Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Hangover blog | May 06, 2005 10:40

The abandoned cats story may well do John Tamihere more harm with the public than his various other political calamities. A lot of people see the treatment of animals as a character issue, and their view of Tamihere will not be at all improved by this one. I was a party last night talking to someone who was both gay and an active member of the SPCA. He didn't know which way to spit.

Said party, at the premises of Festival Mushroom Records, was noisy, crowded and very good fun. I had numerous interesting conversations, the Phoenix Foundation played, my glass kept filling itself and it somehow suddenly went from early yet to My God, is that the time?. My consequent fragile state means just a quick little blog today.

Doug Clover kindly sent me this link, which casts yesterday's Daily Telegraph story alleging that science journals had been suppressing the views climate change skeptics in a very interesting light. Not only did the paper willfully misrepresent the results of the Bray survey, Bray's "international study" was functionally useless. Add in some frankly unethical behaviour on a climate sceptics' mailing list and the whole thing becomes quite astonishing.

RDU's Haydn Kerr drew my attention to the Some NZ Music Is Shit website. Lovely.

Celebrity sedition defendant Tim Selwyn blogs on immigration issues. I kept looking for a sign that it was satire, but he's apparently serious.

A couple of people have pointed out that the Question Time transcript I linked to yesterday suggests that Trevor Mallard was exercising his bovversome tendencies on Bill English rather than Nandor Tanczos. I blame the TV coverage …

The Daily Show on the British general election. Heh.

It's funny what you can glean on a trip to the supermarket: major methamphetamine importing operation involving diplomatic parcels and a foreign embassy. Notorious Auckland gang gets angry about its turf being crossed. It all starts to go septic. It will apparently hit the headlines eventually …

And with that, I end my struggle to form sentences. I have birthday present shopping, lunch with Messrs Slack and Christie and a coffee run to Karajoz to complete before joining 40,000 other people at tonight's main event: the Blues versus the Hurricanes scrapping for a Super 12 semi-final spot. If it's not an absolute cracker I'll be demanding answers.

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Oh Bovver | May 05, 2005 10:17

Go Keith! Keith Ng's student allowances scoop made it to Parliamentary Question Time yesterday, via Nandor Tanczos, who used it as the basis for questions for Trevor Mallard (scroll down to question 9).

The stated reasons that the government's eligibility extension in last year's Budget didn't result in the anticipated extra 36,000 students getting allowances may be quite valid (among them, the strong employment market and the fact that NCEA is keeping kids at school), but the problem is that Mallard gave the impression that such a take-up was happening as recently as March, when he knew it wasn't. Mallard then got all bovver-boy in response and ranted about Nandor "crying", the effect of which was not to impress.

Mallard was in the same mode later in the day when he used Parliamentary privilege to declare that Peter Doone was drunk on that dread night in November 1999. Don't try this at home, kids. Meanwhile, reader John Neal suggests that Doone did not say "that won't be necessary" or "we'll be on our way then" - but "these aren't the droids you're looking for" and "you don't need to see his identification."

National's Simon Power has become the first sitting MP to (partially) answer No Right Turn's candidate questionnaire. Idiot also makes a good point about Winston Peters and has sparked a good discussion about nuclear power ("And if Americans or Australians want to burn uranium rather than coal, then I'm all for it. This doesn't however mean that I'm in favour of nuclear power here.").

A couple of people have asked about what Matt Mollgaard and I said about Kiwi FM on Breakfast yesterday. I should make clear that I bear Kiwi no ill-will at all, and I think they're doing some things right - but my view remains that "New Zealand music" isn't a genre. Even I don't want to listen to it all the time ...

Steadfast climate change sceptic Ztev sent me this link to a Daily Telegraph story about scientists claiming that the journals Science and Nature are deliberately suppressing opposing opinion on the issue. If they are, then that's simply wrong. On the other hand, the Scientific American blog this week noted suggestions that NASA deliberately downplayed a report by one of its own scientists that endorsed the theory of global warming driven by human activity.

