Recent Posts...
Page 31 of 322
Archive
Oh dear ... | Feb 03, 2004 12:29
Remember the Act Party's holiday horror story about how much more tax money those freeloading Maori receive than they pay? In this week's issue of The Listener Brian Easton forgoes a trip to the beach to stay home and check the Act parliamentary research unit's figures. It would be really funny if my taxes weren't paying for it:
To be fair to the unit, this is the work of amateurs, not crooks. Perhaps the major mistake is that they have grossly underestimated the tax paid by Maori, using 2000/01 March year data as if it applied to the 2002/03 June year. They didn't bother to reconcile the data base they used (self-reported incomes) with more precise estimates of recorded income, and they omitted over one-third of the tax base.
Suppose that we were to apply exactly the same method to non-Maori. According to the Act method, the rest of the country pays about $23.4b while benefiting from $34.5b of government spending, again being in a major deficit. Who is covering the deficit (and contributing to the budget surplus)? The nonsense arises because the Act calculations ignore over $14b of taxation.
An apology would seem to be in order for this, but don't hold your breath.
You might have heard that you can't scan and print images of major currencies from Photoshop, or even photocopy banknotes in some machines. You might have thought it was an urban myth. Actually, it's true. I got to the bottom of it in my Listener column this week.
I've just filed another column on what went wrong with Howard Dean's "Napster campaign" in the Democratic primaries, but you'll have to wait to read that. I have begun to find the role of the Internet in current American political life quite compelling: here's an interesting roundup of tech stories from the campaign trail.
Newsweek's What Went Wrong story on how the claims about Iraqi WMDs could be so wholly wrong doesn't really answer its own question but is a good read anyway.
A reader who works for a competitor of BRC, the research firm that conducted the SST's startling poll on responses to Don Brash's Maori speech had some interesting comments. The sample size of 491 is, he says,
…fine for a survey of this type … [it] gives us a max margin of error of 4.4%, and this reduces, the more unanimous the response. So when 61% back Brash's policy, the margin of error is reduced still further. As a market researcher and competitor to that surveying company involved, BRC, I can tell you they are very well regarded and do very sound work.
You'd be interested to know that when sample sizes are selected for given projects, government surveys usually have a much higher-than-necessary sample size precisely because they get such flak. So a sample of 491 is statistically fine - but politically? Try a 1000.
On the other hand, the "push-poll" structure of the survey - a string of questions on a single party's policy and then a party preference question - "you're absolutely right, that line of questioning is poor."
The Brash speech, to give it its credit, continues to produce some nice, heartfelt writing in rebuttal. This from John Roughan in the Herald:
Embracing it does not mean becoming it. I'm not Maori and have no wish to be, any more than a Maori wants to be me. We are not one people. Embracing it means responding to its warmth and welcoming its growing power in national life.
Because - and this might strike Dr Brash at the dawn service - a heritage so deep and powerful cannot be denied its national expression. We are not one people and we cannot be one nation.
Oh, and here's Janet's titty. And here's some windbaggery from Michael Powell, head of the FCC, who wants to raise the maximum fine for broadcast indecency to $US7.5 million. This story relates a few of the absurd and prudish FCC decisions of recent years. I don't expect any of the local neocon drones to start whining about the "nanny state" in this case, however …
Spooked | Feb 02, 2004 11:39
There are some pretty clear caveats to be associated with yesterday's startling (sorry, "shock") Sunday Star Times political poll - small sample size, questionable methodology - but not so much so that it signifies nothing.
Clearly, what Don Brash said in his Maori affairs speech last week - or, more accurately, what people thought they heard - has struck some sort of chord with a part of the wider electorate.
Whether that feeling will be replicated in any major poll, or whether people will really, in the end, base their vote on National's Treaty policy remains to be seen. But Labour - apparently level with National on 32%, with 19% "don't know" - won't be the only party hoping this poll is bung. Act, with 1% support and no hope of winning an electorate unless it's gifted one by National, is a goneburger according to these numbers.
