Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Yes we canny | May 23, 2008 10:11

Amid the clamouring punditry over the tax cuts, it's worth noting a few parts of yesterday's Budget that aren't up in headlines. Special education gets a desperately-needed boost with an additional $18.4 million over four years for students with high needs.

This warrants some explanation. There are only two funding categories for special needs students: "high needs" and "very high needs". What funding generally means is funding for teacher aides in the classroom, providing relief for teachers and help for the students concerned. Criteria have tightened as demand has outstripped resourcing in recent years, to the point where parents of kids who could really benefit from support can't get it. It's those people this will help. And not before time. I still think the whole area, especially as regards autism, needs a more substantial rethink.

Also, the New Zealand Music Industry Commission, which has existed (and been pretty useful) on year-by-year funding since 2000, gets $4.8 million in new baseline funding over four years. This is an arrival: the commission is being funded alongside the rest of the public culture establishment, if at a much more modest level. And it's well-deserved.

And, of course, there's the broadband … David Cunliffe has secured an additional $325 million over five years-- a much smaller sum than the number National has come up with, but one which will be distributed through an established, contestable process. Same strategy, a fair bit more money, in other words. As Ernie Newman points out, there's plenty of detail in the announcement.

Newman also pronounces himself disappointed. This isn't as novel or ambitious as National's grand plan. It's also much more realistic and far less vague. It works now, without an epochal reorganisation of the entire communications sector.

Which is better? InternetNZ is philosophical. And it has announced its plans for an independent assessment of the respect offerings, exploring which is the better fit for New Zealand. How wholly useful of InternetNZ.

And as for the headlines? I like Gordon Campbell's word: canny. He also notes:

Are there fish hooks in the economic data ? You bet. If National does win the election there is a nasty surprise flagged (p 39( near the end of Cullen's speech. The out-year spending allowance has been lowered to $1.75 billion from Budget 2009, and as Cullen says " this will be a hard target to meet, requiring re-prioritisation efforts." You bet. In other words, if Cullen is being Santa Claus in 2008, he plans on reverting to skinflint Scrooge next year if re-elected - and if he isn't re-elected, Key is probably going to have to cut public services to pay for this year's largesse. By how much ? Well, that's flagged on page 155 to the tune of half a billion dollars in each successive year to 2012. Very neat. National has been set up to be a one term government.

I can't help but think that Cullen could have delivered these structural changes to the tax system three years ago, in happier times. He's traversing the edge of responsibility doing it now, but the spoils, especially to families, are not to be sniffed at (for a party allegedly in the clammy grip of the gay mafia, Labour has been very bloody generous to the breeders in the past four years).

Will it restore to family budgets the cash that has flowed out in higher costs for food, energy and interest payments? No. And the idea that it is the government's duty to shelter people from every global economic trend with equivalent tax cuts -- so popular in the news media -- doesn't actually make sense. (Although it would be ironic if the tax cuts induced the Reserve Bank to maintain interest rates at the current high level for another six or 12 months.)

According to John Key, we may have to wait until only four weeks out from the election for a look at National's tax policy. In political terms, success for Labour will not be closing the poll gap, but squeezing it enough that National feels pressed to announce some policy (any policy) sooner than that.

PS: Feel free to take up the offer in the ads from our new buddies at Eden Coffee. We're hopeful that there'll be a bit of coffee to toss around to y'all this year.

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For Young and Old ... | May 22, 2008 10:06

This week's Media7 looks at concerns about teenage girls being sexualised in the media, with reference to the Miley Cyrus and Zippora Seven controversies.

We also had a look at New Zealand's biggest (181,000 readers) magazine for teenage girls, Girlfriend -- and were a bit shocked at what was in a issue whose reader of the month is 13 years old, and which was announced in the editor's blog with a cheery "Hi girls, how were the school holidays?"

It wasn't that sex was mentioned -- clearly keeping it a secret doesn't work -- but the reckless quality of some of the advice, and the general why aren't you having sex yet? vibe. Who needs peer pressure when your tweeny mag is doing it for you?

Woman's Day editor Sarah Henry disagreed and thought it was the same as the Dolly magazines she read as a lass. She was on our panel, along with Pebbles Hooper and Stella editor Emily Wilson, who kindly stepped in at the last moment.

