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Never let the facts ... | Jan 07, 2008 10:13

If you read anything in the Sunday papers yesterday, it should have been David Fisher's tremendous story about the battle between Affco and ACC in Wairoa. It's the story of corporate welshing, hired PR, tame politicians, pig-ignorant radio blatherers and one kid's wrecked life.

In April 2003, sitting in the carpark of the Affco meat processing plant in Wairoa during his dinner break, 18 year-old Joel Storey was shot by a Mongrel Mob member in a passing car. His spine was damaged and and his right kidney was mashed. The friend had gang connections, but Storey did not -- although Fisher's story describes how the young man's alleged gang connections took on the status of fact in the whirl of lobbying, fostered outrage and pig-ignorant talkback blather that followed.

Affco is liable for $1 million towards the lifetime support of the employee shot in its carpark. That might seem odd, but it is the very clear implication of the contract Affco (and its private insurer) signed with ACC to become an Accredited Employer. As an Accredited Employer, Affco took responsibility for injuries on its property, up to the value of $1 million (Storey's lifetime support will come in at 10 times that, with the balance paid by ACC) -- in exchange for paying virtually no standard employer levies.

But rather than honour its contract, Affco hired top-flight spin (Richard Griffin) and got National's Anne Tolley on the case, whereupon the facts started to go west.

For some reason, Fisher's story isn't online, but the droppings of the tale are everywhere.

Here's Anne Tolley saying "it is unfair that AFFCO is being slapped with a $1 million bill for a gang shoot-out outside its premises." But it wasn't outside its premises, it was Affco property, and the kid was at work. And it wasn't a "shoot-out" either, which would imply, y'know, some sort of reciprocal fire between people in gangs.

Here's Tolley again in Parliament, asking "Why does the Minister continue to claim that the 2003 gang shooting of Mr Storey is work-related when the man was not working but on a break outside AFFCO's staffroom, outside the security fence, and outside the employer's control?"

According to Fisher's story, there was no security fence. It was constructed after the shooting, and Tolley should really read up before declaring that break-time isn't work-related.

Here's Ralston, not letting the facts get in the way of a good rant, and DPF doing his bit for the team.

Meanwhile, Affco saw fit to introduce the allegation that Storey had left the premises to smoke marijuana. There was no evidence whatsoever for this claim. (And, indeed, given the kid's acknowledged dedication to the skilled job, it seems quite unlikely.)

The radio, as you might expect, was a bunfight. Until the kid's family were able to reach him and ask him to desist, Michael Laws loudly and repeatedly told his listeners that Storey was a gang member. On Radio NZ's The Panel, that haven of not-very-well-informed indignation, Gary McCormick (isn't it sad what he's become?) harangued ACC minister Ruth Dyson.

No one seemed inclined to acknowledge that Affco had done a deal that saved it millions of dollars in levies -- and then, when it didn't fancy the outcome, after having originally accepted the claim (and assured Storey's mother it would cover his costs), tried to relitigate. Griffin pronounced thus to the Herald:

A spokesman for Affco, Richard Griffin, said ACC might think it had a strong case legally, but its position set a strange precedent for employers.

"There has always been a difference between law and common sense, and in this case the law flies in the face of common sense," he said.

"We think from a business perspective it's very, very weird."

Or very, very inconvenient. If Affco didn't know what it was signing then it doesn't need pricey spin doctors, it needs new lawyers. Or is the law just something the little people worry about? Reality check: insurance is about cost and risk, and Affco made a choice.

The strength of Fisher's story is that it's multi-faceted. He doesn't shy from the media's own role in the affair or from the political dimensions (Affco is owned by the Talley family, whose principals, according to The Hollow Men, offered the National Party a $1 million donation in 2004), but keeps it grounded in Wairoa. The sad, ironic note of conclusion is that Joel Storey now does wear a gang colour -- the red of the Mongrel Mob whose bullet wrecked his life.