Part of the trouble lies in working out exactly what National's policy is. It seemed clear enough after the speech and accompanying briefings last week: ignore the Appeal Court decision and take foreshore title (but only from Maori) into crown ownership forthwith; remove references to Treaty from New Zealand legislation (which I think would mean amending Acts dating back to 1986, one by one, to remove references to the Treaty, and ignoring another Appeal Court decision); remove obligations to consult with Maori over relevant local resource use from legislation; eradicate "racial" public health and education programmes targeted at Maori, even if they work; get rid of Maori electorate seats without further reference to Maori voters.
Then - assuming you're not already chest-deep in a constitutional crisis as the new Supreme Court, in which National has expressed no confidence, deals with the inevitable torrent of legal action, which will have the weight of international jurisprudence behind it - look at scrapping support for Maori broadcasting, and getting rid of Te Puni Kokiri (the Ministry of Maori Development) and the post of Minister of Maori Affairs. Be prepared to live in an angry, divided country.
For how many people is the problem of apparent Maori privilege so acute that they would willingly head down that road? What personal problem do they expect to have fixed? How many of them would actually change places with the average Maori whose unequal rights they so resent? What exactly is so bad about New Zealand in 2004 that you'd step off the racial precipice?
Although editorials in both the Herald and the Star Times have condemned National's grab at racial unease in unusually strong terms, the message has clearly found some purchase.
But, hey, hold on: maybe we don't know what National's stance is after all: after effectively telling Georgina Te Heuheu to fit-in-or-fuck-off last week, Brash was on the radio this morning saying she could stay on in her portfolios if she agreed to the very Bill English-sounding basic principle of "one standard of citizenship for all New Zealanders". Well, which is it, Don? Has the party become a bit spooked at what it has unleashed?
I liked the conclusion of Rosemary McLeod's column on the issue in yesterday's SST, even if I didn't agree with some of what she said before it:
The inheritors of the social policy Brash so derides, young Maori, were recently found to be the most optimistic group in New Zealand society. Nothing on the business pages has ever pleased me as much as that news: They are our future, you see, not old white men.
On a cheerier note, Dean Goes Nuts is bloody funny.
And a little Net fame: my Hutton blog got referenced in Danny Schecter's weblog. And another thing: a number of people have congratulated me on writing such a dynamite intro for it. Well, the credit is not entirely due to me. The "higher standard of proof" line was an off-mic clip by the very clever Olivia Kember during my radio conversation with Damian last Thursday, although I did tell her I'd use it. I rounded up some more recent stories on the Mediawatch site.
Olivia was, as the latest addition to the Listener's staff writing stable, there at the drinks on Friday for Finlay Macdonald's departure from the Listener, along with quite a crop of other journalistic good sorts, including Ralston, who told me the Winston Peters scampi scandal was a "slow burner". Like a roll-yer-own, presumably.
So that was good fun, as was the Damo Suzuki Network at the King's Arms. Suzuki, a long-haired little Japanese chap who used to be in legendary Kraut-rockers Can, tours with a sole accompanying guitarist, picking up a backing band (in Auckland's case, Meterman) wherever he happens to be. Everybody extemporises; although Suzuki did sound oddly like a man singing an actual melody. What did I think? Couldn't tell, to be honest: I couldn't decide whether it was a load of arse or pretty good. Whatever it was he was doing, though, I feel comfortable that I got my $15 worth.
Some of our party disappeared off to hire a karaoke room at the Paradise Bar. I don't do karaoke or Showgirls, so I paid a little visit to Freq Nasty at Galatos on my way home. Freq (aka Darin McFadyen) is a dreadlocked part-Fijian New Zealander who is also one of the foremost breakbeat DJs in the world.
What's breakbeat? Sort of drum 'n' bass that doesn't take itself so seriously. It's not at all grown-up music - it's noisy, bumpy and bombastic and full of energy. I was clearly the oldest person in the venue on arrival, and in fact I was having trouble spotting anyone over 25 until I ran into Mike Hodgson from Pitch Black, who'd got the babysitter in.
Mike's just finished the sound design on the new Saatchi worldwide site (you will recognise a certain vibe) and is now off to New York to work on a big Louis Vuitton shindig being produced by Michael Mizrahi - the whole thing's huge and entirely produced out of New Zealand. Interesting, no?
