Poll Dancer by Keith Ng

VATICAN CITY - Speaking in front of a shareholder meeting yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI hinted at a fourth quarter loss for the Church in 2005. Usually a lucrative period coinciding with Christmas, this loss would mark an unprecedented low for the Church and its subsidiaries.

Sources close to the Almighty have said that He is "furious" with the result, and is considering another Great Flood. The source also reports that close advisors, rumoured to include Jesus Christ himself, have been dissatisfied with the Church's lacklustre fiscal performance over the last two centuries, and are now taking the opportunity to call for immediate and radical restructuring at the upper management level, as well as austerity measures until the Church's cash flow situation improves.

Market analysts speculate that the area most likely to be targeted by the restructuring is Hell, aimed particularly at the long-serving but unpopular Prince of Darkness, Lucifer. "Hell has traditionally been a good earner for the Church," said investment theologian Blaise Pascal, "but it has had trouble adapting to the rapidly growing market for eternal damnation. Sinners are going unpunished, and as a result their credibility in the marketplace has taken a heavy blow."

"It's been centuries coming, but now it looks like horned heads are going to roll," adds Pascal.

Speaking on the conditional of anonymity, an agent of Christ has indicated that our Saviour will be pressing for a far more radical approach at the emergency meeting of the Trinity later today. "The fire and brimstone image doesn't accurately reflect the corporate culture of the Church anymore. While we still value our traditional 'divine vengeance' and 'infinite justice' customer-base, we've lost a lot of ground to our New Age competitors in the 'peace and love' area."

Responding to rumours that former German leader, Adolf Hitler, is a leading candidate to replace Satan, the source believed that Jesus Christ is looking for "someone more experienced in corporate management, and less likely to invade the orthodox Russian market".

Restructuring plans proposed at the Second Vatican are also likely to be revisited, after they were aborted shortly after the abolition of Purgatory. The measures include:

* Outsourcing divine retribution against unbelievers to Armourguard.
* Streamlining sins to reduce judgement time.
* Turn Heaven and Hell into competing corporate entities.
* Selling indulgences for all non-cardinal sins through a convenient website.
* Removing boring parts of bible to save printing costs.
* Replacing the Holy Spirit with the more cost-effective Holy Sprite.
* Merge with Islam to corner faith-market.

Freedom to say anything doesn't equate to an obligation to say everything.

Tze Ming's right: except for the lineup one, the cartoons are lame.

But the issue is not the quality of the cartoons, but the point behind them - that is, to challenge Muslim sensibilities by offending them. It is not offensive in aid of a point, its point is to offend; and through offence, to redraw the borders of acceptability in favour of liberal, secular society, against the traditional teachings of Islam.

It was a declaration to the Muslim public that they cannot expect their religious sensibilities to be taken seriously by Western societies. They can practice their religion, but they can't expect others to obey it, too.

And they can't. We don't take Christian sensibilities seriously, so why would we take Muslim sensibilities seriously? We stick statues of the Virgin Mary in condoms, we have crucifixes in urine, we give Jesus a bit-roles in South Park. Jesusmaryandjoseph, we are just a goddamn blasphemous lot.

We have the right to freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to blaspheme; it's a right that I've personally enjoyed on many, many occasions. But having a right to act does not make it right to act. Nobody should be allowed to stop you, but it doesn't mean that what you are doing is necessarily a responsible action or a good idea.

In this instance, what was Jyllands-Posten's goal? To obtain Muslim assent to the liberal democratic social contract by *offending* them into agreement? To make Muslims abandon their dogma by demonstrating that they are powerless to stop it from being contravened?

Jyllands-Posten's original position seems ill-considered, but the subsequent decisions by other publications to reprint the cartoons is more complex. Since its original publication, Jyllands-Posten and Denmark (!!!) has been pressured and threatened. The subsequent reprints was the media circling the wagons around its own, giving them aid to resist the pressure.

From the media's perspective, political and economic pressure, and of course, death threats, are unacceptable responses to free speech, and must be quashed thoroughly, lest such tactics are tried again in the future. It's not a matter of putting the boot in - it's about demonstrating that the media will stand up for itself, and for each other.

The violence and the threats of violence are obviously unacceptable (not to mention stupid, as the subsequent media response shows). But do boycotts and political pressure really fall into the same category?

Regardless of whether those cartoons serve a greater cause, they are offensive. Which, yes, is perfectly permissible in a liberal society. But likewise, people are allowed to be offended by them - that's what offensive means, no? And offended people have the freedom to take their money elsewhere.

Muslims taking offence to those cartoons seem perfectly reasonable (again - the death threats are not). On the other hand, I still think it's rather noble for the media to band together to defend their bit of the liberal society turf.

