Scotland

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braveheart
Scotsman flirting.

My thing on Scottish independence and its frightening links with New Zealand. 

My hobby, the study of politics, is pretty lame. Like stamp-collecting without the emotional highs and lows. It used to be even more boring. When I first went to university, there was us and the Communists looking over the fence at each other. With the really big powers too frightened to do anything much or start a war unless it involved brown people living in caves or bamboo huts. But then the world started to come apart at the seams and it got a lot more interesting.

Case in point is Scotland and its bid for freedom from England. They are having a referendum on it on 18 September and the polls suddenly have the vote neck and neck. This is amazing and not just to politics nerds. There may well be a new country called Scotland, with a border and passports and an army and navy and air force painted with the St Andrews Cross.

There is panic in England. The pound is dropping like it’s taken up parachuting. UK Prime Minister David Cameron is on an emergency trip up north to try and talk the Scots off the ledge. The Leader of the Opposition, Ed Milliband is going too. Everyone with money and power is saying it’s a bad idea and making very thinly veiled threats about what they’re going to do to Scotland if it doesn’t toe the line. I don’t think they are helping much.

Scotland will not be able to join the EU, they say. Something Scots and an enormous number of English people hate being in. The big banks and financial service providers will have to relocate to England they warn. Scots don’t have to think too far back to remember a time when these are things that had the world at the edge of ruin. The UK’s nuclear-armed subs will have to find somewhere else to be based instead of Faslane on the Clyde, they claim. “Oh dear,” one imagines the naturally sarcastic Scots replying, “that’s definitely something we had not thought of and will give us cause to reconsider.” Both Cameron and Milliband are disliked and distrusted in historically high numbers by Scots.

I have to admit I have a dog in this fight. My family are Scottish from as far back as writing goes. So, yes, it’s a bad idea financially, Scotland takes more from England than it gives. As it stands, people will be worse off. That’s just one measure of how much it will hurt. There will be new things to buy and new people to hire, all at a time when the national income will be plunging into a hole. But, dammit, the Russians will probably loan them the cash in return for leasing the old English nuke base, and it will be … Scotland.  It will be like Germany after WW2 for a generation, grim and poor, but it will have its own identity at last and I think the impetus of that will galvanise its people.

There are interesting and weird parallels from my old home in New Zealand. There are calls for bits of it to be independent, given back to Maori rule. It’s impossible – too small and too mixed up and a Jamie Oliver 30-minute recipe for war if you’ve ever seen one.

A namesake of David Cameron’s had a hand in making NZ history. General Sir Duncan Cameron led the British army that steamrolled Maori fighters halfway down the North Island in 1863. He won and quit, disgusted that the land he had taken was used for the benefit of property developers.

PM David Cameron won’t have that kind of Road to Damascus conversion; that class of man of honour wouldn’t last 10 seconds in modern politics. Which is part of the reason his country may break up. The PM is the worthy figurehead of a decaying system that has led Scotland into useless wars and ruinous speculation and submission to an alien European culture. It’s not a good idea on his terms for Scotland to part ways with England, but his terms didn’t get ordinary Scots too much that mattered to them. So it might be time to chuck all that and dream again.

Lexus Solipist

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Lol. I wrote this about a million years ago. Things are different and much better now. But, in the spirit of car reviews getting ten thousand times the page views of my musings on the existential threat to Western civilisation from Isis, here you go. 

lexus-sc-430-06
Nothing smart-arse to say about this thing. If you buy it, it will improve your life. Sad fact.

