Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Dear Auckland | Jul 01, 2004 09:45

Perhaps we will never really know what brought 17 year-old Thomas John Davidson to Auckland's Northwestern motorway at 5.30 last Friday morning, there to be killed, under the Newton Road overpass, by a truck.

If he was, as is being supposed, hitchhiking, then he picked a bloody awful spot. Although the unfortunate driver of the truck that clipped Thomas may well have had a safe pair of hands on the wheel, the same cannot be said for many of those who ply that stretch of road. I have seen worse driving only State Highway One, north of Hamilton.

People come blazing in from the West, trusting their brakes and fate to haul them up a couple of metres short of slowing traffic; or they leave their lane change for the southern motorway till the last minute, veering across lanes and skimming the bumpers of others; or they drive apparently unconscious of the dodgy world around them, declining to acknowledge the indicator of the car trying to make that vital change for Nelson Street.

So it's intense. It's a handy road, though - I can leave Pt Chev most times after 9am and be parking in Princes Street literally five minutes later. For all that you hear about Auckland's traffic woes, it's actually only when an unforeseen incident reduces road capacity that it all really turns to custard. The classic incident of its kind, of course, is the paint spill on the harbour bridge on the Friday before the 1999 general election, which gave people in their cars all too long a look at the big National Party billboard declaring "Auckland: Keep it this way".

And that, sadly is how Thomas's death was made manifest last Friday: terrible jams on the alternative roads in from the West. I crawled halfway down Williamson Ave before I could nip up Millais Street and onto Richmond, thereby to Ponsonby and well on the way to Radio New Zealand. You have to know the shortcuts in Auckland, physical and metaphorical.

There was quite a bit in the press over the weekend about Auckland: Lee Baker and Benjamin Crellin's Way of the Jafa was profiled in the Herald's Canvas magazine, seeming to be cleverly-written (Baker is a lead writer for Eating Media Lunch, Crellin does a good Holmes impression) but relying on stereotypes for its jokes. Then the Sunday Star Times' investigation about living in Auckland or someplace else.

These things get overdone. Really, Auckland is a village on a harbour, surrounded by a lot of boring suburbs. It lacks cohesion, it gets too much rain and the mayor is a clown. But it is a somewhat larger village than any of the others and, crucially, one that reaches out to the Pacific. Thus, we are strange and dynamic in way other cities can't be.

Leaving aside Auckland's overrated, TV-centric celebrity culture - easily enough to avoid if you don't go to the Viaduct and don't get on the Lists of People to Invite When Launching Things - the city has its charms. Town might be a shabby strip full of Net cafes, food halls and Asian students, but it's really quite close to my 'hood, with its open spaces and summer beach. Seamart is always fun, the fare is good at West Lynn Organic Meats, Orchid is a nice new bar on Ponsonby Road and I'm happy to say that Auckland now has its own Mediterranean Food Warehouse (on Gaunt St in the maritime quadrant). All we need is a Moore Wilson and we're set.

But it's good to get away, and I am, briefly, to Queenstown (I see Aucklanders in Queenstown is the new Metro cover story - quelle horreur!) where hopefully other folks will pay for the expensive stuff. I'll be sure to let you know if Joe Cotton stars in an amateur porn video or anything, and I (hopefully) have something special lined up for tomorrow morning on Public Address. I arrive back in Auckland tomorrow afternoon, and several hours later I'll be spending our massive advertising receipts taking the Public Address crew out to dinner at Rice on Federal Street. You'd like Rice. And thereafter, I expect I'll rest. But ... resting. Doesn't that sound so Christchurch?

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Boundless confidence | Jun 30, 2004 10:40

I can't help but wonder if the current atmosphere of moral panic has arisen partly because people don't have enough else to worry about: certainly not the economy, which is presently spewing out remarkably good news.

