Factory farming a model of good practice
12th December 2009

The announcement this week that dairy companies have applied for consents to house 18,000 cows in cubicles in the Mackenzie Basin has sent shock waves through the community but may be a boon to the makers of astro-turf.

One of the promoters of the scheme, Hugo Largeburger of Two Fingers Dairy Holdings, disputed claims that farming cows indoors will be bad for New Zealand’s green image.

“People are saying this is factory farming but it’s nothing of the kind. I’ve been in factories and they’re full of bloody diesel fumes and miserable looking buggers in overalls. Our farms will be elegantly designed residences that blend with the landscape. We’ll have murals on the walls showing famous dairying landscapes so the cows will feel expansive, and we’re looking into astro-turf in the cubicles to give them the idea of grass.”

Mr Largeburger claims the astro-turf is a uniquely kiwi solution to indoor dairying. “We’ll use different shades of turf to create the changes of seasons. So we’ve got green for spring and early summer, then brown as we head into the drier season and silver to create that frosty effect of winter. The cows will feel like they’re out in the wide open, except they won’t be freezing their tits off.”

Opponents argue that intensive dairying in fragile environments like the Mackenzie Basin is a sign that dairying is heading the same way as the sheep industry in the 1980s, when the national flock topped 70million and sheep were being raised on marginal land that quickly degraded and has failed to recover. Mr Largeburger will have none of this.

“When you’re dairying in cubicles there’s no such thing as marginal land. I can tell you we’ve got plans to build a heap more of these farms all the way up to Mt Cook. In fact, we can see real advantages of building a few right on the Tasman glacier. Let’s face it, that place is worthless for anything else and with global warming there’ll be no problems with water supply – at least for a few years.”

He is dismissive of claims that effluent disposal will damage the environment.

“What environment? There’s nothing there but dust and hills and the odd salmon farm. Our project will actually create an environment through careful application of nutrients to the ground.”

He also hinted that Two Fingers has several other strategies for disposing of waste.

“One plan is to build a pipeline over the Southern Alps and dispose of all the waste in a West Coast river. Environmentally we’ll be pushing shit uphill but nobody ever goes there so we should get away with it. We’ve also discussed gathering all the urine into holding tanks and releasing it into Lake Benmore during peak electricity demand. We could generate an extra megawatt or two of power and offset that against our carbon footprint.”

Cubicled cows will be fed on palm kernel sourced from Indonesian plantations owned by Two Fingers subsidiary, Dipstick Consolidated.

“Dipstick’s been knocking down rainforest for years and we’ve got a mountain of palm kernel over there. We’ll mix it with a local supplement of ground rabbit meal and hieracium, to give the milk a unique Mackenzie tang. Our techies have also discovered that the chemistry of astro-turf is very similar to palm kernel, so we could have the cows actually grazing in their cubicles.”

When asked if his plans were a triumph of corporate greed over good practice, Mr Largeburger looked puzzled.

“I suppose that depends on whether you see greed as a bad thing,” he replied.

A beginner’s guide to National Standards
28th November 2009

When John Key launched the National Standards for primary schools last month he hailed them as the most important educational reform of the past 20 years. Opposition to the Standards from leading academics and teachers has been widely reported in the media this week, indicating that not everybody shares the Prime Minister’s optimism. The argument quickly becomes technical, so here is a beginner’s guide to National Standards.

The National Standards are a set of benchmarks that apply to reading, writing and mathematics. They define what children should be able to achieve in these 3 subjects at each year level from age 5 to the end of primary school. They recapture some very old ideas about teaching and learning – remember, we used to call the primary years the ‘standards.’

From 2010 primary and intermediate schools will be required to report to parents twice a year about how their children are achieving against the National Standards. They must report in “plain language”, which means they must state if the child is above, at, below or well below the Standards.

From 2011 each school must include specific goals relating to the National Standards in their annual charter. The goals must be written as percentages of students the school will ensure are achieving at or above the Standards. From 2012 school results must be reported to the Ministry of Education, this information becoming part of the public record.

The introduction of National Standards fulfils a National Party election promise. National claims two main reasons for introducing Standards. First, they say that parents throughout the country are confused by the way schools report student achievement and that they have the right to be told plainly how their children are getting on.

Second, they say National Standards will ensure that New Zealand’s long ‘tail’ of under-achievers will become successful at school.

The Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, says National Standards are an urgent and necessary measure to correct an education system that fails too many children. She says National Standards are about improving student achievement.

In reality, they are highly political. National Standards are education’s version of the market reforms of the 1980s and 90s. They are formed around a view that high stakes assessment will motivate schools to transform struggling students into geniuses. They are like the farmer who weighs his prize pig every day but fails to realise that simply weighing the pig does not fatten it.

The introduction of National Standards sends a message that up to now children have bobbed about in a sea of conjecture. This is untrue. Teachers already measure children’s progress against clearly defined standards. The difference is that the current standards are not pegged to a particular moment in a child’s schooling.

National Standards, by comparison, assume that all children start school with the same ability and potential, and continue throughout their school years to learn in a steady, unwavering curve of improved achievement. This is nonsense. By drawing a narrow line between success and failure National Standards act as a brake on the brightest and condemn low achievers to toil through their school years as dummies.

Remarkably, for a policy that is a cornerstone of this government, the National Standards are completely untried. They have been written in haste with no meaningful input from schools and against the advice of leading academics. There has been no attempt to gauge their accuracy. We do not know, for example, if the Year 3 standard for reading is achievable by 10% or 90% of children. Neither is there provision to review the standards once schools have worked with them.

Countries that introduced National Standards programmes in the 1990s now regard them as failed policies. In England they are blamed for narrowing the curriculum, de-motivating children and lowering achievement. Schools in England are threatening to boycott standardised testing. By comparison, New Zealand has continued to rank near the top in international surveys of educational achievement.

Tragically, Mr Key’s prediction about the importance of National Standards may be right. We may come to view them as the point where our education system went off the rails.

Hone hurls his toys
14th November 2009

Hone Howarya hadn’t always been a good boy, so when he got the invitation to the party he was very excited. “Look at this, Hilda!” he cried, “I’m gonna play in the big toy box!”

When Hone Howarya arrived at the party Aunt Tatty and Uncle Peet welcomed him. “Now, Hone,” said wise Aunt Tatty, “you must be on your best behaviour. There are toys here you don’t get on with but you have to be good or we’ll send you home.”
Hone looked around the big toy box. Aunt Tatty was right, there were a lot of bigwigs in this place and most of them were buggeryas.

If there was one thing Hone Howarya hated, it was the buggerya tribe. His hatred was an old one. It went back a long, long way to the time when the buggerya tribe gate-crashed the picnic and stole all the Howarya’s lollies. And while it was true they eventually gave some of the lollies back they made sure to keep all the best ones. Now Hone had to spend his days among the buggerya bigwigs, watching them chewing his lollies.

But for a while things just kept getting better, especially after the lection when Jonkey, the chief bigwig, invited Aunt Tatty and Uncle Peet to join the gummint. Hone felt very proud.

One day Uncle Peet took Hone aside and said, “Hone, you’ve been such a good boy you can take some friends and visit Wonderland.”
“Can I be the leader?” asked Hone.
“Yes, but you must be responsible and work very hard.”
“I will,” promised Hone, and ran off to pack his surfboard.

Hone took Hilda to Wonderland just because he could, and they were amazed. They had never seen anything as wonderful as Wonderland. The buildings were tall as mountains, the roads curved like spaghetti, the pastries were sweeter than honey and the frothy beer made Hone sneeze. My, how they laughed!

Everybody in Wonderland made Hone feel important. The Wonderland bigwigs asked him lots of questions and even listened to his answers. But alas, all this importance went to his head and then Hone Howarya did a very naughty thing. He and Hilda sneaked off to visit the Crystal City, the most fabulous of all the treasures in Wonderland.

“Well, why shouldn’t I have some fun?” sniffed Hone. “Those buggeryas have been visiting Crystal City for years. Now it’s my turn.”

But, oh dear, when Hone returned to the big toy box the news mediums heard about his naughty trip to Crystal City and then the fish hit the pan. Suddenly everybody was mad at Hone. Aunt Tatty and Uncle Peet wouldn’t talk to him, the buggeryas were up in arms and so were some of the other Howaryas. One even sent him a fleamail that was so itchy and biting that Hone lost his temper and sent a really nasty fleamail right back.


Matters only got worse when one of the buggerya bigwigs, Pill-the-Goff, said Hone should be sent home from the party without his party pack. Hone got so mad he said Pill-the-Goff should be shot and, anyway, he wasn’t a bit sorry.

Things moved quickly after that. Hone was sent home without any lollies, Aunt Tatty and Uncle Peet got married and retired to Balclutha and Jonkey formed a new gummint with Rubber Hide and the Green Peas.

Back home again, Hone Howarya sat dejectedly on the old wharf, dangling his feet.
“Oh well, Hilda,” he sighed, “looks like we’re back to throwing mud on Waitangi Day.” He leaned on his surfboard and stared across the lagoon.

Raising the Bar
30th October 2009

Tom is six and struggling to master high jump. The run up’s going well, pattering across the grass, his little legs pumping. The problems start when he arrives at the bar. There are of course the technical challenges of a successful scissors kick, but the real obstacle is in his mind.

When Tom approaches the bar he does not see, as you and I do, a thin, red-and-black carbon fibre rod. Tom sees a very large, very high, and potentially very painful obstacle. He sees a brick wall, topped with razor wire and broken glass, probably with a large slavering dog on the other side. Time and again he shies away and trudges to the back of the dwindling line of non-jumpers.

