Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Vrrrrrmmmm ... | Dec 17, 2004 11:42

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The burgeoning support for the continuance of Western Springs speedway racing is probably not unconnected with a desire to compensate for the failure of the proposed V8 race in a different part of town to get planning approval. But the creation of some wickedly funny campaign virals probably hasn't hurt either.

As Brian Rudman pointed out this week, the argument for the speedway, which has been merrily exceeding noise guidelines since they were agreed eight years ago, isn't quite as straightforward as its cheerleaders maintain:

Upholding Western Springs speedway's right to continue polluting the surrounding neighbourhood with noise because it's been getting away with it for 75 years is hardly a rational argument.

It's like defending the use of lead paints to redecorate adjacent villas because that's what was used when the houses were first built.

We are now much more aware than our grandparents' generation were that noise - and lead - are serious health issues. Unfortunately, as health issues go, noise has always been a bit of a cinderella as far as enforcement is concerned.

No one would, of course, countenance maintaining a major rubbish tip nearby (which there was) just because there's always been one there and it was handy to the western suburbs. But the speedway is a colourful Saturday night fixture of very long standing, and no one wants to be a party-pooper. So everyone's in favour, most especially if they don't actually have the bother of living next to it nearly every Saturday night through spring and summer.

I'm certainly not near enough for it to actually be a bother, although we can hear it two kilometres away in Pt Chev on an easterly wind - but it does seem that the long-term solution is surely to find a more sensible place to race. It's not like the issue is going to go away.

Anyway, the council last night unanimously agreed to support the speedway - whatever that means, given that the noise guidelines will actually remain.

At time of posting, DogBitingMen was promising a post on Tim Selwyn's sedition charge. I mean, sedition? Huh?

Karl Simpson was in touch with comment yesterday:

I thought I should try to clear up potential confusion around Gordon Campbell's Listener article regarding re-registration of TVNZ under the Companies Act 1993.

As a junior corporate lawyer in the mid 1990s, I worked on a number of company re-registrations. Companies registered under the Companies Act 1955 had from 1 July 1994 until 30 June 1997 to reregister under the Companies Act 1993. Many companies waited until near the end of this period to effect the change, using the opportunity to tidy up company structures and write a new company constitution to replace the old Articles of Association. This process usually took some time as it generally required director and shareholder approval.

Many companies did not re-register at all, and were instead deemed to have reregistered at the close of the transition period. In this context TVNZ's re-registration on 3 July 1996, a year in advance of the end of the transition period, is neither inept nor particularly noteworthy.

On the other hand, I think the fact that TVNZ's salaries automagically shot up in that three-year period is noteworthy.

The Dom Post is running a McCully special this morning: shock-horror, TVNZ pays $4m in bonuses. On the face of it, this is a non-story. Performance bonus components in salary packages are perfectly conventional, and in a year when TVNZ made a record profit, it's hardly surprising that they were paid - especially to sales staff. (A much more interesting story would be a look at the sign-on bonuses and please-don't-go sweeteners forked out this year by the two big newspaper chains.)

A different Karl also had some comment, this time on Sean Plunket:

As I was reading the second-last paragraph of your post Sean Plunket popped into my head. And serendipitously, you mentioned him in the next line.

Earlier this week he interviewed Chris Carter over a road-block set up by Maori preventing campers getting to a DOC campsite. It was really quite appalling. Carter, at the start, at least tried to suggest that negotiation might be an effective way to resolve the issue (i.e. ask them, what's your problem, let's try and solve it).

I was very disappointed that Plunket carried the standard opposition line to boot them out. His questioning seemed to solely consist of "will you force them out", not listening to anything else Carter said.

I was saddened that Carter eventually relented to this line. The State is unique in its ability to use force on citizens. A responsible State should exercise that sparingly. It is always distressing to see the State use force in inappropriate ways (e.g. the arrest of media covering bypass protests in Wellington before the protesters arrive).

Plunket increasingly seems to want to bully the Government into inappropriate responses to issues.

What was heartening in the end was the way the process was resolved: DOC went to the protesters, asked them what was wrong, said they'd try to address the problems that were outlined, and the protesters went home happy.

Nice one DOC. And I'm now back to listening to Active 89 in the mornings.

