Public Address - Hard News (Home)

New poll: Earth flat | Mar 31, 2004 09:32

New numbers from the Department of Statistics show that New Zealanders' life expectancy continues to rise - and that, for the first time in decades, the disparity between Maori and non-Maori longevity, has narrowed since 1995.

The narrowing of the gap in life expectancy between Maori and other New Zealanders is small, but, it appears, significant. For obvious reasons, it does take time to turn around a long-term trend. Further commentary is here. (Before you ask, the gap between men and women has eased slightly too.)

Professor Tony Blakely, of the Wellington School of Medicine, talking about the new numbers on Checkpoint yesterday, was emphatic that it was the health policies of the past 10 years that had begun to ease the disparity, and that the improvement would continue if the policies did. That is, the "racial" targeted policies attacked by National this year.

Today, Morning Report touched base with half a dozen other health professionals and didn't seem to be able to find one who disagreed. There are other factors, including economic ones, but they all seemed to agree: scrap these policies at your peril.

And then there was Gerry Brownlee, who declared - richly - that the doctors were "playing politics". At least he didn't shout at anyone this time, instead insisting that the modest improvement showed that the health policies "of the last three decades" had failed.

This is either scurrilous or plain stupid. Maori health policy was transformed from the mid-1990s, and Brownlee ought to know it, if only because it was his party that set it in motion. You get the impression that the National Party of 2004 would declare that the Earth was flat if there was a cheap vote in it.

On a similar theme, this brief story popped up in the Herald a week ago: Fuarosa Tamati, the Christchurch woman who received the notorious Community Employment Group travel grant to study the development of hip-hop "was also given $5000 by Creative New Zealand to send her daughter to perform at an Australian music festival" in 2002.

We might be hearing more of this: National's Katherine Rich, who broke the CEG story, has apparently been nosing around looking for scuttlebutt on the entire family, and will presumably milk anything she thinks is worth a crack.

But let's hold up a minute here: the CEG travel grant was wrong and ineffective - it came from a scheme with poorly defined objectives and, consequently, delivered a poor result.

But the Creative New Zealand grant? Fuarosa Tamati's daughter Karoline is also known as LadySix, then of Sheelaroc, who had a hit with 'If I Gave You Th' Mic' when they were still at school, and subsequently received the grant to perform at the Adelaide Festival - exactly the kind of thing Creative New Zealand is supposed to do.

Since then, LadySix has continued to develop as a performer and I really think she's a potential star. Readers may recall past praise for her in this blog. I understand that this is a significant family, not only in terms of its creative talent (Scribe is LadySix's cousin) but its long-term contribution to the Christchurch community. I just hope it doesn't become a sacrifice to Katherine Rich's political ambition.

You'll notice a guest blog by Patrick Crewdson posted today. He and some others have just started what already looks to be a great blog site, Fighting Talk.

Chris Barton, the country's best IT journalist, is moving on to general feature writing. His farewell column is worth reading, and reflects quite a few of my views about tech journalism.

Wired has an extensive and detailed story about the electronic voting debacle.

David Haywood of Canterbury University took issue yesterday with my optimism about carbon sequestration and, hence, the future of coal as a sustainable energy source:

As an energy engineer, I have to say that your comments about coal are severely misinformed -- but not necessarily as a result of your own faults as a journalist. Coal companies will certainly tell you that large-scale sequestration is "just around the corner", but this is really to wilfully misrepresent the facts.

The problem is that you're up against the second law of thermodynamics on this one. Almost all the energy in coal is obtained from oxidizing the carbon to form carbon dioxide. To get the carbon dioxide into a safe and stable form to be sequestered (for ever!) requires an energy input larger than you will have got out of the coal in the first place. In fact, the best way to store carbon dioxide is to convert it back into coal, and stick it in the ground again! But even the short-term storage of carbon dioxide in geological formations, etc. is tremendously expensive (in extraction, transportation, and pumping/conversion costs) and would certainly be uneconomic at anything like current electricity prices.

I'm talking to David on my 95bFM Wire show today, at about 1pm, along with someone from CRL. Ought to be interesting.

