Public Address - Hard News (Home)

At last, it gets interesting | Jun 04, 2004 11:51

The lid seems finally to be coming off the Act party's leadership "primary" election, with Stephen Franks use of his Unfranked email newsletter to issue an "urgent appeal for help in defeating the frontrunner, Rodney Hide.

I was forwarded the email yesterday by a reader ("it's impossible to get off an ACT mailing list once you subscribe") and it's remarkable for its tone of alarm:

Regular readers will know this newsletter is for discussion of constitutional and legal issues. Most subscribers are lawyers and many are known to me personally. Rarely have I used it for direct political purposes.

I am involved in a fiercely contested election primary for the leadership of the ACT party. My colleagues Ken Shirley and Muriel Newman are also standing, but most commentators regard Rodney Hide and myself as the two front runners. I believe an ACT party run by Rodney Hide would be quite different from one lead by myself …

I ask for your help. While the primary can only be indicative, with the caucus making the final decision, it is very important. My success in leadership, as well as in this campaign to become leader, depends on making the strongest possible showing in the primary.

If you are a member of ACT, I want you to vote for me as leader with your first preference vote. You may wish to give Ken Shirley your second preference.

More than likely you will not be a member of ACT, but if you join by 5pm tomorrow night (Friday June 4), you can vote.

This appeal is uncharacteristic of me. I have tried to avoid personal promotion in this newsletter, but now I sincerely ask you to consider and act on this request if you feel you can.

The ability of the leader to attract support for the party will be considered by the caucus in choosing the leader. Accordingly your decision to join the party and vote for me, will not only help me to win the primary. It will also demonstrate an ability to grow the party.

Ouch. It appears that even the most obvious snub to Hide from Act's father-figure Roger Douglas isn't enough to derail him. That's because Hide has shown himself to be a strong campaigner - not least through his weblog, where Hide has clearly got the hang of things. He's sufficiently attentive to thank the little guys who give him a mention, and has even had warm notices in offshore blogs.

Franks' urgent appeal was presumably partially prompted by a Herald story yesterday headed Hide hits the front in race for Act's top job, which said that Hide was "way ahead of his fellow MPs in the increasingly divisive contest for the Act leadership, according to a poll asking who would make the best leader". Except - and I don't think I'm being particularly pedantic here - the poll was not conducted amongst the people who will vote for the Act leadership. It's a chunk of a Herald-Digipoll survey of general voters. Certainly, Hide's wider profile ought to serve his cause - but that's not quite the same thing, is it?

There was more statistical abuse in the Herald this week in the form of a stern editorial on the importance of discipline in schools, which quotes "a Maxim Institute study that found three-quarters of parents rated lack of discipline their biggest concern about schools".

No, it didn't. The Maxim study, A Snapshot of what Parents Think of Schooling in New Zealand , found that 78% of the parents interviewed mentioned discipline as a concern in schools. Discipline was mentioned by more parents than any other factor - but that's not the same thing as weighting it as their "biggest concern". Indeed, fewer than half of parents said that discipline was a factor in deciding what school their children should attend - less than the number who cited zoning or the general atmosphere and environment of the school. This doesn't prevent the report's authors from saying in their introduction that "discipline at schools was the biggest concern for parents".

There are other factors in the Maxim report that suggest that it might be risky to pronounce too boldly on its findings: most notably that it involved only 54 parents. This also occurred to Liz Probert, who sent the following letter to the Herald:

I was rather surprised to read in the Herald editorial this morning that 'three-quarters of parents rated lack of discipline their biggest concern in schools', a statement which is actually based on the results of a Maxim Institute study.

Surely this is a misleading statement given that the Maxim Institute study involved only 54 parents representing 137 children. Presumably the writer meant to refer to three-quarters of the parents involved in the Maxim Institute study, around 40 parents, not three-quarters of all parents in New Zealand as the editorial seemed to suggest.

This is not the standard of argument one expects from the editor of the Herald.