Hmmm. I was looking to be jocular yesterday, but, as a punter rather than a commentator, I was genuinely annoyed about the prisoner compensation interviews. I wanted to make my own judgement, but I couldn't, because I couldn't hear what Phil Goff had to say. Still Anne Hercus seemed to have the key this morning: maximum imperiousness.

Adam Hunt sent Act's Muriel Newman an email about the Civil Union Bill, and got this in return:

Thank you for contacting me and sharing your views on the Civil Union Bill - in a democracy it is very important that people have their say. In that spirit, I have taken the liberty of sending you my weekly opinion piece. If you would like to be taken off the list, please reply to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.

Aarrggh! I hope the Minister for Spam has stopped flicking on email addresses to her husband's business ventures …

Juha Saarinen pointed out this story, which suggests that Microsoft has been thinking along the lines of "Blogging! Great idea! Let's own it."

PS: If you didn't read the current Great New Zealand Argument, Robin Hyde's The Singers of Loneliness, you should. It's brilliant.

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Argy-bargy-whoops-a-daisy | Dec 16, 2004 11:44

Two media industry types have put it to me this week that commentators like myself must be loving all the current media argy-bargy. Well, yes. Grist to the mill and all that. But for anyone with a memory, it ought to seem that the Judy Bailey salary row seems to have attracted a degree of controversy beyond its significance.

The union says that its members at TVNZ are "furious" at Bailey's pay rise. I imagine they might be. But if you have a visceral objection to star salaries, television probably isn't the right business for you. I don't think even Andrew Little believed himself when he declared that "if one person is worth a 77 per cent pay rise, then everybody is."

On the other hand, if Ann Hercus did go freelance to the government with the news of the deal, it's hard to see how she can remain on the board. But is the same government that took receipt of the information, and decided to leak it before the Opposition got to it, going to dismiss the leaker? It is quite bizarre …

Anyway, earlier this year in The Listener, Gordon Campbell told the story of the real outbreak of excess - the one that took place in 1993, 1994 and 1995, when TVNZ inexplicably failed to re-register under the Companies Act. That meant it didn't report on salaries - and that records of how and why pay packets fattened apparently simply do not exist. During that period, salaries - and not just amongst presenters - went through the roof:

The point being: the salaries paid to top presenters at TVNZ have come under fire from all quarters in recent years, most notably from then-TVNZ board chairman Ross Armstrong. Certainly, presenter salaries did rise sharply during the 1990s, despite the fact that New Zealand's television "market" for their wares has only two major players. Far less attention has been paid to the interplay between presenter salaries and top executive salaries.

At the very least, according to TVNZ sources, the presenter salaries served to validate the pay rises that were taking place concurrently among the executives. Around the world, this was a period when massive pay packets were almost de rigueur, serving as self-validating symbols of potency for the senior executive class. Although neither simple nor direct, a linkage does seem to have existed. After all, TVNZ itself told Parliament in 2001 (see supplementary question 10, TVNZ Financial Review 1999/2000) that "internal relativity" was one of the main factors guiding how the company's Remuneration Committee did its job.

After TVNZ got back on the books in 1996, everyone knew who the individual in the top salary bracket was: Paul Holmes. And Holmes certainly isn't holding back now. His rant on Newstalk ZB yesterday - about the "hostile environment", "culture of disloyalty in management" and "deeply unpleasant culture" at TVNZ, about how Judy Bailey must (really?) be insulted at the way that "Ralston's out there trying to get the great John Campbell every five minutes" - was both informative and all-too-telling as regards the conflict that led to Holmes himself departing.

It also tends to bear out my impression yesterday that the risk for TVNZ management was not that Bailey might go to the competition, but that she might just walk away altogether. Holmes may well be right in claiming that TVNZ management blew the negotiations with Bailey and left her with too much power to bargain, way too late in the piece.

For Holmes, it is simply the natural order of things that "personality is everything in broadcasting". Yet without his towering personality, the 7pm slot on One hasn't exactly fallen into the abyss. In key respects it is better than Holmes was, and it might be better yet if Susan Wood could be dissuaded from suggesting how we might wish to feel about everything it screens.

Holmes might end up having to eat his words if the audience does not follow him to Prime - not because his personality is not as compelling as it used to be, but for more prosaic reasons: because Prime won't have a proper 6pm news show to deliver the audience, or because the more mature target audience can't find Prime on their remotes or won't get UHF aerials.