PS: It has just been announced that Michael King and his wife were the victims of the car crash near Maramarua yesterday. I don't often find myself crying at the passing of people I have never met, but I am right now, and I don't really know what to say, other than to offer my deepest sympathy and condolences to his family, especially Rachael and Jonty. A great New Zealander has been snatched away.

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Welcome home, love | Mar 30, 2004 10:16

The irony of the Herald's lavish front-page treatment yesterday of Bic Runga's "controversial" comments to the Belfast Telegraph about New Zealand race relations is that it left out the good stuff.

The author of the Telegraph story describes her album Beautiful Collision as "a marvellous record that recalls the Cocteau Twins, Bjork and Kate Bush" and notes that she is being hailed (at the suggestion of her record company) as the new Norah Jones.

It would seem that after all that work trying to crack America, Europe has been good for Bic: the 'Get Some Sleep' single has been added to the Radio 2 playlist, and Public Address reader Greg Clark tells me that Beautiful Collision is on promotion at Tesco and being advertised on prime-time TV.

She has been accorded a feature interview in the Sunday Times, in which 'Get Some Sleep' is praised as "sublime pop", and The Times also reviewed her Dublin showcase, declaring that "it's hard to believe that anything other than mega-stardom awaits this prodigiously talented and strikingly beautiful 27-year-old singer." She was featured in Showbiz Ireland ("we are going to hear a lot more from this bright star") and appeared at Ireland's Meteor Music Awards.

And then, as luck would have it, she got off the plane yesterday to NZ a racist place, Bic Runga tells Irish paper. Welcome home, love.

A press-release was forthcoming, occasioning this morning's Bic Runga finds 'racism' headlines heartbreaking:

"No country is without racism, I grew up with it, that was my experience. It has not made me bitter or ashamed.

"New Zealand is a beautiful and unique place. I love my country and I am proud to represent it internationally."

The press release, issued by a public relations company, also said Runga found it heartbreaking to arrive back in New Zealand and read headlines about what she had said.

"Sensational headlines do not truthfully convey what I think, nor who I am."

However, she did not dispute that she made the controversial comments.

Runga declined the Herald's request for an interview.

Surprise me. So did she, as a Maori-Chinese kid growing up in Hornby, a working-class suburb of Christchurch, encounter racism? It would be surprising if she hadn't. And can relationships between Maori and other New Zealanders be a bit fraught? Demonstrably, one would have thought. But the Herald's treatment of the story, such as it was, was way over the top. I am put in mind of Blam Blam Blam ...

The Herald was pretty excitable with this morning's lead too: Higher power prices and blackouts loom after plug pulled on Project Aqua. Certainly, we have a problem to address, but Project Aqua was always at the outer limits of acceptability on a number of fronts, including Meridian's right to the water. And diverting a major river into a 62km concrete canal isn't exactly trivial in environmental terms.

So, with the last major hydro resource off the agenda, where do we go for power? In the short term, we ought to respond to potential shortfalls by concentrating really hard on energy efficiency, working on alternative sources and, frankly, getting used to the idea that electricity isn't going to be as cheap as it used to be.

In the long term, I think it has to be coal. We've got a lot of it, and as I understand it, you can now take out pretty much everything but the CO2, and that's coming. Sure, we're signed up to Kyoto, but so is Canada, and they're presently doing a lot of work on carbon sequestration and the US Department of Energy has a useful web resource on the issue.

At the same time, some American companies are working on deriving hydrogen to run zero-emission vehicles from coal flue gases, which could favourably change the environmental equation. Human ingenuity usually wins out.

Perhaps we could get creative and harness that increasingly reliable source of hot air emissions, Gerry Brownlee, who, after lodging a poorly-written notice of no-confidence in Deputy Speaker Ann Hartley, alleging "incompetence", then declared himself to have been defamed when the Speaker demurred. For all I know, Brownlee is right, but his habits of shouting at people and random protestations on his own behalf are becoming tiresome.

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Like any other New Zealander | Mar 26, 2004 11:07

So if I'm unfortunate enough to be convicted of a crime some time, I'm entitled to half a million taxpayer dollars to restore my "mana"? No? Well why does Nick Smith think he is then? That doesn't sound like "one law for all", does it?

