland skate park that symbolised the 70s skateboarding boom. It's a kind of homegrown Dogtown and Z-Boys, and they've already found some extraordinary and long-forgotten film from the era. You should get in touch with them if you have information, pictures or film funding.
Righto. I'm out like bell-bottom trousers …
Surging across the spectrum of news | Aug 28, 2003 11:55
Media coverage of the Corngate select committee inquiry continues to fascinate - and to offer the Opposition a priceless platform from which to embarrass the government. In Parliament yesterday National's Nick Smith yesterday tabled a December 2000 memo to the Prime Minister from her policy advisor Ruth Wilkie, which, he said proved that Helen Clark was "donkey deep" in the deliberations over the possible GM release.
Well, no it doesn't - the receipt of an update from her advisory group isn't impossible to square with Clark's depiction of herself as "chairman of the board" - but it does indicate she was taking an interest.
Smith is correct to say that documents further suggest that the officials were toying with what Steve Price dubbed "legislation by press release" in proposing a tolerance limit that breached the zero-tolerance standard of the HSNO Act, an idea that was eventually abandoned. (Interestingly, he seemed to say that National would have looked favourably on the idea of amending the act to allow a tolerance standard.) He also had a case for saying that the act's precautionary principle was not followed in the light of this passage:
The outcome of the work over the last week is that we cannot say we have reliably discovered contamination in the corn currently planted, but equally we cannot say that we have completely discounted it.
But the main political problem is that the memo was among a handful of relevant documents not included in the pre-election document dump in July last year, when the Prime Minister had promised that everything would be released.
The decision has been owned up to by the chief executive of the Prime Minister's Department, Mark Prebble, who has cited a convention that such policy advice is recognised as confidential under the Official Information Act. Prebble presumably exercised this convention under the last National government, but it's a grey area, as this useful 1998 address by Dr Judith Aitken indicates. Whether the PM's promise ought to have overridden the convention is open to question.
Would the prompt release of this memo have changed the result of the election, as Smith is claiming? Extremely unlikely. There was equivalent material in the big document dump, and the public had extracted whatever revenge it was going to by polling day. Smith can claim with hindsight that he would have been in like a robber's dog, but the idea that it would have made anyone switch their vote to National, Act or New Zealand First is hard to sustain.
National Radio has made more of the story than other media, and both on yesterday's Checkpoint and today's Morning Report - where Smith, Prebble and the reporter Catherine Ryan appeared in succession after the 7am news - done an excellent job of explaining it. One News led with it last night, with a good report by Fran Mold. But TV3's coverage continues to be, um, odd.
Having wildly overplayed the Hardacre story on Monday and been obliged to retract on Tuesday, 3 News held this one back till the second segment and twice said that the documents had been "released" yesterday. No, they were tabled yesterday. They were released last November (to Steven Price, for his Metro story, I'm assuming) and Prebble discussed them in the select committee last week. (NB: see the PPS below.)
Continuing a theme of spectacular ill-timing for the government, the select committee inquiry is taking place just as the GM issue heats up again as the end of the government's GM moratorium approaches. It's worth noting that this debate is going on in many other places, including Brazil, where the congress seems wildly split, southern Africa, where a team of African scientists has just come back with a report concluding that GM foods "pose no immediate risk to humans and animals", and even the Vatican, where the Pope is apparently gearing up to give the green light on biotechnology in agriculture. British Nobel Prize laureate Timothy Hunt has declared that we eat manipulated DNA virtually every time we put something in our mouths anyway, it's just that we only object when a scientist, rather than some other element of nature, is doing the manipulating. Scientists at the University of Bonn have isolated the gene which enables plants to survive droughts.
In the new Biotech Unlimited, Simon Terry of the Sustainability Council provides a welcome break from the neo-religious certainties that seem to be crowding the anti-GM side of the argument (and the letters columns of the Herald), by arguing, simply, that whatever benefits GM technology adds to farm production will be ruined by massive resistance to trade. But Lynne Hartley says our strict regulation is already killing biotech research in New Zealand.
Oh, and from the main part of the magazine, here's my reading of the local loop unbundling debate.
Anyway, moving to the other end of the news spectrum, I confess, I hadn't considered the possibility that NZ Tabloid's "exclusive star confession" from Flipside presenter Mike Puru, of which I made jaunty mention on Monday, was entirely invented, but that, it appears, is the case.