This is a creative country, and since most of us work on some kind of production line, the excess creativity spills over into our driving. Take this 20-year-old Honda. Number three in a series of three slower cars I am passing, on a passing lane that curves to the right. We are alongside maybe 100 metres from the end of the lane when, because he is a wild and crazy artist type, following his own star and bound to no man and no man’s road rules, he drifts into my lane. There is another passing car behind me, and my safest option becomes to take a blind corner on the wrong side of the road at Prime Ministerial speed. Later on, chain-smoking at a country cafe, I think about this and what a couple of greybeard bike guys were telling me just yesterday. We were talking about why motorbike riders die so much compared with scooter riders. Both kinds of bike were hard to see, both offered no protection, both were vulnerable to the classic car-pulling-out-in-front accident; a spine snapper at pretty much any speed above a fast trot. Yet motorbike riding was, as far as anybody could say, much more likely to get you killed. The bike guys had ridden both types for years so seemed like the people to ask why. They said that even thought a bike has superior handling to a scooter, it was more dangerous. “A modern motorbike”, said the guy who had been riding for 44 years, “Is a .357 magnum. A young guy can get on a motorbike that will do 300kmh. 0 to 100 in 3 seconds. When you have that type of speed it is like you are in an F16 and all those cars are like slow moving bombers…” I nodded and smiled. That sounded about right. I could imagine it being right. But only now did I really understand how right it was. The Lexus SC 430 is so motorbike-like in terms of its power and agility, not to mention its size (it has a back seat a small amputee could squeeze into, you can touch the rear window from the driver’s seat) that it is not a car you want to get in if you don’t have a solid philosophy of life. And it must be a proper, post-western enlightenment philosophy, not a Nike slogan or a religion. Let me explain. It is not a hard car to drive. It is a 4.3 litre V8 that your granny could immediately hop in and manoeuvre and park and get from wherever grannies come from to wherever they go easier and safer than she would in her thirty-five-year old 120Y. But it is also not a car for a mumble-mumble-year-old guy with a teenage Japanese kamikaze girl in a tank top as co-pilot and a world-view that amounts to ‘Survival of the Luckiest’. Because it will seduce the (notional) mid life party dude the same way a motorbike (or teenager) will and leave him a smoking, twitching heap in a ditch. Unless his head is screwed on very tightly and anchored by some sort of belief system that can handle unlimited power. The waitress at the cafe is a gangle of limbs garnished with acne. Without prompting she offers “A cigarette and a milkshake. The perfect start to the day”. The Japanese is preening somewhere. The waitress and I talk, eventually she nods at the Lexi: “My favourite car”, she says. You can’t blame her. Chicks dig leather. Chicks love being able to stretch out their hand and have it fall on exactly the right thing that has been positioned in exactly the right place. Chicks marvel at the way the steering wheel folds and unfolds when you turn on the car. Chicks think the convertible roof is the coolest. Chicks will play with the coffee holder, unfurling like a transformer robot from the centre console, for hours. I like all these things too. The only thing chicks and I don’t like is the crap plastic veneer. Mercedes, Jaguar and now et tu Lexus. You pay, in this case, $165,800 for a car and they put reflective plastic in it. It is probably called something like novalight or crystalflame but it is plastic and it flickers light into the eyes so much you think the centre console is on fire. It is a mysterious and bizarre fashion in luxury cars, akin to building penthouses with outside toilets. This is Lexus’s first attempt at making a sports car for their luxury line. You can imagine the Japanese designers standing in the middle of disassembled Jags and Mercs scratching their heads over the cheap plastic. Turning it this way and that, pushing up their glasses and rubbing their noses. Then shrugging their shoulders and ordering a container load because that is what they are doing in Europe. The waitress and I go for a spin. Chicks appreciate a car so insulated that nothing outside seems real, noisy trucks are mute and 60 kph seem like reverse. “It’s your own world in here”, she says. The trap exactly. A square peg hits a square hole. It was my own world this morning attempting a legal but needless overtake in this car, smooth and fast and quiet as a downhill ski run, just because it was so easy. But we’re not ultimately alone here, me and the rich and the motorcycling F16 pilots lost behind their visors, and she’s not going to get a drive. The Japanese thinks there is a central contradiction in the philosophy of a low-slung convertible. “If it was a real summer car, you could drive it with no pants on”, she says. This part of Auckland is the home of the dirty old Prelude. Inevitably with five people in it. Without exception, people who have four other people in their Prelude think their Prelude is a racecar. Even if most of those other people are unrestrained children. But it doesn’t worry me anymore. I can sit back here and gloat. I’ve got the muscle to twist any likely challenger into a balloon animal. I know it and that is all that matters. As the Buddha should have said: A man with a gun in his pocket is no taller if he holds it in his hand. It is a luxury ride, and as such the soft suspension wallows a bit on the hardest curves. A 911 or the new Jag would blow it to bits, but I still prefer the Lexi and its Oriental refinement; a MIG 25 is faster than a Concorde, but a stewardess won’t bring you a cocktail on the MIG. And at the end of the day you still have to get out and walk after you park either of them. The Japanese likes the coffee thing, the steering wheel thing, the inspector gadget roof thing. But she is a good sort, with an unerring moral compass. She is happy enough to get back in the faithful Corolla. “Whee!” she decides,  “It’s nice, but it is just a fun thing. You really don’t need it”.

Fair pay for fair work or we all become muslims.

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The Post saw fit not to put this online. Perhaps it was shit, or perhaps they thought it would spark a revolution. I like to think the latter. 

(As an aside, my page views spiked an actual 70 fold with the Jaguar review, below, albeit off a low base. Lol and gives me both hope and despair that we all want something good, be it beautiful automotavia or economic justice. :-) 

anarchists
May have a point. Though most will be insufferable wankers trying to get with the cute chick in the front.

Barack Obama is almost as good working a live mike as the insurmountable Ronald Reagan. So when the opportunity comes to talk to the country freestyle in the annual State of the Union address in January, it’s a big deal. A chance to lay it down straight out to the people direct. Obama used his time to say he would devote 2014 to working on income inequality.

He said (and imagine this in his Church cadence and style with each word before a pause delivered with the authority of a threatening God): “Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled”. Inequality, he believed, was “the defining challenge of our time”.

Many, (me), thought all this could be helped a lot by not spending 55 percent of your Government’s discretionary budget on the military. I’m not an economist, but then I’m also not in desperate hock to the Chinese, the owner of full-to-the-brim jails or a yard full of homeless people.

Obama though, was on to a global thing. He met the Pope for an inequality summit. Francis had already called for action against an economic system that “tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits”. Thomas Piketty and his new book on inequality came along at the right time and the relatively unknown professor at the Paris School of Economics was raised to the heights of intellectual superstardom overnight.

Some said it didn’t matter, because everyone was getting richer, just that the rich were doing it faster.  

But the doors are shutting on pulling yourself up too, said Obama, with the American dream of upward mobility cruelled for many.

