Up Front by Emma Hart

Imagine you're a woman. This will be easier for some of you than others, obviously. Enjoy the easy, it's about to get harder.

You're widowed, and you've been on your own with your kids for a long time when you meet a man. He's charming and funny. He compliments you and makes you feel better than you have for a long time. There's a very attractive dynamic energy about him. He's got the gift of the gab. Better than any of that, he loves you.

You get married. A bit after that, you have a daughter. He dotes on her: it's pretty clear he thinks she pukes sunshine and poops rainbows. He's a wonderful father to her. He can't spend enough time playing with her. He doesn't read to her, he tells her stories, wonderful made-up stories about an invisible orange leprechaun called George whose job is to look after her. He'll come home after a day at work and let her ride around the lounge on his back. And alright, he spoils her a bit, but obviously only because he loves her.

He's not quite so keen on your other children, but that's understandable. It's not easy raising someone else's kids, especially when they're already surly hormonal teenagers. They push him. Of course he's going to lose his temper with them sometimes. Alright, the time he drove one all the way down the two-storey outside staircase by hitting him in the face with a tea-towel, that was probably a bit not okay, but that only happened once. They're old enough to be leaving home anyway – that’s probably best for everyone.

And yes, when he's had a few drinks, he loses his temper. It's easy for you to set him off even when you don't really mean to. But when he goes a bit far, he's always sorry. He's still lovely when he's sober. He only does it because you mean so much to him. He knows he has a problem with the drinking and he's trying to change. It's not easy, but he is trying.

Then one night, you're having an argument in the kitchen when your five-year-old daughter comes in. She pushes her way between you and yells at her father to leave you alone, her little face a picture of righteous indignation. And he hits her. She's only little: she flies right across the room and hits the floor. And he turns to you in a fury and yells, "Look what you made me do!"

Well screw that. It's okay if it happens to you, you can look out for yourself. And you got your boys away, they're safe. But if you can't protect her, and if he can't stop himself hurting the person he loves most in the world? It's time to make it stop.

So you get your daughter and try to leave while your husband clings on to the door of your Austin 1100 and screams abuse at you and your girl curls up in the passenger seat and just screams. You go to your mother's. Two problems there. First, she's a bit of a stickler for lying in beds you've made. Second, she lives way out in the country, so when your husband tracks you down, you know it's going to be a good hour or so before you could get a cop there, if they even bother. So you go back home.

The next time, you go to a friend's house. He finds you there, too. Rather than watch your friend get her indignant certainty smacked off her face, you go back home. You know she's disappointed with you, but better that than have her understand the only way anyone really can.

Anywhere you go, you're going to take trouble with you. You'd put anyone who tried to help you in danger. He knows all of the friends and family you have left to you, and who else could you impose upon like that?

He's pretty angry that you tried to leave, though, and that you've been talking about private things with other people. When you arrive at the police station, at least the state of your face makes them take you seriously. A really nice, and very large, officer goes back to your house and gets your daughter. Then they take you to a Women's Refuge.

He's really mad now, but he can't find you. That's not easy: it means staying away from your friends and your other kids, and keeping your daughter out of school for a while. You have to take sick leave from work. It means being in a strange place and listening to your kid complain about sharing a room with strangers.

But people are great. They keep telling you it's not your fault. There are people who actually understand what you've gone through. They know how to get you help. It isn't long before you have somewhere new to live, and your other kids have a home to come back to. The first night, you have fish and chips on the floor in the dark because there's no power and no furniture and it's great.

Going back to work isn't easy, and neither is seeing him again, which you have to do. You move once because he finds out where you're living from your daughter. You worry about him too, how he'll cope without you, just how self-destructive he'll get. You want him to get help and sort himself out. You still love him. When he dies, you'll grieve for him. You'll tell your daughter what a good father he was to her, and she'll shut the hell up because she knows you don’t want to hear, "No Mum, he was a complete shit, I was always terrified of him, I'm glad he's dead and nobody who could treat you like that was ever a good anything." It's easy for her, it's much more complicated for you.

Still, it was absolutely worth it. You know that for sure the night your daughter calls you to come pick her up from a party in an absolute fury. You find her walking home with her boyfriend running after her arguing with her, but she just gets in your car and leaves. The bruises on her face don't come up until the next day, when she still won't take his calls, no matter how many times he tries to apologise. And you know she's going to be okay.

