Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Fog of summer | Feb 04, 2005 12:02

Readers outside Auckland may have taken the icons of weeping grey cloud which have signified Auckland's week on the MetService site as an indication that the weather has, in fact, been crap. Perhaps even that, like that of a certain capital city (I'm sorry, but it is funny), our international airport had been closed half the week by fog, in midsummer.

Au contraire. It's jungle weather here: steamy and, mostly, sunny. One of the boys and I ducked down to Pt Chev beach for a swim yesterday afternoon and found it crystalline (well, as crystalline as that part of the harbour ever gets) and populated with sturdy old folk from Selwyn Village. It was marvellous. Amid all the national agonising about our place in the world, it's sometimes comforting to remember that I live somewhere where (a) it takes five minutes to get into town, and (b) there is a beach around the corner.

Anyway, if it's stinking hot, that means it must be just about time for the rugby season to start. Anyone know exactly when the NZRU is going to announce the lucky winners in its lottery for tickets for this year's British Lions rugby tour? The original word was "early February", and, clearly, this is what it is right now.

There's been some unpleasant craziness in the local blog world of late: which escalated with this thread following a post by Gordon King on NZPundit, which questioned the reporting of a child pornography prosecution. This attracted the attention of a certain Internet user, who accused him of being a pervert and a child abuser, and made posts (rightly deleted) referring to Gordon's family. I got an email yesterday from the same person, referring to Gordon as an "animal" and a "sicko" and a "pervert". Then I discovered that David Farrar, who ticked off the poster for turning disagreements into personal attacks, has now had this person email various people in the National Party (with which David is associated) accusing David of being "pro-child abuse".

I frequently disagree with David, and even more frequently with Gordon, but this is completely out of hand. David wonders "at what stage do I stop taking this on the chin, and actually name" the person doing this. I'm wondering the same thing myself.

Am I the only one thinking that the outrage over the failure of the police to arrest and charge Tame Iti has been just a tiny bit overdone? The protest theatre organised by Iti to greet the Waitangi Tribunal members on their visit to Tuhoe country last month was insulting and stupid, and designed (as usual) to offer maximum prominence to Tame Iti. But I thought it was well dealt with at the time by Tribunal judge Patrick Savage, who made it clear that if there was any repeat, Tuhoe wouldn't get their day in court, and received an apology from tribal elders. As the recipient of the "welcome", one would think he would have been in the ideal position to take matters further had he thought it necessary, but he didn't.

The Act MPs who raised the alarm this week originally had Iti on the One News pictures "brandishing" a shotgun (actually, carrying it, broken open and unloaded) as the Tribunal officials arrived, but got lucky when it turned out TV3 had pictures of Iti later, at the local marae, discharging the gun into a New Zealand flag. There is no evidence he actually threatened anyone with it.

Stephen Franks got up a staggering head of windbaggery in a letter to the Commissioner of Police demanding a prosecution. Among other things, Franks claimed that no third party had filed a complaint about the Iti incident because "members of the public may now be reluctant to ask the police to enforce the law in politically sensitive matters for the Labour Party."

Franks also said:

I contrast the omission to arrest Mr Iti immediately with the immediate arrest and prosecution of the unpleasantly misguided but ineffectual and peaceful Wellington demonstrator who was convicted last October for possession of a tiny knife found in his car, after he had tried to defend himself (not using a knife) from a bottle throwing mob opposed to his views. Protesters must expect equal treatment before the law.

He's talking about the National Front member you saw on the news standing on the bonnet of his car waving a wooden baton around after an anarcho-punk protestor had hit the car with a beer bottle. He was charged with disorderly behaviour and possession of a knife (Franks apparently knows it to have been "tiny") - hardly surprising, given that there was an actual affray. What Franks, naturally, forgets to mention is that one of the radical counter-protestors was charged with exactly the same offences, and another was arrested for trespassing at the police station. It would seem that the police did what they had to.

Never one to shrink from micromanaging the police, Franks wanted Iti charged not only with firearms offences, but with dishonouring the flag (a charge that, on past form, would have been a pointless failure). Iti's lawyers will now presumably point out that the theatrical discharge of a shotgun on the same marae (firing blanks) has been discussed in the past, and was the subject of an agreement.

It's likely that a Minister of Police who was not such easy meat in the House as George Hawkins would have swatted this away - or at least seen it coming a bit sooner. But he issued a press release asking the police to issue a press release, and now Iti has been charged by Bay of Plenty police. I'm quite sure he'll enjoy the attention enormously.