The ondemand version is here; Windows Media clips are here; the podcast is here and the video will be here on the YouTube page real soon now. There are also some good links in the blog.

On a completely different TV tip, I was persuaded by our producers, Top Shelf, to take part in another show, called The Sitting. The idea is that Stephen Marty Welch interviews people while he paints their portraits.

I went in to the SOCA gallery last night for my "reveal". I liked it; it makes me look quizzical. And I liked Marty too. The series will kick off on TVNZ6 next month, I think. Other subjects include Tiki Taane, Jan-Marie, Kevin Milne, Pam Corkery and Mike Hosking.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts has a significant programme of Maoritanga underway, including a photographic exhibition of moko and a visit from the Kahurangi Maori Dance Theatre of New Zealand at the end of this month. There has been some press. And last month the LA Times ran a feature on ta moko.

Chris Bourke goes retro-fiesta on EMI New Zealand:

For EMI men it's been Mo-vember ever since the legendary 1973 staff conference held at the Chateau. Cold Duck flowed like water, but it wasn't a good leg opener as the girls all turned up in dungarees. Blame Linda McCartney ...

The photos are a delight. Chris also wrote a magnificent tribute to the late Robin Dudding.

And speaking of lateness and The Listener, I enjoyed Matt Nippert's story in the new issue about the new thinking about funerals -- as in doing away with the things altogether and having a proper party to celebrate the life that's been lived. Matt interviews Kevin Ireland, whoe wife died late last year, her memory celebrated by hundreds of people, with lots of food and drink. It makes sense to me.

The story also mentions our own experience here, farewelling Finn Higgins, as an example of the recent phenomenon of virtual memorials.

So, without wishing to hasten anyone's passage, I thought it might be nice to talk about it amongst ourselves. Which you are welcome to do here at Ways to Go …

PS: David Slack is our man in today's Budget Lock-Up. He'll report on the scene tomorrow …

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The Secret Code | May 21, 2008 10:17

One of the more entrenched prohibitions in politics is that against uttering the bleeding obvious. When Phil Goff granted last night on Alt TV that there was a "prospect" of his party losing the general election this year, he was, certainly, traversing the obvious. It is implicit in any genuine election that there is the prospect of someone losing.

It would, of course, be more accurate to say that given current polling and bearing in mind the lessons of history, there is a likelihood (but not a certainty) that the New Zealand Labour Party will not gather enough votes to form its fourth government on the trot.

Should that be the case, it's a given that Helen Clark will step down and explore other employment opportunities, most probably on the international stage, and Denis Welch will have a tidy conclusion to the Clark biography he is writing. And, to the surprise of no one at all, Phil Goff will seek to convince his colleagues that he is the best choice for the vacant party leadership.

Goff didn't say that in conversation with Oliver Driver: he merely acknowledged that as the "underdog", Labour faced "a prospect" of defeat and granted that, should that prove to be the case and if Helen Clark subsequently stepped down, he might be interested in the leadership. He also held out a "good chance" that the public might yet recognise the "substance" offered by Clark in comparison to John Key.

To which the political news media responded: OMG! He used the secret code! and set about behaving as if something had been said that no one could possibly have foreseen. Such is the dance.

I wonder if Goff fell prey to the unfamiliar environment in this interview. It happens to politicians sometimes, when they're not talking to members of the club; when questions are differently, more frankly, phrased -- and answered. For all the furious punditry of the last 24 hours, it actually seems fairly unikely that that he would have actively chosen Alt TV as his stepladder to history.

This isn't to bag Alt TV at all -- it's a scoop for them, if one that Ben Thomas had to point out yesterday in NBR. See if you can find the touting in Alt's own press release about the interview. Driver has even said the comments were overplayed by other media.

Goff's subsequent failure yesterday to withdraw the code and strongly insist that he has never even contemplated the top job -- to, in other words, say something that no one would actually take seriously -- offered further licence. In a story under the preposterous headline Goff switches on the clobbering machine, Audrey Young explains the secret code today:

"There is no question about leadership at the moment," he said yesterday when questioned about his pre-recorded television interview.

A seasoned politician who wanted to end discussion about leadership would usually give such an answer unconditionally, without qualifications such as "at the moment".