While National Standards have been this week’s big story in education, most teachers at this time of year are raising the bar for children in more literal ways. It’s athletics season and all around the country little Toms, Dicks and Harrys are facing up to the real hurdles.

My heart goes out to Tom. Wind the clock back and Tom was me. Generally I rode through the school year ticking the boxes and enjoying the warm feeling of success. But every November I faced, literally, the hurdle of athletics day – my day of shame.

The worst thing about athletics day was the small cardboard tag that was pinned to my t-shirt with a small safety pin on the morning of sports day. On the card was printed a list of the events and three columns for scoring. At each event you could score a 1, 2 or 3 depending on your prowess. My only consolation was that the score card had no column for scoring zero. As the day progressed the score card became the natural focus for attention and, in my case, misery.

I was bad at all athletics events but useless at high jump. Like Tom, the idea of throwing myself at a bar (they were steel then) defied every bone in my body. Even if I managed to clear it I then faced the prospect of landing in a hard, uninviting sawdust pit (no large blue spongy landing mats). The sawdust pit at our school had not seen sawdust since the last war. Any sawdust that remained was purely conjectural, a thin layer smeared across brick-hard dirt and the preferred dunny of every cat in the neighbourhood.

My problems were partly technical. I marvelled at the children who seemed instinctively to know which leg to take off from and how to arrive at the bar prepared to use that leg. More than once I found myself faced down on the bar, having leapt from the wrong leg.

At least I did not suffer the indignities of my friend Wayne who, having perfected the take off and got his leading leg over the bar, seemed incapable of lifting his trailing leg and always – always - ended up straddling the bar, to his disgrace and the delighted howls of the other boys. On one dreadful occasion Wayne landed on the bar so hard he had to be carried, howling, to the sick bay and the bar sent off to the caretaker to be straightened out.

I invariably arrived at the end of athletics day sunburned and demoralised. Slinking from the field I would tear off my score card and shred it.

Now, as a teacher, I enjoy athletics day. I warm to the sight of hundreds of children in earnest endeavour scattered across a green paddock under a bright spring sky, of picnicking parents and affectionate nanas. In these days of National Standards athletics training is a relief. And as I watch Tom’s struggles to get off the ground I am quietly grateful we do not yet have national standards in high jump.

Ashburton’s new walkway delights
17th October 2009

I have been unkind to the Ashburton River in the past. I have dismissed it. “Scungy” I believe was my favoured expression.

Imagine, then, my delight last Sunday when I discovered the District Council’s new walking/cycling trail that connects Ashburton to Lake Hood, winding along the south bank of the river. Sylvia and I had heard the rumour of this new jewel in Ashburton’s crown so we set out to find it.

The track begins a very short walk from our home on Carters Terrace, at the southern end of the bridge, but finding it is unnerving. Dropping down off the road we followed the cycleway past picnic tables alongside the railway embankment, skirted a large, evil-smelling puddle and negotiated the underbelly of the bridge, where the entrails of the town are strung across steel girders and all hope is lost. The concrete abutments of the bridge scream with graffiti, most of it eye-wateringly desperate. Our spirits rose immeasurably at the most prominent slogan, “**** you bicth.” Bicth? Where was the putative graffiti artist when ‘tch’ was the sound of the week? Perhaps he was asleep in the Wendy house, or kicking a can down Chalmers Ave.

Emerging from Dante’s Purgatorio and dodging a dad and daughter mountain-bike tag team we clambered onto the embankment and there, unassumingly, was the beginning of the new trail, marked with a large white-washed boulder.

The track plunged immediately into the tall grove of trees that spreads out from the eastern edge of the main road. I’ve often admired this stand of trees. I’ve no idea what kind of tree they are: neither willow nor poplar, but something akin to both and at this time of year glorious in the first blush of spring. Their trunks reared up around us and gathered, cathedral-like, far above our heads.

The track, a fine river silt with patches of gravel, meandered among the trees, marked by more white painted boulders scattered heedlessly like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

Emerging from the grove we drew near the riverbank where the newly bulldozed track carved an alley through scrub and willows. In the hot afternoon sun the air was rich with the jasmine smell of willows and wildflowers.

From here the walk quickly established itself as a Cook’s tour of New Zealand noxious weeds. I don’t mean just a few tendrils of hieracium or the occasional ragwort. Here were all the big guns: blackberry, broom and gorse. Here were draperies of old man’s beard scrambling 10 or 20 metres up the trees. In some places the bush was so entangled with creepers it became the adventure land of every small boy’s imagination: a place of writhing anacondas and lost tribes, of sunken temples and scowling statuary.

My ridicule of the Ashburton River tends from the irony of finding myself living beside the least attractive strip of nature in this stunningly beautiful country. What possible pleasure can be found in walking on a bulldozer track through thickets of gorse and blackberry? And yet, on a bright spring day, with the warm sun on my shoulders, surrounded by a carnival of yellow broom flowers, this track was pleasurable: and all the more at those places where it closed to the riverbank and we could admire the sunlight on bright water and the long reaches of shingle.

There are a few disappointments. We encountered too many heaps of broken glass and rusting whiteware, reminding us how often the riverbank is a convenient rubbish dump, and a couple of places where the concrete-block barriers designed to restrict the track to walkers and cyclists had already been breached by joy-riders.

Hidden deep in the undergrowth, lost to all landmarks, we had no idea how far we had walked until, unexpectedly, we found ourselves at the intake to Lake Hood. We strolled down the water race and picnicked with the boats and biscuits at the lake’s edge before retracing our steps to Tinwald.

I take a lesson from this. I am guilty of overlooking my place, of equating pleasure with ‘away.’ I forget that a landscape can still satisfy even if it is less picturesque, and that the familiar can still surprise. If I cannot find virtue in my own backyard I am a poor customer indeed. I cramp my spirit and risk my life becoming, like the man said, a bicth.

Motor mower sparks moral crisis
3rd October 2009


One of the final things my neighbour Leanne Argyle did before she joined the tide of kiwis flowing to the Gold Coast was to give me her late father’s motor mower. It is the first motor mower I have owned. Pause a moment, dear reader, and reflect upon the enormity of that statement. For a New Zealand male of 51 to admit he has never owned a motor mower is like Michael Laws claiming modesty.

It’s not that I have never owned a lawn: I have possessed lawns all my life, usually large ones. Since I was a child I have been an enthusiastic participant in that greatest of kiwi weekend rituals – taming, trimming and tidying a suburban lawn. The difference is that, until now, I have always used a hand mower - a ‘push’ mower as we called it.

Thirty or forty years ago a push mower was commonplace but I can think of nobody who uses one today. Why did I persist for so long? To answer that question is to invite a philosophical discussion, a dialectic of home gardening that would fill several large volumes.

Let me just say that my attachment to the push mower was partly about style (I liked the effect it had on a lawn) and partly about personal fitness (it’s cheaper than joining a gym). I’ll confess that as the years went by it also became a matter of pride, particularly after we moved to Carters Terrace and took up a half acre garden, much of it grass.

So to be confronted with Leanne’s late father’s motor mower was no small matter. Here was a gift with hooks. It sat in my driveway like a great red beetle, exhaling smells of petrol and silage. I circled it suspiciously, my soul in turmoil. What was I to do?

My instinctive reaction was to give it back, but by the time I discovered the gift it was too late, the Argyles had departed. There was nobody to give it back to. Clearly they had observed me pushing my hand mower across the vast acreage of my lawn and had left me this machine out of sympathy, or perhaps to provoke the moral dilemma I now confronted.

My second thought was simply to park the machine in the corner of the garage and continue using my push mower. And that is exactly what I did until the motor mower’s silent mockery became too much for me.

My reluctance to take up the motor mower sprang from more than a desire to cling to old habits. It went all the way back to Mrs McClymont.

As a child I flexed my entrepreneurial spirit by developing a small lawn-mowing business. On most days after school I cut lawns for the many elderly women of our neighbourhood. All my clients had push mowers except for Mrs McClymont, who insisted I used her motor mower. This was a leviathan, an untamable beast of the high veldt, an ancient reel mower with ape-hanger handle bars. It was a brute to start and, being self-propelled, when finally coaxed to life was almost impossible for a young boy to control. It dragged me around Mrs McClymont’s lawns in a cloud of blue smoke, occasionally rampaging through flowerbeds and rose bushes. My only effective way of bringing it to a halt was to aim for a tree or fence post.

This early experience with motor mowers was on my mind when I eventually decided to try out my new machine. True to expectation, Leanne’s late father’s mower proved to be as temperamental as Mrs McClymont’s. It was slow to start and quick to cut out. I tinkered and fiddled, cursed and complained and eventually carted the machine off to Skinner’s in Netherby.

Now, in the full flush of spring growth, I am slowly becoming accustomed to the motor mower. It is fast, effortless and convenient.

Do I feel happier, fulfilled, or at least more in tune with my fellow suburbanites? Perhaps, but I miss the satisfaction of working up a good sweat and I try to ignore the reproaches of my old push mower cast, after all these years, to the back of the shed.

National Standards undermine real change
12th September 2009

Mel is indignant. She sits in the corner of the staffroom and puffs herself up. “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about National Standards. When I was teaching in London I taught right through their national testing and I can tell you it’s brilliant.”

Heads turn - this is a view of the world we haven’t heard before.

