Public Address - Hard News (Home)

After SpongeBob | Feb 15, 2005 10:01

The youth of the nation tumbled into my inbox like a great, anguished wave yesterday. Disturbed, confused and alienated by the brief gay snog in a public health cartoon condom ad, they were also spilling over with gratitude to National's Murray McCully for so generously voicing their pain about it.

"First Spongebob and now this," they wailed as one.

Well, actually, they didn't. At all. But a couple of people were pretty funny on the topic. Matt Powell said "my flatmates love those ads", and exclusively shared a real conversation from his house:

Female Flatmate: I love how there's a boy/boy one.

Male Flatmate: (perking up considerably) There is? Is there a girl/girl one?

Female Flatmate: ...

Male Flatmate: Uh, never mind.

Sam Finnemore, meanwhile, reported that "the most fuss I've heard about the Hubba Hubba trailers is when me and the people at my girlfriend's flat run wagers on whether the gay or hetero couple appear." Aha! State-funded advertisement lures young people into gambling!

Several bloggers have ventured opinions on Te Ara The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, which launched last week. It has the silky command of Internet syntax that you'd expect from Shift, and I really like the fact that the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has been incorporated in the new website.

On the other hand, the contemporary culture sections would seem to have a way to go yet. The music page reads a bit like a pamphlet for the government's culture policies, and the "further sources" page is fairly institutional (if you're going to post a link to Art New Zealand, why not nzmusic.com?). I'd be interested to hear what readers think about other parts of the encyclopaedia.

David Farrar has an idea for which there might yet be room: divert the equivalent of 10% of Te Ara's foundation cost to funding updates of New Zealand entries in Wikipedia. Allow me to lend my voice to that in principle.

On the other hand, Rodney Hide is just being silly in suggesting that an expanded wiki entry under "New Zealand" could have substituted for an official online encyclopaedia. The two do quite different jobs. Meanwhile, Christiaan Briggs has been inviting debate via the Wikipedia entry on the New Zealand flag.

Stephen Judd reported that, to judge by discussions on the NZ Network Operators Group list, problems reaching Stuff yesterday were most likely something to do with to its shift last week to peering at the Wellington Internet Exchange (WIX). Ironically, this change was made to improve performance over Stuff's former 10Mbit/s connection via TelstraClear. This has had the desired effect for some people - but unfortunately, both Telecom and Telstra Clear last year ceased peering at WIX, for commercial reasons.

This is also the reason you might not be able to access the new streaming content on the Radio New Zealand site (I can't get it via Wired Country or JetStream at the moment). It is, in my view, unacceptable that the two big players should be breaking the Internet in this way. I think it's time for the government to wade in and mandate open peering (or at least threaten to do so, which is usually what it takes to get a result in that industry).

Some audio content you should be able to hear with no problems: Zach Bagnall has archived my 95bFM Wire interviews with Barbara Sumner Burstyn and the Ministry of Health's Jane O'Hallahan regarding Sumner Burstyn's story on the meningococcal vaccine scheme, which attracted the attention of National's health spokesman, Paul Hutchison. The MoH also issued a slightly snotty press statement in advance of the interview last week, which pointed to An Attempt To Swindle Nature:Anti-Immunization Press Reports in Australia 1993-1997. What do I think? Well, my kids will be vaccinated …

Australia's Howard government caught lying - again. Rod Barton, a former officer of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, alleged last night on ABC TV's Four Corners programme that ministers and officials were lying when they said they had taken no part in the interrogation of Australian prisoners - and that he personally had participated in such interrogations. Barton says he quit in disgust after learning that the CIA had censored a crucial report on the presence, or otherwise, of WMDs in Iraq. One of the Australians interned, Mamdouh Habib, reported being subjected to sexual torture, which seems to have been an extraordinarily widespread feature of the war on terror. And they wonder why some people don't understand …

And finally, Lisa Williams has posted an excellent little video called Four Minutes About Podcasting, which tell you what you might need to know.