These things are as much a construction of the media themselves than of politics, a fact that journalists are duty-bound to ignore. Hence, Tracy Watkins intones this morning that the comments are "likely to spark damaging leadership speculation." But where? Oh, right: in the news media.

Labour will be thinking that its fortune is outrageous at the moment, if not in the Goff code breach, then in the unravelling of Mary Anne Thompson's credibility. That could have happened at any time since 1990 -- imagine the fun if Thompson had been shown to have invented her PhD from the London School of Economics when she was made special economic advisor to Treasurer Winston Peters in 1998! -- but it has happened now.

But for all the clattering, the Clark government has its house in far better order than the Shipley government did in may 1999, and National is nowhere near making the positive case for government that Labour was then. The fudge-and-smile nature of National's one big-ticket item, the Big Broadband Promise, demonstrates that well enough.

On a luckier day, Michael Cullen could probably have made more of the IMF's cautionary words about tax cuts, but it's not that day. Nonetheless, even though an MP has uttered the secret code on a pop channel, they'll just press on.

But one more thing: just as there is an implicit "prospect" of any party losing a general election, so there is a "prospect" of Goff losing a leadership vote amongst his colleagues. It would be rather cruel if, like Hillary Clinton, he turned up with his impeccable credentials to discover that his time had passed.

PS: A belated plug for the launch of Drinking Liberally, the Wellington incarnation of the popular international franchise that blends liberal politics with a few cold ones. It kicks off at 6pm tonight at the Southern Cross Tavern in Abel Smith St and the guest speaker is Nandor Tanczos. I'd be there if I was in town.

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Shooting for the Moon | May 20, 2008 11:51

I happened to talk to Someone In A Good Position to Know yesterday about the cost and scale of National's plan to bring fibreoptic cable to 75% of New Zealand homes within three five years of work commencing. The answer was not equivocal: at least six years from commencement at a cost of $6 billion.

By far the greater part of the cost (up to 80%) is in the works part: digging up the streets. The advantage of Telecom's cabinetisation initiative is that there is ducting from exchanges to nearly all cabinet locations. Past the cabinets, you're digging up every street in every suburb.

So I have a bit of a problem with Maurice Williamson's cheery assertion yesterday that everyone else is wrong, and we'd only be talking $2.5 billion, plus another $500 million to connect businesses. Making a total cost of $3 billion, which, handily, implies the private sector matching National's promised contribution dollar-for-dollar.

Williamson justified his estimate to Tom Pullar-Strecker by reeling off the cost-per-house for similar projects in such places as Amsterdam, Stockholm and Seoul. I'm not sure such comparisons are wise. Housing densities in Europe (let alone Seoul) are much higher than here. And, importantly, those places have access to a large pool of skilled, mobile labour.

We don't. Even for Telecom's cabinetisation project, Downer (the contractor to Telecom's operationally separated access network division, Chorus) is scrambling for every hand it can get. It's both training and bringing labour into the country. According to my advice, the 75%-of-homes project implies 200 fibre teams working five days a week for six years.

Cost? Let's assume that we're talking about passive optical networks, which employ a loop across which all users contend for bandwidth, rather than an active or "star" network on which every user has dedicated fibre.

We'll assume that not because it's better (it is considerably more limited), but because it's cheaper, and it's the way fledgling residential fibre is currently being built here. It's possible that splitters could be installed in the cabinets currently being installed by Telecom, with each household getting dedicated fibre from there, but you're talking about extra cost.

Williamson further justified National's costings with reference to Verizon's massive (18 million homes) FiOS project in the US, where he said cost-per-house is down to $NZ2158.

Woah. What Verizon is doing it pretty amazing. But the markets are nervous about returns and, so far as I can tell, Verizon is able to cut its costs because it's increasingly using existing coaxial cable to connect the passing fibre to the home. In many cases, it's also not undergrounding fibre, but stringing it from existing poles.

Further, Verizon uses its network exclusively and is relying on revenue of up to $US200 a month from each household and, probably, from TV operators. Returning a similar investment via wholesale revenue from an open-access network on which retail operators have to make their dollar too is another matter altogether. And remember, that number above is cost per house, not cost per subscriber. It would be perilous to assume 100% uptake.