Mel continues. “National testing is so satisfying for the teacher. You know exactly what you have to do and you can work really hard to get the children through the test. I was starting at 7.30 in the morning with extra classes for kids at risk, with other classes on Saturdays and all sorts.”

“What did the kids think of it?” Julie voices our common thought.

“The kids were actually learning real stuff for a change: facts, figures, information.”

“And were you teaching to the test?”

“Of course. The idea is to get your results looking as good as you can. And it works, my class got really good results. I mean, you cram it into them and they won’t remember much of it six weeks later but it’s very satisfying teaching.”

Mel is satisfied - she sips her tea with satisfaction. The rest of us sit uncomfortably.

I generally avoid writing about my day job in this column but there are some things afoot in education that need to be aired outside staffrooms and the offices of policymakers.

Anne Tolley, the education minister, has set as her priority the introduction of national standards in literacy (English to our generation) and numeracy (Mathematics). She maintains that parents throughout the country are crying out for clear standards. I talk to parents and I haven’t heard these cries but I must believe Mrs Tolley because she is the government.

To be clear, the minister says she is not planning to introduce a national testing regime like Mel enjoyed in England. National Standards in New Zealand will be a set of benchmarks against which children’s progress is measured using a range of assessment methods (including tests).

Generally the profession feels comfortable with the concept of standards but their introduction at this time is overshadowing the implementation of a new national curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum is a blueprint to transform schooling from the factory model we’ve worked with for a century. It addresses areas of low performance like the relatively poor achievement levels of Maori and Pasific Islanders by enabling teachers to develop educational programmes that are meaningful and engaging for these students.

Schools have been working for years on the New Zealand Curriculum, which comes into effect in 2010. It is the most significant reform of education in 20 years, drawing together the best of curriculum content and teaching skills.

National Standards on the other hand are about assessing and reporting student achievement – a necessary part of the process but not one that should drive the education system. Assessment belongs in the back of the bus. The front seats should be occupied by strong curriculum and excellent teaching. Prioritising assessment is like driving the bus in reverse, and a bus driven in reverse will never perform at its best.

This is the lesson of Mel’s experience in England. Teaching to the test improves student achievement in only the most facile sense. It does nothing to inspire thirst for knowledge or prepare a child to become an independent life-long learner.

I cannot say whether the introduction of National Standards is a deliberate attempt to undermine the New Zealand Curriculum but that threatens to be the outcome. Support services to schools are being axed or diverted to the National Standards. In 2010 schools can expect no professional advisory support in science, physical education, the arts, social studies and a raft of other curriculum and skills areas. Programmes like the Literacy Professional Development Project that are proven to lift student achievement are being curtailed or cut.

These changes are happening within a wider climate of austerity. In 2010 the government plans to pull $45,000,000 out of the education payroll, with a further $50,000,000 to go in 2011. This is at a time of growing school rolls.

Another change will see Canterbury lose $860,000 of funding for specialist education services over the next three years, leaving schools and teachers grappling with rising problems of learning and behaviour and denying service to children with specialised needs.

The government may believe that National Standards will enable it to improve our education system even as it cuts resources. Time will show that simply weighing the pig more often does not make it fatter.

Christchurch’s big heads and small minds
5th September 2009

From time to time we visit the Arts Centre in Christchurch, usually to watch a play at the Court Theatre. Over the years the Arts Centre has become a cross between Ye Olde England and Toytown, a colourful clatter of hawkers and a jumble of civic art and architecture – both praiseworthy and execrable.

A recent addition to the panoply is a row of bronze heads, the busts of a group of famous Cantabrians set upon plinths, gazing across Worcester Street like a pantheon of Roman senators. They are mostly knights, Sir Thingummy and Sir Whatsissname, Canterbury’s favourite sons – and a couple of token favourite daughters for balance.

As works of sculpture they are pretty good, albeit with a Rodinesque lumpiness that gives the venerable company a bad case of acne. However, as a piece of civic art they are distasteful and disturbing.

The problem is partly location. Shoe-horned among the ice cream stalls, coffee-to-go caravans and purveyors of handicrafts, the sculptures at first glance are straight out of funfair alley at the A&P show. I expected to pay $2.00 to throw balls at them and perhaps win a soft toy for knocking over Sir Tipene O’Regan or Margaret Mahy.

The effect is not aided by the sculptures’ curious mix of gravitas and comedy. Bronze commands respect but as a medium for Sir Richard Hadlee’s drooping moustache or Sir Robertson Stewart’s spectacles it is slightly ridiculous.

Besides, there is something grotesque about monumentalising the living as most, if not all, the subjects are at present. Statues are supposed to be of dead people, aren’t they? Monuments to the living are inevitably self-aggrandising and should remain the preserve of megalomaniacs like Saddam Hussein.

The least comfortable dimension of this little hall of fame, however, is its self-conscious provinciality. For the 25 years I have lived in Canterbury I have observed Christchurch attempting to shake off the smug parochialism that sets it apart from most other major centres. This is exhibited in subtle codes of class (where you went to school), place (Fendalton or Burnside) and pedigree (First Four Ships or waka).

It makes Christchurch a daunting place for newcomers and results in the city being strangely fragmented considering its accommodating geography. Where Wellington and Auckland have become buoyantly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Christchurch retains a slightly prurient English reserve in which communities rarely mix. Hornby is a world away from Cathedral Square, far more so than Manukau is from downtown Auckland, or Porirua from Parliament.

One effect of this fragmentation is an underlying tension that bursts forth in apparently random acts of violence. Successive civic leaders have defended Christchurch’s reputation as a safe place to live, arguing that it is no more violent than anywhere else. Statistically they are probably right but all the same Christchurch has a uniquely visible culture of brutality.

My daughters, both presently living in Dunedin, recently attended separate parties in Christchurch involving celebrations in several inner city bars. Both remarked how unsafe they felt on the streets and in the pubs compared to Dunedin. There was a predatory atmosphere among the people around them that they had not experienced elsewhere.

Christchurch’s dark underbelly is not the responsibility of the people captured in bronze at the Arts Centre but the sculptures are indicative of an old stuffiness that maintains divisions and clamps Christchurch in its small town past. I cannot imagine a similar project on Wellington’s waterfront or in Aotea Square. In a way, I’m surprised the subjects consented to the idea. Surely modesty is a better measure of greatness than civic vainglory.

Hanging with the suits
22nd August 2009

In the movie Apollo 13 there is a moment when Tom Hanks’ companions, their ruptured sardine can disintegrating around them, urge him to turn for earth. “No,” declares Hanks with authority, “the only way back is to go forward, to encircle the moon, use its gravity to slingshot us back to earth.”

Whether or not this idea is scientific it is a beautiful image: the crippled spacecraft spiralling like a cue ball towards the vortex, only to ricochet off the cushion.

Other large objects demonstrate the same astrophysical properties as the moon. Like Wellington for example. Wellington is a crouching black hole at the centre of our small kiwiverse. On any day of the working week it drags hundreds nay, thousands, of small black objects into its maw, swirls them through the gravitational field and slingshots them back to their points of origin. These small objects are suits – men and women of business and public service - the penitents and lackeys, the voluptuaries and petitioners, flung like fistfuls of stardust down the gullet of the great cosmos.

Lately I find myself in the company of the suits – suit myself, in fact. A professional entanglement has me travelling regularly to Wellington; rising in darkness, driving in darkness, flying in darkness to arrive over Wellington’s shiny surfaces about the same time as dawn.

Like any neophyte striving to assimilate I am a keen observer of the ways of the suits. I have learned to take a complementary newspaper in the departure lounge to create a small cone of silence around myself while awaiting the boarding call. I have discovered how to detach from the indignity of security checks to the point where the time and space from ticketing to gangway are a small repressed memory.

I notice how a day in Wellington affects the demeanour and appearance of the suits. At dawn, as we disgorge from the Boeing into Wellington airport’s carpeted thoroughfare, we are crisp and purposeful. Conversation, such as may be, is pitched to the purpose of the day. Our minds move forward. We are tall and steely-eyed.

Returning to the airport at 5.00pm we are crumpled, darkened and diminished. We have been cut down to size by Wellington’s unrelentingly vertical landscapes, starved of natural light and oxygen in a thousand windowless offices, over-starched on catered lunches and a million cardboard coffee cups.

We gather like Peter Jackson’s Ringwraiths around the airport bar. We are almost all men here, black and flapping. Our armpits reek, shoulders sag. If anybody has clinched a deal today or saved the planet they’re not letting on. There is fatigue, but also nervous, repressed energy, fuelled by happy hour, strip lighting and an edgy PA announcer ticking off latecomers.

Into this scene walk a pair of young women, red and blond splashes of colour among the monochrome suits. They buy drinks and perch like birds of paradise at a high riser. The blonde raises her Corona to her lips, baring her throat. Thirty men pretend not to notice. Tension rises like a wave.

The man opposite me really does not notice. He is a big fat slob, spilling out of his chair. He has an open book in one hand while the other wrestles with a plastic-wrapped sandwich the size of a fire log, one of those industrial nourishments that is impossible to tell where the packaging ends and the food begins. He fidgets, twitches, jaws his sandwich, sprays food, adjusts his spectacles – filthy spectacles.

I flee for the departure lounge. In the concourse I have a celebrity moment. Coming towards me is somebody who used to be famous, and whom I knew before that. I seize his hand. “Michael Cullen! It’s Peter Verstappen. I was in your history class at Otago in 1978.”

He recoils. “I am not Michael Cullen.”

