Hard News by Russell Brown

Called to account on Morning Report on Monday for the strong support for keeping the current national flag indicated by recent polls, Prime Minister John Key gave a strange answer.

"It's (a) very early days," Key told Guyon Espiner, which seemed an odd thing to say in the week that final referendum ballots are actually being distributed to households.

"You don't know. The second point is that, on some of the polling we see the, y'know, the numbers of people who are decided they will definitely vote for the current flag is falling. And so what you see in the public polls at the moment is all of the undecideds, all of the y'know, possibly go with the current flag is being geared up into the no vote. That may be what transpires on the day but it also may not be. There's certainly a credible case I could mount for you where it'll change."

Espiner observed that didn't seem terribly convincing. Key responded:

"It you look at a more granulated question we've been asking that for some time now. Do you definitely want to keep the current flag, that's falling. And it's been falling a little more rapidly in recent weeks, just as people have been starting to I think really firm up which way they're going. And you're relying on the sort of poll question they've asked, just takes all that out."

When pressed, Key volunteered that National's polling said that "under half" of those polled "want to definitely keep" the current flag. If that answer sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly what Key said in an interview with Espiner on the same programme nearly six months ago.

He actually expressed himself a bit better back then – managing to get out the word "granular", rather than "granulated" – but the point is this: the government has been polling hard for months on the flag referendum via the National Party's internal polling company, Curia. And it's employing a style of questioning that basically has two functions.

It's the "Are you really, really sure? How sure are you?" question, and in public polling it's most often deployed to try and assess the likelihood of a respondent actually voting. In private polling, like that done by Curia, it's an attempt to find out how persuadable people are. Depending on the question, I might have found myself  among the Prime Minister's persuadables – I would certainly be open to changing the flag if the alternative was better. But going on the identical answers given in the two interviews, National is not having a lot of luck persuading people.

A reasonable person might ask why the governing party is so keen to be persuading people towards one side of a referendum in which, by definition, it is seeking the voice of the people. At the least, it should make it hard for the government to accuse other parties of "politicising" that decision.

But that shouldn't matter. We should vote for the flag we like. I voted for Red Peak in the first round of the referendum even though public polling told me it was going to get creamed, which it duly did.

When the two Lockwood flags crushed all others in the first round, there was quite a bit of commentary to the effect that the majority had spoken and we should now all fall into line and vote for the winning fern flag. As I noted at the time:

It’s rather a depressing argument: that no matter what we think or why we think it, we should just buckle under and shuffle along with the crowd. As an assertion of national identity, it might be a bit too telling.

The taking of positions on the flag has made for some odd bedfellows: inveterate lefties have found common cause with monarchists. It's a point former Green MP Keith Locke makes in a Daily Blog post that seeks to knock out a list of reasons put up by opponents to a flag change. I actually agree with some of what he says – the mere desire to give John Key a black eye should not guide a decision for the ages – but he almost skips over the actual point of the referendum, which is to choose between flag designs.

6. The Lockwood design is too bad to vote for. Fair enough if you really don’t like it don’t vote for it. People differ on what is a good design and a lot of people will disagree with any design chosen. Given the way symbols have been used in New Zealand in recent years the most popular flag was always going to have either a fern or a koru on it, and perhaps a southern cross. Kyle Lockwood’s design won because it combined two of these symbols and for traditionalists it didn’t depart too much from the original flag, with a southern cross on a blue background.

The other way of looking at that is that a change to the Lockwood flag is by Locke's own definition not the "progressive change" he seeks. I thought Keith Ng encapsulated this really well in a recent post here:

To say that left-wingers are hating on the Lockwood flag out of spite for Key assumes that removing the Union Jack is fundamentally progressive.

But it’s not. It’s about tweaking the symbol of the status quo so it can go for another hundred years.

Flags are symbolic by definition. And quite apart from its mere aesthetic shortcomings, the alternative on which we are asked to vote symbolises a fudge. A fudge we're supposed to carry for generations.

