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Regrets, I've Had a Few | Dec 27, 2005 07:30
You know what's great? Readers. And what's better than readers? Intelligent, educated, *interested* readers, such as the readership of Public Address. Quit blushing now - you know you rock.
Even you right-wingers. Even you dirty hippies. Well, maybe not the anonymous flamers, but you regular angry-folks are okay.
Seriously, you've been a great audience to write for. Poll Dancer was a strange, unplanned experiment in online New Journalism, and a readership like Public Address' was the perfect petri dish for it.
Poll Dancer was originally conceived as a travelogue through the election campaign, with portraits of the colourful locals and reviews of the food, but pretty soon, it became an excuse for me to get into shin-digs and get people to talk to me. It became the only blog that regularly used its own primary sources, and that changed the game entirely.
It meant a lot more work, but it also meant the ability to talk about things that nobody reported on, and it also meant being able to - in new, exciting, entirely original and very public ways - fuck-up.
It's important for me to acknowledge these embarrassing booboos, and it seems only appropriate that I follow the fine Parliamentary tradition of doing it during this post-Christmas lull, when nobody gives a toss.
Booboo #1: 30 April, 2005
The election will be held on 2nd of July.
As Kenny says: "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." This one should definitely have been folded.
I heard this information from a friend, who had heard it from someone working in Parliament, who overheard it in his office. When Scoop asked me how sure I was about it, my answer was: "Not very. It's a punt."
If I was my editor, I would have smacked me over the head and binned it without a second thought. As it was, I had put the odds of it being true at around 30%, but I figured that everyone had an election-date prediction, most of them end up being wrong, so why not take a punt on a long-shot?
It was a juvenile call that fell through mercifully quickly.
Booboo #2: 21 June, 2005
Labour will drop a bomb(shell) on the National Party conference.
It didn't start off as a bad call. I had heard from three separate Labour Party people that "something big" was going to happen on a particular weekend, and that weekend just happened to be the National Party conference weekend. Speculating that the two were related was pretty reasonable.
In a 1261 word post, 125 words were spent speculating that this bombshell was going to be some kind of dirt, a la Benson-Pope. One mystified Political Editor confirmed/convoluted the issue, telling me that he was the designated "hitman" for the job - but that he'd only heard that second-hand!
The next day, at the National Party conference, I found out that a lot of people actually read Poll Dancer, because people - many from the Press Gallery - kept coming up to me asking what this dirt that was going to be released was. Then the PM's Press Secretary called me up, rather angrily, and demanded that I stopped spreading this false rumour that the Labour Party even *had* a dirt file on National MPs.
As it turned out, Helen announced the apology from the Israelis for the spies on the Sunday. It may or may not have been the "something big", but regardless, I felt pretty dumb, announcing that something which required secrecy to happen would happen.
The glib "Deep Dark Secret" reference rang excruciatingly true.
Booboo #3: 23 August, 2005
"**NATIONAL IS FUNDING THE ENTIRE TAX CUT PACKAGE OUT OF A $12.8b INCREASE IN DEBT OVER FOUR YEARS** Waaaaaaaa!!!!"
At $9.6 billion, this beats that time TelstraClear tried to overcharged me by $1,700.
The worst thing about this one is that it was actually a tiny, technical mistake on what was otherwise a pretty good find. A $3.2b find, in fact. I originally spotted an ambiguous use of language on a National press release:
"Gross sovereign issued debt is forecast to be approximately 1% higher relative to GDP than currently by the end of the forecast period."
Did "currently" mean higher than currently forecasted, or higher than current debt? It was a pretty fiddly bit of public accounting semantics, but the difference was several percent of GDP - i.e. Billions of dollars.
I actually had it right up until this point. Unfortunately, I was using 2004 figures as the baseline, while the numbers were based on 2006 figures, which means that my estimate was off by two years, and, um, $9.6b.
When I reached my $12.8b conclusion, I made numerous calls to do sanity-checks. In hindsight, starting a phone conversation with "hey, have you got a moment? I think I've just found where the National Party is hiding 12.8 billion dollars" is not the best way to get an objective answer; and also with the benefit of hindsight, nobody outside of Treasury was going to be able to tell me, over the phone, that I had the wrong baseline year.
I tried to contact John Keys, who told me through David Farrar that I was wrong, but he didn't say why.
