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The Liberal Lollyscramble | Dec 10, 2004 11:34
The most extraordinary thing about yesterday's Ahmed Zaoui bail decision is surely the frank disdain expressed by the Supreme Court for the Crown's evidence - or lack thereof - that Zaoui would constitute a danger on the streets of Auckland.
The Crown was not itself moved to offer any reason that Zaoui should, after two years, remain in prison: offering early in the piece yesterday the news that it would not oppose his being bailed to the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, where his communications could be monitored. The court decided that would be too much like interment to satisfy natural justice and instead committed him to the care of the Dominican friars. That, in a system such as ours, is the kind of decision a senior court is entitled to make.
The Herald's stern editorial describing the court's decision as "a sizeable step too far" might reflect the paper's understandable attachment to its Zaoui "exclusives", but it probably reflects the view of many New Zealanders. Morning Report today aired vox pops of citizens expressing shock and alarm that a "terrorist" was abroad. I have in recent months heard educated people holding forth against Zaoui, his motives and his bid for refugee status.
And yet, so far as I can tell, nothing has happened to significantly undermine the Refugee Status Appeal Authority's exhaustive finding that the convictions against him in Europe were not safe. He was elected as a member of the FIS, a very broad party which contained significant, even alarming, pockets of intolerance, and yet his record appears to be one of a community leader, rather than a zealot. (And anyway, as we have seen in recent weeks, we have no shortage of intolerance or zealotry ourselves.) Nothing seems to have justified his extended solitary confinement.
The argument that he was simply a victim of outrageous fortune might be seen as overly generous, but it would seem considerably more robust than the proposition that he is in any way associated with international terrorism in the sense in which we normally understand it. These two years would seem to have been long enough for his various supporters to have had their doubts and fall away, but he seems to have consistently impressed everyone who has met him. At the least, he is a man of great personal charm.
On the other hand, we've seen the growth of what can only be called the Cult of Zaoui. Some of those who have swung in behind his cause have offered not so much support as instant deification. Given the mildly hysterical scene at his exit from Auckland Remand Prison, he probably needs to be protected as much from those people as much as anything else.
Some of the political responses have been amusing, not least Tony Ryall's declaration that "New Zealand's security laws are worryingly vague. The Government should talk to National about how to fix the law." Those "worryingly vague" laws were, of course, signed off by a Cabinet of which Ryall was part, and this is the first time they have been tested in this way.
Intriguingly, the statements of National's leader have been more in line with perceptions of him as a supporter of human rights. Don Brash has confided to Camilla in recent weeks his concern over the length and nature of Zaoui's internment. Yesterday, he told her:
It's important that the SIS can work to some degree in secret. I think it's also important that if there serious charges laid against someone, they have some opportunity answering those charges.
In response to a question, Brash said he "might well have an opportunity during the Christmas break" of meeting Zaoui. I think his comments on the case have been quite fair and judicious - and that he should assert some leadership and tell his immigration spokesman to calm down.
I've said quite enough on the Civil Union Bill, which passed in the course of yesterday's liberal lollyscramble of news. So I'll just note that, especially in the 3 News coverage, the gay people supporting the bill's passage outside parliament yesterday will have appeared way more "normal" to the public than some of the hysterical Christians staging a vigil in opposition. I'm sure that New Zealand First's Brian Donnelly is quite right when he says that Brian Tamaki's campaign against the bill had a, er, perverse outcome.
You'll doubtless have noticed that we have an absolute bonanza of good reading on Public Address today. To much to take in one go, perhaps, but do take the time to read our new Great New Zealand Argument posting, Robin Hyde's The Singers of Loneliness (thanks to Jolisa for her introduction), which is quite wonderful. Also, feel free to have a crack at winning an iPod from David Slack.
Oh, and the folks from Chai, who have been advertising with us, finally got around to sending me some of the product (to be fair, I did miss their launch do). I don't drink ordinary tea, but I tried the Morrocan Mint and the Earl Grey last night. Verdict? Really nice, actually.