I understand that Mike was approached at the TV awards by Jonathan Marshall, and told Marshall he didn't want to speak to him. He received a subsequent call the following night and again told Marshall to go away. Whatever was said, Mike clearly didn't believe he was giving an interview, let alone an "exclusive".
The joke's over now, I think. This is getting sick. And perhaps it's time for the Sunday Star Times to explain its relationship with Herkt and Marshall, and why they get vetting rights on the stories the paper writes about them. The Star Times' editors might also care to comment on the persistent bar-talk that they asked Marshall to go out and fetch whatever dirt might be available on Bill Ralston.
Marshall himself (in an email rather ironically titled "factual error") tells me had had no involvement whatsoever in getting the dodgy teacher tapes to the Star Times. That's not what I was told via a reasonable source, but it's what he says, so ...
Meanwhile, in the mad, mad world of Bush administration economics, the IMF has slammed the American government over its out-of-control budget deficit in the same week as word has been relayed that the White House will seek tens of billions of dollars more to support its out-of-control operation in Iraq. This is also, of course, the week when the number of American soldiers killed since "major combat" was concluded exceeded the number who died in the actual war. Bummer.
PS: David Herkt has been in touch with the following:
I was with Jonathan at the AFTA Awards when the conversation took place. Mike did not tell Jonathan to go away. He approached Jonathan. He told Jonathan that he was going out with Jodie Rimmer. Jonathan said 'Oh, come on, Puru". Jonathan also introduced Mike to me.
The phone call(s) between Puru and JM were clearly done in an interview context. Puru was TOLD it was an interview. He OK'd the quotes. We had several other quotes but he would not let us use them. One we could use but didn't was about his 'bad boy reputation'. Ho hum.
Sunday Star Times? Well you'd best deal with them on the matter. I can tell you JM did NOT provide the tape.
Whatever. I wish I hadn't mentioned it, even in jest, because it all seems so damn dumb and inconsequential. Perhaps we should replace the GM moratorium with a JM moratorium.
PPS:This just in from Steven Price:
Yep, you're right to say that the Wilkie protest letter (and Prebble's response) and the two memos to the PM were released to me in November. I wrote about them all in the February Metro article. I feel like I'm living in some weird parallel universe. (What's more, in my weird parallel universe, Marian Hobbs just admitted to the select committee that she hasn't read Hager's book, nor did she even read the relevant documents assembled by the officials when Hager's book hit the shops -- because she didn't want to corrupt her memory of what happened. Please beam me up.)
Gone missing | Aug 26, 2003 10:47
I despair sometimes, I really do. We heard yesterday from the Corngate select committee inquiry that the Prime Minister consulted her brother-in-law, a crop scientist, when she was first alerted to the possibility of an accidental GM release in November 2000. What we didn't hear - because no one reported it - was the evidence of arguably the single most important figure in the whole affair.
Yes, Russell Poulter, the Otago University geneticist who advised the government that there was no good evidence of GM contamination in seed test results - and thus played a crucial role in the decisions that were subsequently made - appeared before the select committee for an hour yesterday. I understand that TV3's reporter stayed for about 10 minutes of that hour, and TVNZ's left about five minutes later. [NB: I have discovered since this morning's post that this isn't correct - see the PS at the bottom of this post. RB] So far as I can tell, no news organisation has even mentioned that he was present. This is simply astonishing.
Even if you believe that Poulter is a knave, a fool, or both, his evidence was, by any measure you care to apply, of vastly greater significance than that of the PM's brother in law, Allan Hardacre, a peripheral figure who had no official role, relatively limited expertise and no access to official information, including test results. You would have to either not understand the story, or not want to understand it, to make the news judgement our media made yesterday.
3 National News, which had previously skipped lightly over the committee hearings, piled in on the Hardacre story, placing it high in its bulletin, with a live link to reporter Stephen Parker, who described his evidence as "compelling".
There is certainly some news value in Hardacre's appearance, not least because he was new to the picture. His evidence also indicated that, at least when she was first notified, the PM took a personal interest in the problem.
But the TV3 report ran close to misrepresenting what Hardacre said: his opinion that "the genie was out of the bottle" was actually a general one, and related to his belief that a tolerance level for GM presence was inevitable. As anyone familiar with the case will know, the issue of a tolerance threshold - or not - is quite important, but that was apparently too complex to be pursued. (To be fair, I'm now listening to a Linda Clark interview in which that point is being teased out.)