To his credit, Williamson has given a much clearer steer as to the nature of the investment vehicle for National's project: it's the New Zealand Institute's FibreCo, by whatever name. Operators large and small would have the ability to take a stake alongside the government in the big company that builds the network.

We need to accelerate the deployment of fibre, initially to the node, and to the premises where there's demand. Where copper expires, naturally, you replace it with fibre. Ditto for new subdivisions (this is already happening, but I'd like to see someone other than Telecom doing it).

But I still don't buy the numbers on the Great Leap Forward. I think the building of fibre-optic cable infrastructure will perforce be piecemeal, incorporating copper technologies such as VDSL (if your cabinet is close, you might expect 50Mbit/s from that) and it will take a lot longer than National says.

I'm still a shoot-for-the-moon guy regarding fibre. But I'd prefer the rocket to take off from a reality-based platform. And I'll be interested to see what Labour announces in this week's Budget.

PS: Feel free to dig into the new OECD working party report on communications infrastructure and let me know what you think.

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Sunday's Perfect Storm | May 19, 2008 09:22

The sad thing about the Herald on Sunday's lead story yesterday is that everyone involved with it on an editorial level knows its premise is bullshit. That is to say, they know very well that the "secret Auckland house" to which Bailey Kurariki has been bailed, is not "lavish" and neither are his circumstances there.

They know that a pair of shoes and a couple of (quite probably second-hand) electronic items given for Kurariki's first birthday outside prison in seven years do not really constitute "being showered with expensive gifts". And neither does "texting for the first time", or ordering KFC.

Caroylne Meng-Yee is an aggressive and enterprising reporter, one who consciously pushes the line. She wins the trust of her subjects and gets interviews other journalists don't.

In this case, she has won the confidence of Kurariki's mother Lorraine West, then taken what she has learned to Rita Croskery, the mother of the late Michael Choy, knowing full well the result.

No mother should have to endure what Rita Croskery has, but in media terms she has become something like a vending machine for victim quotes. Reporters know exactly what she will deliver. Hence:

"What this boy needs is hard work and discipline, not to be handed things on a plate. How is that going to teach him anything?

"It's just so stupid of them to do this. Let him go out to work and earn the money and then buy these things himself."

But he can't, because he wears an electronic bracelet that won't allow him to leave the property. This is a condition of his parole. According to his mother, he would like nothing more than to get a job. In the meantime, he is showering and feeding his father, who is recovering from heart surgery, and mowing the lawns. Does that sound like a "lavish" life for a 19 year-old?

Kurariki is still, the story says, "the 19 year-old baby-faced killer … the country's youngest convicted killer."

Kurariki was rightly convicted of manslaughter after Michael Choy, just trying to deliver a pizza, was beaten to death by a group of youths who meant to rob him. He was not involved in the beating, but, as a 12 year-old, he acted as lookout.

Yet there were others there, older and far more culpable, of whom we never hear. Indeed, every year, there are grown men convicted of such offences who serve their time and are, in general, never heard of again. Why is Kurariki of much more urgent news value than any of them?

The long-lens photographs of Kurariki kicking his heels in the backyard that he can't leave give it away. He is not only a criminal, he is a celebrity. What we see is the melding of criminal justice and paparazzi journalism. It's the Sunday paper equivalent of the perfect storm.

Thus do we arrive at the manufacture of 'Youngest killer's lavish new life: gifts, games and birthday parties'.

Martin Hirst had similar thoughts.

Elsewhere, "Steve Pierson" of The Standard outs himself. He's Clinton Smith, the guy who stepped up to the mike during the comedy protest about the Electoral Finance Bill at Parliament last year.

And … people keep asking me "What do you think of The Wire?" And I say "I haven't had time to have a proper look through it." But I have now, and I'm impressed. I've gone into more detail in a Listener column, but Ben King and Adam Bryce's big group blog for creative New Zealanders -- including Taika Waititi, Ant Timpson, Madeleine Sami, Bic Runga and Liam Finn -- is quite a scene.

PS: Hit reply if you (with a friend if you like) would like to join us early tomorrow evening for the recording of __Media7__. Our panel discussion this week focuses on the sexualisation of teenagers in the media, with reference to Miley Cyrus and Zippora Seven. The panel is Pam Corkery, Pebbles Hooper and Woman's Day editor Sarah Henry.

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