Public Address - Hard News (Home)

The Debate and Onwards | Sep 29, 2008 09:55

To be honest, I thought McCain was the better debater. He was more aggressive, more obviously scored points and occasionally disabled his opponent. On the other hand, Obama was the grown-up in the room -- he engaged with the moderator Jim Lehrer, and with McCain himself. He was self-aware. McCain, whether by design or temperament, made virtually no eye contact with Obama in 90 minutes.

It's fairly clear what the voters snap-polled by CNN and CBS thought -- they very strongly went for Obama. So strongly as to overcome the 11 point advantage on foreign policy that Pew was seeing for McCain before the debate.

What were the voters -- and in particular the independents and uncommitted voters -- seeing? On HuffPo, Michael Shaw, in the magnificently-titled post Reading The Pictures: McCain Would Have Won ... If He Wasn't So Weird, examines the candidates' body language via some quite striking photographs from the debate. The pictures underline the fact that Obama was engaging and McCain wasn't. (Another way of looking at it is that Obama was demonstrating feminine strength, and McCain was alienating women. I'm not the only one who thought that.)

It seems to have worked. Obama's tracking poll lead is stretching.

The comments sections of liberal blogs are full of people wishing that Obama would go just go feral on Grandpa Munster. But as James Fallows points out, the evidence (and not for the first time) is that Obama knows what he's doing.

So, where to from here?

PS: This week's Media7 looks at Fashion Week in the media. You could just about write most of the stories in advance -- it's that much of a set-piece -- but what does it all add up to? Should we be worried about the extent to which "news" on the event is PR-driven? Are there proper stories about Fashion Week that get missed? And what's in those goodie bags? Our panel is Debrorah Pead, Noelle McCarthy and former deputy chief of TVNZ news and current affairs, Trish Carter. It's an afternoon record, so if you can join us at 2pm at The Classic in Queen Street, hit Reply and let me know.

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The Policeman at the Dinner Table | Sep 28, 2008 16:51

I personally like Peter Cresswell: he is an engaging and intelligent man. Unfortunately, he is also an objectivist libertarian, which means he will often go off on ideologically-motivated rants that enjoy all the internal consistency of your average tantrum.

Case in point: his NotPC blog post from Friday, Time to make a stand!, which came to my notice via the Herald on Sunday's Blog of the Week column. It is channelling the spirit of Leighton Smith:

What does it take for New Zealanders to rise up and demand their government forego all the nonsense they shouldn't be bothering with, all the bossy-boot bullshit about baubles and bureaucracy and scampi and scandals, and focus instead on the one thing they're legitimately supposed to be doing, which is protecting New Zealanders from violence?

What does it take?

Will the random, violent, bloodthirsty stabbing of a man in central Auckland last night be the final straw? Is that enough, finally, to make you sit up and say "No more!"

Will it make you speak out to demand that government start doing its real job? That it starts protecting you and me from every nutter who'd like to raise a hand against us in violence, instead of doing us over themselves? That it begins to realise the primary focus of law and order is protection from criminals, not protection for criminals.

It's not clear what Cresswell is proposing here. The suspension of habeas corpus? An expansion of police enforcement and surveillance so prodigious as to guarantee an officer's intervention? Or that a middle-aged businessman from the Shore should be packing heat every time he steps out of the lift after work, just in case?

There have been four other stabbing homicides in Auckland since July. Relatively speaking, that's a lot. But they are not the kind of crimes that Peter's cri de coeur would save "us" from. They all happened indoors; three in CBD apartments, one in a house in Mt Roskill. They were, literally, cases of domestic violence, in which perpetrator and victim were known to each other.

Thursday's tragic homicide was also, in essence, an incident of family violence. A 45 year-old man -- quiet and god-fearing, apparently -- was unable to accept the end of a relationship. He travelled to the building where his partner worked and, by tragic chance, found his own sister. He assaulted her. Austin Hemmings came to her aid (whether by physically intervening or simply attempting to summon help, it's not clear), was stabbed and died within minutes.

The man arrested by police was not on bail or parole and apparently has no history of drug abuse or mental illness. But he is a sickness beneficiary and for Cresswell -- deftly applying righteousness as the cement between correlation and causation -- that is proof enough that welfarism is to blame.