The highly educated now mostly marry the highly educated and have highly educated kids. Item one, BH Obama (Columbia and Harvard) and  ML Obama nee Robinson (Princeton and Harvard) plus their kids Malia and Natasha (good and very private schools and  no doubt Harvard eventually). 

The cost of university has sky-rocketed in the US. To about half the average wage per year at a top school.  A thing the curious Abbott Government seems to want for us, as it cuts funding and deregulates fees.  In terms of equality, a bit like lending your perfectly tuned car to the neighbourhood kids to do burnouts.

Australia otherwise though, has few complaints. Last year the Treasury said “income inequality in Australia looks to have increased  relative to the OECD average, between the mid-1990s and today.”  But, also that everyone has in fact got richer, mainly due to Australia digging things up and selling them to the Chinese and spreading the profits around to people who do the actual work.

Jobs with good pay helped the most but the tax system did its bit said Treasury. “The poorest 20 per cent of households in Australia receive 12.4 times the amount of cash benefits than the richest 20 per cent of households — the highest ratio in the OECD …”

Horribly, this is half again as much as is redistributed to my fellow New Zealanders by their government, and yet another reason not to let us have welfare without ten years of tax contributions first. If you think you have problems with starving Afghans arriving by the boatload, just wait and see what happens if you extend generous entitlements to Kiwis.

Swiss banks know money and a report from Credit Suisse last year showed Australia as the 12th least unequal country out of the 174 then existing. NZ is 52 spots behind. 

Professor Peter Whiteford from ANU has spent a life studying these things. He factored in wealth, stuff we own, to the equation. He reckons this: “the pillars of egalitarianism in Australia were high wages, high home ownership and low unemployment. If we want to regain this position, we need to ensure that unemployment remains low and that low-income earners are able to buy into affordable housing”

Australia is lucky and fair and should probably try and stay that way. Good things tend to become the opposite if not maintained. As the Buddha would have said if he had a stove and a kitchen; a watched pot may not boil, but it doesn’t set the curtains on fire either. 

Jaguar on the loose.

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A blast from the past. Something I wrote when younger and different. More than a decade ago. 

Jagged edge.
Jagged edge.

Mad magazine used to have a segment called something like “Good news … bad news”. As in “Beyoncé called … but she’s pregnant!” There’s an echo of that with “I’m driving a Jaguar … but it’s a station wagon!” The X-type Estate is Jaguar’s first wagon, to compete with Audi’s A6, the Alfa Romeo 156, and BMW’s “sports” wagons. The idea is that it will be used by US couples to take the tykes and the skis and the dog to outdoorsy-type places.

But, for the more refined, it is also just the thing to take up to the country place. My country place is nestled in wild woods and served by roads intestinal in their curves and sliminess. Usually I tackle those roads in a lightweight Japanese car. So the Jap/Jag difference is noticeable first in the weight of the steering.

The Jag feels as if it is dragging a plough, if ploughs came with a 172kW, three-litre V6 attached and an endless fire-hose of acceleration to turn on. It never seems to reach any limit – mainly because there is always something: bush-hippie vans, planet-mulching 4WDs and cars worth less than $100,000, in the way.

The engine purrs like a Bond girl during these slow kilometres: “Bring on the next Labour government” it seems to say, “and their harsh vehicle emission laws. This time next year I want nothing out here harder to pass than struggling buses full of dreary commuters.”

Despite gathering impatience, I never have a “Go around power, please” moment the whole time in the Jag. Given its freedom in the bush, it corners like a jet-powered train, and soon seems to be reading the road ahead. This suggests some form of hidden artificial intelligence, far more advanced than a car needs. After a while, it becomes obvious what is going on. Jaguar is not something you drive. Jaguar is an indoctrination class, something you sit in and that absorbs you into an alternate history where Churchill’s dream of a united British Commonwealth came to fruition, where the Chinese swapped Hong Kong for all the opium they could do, and India wanted bread more than freedom. Where the Union flag waves over the world at the dawn of a second British century.

In support of this, exhibit one is the audio system. It is a top-of-the-line, eight-speaker Pioneer outfit, whose sound can be optimised for the driver, the front-seat passenger or the whole carload. Steering-wheel-mounted thumb controls mean no more advertising, bad songs or DJ prattle ever. Everything should sound good on this, and it does, but some things sound great, the greatest-sounding things being British bands – Led Zep, the Who and the rolling militaristic beats of pseudo-Brit Beatles knock-off group the Knack.

Extant US culture expresses itself in a 17-year-old boy racer blasting LA gangsta-rap at Auckland’s Pt Chev lights. An alternate British century promises a cold-eyed, middle-aged super elite ripping up a deserted twilight landscape (around the odd cart full of the poor) to the thuds of a perfectly rendered “My Sharona”. Colonial triumphalism at 100 watts per channel. If it came with a Union Jack folded under the heated-leather conformal seats, I would dig the flag out and stick it on the bonnet.

Providing a less-emotional counterpoint is co-pilot Phil the JagNut. His hobby is rescuing Jaguars, usually from someone’s paddock, and putting them back together. He has owned almost every model at one time or another. Several exquisite “cats” grace his driveway.