Amid the flurry of enthusiasm for change that followed the first round of the referendum in December, John Roughan concluded an argument for change with this peculiarly unenthusiastic paragraph.

Few national flags probably had the wow-factor when first conceived. We need a new flag, the old one looks even more dated now than it did last week. The chosen alternative may be an amateurish pastiche of the old and new but it is the way we are. It is recognisably us. It will do fine.

It's revealing to go back to June last year and read Roughan's column on his discovery of another referendum contender, Blair Chant's "beautiful, elegant and dignified" koru-themed Long White Cloud design. He enthuses about its technical merits, imagines where it would fly, thinks about what it would say.

Roughan began that June column by declaring that "There is no point talking about changing the flag until we find one that says, yes, this is us, now," and closed it with the words: "This is it, isn't it."

Six months later, his argument for the Lockwood flag could be paraphrased as "It's a bit shit. But then, so are we."

It would be hard to come up with a more bleak indictment of the choice we're presented with and the process that led to it than the gulf between those two columns. Rather than encapsulating who we are and what we want to be, that gulf sums up what's wrong with us.

So no, even though I have no great love for the current flag, I will not be voting for the alternative.

We walked down the hill on Friday evening to a beautiful play of light: the last of the sun reaching over from the west, the broad shimmer of the sea,  the high moon looking down, the glow from the tents and the necklace of globes that meandered up the slope towards us; a complex whole.

It was nice being with with people attending Splore for the first time and being able to think "There's really a place like this?"all over again. The picture I took only partially captures how pretty it looked.

Quite a few people have said in the days since the weekend that this year's was the best Splore yet. And yes, I think it might have been. John Minty and his crew have enhanced the sense that the festival isn't only about one or two big things,  but a series of intimate experiences. The tiny Rogue Society gin bar, nestled among the roots of a pohutukawa, felt like a world of its own.

On the Saturday night I spent longer in one small space, the Lucky Star lane, than any other. My buddy Andy and I kind of forgot to leave until deep in the morning, so happy were we with the friendly freaks around us, the wild dancers on on the little stage and the oddball presence of DJ Belleville, who alternated minimal techno and French folk songs. 

We discovered later that Belleville was actually camping next to us and kind of fanboyed him the following evening at the crew party. Here's Belleville and Andy:

This is how Lucky Star looked in the daylight. It was very different in the night:

Ironically – this is after all a music blog post – I missed far more of Splore's musical offerings than I caught this year. Because I was working on Saturday running the Listening Lounge, I got in an early night after Leftfield, who were austere and a little disappointing, then spent spent much of the next day orchestrating talk and playing old house records in my own DJ set. But mostly, I spent a lot of the festival just having a good time with my friends.

But of what I did hear, the Dub Pistols were the surprise highlight. I don't really get their records, but live they were a riot of rabble-rousing party music – a bundle of dub, rave, ska and rock that was peculiarly and triumphantly British.

Elsewhere, High Hoops played a great, happy set in the blazing sun (it was rather better suited to the conditions than the music I was detailed to play next, tbh), the Ragga Twins were all wild energy, the Reverend Peyton and his Big Damn Band were lots of fun and Nightmares on Wax and Jafa Mafia were perfect Sunday fare. In general, whereever you were, the nice thing was feeling released by how unguarded the people around you were, how into it everybody was. Just dance how you feel like dancing.

But mostly, yeah, it was quality time spent with good friends. If you're thinking of Sploring in 2017, my advice is to not do it by halves. Go with friends, ideally someone who's done it before, reserve a campsite early, do something special. It really is worth it, because there really is nothing like this.

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Sleater-Kinney play The Powerstation on Monday. And if you know that, you may know about guitarist-vocalist Carrie Brownstein's other accomplishments.

She talked to Kathryn Ryan a week ago about her work as co-creator of Portlandia, which is into its sixth season – and recently featured a guest appearance by The Flaming Lips. And her newish book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, looks like another in a very welcome run of rock memoirs by women.

