Nation

Revisited: You think we’ve got it tough?

2008-09-24T11:36:00.000+12:00

Pictured: “How fit were you after five weeks of ‘Tuesday Trimming’? Lindsay McCaughan, who leads the exercises must be very fit indeed. Each week he went through the vigorous routine time after time under hot studio lights for rehearsals. Then he had to appear fresh and smiling for the programme itself. If you were puffing (as I was) after going through the exercises only once, admire this man who did it all without turning a hair.”

The “two most important events” in television in New Zealand in 1972 were the announcements that the country would soon have both “a Second Channel” and “Colour” — as soon as October 1973, it was predicted. Those who reacted with dismay may have been cheered by the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual: “Fortunately we are able to receive colour transmissions in black and white just as we are at present receiving black and white transmissions from colour films.” This would have been a relief to the colour refuseniks.

But the annual’s writers complained bitterly about the building of the satellite receiving station in Warkworth: “The cost of operating this service has been so limiting that we have had very little of direct on-the-spot television.”

Considering the dearth of outside broadcasts, the commentators were generous about the ubiquitous repeats; as a half-page devoted to the studio potboiler The Forsyte Saga testifies: “Some of us have now been privileged to see this outstanding series three times in three years.” Bad luck for anyone who didn’t consider watching regurgitated period costume dramas a privilege.

Reading this soft-cover magazine is like opening a time capsule. With a colour cover of the recently married Elsie and Steve Tanner posing with Ena Sharples from Coronation Street, the annual grandly boasted a PICTORIAL SOUVENIR OF THE YEAR’S VIEWING, but the interior is all in black and white on cheap newsprint. Olde English favourites, such as Geoffrey Bayldon as Catweazle (“the wizard who jumps through time from the Norman era more than a thousand years ago to the 20th Century”), grace its pages alongside local shows like Break 21, an “electronic word game” featuring a studio set that appears to have been stolen from Thames TV’s Magpie.

Some of the NZBC’s programming, though, was clearly unmissable (just imagine what a wasted device a remote control would have been, assuming such things even existed): “Prime Minister Jack Marshall has emerged from a great deal of Gallery exposure as the most completely composed person appearing on the programme.” Clearly, a tryout would have been wasted on Willie Jackson or Peter Dunne.

Filming for the 1972 series of Pukemanu 2 began “on location” — at the Tauherenikau racecourse near Masterton. “Despite more sophisticated techniques, better writing, more cohesion between episodes,” the annual writers complain, “there is no attempt to make this series anything other than a tale of typical everyday life in New Zealand.” A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, when you consider that such local shows were competing — at other times on the same channel, of course — with big budget US dramas like Alias Smith and Jones and Ironside, not to mention something called The Good Life. No, not the BBC’s Richard Briars/Felicity Kendall self-sufficiency comedy. This was the American take on downsizing: “Larry Hagman (star of I Dream of Jeannie) and Donna Mills, a couple who are sick of the irritations and responsibilities of middle class life, sell their house and car and take jobs as ‘experienced’ butler and cook on a wealthy estate…” Did it sink without a trace, or does any NZBC reader remember the show?

That the big US networks were cashed-up is brusquely underscored by this aside regarding the sophisticated special effects that were commonplace in bigger productions:

“Television viewers don’t always appreciate realism when they see it. For example, did you realise that Mission Impossible is the only television show with its own ‘working’ lift?

“A lift scene is one of the easiest to fake. You close the doors, show a fake indicator moving and the audience accepts the idea that somebody is going up or down.”

Fancy that. How fortunate for viewers that they had the investigative talents of New Zealand Television Annual experts to disclose such trade secrets for them, and how disappointed Kiwis must have been that those riveting lift scenes on all their other favourite shows were, in fact, shot in the linen cupboard.

Back in more sedate territory, Derek Nimmo is pictured sharing some distinctly non al dente spaghetti with his son Piers in “an Auckland hotel”; Marty Feldman rehearses the old goggle-eyed-flame-throwing-lighter-and-fag routine at the Feltex television awards presentation in the long-gone Mandalay; and the great Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett grimaces over a glass of apparently corked Kiwi wine during a month-long stint of nightclub gigs. There was no Spy Valley Pinot Gris in them days.

As far as TV shows from the other side of the Atlantic went, a multi-page Coronation Street special catered to low-brow viewers. The soap, we’re told, was originally scheduled for only a 13-week run, but popular demand “miraculously” extended it:

“I say ‘miraculously’ because it’s always seemed to me that the people in charge of TV aren’t really very interested in what people like. And Coronation Street, though it very handsomely pays for itself now, has never been a cheap programme.”

I wonder what that writer would have said if he or she had been told that the show would still be handsomely paying for itself 6000 episodes and 34 years later, and that the 21st Century would bring Hollywood-style car stunts and movie-budget pyrotechnics to Weatherfield. Remember that for New Zealand fans, this was before Ray Langton joined the show the first time around (and if any Coro fans have been wondering what Neville Buswell has been up to for the last 28 years, read all about it here). In 1972, Albert Tatlock, Annie Walker and Hilda Ogden still ruled Kiwi screens, and a double-page spread, with a Dickensian pen-and-ink map of The Street by Anthony Cobb, showing who lived where, brings back long-forgotten Coro characters such as Effie Spencer, bus inspector Harry Hewitt and his wife Concepta.

The New Zealand Television Annual’s editorial style was neither hard-hitting nor illuminating. This, about the impending visit by Peter Adamson, Coronation Street’s Len Fairclough, is indicative of its laboured style: “The mountain of mail coming into the Television Studios reaches its peak when the characters are involved in controversy,” we’re coyly informed. Just a few lines later, the tone shifts to apologetic: “The real person is seldom completely separate from the character he is playing.” A nice way of warning Kiwi fans that he was a bastard in real life, too?

And this on “expatriate New Zealander” Ewen Solon (a familiar face on British screens at the time), who starred in Section 7 and was obviously quite the wag: “Solon was born in Mount Eden ‘although not the jail’ he quips.”

David Frost visited New Zealand in 1972 as well, but appears not to have been enamoured with Kiwi hospitality. He “breezed through” Auckland on September 4, having given a press conference at the Auckland Town Hall and “left for the United States during the night barely 16 hours after he arrived”.

And if, like Frost, you couldn’t bear 1972 New Zealand, or stomach another episode of The Mod Squad, NYPD or Hogan’s Heroes, as little as $420 could get you away from it all. The inside back cover of the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual offered “a luxury voyage and a month’s marvellous holiday as a bonus!” The ad copy went on to promise “NO CRAMP — NO SWOLLEN FEET — NO STOMACH ‘TIME CLOCK’ UPSET, Comfort all the way via Tahiti and Panama to Southampton in the 20,000-ton one-class super luxury cruise liner SHOTA RUSTAVELI”. The ‘Shot of Rust’ had five bars, and so its “FREE medical attention” was probably a much-needed part of the service. When you finally arrived in Southampton in 1973, you could head up to Weatherfied for a Coro catch-up at the Rover’s Return with Ray Langton.

It had to be better than watching Doctor At Large or The Partridge Family on the single channel of your black and white TV set. But try telling that to the young people of today and they won’t believe you.

Five Minutes with John Clarke

2008-01-23T21:29:00.000+13:00

John Clarke gave Kiwi humour a voice 30 years ago through the wise rustic fool of Fred Dagg, and even though Clarke has lived in Australia for decades, he has magically retained a sense of New Zealandness that transcends the Tasman. He has said that "Dagg is laced all through [what I do], it’s just changed its name a bit". That would include The Games (great mock interview about its promotion here), the political interviews on Australian TV, the poetry, the DVDs, the Farnarkelling. Any attempt to define NZ humour must include John (photos: courtesy John Clarke). We thought that given that he started his career with the NZBC, it might be time to renew the relationship. We sat down with a virtual glass of Victorian Bitter and lobbed a few questions.

Have you seen Flight of the Conchords and if so do you see any affinity with your own work?

I first saw Bret and Jemaine some years ago in a theatre full of shared delight; they are very funny, musically gifted, clever, ironical and wherever they go, there's a map of New Zealand in the glove-box. Their current success is the more admirable because subtle, esoteric work requires a larger potential audience, since a cult (even a big one) will occupy only a small percentage of it. May they continue to burn with a blue flame.

Were you never tempted to go beyond Australia? Was it just the flying or did it just not interest you going to London or New York?

I was never interested. I live here.

You told an interviewer you don't get distracted from the writing process by reading other people's books and that “ideas come pretty quickly once you identify your departure point”. But parody requires close attention to the source material, doesn't it, and don't you have to love it at least a little in the first place?

I don't recall saying exactly that to an interviewer and you're quite right, you can't work in a vacuum. I do read other people's books although I'm a better reader of non-fiction than I am of fiction.

Which Oz and NZ authors, poets, columnists etc do you read and rate?

Most writers impress me and I think NZ in particular boxes above its weight.

Was your mother a big influence on your interests and career?

Yes. [Friends of NZBC who know Neva Clarke McKenna revere her.]

The web would seem to be a perfect fit for a polymath like yourself. Did you deliberately wait until “Web 1.0” had done its dash and you could do what you wanted quickly, cheaply and well? Or did you come late to it, as you seem to other things, and there was a eureka moment?

Various projects I've worked on have used the web in quite interesting ways and eventually I got around to setting up my own site. [We'll take that as a yes.]

What are your current obsessions, and do you have a close group of “wonderers”?

I'm not the best judge of my own obsessions and aside from reading perhaps too many of other people's books I think I'm probably one of the more balanced people in my ward. I don't know what “wonderers” are but if they ask, I'll have some tea and a lemon slice.
If "talk is the first draft of a lot of things but it's not the draft you'd submit", what's email?

Similar.
How have things changed in Australia since the election?

I suspect there's a lot of policy discussion going on at the moment in health, education, environmental issues, indigenous affairs and foreign policy, since these are areas where the electorate clearly felt the Howard government was operating on muscle-memory. If there are not significant initiatives in these areas quite quickly, somebody may get a yellow card.

If NZBC readers read only one book this year, which book should it be?

A book by someone else.

What's on your iPod’s “On the go” playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

I don't even have a mobile phone.