Fisher starts soon as the new staff writer at The Listener. I think he's the magazine's best catch in a long time.

Meanwhile, the inevitable press release-driven faux outrage fills the silly-season papers. Poneke, who warned us about this, notes Simon Power's absurd releases about the purchases of LCD TVs to replace old ones in prisons (have you actually tried buying a CRT set?) and, wait for it, the costumes worn by two Corrections staff at a Christmas party. Even DPF thought Power needed to calm down a bit. It's hard to believe he was seen as potential Prime Minister material.

And finally, the person for whom there is never an inappropriate moment to get her picture in the paper. Christine Rankin weighed in on the current investigation into the death of an 11 week-old baby with a statement that she managed to get run verbatim in most media. The TVNZ version:

For the Sake Of Our Children Trust spokeswoman Christine Rankin says it is clear current approaches to the problem have not made a blind bit of difference.

She says it proves the anti-smacking law is a complete failure and the message just is not getting through to those who need it most.

Rankin says we need to start responding strongly to drug and alcohol abuse.

The Newstalk ZB/Herald online version:

For the Sake Of Our Children Trust spokeswoman Christine Rankin says it is clear current approaches to the problem have not made a blind bit of difference. She says it proves the anti-smacking law is a complete failure and the message just is not getting through to those who need it most.

Ms Rankin says we need to start responding strongly to drug and alcohol abuse.

Really? Whatever has happened here, given that the parents of the dead child are Muslim immigrants, it seems unlikely that drugs and alcohol are a factor. Indeed, given that very little is known about the case yet, it would seem only decent to refrain from wading in and shouting your usual talking points. But that wouldn't be Christine Rankin, would it?

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I'm away enjoying the mysteries of Waiheke Island for a week from tomorrow, so you won't be hearing from me for the duration (although I'll pop something else up before I go).

Also, I have a giveaway: a Heineken Open prize pack, including "a double pass to the Heineken Open, a Heineken 15 pack and tasty cuisine and perfectly poured Heineken in the Heineken Hotel after the game." I'm a little late on this, so click reply, put "Heineken Open" in the subject line and tell me who the top seed is. I'll draw it this afternoon. UPDATE: Comp closed. The winner, as selected with the help of a random alphabet generator, is Rob Wallace.

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Another nail in the coffin of music DRM | Jan 04, 2008 12:21

The news that Warner Music, until now the most fanatical holdout on digital rights management, is to allow Amazon to sell its releases as DRM-free MP3 downloads has a happy implication for New Zealand: it might finally get the Flying Nun catalogue where it belongs.

Warner has not done its deal with Amazon out of any particular sense of enlightenment -- it's an attempt to knock back iTunes' dominance in retail downloads and thus force Apple to shift on its pricing stance -- but the genie won't be going back in the bottle.

It's not that we'll be able to access the Amazon music store any time soon. That's US-only for the foreseeable.

But … without any fanfare, EMI Music in New Zealand, whose global parent agreed last year to let iTunes sell its catalogue at a higher bitrate, sans DRM, has been building a catalogue on Amplifier, the New Zealand download store since late last year. Until now, Amplifier hasn't been able to offer EMI (or other major-label) releases, because it delivers DRM-free MP3s.

Now, you can have Goldenhorse, Greg Johnson, Space Waltz(!) and OpShop (but not Salmonella Dub, for some reason) as downloads from Amplifier. Warner has something bigger. When it acquired Festival Mushroom Records, it got the Chills, the Clean, JPSE, Sneaky Feelings et al in the bargain, as well as the Mint Chicks.

The people running that catalogue for Warners have been knowledgeable and engaged. They got the 25th anniversary box set out the door. But the next step is surely to start bringing the further reaches of that catalogue to the places where people will find it. That means Amplifier -- and the similarly DRM-free eMusic.

The overall list of New Zealand music on eMusic these days includes the Phoenix Foundation's Horsepower and the Fat Freddy's album, as well as releases from Pitch Black, Shona Laing, the Renderers and the unsung (here at least) Roy Montgomery.