All this and she's in a pretty good band. Yeah, I feel like an underchiever too.

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You've probably seen Lorde's bring-the-house-down performance of 'Life on Mars' as part of The Brits' David Bowie tribute. You may not have seen the entire 15-minute tribute. It's here:

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For many of us, vinyl record shopping isn't just about buying new records, but finding interesting old records (and in my case, records I can DJ with). So I'm quite excited about Flying Out's announcement of a new project with Captured Tracks shop and Sideman Records shop to ship in interesting second-hand vinyl. It appears that Captured Tracks founder Mike Sniper got the idea for a used-records business after the Flying Out people explained to him how hard it is to get interesting old stuff here in the antipodes.

The first shipment is on sale at the Flying Out shop at 80 Pitt Street, where they say "we have a great selection of records you don't often see in New Zealand, especially unusual jazz, soul, funk, Verve, Blue Note and various exotica - though we also have some interesting rock/alternative stuff too. We've gone for quality over quantity."

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I've previously mentioned the album the late Graham Brazier had nearly completed with Alan Jansson at the time of his death – and Alan's view that it was the best thing Graham had ever done. The album now has a name – Left Turn at Midnight – and there is a crowdfunding campaign to raise up to $20,000 to get the abum completed and released. Contributions start at $US10, which gets you a free download of the album. So if you want to hear this record, that's what you need to do.

This is cool. Frances Morton for Noisey on the new album from New Zealander Cleve Cameron, which can only be heard in one particular Auckland taxi.

Murray Cammick writes for The Spinoff about tagging along when Herbs went to launch their Senstive to a Smile album in Ruatoria in 1987. It's a companion piece to Steve Braunias's email interview with Angus Gillies about the latter's series of books on the whole, strange business of the Ruatoria rastas in the late 1980s.

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Two of my albums of 2015 were those by Anthonie Tonnon and Nadia Reid. Happily, the pair of them next week launch a national "urban folk" tour with Darren Hanlon. It begins on Thursday in Oamaru and winds up on March 11 and 12 at the King's Arms and Wellington's meow respectively. You can buy tickets here from Under the Radar.

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Tunes!

While you wait for Street Chant's Hauora album, they've posted an out-take:

Another buzzy, bassy tune from Bordertown, creators of that awesome 'Lost in Music' remix I posted recently. Free download:

And a righteous kitchen-dancing special. Karim Chehab reworks Special Touch's 'This Party is Just for You'. A very funky free download:

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The Hard News Friday Music Post is kindly sponsored by:

Mediaworks' decision to replace its longtime news chief Mark Jennings with Hal Crawford, hitherto editor-in-chief and publisher of the Australian Ninemsn website, buys the company the kind of strategic expertise in digital publishing that – witness the Scout debacle – it has clearly been lacking.

It also deprives Mediaworks of a news manager with deep and locally unparalleled experience in broadcasting, the sector which currently delivers nearly all the company's revenue.

The space Crawford will have to fill consists not only of that understanding of broadcast news, but of the loyalty Jennings has shown – and thus had reciprocated – to his journalists. On The Spinoff, Hayden Donnell finds some evidence that Crawford himself has commanded loyalty among his staff at what appears to have been a troubled workplace (read the comments here). We can presume he knows how to use the internet well enough to have done due diligence on his new gig. It does bear noting that TVNZ has had a fairly sorry history with Aussie news executives flown in from sinking ships.

Crawford's most important skills lie in the relationship between the news and what the rest of us do with it. He's the co-founder of the website Share Wars ("How sharing changes news and those who tell it") and the related book All Your Friends Like This: How Social Networks Took Over News, which its publisher declares "does for the media what Freakonomics did for economics."

In a business increasingly being managed by people with no meaningful media experience, Crawford is a journalist and an editor (he's also an industry rep on the Australian Press Council). That's a good thing. But a quick look at NineMSN's home page – entertainers, viral video, sharks, extreme weather – underlines the fact that his job has been to present headlines we'll click on and share, rather than in conventional news and current affairs.