And so to Monday, where my Telecom line is so badly degraded - torrential rain, perhaps? - that it won't support either a JetStream or a dial-up connection. My Woosh gear only works if I climb up outside and hang the (supposedly internal) booster antenna from the TV aerial. This sucks. I have a whole lot of work to do, I'm going to Christchurch with Off the Wire this week and everything's turning to custard. Still, any day where Public Address enjoys a post from Keri Hulme can't be that bad, can it?
Standards of proof | Jan 30, 2004 11:57
Apparently, you need a higher standard of proof to make a radio broadcast than to take a nation to war. I'm not being flippant. That is the clear implication of the findings of the Hutton Inquiry.
We now know that the controversial "45 minutes" claim at the centre of the affair was plucked from a stack of single-sourced raw intelligence provided to MI6 by an Iraqi exile group which has since disowned it: "We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it."
The claim arrived towards the end of the preparation of the Blair government's first Iraqi weapons dossier and was swiftly added to the dossier's final draft. It wasn't verified. It couldn't be verified.
It wasn't intelligence, it was a soundbite, from a source whose credibility could not be assessed. It ran counter to more robust intelligence. It proved to be farcically inaccurate. A journalist who had written a story based on that claim as a tip would have been the laughing stock of his colleagues. And yet it was considered fit to print in the most serious context imaginable.
Lord Hutton would presumably argue that an examination of the British government's presentation of the case for war was beyond his remit. This might be more sustainable if the law lord had not mused in his decision, as BBC chairman Gavyn Davies noted, about restricting the ability of British journalists to use unverifiable sources.
Investigative journalism, especially where it involves scrutiny of official actions, is frequently about the use of sources, about making decisions on their reliability and about occasionally getting it wrong.
By a journalistic measure, the BBC's defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, had a vastly better source than the Joint Intelligence Committee did, and a more robust story. We now know that the JIC was coached by Alastair Campbell, that the dossier was sent back for its language to be toughened up, and that the "45 minutes" claim was added late in the piece (Hutton found it had been added late solely because it arrived late, rather than as an effort to beef up the case for war).
We know at least some defence and intelligence officials were unhappy with the claims made in the dossier. Kelly - a weapons expert, after all - clearly was, and two other officials said in evidence to the inquiry that they were too. Other journalists turned up much the same story from other sources. This March 9, 2003, story from The Observer is one example:
The intelligence professionals feel that they stand somewhat above the vagaries of politics,' said one close observer familiar with their work.
'But what has happened is that they have come into conflict with the politicians over Iraq. They feel that their long history is in danger of being undermined by the uses made of the intelligence product by Number 10, and that the way information has been spun has corroded the public's belief in what they do.'
This tension has been visible beneath the surface for months, as intelligence officials have briefed against the more outrageous claims made by the Government.
The tensions between the intelligence services and the Downing Street spin operation date back to last summer, when the first so-called secret dossier on Iraq, detailing Saddam's armoury of weapons of mass destruction, was being finalised in the autumn.
The team working on it - led by Tony Blair's director of communications Alastair Campbell, head of homeland security David Omand, Downing Street foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, and representatives of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - began by deciding what messages derived from intelligence material should be put across, and then attempting to find publicly available information backing them up.
The September dossier went through two or three final drafts, with Campbell writing it off each time, and had already resulted in fairly serious rows between Campbell, Omand and Stephen Lander, then head of M15.
The essence of the disagreement is said to have been that intelligence material should be presented 'straight', rather than spiced up to make a political argument.
That this should have blown up into such a damaging and spiteful row between the BBC and the government, when very similar reports came and went, is a testament to the particularly sensitive nature of the relationship between Downing Street and the Beeb.
Gilligan, in an off-the-cuff broadcast at 6.07am one morning last May, used language he could not ultimately justify, most notably his claim that the government knew the "45 minutes" claim to be false (whether they ought to have known is another matter). He lost his original notes and over-egged his story. His bosses, with hindsight, picked the wrong issue on which to stand up to Campbell. But of the fact that Gilligan had a story, there is no doubt.
