Kia ora! We're staging one of our Orcon IRL talk events at Golden Dawn from 4pm to 7pm on Sunday, August 13 – and, as it says in the title above, it's about New Zealand's impending general election.
I'll be hosting as ever, along with 95bFM talents Ximena Smith and Jogai Bhatt. Here's the stream:
4.15: How we used to campaign: a video reel of election advertising and coverage from the 1960s to 2014. This will be on the stream and at the venue.
4.30: RUSSELL, XIMENA and JOGAI say hi.
4.35: First-time candidates. Chloe Swarbrick, Kiri Allan, Stephen Berry – with JOGAI.
4.55: BREAK
5.05: Tracey Martin, Geoff Simmons, Louisa Wall - with XIMENA
5.25: BREAK
5.35: The Journalists. Matt Nippert, Susan Strongman and Keith Ng - with RUSSELL.
5.55: BREAK
6.00: James Shaw 1 + 1 with RUSSELL
6.20: Straight into the final panel. RUSSELL, XIMENA AND JOGAI on stage with all MPs and candidates, answering audience questions and more. Stream-watchers can submit questions using the #OrconIRL hashtag (include the word "QUESTION" in your tweet.)
7pm: ENDS
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Much has happened since I started lining up our guests, but I can tell you today that we will be welcoming Green party co-leader James Shaw, New Zealand First's Tracey Martin, Manurewa MP Louisa Wall, and three first-time aspirants to office – Labour's East Coast candidate Kiri Allan, the Green Party's Chloe Swarbrick, and The Opportunities Party deputy leader and Wellington Central candidate Geoff Simmons. There will also be a panel of journalists: Susan Strongman, Keith Ng and Matt Nippert punditing on political punditry.
We were originally also to be welcoming Jacinda Ardern, but her diary was wiped last week when she became Labour leader. And I'm still chasing a particular National Party candidate, who I think will be joining us. It's been a little difficult wrangling Nats, tbh.
So keep an ear to 95bFM and an eye on this page over the next few days. Of course, the venue isn't a big one and you might just want to trust us and get in on your RSVP now.
If you do miss out, or you're not in Auckland, be assured that you'll be able to catch it all live on 95bFM's HD stream. On the internet.
A friend of mine who works as a broadcast soundie has always hated doing Andrew Little. Not because he dislikes the man personally, my friend explained, but because his voice is so hard to get right in the mix. No matter what you do, it just never cuts through.
It's a technical matter, but also a reasonable metaphor for Little's freshly-foreclosed term as leader of the New Zealand Labour Party.
In truth, Little could have faced down the filthy polls had he not blinked so hard on Sunday and then again yesterday. In declaring that he'd considered standing aside as leader, Little made made that departure all but inevitable. The conspiracy theory is that a machiavellian Grant Robertson advised Little to make his confession knowing it would do him in, but even if that were true, Little's decisions are his to own.
The irony is that one of the achievements of Little's tenure is that he seemed to have put paid to – or at least firmly curbed – the factionalism that lay behind its last three leadership changes. I've heard more than once that his union background makes him a good internal manager. But to the world outside his caucus he struggled to project anything more than an excess of caution.
They tried to make him more marketable. Colleagues (and Robertson was involved there) steered him towards a better dress sense and persuaded him to surrender his spectacles in favour of contact lenses. These things are not immaterial: for all Helen Clark's formidable intellectual prowess, part of her turnaround was the grudging acceptance that she'd have to wear makeup and get a better haircut.
The curious thing is that Labour has actually done a lot right in the past year. Its party list was hardly a mass changing of the guard, but does include the promotion of Kiri Allan and Willow Jean Prime, two strong young Māori women, to winnable list places. Winnable, that is, if Labour could only claw its way to 30% of the vote.
The party also presented a shadow budget that included an additional $2 billion in social spending that even the Taxpayers' Union had to admit added up. Many people, I know, believe that winning over self-styled fiscal hawks should never have been Labour's goal, but it is important for a centre-left party to be able to show its numbers work.
The Green Party's bold move to light a fire under welfare issues by having its co-leader confess to historic benefit fraud started an important conversation. At the very least, it hasn't hurt them. But even the Greens were worried last week that they'd lost control of the narrative. And it was a game that Labour just couldn't play – not only out of caution but because a non-trivial part of its membership, including the likes of Kiri Allen, wasn't comfortable with it. The worst-case scenario was that the Greens' tack would peel off some more liberal Labour voters at the same time as it deterred wavering voters on the centre. Which is exactly how that Colmar Brunton poll on Sunday looked.