Maybe we will discover that the man has a criminal history, maybe not. But Austin Hemmings was fatally caught up in a kind of crime that happens overwhelmingly behind closed doors. His death is particularly tragic -- a good Samaritan, a family bereft. But would it somehow have been better if the man had found her partner as he intended, and killed her?

So what to do? We hardly want a policeman at the dinner table, or members of the household carrying arms against each other in their lounges and bedrooms.

What we might do is try and catch and prosecute this kind of violent crime earlier; encourage reporting (and, indeed, a greater readiness to report is largely responsible for an increase in recorded violent crime), emphasise its irreducible unacceptability, try and pick it up in a public health context -- even if it means doing something as squishy as asking someone about their feelings.

All the measures, that is, that Creswell mocked and railed against in another post.

Cresswell's animating thought is a conceit I'm sure he shares with many other Leighton Smith listeners: he is on the virtuous side of what is almost a divide of the species: us and them. The trouble that is that unless your definition of the divide is particularly odious, "us" and "them" will very often share a roof.

All of this only partially relates to common street crime on strangers, which requires its own balance of prevention, enforcement and punishment. But what happened last Thursday wasn't common street crime, and neither were those other four murders. What staggers me is how many people are prepared to carry on as if they were.

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"Rubbish" is putting it politely | Sep 26, 2008 10:24

It's a shame I hadn't seen the Listener's risible 'Gay wrongs?' story before I spoke to Rodney Hide on Tuesday night. I'd have been happy to tell him how I felt about his part in it. The sub-heading of the story in the current issue quite effectively captures its small-minded tone:

Education Minister Chris Carter is supporting a new scholarship that bans applications from "straight" schoolchildren

Yes, like scholarships for young women ban applications from young men, and scholarships for Maori and Pacific Islanders shut out the white folks and scholarships for immigrant Jewish children only go to, well, immigrant Jewish children. But we'll get to that.

At issue is a single new $2000 tertiary education scholarship offered by the Gay Auckland Business Association (Gaba) to a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender student. Just the one, mind. You might think it's just a community helping its own in a modest way, but Rodney Hide describes this to the Listener's Mary Jane Boland as "a big story" and, writes Boland, "the last thing Prime Minister Helen Clark needs as Labour struggles in the pre-election opinion polls."

Why?

Because Chris Carter, MP and Minister of Education, is patron of Gaba. He played no role in creating the scholarship, but his name appears on the letterheads. This is the basis for the introductory paragraph that reads:

Labour MP Chris Carter is well known for supporting gay rights but legal experts say his latest foray – supporting a scholarship for gay or lesbian schoolchildren – is skirting discrimination.

Well, actually, one legal expert -- University of Auckland law faculty dean Professor Paul Rishworth -- says it's "complex", and he seems confused. I cannot question his expertise in the law, but his grounding in public health issues doesn't seem very strong:

The next issue, [Rishworth] says, is whether gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender students need this sort of "financial assistance to achieve an equal place with other members of the community … It is hard to imagine that this sort of assistance is needed in the present situation."

You don't have to go far to slip the surly bonds of the professor's imagination. Only three years ago, researchers on the Christchurch Health and Development Study, one of the most important longitudinal studies of its kind in the world, announced a finding that young people (ages 14-21) with a predominantly homosexual orientation are at significantly greater risk of suffering depression, anxiety, illicit drug dependence, suicidal thoughts and other mental health problems than straight kids.

A more remarkable omission -- on the part of both the writer and her legal expert -- is any mention of what happened in July, when Victoria University researcher Dr Paul Callister sought clarification from the Human Rights Commission over educational scholarships for women. He did have an argument -- women's participation in tertiary education is now 14% higher than men's -- but the commission observed that charitable trusts are exempt from the unlawful discrimination provisions of the Human Rights Act:

Section 150 of the Human Rights Act 1993 states clearly that the unlawful discrimination provisions of the act do not apply to charitable benefits.

The scholarship in question is offered by the Gaba Charitable Trust. That doesn't seem very "complex" to me.

This crappy little story speaks of everything that's wrong with the Listener now. The next thing Mary Jane Boland writes should be an apology.

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On the other hand, once you get past the hopeless cover ("Did Hitler use P?") of the same issue, you'll find the best story yet written on how the methamphetamine trade works in New Zealand, courtesy David Fisher. It really is that good.