This week, it's trade figures (a " whopping increase in the value of goods exported in May" that "smacked economists' expectations clear out of the park" according to the Herald business section), last week it was quarterly GDP ("the economy grew an astounding 2.3 per cent in the March quarter" said the Herald). There's not much to complain about there, although that traditionally does not stop certain sectors complaining anyway. Seeing as someone has to, I hereby undertake to spend the end of this week expressing boundless economic confidence by my actions …

Anyway, Anthony Trenwith has read the omnibus bill that companies the Civil Unions Bill and finds more than a few problems as he explained in an email wittily titled 'Undermining the sanctity of civil unions':

The problem with Civil Unions is the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill. It doesn't just give Civil Union couples the same rights as Married couples - it also extends to de facto relationships too.

So given this, what's the point in Civil Unions and what's the point in the Civil Union Bill? Wasn't it supposed to be about eliminating discrimination by creating a statutory relationship parallel to marriage? Also, when is a de facto relationship (the 2 year limit doesn't apply)?

Sometimes people are going to want to be considered to be de factos and, other times they won't - depending on whether it's good or bad for them. As there's no hard and fast rules, proving or disproving the existence of a relationship could prove to be very difficult. Being able to have unlimited de facto partners complicates things further.

That's not to say there aren't benefits. Flatmates could become de facto partners to get more student allowances. Whole hostel floors could become harems! There's also a downside - de facto partner(s) can claim against your estate.

While some amendments are just anomalous - e.g. the Evidence Act amendment preventing Civil Union partners (as well as spouses but NOT de factos) from being forced to testify against each other. Ultimately, the government is undermining Civil Unions before they even exist, and their premise for the legislation is beginning to wear thin. Married and non-married couples should be treated equally, but not at the expense of creating confusion and uncertainty in the law - which is what will result from the inclusion of de facto relationships. This is meant to make life easier not make work for lawyers!

I had a feeling there might be this kind of problem with the omnibus bill. Oh well, that's what select committees are for …

Dr Matthew Andrews had further comment on the Sunday Star Times' editorial on liquor laws:

Until recently I worked on alcohol policy. I agree with you that the SST editorial is a badly considered rant. Light spirits (under 23%) were hit hard by the 'sherry tax' and are now virtually non-existent (I also remember drinking cheap port and sherry as an underage drinker in Australia - not because we liked the taste, but because it was cheap), and alcopops are not the chosen drink of underage drinkers (too expensive for the volume of alcohol).

However, the SST editorial did get one thing right - social marketing campaigns, like the 'Culture Change' campaign aren't likely to work unless they are well backed up by other measures. I don't believe that this is the case. I believe that it is most likely to end up as easily ignored as a number of other anti-alcohol and anti-drug social marketing campaigns. (The Ministry of Youth Development has put out guidelines for what makes drug education effective - see their website - and generally it includes things like targeting problem groups, providing credible messages - these don't easily gel with a mass social marketing campaign trying to persuade a wide range of populations to reduce their drinking.)

If New Zealand is going to seriously address harm caused by alcohol the measures that need to be taken are simple and clear; ban broadcast alcohol advertising, restrict adult supply to children (an amendment to the Sale of Liquor Act could do this), require mandatory ID for alcohol purchases, encourage local authorities to plan the placement of liquor retail outlets sensibly, raise the price of alcohol, and, maybe, change the age of purchase.

I believe that these measures would be far more effective and value for money than a potentially expensive social marketing campaign to change the culture of drinking in New Zealand.

On a related tip, Nandor Tanczos and United Future are back at loggerheads on drug issues: in this case, regarding the Angel Care Trust's plan to train more volunteers in first aid to take care of clubbers in Wellington and Christchurch and offer them advice on the risks of drugs. The trust, like the Social Tonics Association of New Zealand, is the brainchild of party pill entrepreneur Matt Bowden, who does genuinely seem to have his heart in the right place - he says he turned to the manufacture of the legal BZP-based pills after his cousin died after taking ecstasy, and is also behind a draft code of practice for dance pill suppliers.

But the Christian anti-drug group Drug Arm objected when it became clear that the angels looking out for club kids may have used illegal drugs in the past, or may still (but presumably not when on duty) do so occasionally. Nandor accused Drug Arm of mounting a turf war on the drug issue. In response, United Future MPs accused him of being "nothing more than an apologist for drug use, and he clearly considers wrecked lives and ruined futures to be acceptable collateral damage as long as he and his mates can light up."

