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Tabloid Tale | Sep 30, 2003 09:13
Yeah, I know I wasn't going to mention NZ Tabloid, but I have come into possession of some interesting emails, and no one else seems to have covered this, so this is how they got scammed …
Some of you will recall the brief flap over NZ Tabloid's story about the Prime Minister, in which it was claimed that she had dressed as a "drag king", and, after a few wines, had spoken in the presence of her staff of a childhood ambition for a sex-change. NZTabloid ran this as 'EXCLUSIVE: NEW ZEALAND POLITICAL SEX SHOCK HELEN'S SECRET DESIRE: A SEX CHANGE!'
Bizarrely, it was actually raised at a Prime Ministerial press conference, and even obliquely mentioned on National Radio on the same day. Understandably, it went no further. Which is just as well, because just like Helen Clark's press secretary Mike Munro told NZ Tabloid's David Herkt, it was "fiction … it never happened."
It started like this: Herkt, in response to his standard plea to hear from anyone who had "shagged a celebrity", received an email from a "Simon Jones", a former Parliamentary staffer, apparently, who related a tale that became NZ Tabloid's story. Herkt responded thus:
From an e-mail pile that included photos of John Banks in 1962, odd doings in a drug-dealer's penthouse, information on an actor's genitals, sundry complaints about a recently exposed fraudster, and something Judy Bailey said to someone else in a cafe, I have to say that yours was the best. Really liked the story. And we'll definitely be able to use it.
"Simon" responded with a bit more detail, and what appeared to be gossip about the sexuality of other MPs. But Herkt, who isn't stupid, had noticed some very obvious flaws in the original yarn. The most glaring of which was the repeated reference to Clark aide Heather Simpson as "Helen Simpson". He'd also been unable to turn up the name "Simon Jones" in any searches. Plus, he'd had a flat denial from Wellington, and discovered that Labour's caucus rooms, aren't on the floor that "Simon" claimed they were. Was there anything else that could corroborate the story, he asked? But:
We're probably going to go with the story anyway because we have a denial of sorts, and that itself is fun, but our handling of it will depend on you. Like are you real, Si?
"Simon" replied in a somewhat indignant tone, warning Herkt against asking around too much about his name ("I work in a govt consultancy here now"), adding some more spurious detail, and concluding:
My intention was simply to pass on some words that were heard and exchanged some time ago, which i thought would have been of interest to u. i have little interest in playin any games and fully respect if you delete the emails and story.
But the story ran pretty much as laid out in the original email to NZTabloid. And, subsequently, the group of people (they refer to themselves as "we") who claim responsibility for the scam have circulated copies of the correspondence, along with a covering letter explaining why they did what they did:
It was to test their response and reaction. To see if they would simply be tempted to publish anything without any credible checking or investigation. These crazy invented allegations and suggestions, which would obviously be preposterous to any journo with half a brain and an ounce of noodle, however thought that NZtabloid would bite. And they did.
A number of concerned people over recent weeks have watched with alarm at the type of trash and stories they are publishing, without a care for the people they're taking aim at. We are very disturbed by this. We said 'we'd try and catch NZtabloid out', see how "credible" their checking methods were, or if their motivation was simply to print anything for seeking publicity. NZtabloid didn't disappoint these expectations.
This exercise has displayed that NZtabloid was and is prepared to publish any material that:
- had no basis on fact
- is not proven nor checked
- was provided by an invented name with no parliamentary connection - wasn't properly investigated
- was challenged and laughed at from official authorities
- gave no right of reply nor balance
- the public publishing was aimed to be personally damaging or insulting - didn't care how the "victims" would be treated with such publication
- was hell-bent on putting out nonsense or anything for sheer sensational and shock value
- has consistently showed that they want to attack personal issues and sex-based innuendos
- breaches all codes of ethics and responsible media, publishing and journalism
- has treated the website as a sick 'game'
So that's it. Not my battle really, but entertaining nonetheless. (Lest it be thought I'm picking on them, I should say that I find the police decision to charge Jonathan Marshall, three other young men and a Sunday Star-Times reporter in connection with the video featuring the predatory high school teacher - whose behaviour would not have come to light without their actions - strange and counterproductive. What's going on there?)
Still, it makes a change from Paul Holmes, doesn't it? Speaking of which, is the man capable of making a simple apology without then moving on to his favourite topic - himself? Last night's second try at saying sorry morphed into a promo for his TV show.
He apologised for the Kofi Annan cracks, and the dumb one-loner about women journalists, but his description that same morning of Iraqis as "gypos" (speculating on US troop withdrawal he shrieked "then watch the gypos tear each other apart") has gone pretty much unremarked. Still, I'm for putting this one aside now, and waiting for the Broadcasting Standards complaints to be processed. I'm over it.