TV3, meanwhile, is proceeding quite happily. It has secured the services of the man most people think is the strongest contender for current affairs stardom, it is free of the wearisome accountability issues that beset a public sector broadcaster - has anyone even asked what John Campbell's being paid? - and it is happily developing programmes with the country's most accomplished drama producer, which can't even get in the door at TVNZ, such are the politics. So yes, I'm picking TV3 to prosper from it all.

Bart Janssen had some comment on the CJR essay on science, fact and the media I pointed to yesterday:

For me as a scientist and in particular as a plant molecular biologist it's been very hard watching the media over the past few years. We so often see equal weight given to the opinions of people with years of expertise and knowledge in their field and people with no knowledge to back up their opinions.

For any given topic, and molecular biology is only the topic that I'm most familiar with, there exists a real continuum of knowledge and understanding. From genuine experts, through people who have read New Scientist to get an overview, through to people whose knowledge comes from what was said over lunch in SPQR.

What I took some time to get used to was that journalists seemed to be uninterested in finding out the "truth" and then communicating that to their interested audience. Instead they seemed to look for an exciting headline and appear to be unconcerned about the quality of the source of that headline.

I guess a part of me wants to believe that journalists really feel some responsibility to communicating the "truth" to their audience. Which makes reading the newspaper sometimes a real heartache. Intellectually I know some/most journalists are just doing a job and go home at night not caring. But emotionally I want to believe that jounalists feel responsible to the society they inform and hence want to get it right.

As the essay you pointed us to shows, there are some of those journalists out there - do you think $800k per year might get a few of them to New Zealand?

And Andy, a lawyer, was justifiably unimpressed with Helen Clark's comment that "every possible opportunity to litigate around [the Zaoui case] has been taken" - those pesky lawyers, huh? The government is bringing forward plans to amend the parts of the Immigration Act relevant to the Zaoui case:

This of itself is not so surprising, and we'll have to wait and see what is proposed before making comment.

However when Winston Peters says the whole Zaoui affair reeks of Lawyers sucking at the teat of the state, or words to that effect, I can easily dismiss that as predictable moronic comment. But when Helen Clark implies something very similar when asked about whether she thought lawyers had prolonged the situation and said, well yes lawyers will litigate, I find myself very, very concerned.

But for the amazing work on the part of Zaoui's lawyers he would be still languishing somewhere on remand in prison, very possibly still in solitary confinement or worse "outskied" by now to hell knows where.

But more importantly, you would expect nothing less of his legal team: that is what we lawyers do, indeed that is what we are obligated to do. It's our job. Its called being an advocate.This is how sophisticated democracies with proper legal systems are run.

If someone was lying in hospital on their death bed and a possible operation may give them some respite you wouldn't expect that persons doctor to go, well it might work but it might not so oh well to save money we'll flag it this time.

I am stating the obvious here, but Helen Clark needs at times to be more aware of what I thought were basic Labour principles, and further, be prepared to speak out in support of them. I feel much more comfortable with the Green Party's position on matters such as this these days I have to say.

It would be fair to say that the Labour government is lately rather stronger on human rights in other places than it is here. And the parties to the right of it sometimes give the impression they'd like to live somewhere where there is no principle in law that can't simply be rolled over by a government. Malaysia, perhaps.

Some of the same issues perhaps surround the proposed new law on prisoner compensation - which Don Brash (sounding very much like he was channelling Murray McCully) claimed, somewhat inevitably, on Morning Report today don't go far enough. Phil Goff apparently explained himself in response, but Sean Plunket was shouting at him at the time, so it was hard to tell. Who gets to transcribe that one?

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What price the Mother of the Nation? | Dec 15, 2004 09:41

So in an increasingly competitive commercial TV environment, just what is a fair rate for the country's most bankable newsreader, Judy Bailey? As the government's pre-emptive strike on her new $800,000 contract gathers steam, no one seems to want to even venture a guess.

Neither TV3 or Prime has apparently sought to poach Bailey - and neither is actually likely to - but Bailey could, presumably, decline to read news altogether, a prospect which would be disastrous for TVNZ. Even such an unlikely scenario would have concentrated minds. Whether it would have sufficiently concentrated minds to procure a doubling in salary is another matter.