Five minutes with Chad Taylor

2007-10-15T20:53:00.000+13:00

“Early and avid” Chad Taylor fan Mr O’Neill wrote in his rave NZBC review of Departure Lounge that he’d been “a bit disenchanted” with some of Chad’s more recent books because he likes his realism, well, you know, real. The author commented “Man, you’re gonna hate the new one.” That means I’ll like it, I guess… Elsewhere Chad has said, “My stories are very real, but this surreal aspect to the stories continues to emerge. I wouldn't describe it as fantasy.” He was born in 1964 and grew up in gritty, hyper-real Manurewa. He read English and Art History while doing a Fine Arts degree at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. After writing music and film reviews for (and then becoming assistant editor of) Rip It Up while he was meant to be studying, he nevertheless graduated with a BFA in 1988. In the same year his first fiction was published. In 2001 he was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. His short stories have appeared in Landfall, Sport, Metro, Other Voices, and the anthologies Tart and Juicy and Lust. Of his short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself, Chad says the two weakest stories are the most popular. We asked him for five minutes of his time and he gave us his insights into the eternal value of books. You couldn’t ask for more. We did ask him a lot of odd questions.

You’re not Mad Chad Taylor the Chainsaw Juggler (who has appeared on Jay Leno’s Tonight show) or Chad Taylor the guitarist (who has a Wikipedia entry). Are you deliberately keeping a low profile or do your agent and publisher need a kick up the arse?

“I was online after the chainsaw juggler but well before the guitarist. When I was growing up in Manurewa no one else in the world was called Chad except Chad Everett, and he wasn’t cool either. I don’t like my name.”

Literature certainly no longer gets the mindshare among the young that other art forms such as music and film enjoy. Is this a temporary glitch or a more lasting trend?

“Do we crave mindshare among the young? The kids who are hip to books are the kids who are hip to books. They’ll always be around. I have faith in the young. It’s people my age I’m worried about.

“There’s a technological reality here: books don’t need batteries. You can get them wet, pass them on to your friends, tear them in half and they still work. And they’re cheap. It was the maxim of Java programmers to ‘write once, read anywhere’. Books have always done that. They’re the wheel, the lever, the inclined plane. Basic technology. If industry could replace that with a proprietary, unreliable, fussy technology then it would have happened by now.

“Things come and go. Books don’t have a stranglehold on culture. They could vanish tomorrow, in which case I’d happily evolve—maybe... but stories work. Stories are still around because stories work and novels are the purest way of transmitting those stories, and the form is like pop music—influenced by everything other than itself.

“I was having a discussion with someone the other day: we were talking about the DVDs we’d have or the records we’d want to own, and we could easily run into 100, maybe 200 of each that every person should see or hear. But when it came to novels, really, we started running out of steam long before that. Because in terms of ‘great’ novels—novels you simply must read—we’re not looking at a surplus. Novels are precise and delicate things.

“Here’s a curve ball: the only things that separate us from animals are a written language and a linear perception of time. If that’s true, writing stories is our definitive function.”

Are you still a Paul Auster fan and what else is in your mix of literary and other influences?

“And hello viewers from Rob O’Neill... Not a PA fan, actually. You might not respect the things I read. Faves: going by the bookshelf it’s Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick, André Gide, Anaïs Nin, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Pete Dexter, Delacorta, Joseph Conrad, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Jim Thompson, Edgar Allan Poe, Barry Gifford, Hammett, Graham Greene (End of the Affair and The Quiet American), Bram Stoker. I read anything. Almost. If you read the first short stories that came out in 1988 you’ll see everything in there.

“‘Influences’ are different. What influences you is more private and fleeting. You’re chasing a moment. I was influenced by terrible people. The really good writers you look up to. The bad writers—you can approach them and nick something from right out of their pocket. We learn from the worst.

The author Will Self’s study wall is a scaly skin of Post-it Notes. What do you use for plotting novels, note-taking and capturing ideas? Are you a proponent of pencil and notebook, or do you favour software and keyboard?

“When I’m starting a novel I’ll try anything. Notebooks, tape recorders, chunks of plasterboard torn from the ceiling (which is a Jack Kirby joke—no one will ever get that). Once it gets going, it doesn’t matter—when you’re writing well, you can write on anything. I read a great interview with Woody Allen where he said he can write anywhere on anything—the back of an envelope. Sometimes his movies feel like that. But I really respect anyone who just gives in to the flow. We all do, eventually. When you’re going, you’re going.

“With a novel, however, I would say that you need to develop some sort of system to keep track of everything. The quicker you can find that note you scrawled early in the morning, the better. The more you need to be able to find stuff... but really there’s no definitive process. You muck through and that’s the delight of it, really. You number stuff. Or use letters. And then lose it and find it again. I think I have a process. I carry a Moleskin sometimes. The way to guarantee inspiration is to leave it behind. You live with it and live with it and then one day you wake up and it’s you. Like Cary Grant.”

Do you keep regular writing hours every day, and are you a morning or a night person?

“I worry regularly. I pay bills regularly. Inspiration shifts by an hour a day. I swear the latter is true: it moves with the tides. If you’re doing good work at 9 am on Monday then it’ll be 10am on Tuesday and 11 on Wednesday and so on. (Does this make me a hippy?)

Naming the protagonist of your novel Shirker Ellerslie Penrose, was genuinely inspired. Were you a fan of British experimental rock band Hatfield and the North, and do you have any advice on naming conventions for other writers?

“I knew Ellerslie worked when Alison Mau interviewed me for TV and referred to him as “Ellie”. I thought, hello: he’s become real. You have to be careful with names. Aptronyms are good but can tangle with the actual prose... You have to get it right. I wrote a short story called ‘Supercollider’ that introduced a girl called Carrie Factor—that worked.

“Names are hard. The new novel has some really, really good names in it but I can’t tell you because it won’t be out for a bit.”

Why is the New Zealand setting so important to you and are you ever tempted to set a novel overseas?

“I’m in conflict about this. Who gives a fuck about Auckland? I don’t know if I do any more. Write what you know and so on, but I don’t want to get stuck here, thematically or creatively. Not least of all because it’s disappeared—the good spots have all been knocked down. The new novel was set largely overseas and then it changed... the real part of the story came back to here. I don’t know why. I travel a lot and my characters are travellers, outsiders... I don’t think they’re tied here. Auckland’s nice to write about because it’s a port town and people are always passing through. It’s soulless, so the characters’ souls become, conversely, exposed. People here are really fucked up. And not in a good way.

“I do think that novelists should be able to write about anywhere. There’s a little too much emphasis placed on this by NZ critics and reviewers and so on. You want to go to Iceland, go to Iceland. All that matters is if the story works, if the book is real—if it happens on the page. But I do think you have to really feel that. You need to be truly into it. The cracks show very quickly if you’re not.

“Electric finishes in Japan—I love that part of the novel. It’s two pages long or something but I love it. I love getting away. But I don’t want to write about being a tourist—not in that instance, anyway. I don’t feel like I belong here but I don’t feel that I belong anywhere else.”

If NZBC readers read only one book this year, which book should it be?

“Um... One? This year? Two years ago I would have said Pete Dexter’s Train. Actually, the other night I had a coffee in a book store and read Hunter S. Thompson’s letters and found them to be very good... This year? Jesus, what’s been published this year? I’m scratching around. Go read Poe or Heart of Darkness or something. Like I said before, there aren’t that many really you have to go through.

What’s on your iPod’s ‘On the go’ playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

“Recently played on the Powerbook: Warren Zevon, ‘Excitable Boy’; Jane’s Addiction, ‘Jane says’; The Go! Team, ‘Ladyflash’; Liz Phair, ‘Somebody’s Miracle’; P.J. Harvey, ‘We Float’; The Killers, ‘Bones’; Róisín Murphy, ‘The Closing of the Doors’.

“The CDs beside the dining room stereo are: The Doors (The Doors), Kraftwerk (Trans-Europe Express), The Bird and the Bee (The Bird and the Bee), John Coltrane (Kulu Sé Mama), Nick Drake (Pink Moon), Of Montreal (Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer) and Beck (The Information).

“Don’t hassle me about Liz Phair.”

The great credit card swindle (part two)

2007-07-20T11:27:00.000+12:00

My questions to the Commerce Commission were as follows:

1. Why is the ASB required to pay its customers only “a pro rata portion of the currency conversion fees” paid during the period, and not the whole amount?

2. Why has it been made the responsibility of the customer to pursue the breakdown of fees? (ASB’s initial letter to each affected customer neither explains what the exact settlement with the Common Commission has been, nor does it go into detail about why the total compensation due to customers is such a small proportion of the amount paid — in my case less than 20 percent of the fees.)

3. Since the bank breached the Act by failing to adequately disclose its currency conversion fees on overseas credit card transactions, isn’t it now the bank’s responsibility to fully disclose the settlement with clear information to each affected customer, without requiring customers to search out five-year-old statements and tally up old transactions?

4. What is the Commerce Commission doing to ensure that the agreed compensation settlement is adequately and correctly distributed to affected customers?

The official release about the case is here. But to paraphrase the Commerce Commission’s response to my questions (and it would be unfair to quote Sebastian Bishop here, since he only conveyed Commission policy to me), the ASB’s breach was not that it had charged these offshore service margins but that it didn’t adequately disclose them. That’s why the ruling only requires the bank to compensate its customers a pro rata portion of the fees they paid. Third party auditors will apparently be assessing the ASB’s execution of the court ruling. The Commerce Commission itself is not involved in the compensation side of the judgment. The bank’s original breach related to an “action of trade”; however, the bank’s letter of regret to its customers about the settlement does not represent an action of trade and therefore whether the ASB make a full disclosure to its customers is of no concern to the Commerce Commission. As far as it is concerned, the matter is closed. It won’t be taking it any further.

This means the customer’s only recourse is to the law — to take the matter of the handling of the compensation payout back to the courts. More expense and the granting of more time to the ASB in which to earn interest on the fees it hasn’t reimbursed its customers. If there were enough dissatisfied customers and a lawyer willing to take on their grievance on a pro bono basis, action might be an option. The ASB has had its slap on the wrist and now considers itself off the hook. A risk assessment into the likelihood of such a ruling being taken further by customers may have found that continued obfuscation was the best policy.

Personally, I don’t think the ruling was strictly enough defined. The auditors should also have been tasked with making sure the bank disclosing exactly how the compensation was calculated on each transaction, not some half-assed “pro rata portion”. The way it is, the customer gets shafted while the bank pays lip service to a ruling that only appears to have forced it to regret having been caught. After all, the bank does not apologise to its customers in its letter; the implicit message being that regret about having to pay back less than 20 percent of the fees paid is apology enough for misleading its customers.

Gotta love that Xtra support

2007-07-05T17:53:00.000+12:00

CB: [04/07/2007 02:18 PM] “Several business emails I sent yesterday evening and today have not been received by the intended recipients. The Xtra site says: ‘There are no known major issues on the Xtra network’ but there is clearly a problem, as I’m not the only one affected and can send email via non-Xtra accounts. So what’s going on?”

