Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Friday Fun | May 30, 2008 11:36

I am not without regard for Rupert Murdoch. Capitalism rewards risk, and Murdoch has, at various times, taken huge risks (albeit with others' money) and reaped the rewards. He is also pragmatic when he needs to be: witness his interview with Reuters this week, in which he predicts a Democratic landslide in November and extends what amounts to a public invitation to Barack Obama to pop in for a cuppa.

Whether that means a change of tone on Fox News is another matter. The wingnuts still need somewhere to feed, after all. There's been some totally awesome craziness this week over Obama saying his uncle was part of the force that liberated Auschwitz at the end of World War 2. Turns out that his uncle liberated Buchenwald, which is within walking distance of Auschwitz but that's been enough for some choice winger craziness, as noted by Sadly, No.

(OTOH, I'll go with the WaPo Fact Checker's call that the real problem with Obama's statement is that it perpetuates the myth that America liberated Auschwitz and generally won the war all round.)

If marvelling at wingnut craziness is your idea of fun, allow me to recommend alicublog, which is kept by Village Voice columnist Roy Edroso. He notes Michelle Malkin's continuing self-torture over which restaurant chains support terrorism. She sort of defines unintentional hilarity.

Cursor has loads of links in reaction to the Scott McLellan book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington

Less impressive, Sharon Stone, who advanced the theory this week that the earthquakes in China are a karmic payback for Tibet. I'm sorry, but how fscking stupid would you have to be not to know that many of the hundreds of thousands of people killed, injured and made homeless in Sichuan province are ethnic Tibetans? She has belatedly apologised.

And that'll do. I'm trying to get my head around the MCH review of digital broadcasting regulation for my Listener column, and work up some Newsmash for next week's Media7. Speaking of which, we'll be looking at the Greg Clydesdale controversy, with a panel of (hopefully) Barbara Dreaver, Tim Pankhurst and Oscar Kightley.

If you'd like to come along (with a friend if you like) to the recording on Tuesday evening at The Classic, hit reply and let me know.

Meanwhile, make yourself useful and either grab a teatowel or post some choice links in discussion for this post. (It's Friday, so YouTube goodess is appropriate -- if you haven't done it before, just paste in the URL, the clip will embed automatically.)

Righto!

PS Congratulations to Nick Dwyer for Making Tracks on C4. We loved it in our house. The debut episode turned out to be less about the local cover versions of Shihad and Shapeshifter (although I reckon with a little re-rub both of them would be real contenders) than a music lover's authentic stroll through Brazilian street culture. Nice, really nice.

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Too Good to Be True | May 29, 2008 10:21

If a private consultant in most fields of medicine or social study was to emerge and start firing out press releases declaring that the experts were wrong and he had the fix for decades-old problems, you'd normally expect him to be treated with caution by responsible news media. So why does Mike Sabin get so much indulgent press?

Sabin is a former policeman who left the force and founded MethCon, a specialist consultancy that relies on the proceeds of gambling addiction to carry out its work. Nonetheless, I think he's sincere.

Sabin's miracle cure for all drug problems rests in part on ubiquitous random drug testing in schools and workplaces. He doesn't seem bothered by any thoughts about what coercive testing would do to the school environment, and his claim that it would prevent future drug use is, to put it kindly, dubious.

To give Sabin credit, he emphasises drug abuse as a health, rather than a criminal issue. But the "gateway" theory is hard to stand up against what we know about young New Zealanders and cannabis: nearly three quarter of New Zealanders between the ages of 15 and 21 have used cannabis. It's not going too far to describe it as a rite of passage.

We do know that use of cannabis in early teenage years greatly increases the risk of subsequent problems. We also know that the vast majority of young New Zealanders who use marijuana have no problem with it and most simply stop using it. And yet it's this group that drug testing would catch. The joint at a weekend party is detectable for weeks afterwards -- the weekend P binge will be cleared in 48 hours.