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Presumably at risk of a Listener story for, um, banning teh menz or something: Girl Geek Dinners, to which I was hipped by Robyn Gallagher after the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate this week. They're for girls who are, like, geeks, and dinners have been held in Wellington, Auckland and lots of other places in the world.

Speaking of the debate, both parts are now up on TVNZ ondemand. But I'm still getting the "sorry this content is not available to view" message, even after updating Flash and turning off my pop-up blocker. Is anyone else having this problem? (The Windows Media versions are still available at debate.net.nz.)

Reader Allan B has been in touch with a link to the 2008 Republican Platform, adopted about three weeks ago, which explicitly opposes government bailouts of private companies. From the Economics section "Rebuilding Homeownership":

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all. We encourage potential buyers to work in concert with the lending community to educate themselves about the responsibilities of purchasing a home, condo, or land.

The Chairmen's Preamble begins:

This is a platform of enduring principle, not passing convenience.

Whoops.

On a happier note, you might want to pop over to Bob Dylan's website for your free download of 'Dreamin' of You', from his forthcoming album Tell Tale Signs, No.8 in the Bootleg Series of rare and unreleased material. It's a 320kbit/s LAME-encoded MP3. If you like it, you can pre-order the album as a double CD, vinyl album or CD-vinyl combo. The first 5000 pre-orders come with a Jaime Hernandez(!) poster for Bob's radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. Way to go, Bob.

Hannah Sarney went to the Peaches show, where the boys and the girls lost their shirts.

This remix makes the new Kanye West song sound a bit less sucky.

Soulwax had a whole lot of songs thrown at them by Pure FM (including Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'!) and had to mix them on the fly. You can download the result, and also read a Guardian interview with the brothers, and watch a clip from their new film Part of the Weekend Never Dies (warning: contains trollied people talking bollocks).

Did I mention that Santogold is going to play Rhythm 'n' Vines?

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There's a lot of it about | Sep 25, 2008 10:52

The failure of the Labour members of the privileges committee to find with the multi-party majority that Winston Peters had provided "false or misleading information on a return of pecuniary interests" was pathetic, and they know it.

They will presumably privately despair (and "despair" might be a polite way of putting it) at the judgement of a man who could have shut down the whole thing months ago at the cost of some minor personal embarrassment, but chose to bluff and bluster to his own destruction.

There was, doubtless, a political calculation involved. Although the committee's recommendation on punishment (short version: "go back and do your returns properly this time") will seem rather easy-going to any ordinary citizen who has faced, say, a tax audit, Peters' pride is such that he might well have gone nuclear had even the party he has helped keep in Parliament this year turned on him.

Better, then, for Labour to embrace the lesser embarrassment of heroically extending Peters benefit of the doubt -- while making it clear that he will not return as foreign minister in this Parliament -- than risking the more bloody spectacle of Peters lashing out at the government? Perhaps. I just know that I'm tired of it.

More specifically, I'm tired of political calculation masquerading as moral posturing, all round. John Key's recent renunciation of a future coalition deal with New Zealand First was, of course, a political calculation -- and potentially a fruitful one. But Key drained his stance of much of its moral weight this week by giving the appearance that his first instinct was to lie about a TranzRail shareholding that created a clear conflict of interest.

When even the New Zealand Herald editorial column frets thus about Key's conduct in an impromptu TV news interview on the matter …

Embarrassments such as these are not mere errors of political judgment, or presentational "gaffes". They are much more than "a bad look". There is no way to downplay the fact that when Mr Key was asked the question, his first instinct appeared to be to deny the truth.

You know it's bad. Under the memorable headline The contemptible behaviour of both Peters and Key, Gordon Campbell at Scoop observes:

For much of this year, Key has been hammering Peters and the Prime Minister on ethical grounds, for failing to disclose information where there was a clear obligation to the public for them to do so. Over the Tranzrail shares, Key would seem to have comprehensively failed to meet the standard that he has sought to impose on others. There's a term for that sort of behaviour - it is called 'hypocrisy.'

Yesterday, we got to the point of farce. Peters, who may well be stuck in the "anger" stage of the grieving process for his precious reputation for the foreseeable future, lashed out at the Maori Party for failing to stand by a fellow bro. The idea that the Maori Party's representative on the committee should make a decision based on some sort of racial solidarity is ludicrous enough, without even thinking about what sort of solidarity Peters has really shown to the Maori Party.