Excellent column by John Roughan in the Weekend Herald on hitting kids and that slightly dubious Unicef report. And I'm glad to discover I wasn't the only one who found the statement from Coral Burrows' family on the smacking issue quite creepy. Roughan quotes from the statement:
Most of us had parents who disciplined us by smacking when we needed it and today we respect, honour and thank them for it ...
To the Prime Minister and Government, we don't need or want your help or interference with smacking our children - when they are obedient little angels all the time ... we will stop smacking them.
Hmmm. There's no better means of justifying your actions than to set an impossible condition for stopping them, is there?
I'm also quite impressed with the Herald's P campaign. Like last night's Documentary New Zealand programme on the P epidemic, it is effective because it revolves around the stories of real people rather than politicians' tub-thumping.
The P problem has swelled even as methamphetamine has been reclassified to Class A, and as judges hand out increasingly stiff sentences (prison for small, first-offence cases involving supply). But, as I said what seems like ages ago, this will only be turned around at the community level. P can't be policed out of existence, but it can be made socially unacceptable.
As a psych-nurse friend of mine observed of smoked methamphetamine's addictive properties: "If you have a chink in your armour, it will find it." And, of course, you don't know if you have a chink until you try. Altogether now: not funny, not clever, and definitely not good …
Da Bomb | Sep 26, 2003 12:13
So anyway, I was on my way out the door to record this week's Mediawatch script and my mobile rang. It was my producer, calling from Wellington. Don't bother to go in, she said: they've had a bomb threat and the building's evacuated.
Well, thank you very much Paul Holmes. Radio New Zealand Auckland, as an accident of history, shares a building with The Radio Network, which owns and operates Newstalk ZB. And the hobbit's "cheeky darkie" rant appears to have prompted someone to make the all-too-easy threat of an attack.
We got the recording done eventually, after the police bomb dogs had been through. The hoax also disrupted a major send-off for RNZ's great servant Henare Te Ua, sending his whanau and a cluster of RNZ bigwigs out into the drizzle. And it meant a thoroughly mad morning for the delightful receptionist at the Auckland, Lisa, who goes on maternity leave from today. She's great, and I'm sure I won't be the only one to miss her.
The TRN folk I passed on the stairs seemed, understandably, a bit twitchy, although the sandwich lady certainly had a dry sense of humour.
"I hope there isn't a bomb in there," I quipped somewhat obviously, looking at her basket.
"Nope," she deadpanned. "But it's full of ricin."
Welcome to the modern world. Yes, of course, a bomb threat is out of all proportion to Holmes' original offence, and yes, diversity of opinion is important, even if it does offend. My main objection is that Holmes' effort was just such garbage. Such blathering, self-centred, unprofessional nonsense. Access to a broadcast audience is, in many ways, a privilege, and those of us who get it should be able to do better than that.
So, I'm having a morning of blaming the baby boomers and the unconscious sense of entitlement that some of them seem to carry around. Not all of them, mind: it seems only to manifest in those who have become used to an audience. In a nutshell, they mistake their inner life for the world.
And it's not just the blokes either. I actually read The Female Eunuch as a teenager - probably because the cover looked promising - and I don't doubt that it was a useful experience. But did anyone else see Germaine Greer talking to Kim Hill last night? Truly, she is barking.
The American feminist Katha Pollitt coined the excellent word "solipsisterhood", defined here by Barbara Ehrenreich as "the tendency of some women writers to generalise from their own small store of personal experience into universal pronouncements on womanhood."
So we get Greer coming out in favour of the Catholic Church's position on contraception, and declaring that young women should put child-bearing ahead of a career. She has made many such pronouncements over the years: on everything from the desirability of using cocaine (ie: she had some and liked it, so everyone should), the efficacy of withdrawal as a means of contraception, and the "fact" that men aren't interested in fathering.
In all cases, she simply creates an external justification for what's going on in her head. Often, it's quite entertaining. But sometimes, it's just weird. And it doesn't get much weirder than The Boy, a book of photographs of naked and semi-naked "ravishing" boys, with her text, due for publication next month. News of the book has prompted outrage, and other comments in her defence. But it's hard to regard what she said in this interview - when asked what attracted her to boys, she replied "Oh, everything; sperm that runs like tap water will do" - as anything other than creepy.
Anyway, I dropped in yesterday on the media launch for TV4's forthcoming free-to-air music TV venture, C4, which launches next Friday. I'm really looking forward to this thing. I think the hiring choices have been good - especially in respect of the two top bods, Suzanne Wilson and Andrew Szusterman - and, having seen the schedules, the programming looks right. There's a huge amount of goodwill out there for C4. And frankly, even if you're no fan of music television, you should bear in mind that the fallback option for the new TV4 was a shopping channel. Things could be a whole lot worse than they are.