Oops! I think quickly, people are staring. “Actually, I’m not Peter Verstappen either, but golly don’t we look like them.”

Down the glide towards the koru club I see another familiar face, Mid-Canterbury’s own Don McLeod. At least I think it is, but I’m wary now. The Don catches my eye, grins and greets me. Phew! It seems I am Peter Verstappen after all.

I edge my way into my seat on the Boeing, the undesirable middle seat. A very large suit hulks by the window but the aisle seat is free. I adopt the pose of maximum privacy, elbows close, head in a book. Other suits settle around me like crows to their perches. At the last moment the big fat slob pours himself into the aisle seat, spraying mayonnaise and dandruff. It dawns on me that the 737 is so named for its seating configuration. I am a very small 3 between two large 7s.

We rumble down the tarmac and Wellington’s slingshot projects us into the darkness. The sea rolls below.

No recession for Bumpy
8th August 2009

Researchers in England claim that a cat manipulates its owner to feed it by miaowing in the same register and tone as a newborn baby. The argument is that the cat appeals to our deepest mothering instincts, compelling us to reach for the Whiskas.

This is rubbish. As any cat owner knows, we feed our cats because if we didn’t they would make life hell for us. What they have in common with babies is a talent for persistent aggravation and an unerring faith that their needs will be met. I know this because I live with Bumpy.

Bumpy (real name Felix) appears to base his worth and status within our household on the old legal maxim that possession is nine tenths of the law. He possesses our property more ardently than any other member of the household, spending at least 20 hours of every day asleep on the sofa in the living room, and the remaining 4 riding shotgun on a fence rail outside the laundry window, which is permanently ajar as his drawbridge and portcullis.

I warm slowly to dogs but have always lost my heart to cats. Bumpy is neither the most intelligent nor useful cat I have ever owned. Owned? I should say ‘butlered’, for we are mere servants to our cats.

The cat of my childhood, Tiger, was a swashbuckling tyrant. One-eyed and ragged-eared he ruled every other living thing on the property – human and creature. Tiger could snap a rat’s spine with a casual toss of his head. He could reduce a henhouse to a nervous twitter just by peering around the doorjamb and I once saw him render a full grown possum into carpet in a matter of minutes.

Bumpy’s talents lie elsewhere, just beyond the reach of human understanding. He neither hunts nor fights. He does not breed (but that’s not his fault) or bristle. He is paunchy and so tremendously flat-footed that when he gallops down the hallway it sounds like the cavalry, a trait that earned him his nickname.

Despite these failings he maintains the insouciantly casual genius of an idiot savant – minus the savant.

To his credit Bumpy is neither neurotic nor evil-tempered, both of which can be failings in cats. I once shared a student hovel in Leith Street, Dunedin with a pumpkin-coloured cat named Demolition who was so terrified of the world he spent his days hiding in the mailbox. He died of a heart attack one morning when the postman delivered the power bill.

Bumpy’s single expression of ill will is towards the venus fly trap that occupies a windowsill next to his favourite sofa. He and the fly trap are food chain rivals, and evidence proves the fly trap is rather better than Bumpy at catching flies. Bumpy retaliates by raiding the water dish in which the fly trap’s plant pot resides. He appears to understand that the fly trap, being of swamp origin, will suffer if the dish is dry. Standing on his hind legs Bumpy can just reach the windowsill to lap the water in the dish. If caught in the act he will desist and gallop from the scene, grinning.

Bumpy’s sole talent and saving grace is the charm, unique to cats, of relaxation. With the unerring persistence of a heat-seeking missile he pursues me through the house until I sit. In seconds he has settled into my lap, his head stretched up towards my chest, his gaze somewhere between condescension and rapture, willing me to stroke him.

Perhaps the English researchers were referring to a cat’s purr, for who can resist stroking the softly purring head of a cat? It touches something very deep. It calms and soothes and shoulders away the cares of the world.

We live in difficult times, pitched upon the seas of economic recession, social disorder and environmental decay. Our lives are filled with uncertainty. But there is no recession for Bumpy and each time I recline in my armchair he will be there to continue educating me in life’s true lessons.

Justice must be impersonal
25th July 2009

I have been disappointed but unsurprised by reactions to last week’s comments from Chief Justice Sian Elias criticising the direction of justice and penal policies in New Zealand. Elias argued, not for the first time, that locking prisoners up for longer does not make our community safer. She has been rounded on by editorial writers, pulled up by politicians and dismissed by most opinion-makers as being out of touch with the times.

I am constantly surprised that we don’t see the obvious connection between our increasingly punitive sentencing laws and the rise of violent crime. For the past twenty years successive governments have been ratcheting up prison sentences to the point where we now have 9,000 people locked up - the second highest rate of imprisonment in the developed world. The present government happily predicts that its ‘get tougher’ intentions will see a further 37% increase in prison population by 2017.

Why are we content to accept this outcome and so abrupt in our dismissal of the Chief Justice’s views? Why are we so attached to the idea that locking prisoners up for longer will reduce crime in our community when that policy has failed for twenty years?

The comment that has caused greatest outrage is Elias’s assertion that emphasising the rights of victims traumatises them and damages the impartiality of the justice system. The rights of victims are a sacred cow of those who would make our justice system much more punitive. The wildly misnamed Sensible Sentencing Trust builds most of its argument around tales of victims who feel they have been denied justice.

Elias is warning us that placing the victim further into the process is a “repersonalisation of the justice system.” In order to understand that this may not be a desirable thing we need to imagine what life was like before we had a justice system.

A few hundred years ago justice in most societies was rough. If my neighbour stole and ate my pig I could either accept it as the way things were or I could gather up a bit of local muscle and deliver justice to whatever degree I thought appropriate. I justified my response with the bible (‘an eye for an eye’) or by reference to an older law of the jungle (‘survival of the most aggressive’). Either way it was strictly punitive – I aimed to wreak as much havoc upon my enemies as I could get away with.

Unsurprisingly this behaviour came to be seen as not a good way to run a society. It made criminals of all and, in communities that placed a high value on honour (which includes, by the way, communities that many New Zealanders trace their roots back to) it caused prolonged and violent conflict.

Eventually we hit upon a wiser way to manage justice. We agreed that if I felt I had been wronged I could complain to a neutral party – the state. I agreed to surrender to the state my right to personal vengeance. In effect the state became the aggrieved party, the state accepted ownership of the crime and responsibility for justice.

But the system only works as long as we have confidence in it and today confidence in state justice is dwindling. Why? People who advocate getting tougher on criminals will say they’ve lost confidence because the justice system fails to reduce crime. They are wrong. Rising crime is not caused by the justice system any more than rising heart disease is caused by the hospital system.

Rising crime is caused by the breakdown of the cohesive forces that bound us together as a society and allowed us to live tolerably with each other. The problem is the rise of individualism and, to use Chief Justice Elias’s word, the ‘repersonalisation’ of almost everything.

If I believe, as today many of us do, that the state exists to help me maximise my individual needs and desires, I am more likely to clamour for the state to get tough when those needs and desires have been impaired by the actions of others. When I act largely from self-interest I allow emotion to replace reason and vengeance to overshadow justice.

Most people who support victims rights and tougher sentencing believe they do so in the interests of society. It is regrettable that they are actually serving the interests of individualism and their actions are contributing to the further erosion of the society we all wish to enjoy.

A tale of opportunity and legacy
4th July 2009

This is the story of a book, a movie and a life.

In his recent book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell dissects some of the world’s most highly successful people in pursuit of the idea that nurture trumps nature. According to Gladwell success is due to happy accidents of legacy and opportunity, from something as simple as being born at the right moment in history, to something as complex as inheriting a particular set of cultural values and practices.

Bill Gates, for example, was born at the perfect time – 1955 – to be an inquisitive young teenager at the precise moment that computers became accessible. If he’d been born a few years earlier he would have been already too set in his ways to grasp the vision of desktop computing. A few years later and someone else would have beaten him to it.

Furthermore, his parents sent him to a private school where the PTA mums banded together to buy a computer in 1968 to which young Bill had unlimited access. 1968! - in Tuatapere we’d only just got television.

Gladwell points out that what appears to be raw talent is sometimes the product of deep social bias. He explains the apparently random preponderance of top Canadian ice hockey players with birthdays in January or February as a result of the grading cut off date of 1 January. A ten year old with a January birthday will be slightly bigger and stronger than his age group peer born in October or November, and will therefore be more likely to be picked for the rep team, where he will get better coaching and more game time which will eventually make the accident of birth seem like an accident of talent.

Ideas of legacy and opportunity appear also in the movie Bride Flight, currently screening in Christchurch. It is based on the true story of a planeload of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand in 1953, following the lives and loves of several men and women as first they zig-zag their way across the globe in one of the earliest long-haul flights, and then grapple the reality of immigration in this strange, wild, unpeopled land.

Some succeed, some fail, some do both in either order, others muddle along. The fortune of each is determined by personality, luck and ability. The Dutch themselves will tell you it is down to sheer hard work. Gladwell would pick apart each individual’s life to reveal their DNA of legacy and opportunity.

Drina Verstappen, my mother, should have been on that plane. In 1953 she was preparing to join her fiancée who had left for New Zealand the previous year. She turned down a place on the aircraft because there was no room for her two travelling companions, opting instead for the sea route on the immigrant ship Subayak via the Panama Canal.

Like all immigrants my mother became an outlier the moment her feet left her native soil. When she walked up the gangplank she changed the course of her life forever.