Actually, Nandor's quite right: a well-meaning Christian soldier from Drug Arm isn't going to get the time of day (or, rather, night) wandering round advising kids to just-say-no in a busy nightclub - and he probably won't even know what he's looking for in an acute situation. He's in a different business, and if they really want fewer people being rushed to the emergency department, Drug Arm and United Future would be best advised to butt out on this one.

Now that Fahrenheit 9/11 is storming American box offices, some of Moore's more fervent fans should try and calm down (I don't hold out much hope of his enemies calming down, ever). Cursor is pointing to this site, whose author claims to have Googled the movie and "detected a disturbing trend that made little sense: an astonishing lack of sites in top rankings that expressed positive (or even neutral) view points on the Moore film."

He believes that Google is deliberately manipulating its own search results to ensure that Christopher Hitchens' "extremely biased article" about Moore and his movie on Slate repeatedly comes up as the first result. Other anti-Moore pages rank similarly strongly, he notes darkly, quoting unnamed search "experts" to back up his theory.

Trouble is, the sample results he quotes don't really bear out the conspiracy - pages bearing neutral and positive views of the film do appear on the first page. So why does Hitchens' fit of bile tend to rank top? Blame the blogosphere. Google is performing precisely as advertised and awarding a higher ranking to pages that are linked to by many other sites. The vast right-wing blog community has been frantically pointing to unflattering stories on Moore, and Hitchens' column in particular. Check out the lengthy Blogdex list of links to the Hitchens column.

I've been trying to download a copy of Fahrenheit 911 (with the full intention, of course, of subsequently paying for a ticket), but Gnutella was clogged up with fakes last week, and still doesn't seem to be offering viable sources. I tried BitTorrent this morning, but I think I'm too stupid to work out how that works. Whatever: looks like I have a preview ticket for July 20 anyway.

And on a similar theme, I thought I should obtain a copy of the Beastie Boys' To the Five Boroughs and check out this copy-protection flap for myself. Result? Same as last time I put a new EMI CD in my Mac - the copy control doesn't work. Track one, 'Ch-Check It Out' imported smoothly into iTunes, and played very nicely on my iPod. I actually tried to make it work, or at least launch the built-in music player on the CD, but no luck. There is, however, a warning on the packaging that it might not play in my car stereo. Anybody else think that EMI's policy is just a bit silly?

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Here's hoping | Jun 29, 2004 10:53

It wasn't the tickertape parade that the war's backers would have hoped for, but we should all hope that the surprise handover of sovereignty in Iraq does actually improve things for Iraqis themselves, even if what emerges looks more like the old regime than the new democratic dream.

The Oxford International poll of more than 3000 Iraqis published by the BBC yesterday depicts something of a collapse in confidence in both the Americans and the future of the country. The number of Iraqis who believed life would be better in a year's time has fallen to 56% (from 71% in February) while the proportion believing that attacks on coalition forces are acceptable has nearly doubled, from 17% to 31%. In February, nearly half thought the war had been "the right thing to do". Now, only 38% think so, with 56% saying it was wrong. More than half of Iraqis now want foreign troops out and more than two thirds see the coalition as either an occupying (as opposed to liberating) force or a force that "exploits Iraq".

More than two thirds of those surveyed also placed little priority on acting against former regime members - which would seem to tally with the generally positive view of the interim Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, a former Ba'athist. Back to Iraq's Christopher Allbriton offers a useful snapshot of public opinion in Baghdad: support for both Allawi and the prospect of martial law, a strong desire for the Americans to leave and a clear distinction in perceptions of the homegrown Iraqi resistance and the horde of foreign jihadists.

In this sense, the jihadists have done the Americans a favour. As would any population that finds itself overrun by foreign terrorists, the Iraqis simply want security and are presently displaying little interest in quibbling over the composition of the interim government. How long that holds is a matter of conjecture. In the week before he departed, Paul Bremer appointed nearly two dozen Iraqis to senior government jobs. He also made orders that the national security adviser and national intelligence chief appointed by Allawi should serve for five years, regardless of the result of January's planned election, should that actually take place.