Sabin touts the Montana Meth Project as a striking example of the success of the scare-style campaign he's taking around receptive New Zealand schools now (I'd wager he's using images from the campaign itself in his presentations); and as a "proven model". It's a popular point of view. But as this 2006 analysis points out:

What you won't learn from project officials, the mainstream media or politicians is that meth use by Montana teens, the specific target of the Montana Meth Project, has been on the decline for seven steady years. You won't hear that the project's own survey, conducted once before the ads ran and again six months into their run, found a statistically significant increase in the number of teens who said they saw no risk in trying meth once or twice. Nor will you learn of the survey's finding that large numbers of teens report that the project's ads exaggerate meth's risks, or that decades of drug prevention research has found similar scare tactics to be ineffective.

The whole thing, including the comments from the Republican state senator in Arizona who abandoned his own bill to bring the project to his own state after seeing the research, is worth reading.

The problem is that framing drug education solely in terms of the screaming, scab-infested far end of the spectrum critically undermines the credibility of the message. Any methamphetamine addict is, by definition, in trouble. To say that the vast majority don't actually end up scratching ghastly holes in their own skin is somewhat understating the case.

None of the data reported in the paper Sabin presented to a select committee yesterday are unknown to experts here. It's just that his "proven" facts simply aren't the whole story. Indeed, there is a large body of evidence that argue directly against his approach. On the issue of random drug testing in schools, Britain's Joseph Rowntree Foundation provides a useful summary of pros and cons and concludes that:

… until the evidence one way or another is available it would seem prudent for the government to advise caution rather than
encourage experimentation with a costly and potentially damaging new approach to drug prevention.

Then you have this survey, conducted late last year, which found that 80% of American doctors and 93% of those involved in treating adolescents "disagreed with the Office of National Drug Control Policy's recommendation that all adolescents be drug tested at school." (Among the problems: those tests generally don't screen for the fastest-growing category of abuse -- prescription drugs. The growth in prescription drug abuse in the US goes quite some way to matching the decline in illegal drug use.)

The weird thing is that Sabin doesn't even agree with himself on drug testing. Earlier this year, he told Industrial Safety News:

"The approach to use drug testing to enforce zero tolerance through better interception and policing has not worked in society, so is unlikely to work in a workplace," Mr Sabin says. "New Zealand now ranks third in the world for the use of methamphetamine 'P', after Thailand and Australia."

As appealing as it may sound to control drug use, random testing is also an affront to those 90 percent of workers not using drugs, Mr Sabin adds. "If you ask most of my clients, they will say their policy is 'zero tolerance', but what exactly does that mean?"

It means that Mr Sabin should be approached with caution. As ever, the pitch that seems too good to be true usually is.

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And on a completely different tip, this week's Media7 looks at the wrangle over Sky Television's near-total dominance of major sports broadcasts, and TVNZ's proposal to a government review that Sky be structurally separated to curb that dominance. The panel is TVNZ's Peter Parussini, the Sunday Star Times' Tim Hunter and TV producer (of Eating Media Lunch, among others) Phil Smith.

You can see it on TVNZ ondemand, as Windows Media clips, via the podcast and on YouTube.

You really want to see Simon Pound's report on the suburban wrestling scene. It's choice.

Oh, and the Drench ad featuring Brains from Thunderbirds, which concludes the show, got trimmed at the editing stage yesterday and doesn't really make sense. You can see the full version here.

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How many children with cancer would an editor's salary cure? | May 28, 2008 10:32

When I read yesterday about the Housing New Zealand Corporation's outlay of $65,000 on a staff conference at a luxury resort near Taupo, I was not impressed. Aren't we past this corporate-styled crap in public sector? I thought. I changed my mind when I look at the actual numbers.

Indeed, my only problem with a $250 per head per night cost for accommodation, meals and conference facilities runs along the lines: how could I get a deal like that?

The inevitable comparison, the one that comes to everyone's mind first, is with the infamous WINZ retreat under Christine Rankin. It's actually not much of a comparison. The bill for a similar number of staff (107 versus 94) was nearly four times as much in 1999, and that's not allowing for inflation.

According to Ruth Dyson's answers in the house yesterday, the Taupo venue was chosen as one to which most staff could drive, rather than fly. And indeed, the cost of travel averaged out to $107 a head. For Rankin's junket, it was $1578. How are these things the same?

And how cheap would a conference have to be to avoid a huge front-page headline in the New Zealand Herald reading Luxury for state house staff?

The paper also refreshes readers' memories of the Rankin controversy under another front-page headline; 'Been there, done that'.