He approaches the car as a connoisseur, beginning with a walk around. It’s undistinguished, he says, by any particular feature except the flashy mag wheels, which are like after-market add-ons favoured by spendthrifts.

“The tapered shape evokes the wonderful, graceful saloons of Jaguar’s heyday – the Mk10 and 420G. It is not a big car and it won’t compete with the full-sized wagons produced to assist the migration of a whole family from one Australian state to another. On the other hand, being more compact, it won’t daunt less confident drivers.”

Phil likes the trademark strakes on the front – Jag types call them “claws” – and the size of the thing. “The bonnet may be the shortest seen on a Jaguar and shows just how compact a body the V-engine design can allow,” he says.

He expects the drive train, brakes and suspension to be up to spec, but as we set out he asks on behalf of the non-Jag-nut, “What can it give me that is not already available – sometimes for considerably less investment, from Audi, Alfa Romeo or even from Subaru?”

His test notes: “The engine has more than enough urge to get off the mark and through the traffic as neatly as required. The automatic transmission shifts smoothly, as expected, and the trademark Jaguar J-gate allows any gear to be selected in a way reminiscent of a manual box, to suit either performance demands or to assist in maintaining road grip and the engine-braking function on downhill runs. The driver’s seat impresses, especially as it quickly moulds itself to give a secure, huggy grip.

“Railway lines, potholes and ‘traffic-calming’ speed bumps can almost be ignored as the X-type’s suspension shows off its ready control.

“The combination of current tyre technology and all-wheel drive mean that this cat would not screech its claws even when pushed hard on a wet road.”

In short, it’s a good ride, but as everyone uses the same engine management software these days, at $102,000 you are paying maybe $30,000 extra for a badge.

Phil likes the interior. I and others hate it. Whatever space-age name they want to call that plastic fascia on the dash, it’s not wood. The car has also been widely panned for its lack of Jaguarness from some angles. And production was plagued by build-quality problems. It isn’t really setting the world on fire.

In fact, the X-type Estate marks the end of an empire. The company, now a division of Ford, is in trouble, the premium car market squashed by the migration of the ignorant rich to 4WDs. Jag once determinedly made untouchable getaway cars for smooth speedsters, even while Mercedes and BMW sold out to the colourless with their family-friendly wagons. Now the Brits have joined that donkey conga line, too.

Jaguar has sold its Formula One operation to a soft drink company, and, for purists, the closing of the iconic Browns Lane plant in Coventry marked the moment the heart ceased to beat.

But you should still buy one. Why? Because until the Maori/Celtic people who largely determine this country’s culture can produce their own quality car, it represents our automotive heritage. Admit it, somewhere in your genes you know a good British thing is just a little bit better than a good Japanese or American or German thing. None of them can really wear a tuxedo the way you can. So go ahead and write that cheque, buy the badge, fly your flag, and rule the world again.

 

The Iraq dreaming

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militant
The army of Salvation.

IN the back of the Welsh Guard’s pink landrover, the English officer had a map of Basra.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked.

The year was 2003 and the big tank war was over. There was still gunfire almost nonstop and new bodies every morning, and everyone was armed.

British soldiers had died in guerilla attacks and within four years they would pull back to a tight ring at Basra airport, rocketed and sniped constantly. But at Christmas in the first year there was a lull. I pointed to a dense-packed bunch of lines on the map.

The Brits were tooling round in their unfortunately named ‘Snatch’ rovers. Shipped from Northern Ireland with the anti-terrorist free-call hotline for that province still writ large on their sides. They were a hazard.

All the glossy brochures from their makers and the million-dollar contracts had produced a thing equipped inside with exposed bolts and more sharp edges than a kitchen wizz.

They came with a roof hatch and I stood in it next to a gunman as we pulled into the block. Kids were playing war with bits of wood and welcomed us, laughing and smiling, throwing rocks at our heads. It was their sport, said the Welsh soldiers, without disapproval.

We had travelled past nice houses, their 2m walls topped with broken glass.

But the slum was a mess. The sewerage system had stopped working months back. Every empty building was full of poo. In between the piles of garbage, the roads, more hole than pot, were full of puddles of some sickly blue-green fluid, like liquid disease.

A crowd of dirty boys, smiles as wide as their skulls, surrounded us. A nine-year-old produced a candid picture of a ridiculously endowed woman for whom he made the dubious claim of being his sister.

“Jiggy, jiggy” he said, the slang current at the time for the act of love. The young Welsh troops collapsed in laughter.

The kids were Shiite’s from a Shiite city that had suffered under Sunni Saddam. They would be the right type and the right age now to be the Shiite troops bundled into a ditch and executed on camera by the Sunni ISIS last week.

My first trip to the Middle East wasn’t long before. It brought the first sight of something that isn’t talked about much.

We were zipping down the Egyptian coastal off to visit Kiwis resident at El Alamein. They had been here since the ’40s, mostly farmers and labourers, practical young men. All dead, side-by-side in the only spotlessly clean public space I ever saw in the whole of Egypt.

The road was set back about 500m or so from the sea. On the coastal side, filling the space from the road to the ocean for kilometre after kilometre were garish villas. All walled, with watchtowers. All empty, the holiday homes of the rich.