The key factor is likely to be the same one that led Paul Holmes to sling his hook: the fact that state TV is now only offering one-year contracts to its screen stars.

It's not so much that, as Sean Plunket said this morning, to TVNZ chair Craig Boyce, "for $800,000 wouldn't you want to tie Judy Bailey up for longer than a year?" (ooh-err!), as that when you aren't offering security of tenure you will be paying more.

There are a couple of ironies here: one is that the organisation has clearly moved to curb its "culture of excess" in salaries recently. The other is that it's only ever the dollar figure that is an issue in TVNZ salary scraps - and not the length of contracts or any possibly outrageous terms and conditions.

It's my guess that it has been those elements of contracts that have created more problems for TVNZ over the years than however-many-dollars Paul Holmes has reaped. Obvious case in point: the penalty outclause in John Hawkesby's unfortunate five-year contract in 1999: the contract included a $700,000 annual salary, but he picked up nearly $7 million for being fired. There were also rumours that a number of executives locked themselves into tasty little deals before the change of government in 1999.

Reinventing TVNZ is quoting a voice from inside the machine:

Most people given the chance would be very happy to accept $800K from anyone dumb enough to pay it, so good on Judy for seeing her chance and taking it. It will probably last only one more year, and could be seen as a 'working golden handshake'.

So is Stuff:

A TVNZ source said yesterday the size of Bailey's salary increase had angered some employees, who had got a $400 Christmas bonus while many were struggling to win pay rises in talks now under way.

The source said Bailey's working hours had increased significantly since she took over sole newsreading responsibilities this year.

When working alongside Richard Long the pair arrived at work after 3pm most days, but Bailey now had more editorial input and took part in One News' 9am news meeting.

She worked most of the day "with really not much to do but, bless her, she tries to help the reporters", the source said.

Last night's Molesworth and Featherston predicts a spanking from Mum:

But Ministers will ask whether it might have been possible to persuade Judy Bailey to stay in for any less. TV3 and Prime deny they would have hired her. They will say the Board has made a bad decision. Blame for John Hawkesby's perceived overpayment was attributed by Beehive insiders to TVNZ's then head of news Shaun Brown. Blame for the Bailey payment is likely to be sheeted higher.

The most surreal element of the whole business so far has surely been Bailey herself having to introduce an item about it all on One News.

In other Big Girls' Jobs news, the surprise announcement of Margaret Wilson to replace Jonathan Hunt as Speaker of the House. A shunt sideways, surely? Even the wibbliest of liberals have occasionally been unnerved by Wilson's style as attorney general, and perhaps the availability of the Speaker's chair offers an opportunity to slot in a more reassuring presence (I almost shudder to think how non-controversial and agreeable Labour will try and look in election year).

If so, then the key qualification for Wilson's replacement is likely to be possession of a penis. But who?

The month's Columbia Journalism Review has a very good essay by Chris Mooney looking at the issue of "balance" in news stories relating to science - and the distortion that bland attempts to apply that "balance" can cause.

On a related topic, Adam Bogacki directed me to The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal, a speech on the media and environmental issues by American journalist Bill Moyers.

Interesting blog fight: Juan Cole has picked up on Martini Republic's theory that blogs like Iraq the Model are the result of "astroturfing" (that is, the creation of fake grassroots) and that the perpetually grumpy Riverbend is in fact more representative of mainstream Iraqi opinion than the perpetual (and perpetually grateful) optimists at Iraq the Model.

The brothers who run Iraq the Model have become celebrities with the American right (pro-democracy activists in, say Uzbekistan, need not apply), and two of them got themselves a nice visit stateside, while Riverbend is still queueing 13 hours for gas.

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Smells like teen spirit | Dec 13, 2004 09:44

That thing up about body odour being an issue in smokefree pubs: it's for real. In the crowd about three metres back from the stage at the Checks show on Friday night the air was alive with the various aromas of eau de teenage hormone; the sort of smells that have hitherto been masked by ambient tobacco smoke.

And when the guy in front of me farted it was just horrible. I took a step back and tried to ignore it, but I had to give up and go further back. But apart from that episode, the newly non-smoking upstairs room at the Masonic tavern in Devonport was pretty sweet.