The chief executive and lawyer for the Ministry of the Environment - again, major players - also appeared yesterday. But nobody reported what they said either. This simply isn't good enough, and I do think TV3 has a greater duty than anyone else to keep faith with the public process that its own report set in motion. Otherwise, why bother?
On another tip altogether, the new Unlimited magazine is out, with my music industry story in it. I'm pleased with it, but this is the kind of yarn where you cop it less for what's there than what's not. So, sorry if you're not in there. I did 13 interviews, and only got in a fraction of what they produced. Quite a few people I didn't even get to. No Hayley Westenra or Nathan Haines, no Adam Holt or Michael Glading. Maybe next time.
Oh, and I'm happy enough to link to NZ Tabloid now that they don't have any children mixed up in the muck (their lack of archiving is also a wise move). Big news for this week - Mike from Flipside is doing it with Jodi Rimmer but admits he swings both ways! - plus a little more on the site's main public-interest news story so far, the possibility that one or more MPs who voted against the Prostitution Reform Bill are in fact keen customers at brothels. Even here, the utility of the gossip approach is pretty much over. Either someone's actually going to name and shame or it's over.
By the way, Jonathan Marshall, who clearly has a working relationship with the Sunday Star Times, helped broker the transfer of the videotapes that formed the basis of the paper's "rogue teacher" front-page lead on Sunday. A fee was sought initially, but the paper refused and, in the interests of doing the right thing, the two young men involved co-operated with the paper anyway. My understanding is that we haven't yet seen the half of the story of Takapuna Grammar's accounting teacher, David Arthur. Nasty.
PS: Mark Sainsbury from One News has been in touch with the following. I apologise for the error:
Russell… I despair sometimes too….. I don't usually respond to criticism of TVNZ but in your Gone Missing column you said you "understand that TV3's reporter left after ten minutes of that hour, and TVNZ"s left five minutes after that." I guess that must be a misunderstanding as my reporter Fran Mold stayed for an hour of Russell Poulter's evidence and only left when the committee was supposed to finish (12:30) because of a previous commitment. In fact Russell was there for and hour and a half. She then returned for the afternoon session. It's a small point but given the time Fran spent in there she's right to be grumpy at being lumped into the couldn't be bothered category.
Blood, fury and concussion | Aug 25, 2003 11:12
Blood, fury and concussion. Terrible injuries. A mob baying for the head of the authorities. And that was just the rugby league.
The Warriors won their way through to the NRL finals yesterday, when they conquered the Brisbane Broncos in what I think was the most brutal game of rugby league I have ever attended.
Yes, there was the all-in brawl, triggered after Monty Beetham objected to being carted several metres towards his goal-line and dumped on his back. It must be a little difficult to explain to your young son that fighting is bad when half the stand is on its feet cheering, but at least no one was claiming that this particular rumble was going to stop youth suicide or something.
And anyway, the greater part of the carnage was within the rules of the game. Richard Villasanti's thunderous hit on Shane Webcke effectively put the world's best prop out of the game - even after Webcke tottered back onto the field he wasn't scaring anyone.
And then, about 120 seconds after Bill Harrigan had cleared up the brawl and sin-binned four players, the Broncos' Brent Tate slipped going into a tackle and caught Fracis Meli's forearm flush on the forehead. His head jerked back and you could hear the slap halfway up the stand. He didn't get up. Christ, I thought, this is really violent.
I wondered what the immigrants - quite a few Indians and Pakistanis, from little kids to little old ladies - who come to Warriors games these days must make of it all. Still, they get what they come for: a sense of community. The Warriors crowd is a broad and accepting church. If you turn up, you're in, and you have something to talk about at morning tea on Monday.
Having finally lucked a home game when it wasn't raining, the Warriors also played the kind of footy that makes people come and see them: a wild, brilliant passing game that, but for late fumbles, could have delivered them two or three more tries. It was all the more remarkable that they did so without Lance Hohaia, whose season was ended by a knee injury three minutes into the game.
