Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Speaking freely | Mar 18, 2005 12:12

If the current select committee inquiry into the desirability of a "hate speech" law was intended merely to take the public temperature on the issue, then the submissions suggest that the mood is distinctly chilly. A hate speech law wasn't particularly likely before the inquiry, and seems less so now. Well and good.

There are simply too many problems associated with extending the suppression of speech, including unintended consequences. But it hardly seems a bad move to have the discussion. And - vain hope I know - it would be nice to think that certain interest groups would match their right to speak freely with some measure of social responsibility.

The two videos that prompted the Film and literature Board of Review to muse about a hate speech law -
Aids: What You Haven't Been Told and Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda - are a disgrace. They contain lies, misrepresentation and baseless conspiracy of a kind that, were they directed at, say, Jews or Maori, they would be universally condemned.

I don't think their contents can be divorced from the kind of incidents listed in this GayNZ.com summary of what happens in the real world. So what do you do?

Peter Saxton has a well-rounded opinion piece on the matter in the Herald. Well worth reading.

It hardly needs noting that some of the organisations defending free speech on this score are also those which have spent years trying to curb the speech of others with vexatious complaints. The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards (whose annual meeting that alleged defender of free speech, Stephen Franks, chose to address) is at it again, trying to trip up the Incredible Film Festival in court over its plans to screen the Japanese satire, Visitor Q. Fortunately, the judge doesn't seem too impressed. (Here's a recent story on the film's director.) These people clearly believe the only speech worth protecting is their own.

Carrying on the censorship theme, the reliable Kim Griggs got in touch with links to the Department of Internal Affairs reports behind the Listener cover story we've been discussing here this week. The original 2003 report is here, and Kim's story for BBC Online at the time (which I actually recall now) is here. The DIA's update to the 2003 figures is here.

What struck me about the reports is that while, as I noted, the leading age group for convictions involving trading of banned material (mostly, but not exclusively, child porn) is also the same as that which commits the most of all offences, these censorship offenders are largely not the same individuals committing those other common offences. They're white and middle class.

Brett Davidson noted this bit on the animal homeopathy course flap from the new Association of University Staff newsletter:

It seems, however, that Mr English may have been wide of the mark in his criticism. The Acting Chair of the Tertiary Education Commission, Kaye Turner, told NZPA that the homeopathy course in question has underpinned Fonterra's push to produce organic milk from animals which cannot be given chemical pharmaceuticals without losing their organic certification. She added that New Zealand's growing organic-export industry is dependent on alternative therapies, and this was a big factor behind the approval of the homeopathy (animal health) course at the Bay of Plenty College of Homeopathy.

Brett speculated that, "rather like Muriel Newman's chimerical "political correctness gone mad", this seems to be in truth another example of an organisation actually acting independently according to market needs."

Hmmm. I confess, I took English's characterisation of the course as one in "homeopathy for pets" or treating "cats, dogs and budgies" to be accurate. Turns out, it was quite dishonest. It actually doesn't matter whether you believe homeopathy works for cows, people or whatever. If the market says it will pay a premium for organic products, and that means animal homeopathy, then the market is right.

But - desperately flailing around for a bit of populist indignation that I can actually sign up to - it's a damn good thing the Whangarei police have finally admitted a "stuff-up" and apologised to Dennis Murphy and his son James, who was seriously assaulted last week. The police shelved the case, not bothering to interview a girl who was not only an eyewitness to the assault, but could give them a name for the attacker. Their subsequent comments that the matter was not important in the scheme of things verged on the insulting. I think a few of the recent police panics have hinged on individual decisions of a kind I wouldn't want to make, but this was a shocker.

Okay … I really need to venture out for lunch, but I'll do my darnedest to come back and compile and post the first volume of what I'm calling The Expat Files today. If so, I'll break the usual rule and send out another post to the mailing list. Really, the things I do for y'all …

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Responses | Mar 17, 2005 11:15

My man Zach has kindly excerpted the two main interviews from yesterday's 95bFM Wire show: the first is with the author of the Weekend Herald's expat stories, Simon Collins, who had some interesting things to say - not least in noting that the proportion of GDP going to wages in New Zealand has fallen from 55% to 43%.

I won't have time to digest and compile the nearly 100 emails I've received on this topic, but I should be able to post something tomorrow, so it can stay up for the weekend. It might take that long to read anyway.

