peterverstappen

2011-06-23T01:31:00.001+12:00

Stonehenge rocks at summer solstice
25th June 2011

As we climb the hill we join others moving in the same direction and soon we are at the edge of the crowd. We press on, working our way into the throng. The night is filled with laughter and the beat of jungle drums, the scene lit by camera flashes and blue arc lights.

We force our way to one of the stones. Nick finds an opening and eases himself to the ground, sitting with his back to the rock. I squeeze in beside him while Sylvia and Jeanie move further away across the grass.

At my back the stone is dry and warm, covered with tufts of scaly moss and a mosaic of lichen. A spider legs it up a thread of web and scrabbles into a crevice. Clouds boil overhead but the night is dry and warm.

Around five thousand years ago a group of people stood where I am sitting and hoisted this stone, hewn from a quarry in Wales more than 200 kilometres away, into the position it has remained ever since. It is massive, as tall as a house, as broad as a flat deck trailer. Is is just one of dozens forming a rough circle, some constructed as arches with equally massive cap stones, some standing alone, others lying where the arches have collapsed or where they were placed at the dawn of history.

I heard about people gathering at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice so we have come to join the crowd and watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.

I hoped to witness pagan rituals led by druids with long flowing beards and robes decorated with Celtic runes, to see near-naked women writhing in ecstatic trances to the haunting music of a panpipe, their bodies smeared with ashes or painted in fantastical designs. I wanted mist and mysticism.

Instead we finds ourselves at a rave. It's as if there was a text frenzy to every young person across southern England – prty @ s'henge! They've arrived with beer and groundsheets and camera phones and they are partying hard. The centre of the stone circle is a heaving mosh pit of drumming, dancing, shouting humanity. Periodically a wave of energy rises like a bubble of gas in a lava pool and bursts across the crowd in a cheer that rolls down the hillside.

The mood is festive, the drunks amiable and the police, dressed de rigeur in top-to-toe high viz, have little to do but fend off banter and tend the inebriated.

Near us a man with a Liverpool accent stands beside one of the stone arches like a night club tout. He welcomes each person who walks through the arch with a hug and some scouse wit.

“Come on, luv. Dis is de way in.”
“The way in to what?”
“To me f... house! Ha, ha!”

A woman dodges his embrace and he turns to us.

“Aagh, some people jus' don't get it. Ha, ha! Happy solstice!”

I wander off to watch a young man juggling with fire sticks. Jeanie, Sylvia's sister, is attracting attention. She wears a long calico shift on which she has painted a full length voluptuous nude woman, complete with nipple ring. She poses for photographs with young men and joins a group of dancers who cheer her contortions.

The first grey flecks of dawn appear. At the edge of the crowd a small group of bearded and costumed characters are chanting. They are more Dumbledore than druid and, warming to the crowd, break off chanting to lecture us on the British government's discrimination against pagans.

The dawn climbs up but at sunrise's appointed time the horizon is just a grey smear. A young man solemnly kneels and bows to the east. He leans forward slowly and vomits on the grass.

The sound of drums continues to swirl but we join the crowds wending across the grey fields. Looking back I see Stonehenge unmoved among thousands of tired bodies and a sea of flattened beer cans, plastic bags and burger wrappings, our offering to the gods of mid-summer.

2011-06-23T01:30:00.001+12:00

Gypsies at the margin of English life
14th May 2011

In a trailer park on the edge of Exeter I meet Kenny; small, sly, seven years old. He has a permanent squint that our grandparents may have called a 'wall eye', and half a dozen very white elongated teeth that protrude at odd angles from his mouth. Kenny offers to show me his most prized possession, a slow-worm – a kind of small grass snake. “I got 'im down the back,” is the limit of his response to my questions. He grins and sidles away to where his big sister is talking with Liz, the lady from the Education Department.

Kenny is a gypsy, which is to say he falls within the category known in England as Travellers, only he doesn't travel. This trailer park of about 15 sites lies in an industrial park within the rumble of the M5 motorway. It is an official gypsy campsite provided by the Devon County Council and most of the residents have been here since the 1960s. They have fenced their sites, laid out small gardens with outdoor furniture, sheds and garden gnomes. There is a children's playground and a car park.

Gypsies have lived in Great Britain for 500 years - a proud, independent and wilfully marginalised community. For much of their history they were the caravanning fortune tellers and tinkers, the field labourers and horse breeders of these islands. Their dark skin and decoration made them slightly exotic and, therefore, not to be trusted.

In the past 50 years the network of traditional camp sites has been swallowed up by expanding towns or buried beneath motorways. Seasonal labour that sustained a traveling life has dried up or gone to new subclasses of Poles, Bulgarians and Chinese. Many gypsies, like Kenny's family, have been corralled into Council sites on the urban fringes. Others have bought small plots of rural land and retreated to them, sparring with local authorities for planning permission to erect buildings and instal services. Others remain obdurately itinerant, parking illegally on strips of private land or public byways, in a constant round of evictions and community malice.

But even when settled gypsies remain marginalised. Like Jews in the ghettoes of Russia and Poland they draw their culture and traditions tightly around them like a coat, a shield. They remain almost invisible to mainstream society.

Invisible also to the education system. Liz, from the Devon Traveller Education Service, has played a 20 year game of cat and mouse with gypsy families; coaxing, couching and corralling them into a way of learning – and a way of life – they recoil from. In every one of the 5 or 6 campsites we have visited today we have met school-age children. All the families know Liz and accept her with varying degrees of warmth. Me they regard with outright suspicion. At every site they trot out well-rehearsed reasons for their children's truancy; “his shoes got wet,” “we been at the doctor's,” or, the clincher, “we been travelling.”

Liz's job is not helped by the reluctance of many schools to accept gypsy children. In New Zealand a school cannot refuse entry to any child within its catchment area. In England schools work to maximum rolls and can reasonably claim to be full when new children turn up. Sadly, many schools are 'full' to gypsy children but not to others.

Their unenthusiasm for gypsies is not just prejudice. Gypsy students have high absentee rates. Schools in England have strict attendance targets which a failure to meet brings down the wrath of government inspectors and a thrashing in the local press. One secondary school principal who wants to do well for gypsies says he restricts his efforts to include them because he can't afford his school to become a magnet for high needs and low performing students.

Liz believes the situation is improving. Younger parents are beginning to value education as the way forward for their children. A few gypsy students are completing secondary education and a handful progress to university. Most however remain like Kenny, with wet shoes, a crooked smile and a slow-worm.

2011-06-23T01:18:00.001+12:00

From yawn to outrage in London's theatre world
11th June 2011

Sadler's Wells, 'London's dance house', is the scene of this summer's most controversial show as twenty men, stark bollocking naked apart from flowing blond wigs, cavort across the laps and in the faces of a startled audience. It is a scene from a dance cutely titled A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud! except the title is in French and the company is Canadian.

One reviewer described a tug of war as a naked dancer tried to wrest notebook and pen from his grasp. When that failed the dancer calmly removed the reviewer's glasses, gobbed a hefty mouthful of phlegm onto them and handed them back with a sneer. This reviewer considered he'd escaped lightly; less fortunate patrons were exposed to sustained assaults of close-range willie-wobbling and backside-baring.

The show caused an outrage on Twitter and business is booming. But it raises two questions. One: is this art? Two: don't theatres have rules about climbing on the furniture?

Defining art in London is as complex as the city's Underground system. Nowhere is it more obvious that art in the modern world serves two masters – aesthetic and financial. The city's artistic community strains for large 'C' creativity. Every actor, painter and dancer sheltering within these walls, every hobbledehoy with an ounce of wit, has only one desire – to become the Next Big Thing, to create the Next Big Movement, to establish the Next Big Brand.

But in London art is always – always – tempered in the crucible of hard cash. Art is an industry: the theatres, galleries and concert halls are the draw cards for millions of tourists and millions of pounds of investment so, at the end of the day, art must make a profit.

The force that mediates creativity and profit is risk. A few days ago the new director of the Institute of Contemporary Art was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. The ICA, at one time the most avant garde space in the galaxy and launching pad for Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono and the Pop Art movement, is on the ropes. The director was asked how he intended to revive the ICA's fortunes in a crowded market place. “We are going to take more risks,” he replied.

What he didn't specify was who will take the risks. Is it the artists, the investors or the audience, like the unsuspecting punters who went to see a nice evening of dance at Sadler's Wells?

In London's art world taking risks appears to be more about crossing boundaries of taste than about exploring new creative directions. Shock, sensation and outrage are invited, not as preliminaries to serious artistic debate (although that does happen, usually in the form of commentators lobbing opinions from fixed positions) but to attract the headlines and cyber-buzz that will secure the balance sheet.

For all that, the bulk of London's artistic output is determined by money-men and, like investors everywhere, they tend to stick with the familiar. West End theatres offer a conservative diet of musicals, drama and comedy. Old favourites are dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint; new shows follow the same undemanding formula. The big drawcard in the West End this summer is a centenary revival of the plays of Terence Rattigan – whose work had long ago fallen by the wayside, where it should have remained.

The major concert halls, opera houses and galleries follow the same pattern. Here are Mozart, Verdi and the Impressionists to delight the conservative and the novice, whose trip to London would be incomplete without taking in a 'show.'

Happily, between yawn and outrage there is a fertile strip of creative soil in London's art world, and after watching a ho hum production of The Cherry Orchard at The National Theatre recently Sylvia and I set out to find it.

On successive evenings we stumbled upon an Irish smorgasbord of family conmanship and, in a little walk-up theatre in Soho, a peculiar exploration of youthful awakening by four actor/musician ingenues. Neither show was flawless; both over-reached and under-performed, but we were inspired to debate their merits and messages all the way back to our hotel.

It is likely the creators of these shows see them as merely a springboard to bigger things. But if they are hoping to make the shift from Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue they should be prepared to become either more sensational or to be rubbed smooth to fit a low-risk commercial mould.

2011-06-23T01:16:00.002+12:00

Foals Day and Night
11th June 2011

The signs appeared on the lanes shortly after we moved to the New Forest - Foals Day and Night. It was one of several mysteries, like the words 'New' and 'Forest'.

The New Forest, in England's leafy Hampshire, is a thousand years old. Its newness derives from William the Conqueror's whim to grant the forest to himself as a royal sports arcade. The forest is, of course, as old as time itself.

Then again, it isn't a forest as we conceive it. It is neither bush nor plantation, not a landscape of trees to the horizon. It is a 'forest' in a more traditional sense, possessing certainly a high density of trees but also fields, fallows, heaths, swamps, ponds and grassy plains. It has also acquired, since good king Willie's time, villages, roads, railways, manors, farms, pylons, factories and a pub on every corner.

Furthermore the New Forest is a National Park and, as a kiwi, it requires some adjustment to accommodate the idea of a National Park not as a place which largely excludes human activity but one which, by necessity, tries to maintain a balance among all its native populations, human and non-human, fauna and flora.

I must also rethink gorse. Our home sits on Bull Hill, a slight prominence at one end of Beaulieu Heath (“Bewley” to the locals). We are almost completely surrounded by wide open spaces of grass, bracken and tangled gorse. As a son of Mid-Canterbury I constantly repress an urge to strap on a spray pack or pick up a slasher and beat back the malefactor. I remind myself it is I and not the gorse that is the exotic element in this landscape - perhaps even the noxious weed.

Gorse aside, the New Forest is charming. There are in fact large areas of trees, some obviously working plantations, others skilfully contrived to seem as wild today as when William and his robber barons cavorted here. It is a place of winding lanes, thatched cottages, sudden silent churchyards in dappled May sunshine, arched stone bridges over slow-flowing streams and a gentle tumble down to the Solent, the narrow water that divides Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

The management of the Forest is a gentle tug of war between local and national authorities that has wound across two or three centuries after usurping the royal monopoly. A Verderer's Court of local worthies maintains vigilant watch over traditional commoners' rights, defending the land against the threat of enclosure, or its modern counterpart, privatisation. They have their work cut out – as recently as last year the government proposed scrapping all National Parks and selling off the public bits.

Traditional rights are many and sometimes obscure. We hold a right of pannage, which means we can release our pigs to forage in the forest for up to 40 days in November and December, to hoover up the acorns. Sylvia's sister, who lives up the road, has the right to take firewood and cut peat (the 'right' to split and stack her firewood has fallen to me this year). Rights are assigned to the property and pass with it from one owner to the next.

The most visible right of all is the right to graze livestock. The New Forest is famous for its ponies; small, gentle creatures that graze the open spaces, confined only by occasional cattle stops and fences. These creatures are not wild, each is traceable to its owner by a brand, a fluorescent collar or the cut of its tail. We are woken each morning to John Wayne sounds of whinnies and hoofbeats and they gather at the front gate at dusk to nibble the hedge or sniff a handout.

Ponies and cars compete for the roads and driving is a test of patience. This is particularly true just now when the mares are giving birth. The foals, all legs and nerves, shadow their mothers as they amble from one grazing spot to the next. There have been collisions and caution is advised: foals day and night.

2011-05-01T19:06:00.001+12:00

Qatar lives the dream
30th April 2011

Fa'ad eases the Landcruiser to the base of the sand dune, settles his ample frame deeper into the seat, then plants his foot. We bucket up the dune's brow, tyres scrabbling for purchase in the soft sand, the vehicle pitching like a fairground ride. Sylvia is rigid beside me, arms gripping her seat in terror. For the first time all day Fa'ad grips the steering wheel with more than two fingers as he wrestles to keep control. It seems a petrol head in Qatar is much like a petrol head in Mid-Canterbury, even though he is dressed in what looks like a full length nightie and a veil.

At the top of the dune we fishtail to a halt, Fa'ad stabbing a chubby finger to the horizon. His commentary is brief but eloquent: “there Saudi Arabia, you make photo.”

We wobble from the vehicle into a blast furnace and make photo. 'There' is a landscape of sand stretching towards a shimmering horizon. Beneath us a tidal inlet cherishes a film of briny water and off to our right huddles an oasis of cellphone towers.

On this sand dune, just an hour from downtown Doha, Qatar reverts to form; a small scab of sand jutting uncertainly into the Persian Gulf, home to a few thousand Bedouin, their tents and camels, a cluster of date palms. With a long but meagre history, few could have predicted Qatar's transformation two or three generations ago. But it turned out that these dreadful sand dunes are the skin of a rice pudding. Beneath the surface is an almost limitless wealth of oil and gas.

We clamber back aboard the Landcruiser and Fa'ad rolls us down to a small beach camp. The Gulf submits to the midday heat, its salt-laden water oily and exhausted where it laps the beach. Doha's towers shimmer on a hazy horizon.

Qatar, like neighbouring Dubai, appears to be recreating itself as a theme park. Doha, the capital – and only – city is a frenzy of pulling down and building up. Freshly minted motorways snake among canyons of skyscrapers where a decade ago was only bare ground. Any one of these buildings would cause a sensation in New Zealand. Here they are hurled skyward by the dozen; wild, whacky, outrageous buildings, without rules or restrictions; 30, 40, 50 storeys tall.

I'm told many of these towers – office blocks, hotels, apartments – remain empty or only sparsely occupied for months or years after completion. They are more icon than real estate, their job is to inspire confidence in the vision of Qatar's rulers.

The vision is serious and it works. This is not the hawking, spitting, haggling, thronging, ferocious and fetid Middle East of my previous experience. It is self-consciously elegant, well-mannered and ambitious. All the world comes here: statesmen and sports stars, financiers and fashionistas. Billboards trumpeting Qatar's ambition to be the sports capital of the world, the cultural capital of the world or the airline hub of the world, are more than hollow rhetoric. Anybody who had previously failed to notice sat up and paid attention when FIFA awarded Qatar the rights to host the soccer World Cup.

The achievement is all the more remarkable considering Qatar has been a country for only 40 years and has a population of just 1.6 million. The human story intrigues when you consider that less than a quarter of the population is Qatari. The rest are expatriates who floated in on the gold rush, mostly from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.

These are the men who construct buildings, sweep roads, open doors, and the women who feed babies and wash laundry. They form a shifting, subdued underclass, firmly held in place by a visa system that allows them only a toehold. Fa'ad, has no hope of becoming a Qatar citizen despite being born here because his family comes from Palestine.

Just as Asia supplies the muscle, other nationalities, mainly European, furnish the brains. These include kiwis, like our friends who work in education, engineering and trade. They acknowledge the contradictions. As one said to me the other night, “here I earn twice as much, enjoy twice the comfort and have half the control.”

It is a compromise they seem to bear. For the price of being an outsider they enjoy tax free salaries, five star accommodation with maids, golf courses that rival St Andrews and Michelin-rated restaurants. Oh, and joy riding with Fa'ad.

Qatar has so far remained untouched by the political unrest among its near neighbours. There is no more freedom here than in Egypt or Tunisia but its rulers, shrewd judges of human nature, have spread the wealth enough to dampen any latent desire for democracy.

How long this will remain so is unclear, but Qatar's future will be determined not by fabulous wealth or outrageous buildings, but by its human story – just like anywhere else.

2011-03-22T13:47:00.000+13:00

The Other Rugby World Cup
19th March 2011

Disappointment and anger at losing the Rugby World Cup is coalescing into resolve among stricken sports fans in Christchurch.

Bob's Parka, spokesman for the city's mayor, voiced the concerns of many in Christchurch. “We've had the silt kicked out of us left, right and centre over the past few weeks and this is the needle that breaks the camel's last straw.”

Parka revealed a breath-taking plan to recapture the World Cup – and go one better. “Most of Christchurch went sideways in the earthquake and our thinking has to go that way too. We need to turn disaster into opportunity and use that to relaunch our city.”
The plan being hastily put together by sports administrators, community leaders, EQC and insurance companies is a carefully guarded secret but sources close to Parka have hinted at a major international rugby tournament to be staged in and around Christchurch at the same time as the Rugby World Cup later this year.
AMI stadium under-groundsman, Jock's Trap, compares the new tournament to Kerry Packer's cricket circus that challenged the status quo 30 years ago and ushered that game into the professional age. “The word going around is that we'll see a rival tournament of teams put together with some of the biggest names in international rugby playing a modified game that is fast, free flowing and totally crowd-pleasing.”
Looking across AMI's badly scarred grounds, Trap says the modifications to the game will probably be dictated by the state of the playing surface. “At the moment you'd struggle to hold a crazy golf tournament here so clearly we have to think away from the normal game of rugby. For example, you probably don't need an oval ball to give you unpredictable bounce. And with all those sand traps out on the pitch you'd do well to introduce golf clubs into the game.”
Starting a new tournament from scratch just months out from the official World Cup doesn't phase its backers. “The organisation's all there,” says Parka. “We just have to transfer it to the new plan.”
Parka was tight-lipped when asked how they will persuade top players to break their contracts with the IRB, but local rugby commentator Adam's Apple believes there are some very deep pockets backing the new tournament. “It's like that old movie about Watergate,” says Apple. “You have to follow the money, and when you see who's going into the meetings you start to put two and two together.”
Apple's concerns clearly point to the involvement of the EQC and insurance industry. Trap again: “why do insurance companies want to get involved in a rugby match? They're cooking something up.”
A leaked memo gives weight to their concerns. Sources close to Parka are worried that he and others in the council are being persuaded by the insurance companies to transfer their liability for the city's earthquake damage to the new tournament. They say that instead of paying out many thousands of small claims over many months or years, insurance companies and EQC will make a single payment of the total amount of damage to the city to fund the tournament.
Amy's Cott, an analyst for Robobank, says the idea is a gamble but it just might work. “It's the kind of blue-skies thinking we need to lift this country out of the economic mire. The tournament and its spinoffs could do for Christchurch what 20/20 cricket has done for India. If it works we could be the sole proprietors of the latest global sporting craze. The profits will be enormous, more than enough to rebuild the city.”
And if it fails?
“If it fails,” opines Parka, “then we're all up silt creek without a shovel, which is about where we are now, so what have we got to lose?”

2011-03-07T11:20:00.000+13:00

Silt and Sausages

My mother, Drina, has departed her broken home in Dallington and joined the swelling throng of earthquake escapees in Ashburton. Among her observations of living through six months of tremors, one recurring thought is her helplessness in the grip of such random and unassailable forces.
Drina has a long memory. The last time her world fell apart was in 1940 when Hitler’s armies threw themselves across the South Willemsvaart canal and plundered her sleepy village in rural Holland. The Nazis remained for four years, but the earthquakes are far more terrifying.
At least with the Nazis, Drina says, you could see your enemy, hear him coming, grasp the length and breadth of him. A set of rules was imposed and you learned to live within them, subvert them, find the points of weakness that allowed you to reclaim some small measure of control.
There are no rules with earthquakes – and no control. Nothing prepares you for the herculean fist that smashes your foundations and has you cowering beneath a computer desk while your possessions rage through the house and the building bucks like a barrel ride. Nothing eases the small knife of terror that runs through every moment of waiting, anticipating the next after-shock, never trusting that which should be most trustworthy – the ground beneath your feet.
Helplessness, we discover, is not confined to those at the centre of the disaster. For us at the margins, whose homes are intact and lives largely untouched, there is also a feeling of helplessness, of watching a beautiful city and her people, our families and friends, torn and broken.
The desire to reassert some degree of control in these terrifying events is behind the great outpouring of assistance we are witnessing. We pare helplessness down to a single passionate syllable – help. “How can I help?” is our cry, and we come up with twenty clever ideas.
Generosity is not a uniquely kiwi trait but we have our own way of going about it. In an age of international aid teams and disaster specialists some communities might be inclined to keep away and let the professionals manage the response. Not us. Beneath the official rescue effort a thousand acts of kindness are blossoming. We bake, give and shovel. We ‘toot for tucker’ and dig into our wallets. We load the barbie on the back of the truck and cook sausages in Linwood Avenue for days on end.
Shovelling silt has become the gold standard of giving. It requires no specialist training, no permission to cross a cordon, no heavy equipment. It reaches deeply into the battered communities that have not yet seen a hard hat or USAR vest. It can be highly organised – the student volunteers, the Farmy Army – or touchingly informal, like the parent at my school who took his seven year old son to New Brighton on Sunday where the pair of them shovelled silt off the driveways of strangers.
We give because we hate watching people suffer, but also to ease our own suffering. This is our disaster too. Whatever ‘new normal’ arises in Christchurch we know our lives will also never be quite the same again and that knowledge makes us both angry and frightened.
Drina is right, the earthquake has taken not just our homes and streets, but also our most fundamental human trait - our will. The long, painful, difficult process of restoring Christchurch will not be just about renewing buildings and infrastructure but about reasserting our will over our environment, and over our deepest fears.

2011-02-21T18:20:00.001+13:00

Are we the Lucky Country?
19 February 2011

The solo mother from Ashburton who makes her living driving a dump truck in a West Australia coal mine could have talked as eloquently as Julia Gillard this week about the special relationship between Australia and New Zealand.
It’s thanks to this that she, the truck driver, earns $130,000 a year. Leaving New Zealand three years ago with nothing after the break up of her marriage she now owns one investment property in Ashburton and is planning to buy a second.
The Australian Prime Minister’s visit to New Zealand this week was wrapped in the usual ANZAC spirit of mateship but it couldn’t help but kick a bit of Aussie dust in our eyes. We may have a special relationship but increasingly it is not an equal one.
In economic terms New Zealand has become a branch office of AustraliaCorp. In human terms we are an incubator. In the past 3 years 75,000 kiwis have crossed the ditch to join the 400,000 or so already living in the Lucky Country. We breed ‘em, grow ‘em, educate ‘em and lose ‘em to the Aussie dream. To Julia Gillard that must look like a pretty special relationship.
An Aussie jobs fair in Auckland last weekend saw thousands of people queuing up to make the shift. Their reason for wanting to go was, with a few variations, due to one thing - money. The National government’s promise to close the wage gap has blown up in its face, with Australian wages now 25-30% higher than New Zealand.
The wage gap is driven by a huge difference in productivity between Australia and New Zealand. Productivity is not measured in how hard we work. By international standards kiwis work harder than most, and probably harder than Australians.
Productivity is a measure of how much wealth is created by our labour. In 2010 each person in New Zealand generated $27,000 of wealth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita). Each Australian generated $40,000. In simple terms, the wage gap follows the wealth gap.
New Zealand has been discussing productivity all my adult life. As early as I can remember we’ve been exhorted to add value to the things we produce. There’s more money to be earned by turning wool into carpets and logs into furniture. Electronic goods and sometimes knowledge itself commands an even greater premium.
While this may generally be true, the growing wealth gap spanning the Tasman is not because Australia is brainier than us, or better governed, or simply bigger. Much of it is purely luck. The Ashburton woman driving the dump truck is more productive than a Methven shearer not because she’s adding value to the coal she’s carting, but because the price of coal has gone ballistic on the back of Chinese demand. Lucky Country indeed.
A recent study by the Legatum Institute hammers home the message we see in countless surveys. On its Prosperity Index Australia is the 8th wealthiest country in the world while we languish at 17th.
But the Legatum survey does something interesting. Reflecting the dim awakening in the minds of economists that GDP-based criteria are no longer enough to describe a country’s well-being, they include measures like governance (New Zealand ranks 4th in the world), personal freedom (3rd), social capital (3rd) and education (1st). In all these fields New Zealand outranks Australia. When all measures are taken into account Australia ranks 4th in the world on Legatum’s Prosperity Index and New Zealand 5th.
The solo mum from Ashburton says she will come home in about five years, once she has made her fortune. We notice many who leave our shores do not return, but if it’s the money that draws them away it is the quality of life that draws them back.