You can stop imagining now, because that wasn't your story. It's a story that's happening somewhere, though, right now. All the time.

The Women's Refuge Appeal is collecting on the 24th and 25th of July. But you can slip them a twenty via their website right now. It's something you can do, and it's easy.

I believe the Censor's Office in New Zealand does a very good job. While our laws on Obscenity are just as vague and subjective as anyone else's, here they seem to be interpreted very liberally. In Australia, we're sometimes held up as an example of depravity for what our censor allows to go un-banned.

Given the law as it is written, it seems perfectly understandable that the Department of Internal Affairs should at least attempt to regulate internet content. There's no reason objectionable material should get a pass because it happens to be on a website instead of in a book or on a DVD. It's complicated, of course, because the material can be produced in one country, hosted in another, and viewed in a third, and the DIA only has jurisdiction over New Zealand, but they're surely legally obligated to try.

So in 2007 and 2008, the DIA ran a trial filtering program in conjunction with a selection of New Zealand ISPs. If you were with TelstraClear, Watchdog, Maxnet or Ihug in that period, you participated in that trial. But you know that, right? Your ISP told you they were filtering your internet connection, right? The Department of Internal Affairs' budget indicates that filtering will be introduced some time during the 2009/10 financial year. And I'm sure they were planning to tell you before they did it.

We do have details of the scheme, so there's probably nothing to worry about over the free and open flow of information. That's what Thomas Beagle's experience tells you. A few quick* Official Information Act requests and the DIA is perfectly happy to tell you just what it's up to. Sort of.

Thomas's hard work hasn't just provided the information. He's also written it up into two FAQs, general and technical. They provide a clear, easy summary of the information and I highly recommend them for anyone interested in what's about to happen to your internet connection.

It is, I have to say, a very good scheme as these schemes go. They are only blocking child pornography sites, and blocking to the level of individual pages and images rather than whole sites. Signing up to the scheme is entirely voluntary for ISPs. Sites are viewed by actual people, and for a site to be added to the list, three people have to agree that it fits the criteria. Each site is reviewed monthly to see if it should still be on the list. If you attempt to access a blocked site, you will be told that the site is blocked – unlike the similar system in place in Britain. Because traffic only referred to the DIA system if the requested site is on the list, the speed of most traffic should be entirely unaffected.

That sounds so much better than the Australian scheme, right? No wonder there's been so much less fuss.

It is easy to stop people fussing about things if you don't tell them.

So, given everything I've said, why am I still not happy about this? Partly, of course, because I'm a whiny bitch. But also because I'm a consistent whiny bitch.

I'm not the only one. Thomas has concerns. Mauricio Freitas has concerns. The staff at pretty much every café in a 2km radius of our house have concerns about the way my partner and I keep going for coffee and discussing child pornography.

My first concern is that nobody told anybody about this. This letter from TelstraClear certainly wasn't widely-distributed. It also contains a rather interesting statement:

TelstraClear will not be keeping records of any users who attempt to access these sites. This is not an intelligence gathering or covert measure. It is a simple filtering process to make the internet safer for all.

This is absolutely true. The ISP doesn't collect the information. The DIA does. They log your IP number if you try to access a blocked site, for whatever reason.

No laws have needed to be passed. There has been no public debate. The decision to implement filtering came from with the DIA. As far as I am aware, the ISPs which took part in the trial chose not to tell their users that they were doing so.

My second concern is the nature of 'voluntary'. In Britain, the filtering scheme is enforced in this exact way: it's voluntary for any ISP to sign up, or not sign up. And every British ISP signed up. Here, the ISPs that took part in the trial, and the ones that have indicated interest in picking up the filtering scheme (Telecom and Vodaphone) represent 94% of the New Zealand market. Once this is up and running, how many people will be able to access unfiltered internet if they want to?

Then there's 'drift'. I know this is a dubious 'slippery slope' argument, but if you look at the legislation that governs censorship in New Zealand, nowhere is child pornography separated from other objectionable material. Customs already acts in cases of possession of bestiality material – why not filter for that as well? It's clearly objectionable. And if you're doing that, then why not the worst, most violent pornography as well, the kind covered by Britain's extreme pornography law? In fact, why not everything already defined as objectionable?