In the interim, several people had views on the worth of the Mercer quality of life survey. Someone working at the Auckland Regional Council said:

Here at the ARC we use it as one of our SPI's - strategic performance indicators. A few years ago I had a look at the methodologies behind it, and its pretty ropey. Schools are measured by how many private schools there are in AK, Security is about how many wars etc. Basically it's for extremely rich businessmen, who live in gated mansions in Remuera. I have serious concerns that my organisation is using it as its main judge of how well Auckland is going, and also at how many column inches it gets.

Roger, meanwhile, "did the obvious" and combined Mercer's two indices - quality of living and cost of living - to produce a "bang for buck" ranking. His possibly unscientific Top 10 is:

1. Ottawa (164.5)
2. Calgary (154.5)
3. Montreal (153.6)
4. Vancouver (152.3)
5. Portland (147.0)
6. Perth (145.7)
7. Toronto (144.2)
8. Wellington (142.2)
9. Adelaide (141.7)
10. Auckland (141.5)

Interestingly, the European cities drop out of the Top 10 and Sydney doesn't even make the Top 20.

There was also further comment on this week's Listener cover story. Bennie said:

When I read stats like these I always wish there were classes of child porn, like with drugs. So you could tell the age difference between the porn viewer and the "child". I mean, a 17 year old looking at a naked 17 year old, is that really so shocking?

To be fair, anyone prosecuted by DIA will have been handling the nastiest illegal material. I think their priorities have always been pretty sound. But Joe Boden was concerned about the blurring of the lines.

I haven't read the Listener article on porn and kids, but the tone of the Listener's response to you (and the tone of a number of recent articles in the Press here in Ch-Ch) is a bit troubling. What I'm referring to specifically is the blurring of the line between 'porn' and 'child porn' by reporters and editors. The words are often used interchangeably, when I think it's safe to say we're talking about different things (although the first may blur into the second - old Traci Lords videos and ads for 'teens' being relevant here). The result of this is that a lot of people engaged in a perfectly legal (here in NZ) activity involving consenting adults are tarred with the same brush as those involved in the sexual exploitation of children.

Lucy Van Hout found it:

… amazing that New Zealand and America seem intent on babyising their children. At 15 - 19 a boy/girl is not a child. They can & do have sex and they do look at porn. This was the age we were all looking at playboy and hustler. The medium and intensity has changed but the curosity has not. Same with drink and drugs rites of passage and all that shit! They either turn into ok adults or not.

Sam Finnemore endorsed some of the Listener story's concerns:

I was interested to see that the current Listener story on the Internet and kids mentions the possibly risky capabilities of new-generation 3G cellphones. They're valid concerns, especially when you consider the new kid-friendly marketing slant a certain NZ telco is using to promote 3G technology - thus, we'll soon witness pester power winning cellphones for the youngest market demographic yet. Such commercial targeting of kids deserves closer attention, especially when other more sinister forms of exploitation might follow in its wake. Just a thought.

There was an interesting column in the New Statesman recently, looking at the idea that the ubiquity and extremity of Internet porn is pushing young adults into things they might not really want to do, and included this paragraph:

A 17-year-old - a product of the age - suggested one way to halt this. "Young men need to be taught from adolescence to be porn-savvy. Everybody knows from the time they're a child to be sceptical of the claims of advertising, but young lads don't know to be sceptical about the claims involved in porn. My first experience of women in a sexual context was seeing them on websites as cum-hungry bitches. I guess I started looking at it when I was 11 or 12, and it led me to make some terrible mistakes, approaching girls and expecting them to be into anything and everything. The sex education we got was like something from another age. We were told in class what a vulva was when I was 14, but by that time I had been inspecting them in detail on my computer screen for years, and so had every other lad in the room. I knew what they looked like; what I didn't know was that there was such a huge emotional gap between porn and reality. That's what they need to teach."

The writer, Johann Hari, worries that if the issue stays off the radar, "one of the features of this new age - in addition to the welcome growth in sexual openness - be a terrible wave of increased sexual assaults."

Yet the reality on the ground - in New Zealand anyway - is that the rate of sexual offending falls every year. It is much lower than it was when there was less porn around. Go figure. Anyway, I agree to some extent with the proposition in the Listener story that some sexual practices previously considered bizarre may become normalised, but I really don't think paedophilia will be among them. On the other hand, the major phenomenon in Internet porn is probably amateur and self-made porn: and it's hard to see, say something like I Shot Myself as exploitative, especially when the participants see themselves as "artists". And, frankly, if a 20 year-old college student runs a webcam peepshow for fun and profit, that's an adult choice. The problem is maintaining the boundaries of childhood.