The Herald, says Liz, did not publish her letter. But - and do we detect the spectre of Darth George here? - it did hand it on to Maxim, whose communications manager Nicki Taylor rebutted it in a letter in yesterday's paper. Taylor airily declared that Probert - an accomplished educator by any measure - showed "an unfortunate lack of understanding of qualitative research". Taylor continued:

On the advice of the independent researcher, 54 parents were selected by Consumerlink to ensure they were representative of parents throughout New Zealand.

Actually - and you have to read the full report to find this out - the parents were gathered in eight focus groups held in Auckland and Christchurch only. And according to the report itself, they were not a representative sample, but a targeted one: a quarter of those involved were "mainstream education rejectors" - people who, for one reason or another, had already found fault with the state system.

Another quarter were "low socio-economic groups" - who might statistically be expected to encounter more problems with discipline at schools. This would seem to constitute a bit of a skew. Indeed the large majority of a slew of bring-back-the-cane comments relayed by the authors come from individuals in the two such groups in Auckland and Christchurch. This is certainly worthy of discussion in its own right, but the idea that Maxim's study is representative of all New Zealand parents is unsustainable.

There are a number of other interesting wrinkles in the report - boiled down from more than 300 pages of transcript by the two Maxim authors - that I don't have time to go into, but readers should feel free to have a look themselves at the full report, the summary and the Maxim press release and tell me what they think.

I'm sure I'm not the only one delighted to see the government step up and promise to fund the super-fast Advanced Network. Assuming they'll go with the open network model proposed by MORST, it'll be interesting to see what the price of membership is. Hey, y'know, I could do with some of them gigabits …

Meanwhile, more pathetic attention-seeking behaviour from Auckland's mayor, who got himself a front-page story in the Dom Post and a ludicrous interview with Linda Clark this morning on the strength of a speech last night in which he described Wellington as a "little port town" and declared that Auckland should be the national capital. Please, just ignore him. He's an idiot.

There was a lot of email after yesterday's post - most of it to do with the nuclear issue, and far from all of one point of view. I'll churn through it for Monday's post. Just to be clear, for the benefit of one or two anguished correspondents: I'm not in favour of nuclear ship visits, and I'm yet to be convinced about fixed nuclear generation - the waste disposal problem still seems a showstopper to me - but climate change is so deeply serious that it's quite reasonable to think about options.

There was some interesting feedback about the blocking of The Memory Hole website from US troops in Iraq. Sean, an expat in Singapore, noted that it was blocked by the government there too ("count yourself lucky that your site is under the radar") and Bill Burman got in touch to say that he helped set up the Internet filtering system for the US military:

The company I work for provides communications to companies that are involved with the US military, and we were asked to filter adult content. It's nothing sinister, just a web content filter, but in my opinion web content filters are always lacking in the quality of their database, and this seems to be the case here. What is surprising is that we have heard nothing about this site being blocked. I assume complaints inside the military are just not being treated seriously enough to go anywhere.

The Guardian advances the view that the UN envoy Brahimi was shafted in the course of the Iraqi interim leadership appointments.

Wednesday was a busy news day in Iraq, according to the amazingly diligent Today in Iraq blog. Scary shit.

The Independent had The Lying Game - an A-Z of the Iraq war and its aftermath.

Raed's online relationship with his Irani girlfriend Niki continues to flourish.

And that'll do. Feel free to emerge from the covers and listen to Mediawatch on Sunday morning - I've interviewed Sean Plunkett about his interviewing style. Quite good fun.

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Going Danish? | Jun 03, 2004 10:51

Yes, the Herald's lead story on a poll indicating that New Zealanders are prepared to countenance a more relaxed attitude to nuclear ship visits is, as Gerry Brownlee noted, "interesting". But was the question based on a fantasy?

National's review of its anti-nuclear policy came up with what was put forward as the Danish solution: a "policy ban" on nuclear ship visits rather than a legislative one, which might make the Americans happier. But this letter in this week's Listener suggests that that is not in fact the "Danish solution" at all:

Nuclear-free New Zealand

The National Party Taskforce members have completely misunderstood and misrepresented Danish nuclear policy ("On the defensive", May 22). Their proposal is to replace our legislated ban on nuclear-powered ship visits with an equivalent ban, but expressed only as a policy. Denmark is cited as a country that has such a policy, and has good relations with the US.