But it's the sub-head that's the kicker: 'Housing New Zealand stayed at this lodge for $65,000 -- enough to pay Dot's rent for seven years'.

Dot being a Housing New Zealand tenant who was understandably unimpressed at being told that her landlord had spent $65,000 at a luxury lodge:

She was emphatic when told last night of HNZ's $65,000 conference. "That sucks. They could be spending all that money on doing up these houses.

"Every week I'm ringing them to fix windows and taps, but they never come. It's coming up to winter and it's freezing here."

Dot, who did not want to give her surname, says she has been asking HNZ for years for a bigger house than her current place in Kupe St, Orakei, where she has lived for eight years.

She sleeps in the bedroom, and her 17 and 18-year-old children sleep in the lounge.

"All my family lives on the street, I'm not going anywhere."

Dot - who pays $170 a week in rent - said the $250 a night Tongariro Lodge charge would cover her grocery bill for about three weeks. The $65,000 cost of the trip would pay her rent for more than seven years.

Another Kupe St resident, 22-year-old Leanne Oneroa, pays $89 a week for the two-bedroom house she shares with her partner and their 3-year-old son.

She believed $250 would also go a long way in their household.

I'm sure it would. And if Dot and her neighbours are having trouble getting basic maintenance done, that's a story, albeit a bit unglamorous, that the Herald should be pursuing (I'm not holding my breath).

The fuss here isn't really about the cost. Even a bargain-basement conference for nearly 100 people would amount to several years' income-related rent on a small state house. The comparison -- if you can even call it that -- is utterly meaningless.

Is the National Party, which helpfully provided the Herald's reporters with their story, proposing to ban public sector employees from meeting for training or planning purposes? Or perhaps to set an example by holding its next caucus retreat at a Mt Wellington motel?

And will there be even a skerrick of embarrassment that the website of the Lake Taupo Lodge (" … undeniably the ultimate in 5 star quality accommodation, fine dining and luxury for your conference or seminar. Immaculate grounds, gardens and serene location - it is perfect") prominently carries this endorsement?

WOW!! What a great Place!! After a long day conferencing it was such a pleasure to return to this beautiful Lodge and experience legendary service. See you again next year.

The glowing endorsement, if you hadn't guessed, comes from APN News & Media.

Really.

PS Pitch Black have kindly offered us two double passes to give away for their show as part of Intersect tomorrow night at Galatos in Auckland. Just email me with "Pitch Black" in the subject line and I'll draw a winner this afternoon. Note also that you can also buy tickets for $22 from Real Groovy, and click on the ad on this site to download two free live tracks from Pitch Black.

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O.G. | May 27, 2008 10:25

Ron Mark! Brilliant! The organisers of Youth Week stage Hoodie Day to try and break down negative stereotypes about the popular and practical garment. And Ron wades in to declare that the organisers are "promoting black American gang culture", because "a lot of New Zealanders look at youths kicking their heels around the streets today, they look at youth gangs, youth crime and the rap American culture and they see totally negative things from those hoods."

The man has the master's touch with irony: he highlights the very existence of negative stereotypes around the-shirt-with-a-lid by presenting them in such an unreasonable and bigoted way as to highlight their very preposterousness.

Ron Mark: it makes you think. Eh?

You might think that an elected employee of the public should concern himself with more important matters than ironic fashion commentary. But you'd be wrong. Don't think of it as a salary, think of it as satire's long-overdue share of the arts funding bundle.

Further, Ron has conferred upon some of us a street credibility that money can't buy. I'm wearing my official Hoodie Day hoodie as I type this. I am, perforce, an O.G. Along with Jolisa "J-Girl" Gracewood, I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking. And cosy into the bargain!

The ultimate meta-media cultural acceleration: Joss Whedon fans are preparing a campaign to stop his new show from beign cancelled before it even goes to air!

Mars. Exciting in principle, but a bit dull to look at?

And finally, before I rush off and do another thing, we have an afternoon record for Media7 at The Classic today. We're covering this week's wrangles over sports rights and TVNZ's submission to the MCH review of digital broadcasting regulation, calling for Sky to be, effectively, unbundled from its own network.

TVNZ's submission, along with many others, is here. Feel free to poke around for items of interest.

Anyway, if you can make it along to the recording, hit the reply button and let me know asap. We'd need you at The Classic by 2pm.

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