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Some fuss | Jun 08, 2006 09:58
Residents outside the Beltway may be puzzled by this morning's Claims of Govt split rejected. It refers to apparent threats to resign by two ministers: Marian Hobbs and Taito Philip Field.
I don't know about Field - only God does, apparently - but the Hobbs thing blew up last Thursday, when Wellingtonians woke up to discover that the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary had failed to get the $6 million it sought from the government's Significant Community Based Projects Fund, leaving Hobbs and her defeated Wellington Central rival Mark Blumsky sorely pissed and displaying the raging sense of entitlement (what you mean we didn't get the money?) common to both native and adopted Capital dwellers.
Blumsky is on the Sanctuary board, and Hobbs, guessing that he'd make a crusade of it, thought she'd get her own indignation ("embarrassed and hurt") in first. This, understandably, did not go down well with Her Upstairs, who does sorely pissed better than most people. So I guess it's possible that Hobbs offered her resignation rather than threatening it. Either that or there was a brief barney of a nature only one side was going to win.
It's understandable that the Sanctuary backers felt left out, given that the Sanctuary was supposedly exactly the sort of project the fund was created for (and yes, I understand that it's a totally amazing only-in-Wellington project and absolutely the kind of thing that feckless bloody Aucklanders wouldn't get together in a million years, etc). But they were seeking a hell of a lot of money - as much as the three successful applicants put together - and the other projects had some significant merits.
The stadium in Invercargill will house New Zealand's only world-class velodrome; the Chinese gardens in Dunedin are part of the whole apology thing; and the eco-tourism venture on the West Coast? Well governments of all stripes seem to feel it vital to keep those buggers happy …
Other stuff. I got phone-polled this week; political preferences, brain-drain, and an endless series of queries on behalf of Auckland city and regional authorities (er, um, transport, yeah …). Whatever. More interesting was my mate being surveyed by someone on behalf of Radio Sport. He managed to extract the news that Tony Veitch isn't going down terribly well with the listeners. So send Martin Devlin back to the sports beat - because he's howlingly bloody awful and has no clue as a current affairs breakfast host.
And finally: is it just me, or is telecommunications marketing ramping lately? Vodafone seems to call every few days to make sure everything's alright with my mobile, and last night, there was a knock on the door just before 8pm. When I finally got there, there was a man who claimed to be representing Telecom.
"Do you have an Internet connection?" he asked.
Yes.
"Is it dial-up or broadband?"
Goodbye.
Don't expect to me to stand on my doorstep on a chilly night answering stupid questions. And better yet, don't go doorknocking in the dark when people don't know who's calling. Christ, it might be that P-crazed terminally ill guy with all the guns.
PS: Warmest congratulations to our own Jolisa Gracewood, who is a finalist in the reviewers' section of the Montana Book Awards. Yay!
Splendidly patronising | Jun 07, 2006 10:37
Of all the commentary pouring forth on the Green Party's new leadership and apparent re-orientation, the Herald editorial must surely be the most splendidly patronising.
It's right and proper for the Greens to declare that they could, under the right conditions (including, it appears, the departure of Don Brash) work with National. I would think that the most that could mean is, say, an agreement, in exchange for policy concessions, to abstain on confidence votes to make things look a little less dicey if National finds itself with a narrow majority to govern (ie: the same arrangement they have with Labour right now).
The Herald's writer foresees something a little more dramatic:
But they will need to pay more than lip service to their newly adopted stance. They will gain nothing by disclaiming they are left wing if they have policies that favour closed borders, industry protection and maximum state ownership of the economy.
This is the assumption that being Green is just about saving whales and stuff. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. For all that DPF and his mates might be rejoicing at the Greens having seen the light, a look at the respective platforms of the two parties reveals that they are effectively at loggerheads on issue after issue: Justice, Housing, Industrial Relations, Energy, Welfare, Transport, the Treaty, Resource Management … nearly everything. The two parties may find some common ground - probably around mutual suspicion of big government - but they disagree vastly more often than they agree.
But here's the thing: most of the Greens' policies are culturally rooted in the Green movement and reflect the long-term expectations of core Green voters; and many of National's have been dog-whistled up in the last three years. Any future accommodation will rely far more on National amending its policies (and moving towards the centre) than the Greens substantially changing theirs.