Xtra: “I am sorry to hear that your emails weren’t sent properly. I am not aware of any issues at the moment, but it doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been one when you tried. If you can provide me with your phone number and address, I will check if there was an issue earlier today. The reason the Help page is not displaying a message about this problem is because we haven’t had reports of any problems, with yours being the first so far today. Until we know for sure there is a problem, then only will the help page reflect this. Kind regards, Sanjay.”

CB: “Sanjay, My phone number and address are in the signature in the email you responded to. I know of at least two other Xtra customers who had email problems yesterday and the day before.”

Xtra: “We did get some emails yesterday about email delays which is usually the warning sign for a fault, but it didn’t seem to amount to a full blown problem. These issues are sometimes tricky to diagnose as to where the problem lies. If you are still having problems with email delays then we need to see the email headers of the affected emails. There are instructions for obtaining the email headers can be found here. Hopefully if the problem isn’t fixed by now, we can sort this out quickly for you. Kind regards, Tracey.”

CB: “But there is no detailed header information for email that hasn’t been received — i.e. for which the only record is in my ‘Sent items’ folder.”

Xtra: “The person who receives the email will have this information and can send it to you. That way we can identify whether the issue is at our end or at their end. I’m sorry this is so complicated, and I wish was a simpler way. Kind regards, Tracey.”

CB: “Yeah, that’s kind of the whole point of this exchange, Tracey ... they haven’t received my email…”

Xtra: “Sorry, I was hoping it arrived by now...”

Five minutes with Kevin Ireland

2007-05-24T11:38:00.000+12:00

Kevin Ireland (‘Self-portrait in a straw hat’, oil on canvas, 500mm x 600) tells us he’s always been lazy. That explains his meagre output of sixteen collections of poetry, five works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories (Sleeping with the Angels), three novels (Blowing My Top, The Man Who Never Lived and The Craymore Affair), an opera libretto (The Snow Queen, published by the BBC and translated into French) and a book on the New Zealand novel (The New Zealand Collection). Did we mention the paintings? His writing career began when, in the 1950s, he became part of Frank Sargeson’s “pressure cooker school of writing” in a Takapuna shed. “In the evenings we would drink Lemora wine,” he has recalled, “and people like Keith Sinclair, Kendrick Smithyman, Janet Frame and Maurice Duggan would drop in every night of the week. It was a wonderful, stimulating, exciting time, an oasis of common sense and literary excitement in the dull and conventional environment of the 1950s.”

He has described his life in his memoirs Under the Bridge & Over the Moon (1998), which won a Montana prize, and Backwards to Forwards (2002). He also has a National Book Award for Poetry, a Scholarship in Letters, the 1990 Commemoration Medal and an OBE for services to literature. In 2000 he was made a Doctor of Literature by Massey University. He is a former National President of PEN and a member and the current deputy-chair of the Sargeson Trust. In 2004 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry. He’s our Billy Collins and should be New Zealand’s poet laureate.

Why do you write poetry?

“I’ve never been able to find a plausible reason for sticking with an art so demanding and so odd. I’ve tried in several poems to explain this curious compulsion for constructing word-shapes on paper. For instance, I’ve described how it simply happened to be perfect weather for writing, or how it turned out just to be round-up time in the pastures of the mind. I think this is about as close as it’s possible to get without being dishonest or absurdly high-falutin.”

You have written a book about fishing. Do you often write poems in your head while you’re fishing and, if so, do you have to write them down immediately?

“No. I’ve never written a poem in my head while fishing. The total experience of being on a river or lake unconditionally consumes every minute spent there. I work at poems in a similar way, by giving my entire time to them while sitting down at a desk. There may be a bit of doodling, but there’s no lying around or lolling about. Useful ‘starters’ for poems are more likely to suggest themselves when the mind is completely disengaged — for instance, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, or when walking the dog. I seldom take notes, because I find that the words start freezing up before I’ve managed to get them all down. The general notion of a starter, toyed about with in the head, is usually enough to go on. Only on rare occasions have I dreamed up a whole poem then simply tipped it out onto a page. The real art in poetry is to make careful revision look as though it’s as natural as a chance remark.”

The winner of a recent New Zealand poetry competition was a typographically left-right justified column of impenetrable text. By what definition it is a poem and not prose is unclear. The judge voted a much more coherent poem the second runner-up and raved about the winner, claiming the poet hadn’t put a foot wrong. Is incomprehensibility the main criterion for the success of a poem for the publishers of NZ poetry nowadays?

“There are no set definitions. Like the song says ‘anything goes’ — though as the song also goes on to point out, there happen to be certain things that can provide a special buzz, and obviously incomprehensible texts are a stunning turn-on for some people. They have little interest and no excitements as far as I’m concerned, and some amuse me as examples of smug drivel, but they don’t alarm or bother me, and I certainly don’t think that incomprehensibility is a ‘main criterion’ for winning a competition or for getting published here or anywhere else. It’s just that on the day this poem fell into a sympathetic judge’s hands. All prizes have a large element of a lucky dip about them. Winners should always take the money and run. No one should ever believe in them.”

You’ve worked as a sub-editor, both here and in Britain on big papers like The Times. Do you miss ‘Fleet Street’, and what do you think of APN’s ‘experiment’ to outsource sub-editing on its New Zealand newspapers to Pagemasters, which is owned by the company’s competitors, with the loss of around 70 sub-editors’ jobs?

“Fleet Street doesn’t exist any longer. The papers have gone and the whole bizarre Dickensian set-up with them. The miracle is that they lasted there so long. I got out just in time. What’s happening here with job cuts is what’s been going on just about everywhere else as newspapers have changed from being providers of hard news and political views to daily magazines of colour pictures decorated by shallow texts about murders, abductions, teenage drivers, dogs, fashions, personalities, entertainment, health issues, etc. Getting rid of the people who once maintained editorial standards is just another part of a certain-death process.”

In your poem Wasted Days (from Airports and Other Wasted Days) you say “...every wasted day accrues/in pleasure” and “I think of things/not done as buried treasure”. What’s your secret: meditation, deep breathing, the accumulated wisdom of age, or have you always felt this way?

“I’ve always been lazy. Anyone who writes poetry has too much time on their hands. Writing novels is a sure sign of an idle mind. I have no idea how I’ve managed to publish more than two dozen books and a huge bundle of miscellaneous meanderings and articles. If it wasn’t for my indolence there would have been heaps more.”

In On Getting Old (Four Winds Press), you write: “I’m working harder than ever before, not just because I am absorbed in my work, but because, as I grow older, it is becoming more of a task to get the shambling words down on paper.” Do you have any tips for those who are struggling under the weight of an increasing workload?

“I’d advise anyone suffering from an increasing workload to buck up and stop whingeing. It’s like sex or drinking — someone has to do it, so try to get on with it cheerfully.”

Your poem A Different Country looks at first temptingly into New Zealand’s past before ending on a slightly sour note (“In fact,/everything would have been fine/but for the measly morality/and the greyness, with every poor/bastard toeing the line.”) Has New Zealand society generally improved or worsened since those days, and how?

“It’s managed to do both. We may have once had a lot more time to do a lot less in, but we went about things with determination and social generosity. For those of us who did not conform to the exacting public standards of the 1950s, being out of step had its moments of excitement, good fellowship and great fun — pleasures that no longer derive to the same extent from that source, though I’m sure they have not diminished in general. We were a snooping, puritan, bitter pack at our worst and an obliging, larrikin, egalitarian mob when the going was good. We’ve lost a bit of that classless and independent streak along with the conformist excesses, but at least we’re fairly relaxed about it. I enjoy life here and now, and I prefer the country we’ve now made, in spite of some criticisms. I think things are better than they ever were — and I’m absolutely certain they’re far better than the alternative.”

If NZBC readers only read one book of poetry, which book should it be?

“Quite naturally, the latest. It’s called Airports and Other Wasted Days and it’s still hot off the press. And let me take this opportunity to remind the nation that 50 or 60 years ago every citizen actually would have had a public duty to buy a copy of it. I don’t think we should let our civic standards slip. Besides, there’s a wonderful cover illustration by Malcolm Evans, so the book will look good just left lying about on the table.”

Xtra’s official response

2007-05-02T15:43:00.001+12:00

“We recently added another layer of spam protection to our network. To put it in simple terms this works on a range of triggers that are matched against mail servers or internet address ranges known to be a source of spam. It then defers attempts to send mail to us from these sources if certain triggers are hit. This is considered international best practice and is used by leading Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world.

“The downside of this is that the mail server or internet address range used by a spammer can also have legitimate senders of mail using it. So while this new initiative has seen a very significant reduction in the amount of spam getting through to our customers, it seems that a small number of legitimate emails may have been delayed or not delivered in the process.

“The on-going battle with spammers is a fine balancing act. It is our aim to deliver legitimate emails while still blocking as much spam as possible and we are working hard to achieve this. We do acknowledge we have erred too keenly on the side of blocking spam in this case.

“We have now eased the settings on this anti-spam platform and will continue to fine tune it over coming weeks. This will help to prevent legitimate emails being delayed.

“Should a sender continue to be unable to send legitimate emails to you we suggest that they try using an alternate email address and report to their ISP that it maybe blacklisted for being a source of spam. We are also notifying ISPs if they are on such a spam list so they can take measures to rectify the situation.

“We know that spam is one of our customer’s top annoyances. But spammers use ever evolving techniques, have been linked with organised crime and are in some cases using networks of over 100,000 infected and hijacked computers to send spam. This incident has been a regrettable side effect of our efforts to reduce that spam.

“Once again we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused and assure we have taken steps towards solving the problem, while trying to still stop as much spam as possible.

“Thank you for your patience.”

Hallelujah! Unleashed at last

2006-12-18T14:42:00.000+13:00

Having effectively proven that neither it nor any other item of my own hardware was to blame for my internet disconnection problems, I returned the replacement D-Link DSL-G604T wireless ADSL router Xtra sent me. It was, however, still possible that the router was incompatible with some of Telecom’s own hardware, even though it was not solely the cause of the disconnections.

On Thursday 7 December Telecom replaced the card after all (or changed the port at the exchange — I’m not exactly sure which, due to conflicting information from Downer Engineering and Telecom Advanced’s technicians). No one bothered to call and warn me on the morning they made whatever change it was. So instead of my customary five-minutes of connection, interspersed with two minutes of disconnection, I had nothing all morning; could not send or receive email, generally had no idea what was going on. I called the Xtra help desk and, following completion of the job, in a classic bit of reactive customer service, a Downer engineer called to tell me what had been done.