2011-02-09T17:22:00.000+13:00

Ban the burger, can the coke
5th February 2011

Placing a ban on undesirable behaviour is without doubt the least effective way of stopping it. Consider the Roman Empire’s ban on Christianity (which backfired spectacularly) or the Chinese government’s ban on freedom of speech.
A ban can sometimes reduce the behaviour; enforced vigorously it may even appear to have wiped it out. But as long as the desire remains to perform the activity, imbibe the substance or conjure the impure thought the behaviour will evade or outlast the most punitive sanctions.
Nowhere is this more true than in the behaviour of teenagers. The most enduring achievement of Western Civilisation over the past 70 years may be the raising of successively more wilful generations of teens whose apparent purpose in life is to harm themselves.
So you have to roll your eyes when a recent study claiming New Zealand secondary schools are hedged with dairies and takeaway bars peddling a wave of junk food to vulnerable students is met with calls to ban such products from all outlets near schools.
While I struggle with the image created by the report of waves of students streaming out of afternoon school straight to the pie warmers and coke cabinets of surrounding food bars, and the equally ludicrous response of a ban, we do have a growing problem of obesity and associated health issues among the young, and I don’t doubt we have teens hooked on sugar and fat just as others are hooked on nicotine and alcohol.
Accepting that a ban on pies and fries will not remove the desire to eat them (and forgetting for a moment, as the authors of the study clearly have, that most teenagers can eat vast quantities of fat and sugar with nothing more serious than a few pimples) let’s imagine a response that strikes to the root of the problem – that to most kids junk food is irresistible.
Very simply, we must convince our youth of a simple proposition: junk food is bad.
Totalitarian regimes throughout history have devoted armies to manipulating social behaviour, but for a really effective strategy we need look no further than the principles of dog training, and the training of one dog in particular – Jess.
Jess (now deceased) was our much loved Labrador/Pointer bitch. When Jess was still a young dog we rented a house on a farm and Jess discovered the joys of unauthorised mustering. We realised if we wanted to come between Jess and a bullet from the farmer she had to learn a crucial lesson – sheep is bad.
So Sylvia took to walking Jess down the long gravel drive every morning, hemmed on both sides with paddocks filled with sheep. She walked Jess at heel on a tight lead and discreetly carried a short stick behind her back. She chose the early morning so she could observe Jess’s behaviour by watching her shadow and not draw Jess’s attention to the behaviour modification strategy.
Every time Sylvia noticed Jess’s shadow turning to look at the sheep she gave her a sharp tap on the backside with the stick. Jess never noticed the stick and after a while she came to associate sheep with a sore bum. The strategy improved if Sylvia accompanied the tap on the backside with a deep growl – the message for Jess being that an interest in sheep was displeasing to the head of the pack (i.e. Sylvia).
After a few months of this Jess’s behaviour was transformed. She walked down the drive looking neither left nor right and with no more interest in harassing sheep than in reading the evening paper. If occasionally she glanced at a sheep from the corner of her eye she quickly corrected herself, with a very guilty expression.
I say let’s apply the same strategy to our kids. From a very young age we should walk them daily up East Street and down West Street with a short stick and a deep growl if they so much as glance towards Makkers or KFC. By the age of 5 all desire for junk food will be eliminated. Even if the school gate is corralled with pie carts and burger barrows they will walk past looking neither left nor right. Civilisation will be saved and we can congratulate ourselves on our cunning. Simple.

2011-01-25T21:58:00.000+13:00

Toylets flushed with success
22nd January 2011
From the “next big thing” file, here is the background story to Sega’s latest gaming sensation, Toylets. If you missed the headline earlier this week, Toylets is a suite of new digital games played not with console, toggles or fingers, but with – urine! (no, we’re not taking the piss).
Sega has installed the games in gents’ conveniences in a small range of bars and subway stations across Japan (where else?). Games are played by directing the urine stream onto a sensor placed in the bowl or urinal and following the action on a small gaming screen placed at eye level.
Happy splashers can choose from four games. Mannequin Pis measures and records volume and flow rate; Graffiti Eraser (the fire fighter’s friend) tests control and conservation as you spray the screen clean of graffiti; Splashing Battle challenges the user to out-perform the previous pee-er; and North Wind transforms the flow into a wind blowing up a young woman’s skirt – the stronger the flow, the further the skirt rises.
Does this all sound horribly like little boys and toilets? Yes! But there is a cold commercial reality. The intention apparently is not to reduce splash, improve hygiene or even foster a sense of self-worth, but to hold the urinator’s attention to the advertising stripped across the screen. So, while relieving your bladder of the residue of many pints of beer you may be exhorted to go straight back and consume even more, a circular dance of ever-increasing consumption and expiation.
In a cunning commercial tease Sega claims to have no intention of marketing Toylets beyond the current small scale trial, which means they’ll be everywhere in six months. And you can bet they are already working on Toylets2, 3 and 4, with endless ideas for extending and expanding the original tool – I mean, game. How about a dual sensor: pee with a friend for truly interactive satisfaction. Or hands-free: the ultimate test of poise and shoe leather.
Inevitably we will see a gaming version of the old school boy favourites, height and distance. Like a fairground strongman the urinator will be challenged to ring a bell by peeing to the highest mark on the urinal or by hitting the sensor from the greatest distance.
Public toilets will become vast gaming arcades, complete with hostesses pushing drinks trolleys so players can maintain output without leaving their play station. Champions will emerge, local leagues appear, and eventual Olympic status is assured (with the advantage of instant urine samples to combat doping).
But wait! Is Toylets to be confined to males? Is this to be a rare case of anatomy over-riding equity? With vast advertising revenues at stake you can be assured that the smarts at Sega are working on this problem right now. There are certain physiological challenges to overcome for women to play while they pee (so to speak).
Forget the notorious She-Pee, that sloppy piece of hardware designed to allow a woman to urinate in a standing position. The women I know who have tried a She-Pee say it’s a plumber’s nightmare.
My bet is that Sega will go for a maneuverable toilet seat, a sort of hollow ouija board fitted atop the regular seat that allows the sitter to slide around and direct the flow onto sensors in the bowl. Alternatively women may sit astride hollowed out computer chairs and scoot around large splash pans.
However Toylets develop you can be sure that public conveniences will never be the same – and you read it here first.

2011-01-25T21:56:00.000+13:00

Who will be Ashburtonian of the Year?
6th January 2011

Before we consign 2010 to the dustbin of history let us reflect for a moment on the nominations for Ashburtonian of the Year. At the time of writing there are just two.

The first is the group from the District Council that has fulfilled the dream of a new industrial park to service our growing economy. These visionary men, giants of industry and commerce, have brought forth the Ashburton Business Estate from a scrubby paddock at the north end of town.

I had my first close look at the Business Estate this week in the company of my friend from Gordon’s Road and Portia, a young Doberman bitch. Portia’s excitement was palpable as we strolled down Bremner’s Road. Muscles quivering, she snuffed the warm evening air until my friend unleashed her, whereupon she shot like a bullet from a gun into the gathering dusk. It was then, as I lifted my eyes to follow her track, that I was struck by the full magnificence of the Business Estate.

Like a scene from a Cold War novel the Estate is a picture of near-perfect apocalypsis: pristine roadways, elegant kerbs and channels, streetlamps – even surveillance cameras – all curve away across an expanse of fine rippling grass towards a golden horizon unmarred by single structure. The silence is palpable: somewhere a tumbleweed blows.

Surmounting an elegantly formed embankment planted with many hundreds of small native trees, my friend and I gazed across this $20million ratepayer investment and marvelled at the vision of its creators.

“I was agin it,” my friend confided. “I thought it would be noisy and disruptive but now I see what they were really doing I think it’s brilliant. Overnight they’ve given me an 85ha dog park; I’m even thinking of bringing the horse down here for a bit of exercise.”

But we should not judge the achievement of the Business Estate’s creators simply by the earthworks. The genius is in the marketing. Even now some of Ashburton’s brainiest are fanning out across Canterbury to lure industry away from competitors like Rolleston’s I-Site or the new Dakota Park estate at Christchurch airport.

The Business Estate’s website is breathless with excitement at the inventory of companies that have almost signed up, attracted by global transport links and the nifty begonia beds that provide such a warm welcome.

By comparison the second nomination for Ashburtonian of the Year is, frankly, an embarrassment. It is the colony of black-billed gulls nesting in the Ashburton river bed. Apart from the obvious fact that a group of migratory birds can hardly claim status as true Ashburtonians there is no merit in the irresponsible behaviour of creatures that raise their offspring standing in a gravel bed up to their backsides in dirty water.

It is preposterous to contemplate that a gaggle of seabirds may attain the cover-girl status of Ashburtonian of the Year when they possess neither the vision nor the ratepayer resources of the creators of the Business Estate.

It has been suggested to me that our town is privileged to host the black-billed gulls, that we should embrace these rare birds as an icon for the district. I say how will our town slogan – It Just Keeps Getting Better – appear to the tourist or business investor driving across the Ashburton bridge into a shower of bird shit?

So the Ashburtonian of the Year is a stark choice between the gulls of the river bed and the giants of the Business Estate. The winner will have a statue erected in their honour. What will it be, a great white seagull at the south end of town or a great white elephant at the north?

2010-12-13T09:40:00.001+13:00

WWW comes of age in Wikileaks
11th December 2010

If anybody still doubted the influence of the World Wide Web in our lives, two recent events illustrate how deeply it penetrates the machinery of society and how poorly we respond to its challenge.

A report earlier this week that the government plans to beef up security legislation, giving the SIS and other agencies greater powers to intercept and monitor emails, radiates a Big Brother chill. Mr Key argues the changes are necessary ahead of the Rugby World Cup because that event makes us a more likely target of terrorism. Critics respond that the World Cup is simply an excuse for the State to restrict our freedom.

This story is played out within the shadow of WikiLeaks. The uproar from that organisation’s release of 250,000 leaked US government emails continues to roll around the globe, gathering steam with each passing day. The furore appears to stem less from the content of the emails (which, if we assume the media has focussed on the most provocative, are hardly earth-shattering) than from how it up-ends traditional frameworks of power and privacy.

Wikileaks, like most offspring of the Web, seems a loose gathering of geeky minds. Whether they are subversives intent on bringing down the world order or champions of freedom depends on your point of view. The fact is, this small band of hackers and provocateurs wields more global power at this moment than many nuclear-armed nations. And, unlike nuclear arms or even the now-familiar terrorist threat, the most powerful nations of the world have no effective response.

The arrest in London this week of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, on charges of sexual assault is risible. Here’s an average guy whose desktop organisation has just embarrassed the world’s greatest power and most of its allies and friends, who is living openly in the middle of London with neither bodyguard nor bullet proof vest, and the worst they can do is throw him in the slammer on accusations of rape.

In Wikileaks the World Wide Web has come of age. For 15 years we’ve been told the Web has the power to radically change the world in the same way that, say, the industrial revolution did, except the Web will do it faster. Most of us have gone along thinking the Web is just another tool, like TV or air conditioning, that we can bolt onto our existing structures but essentially continue to operate as we’ve always done.

Governments have clearly thought the same. They have embraced the Web because of its enormous appetite for information while failing to appreciate that it works as a two-way mirror. Just as governments can use the Web to peer deeply into the lives of their citizenry, so can those same citizens peer right back into the heart of government. And what a black heart it is.

Assange has thrown a challenge to the establishment as fundamental as the storming of the bastille or the Declaration of Independence. Like any revolution it is defined by its ingenuity in out-flanking the mighty. The US government will strive to keep Assange in prison for the rest of his life but that will count for nothing – around the world fifty other Assanges are already sucking classified information out of government files.

When the world’s most powerful nations have had their cyber-weapons turned against them our own government may reflect on the risks of its intention to muscle-up surveillance of email traffic. Invading our privacy may backfire.

But the lessons of Wikileaks are not just for governments. Few individuals appreciate the breadth and depth of their footprint in cyberspace, or its potential consequences. And just as governments may realise the only way to keep information secure is to revert to diplomatic bags, so we each must accept that when we embrace the Web we abandon privacy.

The Web revolution will be complete when everybody knows everything, and nobody cares.

2010-11-15T08:28:00.001+13:00

Alcohol reforms miss the point
13th November 2010

Driving through Ashburton on a hot Thursday evening I notice two young women sitting cross-legged on the grass of the Borough school’s playing field, sharing a bottle of Bernadino. They are a picture of summer.

As I drive past the radio reports progress on the government’s alcohol reform bill. If it becomes law it will almost certainly remove the bottle of Bernadino from this happy scene.

The government has grazed across the 150 or so recommendations of the New Zealand Law Society to reform liquor laws in the face of growing unease about our booze culture. In doing so they have chosen to focus the spotlight of reform almost exclusively on the drinking behaviour of 18-20 year olds.

If the government’s bill becomes law this age group will face a zero blood alcohol limit for driving and a split drinking age of 18 for on-license consumption and 20 for off-license purchases. Adults will face fines up to $2,000 if they serve alcohol to young people without their parents’ permission.

Public health advocates criticise the reforms for appealing to populist sentiment while ignoring the real drivers of booze culture. They argue that 18-20 year olds comprise fewer than 10% of binge drinkers and that the reforms fail to address issues of advertising and price-cutting. Opposition speakers in parliament claim National is skirting the tough issues around alcohol law reform for fear of getting offside with middle aged voters and the powerful alcohol industry.

The focus on youth shows the government clearly bending to public pressure from recent high profile deaths of young people after binge drinking. They aim to turn back the clock on youth drinking which many believe has got out of hand since laws were relaxed a decade ago.

It’s hard to see the proposed changes to access and supervision having much effect on young people’s drinking habits. Even 35 years ago when I was just 17 and the drinking age was 21 we could still buy booze. If we couldn’t find it in Invercargill we drove up the road to Winton where they would slip us cartons of Speights from the back of the bottle store. Then we’d retire to somebody’s front room and get happily plastered, sitting on our cartons so nobody could knick our beer.

The question of supervision strikes a tender spot in kiwi culture. As a teenager I don’t remember anybody’s parents pulling me up for having alcohol in the first place, never mind the effect it was having. Perhaps they were quietly looking out for us, knowing that if they got too heavy we’d just go and drink somewhere less safe.

I took a similar approach with my own children and I am sure I would have driven them off if I had expected their friends to show up with parental permission before drinking in my home. This part of the proposed reforms will be unenforceable and probably counter productive.

What restricted my drinking as a teenager was not access or supervision but price - we simply couldn’t afford to buy a lot of booze. Alcohol was not a grocery item as it is today. It was not marketed aggressively through advertising and discounting, and there was certainly no youth market. In this context the government’s unwillingness to address price and advertising severely limits the usefulness of any reforms.

Underlying everything in this debate is our society’s deeper relationship with alcohol. I am no more of a drinker today than my parents were but that hasn’t stopped my children having the occasional bender any more than it stopped me when I was 18. For better or worse, alcohol is a rite of passage for our youth that sadly becomes a way of life for some in adulthood. As long as we allow alcohol to fill this role any law changes will be window dressing.

2010-11-01T12:15:00.001+13:00

Warner Brothers presents The Hobble
30th October 2010

Smaug Warner, king of dragons, reclined on a bed of diamonds in a vast cavern deep beneath the Hollywood hills. His enormous body was encrusted with jewels and the scales on his long neck were trimmed with all the currencies of the world. Giant screens around the cavern displayed the many cash cows of Smaug’s global empire and from a hundred ATMs an unceasing flow of cash fell like gentle rain on Smaug’s back.
Faceless, Smaug’s executive, slunk into the cavern, a frown on his brow.
“Your Warneriness, I have troubling news.”
Smaug turned a malevolent eye on his servant, “trouble for who, Faceless?”
“You should see for yourself, oh Smaug.” Faceless waved a remote control at one of the giant screens. An image flashed onto the screen of a city in a distant land, bathed in sunshine. On the streets of the city a crowd was marching and shouting angrily.
“What ‘as this to do with me?” grumbled Smaug.
“It’s Muddle Earth, your Smaugness, where you sent the new cash cow. They don’t like it.”
“Don’t like it!” bellowed Smaug, “I’ll roast their hides. Who’s our man in Muddle Earth?”
“His name’s Jackass. Sir Peter Jackass. You remember, he has served you well in the past.”
“So, why doesn’t ‘e serve me well now?” Smaug stopped suddenly and a small flame flickered around his nostrils. “Faceless,” he whispered, “I think it’s time for you and me to take a little trip.”
The following afternoon at about 3pm the sky over Wellywood, capital of Muddle Earth, darkened as the great shadow of Smaug fell upon it. The enormous dragon circled the city once, twice, and landed heavily on the waterfront, crushing the national museum and upsetting coffee cups in a hundred cafes. Sir Peter Jackass was waiting to greet his master.
“Jackass”, growled Smaug, “I want answers and I want them fast or you’ve seen the last of my cash cow in this miserable place.”
“It’s the hobbles,” wailed Jackass. “They’ve got this onion and are refusing to feed the cash cow.”
“Onion?!” raged Smaug. “My cash cow will not eat onions!”
“No, no, it’s not an ordinary onion. It’s a trayed onion.”
“Enough! Who runs this country?”
“Ah, that would be me,” simpered a voice beneath Smaug’s left shoulder. A smallish man with a nervous smile stood on the waterfront. “Please don’t do anything rash, Mr Smaug, your highness. I’m sure we can sort this out.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jonkey.”
“Donkey?”
“No, your Smaugness, Jonkey.”
“Jonkey, my ass! You’ve got about 15 minutes to sort this problem or we’re out of ‘ere.”
Jonkey looked around nervously. “Will the other Warner Brothers also be coming, your Smaugness?”
Smaug lifted his head and roared with laughter. “The other Warner Brothers! You know what ‘appened to them?”
“No.”
Smaug’s giant face came to rest within inches of Jonkey. “I ‘et ‘em.”
“You ate them?”
“First I ‘ated ‘em. Then I ‘et ‘em. And that’s just what I will do with you if I don’t get some answers quick smart!”
Jonkey shuffled nervously. “We’ll do anything to keep the cash cow, great Smaug. I’ve talked with my advisors and what we’ll do is make an example of some of these troublesome hobbles, smash their onion, you know the sort of thing, and I’m sure the rest will see sense.”
Smaug looked menacingly at Jonkey. “I don’t want them to see sense. I want them to suffer, I want them to be my slaves!”
“Slaves, oh yes, I’m sure we can do that. Slavery should be no problem, oh magnificent Smaug.”
Smaug leaned closer until his smoky breath made Jonkey’s eyes water. “You believe in free trade, don’t you, Mr Donkey.”
“Yes, yes, indeed. We welcome free trade.”
“So do I, especially the free part. So ‘ere’s what else I want. You and your miserable ‘obbles will pay for all the feed my cash cow eats.”
“Certainly, great Smaug, an excellent idea,” nodded Jonkey helplessly.
“And if you take very good care of this cash cow, I may send you another one some time.”
“That would be very desirable,” glowed Jonkey.
“And then again, I might not,” grinned Smaug.
Several weeks later Jonkey stood at the window of his office looking across Wellywood. Lines of hobbles, their backs bent under huge loads, struggled beneath ashen skies towards a far hillside where the great cash cow dominated Muddle Earth. Crowds of sullen and angry hobbles clamoured at the gates.
His advisor watched the gathering crowds uneasily. “Me and the lads have been talking, Jonkey, and we think you should make yourself invisible for a while, just until things calm down. “
Jonkey sighed, “invisible? Yes, perhaps you’re right. Well, that should be easy to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a message from Smaug. He said he’ll give me a ring next week.” Jonkey smiled to himself.

2010-10-17T21:23:00.000+13:00

Chilean miners’ ordeal is just beginning
16October 2010

It came as no surprise to hear that the Chilean miners, trapped 600 metres underground for 69 days, were debating who will have the honour of being the last person to return to the surface. They understand that, however desperate their entrapment has been, life back at the surface will be infinitely more complicated.

I imagine each miner entering the small capsule with the nervousness of an actor stepping on stage or a defendant rising to the court room. They ascend through layers of living rock that should have been their tomb and emerge, blinking and reborn, into the harsh Atacama sunlight to find themselves the stars of a circus.

A thousand journalists from across the globe have gathered at the mine head and their presence, more than the drama of the miners, has attracted politicians and celebrities, sniffing an opportunity to burnish their public profiles in the glow of a good story. Even if the miners regime for the past 69 days has included daily media training most of them will still find life at the surface more bizarre and terrifying than the warm darkness and camaraderie underground.

They are now public property and the public will demand a return on its investment. The politicians, celebrities and media have not camped outside this mine for two months just to turn away quietly after the first – or even the final – trapped miner emerges. Our heroes may have anticipated the embraces, tears and handshakes that will greet them as they step out of the cage but are they prepared for months and years in the limelight?

Family and friends will pressure them to cash in on their unique fate. Media agents will hover at the back of the scrum to sign exclusive deals for their stories. Like the All Blacks the miners will quickly be sorted into various price categories according to their physical prowess and ability to manage public life. A few individuals (the youngest, the oldest, the leaders) will command the highest fees.

Initially most will enjoy their fame and the public will not begrudge their fortune. After all, these men have suffered terribly and, by all accounts, they have no job to return to and no other means of supporting their families.

One or two will discover a talent for public life. They will appear on talk shows and gala events, with a local beauty draped on their arms. They will open shopping malls and endorse political campaigns. They may become politicians themselves, assuming the mayoralties of small rural towns in dusty corners of Chile where they will live out their days as idle figureheads, stoking petty jealousies and factionalism.

Most, however, will quickly tire of their celebrity status, yearning for life as it used to be and will never be again. Like Rip Van Winkle they will find that those 69 days underground have changed them even in the eyes of their families. Secrets have come to light. A few wives have met a few girlfriends while their men languished in the darkness and some of these relationships will go bust. In the end a few of our heroes will suffer more on the surface than they did below.
Their greatest loss will be the camaraderie. For 69 days they have proven themselves a stunningly successful team. Like soldiers returning from a battlefield they possess a unique bond forged in the heat of adversity. The means of their rescue, each man hauled out individually, breaks that bond with almost cruel abruptness. They deserved to come out together, emerging with arms around each other through the smoke and dust of a gaping hole. What a picture that would have given the world’s press! What a moment to bring closure to the tale, to frame and hang on the wall.

As it is they will be scrubbed clean, dressed in their Sunday best and posed for a picture with their rescuers. Then all will scatter to the four winds, the mine head will revert to desert and far below the chamber will crumble like Tutankhamen’s tomb.

2010-10-07T16:16:00.001+13:00

A late night at Auckland’s Sky City
2nd October 2010

A small boy sits on the floor in the foyer of Auckland’s Sky City hotel. He wears a green back pack and carefully eats a banana. He is oblivious to both the tide of humanity flowing around him and to the leaping architecture that dwarfs his small frame.

Sky City is not just a hotel; it is shops, restaurants, a casino, convention centre, theatre and, of course, the iconic Sky Tower.

It is not so much a building as an enormous creature sprawled across downtown Auckland. Watching the small boy I see that he and I and all the many people flowing through this place are like hapless victims of a sci-fi experiment where we have been shrunk to microbes and released into the body of a large beast.

The vastness of the organism is beyond our comprehension so we experience it as a series of disconnected but intense episodes filled with light, colour and sound. We flow through its veins and tubes, swept along on a tide of conversation, laughter, food, drink and money.

Money is, above all else, the life force of this huge creature. It gushes from ranks of ATM machines and attaches momentarily to our wallets and hip pockets like oxygen molecules to red blood cells before vanishing into cash registers, bar tabs and room service. Most of the money ends up in the casino, an enormous heart that endlessly pumps huge volumes of cash through its many intricate transactions.

I leave the boy with his banana and drift towards the casino. As I near the entrance a beautiful young woman approaches me, wearing a dress with a short silver skirt and bodice so tight it could be sprayed on. “Will you be here at 7?” she asks. I could as easily turn back the tide as say no to this woman. I nod and she attaches a small yellow band to my wrist with the tenderness of a mother bandaging a child’s grazed knee. The wristband informs me that I could win $50,000.

The casino gaming floor is a circus of flashing lights, sudden bursts of music and a deep sense of urgency like a muscle cramp. It is a largely male environment and is overwhelmingly Asian. Croupiers stand at their gaming tables like priests, intoning their various litanies. There is roulette, black jack, baccarat and games that I can make no sense of, with oriental names like wai tai and sow mai.

I watch a solitary Chinese man playing roulette. The croupier, a young Asian woman, deftly stacks up piles of grey chips and slides them over to the man. He spreads them across the numbers embossed in the felt playing surface, half a dozen on this number, ten on another. The young woman flicks a white marble into the running track over the spinning roulette wheel as the man continues to place his chips.

As the marble slows she makes a spreading motion with both hands, a silent benediction that closes the bets. The marble drops, she places a small glass talisman on the winning number and sweeps the unlucky gambler’s chips into a round hole where they vanish with the smallest clatter. The Chinese man shows no reaction. She produces several more stacks of chips and slides them across the table to him.

All around the room, at every table and slot machine, I see the same curt efficiency and lack of emotion. This looks more like work than entertainment. Nobody laughs or even speaks much. Nobody appears to notice when a troupe of stunningly beautiful women parades through the room wearing feathered head pieces and not much else.

I lose myself in a maze of poker machines and emerge later onto a balcony overlooking the gaming floor. Above me the room vanishes towards a distant ceiling lit like a constellation. I recall Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. From where I stand Sky City is a pleasure dome and these are indeed caverns measureless to man.