And finally, sadly, an open letter, from me:
Dear Scribe,
Love your work. But I hate what happened to a good friend of mine on Wednesday. I don't know the exact extent to which you were involved, but at the very least you stood by and allowed your buddy to beat my friend unconscious, and your gang's behaviour was cowardly and out of control. I don't know where that God that you like to thank when you win awards was on Wednesday night, but it wasn't anywhere near you.
I might have been there myself, but I was at my son's school prizegiving. He won a trophy, and he was so pleased. He was up against the odds, just like you always say you were in your songs. The difference is, he can't walk away from those bad odds. You can.
If you want to piss away your talent and amount to nothing, carry on the way you did this week. If you want to do justice to it, be a man and apologise, and then some. If you've got a problem, fix it. And if you can't fix it yourself, get some fucking help.
Enough really is enough.
Let's get on | Dec 09, 2004 11:29
So here we are, finally. The Civil Union Bill will pass its final reading today - by a far more comfortable margin than either last year's prostitution law reform or the homosexual law reform of 1986 - and, assuming something untoward doesn't happen to the Relationships bill next year, we can all get onto something else. It should never have been this fraught.
Last week in Wellington I chatted to a man in a very senior job who said he wished a little that the bill had never been brought. Not because he was against it. Quite the contrary: he lived with his long-term male partner. But, he said, the bitterness of the debate had made him and his partner uncomfortable, especially in respect of their weekly attendance at church.
But it is worth noting, as Helen Bain pointed out in her Star Times column, that however harsh the rhetoric has seemed, it is of a different stripe to that of 1986. Only a couple of MPs have sermonised against sodomy this time, and even National's hilarious Brian Connell, who was sprung with a lesbian sister-in-law, was obliged to admit that she was a good mother to her children.
Much as I would be amused to see Paul Adams continue his fast indefinitely, I do look forward to this issue going away, at least for a while. Having witnessed the squeezing of pus, it would be nice now to heal.
Anyway, nice to see that Deborah Coddington, on the advice of her daughter, has overcome her wearying tendency to triteness (last week: "just the Labour Government vote-buying, we're-nice-to-gays garbage") and will now vote in favour of the Civil Union Bill. As will Labour's Paul Swain. Don Brash really ought to have held his fire. Back talking to Camilla this morning, he said that the passage of the CUB would make virtually no difference to wider society. And then that it was such an important matter that it should go to a referendum. He would have been much better off simply voting his conscience and sparing himself the rhetorical obstacle course.
Paul Litterick's new Fundy Post for the Rationalists is funny and pointed as usual. But I have to say, I came into possession of a bottle of Bellamy's chardonnay once, and it was shocking …
Rodney Hide's blog is increasingly a home for interesting debate on Act's philosophy and future direction. Latest thread: a discussion of National's change of mind on four weeks' annual leave. FWIW, I agree with Nigel Kearney's view that Douglas and Quigley got it wrong when they resigned last week over Act's "false path". Rodney largely looks to me like what Act ought to be.
PA reader Aron got in touch with some related news:
I thought you may be interested to know that today I was phone-surveyed re: Ken Shirley. It was profile/recognition stuff and led into some questions on scenarios for my electorate (Tamaki) involving National not fronting a candidate in order to get ACT a seat in parliament. They may just be testing the waters but it was a pretty specific line of questioning.
Tom Pullar-Strecker has an interesting story on what we might expect from Telecom's move to a next-generation IP-based voice and data network. Forget numbers, it's all about names …
Slashdot has a thread on news that the PC malware jackals are turning on each other. Heh.
And a little anecdote. A pal at The Radio Network was with a group having a gasper in TRN carpark that greeted Paul Holmes this week with the news that he was number 26 on The Listener's Top 50 Power List.
"Number 26!?" said a clearly disappointed Holmes.