This is not a unique philosophy. In the past two months, the home page of the New Zealand Herald's website has been increasingly dominated by clickbait. In the hour after it was revealed yesterday that bomb threats had been made against several New Zealand schools, its lead story was the weirdly irrelevant tale of a woman in Texas who "publicly shamed" her racist father on Twitter, lifted whole from The Daily Mail.

So Crawford will arrive with the task of increasing revenue from what is not only a small market, but a crowded one. Would it not have made more sense to give him his own digital fiefdom, rather than putting him in charge of the broadcast business too? Did he regard that as too junior a role to bother with? Was Jennings unwilling to share with Weldon's pick?   Did Weldon himself decide this non-trivial change of skillsets was what the company needed? We don't know.

Mediaworks' own Newshub reported the news via a corporate press release which says Jennings "will remain engaged in the near term in a mentoring capacity with the TV-led flagship brands." Crawford, meanwhile, seems to be setting up for a long and transformative stay:

"I am tremendously excited to join MediaWorks, and the Newshub team. The strategy of a fully converged TV, radio and digital brand, and a brand born outside the history of any particular platform is unique globally. This is an opportunity to move beyond the delivery method and focus on the stories and the audience. I am looking forward to meeting the team and working with everyone at MediaWorks -- senior leaders, producers, journalists -- to shape Newshub over the coming years."

Whether ditching existing brands for one without history is a good strategy we don't really know yet. Crawford's first job might be to get any of us to feel anything in particular about Newshub.

But one final caution. Sharing the news doesn't always go the way you want. Yesterday, the Herald reported the news by compiling tweets about it, including mine:

Mark Jennings, best and most influential news manager of his generation, has left MediaWorks. That feels like more than the end of an era.

— Russell Brown (@publicaddress) February 24, 2016

Before long, BuzzTeller, "a multi-social publisher of interesting facts, trending gist, motivational and top stories" (ie: click factory) had lifted the story, and, apparently, run it through a translator and back. My tweet came out like this:

It is indeed a brave new world.

Yesterday's decision by 13 Auckland councillors to remove the council's voice from a Unitary Plan process in which, by any assessment, it should be the major player is being greeted as a victory by those responsible.

Richard Burton, the leader of the Auckland 2040 group, who gave an astonishingly arrogant interview on Morning Report today, appears to be believe he and his fellow travellers have dealt a blow to urban intensification.

Councillors and local board members who supported the bid to withdraw the council's evidence believe they have have stood up for proper process and democracy – on behalf of residents who were not to have had  the chance to submit on the council's revised proposal to the Independent Panel considering the Unitary Plan because they did not submit on the more tepid original. And, yes, the way the the process was designed in legislation did seem unfair to those residents.

But what none of them – and they roughly divide into Burton and his mendacious nimby mates; the councillors who oppose intensification but have been typically lazy about engaging with the process; and councillors and board members who support urban goals but believe they stood on process here – seems to be able to outline is how, beyond a mere moral victory, this actually helps them.

Central government has long since walked away from its natural supporters in Auckland and their strident opposition to intensification. Housing New Zealand wants the panel to go further on intensification than the council did in its now-junked evidence. It's not like they go away or the process stops.

Some of you understand this much better than I do. So what now?

The killer fact is a public speaker's friend. It can be used as a way of not so much simplifying a complex argument, but of giving the audience a peg on which to anchor the complexity. I deployed a few of them in my talk introducing the drug policy discussion at Splore on Saturday, but none of them stirred as audible a response from the crowd as this part:

At UNGASS 1998 – the second meeting of the United Nations' most senior policy-making body, the General Assembly, to discuss the global drug problem – the boundlessly confident slogan for the event was: "A drug-free world – we can do it!"

The slogan was the key line in a UN-funded promotional video, screened as a paid ad on television, featuring helicopters spraying herbicides, fields of burning drug crops, armed soldiers and a farmer processing coffee. The message was clear: the community of nations was turning the big guns on the drug trade and woe betide anyone who got in the way. It was the war on drugs made literal.

Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the UN Drug Control Program, even put a deadline on it, writing a special article for the UN Chronicle under the headline ‘Towards a Drug-Free World by 2008 – We Can Do It’.

Needless to say, the world was not drug-free by 2008. Indeed, it appeared that a programme that had begun with the first UNGASS on drugs in 1991 (which heralded the "United Nations Decade Against Drug Abuse", 1991-2000) was, if anything, making the harms of the illicit drug trade even worse.

In 2014, I wrote an article on the drug trade and economic development, which quoted our Splore guest, Sanho Tree of the Institute of Policy Studies, on the unintended consequences of the crop destruction programme that followed UNGASS 1988:

Another problem with forced eradication, says Tree, is that it may cause farmers to adapt with unpredictable consequences. After visible coca crops in Colombia were repeatedly wiped out by US spray planes in the early 2000s, “farmers began to intercrop and shade-grown varieties of coca were introduced, along with new processing and extraction techniques with high yields. The varieties they were replanting with were more productive than the old ones – varieties that were suited to cocaine production rather than chewing.

Far from Latin America's drug war, in the nightclubs of the western world, the UN did succeed in sharply limiting the availability of the ubiquitous dance party drug MDMA, by clamping down on the supply of a key precursor, safrole. This, too, had unintended consequences: it ushered in the era of substitute party drugs – all of them less well-understood and most of them more dangerous than MDMA. The situation only stablised when a German chemist devised a way of synthesising MDMA without safrole a couple of years ago.

So it's not entirely surprising that by 2008, the UN was trying to forget the "drug free world" was ever a goal.

The Director of UNDCP’s successor, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Da Costa, insisted to the makers of the Irish documentary War Without End that, "I would like to remind you that the United Nations never used the word ‘a drug-free world’. In no official documents of the United Nations you will find reference to ‘a drug-free world’."

This link jumps directly to that part of the documentary.

 “At the UN today,” intones the documentary’s voiceover, “the ‘drug-free world’ slogan of 1998 appears something of an embarrassment.”

This history and the prospects for the third drugs UNGASS, which takes place in April in New York, are covered in a feature I wrote for Matters of Substance, the magazine of the New Zealand Drug Foundation.

In theory, things should be very different this time. UNGASS itself has been brought forward two years at the request of the presidents of Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala. Latin American countries as a group – always uneasy about the big-guns approach to supply reduction – also made a joint call to review the current system and “analyse all available options, including regulatory or market measures”.

A string of UN agencies, including the UN Development Program under Helen Clark and even UNODC itself – in a controversially withdrawn paper – have called for change and a move toward decriminalisation.

Kofi Annan, who presided in 1998 as UN Secretary General, has turned 180 degrees and wrote in an essay just published by Der Spiegel that "we need to accept that a drug-free world is an illusion" and that this year's UNGASS "would be a good place to start" on first the decriminalisation of  drugs and then their legalisation and regulation.

Even the United States, for half a century the self-appointed policeman of  the UN drug treaties, is now allowing one state after another to establish regulated, legal markets in marijuana.

And yet, the world is highly unlikely to change in April. The dread words "harm reduction" may finally find their way into an official declaration, although that's far from certain. The US may finally stop seeking common cause with Saudi Arabia, Russia and China on drug control issues. But it'll be baby steps, all bound by the requirement for consensus among participating nations.

For more detail, you can read my feature, which is quite lengthy and includes comments from Peter Dunne on the position New Zealand will take into UNGASS. (TL-DR: We will again go in as one of the liberal, reformist nations, our own terrible domestic contradictions notwithstanding.)

You can also listen to Sanho's interview with Kathryn Ryan today.

And you can tune in to Story on TV3 at 7pm tomorrow evening for Kim Vinnell's report on the Splore talk – which features Sanho, the very sensible harm reduction advocate Wendy Allison and me, possibly being a bit ranty.