But this claim is completely wrong. Denmark allows nuclear-powered ships to visit, provided Danish authorities are given technical details of the nuclear power plants in the ships so that they can assess their safety for themselves. The US Navy does not release such information, so their nuclear-powered warships do not visit Danish ports. This policy is set out in material supplied by the Danish Embassy in Canberra, and has been confirmed by a recent special adviser to the Danish Ministry of Defence.

The Taskforce proposal is baseless. This is astonishing. National understood Danish policy in the Muldoon era, and the Taskforce members had it explained to them in at least one submission late last year. Yet they still could not get it right. So much for the Creech report.
R E White
Director, Centre for Peace Studies, University of Auckland

The proposition that we could have our cake (no nuclear ship visits) and eat it too (no longer irking the US government) is, not surprisingly, attractive. Unfortunately, it seems rather poorly rooted in reality. Really, shouldn't the Herald have exercised a bit more scrutiny before putting it to the public as reality - even if it spoiled the headline a bit?

Still, it behoves us never to close our minds on controversial issues, and the ecologist James Lovelock's urgent plea for us to embrace nuclear energy as the only way to avoid devastating climate change did make me think I ought to do some reading to discover whether I still think what I thought I thought, if you get my drift.

Public Address reader Carolyn Hicks has been following the debate since the publication of Lovelock's essay:

I was fairly dismissive of it until I read the so-called rebuttal by Bruce Sterling, a man who I formerly had a fair bit of respect for, and the associated Slashdot discussion.

As several posters pointed out, the essence of Sterling's response seemed to be an assumption that invoking Hiroshima or mentioning the word "nukes" is enough to render the rest of the discussion unnecessary. I consider myself a greenie, but reading Sterling's snarky remarks and the related Slashdot posts made me question some of my own unthinking assumptions that nuclear=bad (or that nuclear power=nuclear weapons). What it reminded me of was the emotional reactions to genetic engineering, the idea that simply mentioning 'tomato' and 'fish' in the same phrase will triumph over rational argument (and sadly often does).

I'm certainly no fan or apologist for nuclear power or GE, but difficult problems need open minds to solve them. I have in the past really appreciated the rationality you've brought to the overheated GE debate, and I'd be interested in your take on this issue, especially in light of Aotearoa's anti-nuclear stance. Obviously nuclear energy isn't something NZ is going to be needing any time soon (unless climate change dries up the Waitaki River), but on a global level, could opposition to it be as much of a knee-jerk and possibly counterproductive reaction as railing against "potatoes that are part toad"?

I agree with Carolyn. I'm not about to go out cheerleading for nuclear energy - not until I feel I know a lot more about it - but Sterling's response to Lovelock's proposition was inane. Was he hungover or something?

Elsewhere, Fahrenheit 9/11 has distribution and will be in US cinemas before the fourth of July.

The Chalabi-Iran scandal gathers momentum as it emerges that the erstwhile Pentagon favourite tipped off Iran government that the US had broken its communications codes. The White House is, understandably, now furiously distancing itself from the former saviour of Iraq. As the FBI starts conducting interviews, Josh Marshall speculates on who in the Pentagon might be sweating the most.

The case of The Memory Hole being blocked from viewing by US troops in Iraq is quite interesting. I wonder what else they don't get to see?

Molesworth & Featherston cheerily celebrates "topping a hundred thousand hits" on its website for the month of May - then honestly admits to having no idea what that might actually mean. Not much, unfortunately: a "hit" is simply a file request, and how many hits your page logs is purely a function of how many files it contains. The stats you're after are unique visitors, number of visits and total page impressions. But we're happy to send traffic Molesworth's way, so do go and have a look-see …

Oh, and by the way, for May, Nielsen NetRatings had Public Address at 14,000 unique visitors, 50,000 visits, 250,000 pages and, er, 3.4 million hits. Keep it coming, folks. We'll turn a dollar out of the damn thing yet …

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Peers | Jun 02, 2004 10:43

It would seem counterintuitive - absurd, actually - that the Internet in New Zealand could become more expensive and less efficient, but that's an entirely likely outcome of the way its two biggest players, Telecom and TelstraClear, seemed poised to take it.