Here's where being a lone gunman sucks. Sitting alone in the office at night, Queen pumping on the stereo, psyched up because I'd just deciphered a whole bunch of accounting jibberish, there's nobody there to say "oi - slow down". Quite the opposite - the immediacy of the medium screams for you to do things now, always.
It's not that I was stupid, but it's just so easy to get caught up the story. You really do need someone whose job it is to look over your shoulder to pour some cold water on you and scrutinise what you're doing.
I convinced myself that the broad strokes of the story was right. Me, myself and I unanimously agreed that I needed to put it online right there and then.
Ate my words for breakfast the next morning. Not nutritious.
Now I know: This is why you ask subjects for comment, and this is why you wait for it.
I was surprised and grateful that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy didn't take the opportunity to stick the boot in. In fact, a few were rather nice in complimenting the speediness and transparency of my retraction.
I think it's vital to acknowledge mistakes, but indeed, it would be better not to make them.
I think the degree of transparency possible with a combination of online publishing (connecting to sources, documents, recording, transcripts, articles) and New Journalism (taking the reader through the journalistic process; detailing assumptions, extrapolations, uncertainties - acknowledging the weaknesses) is incredibly powerful. It's a form that allows readers to scrutinise the information themselves, as opposed to the traditional model where readers are completely dependent on the ability of the journalist, judged by their credibility.
I had, up until the last incident, underestimated the degree to which trust and credibility still mattered in cyberspace. As much as transparency can lead to credibility, trust in an individual still play a large, if not the largest, role in how people judge an information source. Maintaining this trust still relies on old-fashioned journalistic discipline and adherence to process.
It's been a long year, but ultimately a very good year. And here I am, talking about old-fashioned discipline and following the rules. Surely, if I sound like such an old fogey, I *must* have learnt something. Right?
WTO: White Texan Orchardists | Dec 19, 2005 15:41
It's not that the WTO wasn't listening, but that the protesters weren't saying anything. Apart from vacuous slogans ("Down, down, WTO"), the protesters - especially the Korean farmers - didn't say what they wanted. If they did, the whole protest would have grounded to a halt in stunned silence.
Korea is, of course, a developed country. The Korean farmers are recipients of heavy government subsidies. They say that, if those subsidies are removed, they cannot sustain their businesses.
In short, they make their living by using the economic leverage of their rich government to get one-up on farmers from developing nations, in *exactly* the same way as American and European farmers, who everyone so readily caricatures as fat white men prospering at the expense of poor black people.
(Except, unfortunately for the Korean farmers, they don't hold the electoral colleges of swing states that elects their president.)
If several thousand American farmers came to Hong Kong and fucked some shit up to demand the continuation of their privilege at the expense of their counterparts in developing countries, I can imagine the international disgust that would ensue.
This is what the Korean farmers did.
But nobody realised that the Korean farmers were pro-subsidies, and I'm not sure if the Korean farmers realised that all the farmers from developing countries (who weren't there because the idea that they could afford to fly is preposterous) were the driving force against farming subsidies, rather than the Rich White Folks.
As for the assorted socialists and anarchists, I'm not if they realised that everyone else made their living, meager or otherwise, off international trade. Oh sure, everyone might be better off if we dismantled the system of international trade, but they'll just have to weather through a wee period of "structural realignment" that would involve them eating cotton for the next five years.
By the end, I was terribly uninspired by the whole thing. Ended up missing the outright rioting on Saturday, which was a shame - the police had upgraded from the pocket-sized mace to the family-sized bottles and drenched everyone in it. Sam Graham got maced a bit, but says it wasn't so bad, unlike the tear-gas.
The Koreans were resourceful and tactically savvy. They surprised police by (shock, horror) not following the designated route, and managed to break through thin lines of non-riot-geared police and run amok in the streets, which forced the riot police to play catch-up for ages. They kick the metal bars off the barriers and used them as clubs, threw what was left of the barriers, formed a diamond with other barriers and used it as a battering ram (looked cool, but wasn't very effective). Guess they won't be using them next time, then.
Ah, loyal metal crowd-control barrier, how I shall miss jumping over thee.
In the aftermath, people in Hong Kong are not impressed. 60-odd police were hospitalised with light injuries and the property damage is nothing a big clean-up crew can't fix, but people don't appreciate having to evacuate their homes and their shops because there's a friggin' riot going on outside. Moreover, the leaders of many of the Korean groups pledged to follow the law and protest peacefully when they first arrived.