Through some vagary of licensing, you can actually buy The Clean's Anthology on emusic (complete with a loving review by Ira Kaplan) -- even from New Zealand. Ditto for a Pin Group compilation. But it's haphazard, and it doesn't do justice to a catalogue that should be crucial for the eMusic audience.

What I'd do if I owned the Nun back-catalogue is start talking now to both Amplifier and eMusic to present the label properly. It would easily warrant its own celebrity playlist on eMusic (Kaplan would doubtless put up his hand) and wouldn't it be nice for the Alpaca Brothers' sole EP to be available, and for the Bird Nest Roys cult to actually be able to download their album legally?

Speaking of whom, I went along to the Roys' reunion show this week, and it was a bit disappointing. Not so much the band, as the sound, which was shrieky and (as is invariably the case with Nick Roughan at the controls) very, very loud. Jeez. Not everyone should sound like Bailter Space, and I shouldn't have to stand at the back of the room to enjoy a band that was known for its vocal harmonies and the warmth of its sound. By the time the Roys had finished (I liked 'Alien' and 'Bided My Time' best) my ears were hurting (and ringing and partially deaf) and much as I wanted to see Ghost Club I wasn't really up for much more of that in a hot, low-ceilinged venue. I hope the Roys play again, and this time perhaps with Mario Posa at the controls.

I had some politics to, but Graeme has covered that topic at some length today, so I'll drop that on Monday and leave you with a link: Blam Blam Blam live at the King's Arms and mixed very nicely by Radio NZ's Andre Upston.

PS: I've suggested to the Warner folks that remembering to pay the domain name bill for Fying Nun would be a good idea …

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The Daily Embarrassment | Dec 31, 2007 11:12

It's a measure of the New Zealand Herald's petty and spiteful state that it relegates the appointment of Don McKinnon to the place in the Order of New Zealand made vacant by the passing of the Maori Queen to page four of today's paper -- and leads with a story headed New Year award for Labour's big donor.

Mt Roskill-raised expatriate Owen Glenn donated $200,000 to the Labour Party in 2004 and $300,000 the year following. He has made no subsequent donation to the party, but is said to support many New Zealand charities and, of course, made a crucial $7.5 million donation to the Auckland university school of business, where a building bears his name.

It took no investigative skill to report Glenn's donations. They have never been a secret -- he has discussed them freely ever since they were made. We know, because party president Mike Williams shared the knowledge two and a half years ago, that they were made after Glenn met Helen Clark at a tourism industry dinner.

In June 2005, the same month that Glenn's donations were reported by the Herald, Fran O'Sullivan wrote this column, in which she speculated on the identity of big expatriate political donors, and on what kind of return they might expect for their investment -- not in gongs, but in policy changes that would deliver them a direct financial benefit.

O'Sullivan wrote that the high-profile National Party billboard campaign, which had been running all year, was "rumoured to be carrying a London price-tag":

The story goes that a particular overseas resident Kiwi wanted to ensure his funds were tagged in a singular direction - to make an impact - the goal being to create a National brand to distinguish Don Brash from the more popular Helen Clark.

The "concerned" New Zealanders who are funding DigiPoll surveys over the nuclear policy are also understood to have behind-the-scenes backing from a US-connected individual who wants to see the Washington relationship restored.

Party presidents and corporate bagmen will mouth the usual cliches that major election donations come untagged or are made purely "for the good of the country" or to ensure a "healthy democratic debate".

But the way in which political funding is often disguised by a raft of trust structures - or anonymous donations - enables key influencers to make their contribution to democracy without fear of news media molestation.

She reeled off a list of names -- Gibbs, Myers, Fay, Richwhite and others -- but the only confirmed donor named was Owen Glenn. That remains the case. If there was any "molesting" to be done, it clearly wasn't going to be the Herald doing it.