The Guardian traversed the issue in a masterly morning-after editorial that you really ought to read:
There is a certain sort of judge - thankfully rarer these days than in the past - who pays lip service to the principles of a free press without displaying much understanding of, or sympathy for, the circumstances in which much journalism is produced. Modern developments in the law of defamation take some account of the right to be wrong. In other words, judges are required to consider the chilling effect on free speech if every journalistic slip is punished as the gravest of civil offences. Courts now take into consideration whether the story was in the public interest, the nature of the source, the lengths to which the story was checked and so on.
Judged by these criteria, the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan got more right than he got wrong in the 19 radio broadcasts concerning the government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction in which he was involved last May 29. This was a subject of the clearest possible public interest …
This was a legitimate, important story that no news organisation would, or should, have ignored. But it is also apparent that, in telling the story repeatedly - both on air and in print - Mr Gilligan made errors. He was at times sloppy in his use of language and made serious accusations that were simply mistaken. The BBC should have been much quicker to identify those errors, to correct them and to apologise.
The Daily Telegraph's legal editor Joshua Rozenberg - a former BBC radio journalist - offered sympathy, along with a harsher verdict on Gilligan, in a thoughtful opinion piece.
It appears now that the BBC's unreserved apology and the resignation of its chairman and director general may be a sufficient price. Blair probably doesn't want to go down in history as the Prime Minister who nobbled the BBC (with Greg Dyke's resignation he has already taken down a major Labour Party donor).
Hutton in every possible instance has given the government the benefit of the doubt. He has made statements (notably in his view that the MoD's guessing-game for journalists was not a strategy to out Kelly) that seem positively naïve. But would Blair and Campbell, with hindsight, have picked this particular fight? No. No way in the world.
Back home, and when Don Brash's Treaty speech was delivered, I found myself wondering what Wira Gardiner thought about it. Gardiner was in 1995 the chief executive of Te Puni Kokiri, which meant he was charged with overseeing a series of hui on the national government's ill-fated fiscal envelope proposal. Even though he had reservations about the policy, he did his duty through a difficult year that is recorded in his book Return to Sender.
He is a past Director of Civil Defence and of the Waitangi Tribunal. He is both a prominent New Zealander, and a prominent member of the National Party, of which he is a past Maori vice president. National's new policy was devised, and Brash's speech delivered, without Gardiner ever even being spoken to. As calculated insults go, it's hard to imagine anything nastier.
Then, when Georgina Te Heuheu - whose family has delivered more service to the National Party than Don Brash ever has - dared to voice misgivings about the new policy, she was swiftly slapped down by Brash, who raised the prospect of removing all her portfolios. It appears that the new National Party has decided that if it's not to get any Maori votes it doesn't want any Maori members - except perhaps compliant carpetbaggers like Tau Henare, already onto his third (or fourth?) political party and plainly itching to save National the embarrassment of installing a Pakeha Maori Affairs spokesperson.
I did get an email from someone insisting that Brash's speech was a good thing in that it fostered a necessary debate. Debate is one thing - creepy year zero revisionism that appears to have been devised more in the back rooms of the Act Party than within the National Party itself is quite another.
There was also news about the culture this week: and it was interesting to watch. One News (ignoring for the moment that weird late-evening business) become tougher and more journalistic under Ralston. That's a good thing. But it's TV3's news that now does a better job of speaking to the heart of the nation.
When the Oscar nominees were announced this week, John Campbell ventured out to interview the lovely Ngila Dickson and Carol Hirschfeld spoke to Keisha Castle-Hughes (you half suspect that One's newsreaders would spontaneously combust if they got caught in direct sunlight). The interviews were warm, natural and authentic. When I switched over to see a promo featuring Paul Holmes standing next to a giant Oscar statuette in Castle-Hughes' garden, I decided I didn't really need that.
The story was the same with John Campbell's excellent interview with Janet Frame's biographer Michael King on the occasion of the great writer's death yesterday. You only need consider that for more than half of its history modern New Zealand functionally didn't have a culture, to know that it's as well now that there are people equipped to tell us about the one we do have.
Page 31 of 322
Archive