Ben Thomas of Dog Biting Men has a thorough post on the highly unusual decision to charge Tim Selwyn with sedition after his attack on the front window of the Prime Minister's electorate office - which he suspects has been followed up with the arrest of a man who protested against Prince Charles' visit, on suspicion of - again - sedition.

I think Selwyn's a clown and an attention-seeker, and I suspect his motives as much as I'd suspect those of any pakeha who ended a protest note with "Ake! Ake! Ake!". But I can't see any reason that the charge of sedition should have been revived after 80 years of disuse to deal with his case.

The other audio interview from yesterday is with Chris O'Connell of Radar Guidance, on the issue of Telecom and Telstra Clear de-peering; or, to put it bluntly, breaking the local Internet to serve their own commercial interests. (I can't really be bothered even trying to be impartial on this one.) There are some very interesting developments pending on the issue, so I'll keep you posted.

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Wellington Rising | Mar 16, 2005 10:10

How apt that the day I quote the Mercer quality of life survey, the 2005 rankings should be published. Auckland and Sydney have maintained last year's scores, but been nudged down from fifth equal place to eighth equal by Munich and Dusseldorf, which have apparently raised their game on infrastructure.

Wellington, on the other hand, has edged up from 15th to 14th. Baghdad remains the worst major city in the world, a distinction it achieved for the first time in last year's survey. There's a link to the Top 50 at the bottom of the Mercer press release. Anyone whose firm has paid the $US400 for the detailed Auckland and Wellington reports is most welcome to send them on to me, or just excerpt the choicest parts. However grown-up we get, we still like to know what people think of New Zealand …

As I anticipated, there was a strong response to yesterday's invitation to comment on expat issues. I have 60-odd emails from expats, the recently returned and "reverse expats" who have chosen to come and live here from somewhere else. Some of the messages are quite lengthy and all of them are thoughtful and useful. Give me a day or two and I'll compile them as posts here. Thanks very much. You're a smart bunch.

I should point out that I wasn't trying to make anyone feel guilty (which some folks seemed to) or criticise anyone making a life elsewhere. I lived in London for five years and it might have been longer had a baby not arrived and altered our priorities. I was also lucky enough to have a job that offered international travel from 1996 to 2001, which was helpful. I'm here for the duration now, I think: you reach a point in the media industry where your employment appeal simply isn't portable. (Remember when Paul Holmes threatened to up and go to Australia after the PM criticised his salary? Oh how we laughed …)

Anyway, I'm talking to Simon Collins, the author of the original Herald story on my Wire show at 12.30pm today. You can listen to the live stream here.

A loss of status and funding at the top of our tertiary education system was one common theme of the responses. And on that theme National's Bill English gave a bravura performance on Checkpoint yesterday, in highlighting the fact that four-year courses in animal homeopathy and "art-based health" have been bankrolled by the Tertiary Education Commission's "strategic priorities fund". He knows as well as anyone that National funded sillier courses than that - under the philosophy that the market and not the government should make choices - but, as he kept repeating, these seem like odd choices as "strategic priorities" when there's not enough money for apprenticeship schemes.

So there is no evidence to support the laying of charges against John Tamihere, according to the Serious Fraud Office report - but a close associate is headed for court. A minister in the National/NZ First government is facing 10 charges brought by the SFO.

And, on a somewhat larger scale, Vanity Fair has some eye-popping stuff relating to Halliburton's multi-billion dollar business in Iraq. Halliburton explains why it billed the US taxpayer $27.5 million to deliver $82,000 worth of fuel to Iraq. A man who blew the whistle on kickbacks in a $US283 million scheme to arm the new Iraqi army was dead eight days later. Expect it all to be roundly ignored by everyone who raged about the oil-food-food scam …

I had some issues with The Listener's cover story this week: Is your child getting too much sex? Alarming research on who's accessing the worst pornography. I find the sexualisation of children depressing and unwelcome, and I'm quite glad we have boys. I think Noel O'Hare is an excellent journalist and I don't disagree with the bulk of his story.

But it's not actually surprising that 15-19 year-olds were the biggest group among the 185 offenders listed in the DIA's most recent update on Internet traders of child pornography and other censorship offenders. The same group (roughly) also commits more of all offences overall than any other. Ditto for young men killing themselves in cars, etc - it's an extremely risky time of life. Add in access to technology, misplaced bravado and emotional immaturity and, like I said, the figure is no surprise. It also sounds a bit different if you say "more than three quarters of those convicted are aged 20 or over."

I also thought Noel's observation that "many children will never encounter child porn in the Net" was poorly phrased. On the numbers, the overwhelming majority of them won't. We take the usual precautions in our house, including have the computers in a family room, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the net impact of modern communications technologies is overwhelmingly positive, or that 15 year-old girls are still at greater risk out there in the real world than in a chat room.