Lawful and peaceful protests don't involve battering rams.
(And if they did, they'd turn the barriers upside-down first so that there's less friction.)
WTO: Won't Televise Orcas | Dec 16, 2005 10:16
Just a quick update from the Eastern Front. All my photos from Tuesday are up here, as well as some excellent shots from Sam Graham, a local journalism student.
The past two days has been more of the same: Wheeling and dealing inside the conference, scuffling and swimming outside.
Local media has been giving a lot of coverage to the proto-violence. And fair enough - it's not everyday that you have a week-long mini-riot in Hong Kong.
Jane Kelsey writes that "some local activists believed the TV station was deliberately sensationalizing its reports, making the tussle appear more like a war situation. Its anchorman was wearing a helmet in all his reports."
I think she means reporter (yes, having an anchorman in the studio wearing a riot helmet would be pretty silly), and it was quite justified, actually. All sorts of shit was being thrown around, mace was being sprayed everywhere, there were nails on the ground (as in hundreds of nails, scattered like they were dropped - what were they for? Not home improvement...)
Okay, it wasn't genuinely life-threatening, but it was certainly unsafe enough to warrant wearing a helmet, just in case it started raining mace.
Kelsey also wrote that the Korean contingent are "relaxed, but strictly self-disciplined, they exuded an aura that is hard to describe."
I've got a description: Militant.
It's not that they don't have a good cause, it's not even that I disagree with their tactics (I'm ambivalent at this stage). But let's be honest - the "direct action" arm of the group, they are not interested in peaceful, lawful protests. These guys are here with the specific intention of taking on the authorities (aka Law).
They know what they are doing. They are well-trained, disciplined, organised and determined. As much as these are Confusian virtues, they do not endear the protesters to the Hong Kong authorities.
They're certainly not marauding hooligans, and I doubt they're any threat to the public in general, but they are here to challenge the authorities, and the police, as the whacking-end of the authorities, can't really be expected to let them run amok.
And they haven't done a bad job with it. Sure, they've prepared like an obessive-compulsive Martha Stewart getting ready to have the Hordes over for dinner, but despite the ungodly amount of whacking-power they've allocated for this meeting, their use of it so far has been, indeed, measured and restrained.
I mean, pepper-spray really is the minimal level of force at their disposal, unless you count shouting menacingly. They had, ready to go, guys with tear gas, rubber bullets, big, fuck-off truncheons and full body armour, all sitting right there, metres away.
They were restrained.
Apparently, the protesters were, too. Local media are reporting, somewhat speculatively, that these clashes are just warm-up exercises, designed to test the police response. In fact, they even speculated that the swimmers and the funeral pyre were timed to test the ability of the police's ability to deal with multiple simultaneous events.
Both the local media and "police sources" are speculating that the protesters will disperse into the city and take the action there, in an attempt to stretch the police force to its limits. No doubt the police have long identified the key players and are keeping close tabs on them already.
In local slang, everyone is still waiting for "kick-off". We'll see if the fear-mongering was warranted...
WTO: What The Ouck? | Dec 14, 2005 08:00
Self-fulfilling or otherwise, the predictions for the Korean delegation turned out to be true, with an active contingent of them taking on the riot police and getting confettied with mace, while a flotilla of them made a seaborne protest - that's seaborne, sans boat.
The financial hub of Hong Kong was a ghost-town today, with a lot of shops far from the action closed and boarded up. It was quite pleasant, actually, to be able to get a bit of peace and quiet.
Except for the thousands of cops. Thousands. There were cops around every corner, and a few dozen on every bridge or checkpoint.
They had patrols guarding the parking lot, which was surrounded by a protective wall of containers, covered with children's artwork. There were plainclothes cops, innocuously standing around in pairs, checking everyone out and looking unusually patient with whoever they were pretending to be waiting for. Then there were the police interceptors speedboats. And the police divers. And cops on motorcycles patrolling the area. And the vans full of reinforcements. And the helicopter.
They even had their own Mobile Canteen Unit. Now that's prepared.
The protesters were very multicultural. A very visible, well-organised and vocal Korean contingent was divided into teams with matching clothing, bandannas and banners. A group of them carried around a large funeral pyre that foreshadowed things to come.