An indication of how far apart they really are might be found in John Key's blurt yesterday. The kinder face of the National Party is upset at plans to develop the Hobsonville airbase land for housing. About 3000 dwellings will be built, with about 500 of them designated for public housing. And it's the latter that Key objects to, describing as "economic vandalism" the plan to let public tenants live amongst the private owners who will occupy the bulk of the development. After all, he said there was potential to build "something pretty good there."
I mean, don't these people have slums to go to or something? Can't they go and live under power pylons like poor people are supposed to?
The fact is, this is public land, and its disposal presents a rare opportunity to create public housing in the way it is demonstrably most likely to succeed: as part of a mix. If that means that the neighbours have to lower their sights a little bit, so be it. Housing policy isn't about ramping up their property values. Nice to see Sue Bradford putting Key in his place.
Anyway Labourblogger Jordan Carter forgets to follow the Despise All Greens script in congratulating new co-leader Russel Norman, and Norman, on the evidence of his error-ridden Campbell Live interview, needs a bit of work.
There's still time to catch up on the utterly repellent efforts of some of the leading commentators on the American right to minimise - well, excuse, actually - Haditha. Michele Malkin posted a couple of photos (from LGF) of Palestinian children carrying rifles in a parade and mused that this says something about "the idea of children being used by the insurgents." What the fuck? In one house alone, marines shot at point-blank range girls aged 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, while their father pleaded for their lives. Where was the baby hiding her IED, then?
Instapundit, meanwhile, advanced the frankly amazing theory that there was no incentive for soldiers to show human decency when the liberal left will bag them anyway ("there's no point in behaving morally when they're going to be called monsters"). Wow. But wait, there's more: "these claims of outrage ring rather hollow," he insists, when some blogger no one's ever heard of is venting death fantasies about Bush. Oh, of course. Because that's exactly the same thing as executing babies in real life.
R J Eskow sums up some more of the same.
I have no patience for the "war is hell" walk-away argument. Yes, I think the Iraqis know that war is hell rather better than the rest of us. How could they not, when they are being murdered by all sides on a daily basis? But doesn't it seem just that little bit worse when they're murdered by the people sent in to liberate them?
And, no, as even Hitchens admits, this isn't an isolated incident. The new Iraqi Prime Minister doesn't think so. The BBC's Newsnight has interviews with Iraq veterans who don't think so either. But there are people in high command who chose this war and chose the manner in which it would be prosecuted and they shouldn't be allowed to pretend that gay marriage is the real issue.
Anyway, all rounded off by the best Olbermann-O'Reilly smackdown ever: Bill O'Reilly slandering US WWW2 troops, refusing to aplogise, Fox News falsifying transcripts of his show, you got it. Part One and Part Two.
On a quirkier note, reader Glenn Cassidy pointed out that "the really trippy thing" about the Nasa video I linked to yesterday "is that there appears to be another New Zealand on Titan. You can see it quite clearly on the page you linked to before you run the video. It's in the centre right of the photo."
Oh. My. God. So it is. Freaky!
And finally, I need your help for something I'm working on. I invite you to get back to me with any and all interesting and/or useful local XML/RSS/RDF etc feeds that you know of. They can be commercial, public sector, whatever - anything but blog feeds. Don't be shy about plugging stuff you're directly involved with. I'll tell you why presently, but for now I'm just on the hunt.
End of an era | Jun 06, 2006 09:02
IDG Communications is leaving the New Zealand market, licensing its key titles, including PC World and Computerworld, to Fairfax. Except for Unlimited and IDG's Tone competitor Fast Forward, which are now out of business. [10.20am UPDATE: Not so fast! I wondered if Unlimited was too good to go quietly. Latest info is that there are now a number of options developing to keep the magazine in business, including potential purchasers and a management buyout. Which apart from anything else, means I still have a column deadline ...]
I have a soft spot for IDG, not least because the five years I spent there, from 1996 to 2001, represents the longest period of salaried employment in my life (although the latter half of that was spent working from home - I've never been much of a one for commuting to office jobs). There were the usual ups and downs, but it was in general a highly satisfactory period, which you might gather from the fact that my former boss and I are now business partners. I'm still friends with quite a few other people I met working there.
My time there was essentially the boom time, when a vigorous IT sector funnelled a lot of money through the recruitment section of Computerworld and PC World's readership expanded steadily. There was a good company culture. In part, that culture came from the top: as a privately-held global company, IDG had a strong philosophy of employee welfare, especially for long-termers. I imagine that the shift to Fairfax-style employee relations will not be entirely painless.