Strangeness on the radio | Sep 25, 2003 12:36
Clearly, Paul Holmes fancied himself - and his listeners - to be having a laugh yesterday when he launched into his bizarre tirade against that "cheeky darkie", Kofi Annan, on his Newstalk ZB show yesterday. Oddly enough no one seems to have found it funny.
The very good Newstalk ZB website is this morning prominently featuring Holmes' apology for yesterday's comments (Windows Media format). Well, it briefly starts out as an apology and then tips into a stream of self-serving blather about how he, Holmes, loves "all the colours" and is most certainly not a racist.
The section of his show where he made most of the comments, from 7.45am, is here (you'll have to sit through about two minutes of tedious used-car advertising) and it is ... more blather, in this case in a fairly demented tone. (Indeed, it can seem that unstructured blather from the host is the cornerstone not just of Holmes' show, but of much of the ZB daytime schedule.)
If you can't bring yourself to listen, the Herald has a transcript of the Kofi funnies, and further drivel from later in the show, some of it uttered in the course of Holmes' weekly chat with Brian Edwards. It is worth noting that the twice-yearly radio survey period looms.
Radio New Zealand, meanwhile, led its first few bulletins today with the news that a new United Nations report has found New Zealand to have one of the highest rates of using of amphetamines and ecstasy in the world, but pretty much failed to shed any light on the story. Two drug abuse treatment experts, who didn't seem very familiar with the report, did their best in an interview, but it was unedifying.
The New Zealand Herald took a similar angle with its online story.
You might have formed the impression that New Zealand's drug habits were in inch-high headlines in the report, but we're not mentioned in the official press release from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and actually accorded but a single paragraph in the report itself, on page 108, at the end of the section on Australia.
As you might expect, the media in various other territories, from Australia to the Philippines, also led with the news that their countries were leading the world in stimulant abuse. The Voice of America report, meanwhile, highlighted Eastern Europe and Asia.
But anyway, the numbers are there; 3.4% of New Zealanders using amphetamines and 2.3% using ecstasy. That's less than Australia, but still quite high in international terms.
So what's the context? Well, for a start, the report is based on surveys taken in 2001, so the figure for ecstasy is likely to be a little high compared to that right now (ecstasy use is highly cyclical - it tends to swing around every few years as a new social group discovers it), and the methamphetamine number may be low. (Interestingly, the E cycle seems to have been on the upswing in Britain in the last couple of years, and, naturally, so has the attrition rate. Coroners' reports show 202 deaths to have resulted from the something over 300 million doses taken in the UK over the past six years. One in six of those deaths involved ecstasy only. It does happen.)
More importantly, the UN study measures "annual prevalence" - the number of people between 15 and 64 who admit to have used stimulants in the past year. It makes no distinction between the suburban P addict doing burglaries to support his habit, and the commerce student who buys an E for the Big Day Out, so it's of limited use in measuring the impact of such drugs on public health. Headlines on the subject should be thus be written carefully.
It's also worth noting that this isn't the first time New Zealand has starred in such studies. For years, we were the world's champion per-capita consumers of LSD. Feel free to speculate on relevant aspects of the national culture in respect of that.
The actual report is here, as a 5.3MB PDF file. I haven't read all of it, but its slightly windy tone is not untypical of UN publications on illicit drug use. For years, the work of the United Nations Commission on Drugs was coloured by the "advice" of people like the hysterical anit-marijuana activist Gabriel Nahas. In this case, the damning of stimulant use as "an almost acceptable feature of the 'let's-have-fun' culture in clubs and dance settings" by UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa isn't likely to win over the kids.
So, it's a useful report that confirms other studies suggesting that amphetamine use is on the up worldwide, and bringing its attendant problems with it. Just be careful on the moral panic.
Anyway, while we're on reports, a new one from an Otago University group Trust And Country Image: Perceptions of European Food Distributors Regarding Factors That Could Enhance or Damage New Zealand's Image, Including GMOs - adds some welcome clarity to the issue of how the end of the GM moratorium might affect our trade prospects in Europe. It brings together interviews with European food buyers in what appears to be a notably solid methodology. So in a domain where perception is frequently presented as reality, it's well worth reading. The preamble says, among other things:
Highly negative consumer sentiment towards GMOs in Europe seems likely to continue to influence food buyers, at least for the next few years. This negative sentiment appears likely to transfer from GM crops to non-GM and organic versions of the same crop type due to fears concerning accidental mix-up or contamination. However, no evidence was found that presence of GMO food crops in a country causes negative perceptions in general of food from that country. Furthermore, it appears that GM applications in non-food areas are unlikely to damage perceptions of country image in relation to supply of food products from that country.
I got a furious email from John Tamihere's press secretary, Helen Bain, about my observation yesterday that JT defends smacking as "some kind of Maori cultural right". He has, she says, never said that. Very well then: I ought to have said that he seems to give that impression.