On the other side of the road lived the locals. Men watched women work, donkeys predominated in bare yards outside tiny houses like a loose arrangement of concrete blocks.

I thought, if I was Muslim, and faced living like that across the road from well-off holiday-makers all my crappy life, I’d pick up a rock too. Also if I was Baptist, or Buddhist, or a radical secular humanist.

Blaming the slaughter in Iraq and Syria on religion alone may not be enough. Trillions in US dollars passed through Iraq and Afghanistan without sticking. Billions more have been corralled by corrupt leaders.

A major part of the ISIS success is down to the professional Sunni troops it recruited after they were sacked by Shia when the Americans left.

Back at the Welsh camp there was a bomb. One of four dropped on the telecoms building during the war.

The others had gone off and the multistorey building was rubble. But one had tunnelled off somewhere and was dead or sleeping.

The army didn’t know and couldn’t find it. Naturally, they built a base on top of it. The well-educated officer in charge of the section was more concerned about what his girlfriend in his London flat might be doing with his sports car. I complimented him on his team of young and good-humoured, buzz-cut killers.

The officer laughed, it was easy, they were natural-born infantry.

“They’re all from the same shit hole block of flats in Swansea,” he said.

 

Rape story and trial (of me).

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Firstly, I wrote this…

 

angry

Outside Taupo Youth Court no-one wants to give their name, inside most names have to remain secret.

Everything about the accused is suppressed except this: he is 16, a male, and will be back in this room on January 12. He does not want to apply for bail. He wears a T-shirt and has bare feet.

The victim is five and foreign, her family surrounded now by an aching love that renders $52,000 and counting and more teddy bears and flowers than can be kept.

She was attacked while she slept in a caravan at Turangi’s Club Habitat motor camp on December 21.

There is a crowd interested in the teen, too. Many are right by the side gate, bolshie and mouthy. They call him a paedophile and an animal and tell him he will be judged.

“It was a five-year-old-girl,” yells one simply – hate in the tone. One wishes for rotten fruit and veg, she’s never done this before. “Evil” is her verdict.

A couple came from Palmerston North “to see what a piece of s..t looks like”. There is talk of the death penalty. He has a small camcorder up a big sleeve, the footage due for some website.

Another woman shyly receives congratulations on yelling something particularly cutting, but takes off with her little dog before she can be questioned.

Then there are others across the road among the trees. Just standing, quiet, arms folded. It is unnatural and spine-pricking primal. They stare bullets. There are big corn-fed police on the front door and they ignore the side noise and flat stare straight back into the tree people, unblinking.

Family and whanau are there too and have nothing to say. It is a funeral to them. Mum looks like she can’t believe it is happening. Someone yells for some kids to shut up, “f… ya”.

One guy looks so much like prison he’s only lacking a white paper suit. He seems best avoided until he approaches and starts asking questions. He is not about the accused, he is here to support the little girl’s family, he’s local Tu Whare Toa Iwi and hoping his community is going to be safe over the rest of the holiday.

A young couple have a baby in their back seat, a massive yellow super-soaker propped next to him. They are from Turangi, have rumours that can’t be repeated but seem plausible.

They are shocked their town (a Mongrel Mob “retirement village” where they believe their cousins occasionally stabbing each other is not that awful) could birth something this dank.

Another local tells us the “perpetrator” of the crime is filthy and disgusting. But in the worst thing to happen today, qualifies it. “Who,” she says, “goes to another country and leaves kids on their own?”

Pre-show, Detective Inspector Mark Loper had a word. He had the usual praise for hard work and a quick catch, but then went off script. “New Zealand society needs to have a good look at itself,” he said.

It’s over and the media are leaving and the cops are disappearing but the family huddle together on one seat outside the court. Seeming not to know what to do next.

Just above them the New Zealand flag has ripped and hung up on one edge of its pole. It fills, billowing in the wind, reaching up into a light that brightens the grey clouds only at the top, like it wants to set sail to somewhere far away.

Then, this happened …

Case Number: 2237 ANDY BOREHAM AGAINST WAIKATO TIMES

Council Meeting MARCH 2012

Andy Boreham complains about a Waikato Times account of the mood and character of a crowd outside the Taupo Youth Court when a teenager appeared on a charge of sexually violating a five-year-old girl. The complaint is not upheld.

Background
The crime, committed at a Turangi motor camp on a child of visitors to New Zealand just before Christmas, 2011, attracted intense national interest before the youth was charged. On the day of his first appearance almost everything about him was suppressed and the Waikato Times devoted most of its report to a description of the crowd outside.

The Complaint
Andy Boreham complains that the report contains language and assertions that are clearly matters of opinion but are presented as fact. Specifically, he cites references to the victim’s family being surrounded by an “aching love” and to “big corn-fed policemen on the front door”. One onlooker was described as “so much like prison he’s only lacking a white suit.” and “best avoided until he approaches and starts asking questions”. A couple were said to be voicing “rumours that can’t be repeated but seem plausible.”

Mr Boreham accuses the newspaper of presenting opinion as fact, offending standards of accuracy, fairness and balance and making a discriminatory statement that a person looked “like prison” before it reported that he was of the “local Tu Whare Toa Iwi”.

