Public Address - Hard News (Home)

I'm a Pakeha and you can stick your war | May 12, 2008 11:18

For some reason, Michael Law's latest column, A Pakeha Fights Back, is among the editors' picks on Stuff this morning. Feel free to read it, but you've read it before: it's the one Laws writes about once a month, contrasting decent, middle-class white families with feckless brown ones.

Laws refers to the two-month sentence handed down to a tagger, Randall Grey, by Judge Tony Adeane in the Napier District Court. At sentencing, the judge quoth thus:

"There are some photographs here available to anyone who wants to see them if someone should be inclined to suggest that this has a quality of art, culture or legitimate expression," the judge said.

"Part of it involves nothing more artful than the use of a tin stencil to stencil the word `Comps' repeatedly on a fence that somebody treats as part of their home.

"People treat this as something between an insult and an offence. They do not like it, Mr Grey. It offends people culturally, people whose culture involves the accumulation of attractive property and creating a nice environment," the judge said.

Grey really only has himself to blame: he failed to fulfil his previous commitment to the court to attend a restorative justice conference, pay $75 a week reparation and not to consume alcohol. He paid no reparations and stole a car while on remand.

For Laws, this is a strike back on the part of "middle-class, middle-aged Pakeha," who like to keep things nice. But, confusingly, he also rails against the middle-class white parents of Christchurch, who, he claims, won't let their "felon and feral kids" suffer proper retributive justice, such as would be the case under a "broken windows" policy.

Typically, Laws doesn't have a clue what he's on about when he conflates "broken windows" with retribution. The basis of the broken windows theory is the maintenance of urban neighbourhoods as a means of deterring crime. It's not the same thing as, but is often associated with, the "zero tolerance" policing of New York under the Giuliani mayoralty.

There are some fairly strong arguments (cited in the Wikipedia article for "broken windows") that New York's crime reduction was more a result of other factors, including economic revival and liberalised abortion laws in the 1970s.

But Laws is off one one; complaining about deference to "gays, lesbians, Maori, Pacific Islanders, Muslims, Somalis, liberal wimmin and Greens. Apparently none of these groups can look after themselves without the intervention and protection of the state."

He paraphrases the chief youth court judge in declaring that the "significant majority [of young offenders] have drug and alcohol problems, the collective education of an Austrian cellar dweller and, you guessed it, genetic adherence to an indigenous culture," but continues "I can't imagine Maori are chuffed about that either. Because most of these loser kids have embraced the ghetto sensibilities of LA as much rejecting their own people as Pakeha culture. Certainly most of their victims are brown."

So what exactly is Laws trying to say? It's not clear. His column -- which, for some reason, begins with a fatuous comparison of David Bain with OJ Simpson -- isn't an argument so much as a jumble of criminal clichés in which the victim is inevitably indistinguishable from himself.

The starting point, of course, was Children's Commissioner Kindy Kiro's select committee submission on the Submission on the Summary Offences (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism) Amendment Bill, in which she pointed out that there was a cultural dimension to graffiti, and that we already have laws against vandalism. The same laws that saw Mr Grey sent down in Napier, in fact.

This isn't the same as supporting taggers, but it did occasion this spectacularly revolting statement from the Sensible Sentencing Trust, in which Garth McVicar declared that "her comments are hugely provocative at a time when a decent hard working citizen is facing a murder charge because of his frustration over this issue."

So the next time I get "frustrated" with Garth McVicar I can come at him with a knife?

Laws' work is a reliable indictment of the folly of filling up the Sunday papers with the blatherings of celebrity columnists. On this occasion, he has surpassed himself by trying to declare a race war.

Well, I'm a middle-class, possibly middle-aged Pakeha. I dislike tagging -- much as I despair of any effort to crap in one's own nest -- yet I've been inspired and amused by good street art. I'm not too keen on the kind of perfectly legal urban developer vandalism that has besmirched Auckland in recent years. But I know the difference between all that and murder and race war.

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So, yes, given the SST's efforts this weekend, I'm additionally pleased that the Herald on Sunday was named best newspaper at Friday's Qantas Media Awards. I've been strongly critical of certain HoS stories in the past -- and will doubtless be so again -- but I think Shayne Currie is a good journalist, and I admire the grunty little paper the HoS has become in the past four years. (Just one request: please put Keith Ng's 'Just the Facts' column on the bloody website. Some of us would like to link to it.)