The next few months will be interesting: Allawi is, it seems, already talking to the resistance. Meanwhile, about 160,000 American troops will be station in a country where a third of the population - more, in places like Fallujah - regards them as fair game and a majority want them to leave. Iraqis are, hopefully, on the path to a better future, but it isn't the future as previously advertised.

Back on the home front, Fighting Talk's Matt Nippert is now on staff at The Listener, replacing Olivia Kember who has been poached by Damian Christie to report for Flipside. People get headhunted so young these days …

The trial of predatory former Takapuna Grammar teacher David Arthur seems to be producing a slightly different account of events than what gossip had held to be the case, but not one in which Arthur emerges in any better light. How good do you reckon Jonathan Marshall's Hosking impression was?

In Australia, that great moral beacon of our times, the Catholic church, has been paying off sexual abuse victims - and moving the abusers to Samoa and Fiji, beyond the reach of Australian police.

Slashdot has a lively discussion on the Beastie Boys' response to the uproar over the copy-protection on their new album: the group say that the special WMA player that launches on your computer installs only into RAM, and not on hard drives. I am given to understand from those who have tried it that the player itself is a great steaming piece of shit.

I've been going through the government's new Digital Strategy discussion paper and, having seen quite a few of these reports in my time, I can say that it's actually pretty good. Once you get past the 25 pages of scene-setting, there are real actions with real target dates, not least a National Content Strategy that will encompass a New Zealand Creative Commons. On the other hand, the broadband targets for 2010 - 85% of homes and small businesses enjoying at least 50Mbit/s connectivity - place a heroic degree of faith in our telecommunications companies.

The finalists of the 48 Hour film contest - which roughly half my friends seemed to enter this year - are progressively being posted on NZShortFilm.com this week, in Flash video at rates of up to 1Mbit/s - great for viewing at the office or, in my case, over Ihug Connect. The site (formerly lessfilm.com) has been built by our developers, CactusLab and its based on the same Supermodel content management system as Public Address. I hope and trust that it will demonstrate to the culture industry decision-makers the virtue of getting short films online. Basically, there's no good reason not to make this stuff available.

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Visiting the moral wellspring | Jun 28, 2004 11:58

I presume I'm not the only one to detect the irony in the fact that on the front page of the Weekend Herald there was a teaser for the head of the Catholic church's proclamation of a modern "moral wasteland" - while on page four there was a story saying that police are "considering charges against Catholic priests involved in hiding Alan Woodcock's nine years of sexual abuse against schoolboys and young men."

Roman Catholicism has, like other faiths, offered succour, comfort and satisfaction to its adherents. No sensible person would deny that to them - and, I think, some sense of transcendence is of benefit to most of us in life. We should also avoid glib assumptions about the church and abuse: most abusers are not priests, most priests are not abusers.

But the Woodcock case is damning. To protect its own, collective interests, the Catholic church in New Zealand not only covered up Woodcock's sexual abuse of children, it facilitated that abuse by repeatedly moving on Woodcock to new schools and institutions where he could continue to prey on young people. These actions - which involved senior figures in the church in New Zealand - represented the most grotesque moral failure imaginable. And they are not isolated or unique. The church still has a great deal to prove in terms of its own moral leadership.

It turns out that Cardinal Thomas Williams' essay, The Spiritual Bankruptcy of Liberalism, is a paranoid jumble, distinguished from the average Maxim tract by the fact that he bags economic as well as social liberalism. As such, there will be something in it that everyone can agree with. Personally, I'm glad that my two boys have no interest in the dry-humping that passes for teeny pop videos these days. I, too, am concerned about the pressure on families.