PS: Separated at birth? The website of Capital Times. The website of The Listener. Crikey …

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Hysteria | Feb 14, 2005 12:07

It was the older boy's birthday yesterday, and, as was his wish, we took a crew to Goat Island Marine Reserve and spent the day swimming with the fishes. We cut the cake up on the grassy slopes and sang him happy birthday. It was marvellous: and, apart from anything else, a nice break from being bombarded with various flavours of hysteria.

The media - led by TV One's close-up, which doesn't seem to be able to find an issue it doesn't want to get hysterical about - is starting to resemble 'The Monologue' in Metro magazine. NCEA? In crisis. Bring back school cert! Police? In crisis. Bring back traffic cops! And so on …

George Hawkins' recent hopeless performance notwithstanding, I'm far from sure that cases such as the handling of a 111 call in Hamilton raised in Parliament by Tariana Turia, convince me that there's a crisis on. According to accounts released so far, this happened: a woman calls to say she has been "touched up" four hours previously, that she is on the street and and has support and is near the police station. The call-taker suggests she makes her way to the station to file a complaint. She and her male friend walk to the station, which takes them 20 to 30 minutes. Her friend later says the woman was in shock and so distressed that he had to carry her part of the way.

On their arrival, it quickly becomes apparent that there has been a misapprehension as to the gravity of the situation. She has, she says, been raped. The alleged rapist is still in the house where the offence allegedly occurred and is immediately interviewed by police officers. The decision to suggest she made her own way to the police station turns out to have been a bad one, which has put the woman though unnecessary suffering. But was it completely unreasonable in the circumstances?

John Roughan appeared to take a similar view, linking the response to that which followed the flap over the threat to national security represented by Tame Iti shooting a flag on a marae:

Why, they demanded, had the police not charged him with a firearms offence? Not so long ago the police, backed by good governments, resisted this sort of pressure. Not now. On every issue from road patrols to dubious 111 calls, the commissioner has adopted the policy that it is better to call an inquiry than to stand by a contentious but reasonable decision.

It will be interesting to see how the Clark government handles control of the (presumably) somewhat unexpected damage resulting from her official musing about the participation of women in the workforce. The soul-saving Sandra Paterson was among those to strike a pose of high dudgeon about the Prime Minister (and what would she know about mothering? etc) undervaluing motherhood by commanding women back to work.

Paterson reels off a string of motives and beliefs that didn't feature in Clark's speech, and dismisses most of what was in the relevant section of it, which sought to highlight policies and goals for: targeted support for low-income working families, four weeks' annual leave, increased financial support for early childhood education and childcare, British-style paid parental leave for up to a year, and encouraging more flexible working hours.

Paterson, a single mother, describes herself as an "adapter"; in that she is able to earn money working at home as a freelance journalist while her children are at school. She is - and I speak with the experience of someone who picks up one kid from school at 1.30pm and the other at 3.15pm - lucky to have the experience and skill that allows her to do one of the most flexible part-time "jobs" there is.

So what would she do if she had skills that applied only to office or factory jobs? Would she still be slinging off at women who leave their kids "in state childcare for the day" (which, by her own admission, is the advantage she is taking of her kids being at school)? Or declaring that "home-centred women … often resent their husband's taxes being used to subsidise childcare for women with other priorities"? Has she tried finding a job that offers handy 9am-to-3pm hours?

What few of the ranters and ravers seem to have picked up is that the very high participation of women in work in the Scandinavian countries namechecked by Clark is at least in part a consequence of more flexible attitudes to employment hours. Job-sharing and part-time work are more common in those countries. They allow men and women to both work and be at home. To be "adapters", that is.

Ruth Laugesen noted as much in an intelligent feature that led the Sunday Star Times' Focus section yesterday (I'd link to it but Stuff is unreachable via either the Ihug or Xtra networks this morning): pointing out that "Swedes may work in bigger numbers, but they won't work as many hours. In contrast we have something like one-quarter of fathers of children under five working more than 50 hours a week."

The interesting thing is that the employment market may already be responding in such a vein. The Weekend Herald lead story reporting that New Zealand's unemployment rate is now the lowest in the developed world said the following:

Most of the growth in the latest quarter was in part-time jobs, a break from the pattern of previous quarters. That may be more a matter of necessity than choice from an employer's point of view.