I have often wondered at the breath-taking magnitude of that decision. There has been nothing to match it in my own life.

My mother possessed neither wealth nor education. She knew nothing of the world beyond the small villages and farms of southern Holland. What she did was to seize the only opportunity she had ever been offered to set her own course and break free of a past marked by war, economic malaise and tradition.

Drina is 83 now. It takes a long life to reveal a big story and as the years unfolded I have come to understand that the experiences of my mother’s early life in Holland, so easily dismissed as hardships, became assets in New Zealand. In particular, the act of emigrating gave her a courage that she has never lost.

Although she possesses neither fame nor fortune Malcolm Gladwell would appreciate my mother’s story. Like the heroes in his book she understands the ‘culture of possibility’ and has used it brilliantly to shape her own life, and mine.

Hard times at Hanmer Springs
13th June 2009

From out of the mist a human head appears. Disembodied, it seems to float upon the surface of the water. It glides past me, a woman’s head, blonde.

Other heads emerge and vanish. Some are talking and I hear snatches of conversation:
“So Tom got the farm but the others…”
“I went to another specialist, the best in the South Island…”
I lean back against the tiles and the warm water soothes my body. Looking up I see stars through the mist. The air is very cold.

I prefer visiting Hanmer Springs in the winter. It has always seemed more appropriate to me to enjoy the hot pools when there is snow on the mountains and frost in the air. And I prefer to bathe at night, when light and shadow give the pools an air of mystery and darkness conjours clouds of mist from the hot sulphury water.

The hot pools at Hanmer are one of the few places where the parade of humanity can be viewed close up and unabashed. All the world comes to Hanmer, takes off its clothes and relaxes. The strict rule of keeping one’s head above water to avoid infection by whatever nasty bugs may have survived chlorination adds a dimension of style to this aquatic experience that is missing from beach or swimming pool. At Hanmer women can preserve their makeup and hair styles while bathing so it becomes the only place where they often outnumber men in the water.

The observer’s interest becomes focussed on heads, faces, necks and conversations.

A group of bikini-clad girls emerges suddenly from the rocks at the edge of the pool. One, two, three, four, they clamber over the lip of the pool and splash into the water, all legs and shoulders, laughing and chattering with the excitement of 15 year olds. Their interest is, of course, boys.
“Did you see him?”
“Where?”
“Over there, with the dark hair.”
“Is that Daniel?”
“Daniel! Daniel!”

They wave and giggle. Heads turn, frowning at this disturbance of the peace. A large, soft-bellied youth swoops down the steps and blunders into the group of girls. They shriek and scatter. The boy, Daniel, flings out his arms and dives under the water.

There is a sudden silence, a collective intake of breath. Daniel put his head under! He emerges snorting and dripping, his pale body streaming. Twenty heads turn and gaze at him like otters. The ripples of his dive reach out and claim chins and necks. He surges after the girls and vanishes. Silence settles upon the pool.

Hanmer Springs is silent this winter weekend; a little too silent we thought when we drove in this evening. The streets were eerily deserted, houses dark and frowning. It’s years since I’ve visited and the town has grown. Subdivisions have spread out across the paddocks. Groups of shops - gifts and trinkets and clothing - have sprung up. The pools are surrounded by a tinker’s flurry of tourism: ice cream stands, quad bikes, Krazy Golf, Thai food.

But on this Friday night very little moves outside the ring of light from the hot pools. Seeking dinner we walk past 3 or 4 deserted restaurants which, as a rule, we avoid. We end up at Jollie Jack’s where the landlord turns out to be an old Ashburtonian. We hit it off and over lamb shanks and Cabernet he describes how the combined menace of economic downturn and swine flu are blighting the local economy.

Hanmer, he says, relies upon discretionary spending. All these houses are their owners’ second or third homes. All these shops and concessions feed our desire for recreation.

In hard times this small tourist outpost finds itself marginalised. Gift shops huddle and droop, restaurants blink into an un-peopled darkness.

In the months ahead some will keep their heads above water. Others will go under and be lost in the mist, like Daniel at the hot pools.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
27th June 2009


Is it global warming? Swine flu? The economic dumpster? I can’t put my finger on the exact cause but suddenly everyone’s going bald – I mean men (perhaps women are going bald too but they have products for that sort of thing). The Reserve Bank can add another curve to its graph – call it the follicle forecast – and it’s all downhill.

Perhaps it’s just my age. I’ve crested 50 and the view down the other side is grim. Where once there was a sea of waving hair to the horizon there are now only thinning pates and receding temples.

As far as my own pelt is concerned I’d begun to feel smug. On my head grey was winning over bald. A sudden recession 20 years ago (around the time my kids were born) inexplicably halted, apart from a couple of episodes of glacial creep, leaving my hair to gradually turn salt-and-pepper.

Let’s face it, grey is preferable to bald, so the sudden onset of hair loss around me demanded a swift response.

Enter Dr Kurt Wolff Inc. and the Baldness Calculator. I discovered the Baldness Calculator when I was cruising my favourite hair loss websites. It’s amazing, and free! In just a couple of minutes (less if you’re already bald) the calculator will work out your slaphead probability and how long you’ve got before you can throw the hairbrush in the bottom drawer.

It does this with the amazing power of Q&A. How old are you? How many hairs do you lose each day? (with handy formulae for novices). How bald are you already? (graphic aids to assist). Was your dad a baldy? Was your mum? How often do you stand on your head? On someone else’s head?

With only a little fiddling the calculator declared that I am unlikely to ever lose my hair, with the caution that thanks to my father’s 8 bald brothers I may experience “large genetic hair loss episodes” at unexpected moments.

But there’s more! The Baldness Calculator offers advice. It recommended I use a patented caffeine shampoo, “to provide hair roots with active caffeine”! And a general caution: “at the onset of balding never, NEVER, resort to a comb-over!” Now that’s good advice, isn’t it. I mean, a comb-over is like a massive neon sign on your head – “this guy’s going bald!” In our climate a comb-over becomes hazardous. I’ve seen guys in an Ashburton nor’wester with comb-overs looking like an America’s Cup yacht that’s blown a spinnaker.

Have you noticed how in our society going bald is worse than being bald. Going bald is about as attractive as a moulting cockerel. It looks sleazy when your head starts to resemble an old sofa. But a head that is completely bald captures the spirit of the times - a sort of Bruce Willis sheen of confidence.

That’s why some young men, at the first sign of hair loss, take to the razor and sport a completely bald head. Apart from the occasional chilblain it is a remarkably sane response.

A 30-something acquaintance who maintains his scalp like a skating rink claims other virtues for this practice. He reasons that bald men are more intelligent and points to evolution for proof. The advance from ape to human has been a trade-off between brains and body hair – the smarter we became the less shaggy we looked. It stands to reason, according to my friend, that the ultimate being – Superman – will be completely bald.

Most women disagree. They’ll tell you we can shave our heads but we’ll always be hairy cavemen in other regions.

The lessons of Les Mis
30th May 2009

For the past week my life has been dominated by Les Miserables, so allow me to start this story with a reference to that show. In Les Mis the students of Paris fight for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed. Their iconic barricade symbolises both their struggle for a voice in government and their attachment to Paris itself, the city they “claim as their own.”

It occurred to me earlier this week that the hikoi opposing the ‘super city’ in Auckland touched the same ideas, in a less bloody fashion. Opposition to the super city is about representation and identity. It seems many people living within the template of a super Auckland, prefer their local allegiances. They mistrust the politicians and technocrats who preach the efficiencies of a super city.

We are told that Auckland needs to become a super city to fix its intractable infrastructure problems: transport, electricity, water, housing. What the reformers fail to appreciate is that while infrastructure may be, justifiably, the fixation of local government, it is not the cement that binds a community. It is cultural capital that brings people together and in communities cultural capital is created not with infrastructure but through community assets and services.

This is as true in Ashburton as it is in Mangere. I do not rejoice in being Ashburtonian by virtue of kerbing and drains. I am grateful the District Council has invested $20million to upgrade the sewerage system but flushing the toilet does not make me swell with civic pride. My attachment to this place is discovered through the opportunities it gives me to exercise my talents and live a life I value.

It’s an important point to make as the Council hears submissions to its District Plan, where discussion boils around the timeline for the sports stadium and art gallery/museum. One speaker, a retired accountant, is reported in the local press urging the Council to delay these projects until all the funding is assured. He argues it will be financial folly to give in to pressure from ‘vested interests’ to bring these projects forward, citing the shortfall in funding to build the Event Centre as an example of what can happen when community fundraisers don’t have all their ducks in a line.

Unsurprisingly, what the accountant fails to take into account is the cultural value of assets like the Event Centre and the sports stadium. No doubt my appearance on the stage of the Event Centre every night this week condemns me to a vested interest but it gives me a close up view of just how good this place is for us.

When the final curtain falls on Les Mis this evening 4000 people will have seen the show. For locals the entertainment of Victor Hugo’s great story will be enhanced by the display of young (and less young) local talent in which we all take pride, and in the quality of the venue.

For people from outside the district the show has blown away many of their conceptions about Ashburton as a place of no consequence; like the woman from North Canterbury who, on the strength of Les Mis, persuaded her incredulous friends to have a girls’ weekend in Ashburton. They watched our show, dined in our restaurants, saw our sights. They were amazed – and they spent money.

As the Council weighs the delicate balance of financial prudence and community pride, let me add Adam’s voice to the argument. Adam was the hitchhiker I picked up in Rakaia on Thursday. As we drove through Ashburton he remarked that nothing much ever changes here.