But Cardinal Williams' case is littered with statements so silly and strange as to barely be worth arguing against. "Street walking," he claims, "is now as respectable as shop walking." No, it isn't. I find his claim that "policymakers disastrously tried values-free education," more than a little ironic. My kids have attended a primary school which offers more robust values than schools did when I was young: values like trust, compassion and respect. There is no corporal punishment and, hence, vastly less violence and bullying. Every year, some students are recruited as peer mediators, who assume responsibility for the school environment and seek to head off confrontation in the playground. It's really pretty good.

For a while as a kid, I lived in Greymouth, and maybe half the other kids in my neighbourhood attended the local Catholic school, St Patrick's. They were permanently in thrall of "the Brothers" - the disciplinarian schoolmasters - and I was quite sure that I was better off at the local state secular school. Some of my peers would attend the local Catholic High School, Marist Brothers (now John Paul II High School), others would be shipped off to board at St Patrick's Silverstream. As we now know, there was hidden abuse at both those schools.

The changes in schools in my lifetime are material to me, because both my kids have special needs, and the younger one presents some challenges to the school environment. They'll be okay, and should grow up to be useful citizens. But it is far from out of the question that in another time, they might have wound up simply being whisked out of the system to a place like Porirua Hospital, Oakley or Kingseat - which is what we did as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, Cardinal Williams' moral golden age. Children as young as eight were beaten, injected with paraldehyde and subjected to solitary confinement. If it is "political correctness" and "liberalism" that ended that, then I say that is a considerable moral improvement on what went before.

Of course, many of those who nod sagely at Cardinal Williams' plea will happily go out and shop on a Sunday, or watch the TV programmes he decries. What irks me the most, however, is the ease with which Williams and his ilk regard values other than theirs as an absence of values. Frankly, Cardinal, I have sized up your values and mine and I vastly prefer the latter.

One further observation: once again, the Herald seems happy to allow conservative commentators and their tracts to set its agenda. There will, inevitably, be some rebuttal published in the Dialogue column this week, and various letters expressing passions either way. But I have to wonder what the Herald's editor, Tim Murphy, really thinks he's doing.

The Sunday Star Times has also been keen - when it's not busy being sleazy - to tap into some perceived moral wellspring. Yesterday, it was a deranged rant about liquor laws that included this statement:

There was another piece of not-thought-through law-making soon after when, in an attempt to outlaw those New Year's Eve riots, the government introduced a ban on alcohol in a public place. Commendable, but in its haste parliament turned everyone who put a bottle of plonk in the car on their way to a BYO restaurant a criminal.

Sigh … yes, there was a drafting error at the time, but "the government" never "introduced a ban on alcohol in a public place". The Local Government (Prohibition of Alcohol in Public Places) Amendment Act 2001 granted local bodies the ability to impose a local liquor ban in a defined area, upon consultation with the community. (It has long been against the law for under-18s to consume alcohol in a public place.) Such bans are a constraint on the liberty of responsible individuals, but they appear to have been quite effective. They don't, as the SST believes, turn "law-abiding people into criminals", but they do give police the power to search for and confiscate alcohol within the defined area of the liquor ban. Alac has more information here.

"The problem of youth drinking," the editorial intones with splendid grammatical incorrectness, "has to be solved by instilling in the people who are the future to adopt a far more moderate approach to liquor than their parents have." It then goes on to dismiss as "some feel-good campaign" the impending Culture Change programme that will attempt to do just that.

It is certainly the case that the lowering of the drinking age has not worked out as well as many people hoped (it should be noted that the current Minister of Justice voted against the move), but the general reform of our liquor laws over the past two decades has actually been accompanied by a decline in consumption.

The quantity of pure alcohol for sale per head of population over the age of 15 last year was lower than in 2002. It was lower again in 1998, but is still sharply less now than it was at any time before 1995. Demand for alcohol has fallen. The exception? "Spirit-based drinks" with an alcohol by volume level of less than 23%, which have risen every year since 1995. There is evidence that young people, attracted by the lower price of such drinks, were driving the trend. The additional duty imposed last year on such beverages, in an attempt to halt that trend, is among the government actions angrily scorned in the SST editorial.

Confused? You have a right to be, until such time as the country's newspaper editors display a firmer grasp on the facts than your average talkback caller.

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