Nevertheless, as far as I’m aware, we haven’t suffered a single disconnection since. A couple of websites have been briefly inaccessible, but not as a result of an ADSL dropout.

On the morning of Monday 11 December, Telecom began another 48-hour test to monitor the stability of my line following the change. The latest test was due to finish around noon today. Mark Thomas (Xtra Broadband help desk team-leader) says the preliminary results are “good” and that he will email me some details on the completion of the test.

I’ve been testing my own broadband download and upload speeds using a variety of online modules for the last month or so. Unfortunately, I don’t have any comparison speeds prior to the ‘unleashing’, but on 6 November I was on a measly 936kbps local download and 132kbps upload, running this speed test module. On this test on 6 November I scored 1039kbps download and 135kbps upload, with a latency of 103ms.

By 20 November, I was at just 386kbps download and 128kbps upload here (depending on which overseas server I chose); 968kbps and 128kbps here; and 806kbps and 136kbps here (ping: 90ms).

However, by today, 19 December, our speeds are as follows:

speedtest.net: 2086kbps download; 136kbps upload; 81ms latency
NZDSL: 1822kbps download; 131 upload
Speakeasy.net: 488kbps download; 128kbps upload (using the Seattle, WA server); 477kbps download; 129kbps upload (using the LA, CA server)

I’m now reasonably happy that Telecom has fixed our ADSL disconnection problem. But I’d like to hear from them exactly what the problem was — and why it took them so long to get to the bottom of it when a) so many NZ internet users seem to be having very similar problems and b) it appears to have had its roots at Telecom’s exchange all along.

What I did on my holidays

2006-09-25T13:08:00.000+12:00

My lovely girlfriend (MLG) and I almost supernaturally arrived at our second anniversary recently, and I’ve just had one of those birthdays that’s no longer assigned a number because I’m on the upper side of 40. We decided it was time to surprise one another with a celebratory treat.

The problem was, we both chose the same surprise: a weekend for two at the Auckland Hilton. MLG selected a Friday night with cocktails at Bellini, while I plumped for a Saturday night including dinner at White. Surprise! Not really. But MLG also had an outstanding Christmas voucher for a facial at the nearby Servilles Day Spa, so a bit of self-inflicted TLC in venues of our mutual choosing was in order. Fortunately, the travel company allowed us to combine our packages: a bumper weekend with all the upmarket trimmings, and everyone was happy with the probable exception of my banker. Miserable git.

What made this holiday unusual — aside from it being rare for us to give ourselves time off from parenting and our respective daily grinds — is that we live a few miles away from our destination. Coals to Newcastle, perhaps; a busman’s holiday; a perverse 21st Century twist on the “weekend at the bach”... at least no queuing was involved, and we could carry any bloody hand luggage we wanted.

I admit, after living in and around central Auckland for years, I’ve had phases during which I’ve felt I was ‘over’ the city life. And I’d never have dreamt when I arrived in New Zealand that, the better part of a decade later, I’d still be running the rat-race in more or less the same way as I did in Europe.

For many workers, nothing less than an annual fortnight on a sun-lounger on Fiji or waist-deep at the cocktail bar in a Maldives resort swimming pool would provide the required degree of torpor. But further afield would be going too far — we couldn’t abandon our eleven-year-old with his grandparents for more than a couple of days, and the alternative (to take him with us) was too traumatic for any of us contemplate. Then there was the travelling time, and work to come back to at the end of it.

No, a couple of days pretending to be rich would have to do us just fine.

I’ve travelled large tracts of the globe and stayed in hotels of varying degrees of luxury and shabbiness. But when it comes to rooms I’m of the opinion that little separates a cheap, basic one from its more expensive alternatives. Clean and comfortable you have a right to expect, but unique selling points are few and far between.

Sure, sometimes you have a nice view and a chocolate stuck on your pillow at “turndown time”. You might even be offered lots of stealable, monogrammed swag; satellite or cable TV; and a trouser press (whatever happened to those?). But you get most of those features in a bog-standard Kiwi motel these days and fresh milk, as well.

Only real, five-star hotels — those in which every room is a suite — can be said to offer the guest truly luxurious accommodation; and I don’t care whether the place you’re staying in calls itself a “boutique hotel experience”, you’re going to be hard-pressed to have a more comfortable time than you would at home.

So I wasn’t as disappointed as MLG by the compact, modestly appointed room. But I have stayed in far cheaper motel rooms that seemed as well equipped; and while the Hilton bathroom was large and moodily lit, there was no spa bath, and the smoked glass door, while classy in appearance, didn’t close completely, let alone lock. Personally, I don’t hold with this modern laissez-faire attitude towards bodily functions. Give me privacy any day of the week.

There was a well-stocked mini bar, the usual over-priced snacks, broadband internet access (that seemed reluctant to work) and an impressive array of room service and other luxury hotel facilities. But the air conditioning was crude (the one fan was situated above the shower), suggesting the bedroom would be unbearably hot in summer, and our exterior balcony walls were already showing signs of mildew. White walls are all very well but are a nightmare to maintain in a rainy climate like Auckland’s.

Worse still, the lap-pool on the Hilton’s roof has been out of action since July and there was no prospect of the A-Team bringing it back into action during our brief stay. There had been no mention of this curtailed service when we made our bookings, or when we checked in. When we queried this unavailability we were offered (expired) vouchers for the Tepid Baths down the road. Even had the vouchers been valid, it would sadly have been too late for us to take advantage of them.

After a pleasant Friday night of cocktails and antipasto in Bellini, we woke to found that we had no hot water in our room. By lunchtime the fault had still not been repaired. By way of compensation, we received from the apologetic management a bottle of Palliser Estate 2004 Martinborough chardonnay. But the best was yet to come.

At White, for our Saturday night anniversary dinner, we won a choice window table and the service was attentive while not making us feel nervous about not being stinking rich. A high point of the meal was a menu-prompted wine match for the wild rabbit loin entrée on a confit of pickled rhubarb and chorizo with red wine verjus. The wine was a Syrah (I think a CJ Pask ‘Gimblett Gravels’, Hawkes Bay, 2001). In any case, the combination was breathtakingly good.

But I didn’t set out to write just another a hotel review. There was something about this weekend far more fundamental than the quality of our hotel room and the standard of service; something I hadn’t really taken into consideration until we got there (no, not that).

There are many aspects of any holiday that are completely beyond your control, just as happy accidents always happen that have no place on your itinerary. On this weekend the weather was disappointing, not to say abysmal. It rained virtually non-stop and if MLG hadn’t asked to go shopping on Saturday afternoon following our Servilles Spa facials, we might have spent the entire weekend on the ‘island’ of Princes Wharf (and that’s the plural of prince, not princess, as I’ve heard even Trelise Cooper, who should know better since she has a shop on the wharf, call it).

Instead of moping in our room, listening to the sub-aquatic rumble of the Asian freighter tied to the dock opposite, we borrowed the hotel room’s enormous golfing brolly and slithered and skittered like tourists along the treacherously slippery causeway alongside the hotel and to the ‘mainland’ of the city centre.

There’s much to be said for seeing an everyday thing from a once-in-a-lifetime perspective. A stroll with the person you love through any city centre on holiday is a million miles from the chore of regular shopping, and this didn’t feel like any Queen Street shopping expedition I’ve been on while living here. It was a vacation from the real thing; more like ambling through the ninth arrondissement in autumn, or along Seventh Avenue on Christmas Eve than the sterile duty that mall shopping in Auckland has become.

Lately, I’ve been working on Queen Street, only occasionally heading out for lunchtime sushi or onto Lorne Street for a coffee at Sheinkin. But familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt; as we walked through Queen’s Arcade at the bottom of Queen Street, we might just as well have been in Milan or in London’s Mayfair, but maybe that was just the rain.

I remember that little coffee shop (Custom Coffee House) at the north-eastern end of Queen’s Arcade from my first New Zealand holidays, although I don’t recall ever stopping in there for a coffee before now. It has something reassuringly 1950s about it; it set my mind spinning back to the metal ice cream bowls in an Italian coffee bar in Ulverston, Cumbria in the 1960s; and a cappuccino place I used to go to for cheap lunches, around the corner from London’s Carnaby Street in the 1980s.

The higgledy-piggedly shop layout showcases a dungeon-like array of stovetop coffeepots and a cabinet of tantalising snacks (why do so many cafés sell slabs of flaky, congealed grease and claim they’re sausage rolls?), and the coffee was possibly the best I’ve had in Auckland outside of the consistently good Baretta on Dominion Road.

The only other guest at the time MLG and I dropped into Queen’s Arcade for a revitalising latte, sandwich and slice of cake on Saturday afternoon was an elderly gentlemen engrossed in his newspaper; possibly a shopkeeper from one of the neighbouring stores. “That’s the sort of coffee that gets you to the top of mountains!” he suddenly exclaimed, presumably by way of praise. Apparently, that’s the usual kind of customer feedback experienced here because it didn’t even raise an eyebrow behind the counter.

After a walk between the raindrops along Queen Street, we punished my credit card at Unity Books, called in at Pauanesia for MLG, serpentined through the shops of Little High Street and even the Downtown Warehouse before heading back to the Hilton to get ready for dinner.

And in spite of the world-class food and service at White (the scrambled eggs I had for breakfast on Sunday morning were the best I’ve eaten anywhere), it’ll be that walk in the rain around Queen Street I’ll always remember — not slurping cocktails in Bellini or pretending to be rich while waiting for the MLG’s car to be returned from valet parking.

It reinvigorated my view of the city I’ve lived in for almost a decade. And that’s a good thing.

When we’d recovered from the arduous drive back to Mount Eden, the parity of time zones and the inevitable culture clash of upscale dining at White and the colourful chaos of the kebab shop at the other end of our street, we discovered the Hilton had mailed us a personalised voucher for a free return night (including breakfast), to compensate us for our lack of hot water on Saturday morning. How old fashioned, and how very civilised.

We live five minutes away from the traffic on Dominion Road and yet I’m regularly astonished by the variety of trees visible from our veranda and the multiplicity of the morning chorus I wake to every morning. You can count on one hand the number of cities in the world in which you can still feel this close to nature so close to downtown. And I thank my brief home-from-home holiday in Auckland for reminding me how lucky I am. In American Sonnet, the poet Billy Collins writes about the curious love affair with picture postcards, as though vacationers want to chide those they’ve left behind:

“We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are…”

It’s good to get away from it all but it’s even better to remember how good it is to be here.

Same again, please

2006-08-16T18:51:00.000+12:00

Five minutes with Richard Watt

“Digitalisation has made it practically impossible to distinguish between the expression and the idea for a great many works”.