So I'm not sure that a Corbynesque move to the left would have suddenly changed Labour's fortunes. It's an easy supposition, but Little took the leadership, remember, as the union man who defeated the urban technocrats. And it's not as if an education policy promising much more funding for schools (and teachers!) and a path to free tertiary study hadn't already signalled a commitment. Or the promise to introduce a living wage for public servants and raise the minimum wage to $16.50. Or the plan to embark on the biggest programme of public home-building since the 1940s. Etc.
Labour is already markedly left of where it was at the last election. Yet there's still a sense that it was consciously limiting its ambitions. Out went the capital gains tax. The scene was surely safe for a bolder (or at least more coherent) stance on drug law reform, but no, that wasn't a "priority". Labour has shied off the exciting policies and struggled to foster any excitement around some of the perfectly good policies it does have.
There are all kinds of ways in which politics aren't fair. The governing party is prospering even as it carries a fleet of no-name placeholders who barely had to campaign last time and will be thinking they're equally in this time. Labour, by contrast, has some very good electorate MPs – and seemed to have found the trick to getting them elected by tapping into the ground game of Auckland's newly purposeful and confident centre-left.
Further, the government's integrity was laid waste only weeks ago by the Todd Barclay affair. And last night's Newshub poll, which found Bill English on only 25% as preferred Prime Minister – that is, well less than either Key or Clark enjoyed going into the 2008 election – suggested the electorate wasn't that enthused about anyone. Support for the top four in the preferred PM poll – English, Peters, Ardern and Little – barely added up to 50%.
So Jacinda Ardern will lead Labour into September's election. She is charismatic, skilled – and underdone. It seems like only yesterday I was writing here that she'd only just secured herself an electorate and didn't need the additional burden of the deputy leadership. And now here she is. She may have had other plans, but this is what she's doing now.
The best case is that this becomes a turn to Labour's strongest suit – its women. That would be a compelling route to the kind of modernity Labour couldn't project under Little. But no electorate is going to find a change of leader eight weeks out from an election reassuring. Sure, anything could happen, but logic dictates that the hope of forming a government is a very faint one. But having a charismatic leader – and, ironically, being in the news even for the wrong reasons – might generate enough excitement to bring in some of the new talent the party really needs. That, presumably, is what they'll be telling themselves today.
Update: Jacinda Ardern just gave her first media conference as Labour leader and absolutely smashed it. Composed, authoritative and witty. Labour activists on Twitter say they're already getting calls. What an extraordinary day in politics.
When we use the word "infrastructure", we often do so with some idea of magnitude unspoken in our heads. Infrastructure is big, not human-sized, utilitarian rather than merely handy. It is about things, not people; serious rather than delightful.
And yet, last Friday, something different raised its head. Two bridges were opened: one high over Oakley Creek, connecting Great North Road and the Unitec campus (officially, it's an extension of Alford Street in Waterview).
And the other, Whitinga, tracing a great swoop over State Highway 20 in Mount Roskill. They are infrastructure for people.
The irony, of course, is that they exist because of the Waterview Connection and its vehicle tunnels, the biggest and most expensive work of civil engineering in Auckland's history. They could not have existed had Steven Joyce's ghastly plan to cut a surface route through Mt Albert carried the day, and might not have existed had Joyce's Board of Inquiry not told a reluctant NZTA that it jolly well was building a people-path over its tunnels.
The Southern Shared Path is the more developed of the two. It runs from New North Road to Maioro Street, through Alan Wood Reserve, which for decades was a rough, boggy stretch of green waiting for a purpose – and is now host to the southern portal of the Waterview tunnels. What has happened there is a little miracle.
This isn't a cycleway grudgingly squeezed in alongside a motorway, it's a designed public precinct which connects to its surrounding neighbourhoods with style and even whimsy. The big flourish is the Warren and Mahoney-designed Whitinga, but its real joy is in the overall design directed by Boffa Miskell: the paths that loop playfully along the creekline, the brightly-coloured bridges, the skate park sitting up the hill on Valonia Reserve. It all feels designed with regard to place.
At the north end is the beginning of the Waterview Shared Path, which will eventually trace a line that – as anyone who battled along there in the old days would know – always wanted to be drawn. All the way to the western rail corridor by the Pak 'n' Save. By Spring, the final bridge will be built – the one over the rail line – and there will be a safe path for riding and walking from the Waitemata to the Manukau, all the way across New Zealand.
There will be some squeezes and compromises. The steep northbound climb on the exsting SH20 cycleway to Hillsborough Road is still a serious impediment for casual users – and I'm not sure how this nasty little bit of footpath can be improved at Waterview ...
