Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Fine work and history | Feb 25, 2003 09:55

In 1983, I came to work in a building that stood at the corner of Queen and Darby Streets in central Auckland. A Body Shop squats expensively there now, at the foot of one of the National bank towers. Back then, it was four rickety stories, no lift, and it was home to an odd bunch.

On the first floor there was the Denis Cohn Gallery, which was one of the city's most important art spaces at the time. Opposite Denis was an office held by Geoff Steven - now the apparently indestructible TVNZ executive, then a maker of art movies.

Upstairs was Snake Shirts, a t-shirt printing firm run by some amiable ex-hippies, now thirtysomething and trying to make a dollar, which they did for a while. There was Rip It Up magazine, where Murray Cammick had hired me into a job that pretty much changed my life. And there was a young (but older than me) fashion designer called Ngila Dickson.

I liked Ngila, and the way she referred to me as "Rascal", and she liked me. She was cool.

She was cutting clothes at one end of the loft let by Rip It Up, and trying to sell them from a pokey arcade shop at the corner of Queen and Victoria, where Whitcoull's is now. It was hard - there were designers back then (just like there were restaurants) but there wasn't much of an industry around it.

Eventually, Murray and a photographer called Max Thomson decided they should publish a fashion magazine, ChaCha, and they asked Ngila to edit it. She turned out to be a great editor.

I wrote a bit for ChaCha (as "Wayne Washington", which seemed like a Vanity Fair sort of a name), but its more profound influence on me came in 1991, when I came back from London and became editor of Planet magazine.

I was consciously aware of a local publishing heritage, running up to and including Ngila and Murray's magazine, although for most people it seemed to have disappeared into the black hole of the late eighties. Mark my words: today's street mags, with their large formats, quality photography and retail fashion ads, owe a lot to ChaCha. ChaCha was also a lot wittier than Pavement.

ChaCha foundered eventually, along with almost everything else in the building. The gallery closed, Snake went broke and somebody lost their house, Murray went to Grey Lynn and Geoff Steven discovered the joys of commerce. I missed all that - I was there for the best of times.

It can happen in a city that you and an old friend move in circles that don't quite intersect, and I haven't seen Ngila very often in the last few years. Anyway, she was busy: she went into costume design for the Pacific Renaissance productions out west. And then: she became costume designer for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I can't adequately explain the magnitude of the job or the quality of the work she directed - you really need to see the exhibition at Te Papa to see what makes it tick - but it is extraordinary.

And now, Ngila (along with Richard Taylor) has won a Bafta - Best costume design for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's great: great to see fine work recognised, to see talent truly find its mark and to see someone you knew back when no one had any money do well on the world stage. I'm so pleased for her.

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Magic Bullets | Feb 24, 2003 11:25

John Tamihere had been too well-behaved for too long - a blurt was coming, surely. And it came: after a speech at the Knowledge Wave Conference in which he criticised his own government's welfare policies, Tamihere told the Sunday Star Times that Employment minister Steve Maharey was "bullshitting" about employment policy.

In his speech, Tamihere said the Government's welfare system was trapping people into dependency. He called for the system to be privatised:

"Welfare as presently practised in this country literally kills us with kindness. It hands out enough to get you through until your next handout. There are no mutual responsibilities. Recipients are denied a sense of worth and equality."

I don't object to anyone from any party canvassing such ideas - indeed, I wish we could just let people think out loud a bit more often, without dumping on them the way Asraf Choudhary was dumped on - but it's worth applying some context to what is said.

Firstly, of course Tamihere is going to talk up private welfare organisations - he was chief executive of a private welfare organisation, the Waipareira Trust, before he became an MP. The trust has done some good work.

But that's a long from the Balkanisation of welfare that Tamihere seems to be proposing. What happens to accountability when billions of dollars and tens of thousands of beneficiaries fall under a sprawling new system of service contracts? Do you really want the Pipi Foundation paying out the dole?

And, apart from anything else, the vast majority of people who have cause to use the unemployment benefit don't need or want private caseworkers running their lives for them the way Tamihere thinks they should. I was on the dole, with my family, for a time after we returned from the UK in 1991. I used that time productively and laid foundations for what become a fairly useful career. The money has been more than adequately returned in the tax I've paid over the last decade.

The biggest problem I had getting off the benefit was the savage abatement rate (it has eased a little since) on any independent income I did earn, and the inflexible nature of the declaration system - what motivation is there to work when you face a 97 per cent marginal tax rate on your efforts?