It's a good thing the Warriors appears to have a steady stream of clever little playmakers, because the attrition rate is something awful. But the tiny 18 year-old Thomas Leuluai, who really should still be playing reserve grade, stepped up in quite remarkable fashion. (He is also, according to my old friend, who's enjoying his footy even more since he came out, "drop-dead gorgeous".)
It was while Hohaia was being carted off that it became clear that the Lion Red Guy was going to be a major problem. Rule One: never give a man with nothing to say access to a microphone and amplification. Yet here he was, down in front of the "Red Zone" blathering on at high volume while play continued, kicks were lined up and tries were scored. When he couldn't think of anything else say - which was most of the time - he'd just bawl "smash 'em!"
It got funny during the break when a couple of likely lads jumped out from the crowd in his absence and started distributing his Lion Red t-shirts. The crowd warmed to them in a way they had not warmed to Lion Red Guy, but a couple of cops - ex-English Bobbies by the look of it - were obliged to wander up and restore order.
The merchandise was clearly very important to Lion Red Guy. So much so that he later shaped up to start a fight with one father who helped himself to a cap for his son (frankly, having had to sit in front of the PA system for the whole game, they deserved their money back and then some), and the police were obliged to intervene again. It's a shame they didn't do everyone a favour and arrest Lion Red Guy. Anyway, assuming that this will trigger some media-monitoring alert for Lion Nathan: people, this incident did your brand harm. Fire the bum, and, ideally, don't replace him. It's about footy, not some idiot with a microphone.
Anyway, the New Zealand Herald has gone DigiPoll crazy in the past few days, measuring Maori mood on the foreshores (away from the iwi fundamentalists, Maori sentiment is more favourable to the government's compromise), and public opinion on Ahmed Zaoui (50 per cent of the sample wanted him thrown out, even though no one making a balanced reading of the evidence would think he was a terrorist) and genetic modification, where it appears that the public mood has shifted as the end of the government's moratorium looms.
As previous polls have shown, the response you get from the public on GM has a lot to do with how you phrase the question, but the government does have a job of work to do in building public trust and, frankly, has probably left it too late. It's also probably too late to push Marion Hobbs sideways, but her public representations on the issue seem increasingly problematic. This is a ministerial gig that needs to be in the hands of someone with absolute command of the detail - perhaps as a rite of ministerial initiation for David Cunliffe - not a blurter.
The problem is that no one will really know how well the system works until it is working. And the risk is much less in the science - which hasn't moved a hell of a lot since last year - than in foreign consumer sentiment, which Erma does not seem to be very well set to assess.
The government can't go back on the moratorium deadline - it would be political madness to allow GM to hang on as an election issue, after what happened last time. And the debate is not helped by the kind of idiots who are dropping pictures of sheep with human faces in people's letterboxes.
But the government's professed caution will be on trial in the most acute fashion from now on, not just when the moratorium lifts but for the year or so it will probably take for the first application to go through the approval process and be approved or declined. It's hard to escape the feeling that everyone would be happier for now if Erma just said "no", if only to prove that it can.
The earth moved | Aug 22, 2003 13:06
Nature's grand flourishes are great when no one gets hurt. Thus, we can all feel a bit excited about New Zealand's biggest earthquake in years.
It would be a good day, then, to visit one of the veterans of the New Zealand Internet, the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences. If you felt the quake, you can tell GeoNet about it.
This has to be the most stunning example of missing the point on the cannabis debate all year. United Future MP Judy Turner has revealed in a breathless press release that "Wellington tinny houses are offering their cannabis clients free or heavily discounted samples of the highly addictive drug P to get them hooked.
"It seems to be a growing practice. They claim to have run out of cannabis, then offer P as an alternative at a huge discount. And then when they have them hooked, up goes the price."
Well, yes, this has been going on for a while. But Turner's conclusion is that that this "proves" that cannabis is a "gateway" drug. No it does not. If you could only acquire, say, sauvignon blanc, by going to a clandestine gang house where you were subsequently offered P and became addicted, would that make sauvignon blanc a "gateway drug"? No it would not.
One of the better arguments for cannabis decriminalisation is that it ought to be separated at source from the hard drug trade. This has been the philosophy behind the Dutch approach, and it appears to have been effective. Turner is welcome to rebut that argument. But if anything, she seems to be arguing that marijuana and methamphetamine should continue to be available from the same handy one-stop shop. Maybe she needs to lay off the coffee or something.