The issue has moved beyond "was printing the cartoon a good idea?" to "is *not* printing the cartoon a good idea?". It's insensitive of the media to continue to cause offence in defence of freedom of the press, but they've made a call about what's more important to them - and fair enough.

It's a dilemma - if the media succumbs to pressure, then the media will face similar pressures and threats when considering publishing material that may legitimately offend Muslims in the future. It's a battle that needs to be won, if only to set a precedent.

But why is the pressure there? Because the media was unreasonable to begin with.

And why was it unreasonable to begin with? Because there was unreasonable pressure prior to the cartoons...

Time for a bit of de-escalation, eh?

(Legal aside: Blasphemous libel is still illegal in New Zealand, under section 123 of the Crimes Act.)

All this talk of blasphemy is making me blasphemous. So here's one of my own pieces of blasphemous satire, published in Salient in 2003...

--

Christ Caught Drink Driving

UPPER HUTT - Jesus Christ was taken into police custody at approximately 3 am on Sunday morning for suspected drink driving. A police statement said that the inebriated deity was accompanied by fellow Upper Hutt resident, Mary Magdalene, who is a known sex worker.

Christ was stopped by police after he levitated his car for 2 km on top of the Hutt River. He was driving an angelic white 1978 Holden Kingswood at the time of the arrest. Police pursued him for 20 minutes until he exited the vehicle to urinate and the vehicle sank to the bottom of the river. Magdalene was found drowned in the vehicle, but was resurrected.

A subsequent blood test revealed Christ's blood content to be approximately 200,000 ppm, 1,000 times over the legal limit. "The Blood of Christ is a traditional, full-bodied dry red grape wine with a strong oak aroma, and a 20% alcohol content. Everyone knows this, but the police are persecuting [sic] our client simply because he is Jewish," read a statement from Christ's legal representatives, Armageddon, Armageddon and Jehoshaphat.

Christ, son of God, has had a long and troubled past. His first run in with the law occurred 2000 years ago with Roman authorities, who arrested and executed him for challenging the rule of Caesar and claiming to be the King of the Jews. A warrant was later issued for his re-arrest for resisting execution. New Zealand does not have an extradition treaty with the Roman Empire.

Christ later began a successful career in publishing, starring as the main character in his own critically acclaimed book, The Bible. This was later adapted as a popular musical, though it never achieved the success of the original book. Christ's career in film has also been sporadic, playing various bit-parts in the 60s and 70s.

Friends of Christ have revealed that the downturn in his career has driven him to alcoholism and eating disorders. "I've seen him bless a whole bathtub and turn it into wine. Sometimes, he'd pull bits off himself and start eating it," said one disciple, who wished to remain unnamed.

Upon hearing the news, United Future leader Peter Dunne further condemned the popular religious figure: "As a high-profile leader in the faith community, Jesus [Christ] had a responsibility to set a moral example for our children. If I wasn't out of stones, I'd throw one at him."

Some experiences define your perception of a place. I visited China just before Christmas, and what defined it was when a kid, around 6 or 7 years old, came and grabbed my leg, begging for money.

It was in Suzhou, a famous tourist spot about an hour from Shanghai.

I'm not sure if it made it worse, but the kid was very "professional"; he was posted on a bridge, so there was no way around him; I saw him "mark" me from about 20m away, but didn't make a move until I was two steps away; he grabbed my leg and refused to let go until I gave him money.

One passing local grinned at how utterly helpless I was against this kid. I guess I was a little bemused, too, knowing that this was routine that he regularly practiced with, I assume, some success.

Later on, at a famous historcal estate (a retreat for scholars and A-list cultural elites in centuries past), an old woman was scrounging through the trash looking for plastic bottles (to be recycled for money - very, very little money).

Back in Shanghai, a man who had suffered severe burns to his face was prostrated on the streets begging for money.

--

Nobody really *begs* in New Zealand. On rare occasions, people ask for money, but really, I'm not sure if the concept of "begging" - as in geniunely grovelling, without a shred of dignity - even exists in New Zealand.

I swear to you - see it once, understand what it means for poverty to grind a human soul into nothing, then you will appreciate what the welfare state has done for New Zealand.

--

They say that Shanghai is the jewel of China. It was terrifying. I wouldn't say that about many cities (granted, I haven't been to Bagdad lately), but Shanghai is more than a mess, it's an omen.

As the brochures say, the shopping in Shanghai rivals any city in the world. The neon-glazed streets were full of opulant baubble from the wanky brands of the first-world, modelled by skinny blonde models, in abundance and variety to rival any modern city in the world.