PS: You can be as weighty as you like, but it's always the trivia that gets the punters going. Thanks to the dozens of readers from all over the world who emailed to tell me what a caipirinha is, and how much I would enjoy one. Thanks. Maybe I'll order one over lunch. It seems like the weather for it.

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Geeky Thursday | Feb 03, 2005 11:39

Righto: I defy any member of the Mac faithful not to get in a lather about this. It turns out that Mac-hacker Scott Knaster has, for 21 years, been holding on to a Betamax videotape of the event at which Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh. The launch has been extensively described by various Apple historians, but to find that it was actually captured on video - and that that video still exists - is, well, miraculous.

The German company TextLab helped clean up the video and it has released a 20MB excerpt that you can get here. The moment where the Mac talks is as electrifying as past descriptions suggest.

A new Salon story pegs the Mac revival not just to the success of the iPod, but to a growing weariness in the Windows world of fending off the plague and pestilence of spyware, adware and and viruses. And I'll tell you: it freaks me out. Last week, I made the ill-advised decision to try and fill in a Friday on which not much was going to plan by buying some cheap Wi-Fi gear and hooking up the PC in the kids' bedroom, which has hitherto been safely offline.

What a palaver. It turned out, after hours of messing about, that the USB Wi-Fi adapter I got at Dick Smith's (where, in comparison to the nearby Noel Leeming Computer City store, the staff did at least have a passing familiarity with the products they stocked) was selling with unsigned drivers that simply would not install properly in Windows XP, even after I ignored the alarming the-sky-is-falling messages thrown up by Windows. I lugged the PC down to the office and connected it to the Internet via ordinary Ethernet - at which point ZoneAlarm started freaking out every five seconds, and blocking "access attempts" from my own router. Then Windows Update failed after encountering an unspecified error.

The built-in XP firewall did, at least, ship with ports enabled for Blizzard Downloader (I found the ZoneAlarm slider-control approach to security management extremely irksome), so I was able to download a 50MB update for World of Warcraft (the main reason I wanted to get the PC connected was so the kids had another computer, other than mine, to play WoW on), but then Windows declared file corruption and refused to install the update. It subsequently changed its mind, but then WoW failed to load properly on launch, and was unplayable. Guess I'll have to start again on that one.

This isn't some cast-off PC: it's a fairly new Acer 2.7GHz P4 with plenty of memory and a decent video card. Anyway, I've had to give up on the project for now: the flat-panel monitor has developed a fault, a courier has picked it up and I'm waiting for news. I really can't help but compare it to my iMac G5, which cost roughly the same money and has been little other than a delight to own. It can also be easily configured for various tasks without the intervention of obfuscatory "wizards", and I have updated its system software several times without incident. Everything I have plugged into it has just worked, goddammit.

Further on the geek front, on my 95bFM Wire yesterday I talked to Richard Hulse, who is leading the Internet project at Radio New Zealand - and I'm pleased to report that the situation is not nearly as dire as Dubber thought it to be.

Firstly, the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand has been prepared to negotiate on a licence for Internet transmission of its members' works. It would seem to have been slow going in comparison dealings with APRA, which is eminently practical on these issues, but I'd very much expect it to pick up when the new RIANZ chief executive, Campbell Smith, takes up his position in March 1. (I contacted Campbell, and he replied, justifiably, that he was presently in Brazil, "with no real interest in anything other that caipirinhas and learning how to samba without looking like the rigid-hipped white man that I am." (WTF is a caipirinha anyway?)

On the downside, it may be that such licences as are granted may initially apply to access within New Zealand only (this is the case with the Enzology series currently available on the RNZ website). The irony, of course is that the very people who can't get this stuff via ordinary radio are offshore (a Public Address reader stationed in Korea was very disappointed to discover he couldn't listen to Enzology, and I'm sure there are others).

Next: technology. RealPlayer format is off the agenda, on account of its crazily expensive server licensing scheme. The two formats embraced by RNZ will be Windows Media and MP3 streaming, with the open-source Ogg Vorbis possibly to be added down the track (which should please the geeks).

Live streaming: RNZ has only been funded to provide "audio on demand" rather than a live stream. This, I think, is a result of board decisions going some way back, on the reasoning that the vast majority of New Zealanders could already hear National Radio by conventional means. I pointed out to Richard that quite a few people were actually listening to us speak in places as far away as Chile and London, live on the Internet. He readily acknowledged that RNZ receives regular communications from expats asking for an international streaming service. A full-time live stream has not been ruled out in the future - but it's currently not a priority. Downloadable, rather than streamed, files are a possibility in cases where RNZ wholly owns the copyright in the work.

Bandwidth: better news than had originally been thought. There will be 128k streams available.