"Oh, it's alright - Kim Hill didn't make the list at all."
"She didn't?" said the media dynamo. And off he went, happy again …
Speaking of gaspers, I'm looking forward to the bars going smokefree tomorrow; and I say that as someone who has been known to enjoy a sly rollie in a bar. I'm sick of coming home from a night out stinking of smoke, and I strongly suspect that for most New Zealanders, smoking inside at bars will become as odd as smoking inside at someone's home. The only thing that troubles me is the quirk that makes an RSA Club smokefree but leaves a housie hall alone as a private gathering.
It'll be interesting to see what happens as midnight turns on tonight's bound-to-be-good SJD/Dimmer gig at the Studio in K Road. Not much, probably. I'm looking forward to seeing the Checks play the Masonic tomorrow night: last time I saw them there, the bar was dreadfully smoky. Oh, and a four-piece version of the Tokey Tones plays the Odeon Lounge on Saturday. Get out.
Sharp | Dec 08, 2004 10:13
I wouldn't want them to get big-headed, but DogBitingMen does seem to reach places that other blogs don't. Item: Neil Falloon's thinkpiece on Stephen Franks, based on what I am assured is a genuine conversation, comes up with a brilliant, and probably accurate, simile:
His mind is not like a steel trap. More like a Swiss Army knife that, once the can opener has proven ineffective, can offer a dizzying array of alternatives: a magnifying glass, a pocket knife and a bottle opener. Most of these contraptions will prove utterly useless, but all will look nice and shiny splayed open to gleam in the sunlight.
Also, David Young earnestly contemplates civil unions, but can't resist a fnaar-fnaar moment …
Reinventing TVNZ seems finally to be picking up a bit of steam. Anonymous linked to a post of mine from last week. The comments are interesting.
Another scare story from The Economist on the looming fate of the greenback. It concludes thus:
Many American policymakers talk as though it is better to rely entirely on a falling dollar to solve, somehow, all their problems. Conceivably, it could happen—but such a one-sided remedy would most likely be far more painful than they imagine. America's challenge is not just to reduce its current-account deficit to a level which foreigners are happy to finance by buying more dollar assets, but also to persuade existing foreign creditors to hang on to their vast stock of dollar assets, estimated at almost $11 trillion. A fall in the dollar sufficient to close the current-account deficit might destroy its safe-haven status. If the dollar falls by another 30%, as some predict, it would amount to the biggest default in history: not a conventional default on debt service, but default by stealth, wiping trillions off the value of foreigners' dollar assets.
The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.
I know The Economist backed Kerry and is thus a friend of the terrorists, etc, etc, but you have to wonder how long the official denial can last. The interesting thing for lil' ol' us is that New Zealand exporters, for now, seem to be coping with the relative strength of our dollar.
But is this really the administration you'd trust to competently privatise your superannuation?
I wonder who's leaking this stuff? Largely gloomy assessment of the Iraq situation from the CIA's departing station chief in Baghdad.
The vote-rigging story just won't die. Blue Lemur has an interesting report, and plenty of comment, on the software engineer who claims to have been ask by Florida Congressman Tom Feeney to write software that would allow vote totals to be secretly altered. He's signed an affadavit. The problem, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that there's no way of telling whether he's smoking crack or not.
The next Great New Zealand Argument is a couple of days late, but is really worth waiting for. Tomorrow, hopefully.
And finally, thanks muchly to Karajoz Coffee Company for putting on last night's preview screening of Team America: World Police for Public Address readers. Clearly, all you key opinion formers like the idea, so we'll do it again. I don't entirely subscribe to Parker and Stone's politics, but the movie is really bloody funny. And not just for the puppet sex.
PS: Last chance to dance. The Campaign for Civil Unions' email wizard has been fed some vitamins and is back live and loaded. Have a go if you think you're hard enough. Fnaar fnaar …
PPS: Can anybody help me out with a contact for Nick Gormack, son of Nag's Head Press founder Bob Gormack? He was working as a journalist at The Press until relatively recently.