But it clearly stung Pita Sharples, who responded with this statement, which not only emphasised that he and Tariana Turia had contacted Peters on a personal level to offer support (he explained this morning that they had urged him to "hang tough" through the inquiry, which may account for Peters' feelings of betrayal) but included this passage:

"I personally had two separate phone calls from a senior Minister urging me to vote in favour of Winston, and suggesting that there would be unpleasant repercussions from Maori people if I didn't. Both Tariana Turia and myself were disgusted with this kind of activity, aimed at perverting the course of justice and fair play."

"Perverting the course of justice," has a meaning, and I don't think what Sharples described matched that meaning at all, especially given that Parekura Horomia volunteered his own name to journalists and gave an account of the circumstances in which his conversations with Sharples took place. By this morning, Sharples was down to declaring that the conversations "didn't feel right" and Te Ururoa Flavell was refusing to name the New Zealand First official who he met with. Undue suasion appears to have extended no further than observations that Maori voters might not like what they'd seen.

Not everyone agreed, of course. Corruption! screamed David Farrar. I'm more inclined to go with Audrey Young's assessment:

Parties try to persuade each other to their viewpoints all the time, but Prime Minister Helen Clark expressed concern at any "politicisation" of the committee.

That would have made any lobbying by Labour hypocritical.

Quite. There seems to be a lot of that about lately.

In the week of financial crisis on foreign shores, and at a time when the parties should be making a real case for our votes, this affair is doing little for public confidence. It has done the odd reputation some good (step up Russel Norman) and damaged many more.

But if we're to persist, how about we go back to the roots?

I hold no brief for Peters, and I suspect there will be worse to come on his and his party's affairs. I think Chris Trotter's comparison of the privileges committee's action to a lynching (he even has a picture of a man being lynched on his blog) is revolting.

But senior journalists, including those with a direct view of proceedings, are privately saying this: that neither of the two newspapers that have made the running on the Peters donation scandal were actively investigating the story, and that its key elements were brought to them by someone who had gone so far as to hire a private investigator.

If someone wanted Peters to take a fall, as much as Peters might have deserved it, that is a story in itself. But who does that investigation?

**UPDATE:** Phil Kitchin has been in touch, and he says he's heard talk of a private investigator too -- but he's had nothing to do with one, and has been working on the story for about two years, since he was put onto it by Ralston at TVNZ. In that time he's spoken to at least 20 New Zealand First people and been as far afield as Australia. He says the Dom Post had to "rattle our dags" when Owen Glenn's donation become news, but the investigation was very much underway.

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Meanwhile, video of the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate (including the second hour that didn't air on TV) is online in high-quality Windows Media form. Having been in it, I haven't seen it myself yet, but it felt pretty good. I think there's a lot in there. The only clunky moments came when the MPs indulged in politicking rather than talking about policy.

And this week's Media7 has Tracey Barnett, Therese Arseneau and Bernard Hickey talking about the US election campaign and its recent backdrop of financial crisis. It's a lively discussion, and there are two Newsmashes that traverse some of the wilder shores of the campaign.

The Windows media clips of the show are here, and the podcast is rockin here.

Unfortunately, the ondemand version is having a Fail moment (there are some major technical changes going on there) and the YouTube channel hasn't been updated yet.

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Loving your dog and owning your words | Sep 22, 2008 09:18

Stephen Franks is having a major hissy fit at the moment, over Agenda screening a clip from a Wellington Central candidates' meeting in a Te Aro house that he seems to regard as part of some sort of conspiracy against him.

You might have seen the clip already -- it was noted by The Standard last month. The means by which it came to screen on Agenda is quite innocent: last week, Rawdon Christie invited the country's budding "citizen journalists" to send in video from the campaign trail and be in to win a fancy mobile phone. So James Barber of Lyall Bay did just that. It appears in the fourth segment of the show.

The Agenda panellists, MSM stalwarts that they are, ruminate darkly about the potential "chilling effects" of candidates being recorded on the campaign trail. Really? It was hardly a sting. It was a public candidates' meeting organised by some young students and covered as a novelty by TV3 -- whose crew presumably lacked the patience to stick around and hear what people actually said.