ANZ chief economist Dr John McDermott said: "The intensity with which employers are searching for labour is very strong.

"We see that in the high levels of job ads. And there is a lot of evidence that employers are thinking about alternatives like job sharing.

"There are a lot of experienced and qualified women out there who can't work full-time because of other commitments."

Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O'Reilly and Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive Alasdair Thompson agreed that some of the increase in part-time employment reflected employers becoming more flexible i

You could also look to address the labour shortage with more immigration and the problems of single-income families by sharply raising rates of take-home pay, but in context, Clark's statement hardly warrants the alarum it has generated in some quarters.

Of course, apart from any economic merit it might have had, Clark's statement was probably crafted to portray Labour as economically diligent but more caring and positive than National and Act (whose draft welfare policy, as I noted last week, appears to ascribe an intrinsic value to motherhood of roughly nil). The backlash will have been unexpected and will doubtless trigger a response of a slightly different nuance. But it would be a relief if critics of whatever that response turns out to be could concentrate more on what's actually said than what is assumed.

And, finally, quite some queerness in Murray McCully's newsletter from last week:

Seen the Health Department's "Hubba Hubba" ads, promoting condom use? There are several different versions. Watch carefully and you will see that one features two young men, as they say, getting down to business.

Now, leaving aside the minor fact that we, at the worldwide headquarters of mccully.co display unambiguously and rampantly heterosexual proclivities, there is an important issue here. We are now well past the debate on legalisation of homosexuality. And all manner of protections from discrimination against gays now exist in the law of the land. But this ad goes way further than that. Cynics suggest that its subliminal message is clearly that homosexuality is officially endorsed by the Government of the land (which has gone to the trouble of buying the ad) as one of the lifestyle options to be carefully considered by young people. Above all else, the ad will simply cause offence to many people. The ad is being pushed hardest on TV2, where the largest audience of young people is to be found.

The Sisterhood will no doubt defend the advertisement on the basis that it delivers a health message. But they could easily have done that without graphic depictions of sexual encounters of any kind. And they certainly did not need to spend taxpayers' cash rarking up the very un-gay folks at the worldwide headquarters.

Leaving aside all the crap about the government "officially endorsing" homosexuality (rather less than it "officially endorses" heterosexuality, one would think), have you seen the ad he's talking about as if it contains wall-to-wall buggery? From memory, there's a second or two in which two young men kiss once and smile at each other. This, according to McCully, is a "graphic depiction" of a "sexual encounter". If it wasn't such a wholly terrifying subject for conjecture, I'd be tempted to conclude that McCully must be very dull in the sack.

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The other scandal | Feb 11, 2005 11:45

The only good thing that can be said about the skimming and scamming we now know to have taken place within the UN Oil for Food programme is that the UN has commissioned what appears to be a genuinely independent inquiry. It remains to be seen whether what may turn out to be far greater corruption in the business of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq will be accorded the same scrutiny.

As Paul Volcker made clear in his interim report, the Oil for Food rorting did not involve the billions of dollars claimed; although influence was traded to the tune of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some money from the programme also went directly to Saddam, which was precisely what was not meant to happen.

The billions of dollars in illegal Iraqi oil sales, on the other hand, took place outside the scheme, and with the knowledge of all the major players. The US and UK did push to cut off the sales, but not very hard, and Russia and France were among those who resisted action.

But, as George Monbiot shows in The Guardian, there may be rather grander problems than that hovering over the first year of the occupation in Iraq.

We have known for some time - since at least October 2003, when the British agency Christian Aid blew the whistle - that a great deal of money, much of it belonging to Iraqis, was unaccounted for by the CPA. The agency was not mollified by the time of the handover, last June. It now appears that nearly $9 billion is missing from the books, and, according to Monbiot, there is evidence that $500 million was illegally diverted from Iraqi oil revenues to the CPA.

And further:

Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC's File on Four programme that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has not been seen since.

Perhaps this is not what it seems. But it would take a real investigation to tell. Don't hold your breath.