Richard Watt is a newly minted senior lecturer in economic theory at the University of Canterbury. For the 18 years before that he was a lecturer in Economic Theory at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. So we imagine he speaks Spanish by now, and knows all about wonderful Iberian ham and tapas.

He founded the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues in 2001, which last met in June in Singapore, and was its president from 2002 to 2004. He edits the society's journal, and has written a book in which, inter alia, he argues that a little bit of piracy is beneficial to not only society but also copyright holders.

He's a member of the WIPO group of experts that is defining a methodology for calculating the contribution of copyright to national economies.

1. Why is copyright such a fertile field for economics as to encourage you to set up a society to study the issues around it?

“Technological advances have meant huge changes in many aspects of economic life of late, but perhaps none quite so drastic as the way in which products that are traditionally protected by copyright are created, distributed, stored and consumed. It is certainly naïve to think that social systems, such as legal protection devices, should not change as well in such an environment, but the fundamental question is exactly how should social systems adapt. That, combined with two other factors - the increasing importance of copyrightable products in national economies, and the fact that up to quite recently copyright had not been seriously studied by economists, and so many issues that were directly akin to traditional economic theory were clearly not understood by the copyright community - were decisive factors in setting up SERCI.”

2. Do you believe copyright to be the best economic mechanism in a “digital 2006" to balance the needs of creative monopoly and commercial exploitation?

“I do think that copyright in some form does still work, but not with the same general parameters as, say, 10 or 15 years ago. Certainly I believe that copyright needs to exist, even if only to establish a property right, if not to provide protection for that right which may now be done more effectively by other means.”

3. What are the strengths, from an economic viewpoint, of the copyright model? The weaknesses?

“The main strength, probably, is that we are used to the copyright model, and it is reasonably well understood. Changing a status quo is always a risky endeavour. It does, however, have many weaknesses in terms of efficient allocation of resources. Economists, overall, are interested in attempting to evaluate the trade-off between the weaknesses and the strengths of copyright, in a constant attempt to address the question of whether the strengths can still justify the weaknesses. It seems that, over time, the strengths are falling and the weaknesses are growing, which is what has prompted the huge movement towards alternative models.”

4. Do you side with copyright holders on subjects such as “overzealous” scholarship and copyright extensions or not, and why?

“I really don't side with anyone, especially in my roles of Executive Secretary of SERCI, and managing editor of our academic journal. I must remain totally impartial, and my only siding is with the basic truths that emerge from economic theory-based arguments. When such controversies as those you mention spring up, it is almost certainly the case that strong rigorous arguments exist that support both sides, and it is a long process to see who the overall balance of theoretical weight ends up favouring. However, I think that right now it is quite fair to say that economists probably favour the traditional model of a more restricted duration of copyright, and the mainstream probably suggests that the recent extensions are not really justified, especially retroactively (ie, applied to works created under previous law). In that sense, there are many classic works that would probably be best in the public domain but that find themselves protected by retroactive copyright extensions, which ultimately generate the type of controversy you indicate.”

5. Do you believe copyleft and the creative commons licence are positive developments, in that they help promote creative work and create other possible income streams, or do they actually reduce income opportunities in the long run?

“That is, unfortunately, a quite impossible question to answer just yet. Time will tell, but indeed I certainly support the emergence of mechanisms that are able to exist alongside the legal set-up, and that offer more options for creators. I do not see the creative commons and copyleft types of movement as necessarily implying a complete substitution of copyright per se - property rights still need to be defined, and exactly what the creator would like to happen to his work needs to be fully established and legal remedies need to be available for cases in which the intentions of the creator are infringed by others, whatever those intentions are. It will certainly be interesting to see over time the make-up of the types of work, and the types of creator, that prefer to stick with traditional copyright protection and which ones go with the new types of mechanism.”

6. Any opinion on whether ideas should be able to be protected more closely - eg Da Vinci Code case?

“Ideas cannot be protected under current copyright provisions (see question 9 below). It is true that courts have often found that what is a re-expression of an existing work does infringe copyright, but that is not really what copyright is about. Overall, I think all that I would favour is a closer and more clear definition of what is and what is not protected.”

7. Your thoughts on copy protection/DRM devices in the protection/dissemination of copyright works?

“Another sticky issue. DRM would seem to be a very legitimate protection device against piracy, just as locking one's house or car is a device for excluding unwanted intruders. However, it can clearly run up against the rights granted under the fair use clauses of copyright. Who should we favour, the rights holders or the fair users? Perhaps DRM devices can be adapted to allow for just the right amount of free access, and thereby satisfy everyone. Another thing to bear in mind with DRM is the fact that they inspire inefficient (ie, totally wasteful) technology races between programmers and hackers. Really, the DRM issue is not too different in nature to the option of taxing blank supports to generate a fund for reimbursing creators. A negative externality on some economic agents is a necessary ingredient to generate positive welfare gains to others, and it is a matter of empirics whether or not the trade-off is justified.”

8. Searchable libraries - positive or negative?

“Positive, at least in my opinion, but this is ultimately a legal question. However, it seems that searchable libraries as a database do not actually compete with the object searched, and should be classified as fair use. As I know it so far, the objection is when a small part of the searched object is reproduced in the search data-base, in order to improve the performance of the search, and the owners of the copyright in the searched objects claim that this is an infringement. I personally think that this is a weak claim.”

9. Should more copyrightable material be patentable?

“This is perhaps the critical question for the near future. Traditionally copyright only protects expression and never ideas expressed (which are the subject matter of patent). However, digitalisation has made it practically impossible to distinguish between the expression and the idea for a great many works. Of course, the most important example is that of software. It has been argued that an entirely new regime is needed, as the use of either existing regime alone leaves parts of the work unprotected, but the use of both together overprotects the work. If we are to retain the traditional IP models, then copyrightable material cannot be patentable ever, and the real question to address is if the copyrightable parts and the patentable parts can be mutually separated and each protected independently. As this is probably not the case for many digital products, either the traditional paradigm needs to be altered, or an entirely new one introduced.”

Five minutes with Pippa Wetzell

2006-06-18T13:18:00.000+12:00

NZBC didn’t know very much about Pippa Wetzell except that she’s tall, blonde, beautiful and very smart. But now we know she was born and bred on Auckland’s North Shore; travelled for a year after leaving school; returned to New Zealand to complete a three-year communications degree at what was then AIT; finished that at the end of 1998; and then went straight into a job at TVNZ. Since then, she has spent three years in Auckland, two and half in Wellington, travelled for six months, then returned to Auckland at the end of 2004, and has been here ever since. We also know Pippa judged non-fiction in the first ever Creative Writing Day at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in 2004, and were recently devastated to find out she is married. Not that we discovered any of the above through our rigorous questioning because when Pippa gave us her phone number, we had to take a couple of weeks off work to recover. Every mention of Pippa on the internet (here, here or here, for example), is accompanied by an implicit swoon. People enthuse about her the way our girlfriends enthuse about John Campbell. Comments on this very blog have been of the sort usually reserved for our Muse, supermodels or for TV3 weather girls. Yes, our nation would like to see Pippa on its TV screens more often because she possesses the x-factor other Kiwi news reporters don’t. And she’s lovely.

What’s the origin of the surname Wetzell?
“It’s German — came to New Zealand one generation ago via several generations in Samoa.”

Who or what motivated you to get into journalism — is there a media role-model who inspired your chosen career path?

“Not really. I didn’t really set out with this career in mind, but various opportunities came up and I found myself here and loving it. Since I’ve been in the industry there have been plenty of inspiring colleagues.”

A lot of NZBC readers would like to see you reading the news. Is ‘news anchor’ something you aspire to and, if so, who do you think is New Zealand’s best television newsreader?

“I don’t think being a news anchor is on my horizon. That said, I really enjoyed my stint presenting on Breakfast and I’d love to try out some new challenges. I don’t think I could pinpoint the best single NZ newsreader — there are a lot I think are great, and I think the standard of news-reading here is very high. Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie are wonderful to work with — they’re a lot more than just news anchors — and get involved with the stories that go to air. Susan Wood and Paul Henry are great interviewers. Bernadine Oliver-Kerby is an incredibly professional newsreader and wonderfully down-to-earth and fun. Judy Bailey was a wonderful newsreader and one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with.”

In the past, Kiwi broadcasters have been lured by the promise of fame and fortune to Britain or the States. Is there any danger of us losing you to the foreign media?

“No chance at all — even if they’d have me. I love travelling and spending time overseas but I’m completely addicted to the NZ lifestyle. I love spending time at the beach and hanging out with friends and family.”

Don’t you find it patronising being described, as you were recently by Megan Nicol Reed in the Sunday Star-Times, as “the poised blonde in glasses”?

“No, not at all. There’s really not enough time to be insulted by comments like that — in fact, I’d much rather be described as poised than ruffled!”

What’s on your iPod’s ‘On the go’ playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

“Gosh. I have a Sony Walkman mp3 player — which I can’t really use — so I’m not sure what that makes me. If I managed to find the Sony equivalent of the ‘on the go’ playlist and figured out how to use it, it would probably have on it Ben Harper, Fat Freddy’s Drop, some Dire Straits (because I’ve recently re-discovered them), Jack Johnson, Counting Crows, Exponents, U2, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Tristan Prettyman.”

If NZBC readers only read one book this year, which book should it be?

“This is an easy one. I’ve read lots of great books this year but the one I’m just finishing off is the pick of the bunch. It’s called Freakonomics by economist Stephen Levitt. He applies economics to everyday issues and comes up with some pretty startling findings — it’s worth finding someone else who’s read this book because you’ll want to talk about it afterwards.”

Bust lanes

2006-06-04T17:08:00.001+12:00

Bus lanes, despite seeming a very good idea, are not.

Drive down the Albany motorway and the reasons should become clear.

First, spending all those millions shifting hundreds of cubic metres of earth next to the city's twin rivers of cars to enable yet more road vehicles to enter town is misguided. If we really believe that we are approaching or have passed Peak Oil, why are we encouraging vehicle use? The swathe of land being carved out should be used instead for a new electric railway corridor, trains being fed to stations by regular buses. The station could be under QEII square, or, say, on the Tank Farm, with a light rail link to Britomart. Another light rail link should also go under Albert Park through to Newmarket.

Not so long ago, you would not have found a bigger advocate for motorways than me, but we needed them 20 years ago. Sure, we have to finish the Auckland motorway loop, but we should start now on building a rail loop next to it.