All 'objectionable' material is banned. In deciding whether a publication is ‘objectionable’, or should instead be given an ‘unrestricted’ or ‘restricted’ classification, consideration is given to the extent, degree and manner in which the publication describes, depicts, or deals with:
• acts of torture, the infliction of serious physical harm or acts of significant cruelty
• sexual violence or sexual coercion, or violence or coercion in association with sexual conduct
• sexual or physical conduct of a degrading or dehumanising or demeaning nature
• sexual conduct with or by children, or young persons, or both
• physical conduct in which sexual satisfaction is derived from inflicting or suffering cruelty or pain
• exploits the nudity of children, young persons, or both
• degrades or dehumanises or demeans any person
• promotes or encourages criminal acts or acts of terrorism
• represents that members of any particular class of the public are inherently inferior to other members of the public by reason of any characteristic of members of that class being a characteristic that is a prohibited ground of discrimination specified in the Human Rights Act 1993.

It's their job, just as much as banning child pornography is. Many other lists of banned URLs, initially set up to combat child pornography, now contain much other material, some of it not sexual at all, some of it not violent. Drift happens. And if nobody told you they were filtering your connection in the first place, how likely are you to be told if extra material is added to the list?

The secret list. Thomas has, very ballsily, attempted to OIA the blacklist. The DIA says the blacklist is around 7000 URLs: for context, the Australian list is around 1400. This could easily be explained by the New Zealand list operating at a greater level of detail, so one site could contribute dozens of URLs to the list, where the Australian list would simply block the whole site. But we don't know that, and we're not allowed to know. The DIA refused to release the list. Thomas has complained to the Ombudsman.

It should also be noted that the DIA is required to make public its list of decisions in regard to other media. If it bans a book or a DVD, you're allowed to know about it. If it bans a website, you're not.

There's a good reason for this, of course. If only some ISPs are using the filter, then if you publish the list, people on other ISPs would be able to use the list to find child pornography. Assuming that people interested in looking at that kind of material don't already know where to find it, or aren't trading it between individuals over peer to peer networks.

The child pornography the DIA is blocking also includes material such as drawings or fiction, where no children were harmed in the production.

Most people won't care, frankly, if their internet connections are filtered. And a lot of people will heartily approve – after all, it's child pornography. The filter is 'making the internet safer for all'. But you should at least know.

*please note that in this context 'quick' may mean 'delayed as long as judiciously possible'

I was in Ophthalmology the other day having an armload of blood tests taken by a very nice woman. She seemed pleased to deal with somebody who was at ease with the process. ("See the tiny scar over the vein on my right arm? That's where you go in. We call it the Blood Door.") She was chatty and helpful and good at what she did. ("Your name looks familiar, have you been in before?") She didn't once comment on my novelty cartoon pupils. Then it was time to go back out into a Christchurch winter ("I won't make you wait here while I write all these up, you go."), so I put on my coat.

Tubes of my blood were momentarily forgotten. "Oh my god, what a beautiful coat!"

It's not the first time I've heard that. My winter coat is, by several miles of daylight, the most complimented thing I have. If you added together all the aesthetic praise I've received for my cat, my games cabinet and my breasts, it still wouldn't come close.

I bought the coat with the first paycheque (by which I mean 'PayPal transfer') I got for writing something. I spent days worth of hours dragging my partner around shops looking for the perfect winter coat. It had to be wool, three-quarter length and single-breasted, a good fit, and most importantly of all, not black.

Seriously, it’s not black. Not even a little bit. My winter coat is scarlet. Like Captain Scarlet or Miss Scarlet or The Scarlet Pimpernel, but a coat. It stands out against the staid gray background of Christchurch in winter like self-expression at a Deb Ball.

It's not my Perfect Coat. That's a tailored Victorian-style purple frock coat. I didn't buy that because it doesn't exist. One day I will be rich, and cause it to exist. Try-hard Goths everywhere will weep with gratitude and use my picture as a screen-saver. In fact, I might well commission my own fashion label, called "Fuck It, It Fits Me". Fuck It will make DD-cup push-up bras, because why the hell wouldn't you? If anyone knows a structural engineer who'll need a job in about 2018, let me know.

In the meantime, though, I have my scarlet coat. Every time I have to go out in a freezing southerly on a day where the sun is just a distant lighter patch of sullen gray, my coat makes me feel better. "Hey!" it says. "Look at me! I'm bright fucking red!" Alright, so I'll never be able to wear it to an All Blacks game, but I can live with that.