Unfortunately, good-faith approaches on the pot issue seem to fall on increasingly stony ground at United Future. Peter Dunne's rude and insulting response to a pretty reasonable letter from Green Cross is, frankly, quite appalling. Dunne can, and should, make amends by apologising to Greg Soar.
Reasonable questions in the course of a rather skewed analysis of the foreshore situation by Richard Prebble.
On the other hand, a nonsensical press release - and by golly, he's had his share lately - from Act's Ken Shirley, who objects to Kofi Annan's perfectly accurate observation that it is the coalition forces' job to ensure security in Iraq. Frankly, if it isn't the occupying power's responsibility, whose is it?
An alternative view, as you might expect, from NBR's David Cohen on the Malcolm Evans affair.
While the UN is staying, the World Bank is bailing out of Baghdad for the time being.
The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough has a revealing report on exactly who is behind the Iraqi resistance is, and it's not al-Qaeda or Saddam's old guard.
A rather good English-language Iraqi newspaper, Iraq Today, has relaunched and gone online.
The Atlantic Online points out that only eight more US soldiers have to die in Iraq for the toll in the "war after the war" to exceed that of the war itself.
There's an excellent thread on Slashdot sparked by a story on DARPA's thinking on, among other things, completely new chip fabrication technologies. Moore's Law isn't a law, it's a self-fulfilling observation, okay?
Oh, and as noted, Goldenhorse are playing a free gig to make up for the debacle at Galatos when the PA blew up last Saturday. I don't think I can go, but you're welcome to turn up in my place.
Creeping chaos | Aug 21, 2003 12:11
Phew. WTF is up with this Sobig.F worm? I don't think I've ever seen so much virus traffic in a 24-hour spell. The virus gaily spoofs "from" addresses, so there's no way of telling where it actually came from, but at least I know it's not from me.
No sir, my Mac-using ass is not prey to Windows viruses, which is nice, but no guarantee against being caught in the crossfire, especially given that I operate a number of fairly widely-known email addresses. Sobig has spoofed a hardnews.co.nz address somewhere, so I woke up to about 200 bounce messages from autoresponders all over the world. As The Register is currently pointing out, someone needs to turn those fucking things off. They're part of the problem, not the solution.
Unsurprisingly, SoBig.F has just been declared the fastest-spreading e-mail virus of all time. Meanwhile, the Blaster and Nachi network worms are creating so much traffic that part of the Internet backbone are slowing down. Wired has a story on the virus invasion.
And just to add to your creeping feeling of infrastructure collapse, check another news story from the Reg crew:
The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant personnel that the network was protected by a firewall.
As we say in my country, bugger.
Anyway, Rumsfeld looked scared, Bush was, as usual, as real as Mickey Mouse, and Kofi Annan was incredible. On BBC world last night, I watched all of Annan's press conference at Stockholm airport, en route to New York, and the transcript, while worth reading doesn't really do it justice. Shattered and sombre as he was, the UN secretary general spoke strongly and beautifully, in flowing, balanced sentences.
Compare it to Bush's comments (Lord forbid the President should actually front up to a press conference occasionally), which are full of the usual cant, and the punishing, ugly syntax of Rumsfeld's Iraq answers at his presser in Honduras. Given verbal articulacy as a measure of intellectual performance, who would you rather have running the world?
Electronic Iraq has two essays from Voices in the Wilderness human rights activists, one Irish, the other Muslim-American. Sobering isn't the half of it.
As news of the UN bombing broke yesterday, it might have been easy to overlook quite how grotesque the bus-bomb attack in Jerusalem was. No matter how much bad faith has been displayed by Sharon's government in the last month or two, nothing justifies that. Nothing. It is, however, quite some cause for cheer that the Israeli government is, for the moment at least, holding off on a revenge attack.
On account of having a life, I haven't actually seen any of Brian Edwards' Edwards at Large shows on Saturday nights, but it appears that Mr Edwards is due for an order from on high to sit down. His invitation to appear to Rodney Hide might have been alright had Edwards done so merely to show that his programme really was a light chat show. But Edwards seems to have run very close to using his show to pursue a personal argument. He should stop, before someone else stops him.
Oh, and here's a good news story concerning New Zealand, in an Australian paper, that was virtually ignored here. A bit more detail on Mediawatch on Sunday …
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