Far below me the Chinese gambler sits at the roulette wheel, his grey chips flowing into the hole in the table. Does he know how that poem ends? In this great pleasure dome does he “suck the milk of paradise?”

2010-09-20T08:17:00.001+12:00

Birds of a feather flock to elections
18th September 2010

The Electoral Commission has hit upon a brilliant strategy by aligning this year’s local body elections with the Bird of the Year poll conducted by the Forest and Bird Society. Clearly local government election organisers, whose triennial event gathers about as much interest as a share in South Canterbury Finance, hope to ride the wave of voting fever generated by the prestigious bird poll.
Forest and Bird officials, concerned Bird of the Year may be sullied by association with mere, or even mayor, politics hasten to draw distinction between the two elections.
“Bird of the Year is noble democracy,” argues spokesman Colin Finch. “Voters pick their favourite bird according to virtues like plumage, song and character, not according to where they stand on sewage treatment schemes.”
Nevertheless in some parts of the country local body elections have acquired a distinctly avarian character, with candidates accused of “ruffling feathers” and “strutting like peacocks.” Journalists scrutinise candidate lists to identify pecking orders, while the few candidates of character are dismissed as “birds of paradise.”
This commentator is much too circumspect to suggest Ashburton’s election candidates seek to align themselves with Bird of the Year. As far as we know none of our local candidates is eligible to stand in the Bird of the Year election and any resemblance to birds is merely, or mayorally, coincidental.
Despite assurances from candidates that they will not encroach on the bird poll Mid-Canterbury Forest and Bird has appointed scrutineers from the political wing of the Ashburton Fanciers’ Club to oversee the local government campaign.
Head scrutineer, Wing Commander Snowy Breast, claims there are already signs of interference.
“The mayoral candidates have been challenged more than once to get their ducks in line, although any further reference to ducks may be unkind to Mr O’Malley, as the currently sitting duck - I mean mayor.”
Wing Commander Breast admits it will be difficult for any of the mayoral candidates to burnish their reputations as birds of the bush.
“At a stretch you could imagine Mrs Tasker as a wattle-throated tui in a kowhai tree, but the noble physiques of McKay and O’Malley render them definitely flightless, and probably farmyard. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Domestic poultry is in many ways far better suited to the rough and tumble of political life. If you’re in a scrap you could do worse than have a feisty cockerel or a bad-tempered gander as your friend.”
Colin Finch believes mayoral candidates will only fail if they try to gain popularity through Bird of the Year.
“Mr McKay should be particularly careful. He’s already had his wings clipped on Environment Canterbury and I’d have to say the dodo’s never been a big mover in Bird of the Year.”
In response to these criticisms Electoral Commission officials have hit back, arguing that some local body candidates are in fact birds seeking to leverage their popularity with Bird of the Year voters by standing for local government. They claim that an old rooster has been mayor of Invercargill for years and both leading candidates in the Auckland mayoralty race are turkeys.
And which of the two elections should voters pay the most attention to? Wing Commander Breast is in no doubt. “Y’know, local government has its uses but the real future of the country will always be shaped by Bird of the Year.”
And which bird gets his vote? “My vote for Bird of the Year? That would be the missus, same as always.”

2010-09-06T16:42:00.001+12:00

Hubbard’s life a Shakespearian tale
4th September 2010

As I, the taxpayer, unexpectedly find myself the owner of a multitude of farms, a helicopter company and various other going concerns, along with $600 million dollars of ‘toxic’ debts courtesy of a certain finance company going belly up this week, I have resolved to take my responsibilities seriously and seek advice.
Turning to the most reputable financial advisor I know, William Shakespeare, I find Allan Hubbard has been here before me. Hubbard’s life and career are written in the words of Polonius to his son Laertes. It’s a piece of fatherly advice that establishes Polonius as a tedious advisor whose later death at the end of Hamlet’s sword is a relief to the audience. But it is a handy guide to success in business and, by the way, a window into Allan Hubbard’s rise and fall.
All that we know about Hubbard is captured in this single speech: his famous frugality (“costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy”); his loyalty (“those friends thou hast…grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”; his reserve (“give every man thy ear, but few thy voice”); and his graciousness in adversity (“take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement”).
Ah, but then we come to the nub; “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and, let’s face it, Mr Hubbard was both. Never mind that he conducted both with extraordinary success for 50 years, Polonius would have waited that long just to savour his downfall, and even now the crows of public opinion should be feasting on Mr Hubbard’s carcase. But here’s an unfathomable thing: from the wreckage of his life’s work Mr Hubbard has salvaged two priceless articles – friendship and the means of renewal.
Friendship is the greater prize. Polonius advises against lending “for loan oft loses both itself and friend.” Mr Hubbard has lost his lendings but retains his friends. In fact they flock to the defence of his reputation and honour. You get the feeling these are not just friends whose loyalty was secured through the government’s deposit guarantee scheme, but people who genuinely care for the man.
The loyalty of his friends lies partly in the second article – the means of renewal. Polonius cautions that “borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” and ain’t that true. How often in recent times have we seen the flash Harries and charlatans, the ex-rugby league stars and high rollers living up large on money borrowed from guileless investors. They self-destruct when their enterprises can no longer sustain their lifestyles. Not so Mr Hubbard. A lifetime of thrift is a perfect platform on which to rebuild his fortune.
Age and ill-health may have the last say in this saga but if Mr Hubbard is to rise above his misfortunes he will need to demonstrate two further qualities promoted by Polonius. Finding himself in a fight he must bear it “so the opposed may beware of thee:” in other words, tough it out.
Finally, “this above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” I would say Mr Hubbard understands this very well.
As for me, the new owner of South Canterbury Finance, when I reflect on the events of the past week I find Polonius’s measured advice drowned out by the more street-wise Mr Micawber. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
There are no prizes for guessing which side of the balance sheet we’ve landed on.

2010-08-22T07:51:00.001+12:00

The station’s not worth saving
21st August 2010

I’m being asked for money to save our railway station. I’m not immune to the request, having taken an interest in the debates that have steamed around the building for years.

I know the station. I’ve looked at it. I’ve looked at it closely. I’ve walked around it and kicked the tyres. I’ve pulled over on West Street and studied it across the rail yards. I’ve run my hands over its sagging weatherboards and whistled along the length of its platform.

And I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not worth saving.

Rather, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not worth me giving money to save it.

This is not stinginess – I’m a soft touch for both worthy and unworthy causes. Neither is it a disregard for our heritage. There are buildings in our district I would give money and more to save.

But not the railway station - its liabilities outweigh its merits.

For a start it’s ugly. Try as I might I can see no architectural or aesthetic beauty in it. I accept that an old building should not have to be beautiful to be worth saving, but it helps. I also accept that it will look more attractive with some new cladding, unbroken windows and a coat of paint, but not much more. It will still be an old wooden shed knocked up on the cheap a hundred years ago.

And what about those hundred or so years? Don’t they make it worth saving? I’m not immune to the argument of age but, like beauty, age in itself is not sufficient argument for retention. Some buildings grow in stature with age: others diminish or simply become redundant. My house is a hundred years old and I consider it well worth saving because it is a good, hardworking building. It retains a purpose.

Sadly, the railway station does not have a purpose, which is why it has fallen so far into disrepair. It stubbornly resists the obvious functions for a building of its nature – retail, tourism or heritage chic. This is partly because it has been left high and dry as the commercial heart of town moved south, but also because it is not a building that draws people to itself. It has no vaulted ceilings or mosaic tiled floors to admire, no play of light upon stone, no intricately constructed window or colonnaded terrace, no splash of water from a fountain.

“Yes, but it has history”, its advocates cry. “It means something to us. Our sons embarked for war from this platform, lovers embraced, journeys that changed lives began and ended here.”

Now this is an argument I can just about reach into my pocket to support. The station is part of our story, it bears some of the burden of our collective memory. Except, once again, it remains a frustratingly mute witness to all that history. Standing on the platform evokes no sentiment, conjures no spirits, even for me who has been part of that history in my childhood, jogged through Ashburton in the hour before dawn on the night express from Invercargill, all steam and cinders, dashing into the buffet for a pie or an ice cream. The memory remains, but it’s not the building that calls it up.

Having a past is not sufficient argument for saving a building. It must also have a future. And here, perhaps, I lack vision. Should we save the station for a future not yet revealed? For that matter, do its supporters already possess a vision for its future that I am not aware of?

You see, I wonder how well this idea has been thought through. Let’s say we raise $400,000 to save the station from demolition. Then what? Do we raise another $400,000 to save it from collapse? Then raise some more to make it commercially viable? Or do we resign ourselves to the reality that it is not a going concern and keep raising money just to see it standing there?

Perhaps the future is in the past. In 20 years passenger trains may once more call at Ashburton. But I’m not gambling my money on it.

2010-08-09T17:32:00.000+12:00

Pipe dreams put Ashburton ahead
7th August 2010

Last Monday marked the deadline for companies to register interest in joining the Government’s ultra fast broadband project. So what? So, the future just got a bit closer.

Ultra fast broadband, or UFB (this industry spawns acronyms like oil gushing from a well), is the digital equivalent of an 8-lane motorway; and just as motorways unleashed the full potential of the motorcar so broadband unleashes the potential of the internet.

By comparison, the old dial-up connections that first hooked our computers to the world-wide web – and which are still a fact of life for some – are like piloting your car down a pot-holed dirt track. Dial-up’s fine for the emailed birthday greetings from your sister in Perth, but if she attaches a photo you wait…and wait…

We all cheered when broadband showed up several years ago. Accessing data at Megabyte speed lets us play around on Trademe, zip through online banking and peek at our kids’ latest holiday pics. At its best it allows us to play You Tube clips without the sound and pictures getting out of whack, but falls short of downloading movies. For users like businesses, schools and hospitals that have multiple computers accessing the internet at once broadband has become just too thin.

UFB lifts capacity from 2 or 3 Megabytes per second to as much as 100. This means that on a wet afternoon when the kids are driving me crazy I can download Shrek II in about 20 seconds and avoid carnage. For many businesses and public organisations UFB is fast becoming the minimum standard for operating successfully in the 21st century.

We all cheered again when the Government announced last year it will invest $1.5 billion to provide UFB for 75% of kiwis by 2016. Under pressure it coughed up another $300 million for a Rural Broadband Initiative to spread coverage to all but the most remote regions. The strategy will be in partnership with the telecommunications industry, which is a good thing because broadband networks cost a lot more than the Government’s commitment. Telecom claims to have already invested $3 billion in a network of fibre optic cables for broadband. They’ve been digging holes all over Tinwald in recent weeks just to prove it.

Other companies too are seeing opportunities in fibre networks, none more presciently than our own Electricity Ashburton which has been quietly stringing fibre optic cables along its network for some time and has formed partnerships with local schools and businesses. This has certainly been a smart move for our schools. Having a UFB “fat pipe” coming right to the gate pushes them to the front of the queue for further government funding to upgrade their old “skinny pipe” internal networks.

In this area Mid-Canterbury is well ahead of the pack. From my workplace at Southbridge School I look enviously across the Rakaia to the opportunities opening up for my teacher colleagues and their students in the Ashburton District. Selwyn District lags far behind in the race towards UFB. Perhaps this is due to the large shadow Christchurch city casts over Selwyn, stunting independent thought. More likely it is due to the absence of a locally-owned infrastructure company. Electricity Ashburton will be looking for opportunities to extend its network north of the Rakaia, with or without a successful bid for some of the Government pie.

At present UFB is synonymous with fibre optic cable. Fans of fibre talk it up as our biggest infrastructure investment since the national electricity grid. Others caution against flinging heaps of money at a technology that, in our fast-changing world, could be obsolete in a decade. Yesterday I was introduced to a new educational term, “M-learning.” As E-learning stands for the paraphernalia of computers and cable-based systems that serve them, M-learning stands for mobile, delivering the same services - and better - through the cell phones we carry in our pockets. How’s that for a “fat pipe” dream?

2010-07-26T08:54:00.001+12:00

What would yiz be wanting?
24th July 2010

Revelations that some restaurants are charging customers “cakeage” for bringing their own birthday cakes lifts the lid on dodgy practices in the hospitality industry. Unreasonable charges, like crummy waiters, make a lovely grumble but the reality is that restaurants do this stuff because we let them. New Zealand diners are wiltingly passive. We have no backbone in the face of sloppy service and rortish prices. We plead to be ripped off.

Our salvation is in our own hands. To illustrate let me take you back 25 years to the Greymouth Motor Lodge and one man’s culinary crusade.

As a young TVNZ reporter in the 80s I spent a lot of time on the road with a film crew. Our cameraman was Cedric Heward; sandy-haired, 30-something, tight-jeaned and just camp enough to be particular about his personal comfort.

Cedric was the first person I ever met who complained in restaurants. He made a point of it and could find a dozen faults before we’d even sighted a menu: the furniture wobbled, the décor shrieked, the temperature was too this or that.

Cedric was not petty. He maintained we owed it to our burgeoning tourist industry to lift standards. As he said, “I can shut up and go away vowing never to return or I can mention the problems and give them a chance to prove to me why I should return.”

On one memorable trip we were staying at the Greymouth Motor Lodge, the Coast’s finest hostelry. We assembled, half a dozen of us, for breakfast. The restaurant faced the car park on one side and a concrete block wall painted camouflage green on the other. Outside a dismal rain was falling.

Our waitress was Gail, who was about 18, slatternly but striving to rise above herself. She stalked over to our table and greeted us in West Coast vernacular: “what would yiz be wanting?”

After some discussion most of us would be wanting bacon and eggs. Cedric quizzed Gail. Were the eggs battery or free range? Was the bacon grilled or fried? He was polite, prefacing his questions with “excuse me,” “can you help?” and the like. I observed that this was more irritating to waitresses than if he’d simply been rude.

Eventually we came to drinks. Coffee or tea satisfied most of us, but for Cedric hot drinks were a passion.

“Excuse me, do you have Earl Grey?”
“Who?”
“Or Orange Pekoe? Jasmine? Apple and cranberry scented fruit basket?”
“I’ll ask Warren.”

Gail sloped off to ask Warren. Warren was the manager but that morning he was filling in for the chef who’d failed to return from his possum traps. Warren’s beefy face could be seen through the serving hatch to the kitchen. He had large forlorn moustaches and looked like a walrus on a small screen TV.

Gail returned. “Warren says it’s Bushells.”

“Thank you,” said Cedric. “In that case just bring me some hot water and I’ll make my own.”

Cedric unzipped his money belt and fetched out three or four small boxes of tea bags. Gail eyed the boxes uncertainly, turned and padded back to Warren. There was a brief conference and much waggling of the walrus moustache. Gail returned.

“Warren says you’ll have to pay cuppage to make your own tea.”

“Pardon me?” replied Cedric.

“He says it’ll be $2.50 for the cup.”

Cedric stiffened. “Excuse me,” his voice was tense, the rest of us nervously shuffled our toast. “Excuse me, tell Warren this is not Tiffany’s and I won’t pay through the nose to make a decent cup of tea.”

More discussion with the walrus. Gail returned.

“Warren says this is the Greymouth Motor Lodge. We serve Bushells or you pay cuppage.”

Cedric drew himself up to his full sandy-haired, tight-jeaned height. His eyes swept the room and lighted on the forlorn carpark and the concrete block wall. “I suppose he’ll be charging me for the bloody view as well,” he commanded, and stalked out.

What was achieved? Who knows, but I like to think Cedric brought a little light to the hospitality trade that morning and spared future diners the perils of fringe pricing – corkage, cakeage or cuppage.

2010-07-11T10:11:00.000+12:00

The private well and the public good
10th July 2010
The relationship between water and wealth in Mid-Canterbury is nowhere more striking than in the appearance of irrigation storage reservoirs. From the air our district looks like a water wonderland, the familiar patchwork of paddocks and shelterbelts now flecked with a new patchwork of glittering ponds, some the size of small lakes.
I assume giving up farmland to large ponds is economical for irrigators but I wonder if it is much of a leap forward in how we manage water. Do these lakes capture water that would otherwise be lost? Or do they simply gather water that was already allocated from, say, the RDR and which previously was spread through border dikes but now is sprayed onto the land by centre pivots and rotor rainers?
This gathering of water into reservoirs is a visible symbol of power in the debate over water use. It says, “this water is mine. I have harvested it, stored it and will use it as I see fit.” It privatises a resource that, when it flows in our rivers or settles in our aquifers, is a public good.
The privatisation of water is not confined to farming. The small yellow signs saying ‘private well’ that pop up on suburban lawns confer the same privilege upon the householder who thereby gives himself licence to suck up public water and throw it around with abandon.
The sustainability of these practices may be about to come under closer scrutiny. In this week’s press it was pleasing to see Ashburton Mayor Bede O’Malley encouraging us to put our names forward to join the Ashburton Zone Water Management Committee.
According to Canterbury Water, a stand-alone directorate of Environment Canterbury, the committee will work with locals to develop a wide-ranging plan for water resources in our district. Water zone facilitator Barbara Nicholas says the committee “will need to be able to deal with the complexities of water issues” to help implement the Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS) in Ashburton District.
On the face of it this all sounds rather jolly. One imagines a committee of farmers, householders, business people and local politicians happily weighing private interest and public good and balancing the fine equation to everybody’s advantage.
But there is something in this proposal that doesn’t stack up. Why are we now forming a committee to develop a “wide-ranging plan” for local water management? Isn’t this the purpose of the CWMS and, if not, what has been the point of all the work and politics invested in that Strategy?
The local committee’s brief is to help implement the CWMS and there is a devil of detail in that little word “help”. In fact the proposition asks more questions than it answers. What substantive role does the local committee play? Will it have the power to decide between conflicting interests in water use? How will committee members be appointed? Will it be a fair representation of all stakeholders?
It is difficult to avoid seeing the local committee as window dressing, a trickle down of power like the last few drops from the aquifer. Mr O’Malley’s endorsement of people-power raises suspicion in itself considering his role in the infamous ‘letter from the Mayors’ that caused us to lose our right to a democratically elected Environment Canterbury. He is not the only Mayor in the region who, as local government elections approach, is hurrying to prove himself a friend of democracy.
Recent events at ECan tempt the conclusion that the future of Canterbury’s water resource has been stitched up between big business and the political Right. A local committee will be, at best, a very small voice in a room filled with commissioners and corporates, both single-minded in regarding water only as a path to prosperity.
Nevertheless, we should support the local committee. Even a small voice is better than we have at present. The committee’s small voice can claim a few column-inches in the local press and may in time grow to be influential. At the very least it may become a watchdog to expose the worst practices and to move forward our collective awareness of the fragility and finiteness of our water resources.

2010-06-28T11:20:00.001+12:00

Rainfall Record a journey of the imagination
26th June 2010

In January 1958 - the month of my birth - a man living in Geraldine bought a simple school exercise book. On the cover of the book was a pen-and-ink illustration of a Greek temple, the name ‘Classic’ in flourishing cursive and a small template stating it met the New Zealand Standard.

He opened the book and ruled twelve columns across the first two pages. Above the columns he wrote the months of the year and in the margins he numbered the days of the month. On the cover he wrote, in block capitals as crudely drawn as the stones of the Greek temple, the words ‘RAINFALL RECORD.’

Thus began a momentous undertaking, a private odyssey that spanned a working life. When the final page of the book was completed in December 1996 this steadfast chronicler had recorded every drop of rain that fell, firstly upon Geraldine (until 1973) and then upon Woodbury, for 38 uninterrupted years. He began his measurements in points and inches – 100 points to the inch - and kept faith with this system as the world turned metric.

This was not a man who wielded a pen with ease. The numbers are heavy, often overwritten several times until the blue ink is a black gouge upon the paper. The occasional notations (“dry gales all Jan.” “Hurricane 110mph”) are written in block capitals.

Though the writing is clumsy the maths is pinpoint accurate. The figures for each month are totalled at the foot of the column and the columns collated to produce a “Total For Year,” recorded with a small flourish at the bottom right hand corner of each annual spreadsheet.

The author’s diligence is breathtaking. In the entire record there are only two noticeable slips: a two month period in 1979 when the entries are in a different hand and a moment in late October 1982 (Labour Weekend?) when he compressed three days of rain into a single figure – and noted the lapse of form.

At first and second glances the Rainfall Record carries no hint of the author. The columns of numbers stand mute upon the pages. The pages gather like a deck of bizarre Housie cards.

But look closer and you find small, tantalising glimpses of identity. On 5th April 1979 the rainfall – 17 points – is bracketed by the initials FS written in both red and blue ink, with the words “left from London Vic” beneath. Wedged into the spine of the book in 1983 is the stub of a baggage label with the name H. Simpson and a rusty stain that may have been a watermark. On the front cover, in small cursive writing in a style different from the hand of the recorder is the name M. Simpson.

Slightly more revealing – and infinitely more mysterious – is an inscription on the inside cover: “La Donna Mobilae (sic), Women are Fickle. Riggaletto By Verdi. Arnold’s 1933 musical memory while travelling to Rarotonga on RMS Makura.”

This unique document has fallen into my hands and I am captivated. The numbers are enormously powerful. They have the effect of a strange crystal ball that enables me to predict tiny details from the past with unerring accuracy. I can tell you that between 1973 and 1996 it never rained in Woodbury on 7th January. I can tell you that 8 inches of rain fell between the 12th and 17th of February 1986, followed by another 7 inches in a single day on 13th March, with the word “floods” like the toll of a bell.

I am captured too by the uncanny parallel with my own life. As I read the Record I picture myself as a child, a youth, a young man. The final entries were written just a month before I moved to Mid-Canterbury. By then I had lived in 16 or 17 homes in my 38 years while the quiet collector of the rainfall had lived in just two.

And that’s the greatest fascination – imagining the life of the author. Who was he? Indeed, was it a ‘he’? Could it have been a woman who went outside each day and checked the rain gauge nailed to a fence post or hanging from the end of the verandah? Who is “FS”? Why was Arnold travelling to Rarotonga in 1933?

Should I search for the facts? Or has the Rainfall Record always been, ultimately, a journey of the imagination?

2010-06-14T12:53:00.001+12:00

Punter predicts Tri-Nations trifecta at the World Cup
12th June 2010
On the eve of the football World Cup the Ashburton Guardian’s sports team has been joined by soccer commentator Ronny Tillard. Ronny, Immediate Past President of the Hinds Football Supporters Club, will provide expert analysis throughout the tournament. Our reporter caught up with Ronny in his y-fronts – sorry, in front of his wide-screen TV - primed and ready to go.

So, Ronny, what are your predictions for the World Cup?
Wouldn’t know, mate. Not interested.
Not interested?
Nuh, couldn’t give a monkey’s
But aren’t you in the Football Supporters Club?
Yeah, rugby football.
Oh geez, that bloody sub-editor! Look, Ronny, help us out here, we’ve got nobody else.
Why not, there’s heaps of people can talk about soccer.
Yeah, but they’re all talking to the big papers. Come on, give us a break.
Well, it’s against my better judgement, but if you want my opinion it’ll be New Zealand, South Africa and Australia in the final.
Er, you can only have two teams in the final, Ronny.
So one of ‘em will come third, but it’ll be a Tri-Nations trifecta, you wait.
How come you’re so confident?
Stands to reason. Look, it’s the first time they’ve played the tournament in the southern hemisphere and there’s only three southern hemisphere nations playing, so who’s got the local knowledge?
Local knowledge?
Yeah. You know how water goes down the plughole the other way in the southern hemisphere? Well, it’s the same with how a ball behaves through the air. When you kick a soccer ball in South Africa it curves the other way. All those northern hemisphere players won’t know where to turn.
How do you know this?
It’s all over Facebook, mate.
Anyway, what about the South American countries?
What about ‘em.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile – they’re all in the southern hemisphere.
Fair buck?
Yes.
I thought the equator did a sort of u-turn around South America.
No.
Well, that’s odd. Because they’re not real southern hemisphere people, are they?
What do you mean?
Well, y’know, they’re not like us. They’re sort of like, girls, eh?
Er, moving on, the All Whites have a real David and Goliath battle if they’re to win any games. How are they going to do it?
I reckon David and Goliath is the clue to success. You know the real lesson of that old story?
Tell me.
David broke the rules. You see, Goliath was out there with his sword and his shield and he was playing by the rules. The last thing he expected was some little snot-nose to pull out a slingshot. The Alrights-
All Whites, Ronny
They’ll be All Rights if they follow my advice. What they’ve gotta do is the unexpected, break a few rules.
Such as?
Pick up the ball and run with the bloody thing for a start. Pile in at the break-down, get a bit of go-forward and chuck it down the line. Watch those Slovakian faces when that happens.
Yeah, but the difference between us and David is the referee. We’ll get caned.
So you do it quietly. Stuff the ball under the jersey, get a couple of mates to shepherd you, dive over in the corner, ref’ll never notice.
Do you reckon our boys have got the star quality to pull off a few upsets?
I dunno. Who’s in the team?
Well, there’s Ryan Nelsen and, er...
Oh, I know, there’s that guy who broke his shoulder last week, he’ll be a big asset on the field. Then there’s Dan Carter.
He’s a rugby player, Ronny.
I know, but imagine if he played soccer. He knows which way the ball curves in South Africa.

2010-05-31T16:35:00.001+12:00

A Samoan in my cherry tree
29th May 2010

This sudden onset of winter has been like running headlong into a brick wall. I feel dazed and disoriented, I struggle to recall life before the skies blackened. But I must reach back to Sunday to fetch this story, to the antediluvian Sunday, the Sunday before the storm.