Also from the SciAm blog, some good links relating to the fisking of the curious creationist contortions of philosopher Anthony Flew since his passage from atheism to born-again Christianity. It's a fascinating look at how junk science is made. See also: Fitting the Bible to the Data.

Fraternal Greetings to Sam Finnemore, or should I say Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness. He notes:

The First Reformed Unitarian Jihadists have also dubbed me Brother Inspired Trebuchet of Mindful Balance. So sad it had to schism off so early - must be some kind of record.

And also to the former Peter Ashby, who is now Brother Katana of Courteous Debate and notes that "the implied incision with courtesy rather appeals to me."

Meanwhile, see also The International Unofficial Unitarian Jihad's Journal.

Via Drudge: Kelsey Grammer falling off a stage, mid-speech. Ow.

OneGoodMove has a clip of Bright Eyes Performing the protest song du jour, 'When the President Talks to God' on the Jay Leno show. The song is available as a free download on iTunes - but, of course, you still need an American billing address to get that free download. There's no web link that I can find, but it took only took me a couple of minutes to get via Limewire.

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Brother Sword of Compassion | May 04, 2005 10:31

How lucky is Winston Peters? Courtesy of what is obviously a cracking source in Immigration, he cultivates headlines with the claim that a former Iraqi cabinet minister is here on a visitor's permit. Paul Swain orders a search which turns up the former Iraqi ambassador to South Africa. Wrong guy. Peters is then able to announce the name of his man - and gets two for the price of one.

The result is better than Peters could have hoped - not only is our troublesome Bangkok bureau outed as a soft touch, but even a search ordered by the minister doesn't do what it was meant to. Peters' uncorroborated claims that his man is a security risk and also planned to seek refugee status don't even have to be tested - the story is now that the system tried and failed to find him.

So how bad are the bad guys? The Herald's story this morning has quite a bit of information. The diplomat turned up in the immigration search, Zohair Mohammad al-Omar, is not a wanted man anywhere. But he appears to have been in the tent right up until the end, and spoke up in favour of insurgent suicide bombings in 2003 (oddly, that part is in the print version of the paper, but not online). So, bad guy.

Peters' man, Amer Mahdi al-Khashali, was a Baath Party stalwart in the 1960s and a minister in the 1970s. Although he seems to be unknown to the Wellington Iraqi community, the president of the Auckland Refugee says he was a leader of the militias that slaughtered political opponents when the party came into power in 1963. This, of course, covers a period when Saddam was basically on "our" side, and a not-dissimilar record didn't stop Iyad Allawi becoming Iraq's US-approved interim Prime Minister. But still, it must be said: bad guy.

The question, I guess, has to be: what exactly is our policy on former Baathists? Do we ban them as a matter of course? What then do we make of the speech by Iraq's new prime minister which has been widely read as a call for a rethink of de-Baathification in an attempt to bring former Saddam supporters into the new government? How long do the bad guys officially stay bad guys?

Peters was in Morning Report this morning dangling the prospect of several more unacceptable entrants - doubtless to be fed out slowly between now and the election. This would be one thing if he was a hard-bitten hack - which is actually how he's operating - but he's not. He's an elected member, and it is surely time now for Peters to put the national interest first and tell the ministry exactly what he knows.

Meanwhile, Frontseat producer and well-known Mattherhorn expert Gemma Gracewood was in touch with information on that cocktail I mentioned yesterday:

The drink that 42 Below were so kindly serving you Aucklanders whilst you were enjoying our Wellington band was the "Falling Water" (42 Below feijoa vodka, Ch'i, cucumber, ice), invented by the lovely Christian McCabe, one of the business partners at your-favourite-and-mine, The Matterhorn.

According to the latest Cuisine magazine, "the Falling Water became so popular that at one stage, Matterhorn was accounting for half of all the Ch'i sold in Wellington". Cuisine also notes that the heavenly drink is named after Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous house, Falling Water, which has a waterfall flowing from its cantilevered stonework.