Progress: the content management system has been built, and some new elements are available, but the full site revamp won't appear until at least April. I'm actually quite impressed by the way style sheets are being used to present good-looking pages that can default back to very basic pages that comply with government accessibility guidelines. Other government agencies would do well to look at what RNZ is doing here.

This doesn't mean that Dubber's philosophy is wrong, or that RNZ shouldn't push copyright holders harder on behalf of the rest of us, but the situation is a bit better than he thought.

One situation that has not been at all good is that relating to my Wired Country Internet connection. Ever since the company announced that it was capping its wireless service at 30GB per account per month, it would seem that every BitTorrent user on the network has been downloading their favourite TV series 24/7 - and slowing my whole sector to a crawl as a result. It was naïve of Wired Country to allow its client retail ISPs to even offer the service as a flat-rate one. I presume things will improve on or before the deadline for the new cap on February 16, but in the meantime I'm very grateful to have kept some DSL redundancy so I can actually do my work.

And, finally, truly stunning stupidity from an Australian judge, who has called for has called for the Internet to be purged of any material likely to prejudice a trial, to prevent jurors conducting their own investigations into cases they are sitting on. Yes, really. Justice Virginia Bell recommended that to prevent jurors from researching cases online, Crown prosecutors in any pending case should "carry out searches on the Internet and, in the event that prejudicial material is identified ... request any Australian-based website to remove it until the trial is completed."

PS: This from Christiaan Briggs. United States officials declared themselves "heartened" by a strong election turnout in the face of violent reprisals from insurgents. The turnout was described as a "keystone" in the President's plans to encourage constitutional processes and deemed likely to allow the new government to act with a "confidence and legitimacy" long lacking. Iraq, 2005? No. Vietnam, 1967. Wow.

PPS: Dubber - who clearly never sleeps - has provided a really good update to his original post, in light of yesterday's interview. There's also an MP3 file of the interview (pardon all my umms and ahhs - I had no time to script any of it yesterday, and only got the station at about 11.59am for a noon start) posted by, well, someone …

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Old Uncle Don | Feb 02, 2005 10:55

Does Don Brash actually want women to vote National? Yesterday, he demoted Katherine Rich - when he didn't really need to - to give himself an all-male front bench. He later declared he wasn't going to have a woman there just to satisfy "political correctness".

And in between, he gave his first speech of the Parliamentary year, in which women were specifically referred to in only one context - as bludging DPB mums - and which contained a claim that under the present government there would be "no end to political correctness in the education system which sees our children brain-washed with a revisionist version of New Zealand history - or should that be 'herstory?'"

Ho ho. Good one, Don. At least they knew their place in the fifties, eh?

Perhaps it would have been too "politically correct" to actually mention women in any positive context? Maori, of course, fared no better, featuring in the speech only as people from whom rights and privileges must be wrested - but he doesn't expect them to vote for him anyway, does he?

The rather maternal cast Labour is putting on the business of government - they'll help us get there, rather than just getting out of our way - is a fair and appropriate target for a centre-right Opposition party. But why all the nasty stuff? Is the bitter and twisted vote really that big?

Meanwhile, it seems staggering that National has managed to turn a small but welcome uptick into a calamity by dismissing Rich - National's welfare spokesperson and one of its most promising and marketable MPs - from her post, for failing to sign up to a policy position she considered unwise.

The comparison with last year's humbling of Georgina Te Heuheu is not perfect, but once again, Brash and his inner circle have sacrificed the counsel of the MP tasked with developing the relevant policy expertise in order to court a swing vote.

The demotion of Rich is not a complete calamity - it makes room for the promising finance spokesman John Key on the front bench, and Brash does at least have an honest-to-god neo-Victorian to tout his welfare policy in Judith Collins.

But in other ways it's worse than the Te Heuheu business. National's target voters probably didn't carry much of a brief for Te Heuheu, while Rich was rightly regarded as part of the party's future. Perhaps a falling out with Te Heuheu was inevitable as a result of Orewa I. But surely the gap between Brash's position and Rich's could have been closed in advance - rather than widened with the adoption stuff? It all speaks of a lack of basic management ability that does not sit well with a party that claims to be ready to govern. The public, it seems likely, will perceive and punish disunity.

Helen Clark's speech - perhaps as a direct response to Brash's address at Orewa - relentlessly positive; grand if not lyrical. She too expressed a desire to get more women into the workforce - but by helping, rather than forcing them to do so, with the promise of better childcare. Not for the first time, Clark's affection for Scandinavian-style politics seems relevant here. Sweden offers generous childcare provisions, and even more generous support for single mothers - yet has labour force participation rates for women in excess of 90%. It's reasonable to see such an environment as a policy goal.