Glenn's honour is, of course, a story, and it's competently reported by Bernard Orsman. Audrey Young's reporting on the Electoral Finance Bill was similarly professional. But the editors' decision to make it the lead from the honours list (you have to go four pages back to find any other reporting on the honours), with the obvious, if wholly unsupported, inference that Glenn got his gong as some delayed payback for his donations to Labour, sums up the Herald's year.

The EFA bug has taken its toll on other parts of the paper; notably the Weekend Herald's opinion page, which has become almost unreadable. John Roughan, a columnist I've long respected, got lost in his own tangled argument that private money, the more the better, was a positive boon to democracy. And O'Sullivan's column now reads like a wingnut blog, with all the bitter, conspiratorial muttering and graceless prose that implies.

Case in point: her predictions for 2008. She starts with a couple of punts made more in hope than judgement: "Helen Clark is rolled," and "New Zealand explodes in wave of civil disobedience," over the EFA. And then there's this:

3. Climate change science consensus breaks

More prominent scientists will dispute the extent of the man-made global warming scenario. Four hundred scientists, many of them current and former participants in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have already criticised claims by the panel and former US Vice-President Al Gore.

A minority report issued by the Senate environment and public works committee lists the scientists by name, country and academic/institutional affiliation and features their words, biographies and weblinks to their peer-reviewed studies and original source materials gathered in 2007.

In New Zealand, rational scientists will still be demonised by Government and some business organisations.

This is pure wingnut talking point: Google will find pages and pages of almost identical claims on American websites. But perhaps a newspaper with pretensions to quality should try harder than that.

Let me help: the "report" comes from the office of Republican Senator James Inhofe, who is, by the standards of a developed nation, crazy.

Inhofe has declared that "I don't believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn't been dealt with in the Scriptures," which ought to be the place of first recourse for matters ranging from foreign policy to homosexuality. He has stated that the "spiritual door" for the 9/11 attacks was opened by God because the US government was insufficiently supportive of Israel. Inhofe is also freakishly paranoid. He has repeatedly stated his belief that global warming is a "hoax".

Nonetheless, you might have assumed that the 400 "prominent scientists" heralded in Inhofe's report had relevant expertise, or at least they were all actually scientists (or to put it another way, that O'Sullivan has actually read the list she is recommending to her readers).

Regrettably, neither is the case. The list includes TV weathermen and economists (Update: and three TV gardeners!) as well as people who are scientists but have no relevant expertise, and notorious credential-inflaters like Timothy Ball.

The report deceives in various other ways. In support of the idea that the tide is turning, the official release cites "Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic." I suppose reasonable people could differ on the meaning of "recently", but Patterson has been publicly lining up with climate sceptic groups since at least 2002.

You might also want to be careful of claims that people on the list have been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In most cases, that means they have been expert reviewers. Which still sounds pretty flash. Until you realise that anyone can be an expert reviewer. You just have to ask for a copy of a draft report.

Okay, so -- surely all these people have made some common declaration on climate change, or at least confirmed to Inhofe's office that their view is what he says it is? Well, no. It's a clippings list, compiled by his staff from news reports that could conceivably be taken as indicating global warming denial on the part of the subject. Inevitably, it includes people who actually regard anthropogenic climate change as a fact.

On the other hand, here's a useful, and rather long, list of organisations that explicitly endorse the following conclusions:

1) the climate is undergoing a pronounced warming trend beyond the range of natural variability;

2) the major cause of most of the observed warming is rising levels of the greenhouse gas CO2;

3) the rise in CO2 is the result of burning fossil fuels;

4) if CO2 continues to rise over the next century, the warming will continue; and

5) a climate change of the projected magnitude over this time frame represents potential danger to human welfare and the environment.

The list includes the scientific academies of 19 countries, including the US, Britain, Japan and New Zealand, a slew of US government agencies, the World Petroleum Council, and dozens of multinational corporations. You could also add our own Meteorological Service and National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

None of these organisations, are, apparently, "rational".