The ceremony itself was quite good fun -- given the state of Bill Ralston when he got up to host it, it could hardly have been a formal affair -- and the recognition of Phil Kitchin, especially for his work on the Louise Nicholas story, was particularly appropriate. Dave Hansford, formerly and controversially of the Listener, won his category and was in the final three for best overall columnist, which was won (cue massed gritting of teeth in the room) by Paul Holmes, who can actually write, dammit.

Public Address wasn't in the money this year: we weren't even a finalist. But it's great to see Kiwiblog and No Right Turn get the profile and I was particularly pleased to see Richard McManus's work with Read/Write Web (far and away the most influential and successful New Zealand-based blog) recognised on the home front with the "best blog" prize. Righto, paying work to do then …

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A night on the town with Mr Slack | May 09, 2008 10:26

Public Address won the NetGuide People's Choice Award for "Best Blog" last night. Many of you will realise that it isn't the first time this has happened, but it's still nice to be recognised in a public vote. I had been studiously laid-back about it all, but it did occur to me as the announcement drew near that I'd be a bit bummed if we didn't win.

David Slack accompanied me to the awards, and we both went up to collect the yellow plastic box that represents a trophy. I pointed out that we'd "met" in 1993 in the Iconz Usenet news group, and I actually think that even in the age of Facebook there's a lot about the social internet that essentially hasn't changed.

Not that there was a whole lot of the social internet at the awards. The crowd was from the commercial web, and even if David was a bit harsh ("it's like we thought we were coming to a Billy Bragg show and discovered it was Billy Joel") there really weren't many people we knew. It was nice to catch up with Mark Webster and Gordon White, and to meet Tama Easton (Brian Easton's boy, and the creator of the repeat award-winner vorb.co.nz), but there wasn't a lot to keep us there after the ceremony.

So we set off down the hill to the waterfront, and were accosted outside the Shakespeare by some fairly merry people, one of whom was the journalist Amanda Cropp. It turned out there were drinks upstairs for the delegates to this week's freelance journalism conference, so we gatecrashed that. Keith Ng was in the house, along with Jason Kemp, Fiona Rotherham, Kim Griggs, Pip Stevenson and a number of other fine folk.

Eventually, I needed feeding, so I dragged David off to Euro and treated us to the wagyu special. It was quite satisfying. We stopped off for a whisky at Cin Cin (where hours beforehand, the Public Address reader known as Slarty had emerged from his deep cover to introduce himself to us) before David caught his ferry.

Somewhere along the way, I had two or three more drinks than is strictly sensible, so I'm not exactly on my A-game this morning.

But I should comment on David Skilling's speech at the awards. Most of it was familiar territory, but he also said that Labour would be coming out with its own policy on broadband fibre soon -- meaning this month.

It's the second time I've heard that this week, and Peter Griffin's blog from the Tuanz conference underlined the impression that something is coming. But what? Cunliffe seemed to rule out both National's vague-but-ambitious big-bang plan and Skilling's FibreCo regulated monopoly.

As I've said before, I fid the monopoly idea a bit odd. Multiple operators interconnecting on reasonable (and if necessary, regulated) terms seems fine to me. Look at what's happening up north -- Northpower recently announced a partnership with TelstraClear on the rollout of its new fibre-optic network.

TelstraClear is spending $1 million on the link from Auckland to Whangarei, and now, I'm told, Kordia has come into the picture with a proposal to expand and extend Northpower's network with its own wireless services. This is a brilliant result for Northland.

And I think it demonstrates the possibilities of stepping out of the telco-only paradigm. I went in this week for a chat with people from Vector Communications VectorFibre, which is finally starting to get some retail action behind its Auckland fibre network. It's comprehensive in the Auckland CBD and bigger than I'd realised in greater Auckland.

They're already providing backhaul capacity to various Auckland telephone exchanges for Vodafone. The new bundles their channel partners are selling aren't quite mum-and-dad sized, but small businesses with five or six phone lines and a need for speed on internet will certainly want to have a look at the offer. I just hope the tories on the Auckland City Council can match the vision of the Far North council and start treating the presence of the Vector Network as a competitive advantage.

BTW, I think the young man who knocked on the door earlier in the week shopping Vodafone home-line and internet bundles will get his commission. It works for us: we keep our phone number, I get internet redundancy at a reasonable price (and ADSL 2+ speeds) for my home business, and national calling is free. I do believe things are improving …

Anyway, thanks to all our bloggers, commenters and readers, whether you voted or not. When I first launched Public Address, I called it "a community of weblogs". I think that's more the case now than ever.

