The final Paul Holmes show on Prime last night led with Nick Smith MP wittering on about dog kennels. An hour later, Campbell Live devoted an entire show to what might be the last televised interview that David Lange will do. Spot the difference.
Campbell's interview with the former Prime Minister was a gem; its conclusion sufficiently moving that the host's eyes were welling with tears as he signed off the show. And amid slightly manic media attempts to declare a fight between Lange and various of his former colleagues on the basis of excerpts from his memoir, Lange offered his verdict on Helen Clark with grace and good humour. She had, he said, stabilised an MMP environment that had been collapsing: "without once falling prey to the idea that she did so through charm." I laughed out loud.
Talk about a 90s flashback: Maurice Williamson says that National would review the mandate for free local calling in Telecom's Kiwi Share Obligation, because "it is still the barrier to that true market". The idea is that if new entrants knew they could charge by the minute for local calls - because the KSO would not set the market conditions by making Telecom local calls free - they would be more likely to invest in new networks.
But for God's sake, it's 2005. It's not about metering voice calls any more. The inexorable trajectory of any telecommunications service as it becomes commoditised is towards flat rates. The idea that a new entrant could compete by charging by the minute for landline calls in New Zealand is just silly; as likely as the idea that an ISP could compete with Xtra by charging by the hour for Internet access. (Readers may recall that it was the Wood brothers' ballsy move to flat-rate Internet that put paid to metered access in the local market in the mid 90s; and Telecom's $10 Text product that helped it get back in the mobile game.)
And answer me this: why is it that the least broadband competition - and the greatest degree of flat-out price gouging - is in the business telecommunications market, which already pays by the minute for calls?
The KSO mandates free local calling, requires any annual increase in charges for that services be limited to the rate of inflation, and obliges Telecom to serve (apparently) uneconomic regions at the same rates as it charges in the rest of the country. The rest of the industry is required to contribute to Telecom's costs in meeting the universal service obligation. It's a funny old instrument - one that warrants regular examination - and the idea of tendering out the service obligations (a la Project Probe) is worth considering, if only to discover what the real costs are.
It's quite likely that if the free-calling requirement were removed, nothing would change: in urban areas, anyway. In the more distant regions, where costs are higher and competition absent, it might be a different story. I don't think National wants its heartland voters thinking too much about that (National whipped out a press release yesterday declaring that free local calling was safe, and David Cunliffe's office responded with one pointing out that that wasn't what Maurice said in June.) The telecommunications environment here is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. But the the idea that ditching the KSO would suddenly make a hundred competitive flowers bloom is just daft.
Salon has an interesting interview with philosopher Michael Ruse "an ardent evolutionist who thinks creationism is claptrap," but accuses atheistic scientists like Richard Dawkins "of being as religious as born-again Bible thumpers." I think he has a point: Dawkins et al sometimes seem keener on trying to disprove God than they are on pursuing science. But proponents of the non-science of "intelligent design" should take no comfort:
He thinks that creationists, both of the old-fashioned "young earth" variety and the newfangled intelligent-design model -- which President Bush said earlier this week should be taught in schools -- are spewing dangerous claptrap and are in league, consciously or not, with a sinister right-wing political agenda.
It's a two-level answer. I think creationism is dangerous because I don't think you should teach young people bad ideas. I'm a post-Enlightenment person. Inasmuch as I see creationism as a litmus test, I don't think creationism as such is dangerous. I think premillennialism is dangerous, because this inclines you to simplistic and dangerous positions. You hear echoes of this when George Bush talks about the "evildoers." I think the decision to go to war in Iraq was bound up with many different issues; Cheney just did it for the oil. But I do see it as allied to premillennial thinking, and that's even before you get to the Israel issue. Why are evangelical Christians so gung-ho in favor of Israel? Well, it's not because they like Jews. It's because of their eschatological reading of the Book of Revelation. I do think these things are very dangerous.
String theory star Michio Kaku, profiled in the new Australian science mag Cosmos (whose editor Wilson da Silva I'm interviewing at 12.30 tomorrow on 95bFM), takes a similar view of fundamentalism, but has a surprisingly spiritual perspective on his work. He had Buddhist parents but was raised a Presbyterian and likes string theory as a marriage of the two:
"In Christianity, there is an instant of creation; while in Buddhism there is Nirvana, which is timeless. I am pleased that modern cosmology provides a beautiful melding of these two otherwise mutually contradictory ideas: that a continual genesis is taking place in a hyper-dimensional timeless Nirvana."
Meanwhile, a physicist-stand-up-comedian-screenwriter-blogger goes engagingly ballistic about President Bush's apparent endorsement of teaching "intelligent design" in American classrooms and the Vatican astronomer fires back at Cardinal Shonborn's attempt to drag the church back into the 18th century. Good.