Of course we should question and revisit scientific conclusions. It's what scientists do all the time. But we should also be able to smell bullshit when it is served up, and O'Sullivan doesn't appear to have made even the most modest effort to do that. She has a long and admirable record in journalism, but columns like her last one are an embarrassment not only to herself, but to her paper.

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Uniquely Refreshing | Dec 27, 2007 10:09

Christmas had an odd rhythm this year. The natural conclusion of 2007's business was Friday, and it seemed as if half the town was packing up and clearing out by the afternoon. I wrote and recorded a script for the Public Address Radio Christmas special in time to arrive at the gates of Prego for lunch with Paul.

As ever, we were fed admirably and served like friends before decamping further up the road to the Living Room for a festive glass with David Slack, Michele A'Court, Jeremy Elwood and a number of members of the comedy fraternity. The showers cleared and we yarned, watched dazed crowds from the offices wander the footpaths and laughed like buggers.

Michele is an old friend of my darling, who appeared in good time to share some cheer and then transport me away before I caused any embarrassment. I had Japanese takeaways and nodded off on the couch.

On Saturday, I had the available members of the Public Address whanau around and cooked a whole chicken, some squid and sausages on the barbecue, with home-smoked salmon, salads and satay vegetables. The appetiser was hand-stretched mozzarella, sliced vine tomatoes and basil leaves, drizzled with Paul Holmes olive oil from Mana Lodge (an early Christmas present). It was particularly nice.

As usual, we became talkative, more so after the Duncan Taylor 'Rarest of the Rare' Glenlochy was passed around, but, by dint of a cunning plan, I was able to usher the crowd out to see some live entertainment later in the evening. Two absolute angels stayed behind and cleaned up.

The taxi driver on my way home confirmed my impression that it was quiet on the town. It seemed that the exodus had already taken place -- until Monday morning, when the butcher was a throng of meat and money and food retail in general was mad.

More than any previous year, I was aware that we now share Auckland with many people who have no particular religious or cultural grounding in Christmas, but who still want it to be nice for the rest of us. Disproportionately, they sit behind tills and checkouts, and they all seemed to wish me season's greetings. Keep Christmas secular and inclusive; that's what I say.

We still have one member of the household who is excited enough about Christmas presents to start the day at 6am, and we couldn't refuse to emerge for very long. My best present was a beautiful black leather satchel that had been on lay-by at Minnie Cooper for months. Apparently my old satchel looked like crap.

The day still yawned after our pancakes, dry-cured free-range bacon and maple syrup, so I got on my bike. The morning was warm with fluttering breezes, and down at Coyle Park, Pacific Island families had already set up their canopies and barbecues; family members not required for cooking dozed unselfconsciously. The tide was lapping high and the water looked inviting. Down at the beach on the west side of the peninsular, three or four people were swimming.

I got back home and told the family they should accompany me down to the beach; and they did, although I was the only one game for a swim.

"You'll want to get in that water -- it's great," said the fit bloke as he dried off and fitted his running shoes for departure, which had the effect of intimidating me.

It had clouded a little, and I hesitated, knee deep, before getting one of the kids to give me a countdown. Zero, and I plunged. It was great. And brilliant and special and uniquely refreshing. I floated out and remembered what is good about New Zealand.

At home, I browsed webcams to see how the rest of the country was having Christmas. Courtenay Place was swept with rain, Cathedral Square was being wandered by bored tourists, St Clair beach seemed inviting and the view from Hanmer Springs was a Rita Angus version of paradise. We read our new books and played our new games. Conflicting advice and a desire to avoid poisoning my family got the better of instinct, and I cooked the turkey breast too long and dried it out. Lots of gravy, then.

On Boxing Day, we watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special off the torrent, and I bought this on Trade Me. Like seemingly all "local" Trade Me vendors, the seller lives at the edge of the observable universe: ie, Albany. Well, he can put the thing in the mail, I think. Because I am learning, again, to do nothing.

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