Oh, and wish us luck for the Qantas Media Awards tonight …

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Birthday Cheer for Ricky the Special-Needs Monkey | May 08, 2008 10:11

One of the more straightforward reasons to distrust groups touting climate change "scepticism" is, quite simply, the way in which those groups conduct themselves. The Heartland Institute has provided a particularly acute example with its release of a paper challenging global warming theory, citing 500 climate scientists as "co-authors".

The claim has been explored over the past few days by DeSmogBlog, which broke the story and suggested that many on the 500 list would be horrified to find their names associated with the paper.

They were right. The site's authors emailed 122 scientists on the list and quite quickly got responses. And some more.

Some of the scientists proved to be dead or imaginary.

Stinging repudiations from scientists on the list include one victim's declaration that "using my name (and many others) in this way is a major ethical transgression."

Five New Zealanders on the list -- including NIWA's Jim Salinger -- have now released a statement that says they "strongly object to the implication that they support Heartland's position."

Heartland CEO Joseph Bast eventually issued a snippy statement declaring that the scientists "have no right -- legally or ethically -- to demand that their names be removed from a bibliography composed by researchers with whom they disagree."

He went on to attack the credibility of the scientists who complained. There was one concession:

In response to the complaints, The Heartland Institute has changed the headlines that its PR department had chosen for some of the documents related to the lists, from "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares" to "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares."

DeSmogBlog points out that the unwilling scientists are still being listed as "co-authors".

The story has been picked up by the Herald, Radio New Zealand and others.

The most excellent fellows at the Flat Earth Society NZ are 
disappointed:

We are very disappointed with the Heartland Institute, with whom we agree so wholeheartedly. Not only are we deeply saddened by the fact that our very own Nathanial Pipe-Blower [Tzar and 33rd degree Grand Wizard master of the first Inverted Pancake lodge of the totally Awesome Flat Earth Society Ltd] was not mentioned in this list of top skeptical scientists, but it seems that the Heartland Institute have been extremely sloppy in compiling their list of 500 "co-authors". It turns out that so many of the scientists they list don't agree with the "global warming isn't happening" line. Guys, you're letting us all down here!!! How are we meant to be seen as true conspiracy victims when the people who we say support our claims actually don't?!

All joshing aside, what Heartland and Bast (who you may recall had a furious letter published by The Listener after Dave Hansford questioned his organisation's credibility -- without reference to Hansford himself, I gather) are doing is not an aberration. It's absolutely form for the "sceptics". Remember Sen. James Inhofe's list of "prominent scientists" who denied global warming? The one stuffed with "prominent" TV weathermen and three TV gardening show hosts?

The arrival of the story here and in the local media isn't an accident: Greenpeace, with an eye on Heartland beneficiary Owen McShane's select committee submission yesterday, has been shouting it from the rooftops. But that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Meanwhile, this week's Media7 focuses on the topic we couldn't get a single print publisher to talk about: freelance ay rates, which have remained essentially unchanged for the last 15 years and lag far behind those in similar countries.

This has an impact not only on the livelihoods of freelance journalists (who fill 60% of our magazine pages and a third of those in weekly newspapers) but on the performance and quality of print media here in general. Our panel is Kim Griggs, David Cohen and Deborah Hill Cone.

The programme also contains and excellent and amusing report on last week's Radio Awards by Simon Pound.

If you watch the show (or even just the first few minutes), you will understand the heading for this post …

The ondemand version is here.

The Windows Media clips are here.

The podcast is here.

And the YouTube version will be along any time now.

The Media7 blog has links from the programme, including additional material on the latest Freedom House Press Freedom Index.

Meanwhile, some media you haven't been able to see here: the Ross Kemp on Gangs episode on New Zealand, posted in full by Spare Room.

And Sam Tobin pointed me to the Kick a Migrant game from Australia. It's rather clever.

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The force is strong with this one | May 07, 2008 10:27

Having autism in the family means living with, and learning to love, irreducible difference. But that doesn't mean you can't all share the joy of certain things. Our family convenes over sci-fi and humour: Sunday night is presently reserved for eager viewing of the latest episode of Doctor Who, and at some point every day my son and I drop what we're doing for a "lolcat break".

So it was a no-brainer that we'd all get along to a show that combines both sci-fi and humour.

That show being Charlie's Ross's One-Man Star Wars, which condenses the three movies of the original trilogy into an hour-long solo performance that combines comedy, mime and microphone tricks. There are no props, no costumes, and no music that Ross doesn't make with his mouth. The only external input to the performance is the lighting.

It's brilliant, and surprisingly intense. Ross hurls himself around the stage, impersonating not only a huge cast of characters (Jabba the Hutt is particularly impressive) but the vessels in which they travel. At one point, he landed on the concealed transmitter for his microphone, at another he actually banged his head on the stage. And it did look like it hurt when the AT-AT Walker did its face-plant.