It was the Sunday of the Samoan in my cherry tree - not that it was intended to be. When I awoke, late, on Sunday morning I had no premonition of the Samoan, no expectation that at day’s end I would have lost not just the cherry tree but the plum tree too and come within a hair’s breadth of losing the great Leylandii.

The Samoans were gathering while I slept and the first hint I had of their presence was when I stepped out for my run. A middle-aged woman was walking along the footpath wearing a high-visibility vest, holding a bundle of leaflets or cards in her hand and taking an interest in the Redmond’s trees across the street. I thought nothing of it until I met another woman around the corner, and then a third. I imagined they were part of a religious campaign – God’s workers in high-viz vestments.

When I returned from my run a business card was stuck in my door. Southern Tree Services it read, with a list of felling, lopping, trimming, pruning and associated arboreal verbs and, at the bottom, a cell phone number and a name – Danny.

There are moments when things fall into place. I stood outside my door with the card in my hand and my eye fell on the ancient and once-beautiful cherry blossom tree that has been dying on the front lawn for years and which we have talked about removing for years: then a swift realisation that I had passed a gang of men with a truck and chainsaws a couple of hundred metres up the street. Of course – Danny!

I sprinted (well, okay, hastened) onto the street. Gone.

I sprang to the phone and dialled the number and there was Danny’s voice at the other end, measured, Samoan.

Five minutes later Danny was at my doorstep. He seemed slightly older than me and not much taller, but there is something about Pacific Island men, a certain gravity, that makes them enormous, and so Danny seemed to me.

I showed him the cherry tree and an old plum tree by the letter box. I asked for a quote to fell the trees and remove the waste. Did I want the firewood? Yes, that would be nice.

Danny thought for a moment. “$1250.00 for felling right to the ground. But today I give it to you for $1150.00.”

I said thank you and I will be interested to get another quote.

“$950.00,” Danny’s lips barely moved. And what about that enormous Leylandii threatening the house? “For that, another $850.00.”

I said I would check with my wife. Sylvia said I was mad. I accepted on the spot, minus the Leylandii, and asked when could he do it?

“Now,” replied Danny.

I don’t believe he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled but I know within three minutes the truck pulled up and nine large Samoan men tumbled onto my front lawn.

With acrobatic skills to rival Cirque de Soleil they dismantled the plum tree and the cherry. They climbed, swung, looped and dropped. They plied their chainsaws with a dentist’s precision. They heaved and carried. They sawed and stacked.

And all the time Danny watched. He watched from beneath the doomed trees. He watched from across the street. He watched on his knees while remediating an unruly chainsaw.

While he watched he bargained the fate of the Leylandii. “$750.00. No? Okay, $650.00.” I pleaded lack of funds. The Leylandii stayed.

Two hours later the two trees were gone, the paths swept, the brushwood removed and the firewood stacked behind the house.

During this the three women in high-viz vests turned up. We gave them cups of tea and Anzac biscuits.

And my instincts were right after all – they were doing God’s work, a fundraiser for their church youth group in Christchurch. Danny is both arborist and pastor, a man of the Word and, as I looked out across my suddenly two-trees-less garden, truly a man of his word.

2010-05-18T14:06:00.001+12:00

Auckland Expands Racial Faultines
15th May 2010

Twenty brown faces turn to me as I walk into the classroom. They see my name tag and the greetings tumble out.
“Hi Peter!”
“Hello Peter!”
“Hello! Hello!”
Miss Fai’alofa is kneeling on the floor with a reading group. She stands and greets me shyly then shushes the children back to their work. I squat by a table where half a dozen six year olds are drawing pictures of volcanoes on computers. An older student helps them to master the drawing programme. They sketch cones and billowing clouds of smoke and select colours from the programme’s palette.
One little girl turns to me and brushes her hand against my hair. “You’ve got grey.”
This excites their interest.
“Where you from?” inquires a boy.
I tell them I’m from the South Island and ask if any of them have been there. A few heads nod excitedly.
“I been there,” offers one boy.
“Which part did you visit?”
“Aw, the Cook Islands,” he demurs.
This is Point England School in Tamaki, Auckland. Five hundred children attend this school, every one of them Maori or Pacific Islander. This is a tough corner of town, with the school graded decile 1A, which in edu-speak means the bottom of the heap.
“You have to realise,” said Russell the school principal, “nobody in this community is employed, and it goes back 4 or 5 generations for some. The definition of success in Tamaki is getting out.”
Tamaki was the product of post-war social engineering on a grand scale. A framed photo from 1948 shows rows of new-built state houses, freshly formed kerbs and streets cutting into open paddocks. Some of the first residents were members of the Maori Battalion, soldier heroes returning from Europe who found they had outgrown their country kaiks and were drawn to the big smoke.
Auckland was the dream of opportunity but somewhere the dream went wrong and today 20,000 of our least affluent citizens are wedged into an area as big as Allenton. It costs the taxpayers $150 million a year to sustain this community.
In this landscape of poverty Point England school is a beacon. Russell and his staff build hope and aspiration among their students: better still, they build achievement. These children are learning at or above the levels of any kids in Mid-Canterbury. Russell has flooded the school with digital technology, including a student-driven television station that broadcasts daily into all classrooms and weekly into the community. He has multiple programmes in art, sports and music to stimulate children’s interest in learning. Nothing is wasted, every intervention is weighed for its usefulness and everything rests on a foundation of excellent teaching and total commitment to the community.
Twenty kilometres away on the southern boundary of Auckland is Flatbush. Here the bulldozers are again busy, carving into farmland to build a community that will house 40,000 people within a decade. In Flatbush row upon row of grey tiled rooves and double garages mount the slopes and disappear over the ridge. A small remnant of native forest crouches in a gully. This is urban growth on a scale unknown in the South Island.
The brand new Mission Heights School towers over the rooftops of Flatbush. It is intended as a flagship of 21st century school design - the fact that it looks like a cruise ship run aground seems to have gone unnoticed. Its glass and steel galleries are abuzz with innovation, classrooms resemble high street boutiques with a confetti of computers.
But in this place of wonders it is the students that are the greatest curiosity. Almost every one of the 700 children at this school is Asian.
Flatbush, you see, is 21st century Tamaki. Like Tamaki it captures migrants, only this time the migrants are not from the Waikato but from India, China and Korea. Flatbush is becoming an ethnic enclave just as Tamaki did. No doubt this is accidental; to the town planners Flatbush is about roads and houses. In reality it is another social experiment, one that begins with a shiny new school and a thousand dreams of opportunity. We hope it will not end up 50 years from now as a ghetto.

2010-05-03T09:55:00.000+12:00

A small tale of the Taieri
17th April 2010

In 1980 a short history was published of the small community of Taieri Mouth, which lies on the Otago coast about 30 kilometres south of Dunedin. The history was a community project, the usual account of early settlement, a roll call of personalities and events, with a liberal selection of grainy, black and white photographs.

The authors acknowledged the presence of early Maori in the area before moving swiftly to European settlement, a succession of whalers, traders, gold diggers, sawmillers and farmers. In the early period when roads were uncertain the Taieri was one of those rare New Zealand rivers that was navigable for a fair part of its length, and the little settlement owed its existence to the shipping that came and went through the lower gorge and across the sand bar.

The occasion for the book was the completion of a new bridge over the Taieri River, a streamlined ferro-concrete structure replacing the original wooden bridge that was literally at the point of collapse. To the authors the new bridge was both a leap of technology and a symbol of progress. The book closes with fine expressions of civic pride connecting the labours of the past into an unbroken chain of prosperity stretching far into the future.

This week we have been holidaying at Taieri Mouth, thanks to the friend of a friend who owns a small bach – sorry, crib – at the point where the river makes its final turn towards the sea. I can report that thirty years after its opening the bridge is as fresh and functional as the day it was completed.

The town, sadly, has fared less well. In hindsight 1980 marked the high point of Taieri Mouth’s growth, as it did for most of small town New Zealand. The long unravelling of the 80s and 90s, from the removal of farm subsidies to the collapse of the inshore fishing industry, has reduced Taieri Mouth to a shell.

The school remains, and the hall. A dozen caravans are parked up for the winter at a cheerless camping ground. But there is no store, no café, no hotel, no obvious employment apart from three or four small fishing boats that still work gallantly from the riverside wharf. It is impossible to spend money at Taieri Mouth.

The population appears to have been sucked out on the falling tide. In four days we saw perhaps a dozen people, mostly tourists in campervans.

The community appears to have vanished but in its place has arisen a modern hybrid – the community of holiday homes. I should not call them homes - they are houses, baches, cribs - the weekend retreats of professionals and retired farmers. Ironically, as the town has crumbled I imagine property prices have soared, in keeping with our enthusiasm for every small vista of sea, lake and river. There are probably more buildings at Taieri Mouth today – and certainly fewer residents – than at any time in its history, and most of the newer ones are large, opulent and empty.

When we lived in England a few years ago there was a village near us that had become a popular destination for holiday makers. Wealthy people from London and elsewhere were buying houses at a rate that caused property to boom. In a short time the village was a tourist town, homes became too expensive for the locals to afford so the resident population began to fall and local infrastructure began to collapse.

In New Zealand large parts of our habitable coastline and lake shores have turned into similar strange modern ghettoes. To somebody unused to our peculiar lifestyle the sight of communities of often monstrously wealthy houses, of new streets and parks and footpaths, all silent for the greater part of the year, would seem bizarre.

To the historians of Taieri Mouth the new bridge must now appear a mixed blessing. It became the means of exit for the locals and entry for the bach owners, changing their town from a community to a silo.

2010-05-03T09:53:00.002+12:00

Singing salmon and other fishy tales
3rd April 2010

I am charmed by the Californian Indian tribe, the Winnemem, that journeyed to the Rakaia River to entice their salmon home with song and chant. If you missed this tale don’t worry, it will reappear shortly as an art house movie, a story of loss and renewal with achingly beautiful cinematography of moccasins and feathered headdresses and big skies over Rakaia.

It is easy to deride the Winnemem for having a childlike grip on reality. Local salmon possess no collective memory of their Californian origin and are unlikely to be charmed by music. But at the heart of this tale is a search for identity. The Winnemem’s pilgrimage sits alongside the journeys of young kiwis to Gallipoli or, aptly, the iconic status Maori give to the foreshore and seabed.

Another tale this week is the government’s appointment of commissioners to run Environment Canterbury. There is something fishy about this story too. Sacking a democratically elected body is not without precedent – Labour did it to the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board – but to enshrine the decision in legislation passed under urgency is suspicious. Something more is happening here than meets the eye.

The assertion of the environment minister, Nick Smith, that the public has lost confidence in ECan is too glib. Cantabrians who consider the scope of ECan’s work will be well satisfied with the progress made to improve air quality, manage waste water, provide public transport and promote environmental education.

ECan’s downfall has been its failure to resolve the water debate. Management of water in Canterbury has not been as broken as Mr Smith and others have been asserting in recent days, but clearly it is the cause of growing frustration.

The issue boils down to a conflict between developers and conservers, those who want to use more water, mainly for farming, and those who want more of it to remain in our lakes and rivers. ECan’s board reflected both interests in about equal measure, a frustrating situation but one that is entirely appropriate if you believe in democratic process.

Water is a fundamental resource for all of us and the big question hanging over this week’s events is whether the new commission will fairly represent all views.

One cause for doubt is the now-famous letter from the region’s mayors which forms the basis of the minister’s argument about public loss of confidence. Who authorised this letter? Was it debated in council before signing? Whose view does it represent?

These questions must be answered to allay a strong suspicion that the letter merely reflected the views of the mayors. Their position is vulnerable because the letter appears to be a Trojan horse for the government, albeit a flimsy Trojan horse for there is so much in this week’s events to indicate that the real drivers are corporate farmers and other development interests. Organisations supporting the conservation side of the debate clearly think so. They have been quick to raise concerns about the decision, while development interests are either supportive or unusually silent.

Conservers of water have reason for concern. The legislation enabling ECan’s board to be replaced by a commission also suspends the normal process of hearing water consents before a tribunal and the environment court. The immediate removal of the Hurunui River consents from this process is a strong indication of how the government wants this to play.

Nick Smith tells us the commissioners will be well qualified to sort out the problems and, anyway, all decisions are finally his to make. If that is so desirable why do we have an environment court? It may be convenient to replace public process with backroom deals and ministerial edicts, but it will not serve our interests.

We must wait at least three years before we can elect representatives to run ECan again. That’s a convenient length of time to get our water resources sorted out – or sewn up. Rakaia salmon might do well to heed the Winnemem’s invitation and get out while they still have a river to swim in.

2010-05-03T09:53:00.001+12:00

Cigarette price rise lifts the ash cloud
1st May 2010

As the ash cloud cleared over Europe this week it looks like another ash cloud may be lifting in this part of the world with the government deciding on a hefty rise in the price of cigarettes. If politics mirrors society the almost unanimous agreement in parliament showed how marginalised smoking has become.

Many of us already live in a virtually cigarette-less world. My home is smoke-free, my workplace is smoke-free, the public spaces I move in are smoke-free. My friends and acquaintances are almost all smoke-free. My life has got to the point that when I occasionally get close to a smoker I am acutely aware of the ash tray odour. My rare encounters with smokers are glimpses of strange, refugee-like creatures huddled in the doorways of office blocks, sucking greedy and guilty on their ‘smoko’ fags.

How times have changed. I grew up in a fog of cigarette smoke. My dad was a packet-a-day man who only quit when the habit killed him at 55. In those days smoking was generally regarded as being good for one’s health and almost everybody did it. Our houses, clothes, hair and breath all reeked of cigarette smoke – first or second hand. Halls, pubs and offices were littered with ash trays.

Although we have pushed the cloud to the margins many New Zealanders continue to live in a fog of tobacco. There are groups that seem beyond the reach of education programmes and peer pressure to quit – especially young Maori women, for some reason.

The government’s decision to use price as a mechanism for change is a genuine no-brainer, given that most smokers acquire the habit during those crucial few years of adolescence when we park our brains and operate on hormonal overdrive. With cigarettes now costing nearly a dollar a fag it is going to take just a little more determination for a 13 or 14 year old to start smoking.

Can we foresee the day when New Zealand becomes totally smoke-free? Imagine a world where the few remaining smokers are gathered into zoos for people to ogle and point at; where airlines offer weekend package trips to countries where smoking remains acceptable.

Australia will not be on their itinerary because our cousins hiked their own cigarette prices the day after us, and trumped us by enforcing a 25% price rise compared to our modest 10%. There’s more: Australia will also require cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging with brand names displayed in identical font sizes and types. The reasoning here is that branding is part of the attraction for young smokers. The only decoration allowed on cigarette packets will be the usual horror pictures of gelatinous eye-balls and festering teeth.

Following Australia’s lead there is scope for much more creativity in reducing the attractiveness of smoking. How about placing a small model of a diseased heart or eyeball on a spring under the lid of every cigarette packet? Or fitting all cigarettes with a tiny microchip that plays recorded warning messages when lit? It would take a hardened smoker to puff on a cigarette that’s berating him with comments like “I’m gonna kill ya, buddy,” or simply, “what the f*** do you think you’re doing?”

People who take up smoking never look before they leap but the government’s message is that they can anticipate the price of smokes continuing to rise. May the rise be steep and the grip of cigarettes around our throats become history.

And when we’ve seen off the ash cloud we can get to grips with that other unnatural disaster – the tide of alcohol that washes through our communities like the floodwaters lapping Queenstown’s main street. But that’s another story.

2010-03-22T09:30:00.001+13:00

A bridge not far enough
20th March 2010

In September 1944 my father found himself swept up in the battle for Arnhem, the allied army’s great doomed attempt to hasten war’s end in Europe. Dad awoke one morning to the thunder of aircraft and the sight of hundreds of American paratroopers descending into his small Dutch village. Their objective was a bridge spanning a narrow canal, an unremarkable structure that momentarily assumed significance by lying along a road leading to the campaign’s prize, the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, gateway to Hitler’s Germany.

Bridges matter. They dissolve barriers, disrupt borders, allow the mixing of ideas and commerce. They become hubs around which people gather, villages form, cities muster. A bridge defeats gravity, enables us to become airborne, to sail over insuperable barriers. Bridges can be pretty or plain but are always romantic, where we can gaze down upon water or lift our eyes to a broader horizon. Sometimes they are worth fighting over.

The battle for Arnhem achieved fame on the screen in Richard Attenborough’s movie A Bridge Too Far. This week has seen the opening shots of our own bridge epic with the announcement of the District Council’s plans for a second bridge over the Ashburton river, although for the residents of Carters Terrace and Grove Street it’s a matter of A Bridge Not Far Enough.

As a Carter’s Terrace resident myself I can report that the announcement has been met with howls of dismay at the leafy end of Tinwald. Querulous mutterings of “why us?” issue from Grove Street while up and down Wilkins Road household appliances are being sharpened into swords, or perhaps ploughshares.

To complete our discomfort Fulton Hogan descended upon Archibald Street on Wednesday in one of their periodic frenzies of disrepair, turning our sole means of egress into a chaos of shingle and orange plastic cones in arrangements that would baffle even our heroic young paralympian snowboarder. Tinwald has become an enclave, a Sarajevo of the south. From behind the lines I can report that the mood here swings between defiance and despair. In Grove Street there is talk of bunkers and barricades while on my own street there are dark rumours of “Carter’s last stand.”

To be honest the malcontents are confined to the immediate area lying in the path of the proposed bridge. Civic progress, so prized by us all in its generality, suddenly becomes malign when it settles its bulky shape across our driveway. After 25 years of free market dominance our view of democracy has become distorted. It’s fine as long as I get my own way but if it intrudes on my peace of mind or - God help us - my property values, look out! On these occasions my behaviour is reduced to a single, needle-sharp acronym – NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard!

Tonight the NIMBYs are gathering on Grove Street, determined to resist this damnable blight. What they fail to appreciate is that democracy, while occasionally noble (my father may have thought this as the paratroopers descended), is mostly a messy business of negotiating narrow self interest. Everything is NIMBY and somebody always loses.

How can I remain so philosophical as a resident of the afflicted zone? It’s simple: I happen to live a block further down Carters Terrace. Option D-E leaves me smiling. Had the council gone for option F – Thompson Street – I’d be banging my drum up and down Baring Square with the best of them.

My advice to the guerrillas of Grove Street is to be positive. Consider how the bridge will draw together Tinwald and Hampstead. It will allow trade to flourish between these two great districts. Cultural exchanges will bring line dancing south of the river while we in turn will introduce our Hampstead cousins to Tinwald’s colourful drinking customs.

In time some of us may marry our daughters to the noble families of Chalmers Avenue and Eton Street, cementing bonds of brotherhood that will ring through the ages. Happy thoughts!

And if plummeting property values destroy our equity be comforted that it will also lower our rates.

On the other hand there will be the small matter of paying for a bridge…

2010-03-08T11:25:00.001+13:00

Weight Watchers in a bun fight
6th March 2010

Dieters have rushed to defend the decision by Weight Watchers to approve several McDonalds’ popular meal items. The move, which allows the fat-conscious to clip their ticket under the golden arches for the first time, has been scorned by dieticians and sundry other spoilsports but Weight Watchers clients give it the thumbs up.

Tracy (name withheld), a Weight Watchers client, was revelling in her first visit to Ashburton McDonalds last night. “Oh, this is like heaven! Y’know, I was never allowed into this place and used to hang outside while my friends came in. They’d pass me a couple of fries through the window and then I’d be over my points and I’d be so upset I’d go home and eat half a loaf of fried bread.”

McDonalds and Weight Watchers have worked secretly for over a year to develop the low-calorie meals. There are several items, from burgers to salads, all with catchy titles drawn from the boxing lexicon. We found Rachel (real name Beryl Flutey, from Dunsandel) tucking into a McFeatherweight burger and McFlyweight salad. “Well it’s basically a chicken burger with some feathers in it. I think the feathers kind of stop you from wanting to eat it all so it keeps your points down. And the salad’s called the Fly-thingee because it’s so light. I don’t think it actually has any flies in it.”

McDonalds’ food development manager, Bill ‘Tupper’ Knight, says the breakthrough was in the cooking oil. “We were experimenting with different kinds of low-cal oils and eventually stumbled on a linseed-based furniture polish. It’s a good hot cooker and it also makes the food really shiny, which is good from the marketing side.”

Weight Watchers believes the move will give it an edge in the increasingly competitive dieting industry. Difficult economic times and dieter turn-off had seen a slump in the sales of its own branded diet meals. Tracy agrees that the Weight Watchers meals are hard to stomach. “Honestly, I used to eat them at work because all the girls did and, y’know, you don’t want to be left out. But there’s a limit to the amount of shaved cardboard and tiny designer tomatoes you can put up with.”

Rachel agrees. “They taste like crap and they don’t really work. I’ve been dieting for 22 years and if I’d met all my targets I’d be, like, 18 kilos by now.”

“Same,” says Tracy, “and I’m still, y’know, really short too. So I may as well enjoy myself.”

Critics say the move will place dieters under pressure. “McDonalds is the evil empire for people trying to lose weight,” argues Chris P. Wafer of Sweet Fatties Anonymous. “Sending dieters into McDonalds is like setting up a chocolate wheel in a casino and telling all the compulsive gamblers they can go in there safely and use it.”

Weight Watchers claims the strategy marks a shift in the fight against obesity. In a press release it argues, “for too long we have told dieters to stay away from the temptation of fatty food. But the reality of daily life is that we live in a high-cal world. It’s important that dieters are exposed to temptation and are supported to rise above it with some safe food options.”

Chris P. Wafer rubbishes this argument. “Here at Sweet FA we believe this move is like setting up a soda stream in a public bar and telling all the alcoholics they can go in there safely and use it.”

Rachel has no problem with the temptation to eat McDonalds regular food items. “Yeah, of course I will. I mean I’ve eaten the healthy things so my diet’s sweet and now I can get into this apple pie. And I’ll need a thick shake to wash down the feathers.”

The move has attracted wide interest from other sectors. Gambling support groups and Alcoholics Anonymous are reported to be investing in chocolate wheels and soda streams.

2010-02-23T09:44:00.000+13:00

Toyota takes a dive
20th February 2010

A year ago we bought a Toyota Corolla. It’s a beauty – sleek, comfortable, drives like a million bucks and, according to the Dog and Lemon Guide, as safe as houses. In the past fortnight mounting revelations of faulty brakes, dodgy steering and sticky accelerators have made my Toyota seem as safe as a house in Haiti. I look at it sideways. What tiny menace lurks beneath its smooth features? What miniscule distortion of metal, what nano-slip of engineering mars a cable or lever or rod, biding its time, waiting to pitch me off the road?

I hesitate to read a newspaper or watch the news, fearful of further stories about my marred Corolla. Have the airbags been holed? Will the cigarette lighter explode?

I note with interest, and unease, that Toyota’s executives have decided, after a short interval of denial, to get everything off their chests. They are almost tripping over themselves in their rush to reveal the faults in their fleet, wisely realising that now the media is hunting them it will all come out anyway. They are wonderfully measured in their debasement of themselves, falling on their swords with the naked formality unique to Japan.

Interestingly, as the world’s most trusted car maker sinks to its knees it drags with it a host of lesser known but equally important businesses. One of these is Koito Industries. Koito is part of a group of companies that earn their living making components for Toyota and other companies. As far as I know Koito doesn’t make the sticky accelerators or slippery brakes that may or may not be fitted to my Corolla but it possesses a marvellous little scandal that is an intriguing sidebar to the Toyota story.

Koito makes aircraft seats. It sells them to airline companies all over the world and you are sure to have sat on its products. The airline industry has very strict rules about the safety of its seats. Each seat must be tested for strength and fireproofing. A few years ago there was so much demand for its aircraft seats a few of Koito’s engineers decided they didn’t have time to test each seat. They fabricated test results and even developed software that produced acceptable results when industry inspectors came to call.

There are now 150,000 suspect seats winging around the world in over 1,000 Boeing and Airbus planes. I’m sure I’ve sat in a few – they’re the ones that wobble and feel lumpy. Or was that just the inflight peanuts?

Koito’s dodginess creates a big problem for the airline industry, which is far more readily spooked than the car business by any taint of poor safety. Replacing or checking the safety of the seats will take time. In the meantime grounding every aircraft fitted with the dodgy seats would ruin half a dozen of the world’s biggest operators.

Airline companies are scrambling for strategies to reassure passengers they remain safe despite the risk of their seat falling apart beneath them. Some have suggested passengers should remain standing throughout their flight. Safety information has been modified to include advice about new brace positions for collapsing furniture. It is reported that budget airlines are considering ripping out all seats and requiring passengers to bring their own chair or sit on the floor. Early trials of this strategy led to problems with unbalanced aircraft as groups of passengers clustered together to play cards and complaints that passengers were looking up the skirts of cabin crew.

In Japan Koito Industries has been placed under an official improvement order – the industrial equivalent of home detention – while Toyota bandages its reputation. And as I nervously drive my Corolla to the airport I wonder if the seats on the aircraft will have been replaced by rows of beer crates.