The pub has a modest veranda downstairs - but no ashtrays yet - and smokers seemed happy to pop down there for a puff. Inside, there was no wearying smoke (and no stinking clothes at the end of the evening). There were, however, a lot of punters, the Associate Minister for Arts and Culture and quite a number of policemen, although there was no connection between the latter two.

The police had visited the night before and picked up a few under-18-year-olds. This night, after an exhaustive search, in which they inspected the IDs of every apparent whippersnapper in the room, they didn't seem to find any. But even after they'd retired outside, they sat outside waiting for … something.

The pub manager, a top bloke and a musician himself, couldn't work out what they were doing, but there was a suspicion that they were waiting to bust the Checks' bass player, who is only 16. Perhaps that wasn't the case at all, but he felt he couldn't risk the bass player coming in - not without one of his parents. Unfortunately, both of those parents were at home with a stomach bug.

Dad was summoned and duly crossed the threshold with his boy so the band could play. Johnny Scoop from the Devonport Flagstaff could hardly believe his luck as events unfolded. We kept him appraised of the situation and he scribbled furiously and took photos.

Elsewhere in town, the first weekend of smokefree pubs seems to have been a mixed bag. The Herald reported only a handful of complaints and quoted a happy Viaduct punter, but Morning Report had the manager of the Owl Bar on K' Road, who claimed that her weekend takings had fallen from $3000 to $1700.

Now, the Owl Bar is not like the swish establishments of the Viaduct - it's the place where David McNee met the man who killed him and it's not somewhere I'd set foot. It's also home to 18 pokie machines (the maximum allowable) operated by the Trillian Trust, which under the new regulations would earn it about $4000 weekly. It'll be these places - more in the dopamine trade than the business of serving liquor - which will suffer under the new law. I can't say that I regard fewer victims tethered to pokie machines as a particularly bad result, but it seems likely that the beneficiaries of the gambling machine trade will suffer.

Some war news …

Of all the stories emerging from Iraq, I find this one one of the creepiest. A veteran sergeant in Samarra reports five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees to his commanding officer. He is offered the chance to retract his report, declines, and is sent to an army psychiatrist who finds him to be "completely normal". Under pressure from the commanding officer, the psychiatrist alters her report, and 36 hours later the sergeant is strapped to a gurney and shipped out of Iraq. It appears this is not an isolated incident. Democracy Now has an interview with the reporter, former US Army counterintelligence agent David DeBatto.

Meanwhile, a CBS 60 Minutes report revealed that the US Army has suffered more than 5000 desertions since the Iraq war began. Some refusenik soldiers are seeking refuge in Canada. For the first time in a decade, the US Army National Guard missed its recruitment target this year.

The New England Journal of Medicine has an interesting analysis of military care for the wounded in Iraq, and says this:

When U.S. combat deaths in Iraq reached the 1000 mark in September, the event captured worldwide attention. Combat deaths are seen as a measure of the magnitude and dangerousness of war, just as murder rates are seen as a measure of the magnitude and dangerousness of violence in our communities. Both, however, are weak proxies. Little recognized is how fundamentally important the medical system is — and not just the enemy's weaponry — in determining whether or not someone dies. U.S. homicide rates, for example, have dropped in recent years to levels unseen since the mid-1960s. Yet aggravated assaults, particularly with firearms, have more than tripled during that period. The difference appears to be our trauma care system: mortality from gun assaults has fallen from 16 percent in 1964 to 5 percent today.

We have seen a similar evolution in war. Though firepower has increased, lethality has decreased. In World War II, 30 percent of the Americans injured in combat died. In Vietnam, the proportion dropped to 24 percent. In the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 percent of those injured have died. At least as many U.S. soldiers have been injured in combat in this war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first five years of the Vietnam conflict, from 1961 through 1965. This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict. But a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries.

A Toronto Star columnist looks at bad news suppression across the border.

Donald Rumsfeld appears to have lied to the soldiers who bailed him up about having to operate in Iraq without effective armour when he claimed that the Army was "breaking its neck" to provide fully-armoured Humvees. The company that makes the armoured vehicles says it could make more, but the Pentagon hasn't asked. A Boston Globe editorial says Rumsfeld should go.

But somebody's doing okay: US Rep. Henry Waxman has put together a fact sheet on occasion of Halliburton's crossing $US10 billion in Iraq contracts.

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