Amid talk about infrastructure, savings, support for home ownership and Maori aspirations, and cuddly talk about national identity, the fleshing out of the plan for a single, universal benefit - predicted in Monday's Herald - was missing in action. Not ready for prime-time yet? Being held back for the Budget? Who knows. Apart from a promise on depreciation rates, there was no talk of tax relief - but, as usual, Clark declined to rule it out when interviewed in Morning Report today. My best guess is that there will eventually be a promise to shift the tax brackets - next year.

Dubber goes postal in an Open letter to Radio New Zealand, over its decision not to stream live over the Internet (that part's not exactly new - it's been a source of argument for years), not to allow even programmes it wholly owns to be downloaded, not to stream any music at all, and not to provide high-bandwidth listening options.

He concludes that copyright is the major issue here. Although APRA, the songwriters' rights-collecting group, has been pragmatic over this, and has granted affordable flat-fee licenses for Internet broadcast of its members' works, the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand has - apparently - refused to grant any licenses to allow music to be played over the Internet.

So how come every man and his dog in commercial and independent radio streams live over the Internet? Because RIANZ won't prosecute its rights either? Just like it won't grant any license allowing format-shifting of legally-purchased songs - something that Radio New Zealand itself does every day of the week - but won't take you to court for copying your CDs to your iPod, or making a tape to listen to in your car?

The silly thing is, it's all for virtually nowt. If RNZ were to stream some of its excellent (especially the documentaries) music programmes, the vast majority of listeners wouldn't even try and capture and copy them. That takes a bit of expertise; indeed much more expertise than it takes to, say, tape an ordinary FM radio broadcast.

Dubber urges RNZ to show some guts, but I can understand its predicament. It's one thing for bFM or a CanWest station to press on regardless, another for the public broadcaster. I can imagine a flurry of press releases attacking taxpayer-funded radio for trashing private property rights. I'm still not quite clear on what the actually situation is, though: Jeremy Ansell's Enzology is archived and available on the RNZ site. Is that an exception? I'll try and sort this out on my radio show today. I also have Colin James on at 1pm to discuss the launch of the Parliamentary year.

No Right Turn has sketched out the elements of his submission on the Prisoners' and Victims' Claims Bill, which he viscerally dislikes. I think his "better way" is worthy of consideration.

And a correction from yesterday: Sock Thief and Gordon King both helpfully pointed out that the BBC has retracted its story saying that coalition forces killed more Iraqi civilians in the second half of last year than insurgents did: it confessed to misinterpreting the Iraqi interim government figures.

Finally, a word on the American "welfare reform" philosophy driving the current DPB debate. There have been some respectable studies that showed that the 1995 reforms in the US kept more women in work and did not increase poverty levels. But there's a built-in delay in the system, in the form of the five-year deadline - after which single mothers with children are essentially cast adrift. And more recent research, in less bountiful economic times and a more difficult job market - seems to be taking a good deal of the shine off the idea. Scan the summaries here and tell me you'd still fancy a flutter with the same thing here.

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A new chapter | Feb 01, 2005 10:29

In a story characterised by false endings, the weekend's election in Iraq signals, at the least, a new chapter - for the simple reason that, unlike the invasion, overthrow and occupation; unlike the capture or killing of the old regime's suspects, of Saddam's sons and Saddam himself; unlike the atrocities in prisons and in Fallujah; unlike the appointment of the interim government or the drafting of the country's interim constitution; voting is an act the people of Iraq have carried out on their own behalf.

We don't actually know how many Iraqis voted yet. The interim government's original guesstimate of a 72% turnout appeared to be plucked from thin air, and the new figure of 60% may yet be on the high side. It's worth noting that even these figures are being given as a proportion of registered voters, not of the overall population. In Jordan, one estimate holds that only one in five of expatriate Iraqis actually registered to vote.

But it seems safe to say that the turnout has been better than expected, and well clear of the various worst-case scenarios. And it's not hard to understand why so many Iraqis would choose to vote, even at what seemed like great personal risk: not just because it is decades since they had the chance to do so meaningfully, but because no other choice seemed even a reasonable option. There was simply no hope in any other course of action.

It was not a perfect election, or a "model" for any other in the future. The vote could only be conducted reasonably safely by essentially shutting down Iraq: borders closed, streets cleared. The location of polling places was a not revealed until the day before, and the actual composition of the party lists for which Iraqis voted was still a secret on the day. In some places, out of fear or anger, virtually no one voted. The policemen who guarded the poll were obliged to dress - jarringly and eerily - like commandos, so their faces could not be recognised. And still, 44 people died in violence on the day - a fact that would have commanded the headlines around any other national election.