But I rode the new paths on Friday and yesterday and I got a strong sense that we're past the era of people-sized infrastructure as a mere afterthought. Moreover, the playfulness introduced to walking and cycling by the "pink path" may start to become a keynote of Auckland's ground-level design. Meet you by the purple bridge, people will start saying.
While I was paused on the Alford Street bridge yesterday, I got talking to one of the people using it – a woman who had lived in Waterview for 15 years and felt sad because she was having to move just as this was happening. But you're moving to Te Atatu Peninsula, I said: you'll be able to ride straight here, safe as you like.
"Oh," she said. "I've thought about getting a bike. Where would I get a bike?"
She didn't have much of a budget, so I suggested she look in on Adventure Cycles for some second-hand wheels. But the main thing is, she could see riding as a safe, appealing thing to do. I think she won't be alone.
Sneaky Feelings announced this week that they'd be reconvening as a full live band for the first time in 22 years – on a Wednesday night in Hamilton. It seemed highly likely that there would be other shows in the pipeline and, lo, a couple of days later, came the lineup announcement for The Others Way festival 2017, two days after the Hamilton show on Friday, September 1.
Sneaky Feelings will be playing their standards and songs from the new album, Progress Junction, that they've recorded over the past three years.
Note further that the lineup also includes Micronism, whose singular debut album has just been remastered and reissued by Loop, Street Chant (Emily Littler is back from LA for a while), Bic Runga, Lawrence Arabia, Disasteradio and more. This looks very good.
And also note that you don't have to wait till September for a multi-venue party on K Road. Indeed, there's one on tomorrow: 95bFM's bStreet. And it's free.
I had the chance to see a preview of Julian Boshier's Head Like A Hole film Swagger of Thieves this week. It's a disorderly film with elements of farce, a hazy chronology and one or two really challenging moments. In other words, a perfect Head Like a Hole film.
Like the other local music doco in this year's film festival, Simon Ogston's Bill Direen film A Memory of Others, Swagger of Thieves isn't a standard rock-doc, although its centre is the archetypal Mick-and-Keef relationship of the band's singer Booga Beazley and guitarist Nigel Regan. They hate each other and they love each other and they pretty much need each other.
It's a surprisingly intimate film, one that gets both figuratively and literally up close to its subjects, sometimes in their worst moments. And it's also a reminder of quite how far into the hearts of New Zealanders that band got.
I had a bit of a moment seeing the band's late manager, Gerald Dwyer, on screen. He's gentle, handsome, organised – and also, as someone points out, the "very high-functioning drug addict" whose opiate use took his life and also spilled over into the habits of both Booga and Nigel. Humans are complicated.
Something else to do next week: Murray Cammick's AK•75-85 gathers some of the best of Murray's music photography for an exhibition at Black Asterisk gallery, 10 Ponsonby Road. The preview night is Tuesday, from 6.30, and there's a talk at the gallery at 2pm next Saturday the 5th.
Most of the photos predate my time as deputy editor at Rip It Up – although the shot of Siouxsie Sioux was taken during my first interview in the job – but they were always around the office at the time, so they bring back memories for me. And the one I've always really loved is this one ofrthe Screaming Meemees at the North Shore Netball Hall in 1981. It very much smells of teen spirit.
I was sitting by the fire this week, listening to Apple Music's 'Electronic' playlist on headphones, and something really jumped out at me. It was 'Paid', a track by the curiously-named Sudan Archives, who turns out to be a 23 year-old self-taught violinist and producer from Ohio. The track is from her self-titled debut EP on Stones Throw, which is six tracks of strange, arty fusions of beats, grooves and African folk music. It's cool. Streaming and buying links here, including a Bandcamp purchase.
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Public Enemy's new album is free! You can download it from here. It sounds basically nothing like most contemporary hip hop – meaning it's a classic gear-grinding PE production which seems to take some flavour from Chuck D's recent rockin' work in Prophets of Rage (although let's not forget PE sampled Slayer way back in the day – it's all about the sonics). It's cool too, okay.
There's also an instrumental version of the whole album to download on the same page.
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Last Sunday's 95bFM jazz show was quite a thing, with Duncan Campbell and Dom Nola staging an African special. You can stream or download the podcast.
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Tunes!
Clicks are DJ Dick Johnson and his partner Anna Coddington – and they have a really nice new EP out, comprising five mixes of their groovy house track 'Resolution'. It sounds like this and you can buy it here on Bandcamp.