I raised it with Listener editor Pamela Stirling, who said:

As for Noel's story, he wanted to contrast the public belief that the only people accessing porn are the kind of middle-aged males in the news so prominently after the recent police busts here and overseas. With the Michael Jackson trial also high-profile at the moment, it seemed a good time to point out that children have unprecedented access to pornography and that young people aged 15 to 19 are the largest single group of offenders when it comes to trading child pornography.

Denise Ritchie has pointed out that most people have no idea of the statistics in the area. Certainly, the response we have received from parents in the last few days indicates they were totally unaware that was the case - and also unaware of the material their own primary school children or teenagers had accessed. Many, after reading John McCarthy's comments, have asked their kids what they have seen on the internet and have been appalled, they tell us, about the porn and the beheadings their kids have witnessed. The kids are glad to finally be able to talk about it now their parents are a bit more up to speed on the issue and the parents want to thank us for including the Netsafe contacts.

On a happier note, I got to interview Anthony Bourdain yesterday. I'm a total fanboy and got him to sign two of his books for me. I tried to get something that other writers wouldn't, but I'm not sure I succeeded. He was, I must say, exactly as I thought he'd be. Figuring that everyone else would be giving him food, I gave him some rock 'n' roll: the new D4 album. He perked up noticeably when I told him they were big in Japan.

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Leave the chip behind | Mar 15, 2005 10:09

The Weekend Herald's Saturday lead, Quarter of NZ's brightest are gone, should not have surprised anyone, although it was salutary to see the numbers. Nearly half a million people born in New Zealand are living in other OECD countries, and 24.2% of all New Zealand-born people with tertiary qualifications. The latter figure is the highest for any OECD country, just shading those other small nations, Ireland and Luxembourg.

It has always been thus. Indeed, for a fair part of last century, almost anyone with prospects got out and didn't come back. In 1948, the American academic Leslie Lipson, who weathered the World War II years at Wellington's Victoria University, wrote that he liked and admired us, but worried that we had created "a world safe for mediocrity" and a conscious "restraint on talent". We had delivered the world men of the calibre of Rutherford:

Yet persistently New Zealand refuses opportunities to its most talented sons and daughters, denies them the chance of creative expression, and often drives them from its own shores in that annual "export of brains" which is its greatest tragedy.

At the very time he wrote, there were poets and painters who had stubbornly chosen to stay, and to remedy what Lipson lamented as our lack of achievement in "the realm of art, literature, of the spirit". They helped devise a cultural aspiration that extended beyond being a distant outpost of England. We might still have our issues, but it is in part through their stubbornness we are a bolder and better place now than then.

Or maybe not. What was striking about the Herald's coverage of the story was the huge chips on the shoulders of some of the New Zealand expats who responded to a list of questions on the Herald website last week. Most notable was computing consultant Jamie Clark, who is working in Singapore. In a fairly dazzling burst of invention, he told the Herald this:

"I would not want my (yet to materialise) kids in the NZ system. NZ seems to be on a steady slide to mediocrity. The result of all the politically-correct nonsense is that school-leavers have third-world literacy and numeracy skills, yet they all pass NCEA."

Third world? Clearly he was confused and actually meant to say third in the world, as the OECD's Programme For International Student Assessment found in 2001, for both reading and maths. Another comparison in 2003 had our students ranking only in the top 10 in the world, but as Canterbury University's Warwick Elley pointed out in a paper last year, sharp changes either way in such surveys tend to relate to the vagaries of sampling. He looks at various studies over the past three decades and concludes that New Zealand students' achievement in reading has been high in that time - and remarkably stable given a recent sharp increase in the number of students for whom English is a second language.

The gap between our most and least able students is of concern, but it can safely be said that in airily declaring "third world" education standards in New Zealand, Mr Clark is talking through his expatriate arse. If that's his attitude, he might as well stay away. Or at least leave the chip behind when he does come back.

A number of the Herald's respondents were aware of recent problems with NCEA, although, like so many of those shouting about NCEA at the moment, they had not actually been near a New Zealand classroom. So it might be useful to note that the last letter from the principal of my boy's high school (academically outstanding in its decile, generally glowing ERO reports) was unusually forthright on the matter:

I have concerns about the impact of the current NCEA media furore on students and parents. Clearly, public confidence in our national qualification has been shaken, if not undermined, in some quarters.