In general, I have a lot of time for Tamihere, but he is on record as upholding "the right of parents to give their kids a slap". When the Maori Women's Welfare League and the Children, Young Persons and their Families Service have campaigned against corporal punishment in Maori communities, it's unhelpful for the Youth Affairs Minister to say things like that. Statistics show that 42% of Maori parents regularly discipline their children by hitting them, compared to only 27% of the general population. Take in the disproportionate presence of Maori children in abuse statistics and logic dictates what ought to change.
PS: They're all on the drugs: predictable post UN report soft-on-crime bandwagon-jumping from National's Tony Ryall, and Act's Stephen Franks, and more hypocrisy from Peter Dunne. Not an original thought in any of them, sadly …
Hitting Kids | Sep 24, 2003 11:08
Firstly, isn't it a bit rich for Act and National to accuse the government of "exploiting" the murder of Coral Burrows in musing about a potential change to the law on physical punishment? Should we count the times each party has weighed in on a tragic crime for the sake of political mileage?
More to the point, I genuinely wonder whether Act's justice spokesman Stephen Franks actually believes what he says in this press release. According to Franks, "the law against brutality is as clear as that against murder".
Bill English also rushed out a press release, declaring Section 59 of the Crimes Act, in a slightly odd choice of words, to be "a tried and tested balance between the realities of parenting and the ideal childhood."
These comments are simply impossible to square with the way that juries in the real world have interpreted Section 59, which offers the defence of "reasonable force" to parents who strike their children. As this site notes, the following assaults are among those to have been found "reasonable" under the law.
In October 2000, a judge dismissed assault charges against a Christchurch man, saying he used reasonable force when hitting his ten year old foster-daughter with a doubled over belt.
In February 2001, a jury in Napier acquitted a father of assault on the basis he used reasonable force when smacking his son with a piece of wood. A paediatrician had seen bruises on the boy's buttocks several days later.
In November 2001, a jury accepted that a Ngaruawahia man had used reasonable force when disciplining his twelve year old daughter with a hosepipe which left a 15 centimetre lump with red edges on her back.
There are many other cases, including those of the children who turn up at Auckland hospitals with bruises but whose cases never proceed to a prosecution. Why would the police bother, when clear cases of brutality have failed under the law?
Act and National aren't alone, of course. Both John Tamihere and Willie Jackson have defended hitting children within families as some kind of Maori cultural right. Yeah, right. And it's working so well for Maori, isn't it?
The fact is that Maori, representing 15 per cent of the population, account for nearly half of all convictions for offences of violence (Pacific Islanders are similarly over-represented). Maori, especially children, are also disproportionately the victims of violence. We all express righteous indignation when some Islamic cleric declares that it's culturally okay for a man to assault his wife; yet are we to hand out a cultural free pass here? (This is, of course, the way that domestic violence used to be handled - the police would determine that an incident was a "domestic" and leave well alone. That doesn't happen any more.)
There are, of course, other factors at work. And, frankly, the Coral Burrows case, which involves abduction and a murder charge, is a rather poor one on which to argue for a law change. But it seems absolutely clear to me that something has to be done about Section 59, because its real-world effect is to legitimise assaults on children within the family that would be unacceptable in any other sphere.
So if the removal of the defence is politically unacceptable - in deference to the fears of middle-class parents who think that the police will burst through the door to arrest them if they smack a child's bottom - can we please do something about it? Could we, perhaps, amend the law so that assault with an object is banned, or attempt to better define what "reasonable force" means?
Have I ever hit my children? Yes, the very, very occasional smack over the years, in an acute situation (for example, to short-circuit some back-seat battling that was becoming a hazard to the safe operation of the family vehicle). I suspect there aren't many parents who haven't done that. And that's not what a change to the law would target. Indeed, it's misleading to say a change in the law is about "smacking" as most of us understand it at all.
Would it work? I can only note that the schools my children attend - where there is no corporal punishment, and welcome innovations like student mediators - are markedly less violent places than the schools I went to. (Actually, my high school abolished corporal punishment before I got there. I once had a conversation with the deputy principal in which he marvelled at the way that it had reduced violence and conflict throughout the school.)
Anyway, a good speech on the subject by Dame Sylvia Cartwright, who points out that the law provides the family dog with more explicit protection from assault than it does the family children.
Andrew Gilligan might have offered his mea culpa (see Wide Area News on the new Mediawatch website) for overplaying his story on Downing Street's weapons dossier, but there's no doubt whatsoever that the public interest has been well served by the investigation that his reporting provoked.
I think that the most recent of the elisions, exaggerations and alterations to the substance and language of the dossier to have been revealed is possibly the worst. The Hutton Inquiry has heard that the phrase "Saddam is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat," was replaced with the words "Saddam is willing to use chemical and biological weapons, including against his own Shia population."