Nice. But "our" Wellington band? I have evidence which will show that the professional Wellingtonian Ms Gracewood in fact entered the capital under a diplomatic passport issued by the known insurgent organisation Radio New Zealand and is in fact from Auckland. Unless Ms Gracewood undertakes to make good by way of a round of drinks I will be forced to reveal more.

Several readers have pointed out that the British political map I pointed to yesterday owes some inspiration to Political Compass.

Longtime Hard News reader Adam Bogacki yesterday did me a great service by alerting me to the existence of an organisation called Unitarian Jihad - a sort of jihad of reasonableness, if you will. The organisation - well, more a meme than an organisation - emerged in this rather excellent column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle. An excerpt:

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.
Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.
We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.
We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

Amen. IJ now has its own Wikipedia entry and there is a Unitarian Jihad Name Generator. It gave me the name Brother Sword of Compassion, which I reckon is bloody mint.

Older readers may draw a comparison with the Church of the SubGenius, but without the irritating baby-boomer absurdist tendency.

A Herald editorial dumps on everyone involved in Doonegate, including, naturally, its rival newspaper.

Scary little irony department: according to the Washington Post, Iraqi insurgents are getting their tips from a US Army manual, published in 1965 and subsequently translated into Arabic for Saddam.

On my 95bFM Wire show today, I'm talking to Mark Burton about the government's new defence commitments about 12.30 and Gilbert Wong about Metro's scary cover story on Auckland's future at 1pm, if you care to listen.

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Blackout! | May 03, 2005 10:16

How clever of Metro magazine to stage a major power cut last night as a marketing device for its cover story on Auckland's ailing infrastructure. Or possibly not. Anyway, shortly before 7pm, the lights went out in Pt Chevalier, Grey Lynn, Westmere, Morningside and Kingsland - and stayed out for more than two hours in our case.

We are, as you might expect, a fairly electricity-focused household, and I think we were all momentarily dumbstruck at the sudden withdrawal of computers and the television, and the younger boy was quite frank about having The Fear. We zipped around the block in the car to check the rest of the area, which probably didn't help his nerves: it was dark all over, and burglar alarms were going off.

It was pleasing to discover quite how many torches and candles we had to hand, and dinner was just ready, so we ate by candlelight. We all agreed on a family game of Scrabble, which proved to be a thriller. We were all delighted when the lights came back on just in time for us to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who, which I'd downloaded during the day. Episode Six: The Dalek. Brilliant.

It's the curse of Opposition that you can only ever promise things, while the government of the day gets to make real commitments, and spin them to best advantage. The 10-year $4.6 billion commitment to fixing personnel and recruitment problems in the New Zealand military being a case in point. Don Brash went on Checkpoint yesterday to criticise the announcement, seemed poorly briefed and got what amounted to a bollocking from Mary Wilson. He later announced new promises on roading spending in the Waikato - but it was perhaps unwise to so frankly admit he was making it up as he went along.

Rodney Hide had a better angle, pointing out that if the economy continues to grow robustly, the military spending commitment may not yet increase our military budget as a proportion of GDP, although he did his numbers on the figure of $3 billion rather than the $4.6 billion subsequently announced.

Of course, even the best-laid spending plans of governments don't always work out. Congratulations to Public Address's Keith Ng for his bona fide scoop on the unexpected outcome of the government's promise to boost funding for student allowances. Typically, it took some good work by someone else for the government to actually acknowledge it has a problem.

I think Colin Espiner pretty much gets it right in his comment on the affair of Peter Doone and the Prime Minister:

The charge is that Clark co- operated with, and supplied "false" off-the-record information to, the Star-Times. All politicians - not just John Tamihere - talk to the media in confidence. Most, like former Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel, leak information when it suits them. So the question is, should the Prime Minister be above such a thing?
At the time, Clark was relatively new to the premiership and at that point had not shaken her habit of returning reporters' calls and sometimes sharing off-the-record information, as she had in Opposition.
She should have known better in this case, given that she was effectively involved in employment proceedings with the commissioner. No doubt she never expected the Star-Times to blow her cover.
There's no way of proving Clark knew anything she said to the paper was false. She did have then deputy commissioner Rob Robinson's as- yet unpublished report on the Doone incident in front of her at the time. But knowing it would be made public shortly afterwards, she would hardly have bothered lying to the Star-Times when she knew the facts would be out shortly afterwards. Would she?
The Opposition will this week argue that Clark gave the phrase "that won't be necessary" to the Star-Times to seal Doone's fate. But this argument relies on the fact that, as Doone himself seems to believe, it was that article - and those words - that sank him. Yet Doone was surely doomed from the moment he stepped out of his partner's car that November evening.