We have also recently heard Don Brash's bright idea of scrapping the unemployment benefit as we know it. What Dr Brash forgot to tell New Zealanders on low to middle incomes is that removing the social floor from under the most vulnerable would drag down the median wage, and effectively halt wage growth for about a quarter of earners, possibly for years. It might suit employers and high-earners, but it would be very bad for a fair chunk of the population.

How bad? Brash pointed to the Swiss system as an exemplar. Problem: there are two developed economies that have any significant incidence of the working homeless - that is, people who cannot earn enough from full-time jobs to house themselves. Those countries are the US, and Switzerland.

Fine, let's hear the talk about magic bullets. But - especially when unemployment is already at its lowest for 14 years - let's also bear in mind what happens when they miss the target.

PS: I've long believed it's okay for all of us to lust after sports stars - it's half the fun of watching the Olympics, isn't it? - but Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue always seemed a pretty cheesy way to sell magazines. It still is, I guess - but this year they invited Serena Williams
to appear. Crikey.

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Week Ending | Feb 21, 2003 11:39

I met the Father of the Internet! Vint Cerf was nice - like the great teacher you never had at school - and I have a lengthy and interesting interview on tape. I'm writing it up for The Listener, but I'll post the full transcript here presently.

Thanks for all the entries in the Hard News Faith Challenge - a variety of belief systems have been put forward, and I'll choose a winner and excerpt the best entries early next week.

For now, go and visit my other blog at Mediawatch (it should be updated by this afternoon) and feel free to read this column by Jonathan Freedland. One characteristic of the debate on war has been for each side to point to right-wingers who oppose war and lefties who support it. Freedland, who writes in the Guardian, has often been indentified as one of the latter - but, of course, his views are rather more nuanced than that. He believes those who are opposed to war on Iraq need to show that there is a peaceful way to liberate its people - and thinks about what that way might be.

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The Samoans of Yachting | Feb 19, 2003 11:20

This churning, foaming host of craft - little yachts, sleek superlaunches and the big, black old boat they used to dress up for Xena - powers away from the marinas to … nowhere. This arbitrary patch of sea looks no different to anywhere else in the harbour, (especially if your reference point is Rangitoto), save that a boat and two bouys mark it as a racecourse.

But everything about race day three of the America's Cup emphasises the economic momentum generated by what is, at its core, of no great importance - just a private yacht race. The morning bustle at the Viaduct, where locals and rich visitors hurry past each other to their meeting points. The charter fees, the catering, the diesel and the services. It is a big, delicate bubble.

So anyway (he says, collapsing softly into the past tense), Telecom invited me for a day out on the Pacific Mermaid, a spanking superlaunch that carries enough fuel to motor to Los Angeles. There were a couple of other journalists, and some brass from TV3, but mostly, it seemed, the passengers were guests of investor relations: Macquarie Bank, J.P. Morgan, Rubicon.

It's called relationship-building. It seems a long, long time since the day Telecom sued me for everything they could think of. No hard feelings, and all that. I sat on the lower deck and swapped stories with the people from Xtra.

Watching the race from out on the water is two experiences in one: the familiar, plotted-to-the-last-metre TV experience, and the altogether grander, more mysterious view from the top deck. These yachts look indisputably magnificent on the water, their high, shining sails pivoting against the wind. I spent a bit of time just leaning on the rail looking at those sails, without benefit of Virtual Spectator or any real idea of the state of the race.

Three times before the race began I heard the same, confident rumour: not only did NZL82's boom break on Saturday, the hull cracked. They didn't have time to fix it for Sunday, and by the last beat they'd taken on too much water to respond to Alinghi's pressure. The boat had been repaired and "baked" until 2am. It was fixed, and that rumoured rocketship speed would finally become apparent.

It didn't - but it's hard to imagine how many people could have formed the impression that the black boat was significantly faster than everybody else's. What got the knots?

I can't see how Team New Zealand can come back from here, or mount another challenge wherever Alinghi chooses to defend - probably in the Mediterranean. But New Zealand's role in the regatta stretches beyond the host defence: many components of the competing yachts were made here; North Sails, the Californian company that made all the sails for all the yachts, has a branch here. And, of course, New Zealand will still provide expert sailors to the leading syndicates. It won't be our game, but it won't run without us.

"We'll be like the Samoans in the All Blacks," observed the bright young man from McKinsey. That's the kind of highly distilled thinking that you pay analysts for, isn't it? Perhaps we are getting a dose of the medicine we have freely administered in the rugby world. Perhaps it was inevitable.