And let's be clear here: Franks digs his own hole. In the clip, the Labour candidate, Grant Robertson, puts it to Franks that there had been "a lot of convenience" in Franks' formal justification for opposing civil unions, and that might be set against other comments he made at the time "which weren't particularly positive towards the queer community". Robertson actually tries to hand on the mic after making the observation, but Franks insists on throwing himself into the hole:

Franks: I think you might be meaning, I said I was sick of grumpy Christians and whining gays.

Robertson: No, it was the one where you said 'I love my dog but that doesn't mean I should be able to marry it'.

The point of the clip is the shocked reaction of the kids in the room, who presumably didn't remember the sorry details of the civil union debate. Franks then attempts to explain his reasoning. He has used the "dog" argument more than once, so I can't see why he should be so offended that it has been recorded on this occasion.

The first time I can recall an incidence was in this memorable blog post from Mr Neil Falloon of DogBitingMen (who, it is presumably safe to say, was a fresh-faced Ben Thomas, before he became NBR's political editor). It records the conversation when Franks described the gay community as "riddled with pathologies".

In his blog Franks seems keen to do anything but own his words. And he's still digging. His Labour opponent, he says, "makes a feature of being a gay activist" and "mentions it at every opportunity". It is all a plot, he believes, "to paint me as homophobic".

The more sensible interpretation is that National's Wellington Central candidate is busy plotting against himself. As Act blogger Cactus Kate observed, he was perhaps not the optimum choice for Wellington Central.

Also, I'm told the Labour campaign doesn't know Barber, but if he's the same person who runs the YouTube channel where the clip (along with several others from the same meeting) appeared, he's a 19 year-old lefty with Green sympathies. [Update: Yes, as I thought, he's a Green Party member.]

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With the brief, alarming season of Republican Idol on hiatus owing to a financial meltdown, the US press has been producing some serious -- and sometimes seriously good -- work. The Obama campaign presumably won't be upset with the story that appeared in yesterday's New York Times magazine under the byline of Alexandra Starr.

Starr examines a side of Barack Obama that is surely rich with clues to his way of thinking and character, but which has been studiously underplayed by his campaign -- because you don't get elected POTUS by running as a smart alec -- his decade-long career as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Through conversations with former colleagues and students, she depicts the professor as open-minded, inscrutable and thrilled by the contest of ideas. In a White House era characterised by tunnel vision, nonsensical proclamation and intolerance of debate (let alone dissent), Obama's traits might not seem optimum for the task of actually wining an election, but I'm quite tickled by the idea of the hold of the most powerful job in the world being able to countenance ambiguity.

But the most emailed story on the Times site is, as I write Charles Blow's less-lofty snarkfest about Republican voter attitudes towards Sarah Palin as told in the entrails of last week's NYT/CBS poll. Hoary old clichés about people voting for someone they'd like to have a beer with were thumpingly borne out:

… 77 percent of Republicans said that they had a favorable opinion of Palin. But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. Sounds like a talk-show host, not a vice president. (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind "I just like her.")

When those Republicans were asked what they liked least about her, they started to sound more like everyone else. Aside from those who said that there was nothing they didn't like, next on the list were: her lack of experience, her record as governor and her lack of foreign-policy experience.

Also, most Republicans think you only picked her to help with the election, not because she is qualified, and a third said that they would be "concerned" if for some reason she actually had to serve as president.

Meanwhile, while you all were greeting spring (first barbecue!), quite a number of folk were at Blog World Expo, "the world's largest Blogging Conference" in Las Vegas, also the co-locational home of REBlogCon (real estate), the MilBlogging Conference (military blogging) and GodBlogCon. Apparently, they partied.

PS: Because I'm at the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate tomorrow, we're recording Media7 this afternoon. Our panel, discussing the media dimensions of the US presidential campaign as it plays out against the collapse of the banking system, is Herald columnist Tracey Barnett, Canterbury University political scientist Therese Arseneau, and Bernard Hickey. If you'd like to come and watch and you can be at The Classic in Auckland by 2pm, hit reply and let me know asap.

PPS: My mate Andy has citizen journalism of a different stripe: video of Little Pictures' album launch gig on the party bus on Friday night. It appears to have been a riot.

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