We are all aware that education has become a highly politicised arena, accentuated by the imminent election campaign. Media coverage of this issue has revealed a combination of self-interest, wilful ignorance and political points-scoring which tells us more about the motives of the players than anything else.

[Our] teachers have identified a number of administrative aspects which are problematic and need NZQA's attention. These include the need to invest more resources into ensuring that external mderation guarantees high levels of consistency and reliability, and the need to address the issue of more accurately reporting outcomes resulting from students making strategic decisions about which standards they attempt in the externally assessed examinations.

Nevertheless, our confidence in standards-based assessment and in NCEA remains intact. I have told out students that they should have faith in the value of the qualification and in no way allow the the current controversy to affect their commitment to their course studies. Above all, they need to be aware that the quality of their credits (excellence or merit are the requisites) remains paramount.

I found one response to the Herald on the matter of race relations quite sad. Malcolm Boyce, a systems manager in Bendigo, Victoria, said:

I'm Maori, so in NZ I will be expected to go to prison sooner rather than later.

Or maybe you'll become the head of the Business Roundtable …

New OECD figures have been published in good time to put the issues of tax and wages in perspective. People who complain about tax rates here tend to ignore the impact of separate levies for social security, which in some countries make up between a quarter and a third of labour costs. In New Zealand, there is no additional levy on employers or earners for superannuation.

Since the 2003 survey, the "tax wedge" (income tax plus employer and employee social security levies) on single New Zealand employee earnings has risen slightly - as it did in 18 of the OECD's 30 member states (Richard Prebble found room in this statistic to declare, with admirable creativity, that "the net tax paid by the average New Zealand worker has increased 100 percent faster for single people, 1,500 percent higher for single parents with two children and over 300 percent greater for a one earner family with two children" compared to the OECD average). But, at 20.7% for a single manufacturing worker, it is still lower than that in any other OECD country apart from South Korea and Mexico.

It is higher for families, but still in the bottom third. And ironically, the OECD figures suggest that that is largely because other countries (including the US) operate family tax credit systems like the fledgling Working for Families scheme that the political right here is busy decrying as creeping socialism. Michael Cullen says that on these numbers, Working for Families will reduce the tax wedge for New Zealand families to the fourth lowest in the OECD by 2008. (I'm still hoping he'll surprise us and address the bracket creep issue - if benefits can be indexed, why not tax brackets?)

But there is a problem - and it's a big one for expats. Wage growth. After a couple of years of OECD-leading GDP growth, the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD and labour laws that are, by the standards of the developed world, still highly favourable to employers, wages are flatlining. On the way to becoming a low-cost economy we have become a low-wage economy. It's hard to see how more of the same might change this, or how exactly it's the present government's fault.

At the upper end of the scale, the difference in remuneration between here and New York London or even Sydney is just the fate of a small market. There aren't as many specialist jobs available here. I know quite a few New Zealanders earning very good money in other countries. Some are happily settled elsewhere for life, some would like to come home but despair of finding a comparable job, and some will, eventually, return. I'm sure they have their issues with their birth country, but none of them are as embittered as some of the people who wrote to the Herald.

If your overriding concern is personal income, then New Zealand is not the place for you. It is relatively difficult to become wealthy working for someone else here.

But there are compensations. Auckland always rates very highly in international quality of life surveys (and even with recent currency appreciation is still only the 80th most expensive city in the world to live in). The food's good, so's the wine; the weather's not bad and I like the people; who are an increasingly diverse bunch.

We own a decent chunk of equity in a house only five minutes' drive from the centre of town; there's a beach around the corner and plenty of room to play. The schools, contrary to what you may have heard, are excellent.

And it's home. I went to Pasifika on Saturday, and you can't do that anywhere else. And I'm sorry if this sounds wanky, but I'm not only in it for me. I want to be part of the story here. The scale of things means it's possible to do that, to actually make a difference.

I'm feeling a bit that way about Sunday's Great Blend event, which could hardly have gone better. We lost John Campbell, who was stuck in Dunedin (he was only marginally less apologetic that he'd have been if he'd, say, killed my brother), but his boss Mark Jennings was a welcome and able replacement on our media panel. The Checks were great, David Slack's reading from Civil War and Other Optimistic Predictions (he finished the book only an hour beforehand!) was excellent, and our def poet, Flaco Navaja, was an absolute star, not least with the ladies. I'm looking forward to the next one already. The Herald on Sunday's photographer has some nice pics here and here.

Anyway, I know we have a substantial expat readership, and I'm interested in what you folks think. Feel free to get in touch with comment or even, if you're so minded, a fully-fledged guest post.

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