How often have you and I heard this, or similar? Adam’s is the voice of the wide world. I wanted to veer off the road and show him the Event Centre and Lake Hood. I wanted him to meet the talented cast of Les Mis. I wanted to celebrate my Ashburton in some action that would impress the young man.

The students in Les Mis would have thrown a barricade across West Street and fired a few guns to get the world’s attention. We can do the same by creating community assets that bring out the best in us.

Derailed by Passion
16th May 2009


Once upon a time passion was confined to the bedroom, now it’s everywhere. No, I’m not talking about sex; I mean passion with its trousers on.

Passion stalks the land. It is no longer enough simply to be enthusiastic about a job, or to have strong convictions about an issue. Today we must be passionate about these things.

In my job of running a school I am bombarded by passion. I must be passionate about teaching, passionate about learning, passionate about making a difference, passionate about keeping the toilets clean. Oddly, the one thing it is not wise to say I am passionate about is children.

As any young lover finds, when passion strikes the first casualty is reason. Being passionate about one’s job is fine as a private obsession. I can harmlessly devote my life to teaching and learning and not trouble a soul, but in a world that demands we be publicly passionate we are at constant risk of making fools of ourselves. When we use passion as the basis for spreading a cause or convincing others we almost always over-sell the idea and turn people off.

Take the motivational speaker as an example. These curious by-products of the modern age, these walking egos who strut the boardrooms and function centres of the land, are always so passionate about themselves and their achievements that they kill the message. Their success inevitably boils down to a unique combination of personality, providence and power that crushes the motivation of the audience or, at best, leaves us pursuing a model of excellence we cannot possibly realise because it is not our own.

Admittedly there are times when passion can light a flame in others. Winston Churchill famously inspired England to resist Hitler on little more than a talent for impassioned oratory. Hitler of course was doing the same in Germany. Both had the rare talent of making people feel like their actions could make a difference. It is the dream of every small town politician and civic grandee.

Locally, there has been some passion evident around the Ashburton District Council’s draft community plan. This excellent document appears to have accomplished its purpose of inspiring debate over a couple of contentious projects, particularly the new sports stadium and swimming pool complex.

The council’s proposal to push this project back ten years has its advocates passionately crowding forward in its defence. I don’t need to repeat the arguments in its favour; they have been well aired at public meetings and through the pages of this newspaper.

We have been invited to share the passion of the project’s advocates. How? By sending in a submission form to the council to let them know that we want the stadium and pool built within three years.

What has been the result of all this passion? Well, by Thursday the council had received only a couple of hundred responses to the draft plan. Unless the last 24 hours before yesterday’s deadline brought a late rush of submissions, all the passion seems to have failed in its purpose.

Personally I support the idea of building the stadium and pool sooner rather than later, but if its backers fail to gather enough support to convince the Council they may have only themselves to blame.

They oversold the idea. They overstated the benefits. To some people they made the project sound too good to be true. The rest of us they convinced to the point where we thought their plan was so obviously a no-brainer we didn’t need to make a submission in its support – the council couldn’t help but see things their way.

Let’s hope they’re right, but I suspect the Council’s processes will not bend so readily to an outburst of passion.

Swine flu teaches old lessons
2nd May 2009


In 1665 Daniel Defoe, merchant and writer, chose to remain in London during an outbreak of the plague that killed 100,000 of his fellow citizens. Defoe had the means to leave: he was wealthy and well connected. He stayed to protect his property and, he admitted, with a desire to observe the human condition in extremis.

From that experience Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and as an account of how to ride out a pandemic it’s as coherent as anything you’ll find today. Defoe, sensibly, stuck to the facts, meticulously chronicling the efforts of public health officials to turn back the plague by closing the ports and quarantining early cases (along the way he reveals the origins of the word ‘quarantine’ – the French for ‘forty’, the number of days an infected person was to be kept out of circulation).

He recounts the many strategies used by the populace to ward off the plague or to treat the infection. He is fascinated by the symptoms and progress of the disease: from the first tell-tale blotches to the lolling corpses with blackened limbs and swollen tongues. He is shrewdly critical of quacks peddling opportunistic treatments and clergy who fled at the first sign of trouble.

But it is Defoe’s fascination with statistics that makes his account seem thoroughly modern. Time after time he returns to the daily death tolls collected by parish officials (that there was a functioning bureaucracy in 1665 is startling in itself). He pores over the figures, lining them up in tables and columns, discovering trends, mining the data for cause and effect, striving to get to the bottom of things.

Defoe’s behaviour may have been unusual in its day but he would have slotted right into this week’s swine flu story. What is it about human nature that makes disaster so compelling? All our instincts are programmed towards survival and yet at the smallest opportunity most of us will run towards a fire or chase a tornado.

So it is with swine flu. We are drawn towards it like moths to a flame, creeping closer, wide-eyed and fearful, reaching out a finger to prod the fleshy mass that may turn and bite us at any moment.

We cannot resist flirting with mortality. We want to observe every blotch appear on every forearm, every blackened corpse cast into the pit.

Thanks to Defoe’s heirs we can. The media allows us to indulge our fascination from the relative safety of our armchairs. This week we’ve been served swine flu by a thousand breathless reporters. The numbers affected, miniscule by any standards, are nevertheless polished up to impress. Is it 14 cases confirmed, or 16?

Everybody who can stand upright and speak is interviewed; from the perky Northcote College student to the mayor of Greymouth. The only player in this story whose voice is missing is the swine who started it all.

In the midst of all this our public health officials stick to the story and so far they’ve been brilliant. In interview after interview they resist the media hype. Calmly and firmly they describe their actions and options. If this was part of their pandemic training it’s working well.

Health officials know that in the public’s eye they will lose whatever the outcome. If by their efforts we avoid a full scale pandemic they will be condemned for exaggerating the risk. If they cannot stop the disaster they’ll be damned for doing too little.

Whichever way it goes, will swine flu teach us anything? What Defoe could not have realised was the plague he lived through was the last of its kind. Within 15 years plague had vanished from the globe.

Like Defoe we cannot know what lies ahead. But we may note his wry observation that when the plague had passed, the gratitude and goodwill of the survivors barely outlasted the disease. They simply became caught up in the next awful story.

School league tables are not the way
18th April 2009

Just before Easter my school hosted Jo and Nancy, two young teachers from
England who are holidaying in New Zealand. They loved our school. Talking to them I heard the same comparisons between schools in England and New Zealand that I have heard many times in recent years, and which match my own experiences of teaching in both countries.

Given half an opportunity Jo and Nancy would swap their English classrooms for kiwi ones in a moment. Why? Because education in England has been hammered flat by high-stakes testing, relentless standardisation and a ‘blame and shame’ culture that classifies schools as winners or losers.
In England a broad curriculum - one that teaches art, sport, social studies and values - has been sacrificed for a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, in which children’s achievement is measured against highly prescribed national standards.
Teachers churn out lessons prepared for them by specialised curriculum writers, all
their energies devoted to hauling their students over the standard, driven by performance pay, a combative audit office and the fear of their school slipping down the local league tables.

After nearly 15 years of this model there are many who believe education in England is in crisis. Teachers are demoralised and children emerge from schools ill-equipped to take their place in the world or, worse, with a pervading sense of failure. While commentators cry out for a more flexible and imaginative curriculum and primary teachers threaten to boycott the annual examinations, Gordon Brown’s government seems more intent on debating how much homework four year olds should be doing.

Recently our own Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, said she is happy that the new national standards in literacy and numeracy for New Zealand schools will lead to higher-stakes assessments and school performance being ranked and published in league tables.
There is nothing wrong with standards in education. Schools have always assessed children against standards of some sort. But there are two issues with national standards.
The first is the intention to set national standards only in literacy and numeracy. Actually standards will be set only in a few aspects of literacy and numeracy – reading, writing and number skills. Standards will not be developed for oral language, geometry or measurement skills. Much less will they be developed for science, technology, art, physical education, social studies, Maori, drama or dance.
And because school performance will be judged against the national standards there will be a tendency for reading, writing and number skills to dominate the primary school curriculum. These skills are important but they do not comprise the well-rounded education we owe our children if they are to compete in an era where creativity and problem-solving will be the measure of success.

The second issue is how widely school achievement information should be published. Mrs Tolley proposes that the data schools gather be minced together to produce a generalised rating that the media can pounce on to produce league tables.

League tables are destructive. They say nothing about the value a school adds to a child’s learning. They strengthen stereotypes about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools and widen social inequalities. They sacrifice the interests of our children to an ideology that believes learning is a commodity and that schools can be managed like businesses trading on a sharemarket.
Mrs Tolley’s ideas place our successful education system at risk. While countries that have embraced high-stakes assessment and reporting struggle to extricate themselves from the mess we should not repeat their folly. Jo and Nancy will tell you we should be learning from England’s failures – not repeating them.

Sensible sentencing is neither sensible nor effective
4th April 2009

The visit to Ashburton last week of Garth McVicar, founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, throws a spotlight on the work of that organisation. After nine years in business the Trust is enjoying success. Its message fits closely with conservative voters and reflects the policies of the new government.

McVicar mines a deep vein of support with appeals for tougher sentencing laws, stricter bail conditions and restricted parole. He expresses the frustration felt by many in the face of increasing violence. His desire to revive what he believes were the prominent values of 30 years ago is particularly popular with the middle-aged and older.

The Trust’s vision is to create A Safe New Zealand. Its “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” methods, however, do nothing to achieve this goal.