2010-02-08T09:05:00.000+13:00

Why National Standards worry teachers
6th February 2010
As children returned to school this week a major reform of education was launched. It was the New Zealand Curriculum, the result of years of careful development, consultation and training. It is a unique document to bring New Zealand education into the 21st century. Teachers, principals and Boards of Trustees are excited about its potential.
The launch of the new curriculum has of course been completely overshadowed by the introduction of National Standards. This is no surprise considering the government’s determination that National Standards, not the Curriculum, will be the most important educational change in 20 years.
Debate around National Standards puzzles the public. Why are government and teachers at odds over a policy that seems so obviously good for children? Surely it’s a no-brainer to want to know how your child is achieving against a standard and to have that information reported in plain language?
So why the fuss? John Key tells us the opponents of National Standards are just grumpy teacher unions defending a vested interest in keeping their members comfortable. In fact concerns about the Standards began among academics and include a growing number of school Boards and at least one of Mr Key’s own cabinet ministers.
The most immediate concern is that the Standards have not been trialled. The government’s haste to implement an election promise saw National Standards written and introduced within twelve months, a timeframe that made a mockery of consultation and a stark contrast to the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum.
The roll out of NCEA into secondary schools should have taught us the errors of introducing complex change without sufficient trial. The fact is we don’t know how well the Standards reflect what children can achieve. They draw together a range of assessment methods currently used in schools but not designed to work together to make a definitive (or simplistic) generalisation about a child’s achievement against a National Standard.
Another concern is lack of training. Teachers are experts in assessing children’s learning but the government believes too many are not up to scratch. Unfortunately this is not matched with resources for implementing National Standards. The $26 million announced this week for teacher development, along with a similar sum announced last year, are to support poorly performing schools identified by National Standards results. As this information will not be available until 2012 it is hard to see how the money will be allocated. In the meantime, apart from some on-line resources, most schools are receiving no support.
A grave concern of teachers is that data showing how their school performs will eventually be available for the media to construct league tables. The concern springs not from fear of accountability but from the real damage league tables do to student achievement.
The threat in league tables stems from the tendency of National Standards to become minimum standards. Schools under pressure to look good in the league table will devote their resources to lifting the greatest number of children up to the bar. This means they will concentrate on children just below the Standard, to the neglect of those above or well below. So both the bright and the most needy children suffer, with the ironic result that National Standards produces the very mediocrity and inequity it aims to eradicate.
This has been the experience in Britain and the USA. Both countries are now scrambling to extricate themselves from the disasters of high-stakes assessment. Anne Tolley claims we will not reproduce their mistakes because we have not opted for a single national test, but the danger lies not in how children are tested but in the use of the data to create league tables.
Teachers are frustrated by the Minister’s determination to make our education system appear broken. Mrs Tolley creates the impression that National Standards fill a gaping void. This is far from the truth. Teachers already know who is not achieving and are working effectively to support those children, often in the most trying conditions.
Mrs Tolley justifies her policies by repeating that 20% of students are failing. What she means is that currently 20% of students fail to achieve literacy and numeracy standards at University Entrance level (NCEA level 2). This figure has been dropping for some time and those groups at greatest risk of failure, Maori and Pasifika students, are already the focus of a range of interventions.
Education in New Zealand is world class, our teachers are professional and open to change. If the government agreed to trial National Standards and to legislate against league tables the opposition would largely vanish. Is that too much to ask?

Peter Verstappen
6th February 2010

2010-02-03T09:26:00.001+13:00

Fronting up to our grandchildren
23rd January 2010

January’s post brings a flurry of requests to renew annual subscriptions, mostly for environmental causes that we support in small ways.

But January’s news carries a raft of stories from the environmental frontline that are frankly despairing. Here are a few.

In Sweden authorities have revived wolf hunting. Wolf numbers have risen and 21 will be allowed to be slaughtered this season. The total number of wolves in Sweden is just 217.

Wildlife organisations across Asia are struggling to protect the remaining 3,000 tigers alive in the wild. Of the nine sub-species of tiger, three are officially extinct and a fourth probably so, leaving remnant populations of just a few hundred of each of the remaining five sub-species.

Four of the world’s eight white rhinos were flown from a zoo in the Czech Republic to a wildlife park in Kenya, in a last-ditch effort to stimulate breeding.

These and other stories lend a gallows humour to the UN’s designation of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity.

Scientists have identified two episodes of mass species extinction since life began on earth – one of these included the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs. The causes of these events remain speculative, from rampant viruses to cataclysmic climate change as the result of volcanic activity or large meteorite impact.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of a third mass species extinction, but the cause of this one is obvious. It is human activity.

The market economy, which has miraculously transformed human existence, has been catastrophic for almost every other life form on the planet. Thousands of species of plants and animals have already vanished or will do so very soon, with consequences for the survivors that we cannot imagine.

Some species become extinct because they attract market value. A tiger is currently worth $US50,000, an irresistible sum for a poacher, and the market’s response to scarcity almost guarantees its extinction. Can you imagine the value of the final tiger?

Other species vanish because they command nil, or marginal, market value. Tropical rainforests, the planet’s nurseries for species survival, are rapidly disappearing because their sustainability is worth less than using the land to grow hamburger patties and soy beans.

New Zealand’s loss of species has also largely been the result of habitat destruction or the introduction of predators. Although we no longer knock down large areas of native forest we continue to plunder our least spoiled domains (developing dairy farms in the McKenzie Basin) and constantly ratchet up the pressure on already heavily-exploited environments, like Canterbury’s waterways and wetlands. Ominously, we learn nothing from either our own mistakes or the disasters of others.

The environmental causes I support are all worthwhile, and sometimes extraordinary. Sadly the scale of the disaster forces tough choices and most organisations opt for saving iconic species, knowing the public will dig deeper for the kiwi than for a native fish or frog. I notice a growing acceptance that it is too late to save much of the world’s wildlife in its natural habitat. In a few short years the ‘wild’ will have vanished, so efforts turn to creating sanctuaries, tiny arks of hope for small remnant populations. New Zealand has some remarkable sanctuaries, like Codfish Island in Foveaux Strait, a predator-free bolthole for kakapo.

But the cost and commitment of managing sanctuaries is enormous. Zealandia, a 225ha reserve in Wellington, costs $2million a year, much of this to maintain the 8.6km predator-proof fence. Zealandia has a 500 year plan to restore the sanctuary to a state that existed ‘the day before humans arrived.’ This means finding $2million a year forever.

Locally I support Te Ara Kakariki – Greenway Canterbury – an initiative to develop a patchwork of native bush across the plains, enabling the revival of bird and insect populations.

Each January I renew my commitment and my subscriptions, not with much hope that we can avoid environmental disaster, but so I have at least some reply to my grandchildren when they ask ‘what did you do to keep the world intact for us?’

What will you say to your grandchildren?

2010-01-01T21:30:00.000+13:00

Dr Robert presents a Christmas mystery
26the December 2009

The tides of Christmas have washed me into a strange backwater. I awake this Boxing Day morning to find myself cast ashore on the bank of the Wanganui River, a houseguest of Dr Robert.
Our presence in Wanganui is explicable in the ebb and flow of families. Years ago my brother John moved here and after many Christmas journeys to Canterbury with his family we have decided to return the favour.
Wanganui suffers more bad press than most towns - drive-by shootings, gang patches, Michael Laws and that confounded ‘H.’ In reality it is delightful, warmed by a climate that allows banana plants and bougainvillea to flourish. It is a town that seems to attract a greater than usual share of the bohemian, judging by the number of quirky bookshops and galleries and by the company at my sister-in-law’s work party the other night.
Our residence at Dr Robert’s is a small piece of uniquely kiwi theatre. With John’s house fully booked by siblings and grandparents we sought alternative accommodation. He put the word out that we were looking for a house. A mate at the rowing club mentioned a friend who might have something. The friend said no, he didn’t, but he knew a neighbour whose wife’s ex had left for Australia and his house was empty. And so here we are, guests of Dr Robert, a man we never knew existed until last Wednesday, a man we will likely never meet and yet whose life is laid bare to us.
This is a most unusual house, a crumbling wooden villa that has been tweaked and fiddled with until it is practically uninhabitable. It perches high above the Wanganui River, which, although still several kilometres from the sea, is rendered brown and purposeless in the grip of tide. The river squats like a Louisiana bayou.
The property too has a faded southern beauty. The house, aging and mildewed, sags on its haunches while the garden, acres of it, creeps and coils around it like a Tennessee Williams protagonist. Vines entangle ancient fruit trees and weeds rush through the gaps in the wooden deck. A collection of plant pots, fifty or more, gasp for breath on the terrace, their contents long desiccated.
There is, indeed, a mystery here. For Dr Robert has vanished. According to the neighbour (whose wife’s ‘ex’ Dr Robert is – or was) he simply walked out with wife and child. They say he is in Australia but the material part of his existence remains here.
The place is like an apocalypse movie where humankind has vanished without trace, taking nothing. Shoes and soft toys bestrew the front porch, beds are unmade or the covers hastily pulled across the sheets. A set of keys lies on the television. A blue towel is cast, crumpled, on the bathroom floor.
Kitchen drawers brim with cutlery and plates. The pantry is stocked, only perishable food has been removed. Children’s drawings decorate the refrigerator. In the master bedroom the curtains are drawn and there is a smell of gas.
Photos on the hall table show Dr Robert as a tall, well-built bearded man of about 60, unsmiling, his arm around the slender waist of his much younger Thai wife (a replacement for the earlier wife who came to prefer the neighbour). He wears a navy blue 3-piece suit, the waistcoat a little strained. She leans into him, one hand across his stomach, smiling radiantly.
Sylvia, unsurprisingly, is spooked by the house and would have refused to stay had there not been an adjoining flat that is clean, sunny and altogether less revealing of the lives of Dr Robert and his family.
Why did they leave? Where have they gone? What will become of this place? Will Dr Robert return or will the house and its contents collapse into ennui?
I have found only one clue to the mystery. Somebody has stuck a piece of A4 paper to the fridge with the inscription, in gothic text, “when you realise you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.” In this house the words have endless possibilities.

2009-12-14T11:41:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-11-30T10:22:00.000+13:00

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.

2009-11-17T12:33:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-11-02T16:19:00.000+13:00

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.

2009-10-19T09:50:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-10-08T09:11:00.000+13:00

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.

2009-10-08T09:09:00.000+13:00

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.

2009-09-08T16:00:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-08-27T13:32:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-08-10T16:55:00.000+12:00

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.

2009-07-27T12:06:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-07-22T17:10:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-06-29T10:33:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-06-29T10:30:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-06-03T13:48:00.000+12:00

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.

2009-05-18T14:41:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-05-07T11:04:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-04-23T10:00:00.000+12:00

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.

2009-04-09T15:36:00.001+12:00

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.

2009-03-23T13:56:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-03-23T13:55:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-03-09T11:46:00.000+13:00

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.

2009-02-23T17:01:00.001+13:00

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.

2009-02-10T12:06:00.001+13:00

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.

2008-12-26T14:55:00.000+13:00

Oh, Christmas Tree!
December 2003

We stride, six of us, across the school paddock. My brother, John, leads the way, brandishing dad’s old crosscut saw, Spear & Jackson flashing in the summer sun. In defile we march, in order of age: John, Betty, then me (the lucky third), Mary, Jany and Robyn. John is fourteen, Robyn just three. We seek a Christmas tree, and announce our quest to the world -
‘Oh, Christmas tree! Oh, Christmas tree!
How merry are your branches.’
This is sung to the tune of ‘Oh, Tannenbaum’. It is the only line of the song we know, so we sing it over and over as we walk, a rallying cry that might set any young pine tree quivering with anxiety. Our weapons are various: the crosscut saw; a blunt axe. Mary waves an old tomahawk. Jany carries pruning shears. Robyn labours at the back of the line - ‘Oh, Tristris tree! Oh, Tristris tree!’ - in her three year old’s piping voice.

We slip through a wire fence, across the grounds of the maternity home and into a thistle paddock that is Roy Campbell’s farm. Our song dies as we approach the group of gnarly old pines, weathered by years of southerly gales that whip in over Foveaux Strait or sweep down from the Fiordland mountains. We’re not quite sure that we’re allowed to be here, and this faint premonition that we may be trespassing fuels our excitement. We prowl around the line of trees, gazing up, seeking out the perfect branch. There is much discussion and argument.
‘That one’s good cos it’s bushy.’
‘No it’s not. Look at the big gap half way up.’
‘This one! It’s got cones!’
‘Too high.’
Round and round, like Pooh and Piglet tracking the Heffalump.

Eventually we agree on a suitable branch, a noble and heavily-fronded branch that is far and away, we tell each other, the best on the trees. As always, we send John up with the saw. He climbs expertly, and then eases himself out along the branch, which bends gracefully towards the watchers on the ground, as if in homage to us, its nemesis.
‘Don’t saw on the side closest to the trunk!’ That’s Betty, reminding us of a previous, less successful, Christmas tree hunt. It sets Mary and Jany giggling and shouting. Robyn joins in, until John shuts them up with a growl from the tree.

He saws. The branch bends, cracks and settles to the ground with a sigh. We whoop with delight and rush to inspect our prize. On the ground, however, this branch looks a poor thing: too bushy at the base - too thin up top. We abandon it and resume our search. After we’ve repeated this scene three or four times, and branches lie like corpses, we return to the first one, decide it isn’t so bad after all – ‘nothing we can’t fix up with a few extra bits’, says John – and lift it up for the return journey.

Anybody watching from the windows of the maternity home would have observed a strange sight: a large pine tree branch wandering erratically across the school ground, propelled by six pairs of gumboots, and singing ‘Oh, Christmas tree!’ in a muffled, discordant voice.

Within the moving tree my face is pricked by pine needles, my nose itchy with pollen. Mary sneezes loudly behind me. I am giddy with the scent of pine and the warm, enveloping crush of the branch. My whole world is in this Christmas tree, with my brother and my sisters.

Robyn, encumbered with axe and saw, begins to wail. We stop and Betty picks her up, balances her on one hip while continuing to support the branch on her shoulder. We set off again, Robyn gripping a twig, beaming through her tears.

We cast our prize on the back lawn and, clamouring with the elation of the hunt, troop inside to tell mum. She surveys our tree with a practiced eye. We wait expectantly, breathless, for her judgement. Eventually she nods, declares that, with a bit of trimming here, and some extra foliage there, it will make a good tree. We cheer. John is sent off to the henhouse for the cream can to prop the tree in.

Later, in the evening, we unwrap the nativity set, one of mum’s prized possessions, brought from Holland years before. The tree, glittering with lights and decorations, seems to bend down to embrace the cardboard cave in which Mary, Joseph, the ox and ass, the baby, are tenderly displayed. Tim, the cat, delicately picks his way through the figurines and curls around the manger, one of our Christmas rituals that brings smiles and giggles from the younger kids.

I sit in front of the tree, giddy with excitement, and gaze into its branches. I am filled with wonder.

Thirty-five years later, as I reflect on Christmas as a child, these are the memories that spring to mind. I recall almost nothing about presents, food, visitors or parties. To me, the spirit of Christmas is a child gazing into the branches of a tree, gazing beyond the lights and decorations, into the folds and shadows of the pine needles, and discovering there, with wonder and delight, the life and hope, peace and re-birth that is the Christmas message. As an adult, the echo of that child still sends a thrill through me.

I wish you a Merry Christmas.

2008-12-26T14:54:00.000+13:00

Who Killed Tulkinghorn?
26th December 2008

Whether the leitmotif is Christian or commercial most human behaviour at Christmas boils down to tradition. We strive, year in and year out, to recreate the festive season in a form that is familiar and satisfying. Although I consider myself adaptable, even adventurous at times, a diary of my Christmas week reveals the extent to which I am enthralled by custom.

Sunday 21st December.
Arriving at the point in the year when we can finally relax Sylvia and I are reluctant to engage with the hype of Christmas. Our response is to disappear into a good story. A visit to the Ashburton library unearths a BBC costume drama, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House in 15 episodes. We settle down for an evening of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, fuelled by a batch of Sylvia’s famous rumballs drenched in cointreau. Within minutes we are lost in Victorian London among lawyers, ladies and litigation.

Monday 22nd December.
I have no pretensions as a pastrycook but years ago I picked up the habit of baking Christmas mince pies, small pastry delights that have become a fixture of our festivities. I spend the morning with rolling pin and cookie cutter. For a few hours fruit mince is, literally, my raisin d’etre and by lunchtime six dozen mince pies are cooling on the bench.

After lunch I venture out to the shops in a departure from the tradition of doing all my Christmas shopping at 5pm on the 24th. I buy jewellery for Sylvia, gardening tools for Marjan and aviator sunglasses for Corrie. In the evening we return to Bleak House where Krook spontaneously combusts, Esther’s hopes for happiness are dashed by smallpox and somebody drills a bullet through the black heart of Tulkinghorn the villainous lawyer.

Tuesday 23rd December.
Continuing to distance ourselves from festive frenzy we indulge another family tradition – the pre-Christmas tramping trip. Over the years we have polished this up as a highlight of our holidays. Usually we venture no further than the Mt Somers walkway but on this occasion we drive to Arthur’s Pass where Marjan is waitressing at a luxury tourist lodge. Her roster gives her a couple of days break and she joins us for a short tramp into the Edwards valley.

Marjan is reliably unpredictable. Halfway up the valley she remarks, “I’ve noticed your smell has changed. No offence or anything, but you’re starting to smell like an old man.”
I’m taken aback. Of all the signs of approaching decrepitude I never expected it would be my smell that undid me.

We climb towards the Edwards hut through meadows of shining snow grass and Mt Cook buttercups. Under a bright blue sky we debate the identity of Tulkinghorn’s murderer. Sergeant George is clearly the prime suspect but we agree that he is too obvious. Lady Dedlock has motive. Then again, it could be Guppy the striving law clerk or Hortense the estranged maid. We agree that Hortense is the most likely killer - she is French, after all.

Wednesday 24th December.
Christmas Eve. We rise early and head back down the valley. The Bealey river is thigh deep as we approach the car park and we walk the last few hundred metres through a blanket of purple lupins. We return Marjan to the tourist lodge where she opens her Christmas presents. In another departure from tradition she will not be with us on Christmas day and I feel saddened by this. There are moments when the journey of parenthood still throws up surprises.

We return to Ashburton and a flurry of wrapping paper and trifle. Corrie joins us from her job at the berry farm, we pack the car and turn towards Christchurch and the customary gathering of my family at my mum’s place.

Later in the evening I disentangle myself from nephews and nieces and accompany mum to midnight mass. Father Miles, the parish priest, is as confidential as a butler. From his lips the message of Christ’s birth reassures me just as it did when I was 10 years old. I stifle a yawn – it’s been a long day – and lose myself in the familiarity of it all.

The congregation clanks into Silent Night and Christmas slowly rumbles into view like a coal train emerging from the Otira tunnel. I wonder whether the small traditions I pursue so resolutely have any basis in reality or whether each festive season adds another ring in a slowly growing tree of fantasy. It’s Christmas - and I still don’t know who killed Tulkinghorn.

2008-12-26T14:52:00.000+13:00

Henry Plays God
2006/2008

Henry is no angel. He happily admits he’s not the teacher’s pet. He and his best friend Nathan, with the perfect logic of seven year olds, rate themselves as ‘the fourth or fifth worst boys’ in their Year 2 class.

So it came as a surprise to Henry when Mrs McMurtrie told him he would be God in the Christmas nativity play. She announced it to the whole class, which was hard for Henry. He quickly checked the reactions of his friends, and of the boys he would like to be his friends. Did they approve? He thought about saying ‘no’, but you don’t say ‘no’ to Mrs McMurtrie.

Henry felt proud, and scared. God had a big part in the play. It was God who had to command the star to guide the Wise Men to Bethlehem, choose the animals to share Jesus’ stable and the shepherds to do the adoring. He hoped Nathan would get the part of the sensible star, the one Mrs McMurtrie said God would choose to do the guiding. But Nathan became the giraffe instead, and didn’t even get to share the stable because his neck was too long to fit through the door.

So tonight, in the week before Christmas, the junior school is performing the nativity and Henry plays God. He wears a gold cloak and sits on a big throne, from where he can see the whole audience. Even through the bright lights shining right in his eyes he can tell the hall is packed. He wonders where mum, dad and his little brother are. It is hot and his nose itches.

Mr Jones the principal stands on the second step and claps in the usual way to quieten everybody down. He says something and then vanishes. The music starts and everybody looks at Henry. Slowly he stands and begins to speak…

Henry is among thousands of young children throughout the country who, this week and next, are renewing one of the oldest and fondest Christmas traditions – the school concert. Raise your hand if you never took part in a school concert. Just as I thought…

Do you remember those Christmas concerts? Waiting excitedly in the classroom until it was our turn to be marched to the hall through the twilight of a warm summer evening. Putting on cardboard masks, cowboy outfits or a pair of animal ears. Clutching a sword or a recorder. Standing at the side of the stage while teachers rushed about, moving wooden forms and ‘shushing’ everyone out of habit.

Then the performance. An animal pageant one year, a medley of Christmas songs the next, perhaps an original musical written by a talented beginning teacher or a play from the School Journal.

Most or our memories of school are quickly, blessedly, erased after we depart. Maths and spelling lessons are swiftly forgotten (though their outcomes, hopefully, linger). Good teachers and bad merge over time into a single darkening image. Classmates occasionally become life-long friends, but more often vanish into fragments: this one gave you a Chinese burn, that one shared a detention, the other kissed you behind the bikesheds – or did you just wish they had?

But often the memory of the Christmas concert endures. Even if we forget the details we recall the excitement that ran like a thread through rehearsals and performances, right to the moment when we snuggled into our beds late after the show, filled with jelly and ice cream, wrapped in warm words of praise from our parents and the promise of a half-day off tomorrow.

These memories remain powerful, I think, because they are memories of power. The concert is, for many a child, their first experience of being the centre of attention, of being in control. Standing on that stage, even if terrified, we instinctively sense we have the audience in our hands. For the duration of our performance we can make those grownups laugh or cheer or be silent. We can make them proud or disappointed. We can scatter their emotions this way and that, like straws in our hands.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of a child who truly became the centre of attention. Christ exhorts us to seek our salvation in the example of children. Their innocence, zest for life and faith in their own essential goodness reminds us that we are divine and joyous beings.

Even Henry understands that we can never really play God. There is much in the world and even in our own lives over which we have no control. But at Christmas, when we celebrate a child’s birth, let’s remind ourselves that if we keep alive the child within us we may yet become the perfect creatures God intends us to be.

Happy Christmas.

2008-11-28T13:54:00.000+13:00

Modern Pentathlon loses a limb
29th November 2008

The Olympic movement is in disarray after the IOC’s sub-committee for Failing, Unpopular and Just Plain Stupid Sports has decided to reduce the Modern Pentathlon from five events to four.

“The Modern Pentathlon is the silliest event in the Olympics,” asserted IOC spokesperson, Eva Botticelli. “It is not modern so we thought, what the hell, it might as well not be a pentathlon either.”

The Modern Pentathlon is certainly not modern. The brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, the event was first held about the time the Titanic went down. De Coubertin designed it to embody the ideals of the Olympic movement by gathering into a single event all the qualities of a “modern” soldier. Competitors must shoot an air pistol, fence, swim for 200 metres, ride a horse that is unknown to them over a showjumping course and run 3,000 metres.

Let’s break this down to see just how silly it is. Air pistols? How many armed servicemen or women go into the field of battle with an air pistol? Air pistols are the property of 12 year old boys who shoot at cans and the family hamster.

Fencing and swimming regularly descend into acrimony and were the cause of New Zealand’s Most Embarrassing Olympic Moment when, in 1948, our sole ModPen competitor, Rusty Robertson, formed the mistaken view that he had to construct 200 metres of fencing. Rusty had uncoiled 3 chain of barbed wire across the Olympic stadium before astonished officials dragged him away.

“A horse that is unknown to them” has strained the credibility of the Modern Pentathlon since its inception. Organisers have gone to ludicrous lengths to keep competitors and horses apart, even billeting them in separate countries on occasions. The 1968 winner, Russian Iva Revolstky, was stripped of his medal when photographs revealed him drinking in a bar with his horse the night before the competition.

The IOC’s latest decision is to merge the shooting and running events (I am not making this up) to “restore the credibility of the Modern Pentathlon and give it more audience appeal.” This is NOT A GOOD IDEA. It beggars belief that a sport already confined to a handful of competitors would place its remaining participants in such jeopardy. It will lead to scenes not witnessed since Gunsmoke.

The curious reasoning behind the decision is revealed in the ModPen Federation’s newsletter, Shoot Bang Fire! The newsletter reveals the intense pressure placed upon IOC officials by so-called ‘demonstration’ sports seeking places in the Olympic pantheon. Chief among these is line dancing and the newsletter reveals a history of bad blood between these two disciplines.

“The Modern Pentathlon must never give up its Olympic place to line dancing,” urges one contributor.

“Line dancing’s inclusion would forever besmirch the ideals of Pierre de Coubertin,” exclaims another outraged pentathlete.

The Line Dancers’ Collective has responded by surrounding the IOC’s headquarters in Brussels. Riot police called to the scene are reported to be joining the dancers in their protest.

In a further twist it has been revealed that de Coubertin intended the five events of the Modern Pentathlon to represent the five circles of the Olympic logo. With just a four-event pentathlon the IOC now faces having to drop one of the circles.

“Our view is that Oceania will be dropped,” says Botticelli. “After all, it is just a piece of ocean with Australia in the corner. We can shift Australia into the Asian circle and those other silly little countries will disappear under rising sea levels anyway.”

IOC officials, embarrassed at the prospect of a four-legged pentathlon, have suggested a compromise. Eva Botticelli continues: “we are investigating the inclusion of line dancing as the 5th event in the Modern Pentathlon. We believe this is a satisfactory compromise that will revitalize the sport and more accurately reflect the qualities of the modern soldier.”

Discussions continue.