Of the other players in the saga, it's easy enough to work out Fairfax's motivation for making it known that it had called Helen Clark in evidence: it immediately made the whole thing go away, without even the bother of having to reveal the evidence itself (which Clark says would show that she emphasised that the leak the paper was seeking to confirm was "disputed" information). Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Run are even now preparing a claim for costs from the Doones.

The Doones themselves are a bit harder to read. Given that Doone agreed as part of his settlement not to take legal action against the government and that the time limitation on defamation action has long expired, he would seem to be pushing it all up a very steep hill. But he said in Leah Haines' HoS story that had the Star Times not published its story claiming that he had told a constable seeking to do a breath test "that won't be necessary" he would not have been minded to resign. In which case, it seems clear enough, he would simply have been dismissed.

Doone continues to insist that he did not behave inappropriately on the night (he told Haines he just "followed my natural inclination when I met constables to say 'gidday'"); the effect of which is to make a liar of both the constable involved and the current police commissioner, Rob Robinson.

What does seem clear is that the leaks on which the Star Times was acting were fairly gushing out of the police organisation itself: it's easy enough to see how "we'll be on our way then" could Chinese-whisper itself to "that won't be necessary".

This might be instructive to many of the people getting fizzed up on the more lurid rumours about Dover Samuels' incident at the Heritage Hotel. The only real evidence available so far - the hotel log - indicates that Samuels was angry and "not sober". He may well be due sympathy if he (again in the words of the log) "had an accident" because he couldn't get into his room, more so if he really does have a medical problem in that respect - but ministers aren't supposed to get themselves in such a pickle in the first place, and he shouldn't have initially denied the incident. Yet some of what's being said on the right-wing blogs is, frankly, way out there on the perimeter. Get back onto policy, folks.

Got PowerPoint? Try this fascinating analysis of where Britain's political divides really lie. It makes a fairly compelling case that "left" and "right" don't suffice any more, and it would seem to have some application to New Zealand. Thanks to PA reader Andrew for the link.

The moral reasoning in the US administration after September 11 continues to astonish. The New York Times has a story revealing that under the then-secret "extraordinary rendition" policy, suspects were sent to Uzbekistan for interrogation. Let's not fanny about here: interrogation in Uzbekistan means torture. And the administration could hardly claim it didn't know that, as the Times points out:

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.
The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Information Clearing House has a copy of the previously-secret Downing Street memo (July 23, 2002), in which possible ways to justify an invasion of Iraq, and sell it to the public, were discussed.

The New Zealand Music Month launch in Aotea Square was fun on Sunday. I went along to the launch function at the Aotea Centre, where 42 Below were serving cocktails which seemed to consist of feijoa vodka, Chi (yes, the sweet fizzy water stuff), ice and a long slice of cucumber. I'm not normally a cocktail drinker, but they were delicious and refreshing.

Anyway, Helen Clark turned up, not long off the plane from Germany, and gave the obligatory ra-ra speech. Then Shihad played to several thousand people out in the square. As you may have read in the newspaper, the rain arrived at the same time the band did. It lasted about half an hour, but the crowd proved remarkably plucky. I don't think they would have noticed in the mosh pit anyway.

I ventured down once the rain had eased, and was really impressed. The New Zealand Music Month organising committee certainly didn't stint on the production: it was essentially at Big Day Out level, and it looked and sounded stunning. Shihad are unquestionably back to being Shihad again (God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, etc) and when they came back and encored with 'You Again' it was just thrilling.

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