Mr Boreham believed the article was endorsing anti-social behaviour and was irresponsible. He cited a reference to one angry onlooker having a camcorder up his sleeve, presumably to post pictures of the accused on a website.

He considered the unattributable views of onlookers had no place in professional, impartial news stories. This one, he believed, suggested the public are entitled to take the law into their own hands.

The Newspaper’s Response
The editor not only stood by the story but described it as “a fine piece of journalism”. It was in no way inaccurate or unbalanced. He expected his reporters to include some “colour” of significant news events such as this.

“We rely on reporters to be the eyes and ears for our readers,” he said. At no time had the reporter expressed a view on the accused or the case. He said, “Mr Boreham mistakes colour for opinion”.

The Decision
The best factual reporting is not insensate. The reporter’s job is not just to count numbers in a crowd or listen to what might be said. A good reporter can give a reader a sense of what it is like to be there. A well-written story uses acute factual observation to convey what a fair and impartial observer would see, hear and think.

Waikato Times reporter Alistair Bone has achieved all of this exceptionally well, in the Council’s view.

The passages that Mr Boreham labels opinion are the reporter’s impressions and this would have been evident to readers. There was no risk that comment would be confused for fact.

Mr Boreham finds one particular passage discriminatory. It reads. “One guy looks so much like prison he is only lacking a white paper suit. He seems best avoided until he approaches and starts asking questions.” But the rest of the paragraph puts quite a different complexion on that observation. It continues: “He is not about the accused, he is here to support the little girl’s family, he’s local Tu Whare Toa Iwi and hoping his community is going to be safe over the rest of the holiday.”

Mr Boreham sees an anti-social tone in the whole article. The council reads it quite differently. In the passage just quoted the reporter is cleverly using a prejudgment of his own to show how wrong prejudice can be.

Far from suggesting the public are entitled to take the law into their own hands, the article clearly conveys the ugliness of some of the sentiments without losing sympathy for the crowd’s horror at the crime.

In the Council’s view the article is not only balanced, fair and responsible, it is a fine piece of journalism, a credit to the reporter and his newspaper. The complaint is not upheld.

Press Council members considering this complaint were Barry Paterson, Pip Bruce Ferguson, Kate Coughlan, Chris Darlow, Sandy Gill, Penny Harding, Keith Lees, Clive Lind, John Roughan, Lynn Scott and Stephen Stewart.

Which led to this…

Complaint over story not upheld

The Press Council has not upheld a complaint about how the Waikato Times covered the court appearance of a child rapist.

The complaint was about Raurangi Marino’s first court appearance in Taupo earlier this year. An angry crowd had gathered outside Taupo District Court to catch a glimpse of the 16-year-old, who later admitted to raping a 5-year-old girl in a Turangi motorcamp. It was a crime that shocked the country.

However, Andy Boreham complained that the story blended fact and opinion, was racist, inaccurate and unbalanced.

In response Waikato Times’ editor Jonathan MacKenzie said the story, written by Alistair Bone, “was a fine piece of journalism”.

In a rare move the Press Council chose to name Mr Bone in its adjudication.

“The best factual reporting is not insensate,” the council said.

“The reporter’s job is not just to count numbers in a crowd or listen to what might be said. A good reporter can give a reader a sense of what it is like to be there. A well-written story uses acute factual observation to convey what a fair and impartial observer would see, hear and think.

“Waikato Times reporter Alistair Bone has achieved all of this exceptionally well, in the council’s view.

“In the council’s view the article is not only balanced, fair and responsible, it is a fine piece of journalism, a credit to the reporter and his newspaper.”

Which was nice, and led to this …

JOURNALIST ACCUSED OF BEING ‘EXCEPTIONAL’

In recognition – and celebration – of the Press Council refusing to uphold a complaint against legendary Hamilton journalist Alistair Bone, the judges and convenor of New Zealand’s most coveted media award have awarded the latest prize to the Waikato Times feature writer.

Bone becomes the 20th winner of the Alcohol Sponsorship Press Awards (ASP), now in its sixth month.

News of the Press Council’s decision was a triumph for quality journalism, said awards convenor and Metro hack Steve Braunias.

“Bone is one of the very best newspaper feature writers in New Zealand, definitely better than anyone in Auckland or Wellington.”

“His piece about the child rapist’s appearance at the district court in Taupo was superb. Bravo to the Press Council for their comments.

“We note in passing that when it was published in January, Bone’s story was sneered at in public by a bunch of B-grade media bums. Pah.”

Bone will receive a bottle of award-winning STOLEN Rum (in choice of white or gold variant) as his prize.

rum

The Pivot to Cairns

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Another column for the newspaper. For those of you who are not locals, context is that Chinese business are going to build a massive super-casino complex in Cairns. 

tico
Not a casino.

IN 1984 the New Zealand Labour Party woke with a hangover of buck’s night proportions and a list of promises it had made to win Government the day before taped to the headboard like a drunken contract with a Vegas hooker.

Endless All Black victories, full employment and a puppy in every pot (with a legalised container) for everyone were the sort of things that could be waved off, or as it turned out, done the completely opposite way.

But the promise to ban nuclear armed and powered ships would happen.

In context, it was mainly fun at the US’ expense. When they were allowed in, in the ’70s, US nuke ships were met with seaborne protesters and we all went down to watch.