The Filipino group had their own WTO coffin, too. The Filipino and Indonesian contingents were quite strong - Hong Kong is home to many sojourners from these countries who work as domestic servants in ordinary, middle-class households. It's very strange from a social organisation perspective, having ordinary households include a maid, but from an economic perspective, outsourcing labour-intensive tasks to cheap labour makes perfect sense.
Of the locals, there were lots of unionists, as well as some good old-fashioned socialists who - true to their motto - really do seem the same everywhere. There were also generic anti-Americans and anti-Bush protesters with good-looking placards.
There was the Falun Gong, who have their fingers in many protest pies these days. They've become quite overtly... seditious, too. But then again, I guess I can't rule out the possibility that these signs are all Chinese black-ops.
The protesters played Power to the People on repeat for ages, and chanted exciting slogans such as "down down WTO", "no no WTO" and "[in Cantonese] protest WTO".
A lot of marching, with a lot of people watching and taking photos. In Hong Kong, every man and his dog is a photography enthusiast packing a professional-grade camera. Everyone else just has a digital camera or a cellphone with a camera. It's hard to get a shot without someone in it who's trying to get a shot, too. Some good shots to be had, but the enthusiasts and the international press had to jostle quite a bit. As with everything else in Hong Kong, the solution was to develop vertically.
Before long, a whole bunch of Koreans took off their shoes, put on life-jackets and jumped into the sea. More followed. Then some more. They said they were going to swim to the convention centre and stop the meeting. They didn't manage to do it, but they looked like they were having a reasonably good time, nonetheless. Presumably, nobody told them about the horrendous levels of pollution in that harbour...
There was a period of monotonous chanting and dull speeches. It might have been good that nobody paid much attention to what was being said, since half the people were arguing for reduced agricultural subsidies and "fair trade", while the other half were arguing for an end to global capitalism. Presumably, the farmers wanting to sell their goods at a real market price might have been a bit peeved to have no market to sell to.
Before such minor details could be explored, the large funeral pyre carried by one of the Korean groups got turned into a flaming battering ram. Well, okay, it was smouldering rather than properly flaming, and it was flipped onto, rather than rammed into, police. Still - funeral pyre, burning - you would have thought someone would have made the connection earlier.
A few attempts were made to charge the police line. One of the Korean groups again. A very organised (and obviously dedicated) group formed a mini-phalanx and tried to break through. The police responded with a confetti-rain of mace (it looks like puke).
Other people gave it a go, too. These smug pricks (the usual suspects out for a good time) gave each other high-fives after managing to run the gauntlet without getting maced.
Another casualty was one of Hong Kong's legislators, known as "Long-Hair". Famed for wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and representing the too-cool-for-skool constituency, he copped some mace-in-da-face, too.
While the protesters and police were charging and macing, on the other side of the fence, the rest of the protesters (around 60-70% of them) went about their chants and stuff as before.
Most of the local press (and only the local press) brought riot helmets with them. I was initially skeptical, but as the action began, I got very, very jealous. I ended up hanging on a fence for over an hour. Highlight: Changing camera lenses with one hand while two metres above angry mob and riot police. Lowlight: The diesel generator next to me being designed to vent its exhaust fumes about two metres from ground level, away from people. And my really, really sore back.
A lot of other journalists, though, were down there in the thick of it. There was this amazing cloud of cameras that hovered over the action. When the action died down, the front-line was filled with so many cameramen that it took some time for everyone to realise that the nobody was there confronting the police anymore. Seriously.
Then, in what's definitely the most surreal twist, people started taking souvenir photos. The riot police that were whipping out the mace like it was a pissing contest suddenly became static backdrops for people to pose in front of for I-came-to-the-WTO-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-photo photos. People were chatting, and just hanging out. The tense stand-off suddenly became light-hearted, mostly contrived adventure-tourism.
WTO: We're Thoughtful and Organised | Dec 09, 2005 15:21
I love military and police equipment. They're just so... thoughtful.
Take this Australian made "water barrier". It's a big plastic water container. Easy to move into place, just add water. Sturdy as a concrete block, slippery as a greasy pole. Can't push it over, can't climb it. I mean, if *I* was looking to purchase a two-metre high redeployable crowd control barrier, *I'd* get one of these.
But it's not just the equipment, but the service that goes with it, too. Those security consultants they've got over for the WTO must be wedding planners, too, considering their attention to detail. Bridges are wrapped in netting to prevent protesters from accidentally dropping their belongings over the sides; drain covers are locked into place with metal ties to prevent protesters from... er... accidentally taking them away and breaking windows with them; they've even filled the edges around paving stones to prevent them from being plied out.