Juha Saarinen broke the story last week in the Herald:

Internet backbone providers TelstraClear and Telecom are changing their policies around "internet peering", spelling profound changes for the internet industry.

Peering is internet jargon for the exchange of similar amounts and types of data between networks, usually free.

For New Zealand internet providers, peering allows traffic to be kept within faster and cheaper national networks instead of leaving the country and returning via slow and expensive international links.

But TelstraClear wrote to internet providers last week telling them that from November it will stop exchanging traffic with other providers nationally without cost.

Instead, a "commercial agreement for national transit" must be negotiated to access TelstraClear's networks, the company says.

Paul Brislen followed it up in Computerworld:

ISPs are up in arms over TelstraClear's decision to cease "peering" with other ISPs at the country's two peering exchanges, based in Auckland and Wellington. Typically in New Zealand ISPs and network operators swap traffic from one network to the other without charging an interconnection fee, however TelstraClear says it's now time to begin charging.

"There are several different charging models left over from the Clear and TelstraSaturn days and it's just taken us this long to sort them out," says a TelstraClear spokesman.

Saarinen picked up the thread with a column yesterday in which he said that both Telecom and TelstraClear were using peering, "a cheap and effective way to boost the performance of the Internet" by using well-connected Internet exchanges, as a "business weapon".

Puzzled? You're not the only one. It goes like this: for years, most Internet providers with a national presence have been exchanging traffic via the country's two Internet exchanges, the Wellington Internet Exchange (WIX), established in 1997, and the Auckland Peering Exchange (APE) installed in the Sky Tower in 1999. Both are owned by Wellington's CityLink and operated, CityLink co-founder Neil de Wit told me yesterday, "for the NZ Internet environment."

The system has worked well - as it has in other parts of the world. The Indian government recently announced that it was seeking to improve the function of its national Internet services by establishing four such Internet exchanges.

But peering is, at least nominally, about a roughly equal exchange of traffic, and the two big players feel that it is weighted against their interests. Content providers in particular - people with websites, that is - are freeloading by connecting to the exchanges and then having Telecom and TelstraClear do the job of taking the data to users. Those users being, of course, customers of the two companies who have requested the data.

Telecom blocked about 90% of the traffic passing through its Wellington router from the WIX last week because of a problem that was essentially of its own making. The router was apparently mistakenly advertising (making available as a path to all comers) a route to Auckland via Telecom's own network. Various service and content providers (notably TradeMe and the Telstra Clear-owned ISP Paradise) had discovered the route and were directing their own traffic through it where, in at least some cases, they ought to have been paying for their own circuits to connect with Auckland. So why did Telecom not simply reconfigure its router instead of almost wholly withdrawing?

I spoke to Chris Thompson at Xtra, who put it to me that, as such "gaming" of the peering process indicated, it wasn't the same old Internet any more. And that while Telecom was philosophically supportive of peering, it was time for it to be done through specific bilateral contracts covering costs and traffic levels, and not simply connecting to the exchanges and getting on with it. Although Telstra Clear has, as he notes, a more "overtly commercial" approach (translation: it doesn't really have a plan and is desperate for revenue, and will cease peering altogether in November), there's not much between them on the belief that other providers should pay to deliver traffic into their networks. Can you say "duopoly"?

The country's big geeks disagree, strongly. They say there is no engineering justification for TelstraClear's decision, and that Telecom's problems could easily be fixed technically. And given their long commitment to a well-engineered Internet in New Zealand - it's no exaggeration to say that some of them actually built it - I'm inclined to go with them. The implications of this look horrible: hosting companies will need separate circuits and separate business arrangements with the two giants, raising the risk of the absurd situation where you can't see a certain website because you're with a different ISP from me. At the least, it will raise costs and divert money from everyone else to Telecom and TelstraClear, and encourage hosting companies (as ours has) to relocate servers to the US, where bandwidth is very cheap. In engineering terms, the Internet will function less well.