People who looked and dressed a lot like my teachers, and people who looked like the bearded men Mum told us to stay away from, would motor, paddle or swim out into the path of the visiting US ship. The cops would try to scoop them up.

Auckland harbour was a natural amphitheatre for the show. The rich would take the best seats; cucumber sandwiches in the Range Rover on the North Shore and the beachfront of the South.

The rest of us would sit with a bottle of pop in the Cortina up in the bleachers.

The grounds of the War Memorial Museum – with its long list of dead Kiwi blokes from Europe and Asia’s wars carved in its stone – had the perfect vantage. Everyone, left and right, cheered when a hippy made it to the hull.

It was just a few years since the US had left Vietnam, ending a conflict that added 37 New Zealanders to the wall of the museum and which, in the fullness of time and with a view from on top of the shifting sands of history, experts still classify as “completely mental”.

But there were consequences of the new law.

When a country is ‘not a problem’ to the US, the ambassador it sends is usually a party-drone or big-time contributor getting a payoff for services rendered. New Zealand was used to a parade of salesmen and rich party-people on the Wellington cocktail circuit. But when it hits the fan, the US sends in pros, flinty eyed, bottled water-drinking, exquisitely trained negotiators with a lush carrot in one hand and a big thorny stick in the other. These began arriving in New Zealand.

 And NZ was barred from US ports. When we were in the fold, legend has it that when a NZ navy ship rocked up to a US base with a broken thing-a-me or ten, the US would whip out the old one and give us a new one, on the house. No longer. We were banned like bikies.

But the spinning wheel keeps spinning and times changed.

Now the US military is “pivoting” to Asia, because Asia is largely sea and air.

This is vital because the US can’t win wars on land – mostly because the land is now full of people with a reading age of six, who, nevertheless, all know how to build both ginormous bombs out of poo, and insurgencies.

The latter thing being something the US, to its credit, doesn’t have the deliberately vicious and brutal heart needed to win.

As an afterthought, marginally Asian New Zealand was welcomed back to US ports, it thought.

But when the navy turned up at Pearl Harbor for an exercise, it was sent away from the military docks to the commercial port.

The Yanks still held a grudge. Outrage in New Zealand. Not so much on the ship.

Aloha Towers area had a Hooters practically kerbside.

It is also home to the sort of adult-themed entertainment traditionally favoured by sailors after weeks at sea.

When NZ ships were eventually allowed back in the military zone, miles from the party zone, a suppressed “yay” could be heard from the Royal New Zealand Navy.

The pivot means things here too.

The big bun fight of late in the International Politics scene has been the Shangri-la dialogue. Australia’s Defence Minister, David Johnston was there and seems to believe we are on the verge of war with China. He says Australia’s security situation is ‘dire’ perhaps ‘catastrophic’, and it’s China’s fault.

He believes it is good the US is here, as it is still hugely dominant at sea and in the air, where guerrillas with 12th century mindsets are sparse.

But the Chinese aren’t going to fight the Americans at sea or in the air.

Not because they aren’t necessarily of a mind to, but because they have done military strategy as a science for 2500 years and the sum of that is “don’t punch someone in the fist”.

As in Africa, China’s strategy is not to bomb small, isolated towns, but to build huge parts of the infrastructure. A whole port and railway there; a mega-casino hotel and resort complex shaped like a giant ship on swampland here.

A local council is a much less formidable opponent than the US Seventh Fleet.

Word to Mr Johnston: Mao’s theorem has been updated. Political power no longer grows out of the barrel of a gun, it grows out of a barrel of pork.

Contact Alistair on Twitter at @alistairbone

 

War, the Swiss and a jet.

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New column in the paper. I’m still trying to get the tone right. 

 

cruise
Cruise control.

ANYONE who has worked for any length of time has suffered through the hellish “introduction of new software”.

Typically, it’s a pile of bits knocked-out rough by a committee of computer grads in a lab overseen by a committee of accountants in a bank.

This means it does not work.

Office watercooler discussions move on from sport and drinking to which form of medieval torture, for how many days, is most appropriate for the designers and the people who bought it.

It is not a thing limited to the timid office-bound either, as Royal Australian Air Force pilots and ground crew will shortly find out.

Australia is buying Lockheed Martin Corporation’s F35 plane, in every important essence a new software package.

Sadly, the jet is described by the US Government’s own General Accounting Office as being as effective as “a shiny brick with a dude strapped to it”.

I’ve summarised that bit, but not overly.

To be fair, this is not the whole story.

Buying it keeps the Yanks sweet on us, a factor if they have to one day be convinced to save us from New Zealand, or, possibly, some other close neighbours.

Also, like all software, bugs will eventually be patched and it will work properly some time in the late 2020s.

There are two sides to the story then, the question being why the general public shouldn’t vote on whether to buy it.

Given that one (currently, and without weapons) costs exactly the same as 14 million of the new $7 co-payments to visit a doctor, or about half the next MP salary hike.

If this seems like un-Australian treachery that spits in the manly faces of our brave troops, then consider the Swiss.

Not thought of as a nation of hippies, the Swiss held a referendum on whether they should spend billions on a new plane to shoot down other planes.