Second, if you remove cars from the motorway by way of buses, one of the effects is to speed up car traffic, so encouraging the vain, the selfish, and those with carparks to continue driving in, only with less stress. And don't even mention congestion charges to me. If we had decent trains, our elected reps wouldn't even be considering them.

Turning the bus lane into two rail lines, of course, means adding width to the bridge. This would mean that a walking and cycling lane would have to be added too. Can't do it, I've heard. Figure it out. It's embarrassing we can't walk over our own bridge.

While we're at it:

- If we're adding to our rail network, we need to extend the western line to Kaukapakapa, and our southern line out to Onehunga.

- While we're at that, look at subsidising a ferry service from Waiuku on the Awhitu peninsula to Onehunga. I have heard there's already one going from Port Waikato somewhere to Onehunga.

Oh, and if we are going to have bus lanes in town, they should be able to be used by cars with 3 or more people, and - yes - taxis with passengers.

Enough? For now. But NZBC invites your suggestions, no matter which city you live in.

Antarctic Lemur exposed!

2006-05-10T13:03:00.000+12:00

Mike, and he sells insurance.

That was the year that was 2005

2006-01-02T21:30:00.000+13:00

(RO: Rob O’Neill; MB: Mark Broatch; SS: Stephen Stratford; CB: Chris Bell).

Personal achievement of 2005?
RO: “Joining the diminishing ranks of the unemployed to take up my hobby (fact-checking Sir Humphrey’s) full time.”
MB: “NZBC, and finally making a start on my novel.”
SS: “Am still here — too many friends didn’t make it even this far. Runner-up: Getting closer to nailing the guitar solos in Comfortably Numb.”
CB: “Contributions to NZBC, in particular this one; finishing my short story Shem-el-Nessim, which has taken me over a year to write.”

Event of 2005?
RO: “Probably the London bombings.”
MB: “Happy births and sad deaths, private and public.”
SS: “Winston Peters loses Tauranga, thereby ending years of shame for us locals, and becomes Minister of Baubles. Runner-up: Pink Floyd at Live 8.”
CB: “Hurricane Katrina; 25th anniversary of the death of John Lennon.”

Song of 2005?
RO: “Haven’t really been following that closely, but quite like the Kaiser Chiefs’ one about a riot. It’s got balls.”
MB: “Hung Up, Madonna. Pop genius, shame about the arse.”
SS: “The Ocean, Richard Hawley, from ‘Coles Corner’. Runner-up: Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now by Mitch Benn and the Distractions.”
CB: “The Banality of Evil, Nine Horses, ‘Snow Borne Sorrow’.”

Person of 2005?
RO: “David Hicks’s dad. He’s lucky to have him.”
MB: “Peter Jackson.”
SS: “A tie between Helen Clark and Rodney Hide, who both did the seemingly impossible. Runner-up: Bob Clarkson, National MP for Tauranga. The man has balls.”
CB: “Rod Donald.”

Book of 2005?
MB: “The Insider, Piers Morgan.”
SS: “Watch of Gryphons by Owen Marshall (Vintage), more short stories from our finest, and one of the world’s. Runner-up: The Insider: the private diaries of a scandalous decade by Piers Morgan (Ebury), hugely entertaining memoirs of a tabloid editor.”
CB: “The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organisation.”

Anti-climax of 2005?
RO: “The Clash of civilisations.”
MB: “The adventurousness of NZ journalism.”
SS: “Dick Hubbard, mayor of Auckland. Runners-up: the Hong Kong meeting of the WTO and the EU budget. Budget, smudge it.”
CB: “The NZ General Election.”

Mr Stratford was still alert enough at the time of questioning to add to our feeble list ‘Website of the year’ (“The missing category, you fools!”): “Mark Steyn, ‘the one-man global content provider’. Witty, informed comment from the right. He has met the people he writes about and has been to Iraq and Syria, unlike our local experts at the Listener and Public Address. Runner-up: DGM Live, a model music website with diaries, free downloads, chatty news, photo galleries, etc. Everything for the obsessive or casual fan. On the other hand, it’s about King Crimson, which narrows the appeal slightly.”

Happy screggans and best wishes for 2006, from all at NZBC.

The Girlie hates boomers

2005-11-10T15:20:00.000+13:00

It’s summertime in Sydney and bloody hot. The flies are back. It’s impossible to eat outdoors. The other night I saw fruit bats in Hyde Park, thousands of them bigger than seagulls, doing stuff I’d never seen before. They swooped down and around one after another, through the trees and low over the pond in front of the war memorial, hitting the water briefly and then ascending again. Fruit bats hunting insects.

I live in fear of a fruit bat shitting on me.

The other night was the Girlie’s birthday. You remember the Girlie? I used to write a bit about her here, and here and here. Anyway it was her birthday, her 19th. I texted her “Happy Birthday” because, being between jobs, she still doesn’t get out of bed much before two in the afternoon.

After work I wandered home along Oxford St to our Paddington pad and said we should go out to celebrate. The Girlie still loves Balmain, so off we went and found a nice little Asian place with a good seafood selection. The Girlie is still a vegaquarian.

Halfway through dinner I realised Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home is on the telly.

“Damn,” I tell the Girlie. “I wanted to tape that.”

“Boomer,” she scoffs under her breath.

“Pardon?”

“I hate boomers,” she says. “The sooner they all die the better. I give them thirty years,” she paused. “You’ll probably only last twenty,” she added, looking at the glass of wine in my hand.

The Girlie is an impressionable child. She’s been reading Vice magazine, the “Kill Your Parents” issue. Unfortunately, I find myself in some agreement with her.

I mean when I think about the things I value in life, not a lot of them owe much to the baby boom generation. I think boomers have had a big hand in creating the IT revolution, which arguably has changed our lives more than anything else, but in terms of culture and, you know, exciting stuff, its not to them I look.

To make a very broad generalisation, they produced the worst pop music. The likes of Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, most of the black R&B guys and girls, most of the drivers behind Motown, are often thought of as boomers. But, except for child prodigies like Little Stevie Wonder, those people were mostly pre-boomers, born during or even before the war.

After that, again generalising broadly, the boomers came onto the scene in force and music went down hill for fifteen years, becoming more and more self-indulgent, all the way to disco and the Bee Gees.

Then the late boomers, my generation, came along to put things back on track. (Yay!)

The term boomer is hopelessly imprecise. Online it is generally used interchangeably with “hippy, anti-war, vegan, feminazi” and word like that. A boomer is your classic long-haired 60s radical.

But the late boomers were the first to really react against that hippy legacy. They were the first generation to proclaim their hate of hippies. They were the punks, born mostly at the very end of the 1950s.

While they still, mostly, managed to enjoy the benefits of a free education, the late boomers missed out on the seemingly endless prosperity and security the early boomers enjoyed. In New Zealand they grew up with Muldoon, were restructured endlessly under Lange and Bolger, entered work around the time of the 1987 stock market crash, or after. Worst of all, they had to listen to their older brothers and sisters rabbiting on about Vietnam and Richard Nixon.

It was hardly a bed of roses. No wonder we spent so much time at the Rumba Bar or the Windsor Castle watching Toy Love or The Scavengers, adopting names like Harry Ratbag and John No-one and striking nihilistic poses.

I explained this to the Girlie. She was unimpressed.

“You’re old, Dad.”

On the way back to the car, I bought the Girlie a gelato, just to prove I was still useful for something, and scanned the trees above us for diarrhic bats. The Girlie asked me to pick up the latest copy of Vice for her if I saw it. It would save her getting out of bed.

Fat chance.

Five minutes with Andy Lark

2005-11-02T08:15:00.000+13:00

If you’re after a considered and expert opinion on Skype; Really Simple Syndication (RSS); print-on-demand publishing; podcasts; journalism in the information age; books and literature; food and drink; or even underground music, chances are, Andy Lark’s your man. How he finds time for all of these interests (and then to blog about them, as well) seems to be just one of the many keys to his success. Between his trips to New Zealand and China we caught up with Andy for a chat, and tried to crib from his notes on time management.

Andy, one of the categories on your blog is ‘Eating, drinking and travelling’. What’s your favourite place to eat while you’re in New Zealand?

“Anywhere serving fresh seafood. Love Vinnie’s in Herne Bay. The French Café is world-class. Really enjoyed Soul a few times. Bottom line is that it is really hard to get raw oysters wrong, so I’m the wrong person to ask — I’d be just as happy with fish and chips from the fish shop on the wharf in Tauranga. I tend to really dine out well in the US, Europe and Asia, so when back in NZ tend to look forward to Kiwi basics. Vogel’s bread with NZ butter and Marmite is just a killer meal when you’ve been suffering through US bread and dairy products...”

You’re a big proponent of e-zines. Are there any you’d particularly recommend NZBC readers to check out?

“Flavorpill and Good Morning Silicon Valley are ‘must subscribes’. You want to read Om Malik’s blog.”

You’ve said that the traditional publishing vehicles of newspapers and morning news programmes are under threat. What exactly is the threat, and is there any way in which they can save themselves?

“They serve a basic utility — timely dissemination of information. The threat is that their time-to-market advantage is being diluted by the web, and the simplicity of publishing via blogs and wikis has broken the traditional barriers to anyone becoming a reporter (which is different to being a journalist). I’m hoping that the growth of blogs and wikis will spur people to read more and in fact reinvigorate interest in mainstream publishing. They will need to change, though. Today they are for the most part really dull and uninspiring. Saying that, NZ has some of the best publications on the planet — Urbis, Unlimited, Cuisine are all world beaters.”

You’ve also said, “media sites that don’t allow subscription-free access to content are dead”. The New Zealand Herald has recently gone over to a premium-content model for some of its opinion columns. What message would you like to give the Herald’s publishers?

“Stupid is as stupid does. Your opinions aren’t worth the price you are asking. Be more innovative. You are taking away the one of the things that bought me to you. Might as well force me to subscribe to the whole paper. There would be more chance of that — in fact, I’m really surprised they haven’t, given their monopoly position. The New York Times is trying to do this, but they have Thomas Friedman. Who does the NZ Herald have? I haven’t subscribed to the New York Times, either.

“They are just predictably boring and way out of tune with the next generation of readers. They are constantly framing themselves as ‘publishers’. Yawn. Why not break the frame? Charge for podcasts; build wikis that cause people to participate with them; produce v/casts; develop unique programs; get into micro search. They are in the content game, so this stuff won’t be that hard for them. They just need to use the imagination they have.”

If visitors to NZBC only read one book this year, which book should it be?

“There are so many... Read Thomas L. Friedman’s latest, The World Is Flat. Also Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Also, for fun, The Traveler: A Novel by John Twelve Hawks is entertaining — it will be the next Matrix.”