2008-11-28T13:53:00.000+13:00

2011 election campaign has begun
15th November 2008

Comparisons in the media between the New Zealand and American elections have been unflattering to us. Our election, they say, was dull. It lacked personalities, momentum and any glimmer of history-in-the-making. If it’s true that the campaign never reached great heights this is simply because we hadn’t sunk to the depths of America under Bush. Our outgoing government was not an administration of ideologically driven numbskulls. And although we rewrote recent history by electing a male Prime Minister this is nothing compared to Obama’s epoch-making victory.

But if the campaign was dull the events of the past week have made up for it. Overnight our political landscape is transformed and like show-ponies on Cup Day all parties are scrambling to cover ground.

National, isolated for years by an MMP system that threw up few allies on the right, is suddenly everybody’s best mate. Quick-fire deals with ACT, United Future and the Maori Party have left Labour out in the chook shed with just the Greens and Progressives for company.

Why has John Key stitched up deals with so many partners? After all, he doesn’t need the votes of all these small parties and he knows there will be a cost to running a government that includes both Rodney Hide and Pita Sharples. National’s deal-making this week is really the first shot in the 2011 election campaign. They know that the next election is unlikely to be so kind to them and that they have three years to convince the electorate there is a natural grouping of interests in the centre right. This is why the deal with the Maori Party is particularly important. When the electoral mood swings back to the left ACT will dwindle but a centrist Maori Party will be an ally worth having.

And under Helen Clark’s tutelage National has learned a lesson or two about managing MMP. Labour’s decision in 2005 to run a minority government, criticised by National at the time and sneered at by right-wing columnists since, turns out to have been a good idea. It gives the minor partners in government at least the appearance of power while retaining the independence to keep their supporters on side.

This is important because, however risky MMP is for National and Labour, it can be lethal for small parties. ACT has a full hand of cards this week but it would have vanished completely in 2005 if National hadn’t thrown Rodney a lifeline in Epsom.

NZ First’s sudden death at the polls sends shivers through all the small parties. This was a party that once had 17 MPs, whose leader was Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose leader was Winston, for goodness sake. But without a safe electoral seat or 5% of the party vote it is nothing.

That one safe electoral seat can make or break an MMP government, which may be a weakness, depending on whose side you’re on. Only the Greens, through excellent branding, have managed to stay in parliament throughout MMP without an electorate seat. Others – Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton – cling to their seats like tiny life rafts.

NZ First’s best hope of getting back into Parliament is that sometime in the next three years a sitting MP has a falling out with his or her party and casts around for another vessel to sail back in on. Their 2011 election campaign should start now by ditching Winston, shoring up their networks and keeping an eye out for a potential sugar-daddy.

As for Labour, their behaviour this week has been most unbecoming for a party in defeat. The Clark and Cullen vanishing act has allowed them to move from wake to wedding with Hamletic swiftness. They seem almost buoyant in opposition and, with 43 MPs and an experienced leadership team, things could have been worse. As Treasury forecasts bleaken perhaps this wasn’t a bad election to lose. Suddenly 2011 doesn’t seem so far away.

The campaign has just begun.

2008-11-28T13:46:00.000+13:00

RSA faces an uncertain future
1st November 2008

Hidden among the colossal news stories of the week is a snippet about the closure of the Lower Hutt RSA. Falling membership and financial strain have brought the club to its knees and, short of a miracle, it will fold. Gone. Kaput. The report says many other RSA clubs face a similar end.

At the Lower Hutt RSA the failure to attract new members is blamed on misunderstanding about the organisation. “People think we’re a bunch of old soldiers sitting around talking about the war, but I haven’t heard a war story in here for weeks,” said one member. But there can be no misunderstanding. Few organisations are more aptly named: the RSA is the Returned Services Association – a bunch of old soldiers. Perhaps the war stories have dwindled but its rationale remains the support of servicemen and women who have returned. Returned from what? From the battlefield; from what used to be called the ‘theatre of war.’

In which case the disappearance of RSA clubs should be something to celebrate, signifying as it does that we no longer participate in the large-scale acts of carnage that blighted or destroyed the lives of our young men and women in the past.

Did the founders of the RSA intend it to last forever? Were they so cynical? There is no doubt that the RSA is an icon of the ‘rugby, racing and beer’ generations, of weathered faces in smoke-filled rooms, of stern camaraderie and sober countenance. Some RSA clubs strive to break free of those images, to re-invent themselves for a new generation.

Lower Hutt’s neighbouring club, Porirua, recently ditched the military service requirement for members, throwing its doors open to the public. This has not gone down well with the old soldiers of Porirua and you have to wonder what the point is of having a Returned Servicemans’ Association open to everybody.

The Porirua plan appears to be the response of an organisation that has lost sight of itself. The economic imperatives driving the decision are the consequences of overly ambitious expansion. RSA clubrooms used to be just that; a room where members met, socialised and arranged small acts of charity. Over time many clubs expanded to include restaurants, bars and gaming parlours. They borrowed money to build bigger premises and it is the financial burden of these that now undermines the viability of the organisation as much as dwindling membership.

The Porirua RSA and others like it want to increase membership mainly to sustain their restaurants and bars, in which case they become no different than a hotel or working men’s club. Do the new members of the Porirua RSA participate in the other traditional roles of the club? Are they encouraged to march on ANZAC Day? Are they entitled to the benefits received by returned servicemen and women? Do they uphold the values of the club? Or is it just another watering hole?

This is one of those tiny stories that are compelling because they reveal a much bigger picture.

As a nation we are at a point of growth where, lizard-like, we are shaking off an old skin. Many of the structures that have served us well in the past will not be needed in the future. The RSA is just one of many organisations that struggle at this time. Churches, service clubs and voluntary groups all confront their relevance in the new society. Many respond by rebranding themselves: the WDFF becomes Rural Women, churches embrace rock music and Girl Guides transform into action figures.

Ultimately the continuance of organisations like the RSA depends not on branding but on a genuine need for their services. Painful though it may be to some, the RSA may disappear, or its name continue as a meaningless acronym on a chain of neighbourhood eateries. Like the Temperance Unions of the early 20th century it may eventually fall victim not to progress but simply to evolution.

2008-11-28T13:44:00.000+13:00

Daffodils revive flower power

We were delighted when Carol announced at the end of the choir practice that the large bucket of daffodils was a gift to us and that there were several more in the back of her car downstairs. I gathered a small armful, wrapped them in newspaper like fish and chips and bore them home as a hundred tiny sunrises.

When I was a child my dad played five hundred in a local card club at the RSA hall every Thursday night. He was good at it and often we would wake on Friday morning to discover a box of chocolates or three tins of fruit that he had won the night before neatly arranged on the kitchen bench.

This week I have woken to a riot of daffodils – spoils of the choir. My impulsive arrangement in a glass beer jug has been successfully triaged by Sylvia and the blooms are now artfully arranged in several vases around the kitchen. One bunch consorts with a blushing cyclamen near the fridge, another plays ‘touch you last’ with an out-of-control aloe vera on the windowsill.

They beam at me, these daffodils, as I eat my breakfast and I find myself slowing down, drawn into their sunny smiles and silent chatter.

“Warm to us,” they say. “We are spring. Elevate yourself. Rise up. Lighten your heart.”

Perhaps this long, miserable winter has made me impressionable. Perhaps the current mood of uncertainty draws me towards a simpler truth. Whatever the reason, I am enchanted by these flowers. I gaze at them with Wordsworthian intensity, studying them in a way that I haven’t for many years.

To my astonishment I discover that daffodils are not the flowers they used to be. In fact they have completely transformed since I last checked. Where once they were uniformly yellow – yellow petals, yellow trumpets, yellow stamens – they are now a multitude of different colours. Some have white petals and delicate pink trumpets. Here’s one that looks like a fried egg, with creamy petals and a tight, darkly red trumpet. Another has petals like a dawn sky, pale primrose streaked with dashes of gold.

It is not just the colours that have changed; the daffodil’s shape too has transformed. Petals may be bold, soft and lacy or alluringly frilled. Trumpets are now an entire brass section: boozy, blaring tubas, tight-lipped trombones and snub-nosed cornets. There is one flower whose trumpet has completely exploded into four pieces as crazy and complex as a sea anemone or an Elizabethan ruff.

I have counted 9 different daffodils in the bunch I brought home from the choir.

These mutations are almost certainly not accidental. No doubt they are the product of artful and laborious propagation, of science improving nature. I would not be surprised to discover that the daffodil is now an industry, with jealously guarded patents and breathless investors whose fortunes stand or fall on the success of this year’s new varieties. In a world where almost every form of beauty has a price the bulbs that grew these blooms may be rooted deeply in the corporate mire. Even now a tiny fragment of Wall Street may be dedicated to daffodil stocks, and perhaps those stocks will be swept away in the backwash of the next insurance company or mortgage lender that goes bust.

And if that happens, then what? Will my daffodils turn to dust? Will they vanish like zeroes in my bank account? For that matter, are they less beautiful for being the products of genetic modification and corporate profiteering?

Of course not. They are as beautiful as babies, and as innocent. They gladden the heart and quicken the spirit. They are life.

2008-11-28T13:43:00.000+13:00

Electricity woes hit the South

My, how the world changes! Monday’s revelation that South Islanders can expect hefty power price rises for several years because we have to buy it from up North has knocked one of the chair legs out from under my generation.

In my formative years there were a few things you could count on: the government was National, the All Blacks were invincible and South Island power kept the lights burning in the North.

Since it was opened in 1965 the Cook Strait power cable has fuelled both pride and pique in Southerners. We’ve been proud to see ourselves as the nation’s engine room, churning out the megawatts to fuel the North’s homes and factories. At the same time the cable has been a focus for southern discontent. Feeling ignored by Wellington politicians? Ridiculed by smartarse Aucklanders? Let’s pull the plug and teach them a lesson!

So it takes a bit of getting used to the idea that the North Island now claims electricity among the many forms of power it exerts over the South, and that this situation is likely to remain for at least several years.

There are two components to our problem: a shortage of generating capacity and bottlenecks in transmission.

Electricity generation has always been a seesaw of supply and demand. In recent winters we have complained about the threat of power shortages, but in the past electricity was often in short supply. From the 1920s right through to the late ‘50s demand frequently outstripped supply as transmission networks grew faster than power stations.

Supply was eventually secured with the massive hydro projects that began in our part of the world with Roxburgh in the mid ‘50s and ended with the opening of the Clyde dam nearly 20 years ago. During those years – the ‘generation’ generation – our imaginations were captured by the scale and creativity of the projects. Benmore introduced us to the power of earth-moving machinery; Manapouri was a tribute to the tunneller’s art and the Mackenzie basin became threaded with gorgeous blue canals.

While the engineering was on display for all to see, the economics of power supply remained obscure. With the government taking on the responsibility for building the dams we paid in high taxes for the privilege of low power prices. It was only in the 90s, when the electricity industry was carved up into all those companies with ridiculous names, that reality began to bite. Power prices have been climbing steadily ever since and apparently we still have some way to go before the price we pay for electricity reflects the actual cost of producing it and getting it to our homes.

In the South Island the situation is complicated by other factors. In the past decade irrigation, industry and population growth have greatly increased our demand for electricity. At the same time power companies have shown themselves less willing than the government previously was to risk their capital in constructing expensive hydro projects. Cheaper and more flexible alternatives available in the North Island; such as geothermal, gas, wind and coal, are either missing in the South or have so far failed to gain traction with power companies and consumers.

Over the same period it seems our beloved Cook Strait cable simply grew old. Perhaps it was lack of foresight or maybe it was the error of trusting our infrastructure to market forces, but somehow we’ve reached a point where the cable can no longer reliably carry the load it once did.

The cost of refurbishing the cable has become contentious. Southern generating companies are being asked to pay the huge cost of upgrading the cable because it enables them to sell power into the lucrative North Island market. They argue that with power now heading south the North Island companies should share the cost.

It is easy to criticise the power companies for placing profit ahead of public interest, but we should remember that South Island power companies have in recent years put up several major projects to increase generating capacity. Each has been knocked back, largely for environmental reasons.

It will be interesting to see how scrupulous we remain as prices climb. Will we sacrifice our landscapes? Are we prepared to invest in power-saving technology? Whatever happens, it will hurt our pockets.

2008-11-28T13:42:00.000+13:00

Mr Connell’s Graceless Exit
6th September 2008

There is both irony and pathos in the photograph in last Saturday’s Ashburton Guardian that shows Brian Connell leaping for joy as he closes his office and departs his political career. To the uninformed this could seem to be a leap of triumph, a celebration of a distinguished and successful career. However, we know this is not the case, so what is the leap about?

The caption – I Survived! – hints at what is really on Mr Connell’s mind. This is the leap of the errant schoolboy who has served his detention, of the remand prisoner whose case has been thrown out of court on a technicality. Mr Connell is pleased to have survived his sentence in politics.

Who committed Mr Connell to the punishment he obviously believes his time in politics to have been? Clearly it was us, the voters of Rakaia electorate. Mr Connell’s message, in both the photograph and the accompanying article, is that he is glad to be rid of us. Unable to reflect upon success he instead uses his final hurrah to lambast party politics, the people of Canterbury, the Resource Management Act and New Zealanders in general. In an attempt to salvage his pride he manages to be as graceless in his departure as he was for most of his tenure.

Mr Connell belatedly reveals (oh, why could he not have admitted this to the candidate selection panel six years ago?) that he’s never believed in politics. In itself, this is not an insurmountable handicap to a successful political career. I know a clergyman or two who struggle to believe in God and yet minister successfully to their flocks.

Mr Connell’s real failure is that he obviously never understood politics. This is evident in his pride at not following the party line, speaking when he should have stayed silent and, above all, remaining his own man.

If Mr Connell had understood parliamentary democracy he may have realised that there are very good reasons for managing the affairs of society through well disciplined political parties. His judgements should not persuade us that our political system is weakened by not allowing a ‘maverick’ such as him to do as he pleases. Political systems that allow ego to flourish unchecked never produce good results for their societies. For better, not worse, we choose to mediate individual pride, ambition and extremist views through the mechanism of political parties.

Mr Connell’s insistence upon speaking his mind may have been simply naïve but it was ultimately selfish because in doing so he sacrificed the interests of his constituents to his ego. Principles and ideals are fine but parliament does not exist to serve members’ personal views. In a democratic society politics is the art of the possible. It requires discipline, compromise and patience. In his refusal to cultivate these qualities Mr Connell let us down. We did not fail him – he failed us.

Mr Connell is obviously an energetic and capable man. But as our MP he has been a flop. How disappointing then that his final words to us are so mean-spirited. If I had written his script for last weekend’s interview I’d have advised him to say ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’. Thank you to the local National Party supporters who backed his candidacy and worked hard to make his term successful. Thank you to the people who showed faith in him with their votes.

And sorry for not being up to the job.

2008-09-03T14:19:00.000+12:00

Small gifts from abroad
23rd August 2008

Across the table lies a sculpted face, about the size of an oven mitt, carved or moulded from a tufa-like substance, the weight and texture of sandstone. It is the face of a man, creased in a grin so broad it has forced the eyes closed and wrinkled the bridge of the nose. The grin is beatific or idiotic, I’m unsure which.

It lies cheerily upon the layers of tissue paper from which it emerged, alive with fragments of story that tumble from it like the air miles it has travelled. Where does it come from? Who crafted its features? What cultural narrative styled those pointed cheeks, that upturned smile?

I know the story of this carving. I guessed what he was as soon as Sylvia unpacked him from between layers of clothing in her suitcase. I knew it from the weight of the object in my hands and the contours beneath the layers of tissue paper. The grin was the only surprise.

He comes from Exeter in south-west England. Sylvia will have bought him from one of half a dozen small souvenir shops in a restored warehouse on a stone wharf of the old waterfront, where the river Exe tumbles over a weir and coastal trading ships berthed 150 years ago. He is carved in the style of the gargoyles that decorate Exeter cathedral: the peculiar, often grotesque, figures that are flumes or pipes directing rainwater off the roof away from the walls.

This small figure is woven into our story. We once spent a year living and working near Exeter and explored the cathedral, the Roman ruins and the old waterfront, where we bought two or three miniature gargoyles and carvings. They have joined the accumulation of artefacts that decorate our lives, clattering and braying like the pots and pans of a tinker’s caravan. Little smiley man is a worthy addition.

Small gifts from abroad often possess value beyond price or provenance. I discovered this as a child, on those rare occasions when a parcel arrived in our household from Holland, wrapped in string and brown paper, criss-crossed with the purple tattoos of foreign postal services. It would lie in state on the dining table until dad got home from work and then be unwrapped with such care you’d have thought it held all the treasures of Samarkand.

The objects from these parcels flowed into our young lives like beacons. We pored over them for clues, for the stories our parents never told us, or we never listened to, about Holland, their early lives and the people who wrote those spidery letters on thin blue aerogramme paper. We marvelled at the bars of pale Dutch chocolate, the tablets of salty liquorice that I never developed a taste for, the cigars – Schimmelpenninck or Jacob van Hartog – and smooth linen tablecloths. We puzzled over decorative teaspoons, their handles with tiny enamelled coats of arms and names of towns whose vowels we could not master.

Years later there were other parcels, these from Sylvia’s mother Lyla, in England. Lyla pushed the limits of plausibility. She wrapped gifts in off-cuts of wallpaper, plastic shopping bags, recycled newsprint, and bound them with skeins of wool and pieces of string tied in knots that would have defied even Alexander the Great. She posted her final package to us a few days before she died aged 80, in November 1993.

A couple of months later, on a hot January day, we were moving house. Sylvia had hurt her back, the kids were fractious. There was a knock at the door and a postman with Lyla’s parcel. It had failed spectacularly, string and paper giving up, the contents spilling out. A diligent postal worker had gathered up the pieces, sealed them in a large plastic bag and sent them on their way. We unwrapped comics and sweets for the girls, a cushion for Sylvia and a prayer for our good health.

In the years since my childhood the world has shrunk to the size of a walnut, broadband and internet laying bare all its mysteries. With a few taps on a keyboard I can conjure products from anywhere on the globe. The system is efficient but the mystique has vanished. The small gifts I continue to treasure are those that arrive wrapped not in courier bags, but in stories.

2008-09-03T14:17:00.001+12:00

The Spencer Truss – uplifting NZFirst
9th August 2008

In a week of high political drama, of leaked audio tapes and upset rubbish bins, the Ashburton Guardian’s political reporters have been tireless in their pursuit of sensational stories. In a journalistic scoop one of our team penetrated a private function room at the Grumpy Hog restaurant in Manners Street, Wellington last night where a special meeting of the New Zealand First caucus was being held. He filed this report online just ten minutes ago.

At first glance the only indication that this is a meeting of NZFirst MPs is the presence, the towering presence, of Winston Peters. The remaining 6 MPs, cleverly disguised as themselves, are completely unrecognisable.

The group is seated at a round table with a lazy suzy decorated with a bunch of geraniums. Two large microphones are suspended from the ceiling directly above the table. The only other people in the room are a Chinese waiter, several members of the parliamentary press gallery hiding behind a potted aspidistra and a shadowy figure in the corner of the room crouched over an audio recording desk and wearing a red jacket with the words “Labour Party Spy” printed on the back.

Winston rises to address the meeting.

Winston: Right, we’ll get straight down to business. We don’t usually meet between elections but you’ll appreciate that the recent activities of certain scumbags means we’ve got some work to do. There’s two items on the agenda: fundraising and party policy. Wait a minute.

He suddenly spins the lazy suzy so hard the geraniums fly off the table, spattering everybody with dirt and flowers.

Winston: You can’t be too careful – they can hide microphones anywhere these days. Right – fundraising. We’re gonna need plenty of cash for this election. What have you got, Ron?

Ron Mark: A couple of us have been going through the list of previous donors. There’s Owen Glen, Bob Jones and those Simunovich boys.

Winston: What do you reckon they’re good for this time around – a hundred k each?

Ron: Well, all things considered, Winston…

Winston: Yeah, yeah, I know. Who else is on the list?

Ron: The next biggest donor was Mrs Dorothy Thwaites in Paeroa.

Winston: How much did Dot give last time?

Ron: Three dollars.

Winston: See if she’s good for five.

Pita Paraone raises a hand tentatively.

Pita: Ah, Winston…

Winston: Who the hell are you?

Pita: I’m an MP.

Winston: Which party?

Pita: Our party – I mean, YOUR party, Winston.

Winston: I’ve never seen you in my life.

Doug Woolerton: Well, you have been away a lot, Winston.

Pita: Some of us near the bottom of the list were hoping that you could do some fundraising: you know, use your connections.

Winston: I did that last time and look at the mess.

Pita: Yeah, but you’ve got new connections now.

Dail Jones: Like that Condoleeza Rice, she’s pretty keen on you, she’d give us a few bob.

Ron: Or you could go on the dinner circuit, do some media training workshops, that kind of thing.

Winston: And where would we put the money? Every journalist in the country is sniffing around our bank accounts. I can’t open my wallet without a commission of inquiry or some such thing.

Doug: We can hide the money in a trust.

Winston: Like the Spencer Trust, I suppose? Bad idea, Doug.

Peter Brown: We could change the Trust’s name to throw them off the scent. Make it look like something completely different.

Winston: Suggestions?

Peter: How about the Spencer Truss? That gives us options. We could sell it as either a medical aid or something to do with construction.

Ron: Medical aid gives us some catchy marketing: “The Spencer Truss – providing hidden support!”

Doug: “The Spencer Truss – uplifting NZ First!”

Winston: Brilliant! Right, what else was on the agenda?

Ron: Policy.

Winston: Policy? We’ll do the same as we’ve done every other election – announce our policy the day after polling when we know which party we’re negotiating with. Right! Drinking time. Ron, call the waiter. Oh, and tell him to get rid of that bloody aspidistra.

2008-07-28T09:44:00.001+12:00

Petrol proves a hit with small investors

Pay attention, I’m going to make you rich.

Like me, you’ve been watching your assets evaporate in recent months. Your mortgage is going backwards, that rental property you bought a year ago at the top of the curve is running rapidly downhill and the dabble on the stock market proved to be very bad advice.

You look around and ask yourself what’s increasing in value? And the reply is – commodities. But little guys like you and me can’t afford shares in mining companies or steel mills and we can’t invest in milk unless we own a few hundred cows.

But there is one commodity we can all get a stake in. It’s local, it’s profitable and it’s available.

I’m talking about petrol, and I don’t mean trading shares in oil companies: I mean literally buying petrol.

Think about it. Four months ago a litre of 91 octane was worth $1.76. Today it’s $2.18. If I had bought 1,000 litres of petrol four months ago, costing $1,760, I could sell that today for $2,180. That’s a profit of $420 or about 25%. What other investment today will return 25% in four months? That’s 75% profit per annum!

What’s the risk? Nil. The international oil geezers say petrol prices are going up until 2013. It’s a sure-fire, can’t-lose, gilt-edged investment and you heard it from me.

Investing in petrol is perfect for small buyers like ourselves. Listen up and I’ll tell you how it’s done.

What I do is collect the empty milk containers and Coke bottles from the neighbours’ green bins on a Monday morning (I pretend to be jogging with an empty wool fadge). Then every time I fill up the car I also fill up a few extra containers. I’ve got about 3 or 4 hundred of these stacked in the garage. Recently I extended the mortgage a bit and moved into 10 litre paint buckets and I’m about to step up again thanks to a farming friend who’s just dropped off a few 100 litre offal drums.

You can pour petrol into pretty much any container but you have to be careful you don’t overreach yourself. A mate of mine rang BP recently and asked them to deliver a tanker load around to his house. He’d lined an old septic tank with polythene and reckoned he could get a few thousand litres into it. As it turns out there are rules about things like that, so my advice is stay fairly small and low key.

One thing you want to be careful about is security. You’ve got to protect your investment and we all know there are a few mongrels who’d be into your stockpile given half a chance – even here in Tinwald.

I’ve hidden most of my petrol in an old coal bin behind the garage. Other investors store it beneath the floorboards or behind the fireplace. One mate of mine filled an old beer fridge in his garage, which caused a couple of problems when some mates called around unexpectedly for a few bevies. Now he’s got two fridges, one labelled ‘beer’ and the other ‘petrol’.

I’ve been giving some thought to the selling side of things. Obviously guys like you and me can’t just set up a forecourt on the front lawn. However, if we keep it simple we can sell all we like and the people we’ll sell to are the idiots who, for the sake of a few dollars, drive their cars on empty and keep running out of gas. Apparently this is happening all over the place. So when I’m ready to sell I’ll simply fill the station wagon and peddle the stuff along a stretch of SH1.

The added bonus of this strategy is that guys who’ve run out petrol in the middle of nowhere will pay top dollar. I could probably charge $3.50 a litre and if they don’t want to pay I can rent them a bicycle!

Direct selling of this nature will become competitive and I predict we’ll see turf wars on popular stretches of highway, along the lines of the famous whitebait wars on West Coast rivers. With that in mind I’ve been putting out feelers to the Triads for security. The closest I’ve come is a local Tri-Hard gang up on Melcombe Street. They might do it - I’ll keep you posted.

2008-07-28T09:38:00.000+12:00

Olympic fatigue strikes early and hard

I think I’ve peaked too early in my buildup to the Beijing Olympics. Two weeks from the opening and I’m exhausted.

The problem is I don’t know what to make of the Olympics any more. The original concept of a sports event has, like the guy at the bottom of the ruck, been obliterated beneath layers of marketing, drugs, jingoism and politics. Complicating this is the media’s obsession to cast these Olympics as China’s coming-of-age; an initiation ceremony that will somehow determine that country’s status in the global community.