They've made Hong Kong kid-safe.
Meanwhile, businesses near the convention centre (that would be the heart of the busiest part of Hong Kong) are bracing themselves for massive disruptions. A lot of the staff are being asked to go on leave, with the best-case scenario being major traffic rerouting (except that in Hong Kong, there isn't really anywhere to reroute to), and the worst case scenario being the closing of the harbour crossing, which would cut Hong Kong in half and piss, oh, several million people off immensely.
Hotel staff hosting the foreign dignitaries are drilling for Contingency Plans A, B and C - though I'm not sure if the staff themselves actually get away, or whether they're expected to make the noble sacrifice for the good of global commerce. I hear they have been issued with Tasers, though.
They're expecting a large contingent of Korean unionists (now *they* know how to rip some mad shit up), representatives of other not-quite-cheap-enough Asian labour, as well as the usual suspects here for a good time with a pickax, bolt-cutter and crowbar.
They've created a protest zone just 200m from where I live, so it should get interesting. It has line of sight with the convention centre, albeit with a rather large body of water in between. It's also possibly the last remaining piece of undeveloped land in Hong Kong.
Last time I came back to Hong Kong they had a Russian circus in the same spot. Clown-music. All day. Every day.
I'm looking forward to next week.
Maybe Tomorrow | Dec 05, 2005 09:33
(Update: The photos are up here now.)
Hong Kong's 'Honkies' aren't really known as
the ripping-some-mad-shit-up type. But they try.
Around 100,000-200,000 of them took to the streets today in a massive demonstration to protest against plans by the Government to slow down democratic reforms in Hong Kong, perhaps indefinitely.
Ahem. Except not quite so confrontational. It was more a... widely attended march "aimed at expressing discontentment over the government's package proposals for Hong Kong's constitutional development".
--
I'm reporting from Public Address' newly established Hong Kong Bureau. (I bagsed Bureau Chief.) It's been quite a bit of work, but the bureau is now mostly functional, though the case fan is a bit noisy and the DVD-RAM is bung. But it's got a 10mb connection and unlimited traffic...
I thought only kids with daddies who owned telcos had connections like this, but no, this is just what people have over here. It's funny, coming to a place with fiber-optics blasting ultra-speed internet out the wazoo, trying to explain to people how "broadband" at home means a pale, woeful 256k imitation of the real thing.
When will we get the big-people internet?
Maybe tomorrow.
--
The issue at hand is that the Hong Kong Chief Executive - the Head of Government - is not directly elected. Rather, the top job is appointed by a 800-member committee, which itself is directly elected by a small number of people in "Functional Constituencies".
Check it out - it's complicated, it's tedious, it's diabolically legalicious.
It's Socialism with Byzantine Characteristics.
The general idea was that Hong Kong needed time to develop the civic vigour required to have real elections. You know, like, breed more bloggers and stuff. By 2007, 10 years after Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, the time would be ripe to move to universal suffrage. Or it might be 'move *towards* universal suffrage'. One or the other.
Cue lawyers.
Rather than universal suffrage, the Government is trying to expand the indirect election system so that more people get to kinda vote. The idea of universal suffrage is still good, but Hong Kong is just going to have to wait.
Having waited 10 years, people in Hong Kong are, shall we say, somewhat disinclined to wait until the Communist Party decides to hold an election for them.
Cue polite Sunday march.
There were a lot of old people and families with small children - they certainly weren't an excitable lot. In fact, a lot of it got out-right boring. They kept doing shit like obeying police instructions and "maintaining orderly behaviour", which was a bit disheartening.
It sounds strange, but the slogans were spectacular. Everyone had copies of a local (and evidently liberal) newspaper, Apple Daily, which did a double-page broadsheet spread that could be used as a placard. On it: "I want to see an election." But the meaning was not just see, in the sense of "I want this to happen", but in the sense of "I want to witness it finally happen", "I want to see this part of history through".
The sticker on this guy puts it in terms easier to translate. It says:
"Tell me, will I see the day when we have universal suffrage?"
It's snappier in Chinese, but the idea of dashed hope was very powerful. On one hand, it's expressing their own democratic aspirations and how important they are; on the other, they're asking the Chinese Government to quit the bullshit and tell them whether it'll *ever* happen.
Maybe tomorrow.
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