In the 90s, there would be quarterly company lunches, when they'd get a temp in to attend the reception desk and everyone else would head off to spend the day bonding. After one particularly robust Christmas do, Rob O'Neill and I ended up at his place, loudly and drunkenly interrogating his prized 7" single collection. We never did work out how those stains got on the ceiling.
More seriously, the company also stood by me on the only occasion in my working life when I have been sued (by Telecom!), and the chance to cover the emerging Internet sector was a unique and valuable one (indeed, it became a specialist subject that still serves me well). The travel - New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando (where the Disney Swan & Dolphin is perhaps the worst large hotel in the world) China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia - was an incredible perk.
I'm particularly sad to see Unlimited go. I was part of the launch, and I think I'm listed as deputy editor in the first issue. It will leave a substantial gap. I haven't been officially notified of the closure yet, but I hope there'll be a get-together before it all goes away.
The irony is that IDG's exit comes as the NZ operation was emphatically back in the black, after several tough years. But the decision seems to have been made at a higher level. The deal is that Fairfax takes the licences for IDG's New Zealand and Singapore publications, and Fairfax sells IDG its British IT publications (most notably MIS, which will be renamed CIO and gives IDG its long-awaited foothold in the UK market).
This could work out well for the remaining publications: IDG NZ was essentially a stand-alone business, so the move to Fairfax might mean access to deeper pockets and more resources. But it's certainly the end of an era. I met some great people at IDG, and my thoughts are with those waiting to see whether they still have jobs.
On a happier note, Jason Rockpig's conversation on 95bFM on Saturday morning with regular show host Mark 'Rhythm Slave' Williams was a pretty extraordinary piece of radio. Slave was live on stage with Fat Freddy's Drop at the Brixton Academy, with 5000 noisy London punters providing the accompaniment. The support act was Breaks Co-Op, who appeared on Top of the Pops on May 21, looking like a sort of Kiwi supergroup, with Rodney from Goodshirt on guitar and backing vocals and that bloke from SJD on drums.
I'll deal with some matters arising (war, politics, alcohol and drugs) in the next couple of days, but for the time being: something totally trippy from Nasa. Bro' Town crosses the torrent barrier (honest Barney, don't fret: being pirated is a mindshare victory!) and, with thanks to reader Richard Le Gros, an absolutely heroic take on the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment. The boy and I are off to the supermarket for supplies real soon now …
Shout-outs to two people for quite different reasons: Jim Traue, who was deservedly named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for a lifetime's service to New Zealand letters and ideas. And Tim Selwyn, who goes up on a ludicrous and inappropriate sedition charge today. He was rightly charged with - and has pleaded guilty to - conspiracy to cause intentional damage (although I think they could have done without the conspiracy part), but the sedition charge is a waste of time and money and a blow against liberty. Tim's personal version of nationalism is eccentric, but his ideas are original and sincerely held, and bringing criminal charges against him for the fact of communicating them is simply wrong.
And finally … the Super 14 quotes whoopsie set me about finding some stupid stuff that one of those named in the bogus quote list actually did say. I dug up a Hard News script from 1999, and these are the concluding paragraphs:
New Zealand and South Africa are currently level in terms of test wins against each other. This test, the return fixture in South Africa and a likely clash at the World Cup will decide the winner not just for the year but for the century. We so have to win this, it hurts.
Some of us, of course will be watching keenly not only for top-notch play, but for yet another batch of Murrayisms. Murray Mexted once again welcomed us into his bizarre inner life in the preamble to the test against the French.
As Sir Howard Morrison laboured his way though the national anthem, Murray yelped: "Sends a tingle up the spine - a tingle in the loins!" and then the word "Cock!" as a French rooster wandered onto the paddock. In the post match debrief he held forth about "the security of having a man up your bottom".
Breathtaking. Right up with Murray classics like:
"He's looking for some meaningful penetration in the backline."
"You don't like to see hookers going down on players like that."
"He's running across field calling out come inside me."
"Everybody knows I've been pumping Martin Leslie for a couple of years now"
And of course, the all-time great Murrayism:
"It's hard sometimes when there's other men coming up your bottom."
Amazing. What will he say this weekend? We can but sit comfortably and wait - G'bye!
Is it any wonder I was briefly confused?
Another hat on | Jun 02, 2006 12:11
Another trip to Welly, another hat on. Last week it was my Web Guy Hat, this week, the Drug Policy Hat. (I'm not sure what a drug policy hat looks like, but I assume it's quite colourful.) I was asked by the New Zealand Drug Foundation to chair its second annual Policy Roundtable, focusing on drugs and young people, in the old legislative chamber at Parliament.