It is complex, but you might divine some more from a backgrounder by Simon Blake, and various discussions on the New Zealand Network Operators Group list.

Internet NZ has promised some quotes today, and the spectre of regulation has already arisen. De Wit says: "I still hope pressure will drive sense into TCL & Telecom. Do they actually want regulation? Does central government want the voice interconnect issues replayed over several years? I hope not. I suggest content producers still have some control if they get their act together to lobby strongly."

Last night's All Black trial at Eden Park was thoroughly absorbing; a game in which the alleged second-stringers very nearly upset the shadow test side. There were no sterner questions asked than in the front row, where our number one tighthead prop Greg Somerville was put through the wringer for an hour by Kees Meeuws, and his propping partner Deacon Manu could make no impression on Carl Hayman. The dominance of the Possibles scrum was underlined when Xavier Rush scored that rare thing in modern rugby, a bona-fide pushover try.

Both Rush and the Possibles captain Jono Gibbes went a long way towards securing themselves a test match run-on, and the shadow test No.8 Mose Tuiali'I seemed to show that he wasn't quite ready for prime-time. First five was interesting: Spencer went well enough behind a pack that struggled for parity (and a halfback having a bad hair day with his passing), Nick Evans moved forward effortlessly for the Possibles after Mauger was injured and then, with 15 minutes to play, Andrew Merhtens took the field to the delight of the big crowd and surely made everyone wonder what the hell has Robbie Deans been thinking?

The trial has had its impact: the 26-man squad announced by Henry this morning includes Merhts and Evans (giving us four players who can play first-five!) and not Manu, Thorn or Thorne. Sam Tuitupou was rewarded for a very strong match, but given his lack of utility value, it's hard to see him included in the playing squad against England. I'll look forward to seeing what front row takes the field on the 12th.

There are two riveting pieces of autobiographical journalism on the wires today. One is by Alex Polier, the young woman falsely claimed during the Democratic primaries to have had an "affair" with John Kerry. Her story for New York magazine about the Drudge rumour that changed her life - part shocked memoir, part investigation - is one of fixers, leakers and desperate journalists.

The other story is one not best read before going into a meeting today, because it will prey on your mind. In the Anchorage Press David Holthouse writes the testament of his life: how he was raped by a family friend at the age of seven, how he carried that with him and, as an adult, made detailed plans to kill his rapist and how, having confronted the man, he didn't. Since the publication of the story he has been arrested on stalking charges.

Right. Radio show to get ready for. And can I say that as I listen to Linda Clark talk to retired Maori Land Court judge Ken Hingston, I am very glad that he is, in fact, retired …

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Return of the Redeemer | Jun 01, 2004 10:00

Last year, I actually convinced myself that John Mitchell's apparent inability to speak in sentences was simply a defensive ruse. The All Black coach, I reasoned, must simply be baffling the pundits and critics on his players' behalf.

I'd sometimes watch the after-match press conferences on The Rugby Channel. They were bizarre: Mitchell and Deans would sit there like faulty robots, heads swivelling, disgorging fractions of a puzzling, new-agey language that sounded like English. Occasionally, you'd catch a glimpse of a rugby scribe looking like he had a bad headache.

As it turned out, those strange fractions were the message. The 2003 All Blacks, bursting with talent, got out-thought and out-played by a passionate Australian side in the World Cup semi-final, and, even though they'd reclaimed the Bledisloe and set records against the all-too-familiar foes in the Tri-Nations, the coaching team was on borrowed time.

Mitchell's response as he came up for re-appointment - the clumsy, negative PR effort - was that of a man who suddenly seemed too immature and self-obsessed for a job steering the great national aspiration. What, you had to wonder, had it been like actually playing for the guy?