Anyway, here's a graph that illustrates the size and shape of the economic elephant in the Oval Office. Bush Jnr has, in remarkably short order, returned the US fiscal position to the depths it plumbed under his Dad, and then some. Conservative parties in most places stand for fiscal prudence. In the US, the opposite appears to be true.

Here's an analysis by Jeffery Tucker, VP of the libertarian-influenced economic think-tank the Mises Institute, of Bush's religious beliefs. And a look from Mises at the cost of war: "If the war is so popular with the present generation, then make it foot the bill now. Such an economic reality, stated firmly by our leadership, may have forced a more realistic assessment of the Iraqi threat and a more serious consideration of less costly alternatives to the present buildup of forces."

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A Competition! | Feb 18, 2003 09:09

It strikes me that in yesterday's post I was a little hard on belief.

After all, I have stood before a raging sea and wondered what kind of god Tangaroa might be; I have stood in an old church in Cornwall, built on an existing sacred site, and felt I was in a holy place; I read The Tao of Physics and dreamed of the nature of things; I have loved the devotional music of Christianity, Sufism and Rastafari; I have been in the same room as the Dalai Lama and thought I was in the presence of a special man; I have occasionally taken homoeopathic remedies in pursuit of some magic (and face it, it ain't science).

So the problem isn't belief, just that the faiths enjoyed by Bush and many of his fellow Republicans and, more so, by Bin Laden and his armies are unsatisfactory, intolerant and unhelpful. So I believe you, Hard News readers, can help the world by suggesting a new faith for these people. I'm looking for a tolerant, pluralistic, peaceful belief, but mostly, millennialism of any kind is right out. People who believe in great wars that presage the end of the world are dangerous and stupid.

You, reader, can email me via the feedback link on this page with your suggestions for new belief systems for the world's would-be combatants, and the reasons for your suggestion. Head it Hard News Faith Challenge 2003. If yours is the best suggestion, I will send you one or two CDs approximate to your favoured musical genre (so remember to indicate genre). So move it people - together we can beat bad religion!

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Killing freedom with superstition | Feb 17, 2003 11:42

It seems that God-bothering and religious bigotry runs deep in the Bush dynasty. A friend of mine came up with a link referring to Bush Snr's statement that atheists should not be considered either American citizens or patriots. I had thought the story might be apocryphal, but here it is.

Bush Snr, of course, made this bizarre statement in the course of the same 1988 presidential campaign in which he responded to the USS Vincennes' unprovoked shooting down of an Iranian Airbus A-300 - killing 290 innocent civilians - with the immortal words: "I will never apologise for the United States; I don't care what the facts are." This really is some family …

Here's an intriguing demographic and political profile of America's religious right.

Here's Bush Jnr arguing against the Theory of Evolution last year. "The verdict is still out on how God created the Earth." Apparently.

This frightening story in the Los Angeles Times examines the way the current White House is debasing scientific values, principally - but by no means exclusively - by "using political and ideological screening tests to try to ensure that its scientific consultants recommend no policies that are out of step with the political agenda of the White House." Incredibly, those tests include: did you vote for Bush?

An open letter to the president urging him to "put reason ahead of belief" from Alan Alda, who these days fronts a science TV show. Preserving core values of science lists a few more offences against reason.

Robyn Blumner writes in the St Petersburg Times about the reality of Bush's announcement of $600 million in funding for drug and alcohol treatment: Religious indoctrination dressed up as social welfare.

But perhaps the President just wants to spend more money helping addicts? Hardly. Last week, he made a speech to the Religious Broadcasters' Association in which he said he was "especially" keen on money going to treatment programmes of a spiritual nature, and that religious charities should not "compromise their prophetic role" while they're providing treatment. Does this look like a federal subsidy for religious recruitment to you?

If you're interested in keeping regular track of contemporary America's lurch into the Dark Ages, the Internet Infidels Newswire has new stories every day.

Here's a backgrounder on the millennialist Christian US Senator (Republican, naturally) James Inhofe, who believes God allowed terrorists (he opened a "spiritual door" apparently) to attack America on September 11, 2001, because He was displeased with America's policy on Israel. Like Tom DeLay, the Republican Leader of the House, Inhofe believes that God requires the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from all of the occupied territories.