The vengeful desire to stuff more people into prisons and to keep them there for longer may be a natural response to violent crime. If a person takes a life why shouldn’t they serve the term of their life in retribution? Surely this will deter future offenders?

But there is a problem with this approach.

It doesn’t work.

McVicar says we should look at the example of other countries and ‘get tougher’ but the evidence points strongly to the failure of tougher sentencing laws. The United States has pursued the path of getting tough on crime for years, with disastrous results. Today, the United States locks up 750 out of every 100,000 of its citizens, compared to 197 in New Zealand and far fewer in most other countries, and yet America is awash with violent crime.

People who commit violent crime are not deterred by tougher sentences. The murderer does not stop to reflect on whether the penalty is likely to be 10 years or 20.

Prisons are schools for criminal behaviour. Putting more people into prisons and keeping them there for longer feeds the sub-culture and drives it deeper into the families and communities of the convicted.

McVicar is right in saying we have to learn from our history, he just draws the wrong lessons. We will not build a safer future by recalling a more punitive past, but by addressing the real roots of violent crime, which lie in the social and economic directions we have chosen to take New Zealand in the past 30 years.

Growing inequality is the foundation of lawlessness. We have succeeded in creating a permanent group of poor at the bottom of our society and we treat them with a level of disdain not seen since Victorian times. Child poverty, abuse, ignorance and poor health are not accidental. They are the natural outcomes of deliberate policies, like this week’s tax cuts which effectively redistribute money from low income earners to the wealthiest.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s ideas are not only wrong, they are also expensive. Building more prisons is the least cost-effective approach to reducing crime. Research in many parts of the world proves that relatively small sums of money spent on identifying children at risk of criminal behaviour and intervening to support those children and their families has much greater value.

In America, recent research by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy was so effective in demonstrating that every dollar spent to support young children at risk saved the taxpayers 3 dollars in the criminal justice system that the state legislature scrapped plans to build a new prison and diverted the money into parenting and youth programmes.

The real solutions to our problems are less attractive than the simple appeal to vengeance of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. They are slow and incremental and they work from the ground up. They require us to confront greed and self-interest. But they are, ultimately, the only sensible solutions.

Locking up schools is no cure for violent behaviour
12th March 2009



Last week’s stabbing of a teacher in Auckland has most of us in education bracing for the fallout. The response so far inspires little confidence that we can maintain perspective on this issue.

Talk of metal detectors and police patrols adds insult to injury. These are not simply facile responses to a complex issue, they are strategies that will, over time, escalate violence in schools.

There are four sources of violent behaviour in schools. The first, beloved by fiction writers through the ages, is violence from teachers towards students. The Dickensian school master, with stout cane and withering tongue, survived intact until remarkably recently.

Teachers who worked in the era of the cane and strap will tell you the relief they felt at the ending of institutionalised violence towards children. Some will admit it brought out the worst in them, an experience they found deeply unsettling and which clouded their relationships with students.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that teachers no longer bully children, but almost without exception the people who work in our schools today have constructive relationships with students, are highly positive and well supported in managing student behaviour.

The second source of school violence is bullying among students. This is a genuine problem in New Zealand and deserves attention. Bullying is a nexus of factors: individual, institutional and societal. Schools that experience high levels of disruptive behaviour can often link this to high levels of violence within their communities. Some schools succeed in becoming havens of respect and tolerance in even the most difficult communities, but to do so requires vision, stamina and extraordinary commitment from a wide range of agencies.

Bullying among students can usually be controlled by adults but the bullying will only cease when students take ownership of both the problem and the means to end it. Students, not teachers, are the guardians and enforcers of school culture. The most effective behaviour management consists of a student or group of students demonstrating their disapproval of wayward behaviour. This is as true of students at the age of six as it is at sixteen.

The third and fourth kinds are those acts of serious violence committed against students or staff. In one form they may be committed by a member of the school, such as last week’s attack in Auckland. Alternatively they may be the act of an outsider, such as an irate parent coming onto the school grounds to take the law into his own hands. What these two forms of violence have in common is that they can almost never be anticipated, they are highly aggressive and they are rare.

Schools have procedures to handle these events and react swiftly and firmly to minimise the risk to students and staff.

The debate in the past week has concerned itself almost exclusively with school violence of the third and fourth kinds. Several voices have chided schools for not doing enough to prevent such acts of violence. These contributors to the debate tend to be fans of metal detectors at the gate and police patrols in the playground but their solutions are more damaging to schools than the continuance of the very small risk posed by violent offenders of the third and fourth kind.

I have worked in schools in England where, in the climate of fear created by high level violence, school security is extreme. With chain link fences, metal gates, swipe cards and access codes schools have come to resemble prisons.

From my observation these measures have two effects. First, they seriously damage a school’s relationship with its community. The message to parents is, “we do not believe this community is a safe place for children, so we will make their safety the role of the state.” The security measures effectively disempower parents and children from taking responsibility for their behaviour. Unsurprisingly bullying and violence are major problems.

Second, the security measures do not work. It is impossible to keep a school in permanent lockdown. School boundaries are porous – people are constantly moving in and out for a hundred good reasons. The gates and security codes are impossible to enforce to the degree where they would exclude a person intent on harm.

Maintaining high-level security would be even more challenging in New Zealand where our schools, happily, are designed to be open to their communities.

In fact the greatest risk in over-reacting to last week’s incident is that we will draw a curtain between school and community. Violence in schools can be solved only by schools and communities working together. The idea that schools must be made into islands of safety in a dangerous world nurtures a climate of fear, creates discord among the groups that share the problem and leads to greater violence.

Crime scene blunders steal the show
21st March 2009

After last week’s decision to cut jobs TVNZ has moved to restore market share with the launch of a new flagship series. The new show, Crime Scene Blunders, lifts the lid on the tragic, hilarious or just plain tragically hilarious mistakes made by police in their investigations.

In the spirit of the programme TVNZ ‘leaked’ the script of the series opener to selected media. Here it is – Crime Scene Blunders, Episode One.

Huge applause, lights, techno-pop music. Jason Gunn enters.

Jason. “Good evening and welcome to Crime Scene Blunders. Yes I’m Jason Gunn and just to prove it I’ve got my gun right here. Give us a close up on the piece, Morrie. There you are, it’s a nice wee Glock, standard police issue, and crikey! it’s been the cause of a few crime scene blunders over the years. Let’s hope this baby’s not loaded or we could have a few blunders of our own tonight.”

The gun fires.

Jason. “Whoopsedoodle! There go the studio lights, told you I could be in trouble. So moving quickly along let me introduce my co-host, please welcome our extreme advocate, Horace Rumple QC.

Big cheers. Horace enters with wig and gown.

Jason. “Welcome Horace. Now, you’d be Rumple of the Bailey?”

Horace. “No, no, Jase, I’m Rumple of the Trailer Home.”

Jason. “Fallen on hard times?”

Horace. “Nuh, I fell on a large quantity of gin and the old career’s been downhill ever since.”

Jason. “Well we’ll give it a pickup tonight because, goodness me! it’s been a great week for crime scene blunders.”

Horace. “Certainly has, Jase.”

Jason. “And first up is the Housing NZ ‘ram raid’ in Porirua.”

Horace. “Yep, this is a beauty. The Housing Corp whistles up the cops to kick the Mongrel Mob out of a few houses they’ve been using as a wildlife park and, dear me, they go and leave the letter of complaint lying around with the name and contact number of the little old lady who dobbed the Mob.”

Jason. “Classic! Well, over in our studio witness box ..”

Horace. “…you mean, the witLESS box, Jase.”

Jason. “…we’ve got Inspector Dicky Riddle. We should tell you all our police guests have been given false names to conceal their identities.”

Cut to police inspector.

Jason. “How’s it going, Dicky?”

Dick. “Yeah, good, Jase. It’s a pleasure to be your first guest.”

Horace. “So, a bit of cock-up, Dicky. What’s happened to the old lady? She had some death threats, eh?”

Dicky. “Yep, but we’ve sorted that out. We popped her onto the witness protection programme.”

Jason. “So, where’s she living now?”

Dicky. “Alaska.”

Jason. “Got her contact so we can call her?”

Dicky. “Sure, it’s 027 – oh, now wait a minute, you were trying to get me to make another blunder, weren’t you?”

Big blast of music and appluse.

Jason. “Congratulations, Dicky! You’ve won our super ‘stop-the-cop’ prize. What’s the prize, Horace?”

Horace. “Ah, we haven’t got any, Jase, the sponsor went belly up.”

Jason. “Here you are, Dicky, you can have my Glock. It’s got the bent barrel so you don’t have to worry about hurting anybody.”

Horace. “Moving on, Jase, and next up is the ‘candid camera’ story.”

Jason. “A wee ripper and a big ‘whoopsedoodle’ for the boys in blue this week, when the investigating officer left behind the camera he’d been using to photograph the crime scene victims.”

Horace. “Yep, and now the dude who snaffled the camera is offering the photos for sale to the media.”

Jason. “And we’re going to show them to you now so you’ll know what to look out for if he offers them to you. Let’s see the pics, Morrie. What’s that? A hold up?”

Horace. “We’ve got a bit of a techno failure, Jase. We can’t put the blurry lines over the faces in the photos.”

Jason. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. The faces on the pics are going to be roughly in the centre of your TV. So while we go to the break you get some masking tape and cover that part of your screen so you won’t see the faces.