My coat seems to make other people happy too. I've lost count of the number of times someone has reacted to the sight of it with delighted surprise. Sometimes it even seems to eclipse any other impression I might make. I was once in a position to help out one of my partner's workmates, and he was trying to remind the guy in question that he'd met me once, a couple of years before. "Oh yeah," he finally said, "I remember her. She was… red."

I even sometimes wonder if my coat is magic. Apart from the time I tore down the entire hem with the heels of my faux-lace-up faux-Victorian boots, it's never so much as dropped a loose thread or shed a button. It never gets dirty even when I take it off, stuff it in a corner and forget about it. And if I should happen to spend a night standing in a smoggy smoker's courtyard making a pack of cigarettes mysteriously disappear using only fire and my mouth, you know how it smells the next day? Faintly of wool. I suspect witch-craft.

In general, I hate clothes shopping with a fiery passion. Any time I find something I'd actually be prepared to wear I do a furtive commando run to the checkout before it turns out to be some kind of nasty trick. I've come to the only logical conclusion, which is that wearable clothes are hidden in shops at random by magic fairies. I'd like to take a moment to thank whichever fairy it was who hid my coat in that Classic Clothing outlet store in Hornby. I wasn't expecting that.

It's with much pride and excitement that Up Front can reveal it has secured its first scoop. Due probably to a mix-up with names, an email intended for Ian Wishart has come to me instead. Claiming to have originated from Lockwood Smith's parliamentary in-box, the email contains a copy of the legendary Gay Agenda.

There are things about the email that indicate it might have genuinely originated from within parliament. For a start, all 320 000 recipients' email addresses are disclosed in the header. Also, the actual agenda is attached as a MS Word document. My team of elite geeks is analysing the revision history as I type, and it's fascinating – particularly the point at which the phrase 'toaster oven' is replaced in the document with 'ipod touch – the pretty purple one'.

After considering the moral dilemma at length and shaking my Sense of Ethics several times, I forwarded the email on to its intended recipient. On later phoning the Wishart household, I was informed that Ian had been so devastated on reading the document that he'd taken to his bed.

"He barely made it through the preamble and affirmation of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi," his wife Heidi told me. "He keeps thrashing about and muttering to himself. Last night he woke up screaming something about Volvos." I was assured that Ian would be publishing a scathing exposé of the Gay Agenda in his magazine Invigilate as soon as he had 'got a grip on himself'.

So my time to undermine the Master was limited. This job was so important it would push even writing Allison Janney slash-fic onto the back burner. (Coincidentally, 'Allison Janney' is item #124 on the Agenda, just after 'make John Barrowman Minister of Foreign Affairs'.)

After contacting everyone on the email list, I managed to find one person who would discuss the Gay Agenda with me – but only if I concealed her identity and interviewed her in the dark, a process which proved more than satisfactory for everyone involved. To further protect her, I've replaced her with an actor called Mark for the rest of this column.

It was, Mark assured me, all true, despite its breath-taking scope. "It's probably not too disastrous that it's coming out now when we're nearly finished. I mean, forty years since Stonewall, what could be left to do? Gays can almost get married, and it's nearly illegal to use someone's sexuality as a defence for murdering them. We figured New Zealand's pretty much sorted: why else do you think we had Helen Clark elected to the U.N.?

"We'd have got further, too, if it wasn't for the Gin and Tonic Fruit Schisms of the eighties. Things would certainly have been simpler if Fran'd had the backing of the Liminalists as well as the Lemonazis."

Not all of the agenda is as straight-forward as simply pushing, well, the agenda. Some of it is impressively Machiavellian. One item in particular was so astounding I just had to get confirmation.

"Well duh," John Tamihere told me, "of course I’m a plant. To be honest I thought we were going to get caught a lot earlier. I mean, we just kept on pushing the envelope, getting more and more puerile and ridiculous. When I made that dickish remark to Simon last week I was thinking 'this'll either bring gay marriage a few months closer or it'll blow my cover completely'. To be honest, I'm glad it's over. The strain of behaving like a drunk fourth-former all the time was really starting to tell."

Having the inside story of the Gay Agenda (or to be fairer the GLITTFAB Agenda) has made a lot of things make sense. A previously-curious lull in Kiwi gay activism is now explained by the designing and construction of Daniel Carter. "Rugby was a problem for us for years," Mark explained. "But once our insider in the NZRFU persuaded them to try to market the game to 'straight women', we were set. Why do you think they train in swimming pools? The 2.0 model was doing really well too, but it seems to have some kind of design fault in the shoulders. We're working on it."