In Outsourcing Torture in this week's New Yorker, Jane Mayer describes the "secret history" of America's "extraordinary rendition" programme. There's also an online-only Q&A with the author.

A Pentagon report confirms the use of sexual humiliation and torture at Guantanamo. The story was broken by the Washington Post, but has been more widely reported in the Arab world.

Not online, but worth a trip to the newsagent, is a story by Donovan Webster in this month's Vanity Fair, in which he interviews "the man in the hood" captured in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs. More disturbingly, he also talks to a 15 year-old Iraqi boy who was picked up, imprisoned without charge and eventually released with a couple of hundred dollars and an apology. In the interim, he was subject to sexual torture including, but not limited to, digital penetration. And this happened in July last year, months after the Abu Ghraib abuses become public. If you believe that the practices employed sprang from the fevered imaginations of a few hick prison guards, you will, frankly, believe anything.

(The same issue of Vanity Fair also features an intriguing interview with Bob Guccione, a mind-blowing backgrounder on the British boy who tried to incite his own murder, the Beverly Hills burglary spree [if you worry about emergency calls responses here, just be glad you don't live in West LA] and the dirt on the Disney dispute. The Star Wars cover story is as arselicky as you'd expect. )

Meanwhile, a torture-themed reality TV show on Britain's Channel 4.

No Right Turn has commentary on the New Yorker's torture story, and raises a salient point about our own Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill (No 2).

The Point Turn's Manu identifies similar overreach in new provisions aimed at those distributing child porn. He speculates that "you could soon face a jail term for owning a copy of 'Manhunt' or 'Postal 2', computer games deemed too dangerous for NZ consumption. The maximum sentence for owning an banned game could soon be ten times greater than that for possession of heroin."

Dog Biting Men have been too lazy to post for a whole week. Are they working or something?

It appears that one reason for Microsoft's delay in releasing the .NET source code is the presence of unfortunate programmer comments in said code. Whoops.

Star turns on radio: Jon Gadsby is much funnier in Linda Clark's week-end wrap-up than Jim Hopkins. Is it permanent? And occasional Close Up host Mark Sainsbury (or "The Sainzer" as he has been dubbed) has been in cracking form as a guest with Jeremy and Steve on 95bFM's Saturday Special. Give the man more work.

A number of readers have been in touch to thank me for turning them on to the prose delight of Deborah Coddington. Always happy to share it around, folks. Matt Heywood was among them:

Having never come across Ms Coddington's Liberty Belle newsletter before, took a peek. All I can say is, wow! And thank God Debs is out there to protect us; striding all single-minded and Elliott Ness-like through the dark, dangerous city to protect the innocent (read, wealthy conservative) individual from danger.

I didn't know people still wrote like that. It reads badly, but can you imagine her saying this stuff, hammering it out in a breathless and spittle-flecked, vein-popping tirade to a three-legged dog and two diseased pigeons on a windswept hustings? Christ, it makes me want to race home and hug my children. Debs' particular style of pretentious diction would lend itself beautifully to the propaganda of 18-year old wannabe Marxist revolutionaries still living at home with mum & dad in Howick. Clearly, Ms Coddington is so convinced of the rightness of her message that she's lost the power of self-criticism, and just accepts any old crap as it lands on the page. Like a late-career McPhail & Gadsby skit, it just goes on too long.

Yeah, but isn't it great? Perhaps we could make her a cult figure. But that might be going too far …

I've been meaning to link to Chris Barton's excellent story on apparent cultural differences between New Zealanders and Australians. It looks at a marketing study whose conclusions are roughly what I came up with myself when I wrote the "culture and identity" chapter in the current Lonely Planet guide.

Whose truth is this? New Zealanders love the land. They love being in it, doing things on it. New Zealanders go barefoot or in jandals because they want to be as close to the land as possible. They love the outdoors so much that when they invite you into their house they immediately take you outside again. They like to run on the streets.

For New Zealanders the land represents everything that is pure and authentic. It's. the essence of who we are. We love it so much that we fear losing it which is why we get so upset about foreign ownership and Maori claims to the foreshore.