Also on the remix tip: Wellington's Lord Echo, who has a bunch of mixes of 'The Sweetest Meditation', featuring Mara TK, on Bandcamp, including this fantastic club take (which is also on the 12" available for pre-order via Bandcamp):
I've shared quite a few tracks from Leftside Wobble (aka Jonathan Moore, but not the one from Coldcut) over the years – his stuff really is in my zone for dance music. This week he dropped a two-hour mix to mark 10 years producing under the Leftside Wobble name (he's been DJing since the late 80s). It's bloody dubby disco marvellous – and if you click through you can download it from his Facebook page:
And finally, you might have seen my interview with Paul Oremland, director of 100 Men. The interview was a delight – and also occasion for Paul to finally hand over a copy of The Rhythm Divine, the disco history he directed back in the early 90s for Britain's Channel 4. Written by Jon Savage, it traces an indiosyncratic path through the music, a British one – and also a notably gay one.
In the happiest of coincidences, Bill Brewster has just posted a two-hour playlist in tribute to gay club culture – and marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised sex between men. It's a free download.
But one track that's in Paul's documentary that not in the mix is this one. I honestly did not know about this Three Degrees track, but it's a Giorgio Moroder-produced banger!
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Public notice: The vacancy has arisen for a new sponsor for Friday Music (thanks so much Songbroker, you've been lovely). It could be you! It's only $500 a month after all. Interested? Click on the email icon under this post and drop me a line.
In Nigeria, they call it Black Mamba, and the papers report it's causing "convulsions, kidney failure and a ‘zombie-like’ state of intoxication that can lead to death." In Mumbai, kids are flocking to "Spice" because it doesn't show up in drug tests. Last week in Fort Wayne, Indiana, there were 20 overdoses in 24 hours attributed to a "bad batch" of Spice. The week before, there were 150 ODs – many requiring intensive care admission – in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the director of emergency services speculated that "some bad K2 has hit the street."
No one knows whether Spice in Indiana contains the same things as Spice in Mumbai, or whether Black Mamba in Lagos is the same as the Black Mamba that killed a man in Birmingham. They're all just retail brands that have jumped the fence to become generic descriptors of a group of drugs.
In nearly all cases, these drugs entered their markets as mimics of cannabis in both a social and technical sense. But in the UK, last year's blanket ban on psychoactives is driving a move to new formats for "Spice" – including dipped cigarettes and sprayed rolling papers. Last month in Manchester, 10 people were taken to hospital after taking crystal billed as "pink champagne", a supposedly "particularly potent form of MDMA" – which turned out to be one or other cannabimimetic in its original crystal form.
What can be said, six days after the police and the Coroner's office sounded the alarm in New Zealand, is that it's a mess all over – but it didn't need to be such a mess here. Associate Health minister Peter Dunne revealed on Morning Report today that the government only knew about last week's warning – and its headline seven deaths – less than an hour before it was published. The Drug Foundation's Ross Bell says the Auckland DHB called him after the statement was published to see if he knew any more than they did.
Police messaging itself has been incoherent. We've gone from vague stuff in the original statement to a senior officer at the Avondale branch declaring: "Any drugs that we seize, we get them tested. What comes back are the technical aspects, which show things like fly spray and weed killer." And then, on Checkpoint yesterday, Acting Detective Inspector Peter Florence said that, contrast to reports, there is no evidence the product has been "spiked in any way – there's no other foreign substances in it":
Unfortunately, Florence immediately went on to declare that "synthetic cannabis" is "a drug in itself". No, it isn't. Fortunately, reporter Anusha Bradley also took the step of finding someone at ESR who could say something useful – and the upshot of that was some confirmation that that the chief suspect in the recent deaths and acute reactions is the cannabimimetic AMB-Fubinaca.
Like a number of the other cannabimimetics, AMB-Fubinaca was originally developed (and patented) as a potential painkiller by Pfizer. It's considerably more dangerous than the original JWH cannabimimetics banned in what now seem like the good old days, although it's related to AB-Fubinaca, which featured in a number of the products given interim approvals under the Psychoactive Substances Act. It's almost certainly made in China and sells online as powder for virtually nothing – maybe $2500 for a kilogram, which will probably break down in 15,000 doses. Suppose a dose is sold for $10 or $20, and do the math.
I was contacted yesterday by someone who said they had good information that "synthetic ketamine from China" was the problem chemical in synnies. That would be methoxetamine, or MXE, which has showed up here before in dance pills and as powder. It may now be being sprayed on herbs too, but the reported symptoms strongly indicate that the main problem is the cannabimimetics.
It's important for emergency medical staff to know these things, and unhelpful for them to have to deal with noise about fly spray and weedkiller. It was encouraging, therefore, to hear Dunne announce this morning that an "incident response team" involving police, DHBs and the Ministry of Health, is being established. Ideally, this would be the start of a proper early warning system to which everyone – including users – has access.
So maybe, just maybe, all this mess will do some good.