That he can keep this much energy in a show he's been touring with for six years is remarkable. It seemed appropriate that he should conclude the performance not with a big finale, but by winding it down, kneeling at the front of the stage and talking to the audience about the show itself.

Warning: if you're not reasonably familiar with the original trilogy, this might not be the show for you. I got lost a couple of times in the flurry, but the boys (remarkably, given that all three films were made well before they were born) seemed to be there with every beat. They laughed and applauded and were afterwards able to explain to me the origin of the little fellow with the big eyes and the big bottom lip who is at Rebel command during the final assault on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi.

Ross says he'd like to come back next year with his other show, One Man Lord of the Rings. We'll be there. And given how long he's been doing Star Wars, it seems certain that this week at the Sky City Theatre in Auckland will be your last chance to see this show (don't hold your breath for a version of the prequel trilogy, because really, what was that about?). It's not cheap (and unfortunately there are no kids' concessions) but you might just feel you owe it to yourself.

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Meanwhile, despite recent confident noises from Telecom, Vodafone gets the Jesus Phone for New Zealand, in a deal done at international level. It seems fair to speculate that it's Vodafone that has come to Apple rather than the reverse.

And Anthony Doesburg's experience with Orcon's unbundled ADSL 2+ underlines the problem with any company offering service across lines it doesn't have a deep technical grasp on. Anthony's not the only Grey Lynn dweller to have had a nightmare with Orcon. The company needs to get up to speed, pronto. I hope Vodafone (where it took a call upstairs and a third ticket raised to get my DSL line fixed last week) is taking notes in advance of its own venture into unbundled services. It's not tiddlywinks, as Tana Umaga used today.

PS: I've established a discussion thread for the latest Democratic primary round in Indiana and North Carolina. Post yer links and commentary there.

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Track to the Future | May 05, 2008 10:19

So the worst of all our privatisations has finally been undone. We can hardly pretend that the railways and ferries were doing well before the National government sold TranzRail to Fay, Richwhite and friends, but by any reasonable assessment what happened subsequently was hideous.

With Toll out of the picture and the robber-barons but a foul memory, the government is now tasked with deciding what it will do with the network. Cullen has made the point that it makes more sense for the government to subsidise a public enterprise than a private one. But how much needs spending and how freight will be wooed off the roads and onto rail (shades of the Muldoon era!) remains to be seen.

(Oh, and when National, as it inevitably will, demands to know why the government should be subsidising the network at all, it should be asked then why it's such a fine idea to subsidise a comprehensive fibre-optic communications network to the tune of billions of dollars.)

Across the Tasman, it hasn't taken Kevin Rudd long to throw the gays under the bus. The new Austraian Labor government could simply have declined to follow the ACT government's move to recognise same-sex relationships. Instead, it has chosen to try and block ACT's initiative by any means it can think of.

The context is the Rudd government's much-touted move to amend more 100 laws that discriminate against gay couples. But Rudd and his people have decided that the masses will not bear the obvious move to civil unions.

Rudd's excuse is that he promised there would be no amendment to Australia's Marriage Act. Perhaps someone could point him across the Tasman, where civil unions have been embedded without troubling the Marriage Act -- and, for that matter, without provoking buggery on streetcorners and the collapse of the family.

Presumably, Rudd fears the kind of destructive hellfight Labour encountered here when it made the move: he wants to preserve his popular public image from a campaign by the forces of angry conservatism. And that, really, is the problem with a strategy of government based solely on maintaining popularity.

Rudd might also want to read this third-anniversary blog post by New Zealand Labour's Wellington central candidate, Grant Robertson:

One of the things that opponents of the Act might find difficult to understand is that it is playing an important role in strengthening families. We recently attended the celebration of a civil union of some friends. This couple held events in different parts of the country so everyone could be a part of their celebration. One set of parents had never really acknowledged their relationship of ten years, until the civil union. The civil union gave the parents the opportunity to see the relationship for what it is- a loving, enduring commitment. In a sense the civil union gave the relationship a sense of legitimacy, and has built bonds across and within two families.

Meanwhile, Stateside, Red State Obama derangement reaches right over into an attack on Obama backer Lawrence Lessig. Even the commenters aren't impressed.

And finally, we have room for some Public Address readers at tomorrow afternoon's recording of Media7 at The Classic on Queen Street (the last of our afternoon records for a while). Just hit "reply" and let me know you want to come and whether you'd like to bring a friend.

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