There was a lineup of international speakers, including Professor Rodney Skager, the author of Beyond Zero Tolerance: A Reality-based Approach to Drug Education and Student Assistance, but the highlight for me was the presentation of Dr Joseph Boden, one of the researchers on the Christchurch Health and Development Study, which, like a similar (and slightly older) project in Dunedin, is a longitudinal study of a cohort of New Zealand children born in Christchurch in 1977.
In recent years, the study has generated some globally important data on drug use and marijuana in particular. It has done a great deal to illuminate links between cannabis use and mental illness, positing the idea that there is a genetic vulnerability in a segment of the population, for whom cannabis use substantially increases the risk of developing a psychosis, especially in cases of heavy use. The other risk factor - and this was the big takeaway for me - is early onset of use. All social and medical risks involved in cannabis are hugely amplified by early onset of use. Adolescents smoking dope is a bad thing. (Contrary to what you have read in the papers, the research has reached no conclusion on the exact nature of the "gateway effect" of cannabis.)
But the study has also found that 80% of its cohort has used cannabis at least once. The researchers regard it as - and Boden admitted the term is "controversial" in some circles - a "normative experience". In other words, trying a toke is part of growing up in New Zealand. The 80% figure is higher than other estimates, but that's likely to be a function of trust amongst the participants. You're more likely to 'fess up in a lifelong study like this than you are if someone cold-calls you on the phone to ask if you do drugs.
Interestingly, in his opening address, Jim Anderton cited the data from the Christchurch study as the reason that he would countenance no alteration to the laws on cannabis. Then two hours later, Boden said that on the basis of their data the researchers believed the current law was "ineffective" (fairly obviously, given that it fails to deter eight out of 10 New Zealanders) and "discriminatory", and needed changing. The important qualifier here is that they believe changes should be be small and incremental and extensively evaluated at each step.
Boden also admitted he was disappointed that the evidence of the Dunedin and Christchurch studies is not referred to at all in the draft National Drug Policy consultation document.
This is where we reach one of the oddities of the debate over "evidence-based" approaches to drug policy. Isn't all policy evidence-based? Not in the matter of drugs it isn't. Faith, ideology and morals often trump evidence, and often to quite bizarre effect. The most notorious example is the DARE program, in which (typically) cops come in to primary schools and scare the bejeesus out of children with the aim of "inoculating" kids against future drug use. Study after study has demonstrated that DARE is at best ineffective and at worst actively counterproductive. Yet it's still in use at 80% of American schools. Total abstinence remains a politically popular educational strategy - and harm reduction a politically risky one. The evidence doesn't really come into it.
I did enjoy the day. The fact that the health select committee had to meet meant that some of the MPs who had RSVPd couldn't be there, but National's Jacqui Dean and NZF's Barbara Stewart attended, the former for the whole day. There were also departmental CEOs, treatment providers (who were at mains to emphasise the alcohol remain their biggest issue) and other interested parties. It was a fairly open setting, and one in which I felt comfortable speaking plainly.
There's a related debate going on in Australia at the moment, around the current Parliamentary inquiry into Amphetamines and Other Synthetic Drugs. This transcript is interesting - particularly the evidence given by Dr Susan Carruthers of Australia's National Drug Research Institute. She has quite a robust exchange of views with the elected representatives, who don't always seem very receptive to what she has to say. (Enlighten is covering proceedings on a daily basis.)
The Australian delegate at Wednesday's conference, Professor Richard Midford (an associate professor at the National Drug Research Institute), had some harsh words for the current direction of Australian drug education policy, which he described last week as "a slogan masquerading as an outcome."
I sat next to Richard at the previous night's dinner, and talked to him about the current political debate here with respect to differences between wealth and taxes in Australia and New Zealand. He said that such was the nature of the "mining boom" that you almost can't get anyone to do anything in Perth, because the money's all in the mines. He said he'd gone into a mining town on a community drug education project and realised that even the apprentices were making more than he was.
As luck would have it, Tim Selwyn looks at the same issue this week:
They don't call it "the lucky country" for nothing. The line in their anthem about "wealth for toil" is relative - there certainly isn't anything in there about having to have a knowledge economy to succeed in the world - just grab your shovel, cobber! A graph in the link shows in 1980 the export value of minerals and agriculture were equal. In 2000 minerals are almost twice that of agriculture. Does this help to explain why they have done supposedly so well compared with us over the last 25 years?