The problem, as documents released to the Hutton inquiry reveal, is that Jonathan Powell, a senior aide to Tony Blair, realised that by any logic, the original statement was an argument against invasion. So it was changed. The dossier was never intended to give British citizens a true and balanced picture, but to back the case for a war that had already been mandated. It's just a shame that someone had to die for this to be made plain.
On a cheerier note, Michael Davidson of Obscure Pixels has been back in touch with a little more info about the Sportronic
I've rescanned and uploaded a few more Sportronic brochures, etc, including the back of the poster. These mention the system was "awarded Designmark for technical excellence".
I think the one you have must be a Sportronic 4, the model released before the one I have images of - this just lacked the light gun functionality.
Datewise these were produced late 1979->1980. I have sales/warranty slips for one purchased 17/12/80 - so it was a Christmas present for some lucky person.
There were a number of different NZ companies producing TV Games around this time - I've got 1/2 a dozen different locally produced versions, the plans for making these were widely published in amateur Electronics magazines from 1976 onwards.
Some background about the chip that was the "brain" of this system is here.
Odd little bit of obscurity - the light gun design is identical to one Jane Fonda uses in Barbarella. It's vaguely visible here.
I've got a number of these systems and they still all work 20 years on!
Jolly good, although I'm still hoping there's a story behind Sportronic TV Ltd, and its owner, the Spectrum Group. Did they crash and burn, or just wither away?
Sportronic in Beige | Sep 22, 2003 11:19
So Adam, who's a dustie, had had the intuition to cut open a bag he'd lifted and save the Sportronic 4 from oblivion. The rotten old batteries were replaced, Simon knocked up an RF lead and - yes! - we had a working model of New Zealand's own games console.
I can vaguely remember the Sportronic from when I was at school in the 1970s - I think some rich kid must have had one. Michael Davidson, keeper of the very cool Obscure Pixels site, has an original poster, and another one here, although it's not clear whether he actually has a working example.
Adam's Sportronic is a different model from those in the posters - it's beige all over, and offers four different Pong-style games: Solo, Squash, Tennis and Soccer. You can toggle bat size and the speed and angle of the bounce of the ball. In actual gameplay, there is but one control: a knob for each player. There are no handsets, so you're up close and personal when you play head-to-head.
We found that the Soccer game was easily the best. The rear and forward "players" have different roles. Your back man needs to cover the angles, while your forward needs to get up and in your opponent's face. Achieving both with a single knob is fairly challenging, especially after a couple of beers, and we had some excellent matches.
The Sportronic was built by Osborne Professional Electronics, for Sportronic TV Ltd, a division of The Spectrum Group, 82 Symonds Street, Auckland. I couldn't find any record of Osborne Professional, but both the Spectrum Group (founded 1966, wound up 1992) and Sportronic TV Ltd have been struck off the New Zealand Companies register. Intriguingly, Sportronic TV, founded in 1976, wasn't removed until last September.
Does anybody have any more of the story? New Zealand's own games console is a fairly significant item of Kiwiana - especially with the beige thing - and I'd love to know more.
Firing up the Sportronic was an excellent way to follow up watching the Warriors' nail-biting 17-16 finals win over the Canberra Raiders, and we stayed up rather late in the house on the hill over Wellington.
I was in the capital on account of an invitation to address the New Zealand Skeptics' conference; no small commitment given that the night before I'd been at the bNet New Zealand Music Awards, which, with the exception of a somewhat iffy PA system (there was plenty of it, it just didn't seem to project much), was yet another riotous and robust celebration of local culture and the bNet ethic. Scribe and the D4, as you might expect, really rocked the house. I'm seriously looking forward to their new albums.
So, after wisely passing up on the awards after-party, I got myself to Wellington the next morning (it wasn't easy), and did my speech, which I'll post once I've updated it with my last-minute jottings and maybe added some links.
The Skeptics themselves were lovely: a mostly older crowd, often from scientific backgrounds, many of them attending as couples. They have a little bit of an image problem - which might in part be put down to their past media spokespeople - but they struck me as very decent people who like to ask questions rather than taking things on trust.
There's the odd light shade of autism present (and, with autism in the family, I can say that in a loving way) and I was pinned against the wall in earnest discussion for the entire 30-minute coffee break that followed my speech, but that was okay.
I stayed around for the address by Lynley Hood, author of the book on the civic crèche case, A City Possessed. Hood is someone with a headful of facts, and not a natural public speaker, but the day's concluding presentations, from Victoria University's Maryanne Garry and her graduate students, were absolutely riveting.
It can be difficult to grasp the idea that anyone, child or adult, can "remember", in detail, something that never happened, but the series of presentations on various experiments with memory, involving both children and adults, showed quite how easily that can happen. Factors that can produce such memories include repeated interviews on the same topic, interviewer bias and the sidelining of or failure to accept "incorrect" answers. All of these factors appear to have been at play in the conviction of Peter Ellis.