The approach subsequently taken by Mitchell's successor, Graham Henry, can hardly have been an accident. He has provided the press with a steady flow of thoughtful quotes; been as forthcoming as Mitchell was stiff and cryptic. He has recruited a coaching and selecting dream-team: Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith and Sir Brian Lochore and, apparently, already set about a programme of detailed technical improvement with the shadow All Black squad.

Let's be clear here: the All Blacks were hardly bad last year. They were only beaten by two teams, and they contrived to lose against England in Wellington even as they won every forward statistic. But a sense of unease that our game is no longer setting the standards has only grown since. I've watched a little English club rugby on the TV this year and it's quite hard to compare with Super 12. The northern game seemed to have more space and structure, certainly more obvious forward technique - but only rarely the sheer concussive impact of the Super 12, with its explosive Polynesians. I couldn't decide how a head-to-head clash might work out.

We'll get to have a look, possibly a little sooner than we'd have liked, when a (somewhat depleted) England side arrives to play two tests this month. Can Henry - the hidden hand behind last year's all-conquering Blues side - raise the players from their out-of-sorts Super 12 season?

We'll get the first look tonight, with the All Black trial at Eden Park. I'm going along with Paul K and Euan from our little rugby mailing list, as a sort of warm-up for our annual list get-together at Eden Park on the 19th. Players to watch: Meeuws, who I figure has been picked at loosehead in the Possibles side so Henry can see how he goes against Somerville. Spencer, who has always played his best rugby under Henry's guidance. Mose Tuiali'I - is he the answer at No.8? Brad Thorn, offered a lifeline by Chris Jack's withdrawal - can he demonstrate enough ability in the lineout? Or will the lock-loosie bench spot go to Jonno Gibbes? Tuitupou - can he, literally, force his way into the squad? And Merhtens - the whole of Canterbury growled about-bloody-time when Deans had to send him on as the Crusaders' final fell apart. Will he get a decent run with the Possibles?

Speaking of sports, isn't the French Open coverage hilarious again this year? Why do French TV cameramen always seem to fancy themselves as experimental film-makers?

Another thought I forgot to include yesterday on the Crimes Amendment Bill fiasco. As they conjured up objections and horror scenarios - wrong signal, teen pregnancy rates, etc - why on earth didn't any of the country's media actually do a little research. Perhaps the editorials were actually right - but wouldn't it have been good to find out? Why not look at a few of the other jurisdictions that operate laws with age-gap defences - and Lord knows there are plenty to choose from - and discover what their experiences have been? Instead, as is so often the case, we got issues-via-talking-heads.

Anyway, a little levity on the moral conservative front: PA reader Michael reports:

I wish to all hell that Cate Brett had not declined the chance to put both feet in her gob defending her editorial choices recently. Like you, the smug editorial in the last issue of the SST left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I guess you don't even bother reading Garth George's insane rants these days -neither do I usually, but his sputtering ravings of the imminent 'moral apocalypse' last week sent me over the edge. I mean, he actually referred to Phil Goff's bill as 'evil' - and ended with a Bible quote (sigh!). I phoned him at work (pretending to be a huge fan) and asked him to explain his position. He blustered on inanely until I stung him with "One final question Garth.....are you on medication? or just plain senile?" His swearing and insults were priceless. I wished I'd taped it.

National Anthem report from David Roche:

I was on National Anthem (played in "Magnetic Funk", 4am in Chch - we were the only funk band who actually played instruments).

It was a terrific experience. The quality of the setup , really well orgainsed venue and helper-people, sound guys, lights, and awesome sound gear was top rate. Only a dozen bods in the audience, too bad. My mum liked it.

And Christiaan Briggs notes that Barbara Sumner Burstyn won a Qantas Award for a column that had already been scrapped by the Herald, which is certainly quite ironic. Best of luck to her - I hope she prospers - but I won't accept Christiaan's kind invitation to revise my opinion of her column. I just didn't like it much. Here's Christiaan on her being fired as a columnist.

And finally, WTF is going on with the appointment of a new president for Iraq?

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