And yet, as the Saudi-based Arab News concluded in an editorial headed First Step, "was it really better than no election at all? We think so … This is what we have been waiting for - not appointments but an election by and for the people in which the people choose. It is what so many all over the world have died for and that should not be forgotten."

There are many ironies, of course: not least that these direct elections were opposed by the Americans, and only scheduled at the insistence of the majority Shiite figurehead, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani - after huge public demonstrations to press the point. Sistani's role has been quite remarkable. At any point he could have given the signal for a backlash either against occupying forces, or against the Sunni insurgents who tried to provoke civil war with the Shia. He didn't.

The Americans did not, you can be assured, go in to Iraq expecting that they would depend on the statesmanship of an Iranian (Sistani couldn't even vote on Sunday, because he is not an Iraqi citizen) religious leader, or hand over power to a coalition ticket that includes the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and which touted itself in mosques with banners reading "Elections are the best way to expel the occupier from Iraq."

The new government has been elected less to govern than to write a constitution in advance of another vote in November. That process will be very interesting - not least in the extent to which the new, permanent constitution differs from the interim one that was essentially imposed by Washington. The background to that story was outlined by Naomi Klein in a story headed Baghdad Year Zero in Harper's magazine last year.

I don't actually share (surprise!) Klein's apocalyptic view of market policies - democracy in Iraq or anywhere else won't survive without markets. But the point is that it is something for Iraqis to choose - not to have mixed up in a test-tube for them by some twentysomething neocons fresh out of university. It is a safe bet that some degree of statism will survive quite well under a new constitution.

So what, exactly, will a state governed by a majority coalition of religious parties look like? It seems likely that women will lose some of the western-style rights they enjoyed under the secular regime of Saddam. Newsday's story was inconclusive, but noted:

The ayatollah wants Islam to be declared the country's official faith and Islamic law to infuse civil laws. He is also resistant to giving Kurds a veto power over the constitution, as they currently have under an administrative law put in place by the U.S. occupation.

Part of the reason for al-Sistani's backing of the unified Shia slate is to assure him a key role in drafting the constitution. But that is likely to rekindle the debate over the role of clergy in politics.

"Al-Sistani wants to have a strong hand in drafting the constitution," Shammari said. "This will renew questions about what role he wants to play in politics."

On the other hand, Trudy Rubin, who traveled to Iraq for Knight-Ridder - a newspaper chain whose honest, unflinching coverage from Iraq has distinguished it from its peers in the American media (and earned it the enmity of the conservatives' Pollyanna tendency) - talked to senior Shia leaders and found "some room for hope" that they would not move to install a theocracy. She also noted that:

These hopeful signs don't mean that the Shiites are going to deny themselves the fruits of their majority status. They frequently use the analogy of South Africa, with themselves cast as the blacks and Sunnis as the whites.

"They (the Sunnis) will get used to it (the loss of power)," said Finance Minister Mahdi, "like South African whites who didn't give up the first day."

There are ironies even in that characterisation. It seems likely that those Sunnis who did vote were middle-class, West-facing and secular - the kind of people we're used to thinking of as the good guys - and that they voted for Ayad Allawi's list as a way of fending off the perceived threat of religious parties.

Another point of interest in the story: the role of the United Nations. From what I can tell, it's no exaggeration to say that these elections could not have taken place without the conservatives' favourite whipping boy. Voter registrations - something of a miracle in the circumstances - were based on UN food ration cards (an option the US leadership adamantly opposed, then relented on). The UN's election organiser Carlos Valenzuela - the only non-Iraqi on the country's election commission - appears to have played a particularly significant role. (Interestingly, the UN has started its own PR pushback on this and other issues - buying blog-ads that point to pages like this.) The fact that the governments of both Iran and Syria urged Iraqis to seize the chance to vote is also not insignificant.

It is all, of course, far from over. The Turks are already antsy about the nature of the vote in the Kurdish north. The large-scale absence of a Sunni vote causes obvious problems. Although the insurgents under Zarqawi were cruelly exposed by the election, the violence has already begun again. According to Human Rights Watch, the interim government has been overseeing the torture of civilians - and even children - since taking over management of Iraq's jails.

The basic problem of the occupying forces - that it is acceptable neither to stay or to go - persists. As many as 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the invasion. By the interim government's own assessment, coalition forces were killing Iraqi civilians at a greater rate than insurgent terrorists were in the last six months of 2004. In many respects, Iraq is still a horrible, expensive, bloody mess. But today it is, without doubt, better than it was before.

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