The great problem is that false memory is forensically indistinguishable from real memory: it can't be reverse-engineered in pursuit of the truth. There was discussion of the fact that real abuse does occur, and it's neither ethical or viable to go back to the old practice of regarding children as intrinsically unreliable witnesses. The only thing you can do is strenuously avoid practices and conditions that tend to produce false memories.
I can't say Peter Ellis is innocent - I simply don't know enough about the case. But I do feel confident in saying that the "no new evidence" objection to a sweeping review of what went on in Christchurch is a red herring. I do believe that the crèche case, from the original complaints, to the interviews, police conduct and the use and selection of expert witnesses, needs to be examined from top to bottom. It's important, and I don't believe that anyone who sat through the presentations I saw on Saturday would believe otherwise.
The road to weirdness | Sep 19, 2003 11:03
Who'd be a Californian? Larry King's interview last night with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who would be Governor of the golden state, would have filled no sensible person with joy.
Arnie, as you might expect, knew his lines well enough. But they tumbled out in the most arbitrary fashion. He knew all about "the ordinary life" he insisted, droning on about his work for the Special Olympics, that had taken him to Africa to meet Nelson Mandela. Arnold, a quick word: ordinary people don't fly to Africa to meet Nelson Mandela.
"I'm against partial abortion and, er, all those things …" he explained in an attempt to place himself on the moonscape that is modern Republican Party thought.
He's also thunderously against fiscal deficits - which at least aligns him with the sector of Republican thought that isn't stark raving mad - but provided little or no clue as to how he'd balance California's budget without raising taxes or cutting services. And King was too busy trying to empathise with the big guy to put the obvious question: If running fiscal deficits is so bad, and the people doing it are such idiots … what's your view on the White House these days?
Actually, I don't dismiss the possibility that Schwarzenegger's combination of profile, motivation and raging egotism might be useful in the top job, but it's an indictment that these can only be found in a populist screen actor.
The big problem is that California is so far down the road to weirdness that I don't think anybody really knows how to turn it into a conventional, transparent economy. And I'm puzzled that no one else seems to be making this point: that even if he can win Arnold is going to have hell's own job setting any budget at all. Thanks to the state's requirement for a two-thirds "supermajority" in the state assembly on fiscal bills, even the Democrats have struggled to do that - and they have a majority.
It was nice, then, to tune over later in the evening to find Kim Hill interviewing Nandor Tanczos. I disagree with him on a number of issues, but he came across as a serious, articulate young man capable of having a debate without cue-cards.
And at least he has something other on his mind than flimsy allegations of corruption. In recent weeks, we've had Opposition claims that all public sector CEOs are bent, the police are bent, the Prime Minister's Department is bent, and, now, the Speaker of the House is bent.
The stupidest story of all was the "cover up" alleged in this Star-Times front-pager. I'm sure Rob Muldoon would have approved of the micromanagement of the public service, but the rest of us ought to be past that. Yes, perhaps Shane Ardern ought to have been ticked off, rather than prosecuted, for his tractor stunt, but really. Who'll be the first to turn up in a fetching new tinfoil hat, then?
So the telecommunications commissioner's inquiry has come up markedly in favour of local loop unbundling. The Herald's Chris Barton is well pleased.
But the market appeared to be expecting something else - as was I in the conclusion of the analysis I wrote for the current issue of Unlimited magazine. There's quite a stoush to come between now and 2005, when unbundling is proposed to come into effect, but, assuming that the recommendations stay essentially in place, you can expect some rather better deals from your telecommunications providers in the next few years.
Jane Kelsey kindly dropped me a line to advise that she has addressed the trade issues I discussed this week in her last newsletter from the WTO meeting, Reflections On Cancun: Where To From Here?
It's wordy and occasionally obscure, but, it must be said, better than the NBR's bizarre back-of-a-fag packet "editorial" this week, under the title Bye, bye WTO. It's a demonstration of the increasing tendency of elements of the right and the left to converge on the issue of multilateral trade rules - albeit for very different reasons. But, hell, is this the standard of analysis we can now expect from our leading business weekly?
As it happens, I also drew a parallel between the WTO and the UN, in a recent column for Unlimited, which focused on shifts in perception revealed in the Pew surveys. Feel free to read the whole thing, but here are some relevant paragraphs:
The new report uses previously unpublished responses from the earlier surveys, and adds a round of questions about the war in Iraq, the war on terror and global governance. International perceptions of the US, especially in the Islamic world, but almost everywhere else too, have flagged in the past year. But in almost every country where a previous benchmark was available, confidence in the UN has also reduced. So has support for the kind of ties embodied in NATO …
… But, happily, there are things we can all believe in: "People everywhere are united by their desire for honest multiparty elections, freedom of speech and religion and an impartial judiciary," says the report. There was guarded but consistent support everywhere for global trade. Indeed, the very countries that anti-globalisation activists tell us are hurt by free trade were the most enthusiastic. Sixty-seven percent of Nigerians thought global trade had a "very good" impact on their country, and 62% of Pakistanis — compared with only 21% of Americans. African countries were the most enthusiastic about the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank and they had a better opinion of big US corporations than Americans did.