Funny old week | Dec 07, 2004 10:35
The prospect of a tunnel under Auckland's Victoria Park - to fix a major motorway choke point without destroying more precious urban green space - is provisionally welcome around these parts. It will cost a small fraction of what the doomed Eastern Corridor was going to, and it should actually work.
The Herald editorial argued yesterday that it should be a six-lane tunnel running both ways, or nothing. This morning, a news story reveals that another tunnel may also be on the cards.
The comments thread about the CUB on Rodney Hide's weblog has been lively. I'm going to write a paid column about the relationship between social and economic liberalism in the class of '84 - as imperfectly personified by the Act Party - so I won't expand on it here, save to note that I'd quite like to see Act bite the bullet, shed the Amway types and crypto-conservatives and be what it was meant to be. Meanwhile, Jim Peron does a neat job of explaining why referenda on minority rights are a bad way to go.
No Right Turn catches Stephen Franks being intellectually dishonest over the CUB. Again.
Gay Eaters for Jesus prescribes a nice feed of cookies and milk for the Campaign against Civil Unions. CACU compares the "filth and squalor" of homosexuality to a sewage outlet.
Meanwhile, some sick fucks standing up for decency have sent Tim Barnett a castration kit (or "conversion kit for males who think they are females"). Delightful. Ironically, the Catholic church is complaining about receiving hate speech in response to its opposition to the CUB. I'm waiting for the thunderous statement condemning the church from Stephen Franks. No? Really?
One prediction from opponents of the Iraq war that didn't come to pass was a consequent refugee problem. Unfortunately, the attack on Fallujah has now driven more than 200,000 people from their homes. They can't get back, many lack food and winter is closing in.
Salon has a very funny interview with author Jerry Stahl, who muses on the idea of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as the neocons' Kurt and Courtney. He wonders if Coulter, the twitchy, self-obsessed stick figure that she is, is on the charlie. He's not the first.
The full data from the TV3/TVNS Global poll are online here. They're notable for a collapse in public perceptions of Don Brash. He's down on every positive perception - leadership, judgement, etc - and up on the negative ones. Ouch. Where is that conservative moral backlash when you need it?
Wellington Again | Dec 06, 2004 11:29
I crane my neck and look down the public gallery. Yes, it really is Brian Tamaki; slick-haired, chewing gum, at the centre of a cohort of burly, self-conscious men. The men on the outside are wearing radio earpieces - ready, presumably, to ward off assassination attempts and unexpected outbreaks of sodomy. I'm sure he thinks he appears cool and powerful, but it really looks like embarrassing play-acting. It's not threatening so much as a bit naff.
Like the rest of us, Brian is in the House for the debate on the second reading of the Civil Union Bill. His attention span isn't up to the job, however. About half an hour in, he gives the nod, like some rinky-dink mafia don, and departs with half his crew. I'm not sure what the remaining dudes are supposed to do now, apart from looking aghast and incomprehending at Georgina Beyer.
The galleries aren't full, but there's a reasonable crowd in: students, queers and Eltham from Shortland Street, who is attending with his Dad. They are clearly in favour of the bill. The fiftysomething Maori man sitting next to me clearly isn't. It's a little like sitting next to an opposition fan at a footy match, and it is surely one of the good things about New Zealand that we can rub shoulders this way.
My neighbour nods, murmurs assent and starts taking notes when Don Brash declares that hundreds of thousands "and indeed probably millions of New Zealanders" see the bill as an attack on the institution of marriage. And then palpably stops cold when Brash declares that if there were a referendum he'd vote in favour. My neighbour probably has a right to be confused.