Smith's electorate chairman - who will hopefully be relieved of media duties henceforth - appeared on Morning Report today to declare that Smith deserves an expensive and unnecessary by-election, which will not be contested by any of the other parties, in order to "restore his mana in Parliament". Smith, he said, had a right to go to "the court of public opinion".

Like hell he does. Smith didn't deserve to lose his job over his contempt conviction, and according to the Speaker, he won't. If he's unhappy with the High Court's decision, he can appeal it, like any other New Zealander. If he finds himself in an unhappy position as a result of having broken the law, then he can just deal with it. Like any other New Zealander.

In the further interests of getting on with it, Government members would also be well advised to avoid playing party politics over Smith's conviction, particularly given that Helen Clark had a public crack at a Maori Land Court Judge herself recently.

In more Parliamentary silliness, Katherine Rich is demanding that Ruth Dyson resign as a minister, after Dyson, under her breath, called her an "irresponsible tart" in a select committee meeting. Rich didn't hear the comment. No one did, until it turned up later on a media recording, and even then, when it was played on the radio this morning, I confess I couldn't really hear it. But then, I was eating toasted muesli, and that can make a fairly loud crunch.

Dyson, clearly, ought not have vocalised such a thing, even for her own consumption. She should probably make a more gracious apology than the one she has already made. And Katherine Rich and Muriel Newman should probably get a life.

In the latest episode of TV theatre, the Prime Minister jacked up her own appearance on Holmes last night for what the programme billed as a "major announcement". Which was that the military aircraft taking a New Zealand delegation to the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the battle at Monte Cassino will be reconfigured so that 50 veterans will now be able to travel with the official party. Final offer. There will be a ballot amongst the 360 who want to go. Special funding has already been announced for all veterans who want to travel independently.

I'm in two minds about this. On one hand, this kind of campaign is something that TV does well, and there's nothing wrong with giving the government a nudge. I'm pleased for the old chaps who will be able to make the journey at public expense. On the other, I find it a little odd that the government is being made out to be wicked and mean when it is taking many more veterans than have travelled to previous commemorations (and always intended to) and, so far as I can tell the American and Australian governments don't appear to be doing the same.

Holmes, in the course of a lively interview, sought to contrast the lack of seats for all 360 veterans with the $10 million budgeted to the Community Employment Group (he didn't go so far as to speculate on how much money might have been freed up for the TVNZ dividend if flagship presenters were paid less). Clark, wisely, didn't attempt to defend the CEG, and described some of the grants from the now-frozen scheme as "looney".

Uh-huh. I had intended to wait to comment on the Community Employment Group until I understood what it actually did. I still don't. I don't understand what its criteria were, what it was meant to deliver and what a social entrepreneur is. Some of its grants seem unexceptional, even laudable, but others … well, Katherine Rich and her fellow Nats must have felt like they were unwrapping a present when they sighted its report. I don't actually object to the idea of a travel grant to study the hip-hop industry, but why a Christchurch social worker and her daughter got it is beyond me.

A crackdown on all such funds and agencies has, inevitably, begun. And there will probably be some babies thrown out with the bathwater. Overly prescriptive grants schemes tend to require so much compliance as to be self-defeating.

Back in the early 90s, when we published Planet magazine, we got rollovers of both Taskforce Green and Job Plus (both equivalent to the dole) when we possibly shouldn't have. And it may well have had something to do with someone's auntie.

That was under a National government. The magazine eventually failed financially, but I think we delivered, both through our subsequently enhanced taxable income and through creating a market niche that really wasn't there before but certainly is now. We were never in the frame for any proper cultural funding - we never seemed to qualify for that - but we worked hard. If you let discretion devolve down the public food chain, you're always risking embarrassment, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.

Anyway, best of luck to both the Black Caps and the Maori Television Service, which launches on Sunday. And if those don't suit you, might I recommend Nanosaur 2 and the update to Bugdom 2 from Pangea Software? If you still have those red-cyan glasses from Spy Kids 3D, both games offer a totally wicked take on 3D gaming. If, of course, you've got a Mac …

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