Horace. “We’ll be back shortly with our sports slot, Howzat!?, the latest blunders from the Appeal Court.”

Jason. “And our hugely popular celebrity dance-off, featuring this week, David Bain and Arthur Allan Thomas.”

Both. Back soon.

A close shave at the crossroads
7th March 2009


Last week, on a sunny morning in the broad heartland of the Canterbury Plains, a farmer drove through a give way sign and into the oncoming path of my wife. Sylvia had time for just one thought - “how do I get out of this?” - to which the only answer was: “you don’t.”

She hit the farmer’s ute at 100km/hr. The force of the impact and the momentum of the vehicles carried them 30 metres down the side road, past a young man waiting for a school bus and onto a grass verge.

By a miracle they both walked away from the impact; battered, bruised and broken, but alive.

I shall write no more about the crash because it is, as they say, before the courts.

Besides, we’ve been caught up in the aftermath, which is where this story lies. Sylvia is gradually returning to health. Her bruises are a landscape by Constable. She suffers dizzy spells and says it feels like she’s stepped off a boat after several weeks of constant partying in high seas.

Of less importance, but greater distraction, is the problem of the car, the front half of which looks like a bowl of breakfast cereal. It must be replaced, and soon, for Sylvia needs it when she returns to work.

I have written before about how bad we are at shopping. Breakfast cereal is probably one of the few things we purchase with confidence, so the prospect of buying a new car fills us with despair.

Our car purchases in the past have been few but simple, usually involving an upgrade from a really old car to a slightly less old car. Now we find that last week’s event has made us gun-shy. Now we are thinking about airbags and ABS brakes. Now we are looking at cars that can save your life…

…and are economical

…and affordable

…and red.

It’s a minefield. Honestly, we do try. We spent most of last Saturday driving Mazdas around Dave Barlass’s sheep yards. We’ve trawled Trade Me, searched The Dog and Lemon Guide and downloaded Consumer magazine’s centrefolds. We’ve scoured car yards pleading silently for the perfect car to speak to us and grappled with tiptronics, pre-tensioning seatbelts and electronic stabilisers. But the nuances of design and engineering are over our heads. The pair of us walking into a car yard is like casting swine before pearls.

One thing, and one thing only, has resounded in my mind from all this research.

Crumple zones.

Crumple zones, if you didn’t already know, are those parts of the car that are designed to absorb the shock of a collision by collapsing – crumpling – in highly scientific ways. Our old Bluebird crumpled in a way that was less than scientific, but mercifully robust.

Sylvia’s next car needs lots of crumple zones. Ideally, it will be an enormous donut with vast spaces of steel, rubber and plastic surrounding a central seating position with multiple seatbelts. It will have crumple zones the size of the Gaza Strip.

That cuts out small modern cars where you sit with knees against radiator and tailbone brushing tail light. These have the crumple zones of a catwalk model. Some have rear ends so abrupt the whole vehicle looks like the front half of a real car.

And now the penny drops. Of course! This is why so many people who don’t seem to need them possess huge 4WD vehicles. The ‘Fendalton tractor’ is all about safety, not status as I’ve always thought. What we need is a Toyota Landcruiser.

But wait a minute, there’s a trap in this. When you’re sitting in the middle of a big 4WD, secure in the knowledge that you’re going to come out on top in any mishap, there must be a subtle shift in how you see the road and your fellow travellers.

Perhaps you become a little more casual about safety and courtesy. Perhaps you don’t bother to look too closely as you approach give way signs, or maybe you roll across intersections as if you were out the back of the farm.

I know that’s unreasonable. Forgive me. We came so close to disaster.

How to leave home
21st February 2009


It is 10.30 on Friday night and I find myself in a tight place. I am attempting to carry a large office desk down a flight of uncertain concrete steps between two of the least desirable student flats in Dunedin.

I negotiated the waist-high grass in the front yard, sidestepped the hedgehog (sleeping? terrified? dead?) but now find myself wedged between the concrete foundations of the building on my left and a rusting toilet wastepipe fixed loosely to the building on my right.

Small yelps of distress – not from the hedgehog – fill the dark Dunedin night. The desk slips sideways a little, the wastepipe creaks. “This is a helluva way to leave home,” I strain to Marjan.

When I embarked on the journey of fatherhood twenty odd years ago, I had no plan. Moving directly into survival mode I basically took it in 15 minute blocks and have tended to work that way ever since. The wisdom of this approach was borne out time and again as I observed better organised parents anticipate their children’s needs and fail.

Fifteen-minute-fatherhood is, by nature, a journey of surprises. One learns to expect the unexpected, to roll with the punches. Most fathers finding themselves in my position, caught between a rock and a wastepipe on a Friday night, would make a fuss. Actually, most fathers reading this will tell you they wouldn’t be so stupid as to get themselves into this position. They lie.

Did I make a fuss? I can honestly assert (because the other witnesses have no opportunity to reply) that not only did I not make a fuss, but I used the moment to reflect on the phenomenon of leaving home.

How did you leave home? I mean, how did you leave your parents home, the home of your childhood and youth? – assuming you have. Whatever your experience I bet it wasn’t as straightforward as you anticipated.

In my keen observation the modern world has made leaving home desperately complicated. Think about it. Traditionally, young people departed their parents’ home on their wedding day to set up their own home in which, if things went to plan, they would dwell in peace and fidelity for the remainder of their lives.

Young men had a couple of alternatives: they could run away to sea or be apprenticed to a bootmaker uncle in distant Dorpsville. Young women had to sit tight and wait for their father’s permission.

Then society invented tertiary education and condemned its youth to years of enforced poverty, of straining against the umbilical cord but not daring to break it for fear of cutting off essential support. A former boss had a terrific expression for this – ‘sucking on the back teat.’

My parents, with six children, discovered this the hard way. Us kids were always leaving home. One after another we moved out with fanfare, only to return when the university holidays rolled around or a relationship went belly up or a job moved off-shore. Even when we eventually set up our own homes we still retained a pied-a-terre at mum and dad’s: a few boxes of books in the spare bedroom, a rack of clothes in the sleepout.

My own kids are equally ambitious. So when Marjan, at 19, decides to go flatting in Dunedin I’m all for it. When she suggests we hire a trailer to move her stuff I’m right there. When the trailer needs to be a large one because she’s taking ALL her stuff, including the mattress off my bed, I apply maximum fifteen-minute-fatherhood and go with it.

But when I’m stuck down a flight of steps on a dark Dunedin night I know that leaving home is not as easy as Marjan thinks. And I know I will be here again, straining against the wastepipe. Marjan, and her desk, will return.

Think twice about boy racers
7th February 2009

Every parent and teacher knows, or should know, the futility of losing your temper with a child. We’ve all been tested. Even the sweetest child chooses at some point to goad us to our boundaries and then, often with astonishing calculation, take a deliberate step beyond. At that moment we have a choice: we can either calmly but firmly apply established consequences – or we can lose our rag.

There has been a fair bit of rag-losing this week around boy racers. After goading the establishment with an escalating war of words the attack by a group of boy racers on a police officer in Christchurch last Saturday was the deliberate step over the boundary. Our response will have delighted them. Just as the parent who loses his temper with a child discovers he has also lost trust, respect and control, the frenzied response to last weekend’s incident moves us further away from solving the boy racer problem.

Let me be clear, the attack on the police officer was abhorrent. There is an element within the boy racer fraternity that deliberately offends, but the appropriate response is to support the police to identify the offenders and, calmly and firmly, apply the force of law.

Whipping ourselves into a lather with threats of car crushing and other unspecified sanctions is like an enraged parent shouting, “watch what you’re doing sonny, or, or, or…you’ll be sorry!”

There are dimensions to the boy racer problem that we seem unwilling or unable to grasp. For one thing, labelling all young men (and women) who possess late-model, low-slung cars as ‘boy racers’ is as counter-productive as the ‘war on terror’ because it marginalises a range of mostly unoffending people to a point where they see little alternative to behaving badly. Just as the war on terror glamourised terrorism for some, lumping all car enthusiasts together as ‘boy racers’ gives them an identity, a common purpose and a desire to bait the law that they previously did not possess.

Have we ever tried to find out who ‘boy racers’ are or what motivates them? Are they a constant group? Do they all deliberately break the law?

I suspect those who incite violence are often an older, criminal element who manipulate the energy and youthfulness of boy racers for their own ends.

The government’s response has been disappointing. Threats to increase penalties against boy racers overlook the fact that recently toughened laws are not working. Using the force of law to shut down boy racers on the streets needs police resources far beyond our means and would require mass court actions that will almost certainly fail for lack of evidence or for breaching civil liberties.

Just as in the anti-terrorist raids in Ruatoki, attempts to enforce impractical laws against boy racers will frustrate police, diminish trust in legal process and boost the mana of the alleged offenders.

A better approach is to tackle the supply side of the problem. If government restricts the ability of car dealers and finance companies to offer almost unlimited credit to young men off the street we will curb the proliferation of vehicles in their hands. If the only way I can buy my first car is to save the purchase price there’s a chance I will be more mature by the time I can afford it and I will value it enough not to risk having it confiscated.

Eventually we will have to accept that the long term solution to boy racers is to address the underlying causes, which are our cock-eyed societal values that produce young men with appallingly limited role models and aspirations.

Until we offer boys a better model than the alcohol-inspired, fuel-injected macho posturing that passes for masculinity in this country we will continue to have mayhem on our streets. As a community we must accept that their behaviour has been learned from us. As the collective parents of these young people we could do better.