It's the carrot that's dangled in front of the city's donkey - the educated, white-collar middle-class. They drive the engine of capitalism that runs the city, and they in turn are driven by the relentless consumerism of the city.

Shiny watches, senselessly sexualised cellphones, miscellaneous trinkets on skimpily-clad models... The tabacco companies, of course, have been very successful. About three-quarters of the population smokes. The other quarter are lighting a cigarette or buying some.

Even getting on a regular commuter train was a near-stampede. A few older women were screaming out as they were crushed between the crowds and the barriers, while others were giving as good as they got nearby. The place was dynamic alright - a perpetual state of pandemonium.

(To be cont.)

You know what's great? Readers. And what's better than readers? Intelligent, educated, *interested* readers, such as the readership of Public Address. Quit blushing now - you know you rock.

Even you right-wingers. Even you dirty hippies. Well, maybe not the anonymous flamers, but you regular angry-folks are okay.

Seriously, you've been a great audience to write for. Poll Dancer was a strange, unplanned experiment in online New Journalism, and a readership like Public Address' was the perfect petri dish for it.

Poll Dancer was originally conceived as a travelogue through the election campaign, with portraits of the colourful locals and reviews of the food, but pretty soon, it became an excuse for me to get into shin-digs and get people to talk to me. It became the only blog that regularly used its own primary sources, and that changed the game entirely.

It meant a lot more work, but it also meant the ability to talk about things that nobody reported on, and it also meant being able to - in new, exciting, entirely original and very public ways - fuck-up.

It's important for me to acknowledge these embarrassing booboos, and it seems only appropriate that I follow the fine Parliamentary tradition of doing it during this post-Christmas lull, when nobody gives a toss.

Booboo #1: 30 April, 2005
The election will be held on 2nd of July.
As Kenny says: "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." This one should definitely have been folded.

I heard this information from a friend, who had heard it from someone working in Parliament, who overheard it in his office. When Scoop asked me how sure I was about it, my answer was: "Not very. It's a punt."

If I was my editor, I would have smacked me over the head and binned it without a second thought. As it was, I had put the odds of it being true at around 30%, but I figured that everyone had an election-date prediction, most of them end up being wrong, so why not take a punt on a long-shot?

It was a juvenile call that fell through mercifully quickly.

Booboo #2: 21 June, 2005
Labour will drop a bomb(shell) on the National Party conference.

It didn't start off as a bad call. I had heard from three separate Labour Party people that "something big" was going to happen on a particular weekend, and that weekend just happened to be the National Party conference weekend. Speculating that the two were related was pretty reasonable.

In a 1261 word post, 125 words were spent speculating that this bombshell was going to be some kind of dirt, a la Benson-Pope. One mystified Political Editor confirmed/convoluted the issue, telling me that he was the designated "hitman" for the job - but that he'd only heard that second-hand!

The next day, at the National Party conference, I found out that a lot of people actually read Poll Dancer, because people - many from the Press Gallery - kept coming up to me asking what this dirt that was going to be released was. Then the PM's Press Secretary called me up, rather angrily, and demanded that I stopped spreading this false rumour that the Labour Party even *had* a dirt file on National MPs.

As it turned out, Helen announced the apology from the Israelis for the spies on the Sunday. It may or may not have been the "something big", but regardless, I felt pretty dumb, announcing that something which required secrecy to happen would happen.

The glib "Deep Dark Secret" reference rang excruciatingly true.

Booboo #3: 23 August, 2005
"**NATIONAL IS FUNDING THE ENTIRE TAX CUT PACKAGE OUT OF A $12.8b INCREASE IN DEBT OVER FOUR YEARS** Waaaaaaaa!!!!"

At $9.6 billion, this beats that time TelstraClear tried to overcharged me by $1,700.

The worst thing about this one is that it was actually a tiny, technical mistake on what was otherwise a pretty good find. A $3.2b find, in fact. I originally spotted an ambiguous use of language on a National press release:

"Gross sovereign issued debt is forecast to be approximately 1% higher relative to GDP than currently by the end of the forecast period."

Did "currently" mean higher than currently forecasted, or higher than current debt? It was a pretty fiddly bit of public accounting semantics, but the difference was several percent of GDP - i.e. Billions of dollars.

I actually had it right up until this point. Unfortunately, I was using 2004 figures as the baseline, while the numbers were based on 2006 figures, which means that my estimate was off by two years, and, um, $9.6b.

When I reached my $12.8b conclusion, I made numerous calls to do sanity-checks. In hindsight, starting a phone conversation with "hey, have you got a moment? I think I've just found where the National Party is hiding 12.8 billion dollars" is not the best way to get an objective answer; and also with the benefit of hindsight, nobody outside of Treasury was going to be able to tell me, over the phone, that I had the wrong baseline year.