But, true to the Olympic spirit, I am determined to be fortius, altius and speedius – to rise above myself and participate fully in the event.

I do this largely from guilt. Over the past several Olympics I have not pulled my weight. I’ve become increasingly detached from the pride, the hoop-la and the sheer stamina required to be a member of the 4 million-strong support crew to our athletes.

Instead of doing the hard yards I’ve soft-pedalled, tuning in only for the victorious soundbite or videoclip – “coming up to the line and it’s gold for New Zealand!” – and shunning the near-misses, the failures and the steady plodders. The only thing I recall from Athens are the final three minutes of whatshisname and theotherguy winning gold and silver in the triathlon.

I am sorry for this and I will try to redeem myself in the next few weeks. It won’t be easy – as an Olympic fan my match fitness peaked in 1972 (the men’s rowing eight) and 1976 (John Walker). Over the decades the malaise has spread to my interest in all sports. I no longer follow cricket, tennis, motor racing, the horses or even rugby. I’m not so much out of shape as off the planet.

Looking back, my single greatest error as a sports fan was my failure to make the shift from free-to-air television. Over a period of about a decade I shunned the enticements of subscriber TV and satisfied myself with the dwindling offerings on the traditional channels. Eventually my diet was reduced to crumbs and I turned off completely.

A couple of years ago I realised that, quite unintentionally, I had stopped watching television altogether. Like old friends we had sort of drifted apart and it became too much of an effort to get back together. My television sits in the corner of the lounge draped with a colourful scarf. It is now so out of date it ranks as ‘legacy’ equipment because it needs a special adaptor to connect a DVD player.

My relationships with other media follow a similar, though perhaps less final, trend. I do a bit of newspaper browsing and occasionally ping the sports headlines on National Radio. I use the internet constantly in my work but almost never for recreation or news.

On the rare occasions when I confront sporting events in the media, especially radio and television, it all seems too clamorous. The grace, the finesse, the dignity of the athlete vanish beneath self-indulgent broadcasting, mind-numbing advertisements and truly blithering commentaries.

You can see what I’m up against if I want to pull my weight as an Olympic supporter.

But I’m making a start. To regain the TV habit I’ve rented a few videos of ploughing competitions from the library. I can manage about 8 minutes of this - more with carbohydrate loading. This weekend I’m stepping up to a highlights package from the 1986 Ashes and I plan to spend a bit of time with my ear to the neighbour’s front door during the rugby test.

I figure some high altitude training will do me good so I’ve booked a couple of evenings watching Sky at a friend’s bach at Castle Hill.

With my limited build-up I will inevitably resort to doping like everybody else. My preferred option would be a live-feed internet implant. That should reduce my broad band and give me a passing chance of surviving the opening ceremony. I’ll see you there.

2008-07-02T09:25:00.000+12:00

Anti-Smacking law proves its worth
28th June 2008

One year after the notorious “anti-smacking” law came into force the screaming and shouting has begun all over again. Strident demands for a referendum to be held at this year’s general election are batted away by the government; the Opposition is gleeful, sensing another opportunity to bag Labour; Helen Clark reminds them they voted for the legislation in the first place; and somewhere in the depths of Parliament a clerk patiently works his way through politic’s answer to the New World Longest Docket Competition.

So, what has happened in the twelve months since Sue Bradford robbed us of the right to hit our kids? Have the wheels fallen off? Has the thin fabric of society been torn asunder? Yes! shout the law’s opponents. Innocent mums, dads and grannies are suffering the wrath of the state for the slightest rebukes, while a generation of children spared the rod are growing wild and lawless as a consequence.

The truth is more modest. In the past six months police have responded to 82 callouts under the legislation, which have resulted in just 4 prosecutions and, to date, no convictions. This is no upheaval.

The Child Discipline Bill had a single purpose: to remove the defence of ‘reasonable force’ in prosecutions of physical violence against children. As far as I’m aware it was never intended to outlaw physical disciplining of children, but this arose as a public perception during the passage of the bill, where it became the ‘anti-smacking law’, and so it remains in most people’s minds. The insertion of a clause in the bill giving police the power to disregard inconsequential complaints has done nothing to pacify its opponents.

‘Reasonable force’ is a fine legal precedent but, with reference to the disciplining of children, it is an oxymoron – a contradiction. Using force against children marks the departure of reason. When adults hit children they are, at least for that moment, neither reasoned nor reasonable - they have taken leave of their senses.

Some opponents of the law have tried to tell us otherwise. They claim to smack or hit their children in a calm and reasonable way, after patiently explaining to the child why they are about to undertake such an insane act. Who are they kidding? Children get hit when adults lose their temper and can’t think of anything else to do.

‘Reasonable force’ is often accompanied by cries of provocation: “the little bugger drove me to it,” “you can’t reason with kids.” I work with children every day. In my experience there are almost no occasions when children cannot reason or be reasoned with.

The only times I can imagine reasonable force being necessary with children is to restrain them when they are about to endanger themselves or others. No police officer would ever prosecute this.

The issue here is not the behaviour of children but the behaviour of adults. Most of us are kind and caring parents but New Zealand has one of the highest rates of child abuse in the world. Some of us enact the abuse, others observe it and do nothing while the rest of us look on with mild concern or fuel radio talkback with forced outrage. We scream against the Kahui family while failing to understand that the roots of evil lie in society’s general acceptance that it’s okay to hit kids. So important is this belief that thousands of us have signed a petition to restore it as a parental right. This is crazy.

We are told the anti-smacking law will never stop the worst cases of child abuse. I disagree. This law sets a standard. It places the safety and care of children above poor parenting. If the effect of the act is to make adults think twice before hitting children it will, in time, contribute to social change that will reduce even the worst violence.

The deputy police commissioner, Rob Pope, said this week that the act “provides another check in terms of alerting police to different standards of parental behaviour.” For years we have cried out for more police powers to intervene before extreme family violence occurs. It’s odd that, now we finally have something that does just this, so many of us want to get rid of it.

2008-06-16T12:06:00.001+12:00

Public transports of delight

At 5 0’clock on Tuesday evening the only sound in the Palmerston North bus station comes from the carpet - a screaming cocktail of seventies psychedalia. The cafeteria is barred and shuttered and, apart from myself, the sole occupant is a frail-looking elderly woman with a red woollen scarf.

I’m hungry so I attempt to purchase a bag of ready salted crisps from a vending machine. I’m not good at these things and, after several attempts, end up with a Snickers bar.

I eat the chocolate bar and gaze out the window. In the past 20 years I have travelled in New Zealand by bus only a handful of times. Those years have seen public transport in heartland New Zealand eclipsed by the automobile. Where once the railway stations and bus depots took centre stage they now huddle on the fringes.

In Palmerston North the view from the bus station includes a Kut-Price car yard, a workshop and a row of flats. On this Tuesday evening a small circus has pitched up on a grassy area across the intersection. A row of lightbulbs marches uncertainly up the ridge of the circus tent.

The Intercity coach pulls in on time. I gather my bag and follow the elderly lady with the red scarf onto the platform and up the steps. The bus is newish and in good condition. I note the Designline logo.

Rising fuel prices have not yet driven the people of Manawatu back to public transport: only 6 of the 50 seats in the coach are occupied.

The driver bustles aboard, the only purposeful figure in the landscape, and prepares to depart. As the door shuts a long arm in a greasy brown raincoat reaches through and signals to the driver. The driver leans towards the door, there is a short conversation with the arm, money is exchanged and suddenly the arm and its attendant body are settling themselves in the seat across the aisle from me.

As the bus pulls out the new arrival snorts and writhes his way into his seat. He is large and infinitely greasy. He fixes a look at me and reaches his hand across.
“Quintin,” he exhales and the bus fills with the alcoholic residue of a hundred public bars.
“Peter.”
It’s like shaking hands with a cold meat pie.

After a time Quintin releases my grip but continues to peer boozily at me.
“Do I know you?” he charges.
“I’m not from around here.”
“So you’re from Wanganui?”
“No, but I’m going to Wanganui.”

For a moment this satisfies Quintin - but only for a moment.
“They wanna put an ‘h’ in Wanganui. Do you put an ‘h’ in Wanganui?”
I reply that I do not.
“That’d make it ‘Fonganui.’ The day they start saying Fonganui’s the day I stop going there. Yep.”
Quintin sags back into his seat.

For better or worse, I reflect, public transport brings us in contact with each other in ways over which we have no control. Perhaps that is why we fled to the isolation of private cars as soon as economics permitted. These experiences are often revealing, if not always pleasant.

Quintin snores as we pull into the Mobil station at Bulls. The driver announces he is ‘taking on’ fuel, like a steamship bunkering coal.

Quintin is galvanised by this and flails back to consciousness. He peers at his surroundings and snorts fiercely.
“Bloody Bulls again.” He turns to me, his interlocutor, once more. “I grew up in Bulls and d’you know why I left?”
He waits. I do not know why he left.
“I got sick of the jokes.”
“Jokes?”
“About Bulls. All sorts of jokes. My father…” Quintin is settling down for a serious chat now, “…my father owned a takeaway bar. You know what he called it? ‘Food on the Hoof’. Then this guy opened another takeaway bar across the road. He called his ‘The Udder Food Bar’. It was always like that. I buggered off in the end.”
“Where did you go?”
“Down the road, to Foxton.”

Exhausted by this effort Quintin collapses into his seat.

I wonder if Foxton has the ‘h’ problem.

I have travelled in countries where long-distance bus trips are a chaotic and colourful microcosm of society; where bodies sweat and jostle, chickens flap, mergers are sealed or broken and everybody talks at once. Will the looming energy crisis bring New Zealanders to that glorious state? Or will our transports of delight remain essentially Quintin-esque?

The Wanganui bus depot is a shopfront on the riverbank. We arrive in darkness. Small round taxis appear from nowhere and scurry about like tugboats. Looking back at the coach I see Quintin fast asleep in his seat. The driver is leaning over him talking gently into his boozy, dream-filled face.

2008-05-19T09:21:00.001+12:00

185,000 children living in poverty

Research by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) reveals that 185,000 children live in poverty in New Zealand.

There’s more. In the past 20 years New Zealand has had the fastest growing gap between rich and poor of any country in the developed world.

The link is obvious. The widening gap between rich and poor, like a slowly receding tide, has left those 185,000 children washed up.

This means there is a group of people half the population of Christchurch who are under-nourished, poorly housed, ill-fed and without the hope of participating fully in society. And for every child in this group there is at least one adult.

The problem I have, and where I think we should all feel uncomfortable, is that this situation is not an accident. It is the inevitable and foreseeable outcome of our actions as a society over two decades.

This number – 185,000 – should bury forever the myth of New Zealand as a land of equal opportunity. It also buries the last shreds of the social contract that prevailed during my childhood and youth. The terms of that contract were simple: those who were well off agreed to share some of their wealth with the less fortunate. It was, we told ourselves, the measure of a civilised society.

Poverty, especially the deep inter-generational poverty we are witnessing in New Zealand, is very difficult to overcome, but one crucial factor is money. 185,000 is the number of children living in families that receive less than 60% of the average household income which, in New Zealand, is already considerably lower than most of the countries we like to compare ourselves with.

The welfare state transferred money from rich to poor through taxes and benefits. It reflected a consensus that poverty was neither the fault of the poor, nor did they desire to remain forever dependent upon the state.

Perhaps the single biggest change in the past 20 years is the acceptance that the poor are to blame for their situation. To be a ‘beneficiary’ in New Zealand is to be cursed like an Old Testament leper.

The greatest blame is reserved for the unemployed. When the government introduced Working For Families in 2004 it elevated work as the crucial factor in determining social equity. To qualify for tax credits, Family Support and a range of other services you must have a job. “If you are working,” the government said, “we will top up your family income to a level where you can have a decent chance at life.”

Working For Families has been successful in reducing the number of people on the margins of poverty, but it has enabled other injustices to remain. It has shielded employers from the responsibility of providing a decent wage, and consigned many people to dull, repetitious, low-skilled employment that contributes little to our economy and nothing to their quality of life.

For the jobless Working For Families is a disaster because it streams government funding away from benefits.

Working For Families stems from the belief that the poor are idle and undeserving. But it is a mean-spirited society that does not recognise some legitimate reasons for not being in the work force. People should not be reduced to poverty because of long term illness or staying home to look after the kids.

Linking income support to jobs looks good in a buoyant market where jobs, even “McJobs”, are being created. I think we are about to see what happens when jobs start to disappear. The 450 meat workers who were laid off in Dannevirke this week have lost not only their jobs but also their access to Working For Families. Are they idle and undeserving?

I hold no hope that either Labour or National intends to reduce child poverty. Their policies reflect voter expectations and as a society we shrug off the problems of the poor. We forget that poverty is everybody’s problem. Poverty breeds crime, child abuse, ill health and ignorance. Morally, these are compelling reasons for change. As a purely fiscal argument it is much cheaper to lift people out of poverty than to pay for more prisons and hospitals.

Our politicians must hear the message that rather than cutting taxes they need to invest in some genuinely equitable social policy.

Ultimately this is about self respect. I am not proud to live in a country that turns its back on 185,000 children. Are you?

2008-05-05T13:58:00.001+12:00

Pipe Band Saved By Daring Strategy

Ashburton has been rocked this week by the announcement of a last ditch effort to save the town’s pipe band. The band has been reduced by age and shifting musical tastes to just five members – four pipers and a solitary drummer.

Band chairman Dougal Claymore has called a meeting on May 7 to pull the band from the brink of oblivion. Mr Claymore, speaking with the obligatory Scots accent of his office, described the band’s plight. “We cannae go on. If the people will nae rally to us ye’ll no hear the skirl o’ th’ pipes in this wee toon nae more.”

Treasurer Agnes McFinger revealed that the club’s assets have been reduced to 2 sets of pipes, a puncture repair kit and one ear plug. “To think we used to send out 600 pipers first footing on New Year’s Eve and now it’s come to this,” wept Mrs McFinger.

In response to the crisis the Guardian has set up a McThinktank. This group, whose members are anonymous for reasons that will become obvious, has prepared a report, with the nifty title Bagging the Band, to restore the club to its former glory.

At the heart of the package is a marketing campaign to freshen the band’s look and to bolster a recruitment drive. The McThinktank will replace the “hairy knees and tartan” image with the Paul Kelly dancers. It recommends a series of street concerts featuring the girls in hot pants and halter tops working out to a pipe band routine. These will be supported by a billboard campaign featuring scantily clad young women with pipes and drums and the slogans “Come and Play with Me” and “Beat my Drum you Big Scots Laddie.”

The report aims to improve all aspects of the pipe band. Marching is out, replaced by line dancing and Latin routines. “There is no entertainment in simply walking down a street,” the report’s authors claim. “We want our pipe band to become the Riverdance of Scottish performance. Imagine 30 pipers hip-hopping at the ANZAC Day parade backed by a dozen disco dancing drummers.”

But it is the band’s music that attracts most criticism in the report. “Pipe bands have been restricted for years by a limited and lacklustre repertoire, which is dictated by the limited and lacklustre instrument.”

In a bold move the report’s authors recommend the replacement of the traditional bagpipe with a modern digital version. The ‘digipipe’ replaces bag and chanter with a small laptop computer worn on a harness around the piper’s neck (the laptops are produced in various clan tartans). Small speakers are mounted on the laptops.

“The sight and sound of these machines is awesome,” claims the McThinktank. “Imagine 30 big strapping lads dancing down East Street with laptops round their necks playing anything from a Brahms concerto to techno-funk. Throw in the Paul Kelly dancers and you’ve started a craze.”

The report acknowledges the difficulties of commercialising the pipe band. “The bagpipe has limited revenue-generating potential owing to the essentially anti-social nature of its sound. The alarming quality of pipe music could however hold the key to commercial success. As most people are compelled to flee from the sound of bagpipes the music may be recorded for use in smoke detectors and fire alarms, and pipers may be hired to clear public bars at closing time.”

Bagging the Band reveals that the first bagpipes were made as duck calls for 18th century Scottish duck shooters. Their musical qualities were only developed during long, slow mornings in highland maimais, fuelled by large amounts of Scotch whisky. The report’s authors suggest an immediate and practical way the band could revive its fortunes is to hire itself out to duck shooters this weekend.

If all these strategies fail there is still hope for the pipe band’s remaining members. After all, five is still one more than the average rock band and as a last resort Mr Claymore and his companions should throw away their pipes and take up the guitar.

2008-04-16T09:05:00.000+12:00

New theatre should be a ‘house of story-telling’
5th April 2008

One of the things that makes us human is the desire to hear and tell stories. From the raconteur in the local pub to Hollywood movie moguls, story telling takes and holds our attention. “Tell me a story” was one of the first complete sentences my children learned to say. And, like all parents, we told them stories: about our childhood, about our family, about heroes and villains, about adventures real and imagined.

Stories populate the imagination. They help us make sense of our world. They teach language and the codes of behaviour of our community. They provide comfort in defeat and give us words to celebrate victories.

In our lifetime technology has allowed story telling to flourish in ways we could never have imagined. Television, movies, music and internet expand the story teller’s art in glorious, digital techno-wizardry. Story telling has become industrialised, with vast fortunes earned and spent to fuel this most simple and fundamental human need.

On Thursday evening I had the pleasure of being entertained by story tellers at Ashburton College’s Festival of the Spoken Word. For 15 years the Festival has showcased the talented, the eager and the just plain hopeful among our young poets and performers. Sly, shy or swashbuckling they step into the lights to make us laugh or cry, to make us sit up and take notice, to make us think.

I have attended the Festival of the Spoken Word many times in recent years. I have observed young performers grow from timid 13 year olds to highly accomplished and, occasionally, brilliant actors and orators. I am always entertained and often awed by the apparent ease with which they tackle the most daring subjects, from Shakespeare to The Flight of the Conchords.

As Ashburton’s new theatre nears completion it is exciting to think we may finally have a venue to match the talent in our district. Shakespeare told us “all the world’s a stage” but these days actors and singers can no longer expect to attract audiences to street corners or draughty church halls. Audiences expect to sit comfortably in a theatre that has a few bells and whistles.

But bells and whistles come at a price and I notice that sometime in the past few months the new theatre has become the Ashburton Trust Events Centre. I am sure the new name reflects the Trust’s financial commitment to the project, both in funding the construction of the building and supporting its future operations. I believe the Trust will be a major user of the facility.

All this is good. The Trust does an excellent job in Ashburton. It is probably the only organisation in the district with the management expertise and financial muscle to make the theatre commercially viable.

My concern, which is shared by others, is that the move from a theatre to an ‘events centre’ will place the new facility beyond the reach of many local performers. Will the venue’s programme be filled with ‘events’ (conferences, trade shows and promotions) to the exclusion of theatre?

Already some local groups have become concerned that even if they can find a slot in the centre’s timetable they may not be able to afford the charges. A subsidised rate for local groups has been discussed but, as far as I am aware, no assurances have been made that the centre will be affordable to local groups.

In my view the new theatre should remain, first and foremost, a theatre – a house of storytelling. Yes, we have many ways of feeding our human desire for stories, but books, movies, DVDs and the internet fall short on two counts: they generally tell other people’s stories and they are essentially private.

Nothing matches live theatre as a shared experience of story-telling and as an opportunity for our stories to be performed by our people. I hope the Ashburton Trust Events Centre will become a place that excites us, that we become fond of for the store of memories it builds over the years. I hope we can balance commerce with community.

2008-04-16T09:03:00.000+12:00

Chinese Actions in Tibet are Wrong
22nd March 2008

Twenty years ago as a young broadcaster I toured China with a polyglot group of kiwis. We were guests of a Chinese government that was just getting the hang of managing the outside world. Our party included a couple of MPs (both of whom, by the way, were seeking re-election), some trade unionists, businessmen, radical Maori, lesbian feminists and a boy scout.

Our chaperone was Mr Hu. Mr Hu had a gold tooth and chain-smoked – to the delight of the trade unionists. Mr Hu smoothed our passage through the Great Hall of the People, Mao Tse Tung’s mausoleum, dark satanic mills, the terracotta army and an apartment block exclusively for one-child families.

Mr Hu was a good party man in every sense. He drank us under the table each night while never forgetting his duty to communism. He was courteous and professional, but one thing baffled him. He could not understand multi-culturalism. At official functions he became visibly agitated while we mihi-ed, chanted and laboured through a litany of introductions. Why didn’t we unite and speak with one voice, he asked. Why did we show so little respect to our leaders - the politicians?

There is a luxury in totalitarian states of seeing the world in black and white. Power that resides in the barrel of a gun and not a ballot box makes absolute sense to the person holding the gun. When that power has been hard-won the rightness of it assumes a moral authority. In the West this was called the Divine Right of Kings. The Chinese were more prosaic: they called it the Mandate of Heaven. Traditionally in China this mandate resided in the emperor and his family. When that family lost its grip on power the Chinese believed the gods passed the mandate to whoever was strong enough to take over. It’s a familiar tale – to the victor go the spoils.

Mr Hu’s frustrations with our group’s messy multi-culturalism were the product of the black and white world in which he lived. I enjoyed Mr Hu and greatly admired what I saw in China, but I found his discomfort satisfying. In our stumbling way we were demonstrating to Mr Hu our commitment to human rights, particularly minority rights.

I’ve been thinking about Mr Hu this week as the stories of violent protest rolled out of Tibet. I’m sure these stories don’t air in China but I feel confident that if he saw them Mr Hu would absolutely approve of the actions of the Chinese government. It would seem perfectly natural to him that China asserts its authority over the Tibetans. He may even be puzzled that the Tibetans would challenge that authority. Can’t they appreciate the benefits of being part of China? Why do they cling to their feudal beliefs and out-moded practices?

Tibet suffers the same arrogance and destructiveness from China that colonised populations have endured for centuries. It’s the story of Native Americans in the Wild West, of Maori in colonial New Zealand, of Africans down through the ages.

The Chinese cloak their theft of Tibet in a bogus historical legitimacy, claiming it has traditionally been part of China. Their invasion of Tibet in the early 1950s was largely ignored by the international community. Tibet was a backward and useless little corner of a world that was preoccupied with the Cold War.

While China remained poor it had only limited power to realise its ambitions in Tibet. Tibet’s leaders were driven out of the country, replaced by Chinese administrators and soldiers, but daily life for most Tibetans was endurable and the country remained cut off.

China’s recent prosperity has changed things dramatically. Massive road and rail projects have connected Tibet to China and the world. China has flooded Tibet with settlers, bulldozed Tibetan villages and replaced them with factories and high-rise apartments. The intention is to edge out Tibetan culture and language, break up its institutions and gradually erase its identity.

Perhaps China has been emboldened by the Tibetans’ Buddhist pacifism. The events of the past week will have done little to shake that conviction. A few hundred protesting monks can do little damage to Chinese authority. Unless, that is, they find support from more powerful friends.

New Zealand has only a small voice but we’ve proved that when we lay aside our fears of standing up to bullies, when we act from our deepest convictions, we can make a big noise.

In my view this is one of those times. I think we should, politely but firmly, tell China that its actions in Tibet are wrong. To publicly demonstrate our beliefs is as vital to maintaining our own dignity and freedom as it is to defending the dignity and freedom of the people of Tibet.

2008-04-16T09:02:00.000+12:00

The (Narrow) Window of Opportunity
8th March 2008

I have good news: we can save the world and ourselves. This is the message from a group of Very Brainy People at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They recently put their pointy heads together and considered all the major problems facing humanity and the globe: energy supply, terrorist threats, natural disasters, pandemic diseases. Voila! They came up with answers.

Take energy, for example. How do we secure a supply of clean, renewable energy for all? Simple: all we need to do is capture one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the planet and we’ll have all the energy we could hope for. Solution: “this will become feasible with nanoengineered solar panels and and nanoengineered fuel cells.” To think we’ve been angsting about peak oil and nuclear waste and these guys solve the entire problem with one slick move off the back of the scrum.

But that’s only the entrée. The idea that really made me sit up and take notice was their forecast for personal health. They claim advances in genetic technology mean that “within one or two decades, we will be in a position to stop and reverse the progression of disease and ageing, resulting in dramatic gains in health and longevity.”

Now there’s a thought to conjure with. If I was ten years older I’d be trying to pin them down on whether it would be one decade or two – that would be uppermost in my mind. But I’m 50 - only 50 - so I figure even at the conservative end of the projection, two decades, I’m in the zone. Like the boy racer aiming for the gap in the traffic I just have to stay straight, keep my foot down, hold my nerve and I’ll be through and into the wide blue yonder. If I can keep ahead of cancer and coronaries until I’m 70 I can look forward to, what? another 50 years? another 100?

It’s a dizzying prospect. Imagine what I could do with another 50 years of healthy living. I could travel endlessly, write and read books, be entertained with movies and TV programmes made by people not even born yet. I could enjoy the company of several generations of descendants, becoming a great-great-great-grandad. The window of opportunity opens wide.

But wait, there’s a downside to a world peopled with millions of modern-day Methuselahs. For a start, who’s going to support us? Like the man who is assured by his doctor he has 30 more years only to be told by his accountant he has just 20 there is a gap between vision and reality.

I have a beautiful financial plan, as finely balanced as a trimble. I accumulate capital for another 10 to 15 years then use it up over a similar period. That takes me to 80 – beyond that is blue sky. So, if technology is going to allow me to live until 120 do I plan to remain in the work force until, say, 90 or 100? Do I have to keep getting up early and going to the office for another 40-50 years?