The silent, cunning efficacy of the Gay Strategy is breath-taking. Once you know, it's quite terrifying. There are Queer people everywhere you go. They're in every business, every school, every government department. No wonder Ian Wishart's had to have a little lie down.

I don't normally comment on criminal trials. Unless you're actually there it's very hard to get a solid picture of what's going on. And I wouldn't want to accidentally put Public Address in contempt of court or on the receiving end of a libel suit. In the spirit of not getting Russell a lawsuit as a convalesence present, I'm not saying that Chris Comeskey is a massive jerk. I just didn't call him something else a little more NSFW on Twitter, too.

The guy's just doing his job, right? That job was defending Nai Yin Xue, and he had to do it in trying circumstances, where the public were convinced of his client's guilt before any evidence had been presented.

I understand that, and yet I remember the good old days, when you had to either be gay or a prostitute for your sex life to excuse your murder. Almost the entire defence case centred not on the defendant, but on the victim. An An Liu was found wearing only gloves and a tie around her neck and over her eyes. Therefore, she must have been into kinky sex. Therefore, a couple of other men killed her by accident, put her body in the boot of her husband's car, covered it with her husband's dressing gown, and drove the car back to her husband's house.

It's terrible to cast aspersions on the character of a murder victim, but sometimes it's just necessary. After all, as Comeskey said;

Gloves, nakedness, and the tie tied on like that?... It's the only thing it points to, isn't it?

She was trussed up in a very very unusual way, she was naked, she had gloves on, there was DNA, not only on her underpants and also on her tie.
"That has got to be a huge huge coincidence

See, she had gloves on, that proves she was into erotic asphyxiation. And if she was into that kind of thing, not like a normal person, then she was taking risks, wasn't she? Kinky sex is dangerous, it's just asking to be murdered.

Comeskey argued that An An was a secretive woman who had been awakened sexually. She was enrolled on an internet dating site and there was the wolf remark.
"If that doesn't suggest a young woman of 30 embarking of experimentation and variance, what else does?"

Variance. Nice women don't do that kind of thing. They don't like kinky sex, they aren't 'as sexually furious as a wolf', and they don't have microscopic amounts of male DNA on their clothing. An An Liu was devious, she was a liar, she was sexually voracious and kinky. She was not the sort of woman an all-female jury should be sympathising with.

None of that indicates that it wasn't her husband that killed her – a man who pursued her to Wellington with an axe, and had a previous conviction for assaulting her. Even if you accept Comeskey's remarkable construction of An An Liu's character, it makes Nai Yin Xue more likely to have killed her, not less, surely.

Comeskey didn't originate this line of defence, of course. The case was described as another Peter Plumley Walker, but it wasn't. If anything, it was another Jane Longhurst. Graham Coutts' defence for having murdered Jane Longhurst was that he killed her by accident during an erotic asphyxiation session, to which she consented. She might not have consented to being strangled to death (or having her body kept in a shed for two weeks and regularly visited), but hells, you cross the line from normal, those are the risks you take.

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is dangerous. It's estimated to cause between 250 and 1000 deaths in the U.S. every year. It's so desperately kinky it kills rock stars and British Conservative MPs. But that's auto-erotic asphyxiation – strangling yourself for sexual gratification. Despite the phrase being frequently used in reporting of the case and by Comeskey himself, that's not what he's suggesting. Where there's a partner involved, the death rate from erotic asphyxiation is much lower. Despite its being considered weird and deviant, the effect of asphyxia on sexual arousal is so pronounced it was used as a treatment for impotence.

The An An Liu case wasn't a Jane Longhurst either, though. In that case and the Plumley Walker case, there was no doubt as to who had strangled the victim. The case simply centred on why, and to what extent it was deliberate or careless. In this case, there is no evidence at all to suggest that An An Liu practised erotic asphyxiation. It is an entirely hypothetical construction of Comeskey's.

It's hard to imagine, given the paucity of the defence case, that Nai Yin Xue could appeal successfully. It's easy to imagine, from the post-verdict attitude of both himself and his lawyer, that he might appeal unsuccessfully, and we could have yet another round of victim-blaming and vanilla privilege appeals. In which case, I'll have a much harder time not calling Comeskey a jerk. Or perhaps I should just start a rumour that he likes weird sex.