I tried to contact John Keys, who told me through David Farrar that I was wrong, but he didn't say why.

Here's where being a lone gunman sucks. Sitting alone in the office at night, Queen pumping on the stereo, psyched up because I'd just deciphered a whole bunch of accounting jibberish, there's nobody there to say "oi - slow down". Quite the opposite - the immediacy of the medium screams for you to do things now, always.

It's not that I was stupid, but it's just so easy to get caught up the story. You really do need someone whose job it is to look over your shoulder to pour some cold water on you and scrutinise what you're doing.

I convinced myself that the broad strokes of the story was right. Me, myself and I unanimously agreed that I needed to put it online right there and then.

Ate my words for breakfast the next morning. Not nutritious.

Now I know: This is why you ask subjects for comment, and this is why you wait for it.

I was surprised and grateful that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy didn't take the opportunity to stick the boot in. In fact, a few were rather nice in complimenting the speediness and transparency of my retraction.

I think it's vital to acknowledge mistakes, but indeed, it would be better not to make them.

I think the degree of transparency possible with a combination of online publishing (connecting to sources, documents, recording, transcripts, articles) and New Journalism (taking the reader through the journalistic process; detailing assumptions, extrapolations, uncertainties - acknowledging the weaknesses) is incredibly powerful. It's a form that allows readers to scrutinise the information themselves, as opposed to the traditional model where readers are completely dependent on the ability of the journalist, judged by their credibility.

I had, up until the last incident, underestimated the degree to which trust and credibility still mattered in cyberspace. As much as transparency can lead to credibility, trust in an individual still play a large, if not the largest, role in how people judge an information source. Maintaining this trust still relies on old-fashioned journalistic discipline and adherence to process.

It's been a long year, but ultimately a very good year. And here I am, talking about old-fashioned discipline and following the rules. Surely, if I sound like such an old fogey, I *must* have learnt something. Right?

It's not that the WTO wasn't listening, but that the protesters weren't saying anything. Apart from vacuous slogans ("Down, down, WTO"), the protesters - especially the Korean farmers - didn't say what they wanted. If they did, the whole protest would have grounded to a halt in stunned silence.

Korea is, of course, a developed country. The Korean farmers are recipients of heavy government subsidies. They say that, if those subsidies are removed, they cannot sustain their businesses.

In short, they make their living by using the economic leverage of their rich government to get one-up on farmers from developing nations, in *exactly* the same way as American and European farmers, who everyone so readily caricatures as fat white men prospering at the expense of poor black people.

(Except, unfortunately for the Korean farmers, they don't hold the electoral colleges of swing states that elects their president.)

If several thousand American farmers came to Hong Kong and fucked some shit up to demand the continuation of their privilege at the expense of their counterparts in developing countries, I can imagine the international disgust that would ensue.

This is what the Korean farmers did.

But nobody realised that the Korean farmers were pro-subsidies, and I'm not sure if the Korean farmers realised that all the farmers from developing countries (who weren't there because the idea that they could afford to fly is preposterous) were the driving force against farming subsidies, rather than the Rich White Folks.

As for the assorted socialists and anarchists, I'm not if they realised that everyone else made their living, meager or otherwise, off international trade. Oh sure, everyone might be better off if we dismantled the system of international trade, but they'll just have to weather through a wee period of "structural realignment" that would involve them eating cotton for the next five years.

By the end, I was terribly uninspired by the whole thing. Ended up missing the outright rioting on Saturday, which was a shame - the police had upgraded from the pocket-sized mace to the family-sized bottles and drenched everyone in it. Sam Graham got maced a bit, but says it wasn't so bad, unlike the tear-gas.

The Koreans were resourceful and tactically savvy. They surprised police by (shock, horror) not following the designated route, and managed to break through thin lines of non-riot-geared police and run amok in the streets, which forced the riot police to play catch-up for ages. They kick the metal bars off the barriers and used them as clubs, threw what was left of the barriers, formed a diamond with other barriers and used it as a battering ram (looked cool, but wasn't very effective). Guess they won't be using them next time, then.

Ah, loyal metal crowd-control barrier, how I shall miss jumping over thee.

In the aftermath, people in Hong Kong are not impressed. 60-odd police were hospitalised with light injuries and the property damage is nothing a big clean-up crew can't fix, but people don't appreciate having to evacuate their homes and their shops because there's a friggin' riot going on outside. Moreover, the leaders of many of the Korean groups pledged to follow the law and protest peacefully when they first arrived.

Lawful and peaceful protests don't involve battering rams.

(And if they did, they'd turn the barriers upside-down first so that there's less friction.)