Meanwhile Don Brash said this:
I have a terrible fear that the economic gap between NZ and Australia will become so vast that the skill drain will accelerate still further. If that happens New Zealand society as we know it may not survive.
Well, actually, he said that in 1979, in a letter to his parents, quoted on page 104 of his biography.
Other stuff: Jason Mackenzie emailed to put me in my place for fretting about Haditha:
Hard to imagine how things could get any worse in Iraq, is it? How about one third of the women and girls in the eastern quadrant slaughtered or raped by the invading force (see the Red Army's soldiering in Germany 1944 - 45). War is hell and terrible things happen but there is no great power in all recorded time with a more honourable record in such proceedings than the US. Faux-bro, senior woodchuck, Muslim butt-kissers like you need to get some perspectives on events.
Jason, your moral compass appears to be broken.
Now, I usually leave the Sir Humphreys crew to get on with their thing while I get on with mine. But Lucyna's latest post is unintentionally hilarious. She's disturbed at the news that children in state schools are being taught the names of body parts:
I guess that some sex obsessed bright spark decided that as soon as children got into a state school, they needed, just needed to know these extra special names. I would be interested to know from any parents out there with five year olds in state schools if the names of every single body part, ala physical anatomy, are taught as well. Some how I doubt it, since the purpose of such teaching is not anatomy, but sex.
I'll just end with the thought that at the age of five, a child needs to know there are parts of themselves that are private, and that privacy be reinforced by absolutely not mentioning them. By introducing this lack of privacy at age five, insidiously creates a crack through which a child and their future sex life is open to public scrutiny. Which seems to be the purpose, maybe unintented, by teaching five year olds words for gentalia.
"Mum, what's this?
"Shhh, darling, that's a part of your body that must absolutely not be mentioned."
Still, I guess anything that gets me and AL on the same page can't be all bad …
And, finally, John Cawston posted the following list of priceless Super 14 quotes to our little rugby mailing list. I'm not sure of its sources, but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere, so I think I'll just paste the whole lot below. Toodle-pip!
UPDATE: Ah - okay, and yup, I should've Googled a little more. As a number of helpful readers pointed out, the following quotes aren't really real. As PC notes, they're listed here. Snopes a little more on it.
I'd love to say I was just testing, but actually, I was in too much of a hurry to get out the door for a school appointment to think before pasting-then-posting. And in my defence, I would point out that the Mexted quotes below are no sillier than many things he has actually said. I'll leave them there for your amusement anyway …
"Nobody in Rugby should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." - Jono Gibbs - Chiefs
"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes." - Rodney So'ialo - Hurricanes - on University
"You guys line up alphabetically by height." and "You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle." - Colin Cooper - Hurricanes head coach
Chris Masoe (Hurricanes) on whether he had visited the Pyramids during his visit to Egypt: "I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we went to."
"He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the morning regardless of what time it is." - Colin Cooper on Paul Tito
Kevin Senio (Auckland), on Night Rugby vs Day Games "It's basically the same, just darker."
David Nosafora (Auckland) talking about Troy Flavell "I told him, 'Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, 'David, I don't know and I don't care.'
David Holwell (Hurricanes) when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to reach for 150 or 200 points this season, whichever comes first."
"Andy Ellis - the 21 year old, who turned 22 a few weeks ago"(Murray Mexted)
"Colin has done a bit of mental arithmetic with a calculator." (Ma Nonu)
"He scored that try after only 22 seconds - totally against the run of play." (Murray Mexted)
"We actually got the winning try three minutes from the end but then they scored." (Phil Waugh Warratah)
"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body." (Jerry Collins)
"That kick was absolutely unique, except for the one before it which was identical." (Tony Brown)
"I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father." (Tana Umaga)
"Sure there have been injuries and deaths in rugby - but none of them serious." (Doc Mayhew)
"If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again."(Anton Oliver)
"I would not say he (Rico Gear) is the best left winger in the Super 14, but there are none better." (Murray Mexted)
"I never comment on referees and I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat." (Ewan McKenzie)
Murray Deaker: "Have you ever thought of writing your autobiography?" Tana Umaga: "On what ?"
"Well, either side could win it, or it could be a draw."(Murray Mexted)
"Strangely, in slow motion replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air for even longer."(Murray Mexted)
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