This should have been an easy win. In previous votes they rejected a minimum wage, immigrants, and decided to keep conscription.

Also, they really needed some form of air force. In February a nut-job pilot hijacked his 767 over Africa via the smooth move of locking the other pilot out of the cockpit when he went to the loo. He flew it to Geneva in Switzerland.

The Swiss knew it was coming, but could do nothing because their air force had gone home for the day.

Swiss air bases are only open during business hours because their planes are old and they don’t have the money or enough pilots game to fly them.

As an aside, it is hard not to think what Swiss fast-jet pilots do with all that time off.

The Tom Cruise documentary Top Gun suggests they will be riding powerful motorcycles into golden sunsets wearing aviator shades and a tailored leather jacket.

Or serenading blondes en masse in a bar. The reality may be different.

Also, the plane the Government wanted, Saab’s Gripen, was the worst of the four on offer, but had the sterling Swiss quality of being the cheapest.

The Swiss people (remember, not hippies) still rejected it earlier this month by 53 to 47 per cent.

Speaking officially, as I like to do, for New Zealand, we’re fully supportive of Australia’s F35 buy.

Top-level strategic thinking, by me, is that Australia’s current fighter – the solid F-18 – will soon be for sale at giveaway prices. And is just perfect for making real the long-held dream of a “reverse Pearl Harbor” the next time the Japanese fleet come down to hunt Kiwi whales in NZ’s Antarctic Sea.

So please, let’s have an F35 referendum, I’d vote yes.

Sex and Welfare

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Boys
Girls

Mike Watane had plans and savings when he was a kid. He wanted to go around the world.

“There were places I had planned in my head. I saw the Gold Coast on TV and thought that was a lot better than Rainbows End had to offer”. Then the unexpected happened.

“I saw her stomach getting bigger and bigger and thought ‘aw yeah, I’m trapped now’. That was pretty much my money gone, getting her stretchy waist clothes.” He was 21 and she was 22.

He’s still with his girlfriend. Baby is three. He’s just come off a welding course and goes down to Hamilton every couple of days looking for something. There’s been no luck yet, so he’s on his bike, literally, and talking to mate Poro Kingi on a street in Huntly West.

On paper it’s a terrible place. Dead bottom and 10 out of 10 on the deprivation scale, worse than Meremere, worse than Ngaruawahia, worse even than living across the river in Huntly East.

It’s hard to find actually abandoned houses in New Zealand, but there’s heaps here, their windows boarded with graffitied plywood.

The rail line runs straight through Huntly West and the twin towers of the power station don’t go anywhere. There are so many gangs locals need more than a hand to count them off and subset them into senior and junior.

Kingi’s hefting baby Cali on his shoulder. He and his partner are struggling, but Cali was planned and wanted. He says a lot around here are not even 18 when they have their first. He’s lived here all his life and can’t think of a time when that’s not been true.

They like the Government’s new plan. Watane thinks long-term contraception would help the younger generation, make it a place where you just see girlfriends and boyfriends together and not with a kid in tow.

The heat of the moment can do funny things to your plans, he says.

Down the road a bit and Te Aroha Kirkwood and Shanelle Herewini hear that.

“You tell them to wrap it, but sometimes they don’t listen or they are too drunk.” Te Aroha giggles, she’s on a benefit, 19 years old, eight months gone.

Shanelle says she wouldn’t take the contraceptive, even free – “put the money in the bucket”.

Get the kid and take the money. She’s laughing, maybe playing up. But Te Aroha whispers, just about to herself, “I would like to have that.”

The Police Ten Seven crew were at the dairy earlier. Someone knocked it over looking for smokes, the girls say. Three young guys turn up on bikes. They’re intense, they give names, probably not real.

Walter is 16, his girlfriend is 17 and pregnant. He doesn’t have a job, just a mystery magic formula. “Money is all around me. Why do I need a job when money just gets given to me?”

Despite that, he’s going to hold off. He’ll see how “hard case” the first one turns out before getting another. Most of the girls won’t go for the Government offer, he reckons. They want babies. “I heard you crack it on the benefit if you have babies.” he says.

One of his lieutenants has a different take. He learns the Government doesn’t actually want to pay people on a benefit to have babies. “They should move that thing – the minimum wage, yeah – up from $13.50 and they might get a job. Even if they moved it to $15, that would make a big difference,” he says.

Farther down the same street lives Fay Love. She’s been bowled by a purse snatcher, but still takes a stick to the hoods in her yard. The voluntary contraception offered to the teen girls of beneficiaries is never going to work: “Half the parents round here are going to say ‘it’s my child, they can do what they like’.”

As she talks, more and more women appear on her steps. They agree. Take their benefit away or it’s a joke.

Abby Martens flats with Desiree Maddern. They’re both on the benefit. Desiree was pregnant five times before she was 20, twice by accident. She works with the cops in the Blue Light programme, trying to put kids back on track. She’s dead against it being compulsory.

She poses a question. “Are girls just having babies for the money, or because they want a baby, or to keep a guy?”

At 19, Abby would be the bullseye for the programme. But she wouldn’t do it. She doesn’t believe in unnatural contraception; her parents were very into homeopathy.

She’s brave, honest. When she’s with a partner she uses a condom she says, but sometimes …