The danger, perhaps, is that trade and economics might become as fractious a battleground as democracy has been lately. In Argentina a loss of faith in the market model (not entirely unreasonable under the circumstances) has been accompanied by a collapse in confidence in institutions in general, from the IMF to trade unions. As they pursue their newly unilateral policy on trade, America's leaders ought to ponder the dangers of a world where nobody believes in anything but their own gods.
Anyway, that'll do. Check out Cursor.org for dozens of interesting stories. I've got paying work and a Skeptics' speech to finish before I can make the dread journey to Takapuna for the bNet Awards tonight. Now that will be fun …
Affectations | Sep 17, 2003 10:27
The New York Times has a backgrounder on Lee Kyung Hae, the Korean farmer who committed suicide last week as a protest against the WTO meeting in Cancun. Lee's action was hailed by Jane Kelsey in one of her newsletters from the meeting. But some context is useful here: South Korea imposes tariffs of more than 100 per cent on 142 farm products.
As a result, South Koreans pay four times American prices for rice, and farmers from developing countries in Asia are cut out of the market. This is the system that Lee was defending with his death.
Lee's case is sad, but the contention from Kelsey and others that poor countries should pay the price for a relatively rich, industrialised nation such as South Korea to delay social and economic change is simply wrong. If South Korea can play hardball on farm trade, why can't Europe and the US? How on earth can Kelsey square supporting Korean farmers with locking out the farmers of the G23 countries that represent the developing world?
There's an answer of sorts in the Pew Survey of Global Opinion. This analysis indicates that support for anti-globalisation protestors is strongest in rich countries, and belief in the benefits of global trade itself is strongest - by far - in Nigeria and South Africa. There are nuances galore, but it's not unreasonable to see WTO-bashing - especially when it's as confused as Kelsey's - as an affectation of the residents of rich countries; comfy left-wing academics in particular.
Writing in the Herald today, Simon Duffy of World Vision also climbs into the anti-capitalists:
Opponents of "corporate globalisation" will be celebrating after the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun. Few will share their joy.
The collapse jeopardises the WTO's development round, and every hour that an agreement is delayed means more unnecessary suffering in poor countries disadvantaged by skewed trade rules.
You don't have to be a free-trade disciple to want the development round to succeed. It's not about unfettered globalisation, it's about rebalancing rules that favour the rich and undermine poor countries.
Oh, and it's handy that I can have a kind word for Denis Dutton in the same week as the Skeptics' conference: his Herald column about the malleability of memory - especially with respect to the Peter Ellis case - is useful.
Philip Matthews' blistering feature on the never-ending story of Joel Hayward's thesis is perhaps the best thing in the local print media this week, but The Listener is making you buy the magazine to read it. Never mind: Diana Wichtel's gobsmacked review of Big Night In is available online.
Staying on the theme of TVNZ's bold new age of entertainment, I'm struck by the bitterness with which people seem to approach it. I've had email from people who seemed to hate Pam Corkery purely because she is - or was - there.
The Herald has some similar letters today, including one from a woman who seems to have transferred her entire stock of self-loathing onto TVNZ. That's what living in Howick does to you, I guess.
And am I the only person who thinks that Mike King Tonight didn't entirely suck? When it got past trying to be a carbon copy of Letterman, it actually had its moments. King should look a little harder at Letterman, get more writers with better jokes, and lose the puerile asides and gags about Nicky Watson's breasts: they don't work and nobody laughs. But you can't kill every telly baby at birth. I'm for letting this one live a little longer …
Wham, bam, thank you Pam ... | Sep 16, 2003 11:08
Yesterday, TVNZ announced that The Last Word was no longer. The Pam Corkery-fronted newstalk show would revert to a 30-minute news format and there would be "no further statement" on the matter, from anyone.
The question is, was The Last Word the first New Zealand media feature to be rolled by bloggers? On Friday, National Party staffer and long-term local Internet identity David Farrar made a post to his blog which included a transcript of an promo interview on Newstalk ZB, with Corkery talking to host Larry Williams - and making some fairly tasteless (and not very funny) cracks about September 11 victims. "Even now," thundered Farrar. "I am furious and can not believe that she remains on air after this appalling broadcast."