In his speech, Stephen Franks constructs his familiar, unconvincing straw man, advancing the view that the "right to discriminate must be protected" before same-sex unions can be allowed. If that's what he wants, he should put up an amendment to the Human Rights Act where it might actually be relevant. Curiously, he doesn't cite a single instance of someone losing their right to discriminate now, and only the theoretical possibility of churches being forced to hire out their halls to civil unionising couples. It's a speech of remarkable intellectual dishonesty.
Beyer gives a rip-snorter of a speech, and is followed by the National MP for Rakaia, Brian Connell, who declares that the bill is actually "a recruiting drive" by the homosexual lobby. I have a why-am-I-listening-to-this-crap moment and decide I need some fresh air.
Paul calls me later to tell me the result: 65-55 in favour. "I'm up at the bar, trying to do some recruiting," he says. "But I'm afraid I'm not having much luck." I suggest he tries offering Fly-Buy points.
I'm at the opening drinks for Te Papa's 'Out on the Street' exhibition, which, in the familiar Te Papa style, is a mix of art, social history and domestic appliance. It's worth seeing although, like the associated conference, largely captured by the baby-boomers. I meet publisher, poet and critic Peter Simpson (father of bFM's Saturday morning co-host Steve) and we go and eat Malaysian with a couple of other interesting chaps.
Friday morning starts with a nicely-crafted long black at Felix, and then it's up to Radio New Zealand House for interviews with Herald editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis and Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson about media scare stories on medical misadventure. (Two days later, the Herald on Sunday conflates three wholly different and unrelated such stories into a be-very-afraid lead yarn. Sigh …)
Afterwards, I head on over to New Zealand in the 1970s: A Decade of Change, for the film and TV session. Roger Horrocks' rundown on how we came to have a film industry - thank the druggies, weirdos and commune-dwellers, basically - is excellent.
He notes that in 1975 almost half the films submitted to the censor were either cut or banned outright. He also tells a story I'd forgotten: that when New Zealand's first gay feature film, Squeeze was in production in 1980, the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards scared the government into passing a legislative amendment explicitly forbidding its support by the Film Commission. But I'm sure those liberal fascists had it coming, right?
Horrocks also notes that in the 1980s some of the protagonists took their "rebel attitudes" and justifiable suspicion of the public sector to the heart of the establishment, in the form of the post-1984 economic and social reforms.
The other lectures aren't as good; Trish Dunleavy's survey of the flourishing of New Zealand TV drama in the 1970s has fascinating subject matter but wants a bit for structure. I guess I'd rather hear the people who actually made the programmes talking about them. The last lecture does not, so far as I can tell, have anything to do with either film or television, so I nip out for lunch with Tom Frewen and Colin Peacock at Leuven, where the service is quite odd, in that it proves necessary to order every beer three times before it actually arrives.
Outside, Wellington is at play in the Sun. Colin and I pop into Quilter's bookshop in Lambton Quay, which turns out to be staffed by my old schoolmate Ross Humphries. Half the reason I'm in Wellington is to scour the bookshops for Great New Zealand Argument-type material (it seems easier than engaging with the libraries at this point) and I find a couple of gems, most notably Bookie, a "miscellany" published in an edition of 200 in 1948 by Christchurch's Nag's Head Press. The title is both a play on that of a similar work by the rival Caxton Press and a reference to the horseracing theme that crops up throughout. It's amusing and informative and I can't believe it's only $20.
I make contact with my friends Kerry and Simon and, as we usually do on the first day of any meeting, we drink far too much wine. The Hummingbird, Matterhorn and Anise all take our money in the course of the evening.
On Saturday morning, I ought to have gone down to the conference again, but instead we are headed for the cancer ward at Wellington hospital, which stands amid the rubble of the hospital site. Our friend Claire was a lover of all things bright and shiny, and when she died two years ago, she made her friends promise to come down and decorate the ward every Christmas.
I feel uneasy as we set foot on the stairs: a flashback, I think, to weeks spent in wards as a child. When we reach the ward, I can see why Claire found it a difficult place. It's hard not to catch the eyes of the gravely ill people who stay here; to note their pallour, to glimpse the sad, why-is-this-happening-to-me air about them.