In most modern democracies, any politician who made such bizarre claims would be disowned - or at least made to shut up - by his party leader. But here's Dubya, six months after Inhofe's God-was-punishing-us-for-Israel claim, describing Inhofe as "a United States Senator who stands on principle, who does what he thinks is right, and has lived up to his word."

A recent and thoroughly deranged column from prominent US Christian conservative (and former pro wrestler) Tom Marsland, explaining what's really wrong with Europe. Their governments just don't believe in God: "Europe begat the modern-day humanist movement at the very same time we were founding a nation on godly principles. That is why we are superior ... and yes, we are."

One of the USA's founding fathers, James Madison, a Christian himself, was of a very different view in his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. The thorough separation of church and state was, he said, crucial to the young republic: "The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves."

And, on a different note, Google is getting into weblogs.

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You talkin' to us? | Feb 14, 2003 08:24

Is he talking about us? Swiss president Pascal Couchepin has sent the Alinghi team a letter on the eve of the America's Cup showdown.

Couchepin said Alinghi's win in the challenger regatta was a "victory of team spirit and an attitude which should serve as an example: the choice of action over inaction, of optimism over nostalgia, of openness to the world over inward looking nationalism."

Uh, I think he is talking about us. He also hailed Alinghi's victory in the America's Cup challenger series as a "remarkable sporting achievement for a small country with no access to the sea." But plenty of access to money to buy the sailors of countries that can actually sail, I guess. Isn't it a bit rich to play the nationalism card when you buy your talent from the country you're running down?

Curiously enough, the Swiss don't seem to feel patriotic about Alinghi.

Frankly, it is a bit hard to love Alinghi the way people loved Prada last time round, what with its slightly creepy way with the media, questions over the provenance of those threatening letters and Bertarelli's silly snit from the safety of Switzerland.

But perhaps that's the way of the game: the series of revelations and counter-revelations about what happened in the old Team New Zealand seemed indicative above all else of a high degree of prickery.

Curiously, word from the current Team New Zealand seems relentlessly positive. I have a mate or two in a position (nothing glamorous - quite the opposite) to hear things and, consistently, the word is that not only is the boat fast, the crew is very much together and confidence is high. Should we thank Ralph Norris?

I don't care all that much about yachting, but I love it when billionaires bring their money to my town. Bring it on. Again.

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The Pet Name Boys | Feb 13, 2003 10:17

The Wellington-based website nzpundit.com, a right-wing blog, takes a keen interest in Public Address and Hard News in particular. In principle, this is a good thing: I like being held to account. Ideally, I'd prefer to be held accountable by more original thinkers, but you take what you get, I suppose.

Unfortunately, these people seem far more interested in me than in anything I write. NZPundit (Gordon King to his mother - he and his chums like to refer to themselves and each other by third-person pet names) is quite obsessed with my social life. I feel like I'm supposed to apologise for failing to spend my Friday nights at home jerking off over pictures of Condi Rice. It's a bit weird, but harmless enough, I suppose. Certainly not worth responding to.

But this post - Media Watchdog or Lapdog Bitch - by OtherPundit (the pet name used by Craig Ranapia) is quite nasty. Ranapia emailed me yesterday (under his real name) with the same accusation. In the circumstances, I suspect that he is himself the "extremely cynical reader" he quotes, which is a bit sad.

Leaving aside the question of what kind of dyslexic reading of yesterday's post (below) in which I said that Linda Clark (who I have never met) was under-briefed and consequently overrun by Christopher Hitchens, then furnished a list of questions she could have asked but didn't, could find a "strenuous defence" of Clark, the intimation of conflict of interest is unpleasant and unfair.

Ranapia claimed that I should have declared a potential conflict of interest - I present a show on National Radio called Mediawatch and am therefore presumed to be attempting to curry favour for myself with RNZ management. He appears to be blind. Look to the right of this column. There is a link to the Mediawatch website.

That I present the radio show is hardly a state secret. I have referred to it in Hard News and it has been widely written about. I also write a computer column in The Listener and a column in the business magazine Unlimited - both of which, along with the broadcaster itself, have been scrutinised from time to time on Mediawatch. It's a matter of professional ethics. (According to David Cohen I "grilled" and "interrogated" my editor at Unlimited. Very flattering, but I prefer the word "interviewed".)

Indeed, I have worked for a great many media organisations in New Zealand. Unlike NZPundit, I'm not using my website to beg for work. The market has seen fit to deliver me plenty of that. It might do the same for Mr King if he thought a little more about the consequences of what is said on his website.