But Australians see the land as something to be tamed. The relationship to the land is more rugged, in the Marlboro Man tradition. The land is something to be observed, or crossed, not something to integrate with. Australians have a fear of the land because it's much more harsh and hostile. In Australia it's the people who create the land, the big continent. Australians have a psyche of populate or perish. They don't fear growth.

The observations about the role of women in New Zealand culture are on the money too. I recall once, many years ago, being told by an Englishman in a bar in Istanbul, that: "you decide to go and see some ruins at the top of a mountain and you stagger up in the blistering heat, and when you finally get there, you're knackered … and you find two New Zealand girls up there, calmly having a beer."

Right. That'll do. Is anyone else struggling with the back-to-work transition, or is it just me? The reality of my workload seems a bit daunting. Was I really doing all that? Was I manic or something? I actually hit the wall a bit last week, what with kids starting school and all, and have since been cancelling a few things for the good of my health. On the other hand, there's work in train on the next two Public Address events, three people have more or less advanced business propositions to me, and I still can't think of much that I want to give up. But not today. It is the time of lunching, and if you need me, I'll be at SPQR.

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Just a location | Feb 09, 2005 10:17

I was obliged to swot up on the brief visit to these shores of Cherie Blair for my Breakfast slot this morning. I quite quickly realised that New Zealand has been no more than a fleeting location for a story that wasn't really about us at all.

Apparently - according to newspapers as far afield as Australia, Britain and India - we're angry that La Cherie couldn't remember what country she was in when she made her charity speech in Auckland on Monday night. Bemused would be more like it.

That didn't stop Stephen D'Antal, who seems to be filing pool reports for half of Britain's dailies, declaring that her arrival in New Zealand "was treated with all the excitement of a royal visit". Was it? Clearly, I was distracted and missed the schoolchildren lining the streets eagerly waving miniature union jacks.

The Sun said Blair "began her controversial tour Down Under with a blunder last night - by calling her Kiwi hosts Australians" - and then went on to spell our Prime Minister's name wrong. "Celebrity chef" Peta Matthias has been quoted rubbishing the speech in six different newspapers by my count, and 34 year-old insurance executive Caroline Canning's comments in a similar vein have earned her a mention in even more stories (her friends should definitely be teasing her about being briefly world famous). One paper called Peta "Peter" and another called Canning "Cunning". Like I said, we're just a location …

The PR consultant behind the whole business, Max Markson, has, meanwhile, been discovering what it's like to be involuntarily sodomised by a rampant British press. The Times had the lowdown on her fee before she even flew out, and journalists have had so much leaked material in hand that Markson has claimed that documents were stolen from his office in a burglary. Embarrassingly, the Sydney police have rather pointedly said they don't think so.

And Blair/Booth herself? Train wreck. Did she really not think that taking nearly a quarter of a million dollars for a tour on which she chose to use her husband's surname would drop her in it? Did she do any research on Markson - who has previous organised charity speaking tours in which the nominated charity has come a distant third to himself and the guest celebrity when it comes to divvying up the cash? And whose charitable practices have been discussed in two Australian Parliaments? (The Daily Mail has the full, grisly scoop.) And did she have to plug her damn book so hard?

The normally mild-mannered Juan Cole has climbed right into self-inflated conserva-pundit Jonah Goldberg. It's really worth reading. The spat between the two blew up over Goldberg's explanation that he couldn't possibly have volunteered to fight in Iraq, what with a lifestyle to maintain and everything.

The Middle East ceasefire - a move the Palestinians have been seeking for a while - has to be a good thing. And Condoleeza Rice appears, at the least, efficient in her new job.

On the other hand, Bush's new Budget is simply a sham. His plan to cut federal deficits in half rests on leaving out any cost associated with the wars in Iraq or Aghanistan, the huge short-term cost of his flagship social security reform, or the impact of making his tax cuts permament, which he's already said he will do. Worse, he has actually raided the social security trust fund to the tune of $170 billion to try and balance his books.

The San Francisco Chronicle lashed it in an editorial headed Bush's bad math.