I suddenly remember that my Dad spent some time here. I recall a dream I had when he was ill: that it was me that was dying and how strange and wholly desperate that felt. It's stuffy in the ward: they have to keep the windows shut to keep out the demolition dust.
Eight or ten of us gather and unravel last year's tinsel and trees from battered cardboard boxes. I get into the rhythm of decorating and before long the halls are decked with everything we have. It feels right to be doing this. A nice Scottish lady who has been here only a couple of days, joins in. "Who would have thought?" she says "That I'd be here for Christmas?"
Later on, we make the pilgrimage to Moore Wilson, and I carry on to the conference. I'm just in time to hear Will Ilolahia's memoir of the Polynesian Panthers, which is riveting. I had no idea what they did. He has some fantastic stories: the best of which concerns the early-morning visits by three units of the Panthers' "military wing" to the homes of three cabinet ministers to protest the dawn raids.
They turned up with whistles, lights and loud-hailers and demanded the occupants emerge to present their credentials for living in New Zealand. Will teed up Fred Botica at Hauraki to make an on-air call to the then Minister of Immigration, Frank Gill, while the unit was outside his house. Gill, rather fatefully, fumed: "How dare these people visit us at this ungodly hour!" Dawn raids ended three weeks later.
An intriguing end-note to the Panthers' story is its connection to today's hip-hop boom. The Rev Mua Strickson-Pua, who ran the Panthers' homework centres (the first such centres in the country) is the father of Feleti Strickson-Pua of Nesian Mystik. The Panthers' Minister of Culture was Tigi Ness, father of Che Fu. And Scribe's dad was a member of one of the Panthers' prison chapters.
I had actually been keen to attend the closing session to introduce myself to Alister Taylor, and talk about republishing some of his books online. But Taylor, set to deliver a lecture on 'Politics, Pornography and Protest' fails to show. So the conference is closed by lectures from Sue Kedgely and Sandra Coney on the rise of the women's liberation movement.
Coney is good value, and quite funny, but I choke on her declaration that she and her sisters were inspired by radical left movements elsewhere, including Castro's Cuba and, gulp, China's Cultural Revolution. I don't think I'd have been a Maoist or a Marxist back then, but I'm glad to have missed the opportunity. Punk rock seems a much more defensible galvanising force.
I've ended up missing quite a bit of the conference, including what sounded like an excellent lecture by Wystan Curnow (which did encompass punk rock), but you get that. I nip down to the Te Papa shop to buy Christmas presents for my mother and my sister, who lives in Australia, then catch a taxi back to Melrose for a barbecue. I make a green salad with shaved parmesan and a little arrangement of buffalo mozzarella, drizzling both with the gorgeous Awatere River olive oil I bought at Moore Wilson.
Sunday morning, I pack up and totter blearily down the hill to Martin and Anna's place to see the second-string All Blacks win a fairly engaging but somewhat meaningless match with the Barbarians, then get a lift down to the railway station.
On the train to Paraparaumu to see Mum, I listen to my iPod and read Bookie cover-to-cover, quietly chuckling and finding two parts I would like to use online. Wellington is always a journey of the mind. I take Mum to lunch and talk with her for a couple of hours at home before returning to the station, where a biting southerly is now tearing down the length of the platform.
By the time I get to the airport, the weather has become fierce. As our plane is being loaded, a full backpack is blown off the luggage cart and tumbles across the tarmac like an empty chillybin on a windy beach. Even when we board the plane, we sit for 20 unexplained minutes. Turns out the pilot is waiting for a lull in the southerly. It comes, and we belt up the runway into the headwind to make what seems like an uncommonly steep ascent. When I reach Auckland, hundreds of people are queuing. Flights to Wellington and Christchurch have been cancelled, and aren't expected to resume any time soon. We were the last ones out of Wellington.
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