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When Linda met Chris | Feb 12, 2003 10:41

I know what it's like trying to manage a radio interview: one eye on the clock, the other on your questions, trying to balance interrogation with elicitation. And then there's always someone emailing to tell you what you ought to have done and said.

But the fact is, Christopher Hitchens, who must spend half his life doing this, ran right over Linda Clark on National Radio yesterday. He interrupted her, patronised her and ignored the questions he didn't wish to answer. I like Linda Clark, but on this occasion she was under-briefed for what was always going to be a demanding interview.

Even when he's right, Hitchens has always appeared to be a little too much in love with his own iconoclasm. He told and re-told his j'accuse story about Mother Theresa. He was eternally available to express his vaguely unhinged distaste for the Clintons. He has a sound knowledge of the geopolitics of the Middle East, which he likes to use to intimidate those interviewing him. Trouble is, for all the chest beating, he doesn't always make sense and sometimes he goes right off the radar. So, here are some questions that Linda might have asked Chris:

Oh, and here's that Rogue Nation column from May 2001. Priceless.

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Cool old lady | Feb 10, 2003 11:01

I got a book about cool for Christmas. A book about cool ought to be laconic, adept, cool itself. Unfortunately, Lewis MacAdams' Birth of the Cool is none of those. He could have taken some lessons in poise from Marianne Faithfull. She's a cool old lady.

Before she played the Aotea Centre on Saturday night, the foyer was milling with fiftysomethings who looked like they used to go to the Gluepot 20 or 30 years ago, middle-aged lesbian couples and a sprinkling of whippersnappers and rock scholars. Not a lot like last weekend's crowd at the boxing, but a gathering of tribes nonetheless.

So we ascended to our seats in the Gods - people who get last-minute comps can't be choosy - and I spent the first 20 minutes fighting off vertigo and wondering how long she'd hold my attention. Right through, as it turned out.

She could have croaked her way through a Brecht-Weill set with a balding session band and the crowd would have lapped it up, but instead she brought along a Glasgow indie band (a kind of Goldenhorse-Goodshirt cross) and packed her set with new songs co-written with Beck, Billy Corgan, Damon Albarn and Will Oldham, plus a murky version of Beck's 'Nobody's Fault But My Own'. How cool is that?

Her hips, clad in skinny black pants, moved so as to suggest that the first few rows would have heard them creak, but it hardly mattered. Just a flourish, a sultry look, a word or two and, as Beck put it, "all the lesbians scream." She is clearly adept at being adored.

Her hits, apparently so well traversed as to defy reinterpretation, came through surprisingly well. 'The Ballad of Lucy Jordan' (for which a kind security guard allowed three emotional young women to stand arm in arm at the stage front) got a little country tickle that seemed to elevate its mood.

And 'Broken English' was retooled as a snarling rock song and it was hard to escape the feeling that she was performing it as a contemporary protest song, rather than one from the 1980s. She seemed to spit out the lines: "What are you fighting for?/It's not my security."

Speaking of which, the British "dossier" on the Iraqi threat - so warmly endorsed by Colin Powell last week - has turned out be a shabby and shallow work of plagiarism and manipulation of the truth. And The Guardian has visited the "terrorist chemicals and poisons factory" in Northern Iraq, to which Powell alerted the UN last week, and discovered a rather folorn old compound manned by nervous Iraqi troops. Is this really the kind of thing you set the world to war for? The American press will dutifully play this one down, but it's a very serious blow to Blair's credibility at home.

Ironically, The Guardian's own Voices on Iraq provides more convincing - and credible - arguments for war than either the British or American governments have managed thus far.

American government representatives have harpooned another international initiative, this time on open-source software. Meanwhile, Libertarian hero John Gilmore has gone to war against his own government's moves to curtail privacy and the domestic use of encryption.

Hey, it turns out that the origin of the Saulbrey name that I discovered at A Country Wedding may not be right after all. My mother's maiden name is an Anglicisation alright, but one derived not from Saulberg, but the German (via Denmark) Saurbrey. There's even a Saurbrey.com, whose founder, Dan Saurbrey, was quite excited to hear from me:

"I have seen a similar spelling once before. In the passengerlists for the ship 'Panama' which brought the first lot of Saurbreys to Australia in 1852. They spelled it Sauerbrey but it was misspelled Saulebrey in the ships papers."

Happy to help, Dan. Me, I'm quite excited at the fact that I am distantly related to a man who went by the quite magnificent name of Viggo Lauritz Saurbrey. Now that's cool.

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