The Economist also analysed George Bush's "lean" budget:

Mr Bush's new-found fiscal conservatism is patchy. His current deficits are primarily the result of a collapse in tax revenues, down from 20.8% of GDP in 2000 to 16.8% this year, yet he intends to make his tax cuts permanent. Security spending is also largely exempt from his tight-fistedness. Next year, defence spending will grow by 4.8% in nominal terms, to $419 billion; homeland-security outlays will go up by 1.2%, to $29 billion. And the budget does not include likely "supplementals" for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress has already approved one such supplemental, of $25 billion for fiscal 2005, and is preparing to consider another $80-billion request from Mr Bush.

Josh Marshall puts it this way:

Back in the day (you remember the day, right?) every time a president came forward with a budget, reporters would pore over the thing. And any line item or provision or assumption that wasn't based on the most rock-solid accounting or didn't take into account the most pessimistic prognosication was instantly given that most infamous of DC budgeting sobriquets: the dreaded "smoke and mirrors."

Nowadays I guess you could say things have changed. How else can it be when an OMB Director can simply state that borrowing a trillion dollars doesn't count as new debt?

Under the circumstances, it's a good thing that Blue State ingenuity will continue to make Bush some money. This way geeky article tries to get to the bottom of a media player patent secured by Apple Computer.

And some smart kids are running the Flat Earth Award for the greatest climate change denier. AlterNet's Matt Wheeland notes, among other things, an analysis for Science magazine of 928 peer-reviewed studies on climate change.

And the number of those 928 studies that "disagreed either explicitly or implicitly with the consensus position, as stated by the UN's panel on climate change, that the observed global warming over the past 50 years has been caused by human activity"?

Zero.

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Talkback Radio With Pictures | Feb 08, 2005 10:15

I confess, I briefly wondered whether I had chanced upon a stray episode of Eating Media Lunch during the first item of the debut airing of Prime TV's Paul Holmes vehicle, Paul Holmes. The eponymous host linked live to reporter Solina Theron for a report on the tree that he had planted on One Tree Hill earlier in the day.

"Has it been watered?" enquired the host, the very stuff of history pulsing around him.

"Yes, it looks like it's been watered," reported Theron. "There's actually like a little, um, sort of puddle around it …"

Jeez, why didn't they just go to rolling live coverage so we could watch the brave little tree grow all night? Or at least until it got dark?

To be fair, Holmes presumably knew as well as anyone that this was all fairly daft. We had already seen Holmes planting the replacement tree (to replace the replacement tree planted the previous day by persons unknown) with a helpful gardener ("A Maori and a Pakeha," mused Holmes, "We're planting the tree … It may last a day, it may last a hundred years …"

Indeed. And a hundred years from now, parents will take their children to the site, to gaze at the wise old pohutukawa and whisper Paul Holmes planted that …

Actually, the Holmes tree will be gone as you read this. Half a dozen candidates for the real new tree are currently growing in a nursery and will be planted with an appropriate ceremony at such time as Ngati Whatua is happy that its Treaty claim is in motion - within six months, apparently. I don't mind the iwi assuming a sense of guardianship over the site, but it has taken too long to replant.

Most of the argy-bargy over it belonged to the last council: John Banks' freelance declaration as mayor that the council had already spent too much money on the site and that there would be no tree henceforth (withdrawn and reversed without apology, like most of the stupid pronouncements Banks made) being the most notable incident.

But it would be churlish to object to Holmes' opening stunt on Prime: it was mildly funny, and it set the tone for a show which will likely be a better vehicle for Holmes' idiosyncrasies than Holmes had become on TV One.

I noted last year that Holmes was basically a radio man who had found himself on TV, and Prime's Paul Holmes is essentially talkback radio with pictures. The host gets to push his own buttons (so to speak) and calls and text messages from viewers will clearly be a major element of the programme. One texter actually had the best line of the whole show in suggesting that Cherie Blair was wearing Brian Tamaki's jacket.

The texts in particular have some incendiary potential: unflattering messages about both Tamaki and Jonah Lomu flashed up on the screen during their respective interviews. But the idea that these are somehow the unmediated voice of the people is disingenuous: you get a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand texts, and you can use maybe three of them: it's still the director who decides which messages get aired.