The transcript was picked up by NZPundit's newbie Grant Tyrell, who declared that "this goes beyond Corkery however and directly to the government. A government with its PC charter and use of TVNZ jobs as kickbacks. Worst [sic], as state owned broadcaster, Corkery's comments will be interpreted as the NZ Government's position overseas.
"Clark must act quickly to distance NZ from this reprehensible women [sic] and apologise to the US - and this time the public must see the text of the apology."
At which point, of course, it all became more than a bit silly. A New Zealand government diplomatic apology for Pam Corkery? For something she said on a station owned by Americans and an Irishman? Because there is an imminent danger that her comments will result in the perception that the New Zealand government's official position is that September 11 victims should be reassembled and coated in shellac? Hello?
This sort of exaggerated response from the political right - the very people who bitch in the same breath about "PC" - to any perceived slight relating to September 11, Iraq, etc, etc, seems, frankly, a prodigious manifestation of political correctness in itself.
All this rolling around wailing and gnashing on behalf of people they will never meet, and who will never hear the original comment anyway. I can only presume that these folk wouldn't enjoy their own opinions being similarly scrutinised for offence.
Anyway, Farrar, who was, I'm sure, genuinely affronted, wrote his letter to Fraser and Ralston, and it's not unreasonable to assume that horror (or at least embarrassment) at Corkery's act of tastelessness was enough to bring the whole thing a halt four weeks early - The Last Word clearly was not set to return after the Rugby World Cup coverage.
The shame of it is that a good late-night newstalk show remains a bloody good idea for that slot, it's just that The Last Word wasn't that show. TVNZ can reasonably be expected to have a few misfires with such programming initiatives. TV3 can happily fill its evenings with reliable, lookalike SVU-CSI-Law-and-Order crime-porn, but the public broadcaster is obliged to take a few risks.
So the problem isn't the odd failure - it's the absence of any hits. Big Night In seems like a turkey, and Edwards At Large went off the rails as soon as Brian Edwards started to give the impression that it was all about him. Tip: find someone under 30. Or even 50.
There seems to be no point in approaching TVNZ for information given the "no further comment" decree, but I'm happy to receive email from anyone who thinks I ought to know something …
The Man in Black | Sep 15, 2003 12:23
Would that we all could go out like Johnny Cash. It almost defies belief that a man who was on hand for the genesis of rock 'n' roll could have spent his last decade making work as moving and relevant as anything he ever did before.
The American Recordings series, four albums composed largely of Cash's interpretations of other people's songs, mark an extraordinary creative flowering. Remarkably, he had already been gravely ill by the time he recorded volumes III and IV, Solitary Man and When the Man Comes Around. Mortality is suffused right through the latter.
The songs that Cash and Rick Rubin chose for those records were dizzingly diverse: from Egbert Williams' century-old whimsy 'Nobody' all the way across the spectrum to his devastating reading of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'. What united them was the way that Cash made each song his own; often making their authors' original recordings (Neil Diamond's 'Solitary Man', U2's 'One') sound simply irrelevant.
In the liner note for Solitary Man, Cash wrote:
"The song is the thing that matters. Before I can record, I have to hear it, sing it, and know that I can make it feel like my own, or it won't work. I worked on those songs until it felt like they were my own."
There have been literally hundreds of stories published over the weekend, and oddly enough, the Guardian captured the mood as well as anyone, with a potted bio and a nice little piece by Nick Cave, whose 'The Mercy Seat' was recorded by Cash and who collaborated with Cash on the last album. Rolling Stone has a brief story from November last year.
Cash was recording again with Rubin when he died, so perhaps there is a little more in wait for us. But one of the great American lives has come to a close.
The WTO meeting in Cancun has apparently collapsed, but the moral victory appears to have gone to the group of non-Western nations, who, for the first time, got the developed bloc on the back foot. Over the weekend the Europeans blamed the Americans ("They're behaving like the Soviet Union in the Eighties.") and the Americans blamed the Europeans. An American negotiator attacked the credibility of the Group of 21, which didn't stop Turkey joining to make it the Group of 22. And the Europeans are bitched about being called to account. Where next? Who knows? But it now seems to be a different world.
The worst outcome would be a swing away from the multilateral forum at the WTO and towards new bilateral deals, where the US in particular can pick off potential trading partners one by one. The anti-globalisation protestors demanding "agriculture out of the WTO" might want to be careful what they wish for.
The billions that the US will spend on farm support this year will only worsen the country's extraordinary fiscal deficit. The New York Times looked at who will actually carry the can for the Bush administration's faith-based economics:
When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents.
Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known
The US national debt clock is worth a look. And Cam Pitches tipped me off to this graph, which puts the $87 billion bill for Iraq in a very stark context.
Anyway, to end on a happy note, what about those Warriors? You don't often see the game of rugby league played the way they played it on Saturday night. When you thrash the title favourites 48-22, you have to be doing something right …
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