Which tracks do you have on your iPod’s ‘On the go’ playlist at the moment?

“Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues; and The New Pornographers, Electric Version. BTW, my favourite is Goldenhorse. Their latest album, ‘Out Of the Moon’, is a stunner. And a ton of podcasts — tune into stuff on IT Conversations.”

You reckon New Zealand is the best place on Earth. How much of the year do you get to spend here these days?

“Not nearly bloody enough... I guess about four to six weeks a year. I’m going to come more so I can use Air New Zealand’s new business class — it’s the best in the world.”

Tawkesby: A Beginner’s Guide

2005-10-31T21:12:00.000+13:00

Welcome to the Hawkesby School of Elocution. Do you long to sound like TVNZ’s lovely Kate with no fuss and no mess? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Allow us to explain. Kate had a perfectly ordinary voice until fairly recently when, it appears, a branding expert advised her that she should “own” her IP — her newsreading voice — and a leading voice coach helped her to subtly re-engineer key components of the English language in order to differentiate herself from the competition. This is her USP, or “unique selling point”. The effect is rather like… well, imagine how Barbra Streisand might sound if she’d been born in Johannesburg and then sent to a flash English girls’ school like Roedean.

So that we’re all playing on a level playing field — reading off the same newssheet, as it were — we at the Hawkesby School of Elocution feel it’s high time all New Zealanders started talking like this. It’s sexy, it’s now, and it’s so much more fun than boring old Kiwi English.

Just remember to speak perfectly normally at all times when you’re voicing a segment, provided your face isn’t actually on camera — there’s no sense in squandering your USP. But whenever your face is on screen, switch over to ‘Tawkesby’. Yes, that’s what New Zealand linguistic experts are calling this exciting new phenomenon.

Pucker your glossy lips and hollow your cheeks and make your face as long as possible. And don’t forget to do that funny little Streisand-esque grimace/pout with your mouth, just before they cut away to any video segments.

The most important word in your vocabulary is going to be “thousand”, so use it as frequently as possible — you’ll be surprised how easy it is to sneak this all-purpose word into almost any autocue script that doesn’t already contain it, and then milk it to the max — like this:

“Thaarsands and thaaarsands.”

(Remember that in Tawkesby you’re trying not for an “ow”, but rather an “aaar” sound.)

Here are a few other examples, taken from TVNZ’s forthcoming Dictionary of Tawkesby:

“faarnd” = found
“graand” = ground
“corst” = cost
“naah” = now
“inspaah” = inspire
“annaarnced” = announced
“Vaarduct” = Viaduct

Now try stringing together some Tawkesby to form a complete sentence:

“It’s been annaarnced that thaarsands of new apartments planned for Auckland’s Vaarduct Basin, each corsting hundreds of thaarsands of dollars, will naah no longer be built...”

By jove, I think you’ve got it!

Now, just imagine if, say, TVNZ reporter Pippa Wetzell was reading the six o’clock news. It hardly bears thinking about, does it? You wouldn’t need any of these tips, we’d all still be speaking English and New Zealand would be so much less… now, hang on there just one minute…

Prophecies of doom

2005-10-26T20:39:00.000+13:00

By Andrea Malcolm

Normally I would have done my best to ignore the media coverage on the avian flu (remember the prophecies of doom around Y2K – I do, I was one of the journalists hyping it) but having a baby has rendered me particularly susceptible to it.

I’ve always fancied myself as fit, healthy and fairly disease resistant so (foolishly or not) I’m not worried about myself but I sometimes wonder how I could keep my little guy out of harm’s way if the H5N1 virus should mutate and start spreading among humans. Because, despite assurances from the Ministry of Health that we could close our borders, I don’t see how we can keep it out.

A couple of years ago I was down visiting my uncle at Putiki Pa in Wanganui and we went for a walk down to the urupara (cemetery). I was looking at the headstones and noticed that about six people in what is a small family cemetery had died in 1918, all within days of each other. It was the Spanish Flu epidemic and I wondered how the disease could have made it to such an out-of-the-way corner of the world, especially during a time when the only way to get to New Zealand was by ship.

So now I find myself compelled to read, watch or listen to every article and item about H5N1 that I come across – which happens almost daily - and wonder whether I should’ve stocked up on Tamiflu (but it’s probably way too late to get any now).

It seems I’m not the only one lapping up all this stuff. TVNZ’s Breakfast was inundated with inquiries when it featured a site that aggregates avian flu coverage from around the world.

Pandemic News is updated daily and pulls in articles from the mainstream media, so it’s interesting if only to see what the rest of the world is being told. It also has links to various sites such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In case you’re wondering who is behind Pandemic News, it’s a colleague of mine, Roger Smith, who’s in charge of Auckland University of Technology’s web site. Roger isn’t a medical man but he does know how to build a site that looks good and with great content.

Last year he won an award from the global museum curators’ community for GlobalMuseum and he also has DinosaurNews.

Bringing home the vote

2005-10-19T21:52:00.000+13:00

By Andrea Malcolm

The other day I received a letter from Helen Clark thanking me for my help on Election Day. Let me explain. I joined the Labour Party two years ago. Apart from forking out for the annual membership fee ($60), joining the party put me at the disposal of the Mt Albert electorate office and I was occasionally called upon to deliver Helen Clark newsletters.

Trudging from mailbox to mailbox on these distinctly unglamorous excursions, I’d feel that this wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I signed up. I’d planned to make a difference at the grass roots level and get the sort of government I wanted.

But work, play and a baby got in the way of greater involvement.

The one meeting between Helen Clark (as our MP) and local party members that I managed to make it to was a washout because she couldn’t make it (being bunkered in the Beehive for an emergency meeting after Orewa I). And I was put off the various Helen-in-attendance BBQs with the advice “They’re really just an opportunity to hit you up for a donation.” But then election year arrived and even I started to feel motivated. Don Brash has that effect on people.

I offered to be a scrutineer on election day, having only a vague idea of what that entailed. The mechanics of the job were fairly mundane. Turn up, sit by the electoral officer, and, in the case of the Labour Party, write down the page and line number of the voter. This information was collected by Labour runners and taken back to the electorate HQ so that, as the day went by, the party knew who hadn’t yet voted and these people were rung up and offered transport to a polling booth.

Labour is big on getting people to vote because historically the bigger the turnout, the better it does. National scrutineers on the other hand didn’t have to do any of this. The other part of the job was to keep an eye on the whole procedure, make sure the queues aren’t too long, people aren’t walking out without voting or being hindered in anyway.

But what I loved about it was the primo opportunity to people-watch. I was sent to a polling booth in Mt Roskill (home of the Exclusive Brethren; no, none of them voted) and was surprised to see a queue had formed even before the polls opened. There were four Labour scrutineers, two from National and none from any other parties. The woman from National said she wasn’t allowed to talk once the polls opened. My instructions were that we couldn’t answer questions on voting from the public and above all don’t touch the actual roll because this would constituted tampering. When my baby showed up with this father I wondered if there was a rule against kissing the electorate.

Although we were a bit of a backwater booth there was a steady stream of people all day except when it rained. Just as they say, the wet weather had a definite dampening effect on the turnout. In general, an air of excitement filled our battered church hall. A hugely diverse ethnic population meant many immigrant voters and they all seemed to have a real sense of pride and excitement about what they were doing. Endearingly, nearly every parent with kids would give their voting papers to their child and lift them up to put them in the ballot box. People were patient and generally jovial.

At lunchtime the National scrutineers left never to return. The Labour group lasted another four hours. I wouldn’t have minded seeing what happened in the last half hour before the polls closed as veteran electoral officer Don told me that that’s when all the “crazies” turn up. In a past election, one such individual grabbed the ballot box nearest the door and ran away with it. Luckily he was caught but Don had learned his lesson and pointed out to me that none of the ballot boxes in our hall were too near the exit.

At 4pm we headed back to Sandringham HQ where we offered tickets to the election party at the Dominion Road War Memorial Hall. But I was hankering to see my three-month-old as this was the first time I’d been away from him for more than an hour. Plus I wasn’t too sure how much of a celebration it would be. Winston not withstanding, it turned out OK and I got my letter. Now it’s probably back to the coal face - mail drops for the next three years.

Centrebet hedges on NZ election call

2005-09-20T19:46:00.000+12:00

Last week the Sydney Morning Herald reported Aussie betting agency Centrebet has only been wrong once in the 60 elections.

Last night one new TV poll put the parties neck and neck, while a second placed National ahead, as did the online bookmakers Centrebet, whose only electoral failure in 60 polls worldwide to date has been picking Jeff Kennett to win over Steve Bracks in 1999.

That's a proud record indeed, but as betting closed before the New Zealand poll on Saturday, the agency had Don Brash ahead. Does that make it 2 out of 61?

I put that question to company spokesman Mark Ward today and found he was reluctant to concede the point. I also found he knew the election inside out and back to front.

Ward concedes that Don Brash did cross the line as favourite in Centrebet's odds. However, the betting had been volatile. On Friday, he says it was around 60:40 in favour of National. On Saturday it went to 50:50 and in the last hour Labour led.

While conceding Labour still went over the line a slight underdog, Ward says Centrebet never issued its usual bullish press release calling a result.

"It was one of the very few we couldn't call," he says. $600,000 in bets were placed, he says, the equivalent of a couple of Premier League rounds.

Ward, an Englishman based in Sydney, talks freely, expertly and passionately about the election, right down to the contests in Epsom and Tauranga. And he is hugely critical of the polling delivered in its lead-up.

"A couple of the polling companies have to have a good hard look at themselves," he says, insisting even if Centrebet was wrong at the end, it was still more accurate.

Polls showing 6 and 7 per cent gaps were ludicrous, he says, especially when 20 to 25 per cent of people on Thursday and Friday didn't have a clue how they would vote. He says 20 undecided voters will usually break 12:8 for the incumbent, and that's pretty much what happened. The polls exagerated support for National.

Thursday night's debate was behind the surge in betting support for National, he says, as Brash stood up and arguably carried the night.

"The general feeling was he was a dead-set chance, and that caused a couple of people to get a bit overexcited and take some losses."

So, when he's next asked the question, was Centrebet wrong once or twice?

"It's a matter of public record we went to the line with Labour as underdog," he says. "You could mark it down as a loss but I say we never really called it."

New bottles

2005-09-15T07:16:00.000+12:00

It's down to the wire. Neck and neck. Too close to call. Will the Blue states outnumber the Red? Will we be spitting at each other over the barricades?