The host's major glitch came when, with an ad break looming, he blew right past Tamaki's claim that Transit New Zealand's refusal to allow his flock to march over the Auckland Harbour Bridge was the result of "a decision … from high up - high up - that says you cannot do this." Was he suggesting political direction of Transit? Shouldn't Holmes have asked? If only with an eye on this morning's headlines?

Anyway, for all that, I thought Paul Holmes came off reasonably well. It sometimes sacrificed sense in pursuit of the magic moment, but it seems to quite clearly know what it is, which is more than can be said for Close Up lately. I still think John Campbell has it all there for the taking …

So: another in Hard News' Coddington Watch slot, an occasional visit to the foreshore of inanity. Why? Hell, it's good fun, isn't it? In her latest Liberty Belle newsletter, once she's finished congratulating herself, Codders stumbles on an actual point - and then smothers it in Remuera hyperbole as usual:

A Wellington City Council holiday programme coordinator was asked not to use real eggs for egg and spoon races. Wooden eggs must be used, not just because they're cheaper but because, yes you guessed it, "there is an element of cultural sensitivity in [real eggs'] use because some cultures are offended by the use of food as a plaything".

True. And in some schools, flour-and-water playdough is no longer used for the same reason. The application of cultural and spiritual practices to food actually isn't that unusual - a fairly large chunk of the global population embraces either halal or kosher practices - and in this case Maori culture has certain strictures about the handling of food (some of which, including not-putting-your-bum-on-the-table, are quite good manners). Much as I have a deep respect for food, I don't think those strictures should be visited on everyone. What's wrong with simply allowing a parental opt-out?

But then Codders starts spraying word-vomit:

The culture-sensitive police will be inspecting all playcentres. I suppose I should have stopped my children from eating anything at all, really, when they were wee. Rupert would use a banana as a toy gun, and eat his sandwiches into crusts and 'shoot' me with them from his highchair. So take note parents, no more fun with food.

No, not really. It's your house, do as you wish. And then:

Mind you, mothers won't have to worry about this because they'll all be out in the workforce, since the Prime Minister (she-who-must-be-obeyed) assumes we all can't stand looking after our own children and are bursting to get out of the house.

And surely that was the biggest lunacy of the week? It brought to mind a lovely line I read when my children were small and I despaired of ever having a brain or a life again. Metaphorically, you're constantly tripping over untidy gumboots at the back door. You tidy them and curse the kids. The next day, and the next, ad nauseum, you do it again. Then one day you go out the door and there are only your own gumboots there. The children have grown up and left home. Children are a gift; enjoy while you can.

At which point, we cruise on over to Act's draft welfare policy, as channelled to Muriel Newman from the space aliens. As I read it, this, caring, sharing affirmation of motherhood would place DPB mothers on the same footing as all the other malingerers on the unemployment and sickness benefits, which would all be replaced by a single "temporary benefit". Why?

For too long as a society we have condoned the present system in spite of the fact that it breaks up families, that it prevents parents from being working role models for their children, and that it pays people who could and should be earning their living to do nothing for 10, 20, even 30 years. Amazingly, in spite of the present critical labour market shortages, there are still more than 350,000 adults and 250,000 children dependent on taxpayer-funded benefits. Welfare is clearly a system that has gone off the rails.

Thus, single mothers will have six months during which they "will be free to find a job in their own way". After that, bludging mums will go into compulsory case-management and if they still can't get off the teat of the state, they will be compelled to undertake 40 hours a week of "work placement".

Or to put it another way: "Children are a gift; enjoy while you can … you've got six months."

This, of course is in the same tradition of Act MP statements as "tax is theft … spend more!", and "build more prisons … but not here!" but it does seem a particularly silly example. Perhaps Coddington will resign in protest at her party's welfare policy? No?

Anyway, tying up a number of threads in this post, I understand that Rodney Hide believes John Banks is a racing certainty as an Auckland-based Act candidate in this year's election. Rodney thinks Banks is a vote-winner in the Queen City. Hmmm …

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