Or is it, as Act's latest newsletter suggests, the case that the polls could be unreliable because the pollsters can't get a representative group of voters? Is the presence of caller ID, more people having only cellphones or unlisted numbers, and the likely reluctance of 100,000 Chinese-born residents to reveal their true voting intentions making it tough to get a representative sample? Are the people being polled just those with the time and inclination?

It's all academic to me. I've voted. I will be out of the country on election day, as will two other of NZBC's board. It's a move I might firm into policy, given my dislike of the whole results palaver. I trotted along to the nearest voting office, which was only open 10-4 weekdays, oddly I thought, given that the election is on the weekend, and got my “Yes I've voted” sticker.

As I stood there with my thick dark pen ready to make my two ticks, I did pause. Putting aside the arrogance of Labour, its blitheness to the concerns of the middle classes and keenness to boost the lot of the strugglers of society and those with kids (often the same people) rather than all of us, I still found it slightly perplexing that the populace were thinking of voting out a government that has delivered economic stability, an arguably excellent health system and some social cohesion. They did have a healthy economy to help them do it. Or did they help produce and maintain a healthy economy? That's where the ideologues would start to fire up.

I'd love more money, but I am more interested in a more gentle tax threshold shift that didn't mean cuts to services, that insured they were there when I needed them. The personalities don’t interest me. None of the old turks in the Nats impress me – in fact, many of them worry me – but then the faces behind the government's benches don't inspire me particularly either. If it came down to the wire, though, wouldn't you be worried if you led a party and the Exclusive Brethren preferred your lot over the others?

Allowing for the fact that the major parties differ far more in fiscal policy than in parsable social policy – or probably moral liberalness – my vote came down to deciding whether I wanted a return to pre-cup of tea against post-cup of tea. (I should say at this point that the directors of NZBC vary on their voting preference but we all tend towards the socially liberal end of the spectrum.) Certainly the economy in the early 1980s needed loosening up. We certainly weren't the USSR, but there were a lot of controls. I worked in a bank at the time and you had to fill in a little coloured slip for every $200 people took out of the country. I remember a lot of people moving to Perth at the time (and one well-endowed customer being allowed to overdraw her savings account, but that's another story).

But calls year after year for more deregulation, more state asset sales, a little more pain, a little more trickle-down: it all got too much. No country in their right mind had opened its economy to the rest of the world without some restraints, some barriers, some doubts, some thought for the knife-edge manufacturers which employed people who would otherwise go on the dole and suck up our taxes. The ideologues were like the Intelligent Design crowd: they had a theory and by God they would argue it was right regardless of the cost (to others). But ideology is like economics – it often ignores reality.

A couple of things I read recently reminded me that ideology colours the views of even the clearest thinkers.

Mark Steyn, a smart fellow with a great turn of phrase, comes up with an odd coda about political choices during an otherwise useful dig at those in charge of messing up N'Orleens.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Probably true, but here I was thinking that the US was the perfect dog-eat-dog capitalist society and didn't at all instill welfarism.

Think you can please three-kid families, students, beneficiaries AND impatient businessmen? (Key wouldn't be a 'better' finance minister than Cullen, as some survey was reported; he would just be probably more favourable to businesses. Probably.)

A par in a review by Bryan Appleyard (of Why they don't hate us by Mark LeVine) also reminded me, obliquely, of how little changes beyond the colour of the bottle.

Essentially, the belief that Iraq could be flipped solely by the judicious application of shock and awe sprang from the neocon/neoliberal ideology that, in turn, had its roots in the monetarist and free-market economics of the 1970s. These were all redefinitions of conservatism as a utopian programme. Previously, conservatives had defined themselves as pragmatic and anti-utopian, not least because of the catastrophe of left-wing utopianism in the Soviet Union. But, for the new right, this pragmatism had become too tainted with soft, postwar socialism and so, from Milton Friedman to Francis Fukuyama, the right reformed around the utopian notion of the West’s discovery of the end state of politics and economics, a discovery which was now to be propagated, like penicillin or McDonald’s, across the globe.

Utopia doesn't exist. I hope pragmatism rules. Happy voting.

Spoilt for choice

2005-09-13T09:16:00.000+12:00

Duncan Robertson writes:

Living in the leafy streets of the Epsom electorate, it appears I now have the power to change the government. We in Remuera have always thought that was a given, but I digress.

However, unlike some in the more bohemian suburbs, we in leafy Epsom take our electoral responsibilities seriously. So some voting advice please:

Rodney keeps shouting at me to vote Act every time I venture out, but there is something about a grown man humping my leg that I find a little unnerving.

My dear grey haired Mum intends voting Winston, which is why the elderly should lose their vote the moment they can no longer chew solids.

My wife thinks cauliflower; spinach and leeks are edible vegetables so there is a real danger she will vote Green.

My mother-in-law is voting Helen but hopefully dementia will kick in before then.

My father-in-law is voting Don because they both dress well.

My brother-in-law says he's voting Jim Anderton but I'm sure he will switch to that Legalise Cannabis mob the moment his rope sandals slip behind the electoral booth curtains.

The neighbours next door who drink and shout a lot will be voting Christian Heritage.

The neighbours on the other side will be voting the Maori Party because they said they went to one once and it was great.

Benson the Dog can't vote which is fortunate because whoever he supported would be dog tucker.

So I'm torn.

The Outdoor Recreation crowd because they like fishing?

Destiny New Zealand which is apparently promising to take a jar of hair cream and turn it in to Harley Davidsons for the multitude?

Or the One New Zealand Party in case it turns out there are two in the world and that would bugger our tourism industry?

The right is so amusing, when it’s desperate

2005-08-25T19:47:00.000+12:00

I must say the political right is providing a lot of entertainment on the Helen Clark motorcade non-issue.

These guys are whipping themselves up into a huge lather trying to show that the person driving a car is not responsible for the speed it travels at. The person responsible, they say, is the one in the back seat.

Here’s their smoking gun:

I could see her, she was seated behind the driver and she was leaning over to her left, more towards the centre of vehicle so she could look ahead. She was looking in my direction past her driver... I don't know if she could see the speedo or not... she was definitely looking in my direction and I was looking at her face in the glimpses that I could see.
She was smiling and appeared to be enjoying the ride is how I would put it. Most definitely aware of what was going on in front of her and around her, and I can't recall her being engrossed in any paperwork.

She was “smiling” and “enjoying the ride”. Golly. Now if only they could prove she was driving the damn car they’d be onto something.

But no, the incident is proof she’s a megalomaniac, says Grant Tyrell.

Waimate police officer Clint Vallender told the court that as far as he was concerned if the Prime Minister wanted to get somewhere it was her privilege.

If she wants to get there, she gets there … as far as I’m concerned it’s her job.

No actually it’s your job, Clint, you and the other police and drivers involved. And it’s your job to obey the law just like everyone else and to take responsibility when you break it. And that's what's happened.

Racing NZ to the bottom

2005-08-24T16:58:00.000+12:00

God Australians are competitive. They’ll turn anything into a contest. Today they declared a race to see who could have the lowest wages, and their warm-up is against New Zealand.

We all know, no matter how it is dressed up, that labour market reform is about screwing the workers. But you rarely get to hear its advocates admit that.

Today, Australians got a glimpse under the skirt of the proposed industrial reforms being marketed as delivering "More Jobs, Higher Wages, A Stronger Economy". Industry minister Ian Macfarlane dropped his guard saying Australia should cut its Labour costs to meet those of New Zealand, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

We've got to ensure that industrial relations reform continues so we have the labour prices of New Zealand. They reformed their industrial relations system a decade ago. We're already a decade behind the New Zealanders. There is no resting.

Whoops! Predictably he later denied he meant wages should be cut and his spokesperson “clarified” his comments saying labour prices could refer to a lot of extranous employment costs.

So, New Zealand, are you up to the challenge? Will we beat them to the bottom or are you going to meekly surrender yet another trophy?

If you’re up for a race, Don Brash is your man. You won’t see him lifting his skirt like Macfarlane, but he seems keen to give the Aussies a run for their money.

For starters, he wants to get rid of that extra week's holiday you’ve just been given.

If we are being generous, we could assume that the new law was passed with the best of intentions, rather than as a sop to Labour’s union friends. If that is the case, then it is misconceived. It is based on the fantasy that government can simply dial up an income for people, that government can somehow give more holidays to people without that cost affecting anybody, or perhaps with the cost confined to a small group of class enemies.

Okay, look Don, this is what I reckon. Kiwis are prepared to make sacrifices to see the country succeed. Most New Zealanders have been making those sacrifices for the past fifteen years. What you need to do, Don, is tell them when they are going to get the higher wages and better conditions you reckon will result from those sacrifices.

When will the pay-off come? Go on Don, put a date on it.

It shouldn’t be hard. You could even do it by a formula. You could say New Zealand can afford an extra week’s holiday after it has grown above the OECD average by, say, three per cent.

But of course he won’t do that because there is no pot of gold awaiting workers at the end of the growth rainbow. That pot of gold is called profits and it belongs to the shareholders.

Oh, and Don, whatever you do, don’t use the term “trickle down”.

Driven to distraction

2005-08-23T07:45:00.000+12:00

Further to our earlier piece on NZ car habits , NZBC has seen an anonymous submission to an unreleased LTSA report on the quality of New Zealand driving – random quote: “It's really bad” - that makes some suggestions about who should have their licence removed:

Those who change lanes without indicating.

Those who brake before they indicate that they're turning.

Those who don't brake, don't indicate and make the turn anyway, laughing and giving the fingers to drivers behind.

Those who think The Drift or The Dart is as good as indicating.

Those who think indicating gives them a magical right to instantly change lanes.

Those who drive wearing baseball caps or beanies, who are not baseball players or freezing workers.

Anyone with mag wheels, lowered suspension, home-built turbos or spoilers, especially on their car.

Helen Clark.

The Governor General.

Asian drivers, apart from the good ones.

Red light runners.

Those who drive across intersections knowing the light is about to change, but “like, don't care”.

Anyone with an SUV, especially those who don't live in the wops and have a bog for a drive.

Anyone with a 'Baby on Board' yellow plastic tag in their back window.

Those who drive a Holden V8 but aren't taxi drivers.

Anyone who washes their car regularly.

Those who never wash their car.

Anyone carrying bikes on the towbar that are worth more than the car.

Anyone with a towbar.

Those who drive in summer without a shirt.

Those who drive in winter without a shirt.

Drivers sitting at the front of a traffic-lighted intersection who aren't in first gear at the change.

Those who can't do a hill start.

Those who leave big gaps in stop-start motorway traffic.

Those who jump into two-second-rule gaps.

Drivers on the open road who speed up for passing lanes but slow straight after.

Everyone else.