And what about all the stuff we haul through life with us? Do I have to maintain a home and garden for another half century or more? That’s a lot of painting and lawn-mowing. Do I have to get used to the idea of working my way through another 10 or 12 motor vehicles?

Maybe not. Perhaps the scientific wonderland of the future will include self-painting houses and cars that never wear out.

And then there’s the simple human need for company. Will my spouse and my friends also make it through the window of opportunity? Or will my long twilight see me shuffling around Tinwald as a lonely remnant of a lost age, the butt of jokes from middle aged octogenarians.

I don’t blame the scientists for the flaws in their plan. The job of scientists is to conjure visions of perfection. Where my window of opportunity narrows is at that point where perfect science rubs up against human nature.

Individuals and societies are a tangle of half-grasped opportunities, of false starts and blind alleys. We’ve had 35 years since the oil crises of the 70s to solve the problem of clean energy, yet the world’s major economies continue to be run by a self-serving oilocracy. We could have solved world poverty a hundred times over but we made the mistaken of relying on the market to do it. Gene therapy could be a reality today except the medical research companies are competing instead of co-operating.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll finish reading The Guardian, then step out into my day and simply enjoy myself. Why don’t you do the same.

2008-02-28T10:10:00.000+13:00

New Slogan Excites Debate
23rd February 2008

Debate over a new slogan for Ashburton deepened this week with rumours that the District Council has committed millions of dollars of ratepayers’ funds to acquire the famous Tui catch-phrase.

Ashburton mare, Bede O’Malley, has refused to comment on the speculation, but in a terse press release Council spokesperson, Edgar ‘Tiny’ White (Parks & Gardens) has denied the rumours.

“There is absolutely no intention to use the Tui slogan in Mid-Canterbury,” he said. “It is Council’s view that Ashburton - Yeah Right would not capture the spirit of our community going forward.”

Mr White confirmed that a new slogan will be in place before Wheels Week in May.

“Over the years we’ve had a bit of grief about our slogan from the numerous petrol heads, sorry, ‘car enthusiasts’ who visit during Wheels Week. Whatever It Takes has tended to be seen by visitors as a licence for bad behaviour.”

Guardian readers agree. “Whatever It Takes was fine for the 90s,” writes Pickles from Hampstead. “It was a desperate slogan for desperate times but it led to some pretty poor decision-making about development in our district. Our new slogan will have to be a lot more self-respecting.”

“Whatever It Takes was rubbish,” blasts Miss Fortune from Chertsey. “It was the catch-cry of a superannuated call-girl.”

Many local residents are rising to the challenge of finding a new slogan that captures the spirit of our place. A vigorous debate has been raging through the Guardian’s website and editorial pages for weeks.

Predictably, many of the suggestions are inspired by local geography: Plain and Simple, Plain Magic and The Heart of the Plains are just a few.

These suggestions are vociferously rejected by others. N Spired of Allenton writes, “The slogan can be anything as long as it doesn’t mention ‘plains’ or ‘heartland.’ Do we want Ashburton to be linked to the word ‘plain’? And heartland has been done to death. Give us something more original!”

Others draw on Ashburton’s location at the centre of the South Island, or its close proximity to Christchurch. Ashburton – Just Down The Road is the choice of Mrs Ima Divot of Netherby. Which draws a response from Fred in Pleasant Point, who writes, “Mrs Divot should remember that from South Canterbury Ashburton is Just Up The Road.”

An undeterred Mrs Divot then suggests we could have two slogans: Just Down The Road for places north of the township and Just Up The Road for places south.

“What about, Ashburton – Middle of the Road?” offers Compromise from Tinwald. “I think that sums us up nicely.”

“Well, if we really want people to stop here why not The End of the Road?” retorts the feisty Mrs Divot.

“That would look just peachy on a sign at the northern end of town within sight of the cemetery,” observes Fruit Loop of Netherby.

Another tranche of slogans draw inspiration from the district’s major economic activities. Dairy enthusiasts have submitted Ashburton – Udderly Fabulous, Teats R Us and Land of Milk and Money. An inspired crop farmer suggests New Zealand’s Bread Basket or Serious Cereals.

A lively entry in the debate comes from The Lab Coat Girls from Talleys. “Dear Sir,” they write, “we work in the lab at Talley’s and we have a lot of fun. We tell our mates we work in a pea lab and, oh, how they laugh! Anyway, we thought what about a slogan that celebrates the vegetable industry? Some suggestions are: Ashburton – Have a Pea. Or what about Minted Peas, or Mixed Vegetables? We think these really are what Mid-Canterbury is all about.”

“Those girls need to get out more,” responds Grizz from Methven. “No, for a slogan you’ve gotta look at our resources, and that means water. I reckon Ashburton – Pour It On is a winner. You could paint it on big signs hung from centre pivots across highway one at each end of the town. You could even have the centre pivots working so visitors to the town would get a little shower on their way through. That’s a ripper idea, I reckon.”

“Actually, the whole point of a slogan is to give us an edge over our neighbours,” argues F. Lukes (Dr). “So what we should do is trump our neighbour’s slogans. Take Rolleston, for example. Their slogan, Town Of The Future, begs to be topped. I suggest we make ours Ashburton – The Future Starts Here.”

“Once again I point out the proximity of the cemetery,” pipes Fruit Loop of Netherby.

“And none of these ideas capture the vibrancy and energy of the district,” laments Speedy of Rosebank. “My suggestion is On The Move! or On The Run!”

“On the Run sounds great,” chime in the Lab Coat Girls. “It could go with Have a Pea.”

With quality debate such as this our new slogan is bound to be a winner. But whatever we decide to call ourselves one thing is certain. To the rest of the country we will always be, affectionately, Ashvegas.

2008-02-28T10:08:00.001+13:00

Let’s Give It Up For Lent
9th February 2008

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
In the church a long line of worshippers shuffles silently towards the altar where the priest stands holding a large cup filled with ashes. As each person kneels before him he dips his thumb into the cup, bends down and, murmuring the incantation, inscribes an ashen cross on each forehead. The worshippers return silently to their seats, ash-marked heads bowed in prayer.

As Waitangi Day swirled through Aotearoa this week a couple of older, darker celebrations tangled in its coat tails. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar, a six week period of abstinence that culminates in Holy Week, the great celebration of Easter. Because it is tied to Easter Ash Wednesday does not fall on a fixed calendar date – it is a ‘movable feast’. This year it happened to fall on Waitangi Day.

In my Catholic youth I attended Ash Wednesday mass to be marked with ash on my forehead and reminded of my mortality – “and to dust you will return.” Back home us kids would peer in the mirror, rubbing in the ashes with our fingers or teasing each other when soap and water failed to remove them.

Then our conversation would turn to what we were ‘giving up’ for Lent. Giving things up for Lent was the most significant calculation in a Catholic child’s year. We were expected to sacrifice some small pleasure or privilege for six long weeks. This, along with praying our rosary beads every night and abstaining from meat on Fridays, was intended to strengthen our faith.

Usually we gave up eating sweets – which wasn’t such a great sacrifice in an age when sweets were not as mainstreamed as they are today. Sometimes we sacrificed pocket money or a favourite TV programme. Alternatively we could take on extra duties around the house: hanging out the washing or bringing in the firewood.

We resisted these sanctions and tried various strategies to avoid them. We proposed giving up homework or spinach. I remember one of my sisters offering to do the dishes more often and my brother generously agreeing to give up his share of dishes duty so she could meet her goal.

Mum invariably quashed these creative solutions.

However, in a brilliant theological sleight of hand we managed to convince her of a loophole. She agreed that giving up eating sweets did not mean that we had to give up buying or acquiring them. So we accumulated our sweets, hoarding them in glass preserving jars under our beds, counting them up as we counted down the days until Easter. Lent for us finished on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and I remember the agonies we suffered after gorging ourselves on lollies. To this day I cannot face an acid drop without thinking of the yellow candlewick bedspread and dusty carpet of my childhood.

Like many Christian festivals Lent overlays older traditions. In the northern hemisphere Lent coincides with the end of winter and early spring (in Dutch ‘Lente’ means spring). For our ancestors this was always a lean time, when food supplies were running low. They fasted by necessity. The Christian church simply appropriated the practice as yet another expression of faith. It was a clever move – a rumbling tummy was easier to endure when one believed it was earning a few credits in the afterlife.

In hindsight I was short-changed as a child. It was many years before I discovered that Ash Wednesday was the second half of a double act: that it followed Shrove Tuesday, pancake day, Mardi Gras (literally ‘fat Tuesday’ in French). And it wasn’t until I travelled to Holland in my twenties that I discovered Mardi Gras is the climax of Carnival.

Carnival is a pagan festival the Church never completely subdued. It continues to this day, mostly in Europe and Latin America, a raucous outpouring of parades, masks and grotesqueries; of eating and drinking to excess; of sinning and confessing (being ‘shriven’). No wonder it was mislaid in my small Catholic childhood.

Times have changed. Lent has vanished and now every day is Carnival. Carnival suits the spirit of our age, where we are expected to live to excess. In a consumer society there is no room for abstinence, fasting or restraint.

I miss it a little. Giving something up brought a sense of accomplishment. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we revived Lent. Imagine if the big box retailers announced they were putting prices up for a few weeks to reduce sales, or they were closing every Friday until Easter because we all had enough stuff. Imagine if we shunted advertising from our TV screens and junk mail from our letterboxes.

I’d happily give up sweets to see that.

2008-02-07T14:36:00.000+13:00

Geocaching Sweeps the World

Miles stands at the edge of the bush on the old Woolshed Creek tramline and studies the small device in his hand. It is a GPS unit, a Global Positioning System, about the size and shape of a cell phone. It shows him exactly where he is on the planet and, of greater interest to Miles, where he is going. The small screen displays co-ordinates, arrows and distances.
“It’s this way,” Miles waves his right hand like General Custer rallying the cavalry, “about thirty metres into the bush.”
We plunge into the trees, closing in on our prey.

Welcome to the world of geocaching, a digitally-enabled treasure hunt. It is fun, infectious and is sweeping the world. It is also unique in using digital technology to encourage physical activity.

If you have never heard of geocaching I can tell you it is happening in your neighbourhood, on your street, perhaps right under your nose.

The story of geocaching begins with the US military – but keep reading because the story is positive. In the 1980s the US Defence Department developed a network of satellites to provide super-accurate navigation. Civilian use of this network was severely restricted by the military scrambling the signals from the satellites. In 2000 the US government turned off the scrambling, allowing you and me to buy GPS devices with accuracy almost as good as the army’s. Today, for a couple of hundred dollars, you can buy a small GPS unit that allows you to locate your position or track objects to within a few metres, anywhere in the world.

Geocaching sprang up as an inventive use of this new and powerful technology. A geocache is a small treasure chest hidden by a player who then advertises the co-ordinates and a description of the cache on a website. Other players pick up the co-ordinates and try to find the cache.

Simple? Ho hum? Well, not quite. Caches can be extremely difficult to winkle out, as we discovered in the bush at Woolshed Creek. Steep or difficult terrain limits the accuracy of the GPS so the treasure seeker may still have to cover quite a bit of ground in a manual search for the cache. A cache’s location may be masked by cryptic clues. There may be a series of co-ordinates that have to be followed before the cache is reached. There are other variations: Offset Caches, Multi-Caches and even Virtual Caches.

Caches may take a number of forms but the few that I have seen are plastic lunchboxes with a notebook, a pencil and a collection of trinkets and other small objects. The successful treasure hunter records his or her name or caching nickname, the date of discovery and a comment in the notebook and swaps an object.

At Woolshed Creek, when we finally found the cache hidden deep within a rock crevice, one of our companions took a plastic light stick from the cache and left a small soft toy. Occasionally you may find a small engraved metal disc, a geocache ‘coin’, which I’m told is a collector’s item. I have also heard of objects being tagged with a small electronic tracking device enabling the person who first planted the object to track its progress from cache to cache.

When a cache has been found the successful geocacher records the find on a website, allowing the owner of that cache to keep track of the cache’s success.

Anybody can hunt for geocaches and anybody can hide a cache. Owners of caches are encouraged to manage their cache, checking it occasionally to make sure it is in place and has not been vandalised. Caches can swap owners: a friend recently took over the management of one on Quail Island.

Geocaching builds on older versions of the same idea. When we lived in England several years ago we were introduced to Letterboxing, a version of caching using written instructions, maps and a mailing list. We scrambled around Dartmoor, startling wildlife and wading through nettles, in search of ‘letterboxes’. I don’t think we ever found one.

If geocaching seems a bit too much like Morris Dancing or playing quoits, don’t be too hasty in your judgement (some of your best friends may be geocachers, or even Morris Dancers). It is highly infectious and a novel way to explore the countryside. When planning a walk or trip, check the website first for co-ordinates of geocaches in that area and plan your route or itinerary around them.

You may not have to go far. I’m told there is a geocache within 500 metres of my home and there is probably one close to you. You may walk past it daily, it may be visible from your front gate – if only you knew. Google ‘geocaching’ and get started today.

2008-02-07T14:35:00.000+13:00

We Don’t Mean to Mess Things Up
12th January 2008

My favourite music of 2007 was a low-key album called Surprise by Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel fame). It is as unpredictable as its title suggests. Along with the usual quirky love songs there are comments on some of the darker themes of life in George Bush’s America, with an acid reference to “lunatics and liars.”

The album is rich with layers of instrumentation, but it is the lyrics that make the strongest impression. Simon is back at his poetic best, capturing the imagination with lines that seem just pretty at first but more unsettling on reflection: “we brought a brand new baby back from Bangladesh, thought we’d name her Emily, she’s beautiful…”

Paul Simon is not an evangelist. His songs have probably never been sung on protest marches or picket lines. But he has a way of getting under the skin. If there is a message in Surprise it is in these words, uttered in a monotone, almost sotto voce: “we don’t mean to mess things up, but mess them up we do.”

I find these words constantly in my mind as I enjoy the holiday luxury of reading newspapers and listening to the radio. Most stories boil down to Paul Simon’s message, a parade of accidents and mistakes, of outcomes totally at odds with intentions. It is as true of small stories (Ashburton art gallery’s stolen flag) as big ones (Pakistan’s political meltdown).

If the newsmakers are to be believed our ability to mess things up is no longer confined to human affairs. Events that were previously explained as acts of nature or God are now cast as consequences of our actions. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, bush fires and pestilence are sheeted back to global warming caused by our plundering of the planet’s resources.

Global warming was the Big Story of 2007 and will continue to be for a while yet. It is treated with the same breathless excitement by journalists and editors as the Cold War was when I was a child, and for the same reason – global warming has the potential to wipe us out. We watch with dismay as carbon emissions soar, as our leaders squabble over who will take the first meaningful steps towards reduction, as science falls further behind in the race to prevent a catastrophe.

I notice over the past year or so that the global warming story has become increasingly fatalistic. Even if we reduce our carbon emissions to zero we will not prevent disastrous effects from all that has gone before. The best we can do is strive to minimise the damage.

How do you respond to this stuff? I get the impression the scale of the problem frightens most of us to the point where we stand frozen in the headlights of oncoming disaster. How can I make any difference when China burns millions of tons of coal a day? Why should I install an energy saving light bulb in my kitchen when New Zealand’s cows and sheep produce 40 million tons of carbon-loaded methane each year? Why bother?

In the spirit of our times the people who appear most optimistic are often those who see a profit in global warming. Leaving aside the delicate issue of all those burping cows New Zealand continues to trade on a “clean, green” image.

This sometimes becomes ludicrous. Last week I stayed at a motor camp in the Catlins that promoted itself as “eco-friendly.” I was told that the camp owners had “retired” two sheep farms, replacing grass with trees whose carbon-soaking abilities they claimed will match the emissions of the campervans they attract to the park. Their brochure touted a “solar clothes drier” and “energy-saving” facilities. In reality the solar drier was a clothesline, energy-saving was mainly signs encouraging campers to take short showers while simple measures like separating and recycling rubbish had been overlooked.

Is a bogus response to global warming better than no response at all? If we pretend to be doing something about it will our actions eventually lead to some meaningful change in behaviour? Is any response better than despair?

Vicki Buck, former mayor of Christchurch and recently listed as a global “eco-warrior,” possesses a well-modulated view of global warming. Despite her belief that we are probably too late to stop it she continues to act from natural optimism and a sense of hope.

We can all do the same: take some small steps and pursue them with hope. We may fail to avert disaster but if we do something we will at least be able to answer the criticisms of our grand children.

If we do nothing we’ll earn Paul Simon’s words as our epitaph:
“We don’t mean to mess things up
But mess them up we do
And then it’s
‘Oh, I’m sorry…’”

2008-02-07T14:34:00.000+13:00

Farewell 2007 – Welcome the Year of the Spud

After a promising start summer has stalled in a succession of southerlies, driving us indoors and towards more reflective pursuits. We read the papers and watch the tele, drawing in to the media’s annual obsession with taking stock of the old year and predicting the new.

I’ve learned a new word from the media’s review of the passing year. Hubris.

Hubris means arrogant pride or presumption. A new word, once discovered, pops up everywhere and I notice hubris is fashionable for commentators to sum up – or dismiss – 2007. America’s continuing shambles in Iraq is hubris. The Labour government is driven by hubris. Graham Henry was motivated by hubris. Pride and presumption – “I know what’s best for you” – are the dominant motifs of the year.

Is this merely media cynicism? Having spent the year talking ourselves down are we now victims of our own propaganda? Or was 2007 really as dreadful as it’s made out to be?

Looking back over the year, the doom and gloom merchants have had a field day. Chief among these is the Reserve Bank which has discovered that making the populace miserable is a far more effective tool than interest rates in the war against inflation. Alan Bollard has out-Scrooged even Michael Cullen in his predictions that we’re about to be ruined. Consequently the housing market teeters, finance companies drop like autumn leaves, factories move offshore and thousands flee to Australia.

It is ironic that we are talking ourselves out of one of the few genuinely prosperous times we’ve experienced in the past 40 years. Instead of celebrating the fact that most of us have never been better off; that we have jobs and money in the bank (or at least a good line of credit), we are wishing ourselves back into poverty.

This is a flaw of our national character, a kind of anti-hubris that makes us feel more comfortable with failure. As individuals we may be optimistic and strive towards success but as a nation we’re never happier than when the wheels fall off.

The evidence is overwhelming. Did somebody mention sport? I know, I know, it is a painful topic, but to a nation of cynics 2007 was a thoroughly satisfying sporting year. We lined up an unprecedented series of major events in which we potentially excel – and failed in every one.

That is, we failed to win. We scored a few seconds, thirds and fourths, which left us solidly within our comfort zone. Winning is much scarier. If we had triumphed, if we were now world champions in rugby, cricket or netball, if we held the America’s Cup, we would be like the mountaineer who reaches the summit and, instead of looking up and out to enjoy the view, looks down and is overcome by vertigo.

The media understand our nature and exploit it utterly. Good news is glossed over or explained away as accidental or, maliciously, as hubris. Bad news is pushed, promoted and picked over endlessly and nauseatingly. I don’t know if it is laziness or simply lack of imagination but most journalists seem to be permanently assigned to parliament or the police. Politics and violent crime dominate our news in obsessive and gratuitous detail. Stories are reduced to a few headlines that are repeated endlessly and hysterically.

In mainstream media there is almost no attempt to make sense of the news through discussion of context, background and detail. Analysis is reduced to opinion pieces by columnists or soap box diatribes by the subjects of the stories. The medium becomes the message: politicians (Michael Laws) and police (Clint Rickards) are media stars.

When cynicism prevails all behaviour seems motivated by self-interest. Take the Electoral Finance Bill. Here is legislation that springs from the praiseworthy motive of protecting democracy from the American disease – the growing influence of big money to decide who gets elected. We are told the legislation is imperfect but the argument is reduced to a political squabble that leaves us groping for the issue and mistrustful of all points of view. Politicians argue for or against it depending upon its possible effects upon their sponsors, and the opposition of large media companies appears driven by concerns about lost advertising revenue. Hubris indeed.

In my mind the single enduring image that captures the spirit of 2007 is a photograph of Andrew McAuley, the Australian who vanished off the Fiordland coast in February, just a few kilometres short of completing the first trans-Tasman crossing by kayak. The photo, taken hours before his death, was recovered from his boat and published widely. McAuley looks into the camera. Deep lines of exhaustion are etched into his cheeks and forehead. In the background the outline of the Fiordland mountains can be seen. In his eyes there is no triumph, only hopelessness and – worse - fear. It is as if, with his goal in sight, he knows he is about to give up.

That was 2007. I discovered yesterday that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato. This sounds far more comfortable – bring it on.

2007-12-20T12:18:00.000+13:00

How Men Do Shopping Malls
15th December 2007

For the last thousand years or so our urban landscape has been dominated by cathedrals. Today our dominant architectural form is the shopping mall.

There are many similarities between the mall and the cathedral. Both capture the prevailing values of their age – religion or consumerism; both are market places of a sort, their halls filled with celestial music and their display cases rich with icons.

But there is one crucial difference. The cathedral was an overwhelmingly male environment. The shopping mall is not.

Almost every man I know dreads going to a shopping mall. Males possess a deep, instinctive aversion to these glass and concrete celebrations of consumer joy. The men one sees in shopping malls are desperate creatures: huddled forlornly over cardboard coffee cups in the food court or trailing disconsolately behind revved up wives and girlfriends. The mall reduces the male to chauffeur, shopping trolley and cash cow.

Many of us come up with pretty good avoidance strategies, golf being the most common. Christmas, however, usually defeats us.

After years of careful study I’ve come up with a foolproof way for men to do shopping malls, so tune in guys and I’ll talk you through it.

Let’s start with the universal law of men and Christmas shopping. Despite having an entire year to carefully plan a shopping list the male never has a clue what he is going to buy. You must never enter a shopping mall in this state. Give yourself some time to think about gifts before you are confronted by the dread of all male shoppers – choice.

What I do is park half a block from the mall. The few minutes walk is plenty of time to get my ideas sorted.

It also gives me time to scout the fringes. There are always a few shops on the outer perimeter of a mall that are accessible without being sucked into the vortex. These can be a godsend for males.

If you can combine fringe shops with high speed purchasing – the natural reflex of the male – you are well on the way to success. I’ll give you an example. Last Saturday I conducted my annual visit to a mall. Through accidents of history I always go to The Palms in Christchurch. I arrived without a thought in my head of what to buy for whom. I parked and walked – still no inspiration. I rounded a corner of the building and there was my perfect fringe shop – Dick Smith.

As I passed its doors the vision of the perfect gift for Sylvia lit up in my head. I weighed it up, made my decision and entered the shop. This took about three nanoseconds. Inside the shop I wasted no time trying to find the product myself. A nice young man took me directly to it. We discussed the various models and options, I selected the one I wanted, paid for it and was back on the street within three minutes.

A problem with malls is that they never stay the same. I am sure The Palms has been rebuilt annually for the past ten years. The landmarks I relied on last Christmas have vanished this year. The exits have been moved, entire corridors have been added. There was always a sports shop (another high-value location for male gift shopping) just to the right of the main entrance. Now there is a clothing boutique (low value!).

In this confused state last Saturday I made a tactical error. I headed for the landmark big box retailer, in this case K-Mart. Every mall is anchored by one or two of these monstrosities. They squat like gargoyles at the most prominent places in the mall, highly visible and almost always a disaster for male shoppers.

They are staffed by dull youths dressed in ill-fitting corporate polo shirts earning $3.00 an hour. These kids are locked away in dark cupboards each night so they possess the complexion of three day old rice pudding and the mental acuity of a vacuum cleaner. They know absolutely nothing about anything in the shop, and furthermore they don’t care. Ask them a question, they shrug their shoulders, say you should “talk to John” and vanish.

On Saturday I was looking for a badminton set. I searched haplessly through K-Mart for 15 minutes, finding neither John nor badminton. I left empty-handed, to the disdain of the young man on security watch at the front entrance.

As well as failing to master the geography of malls I have never developed a resistance to the sensory bombardment of these places. I become hyperactive and over-excited. They should install Ritalin vending machines for people like me, but that’s the last thing they want to do - hyperactive people spend more money.

In this condition it’s vital for the male shopper to know when to cut his losses. On Saturday I stumbled across Rebel Sports, secured the badminton set, flashed through Whitcoulls and was back on the pavement without suffering permanent damage. A Salvation Army Band was playing at the exit. I put $10.00 in their bucket, sent up a small prayer of thanks and thought of cathedrals.

Happy Christmas.

2007-12-06T09:31:00.000+13:00

One Good Tern Deserves a Plover

I have endured some good-natured teasing from friends and acquaintances this week over a photograph of myself and Sylvia that appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. If you did not see it – and I hope you didn’t – it shows us ankle-deep in the Ashburton River, dressed in gaiters, tramping shorts and (in my case) my daughter’s wide-brimmed school sunhat. Sylvia is peering through binoculars at an imagined point of focus somewhere off to the right, while I gesture wildly with out-flung arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam straining towards God.

A nineteenth century portrait artist would have painted out the river and invested the pose with a heroic Byronesque quality. In reality it was more like one of those satirical greeting cards. I imagine the caption: “after being lost for weeks in the wilderness Sylvia and Peter were astonished to see the same costume-hire shop they’d started from.”

Let me say that the photograph had a more serious purpose than simply to display us as objects of ridicule. We were on the Ashburton river to help with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s annual bird count. I must also add that the photograph is completely fraudulent. At that time our involvement with Forest and Bird had been all of five minutes. We turned up to help with the bird count purely on a whim only to find ourselves hustled into the limelight by Ashburton’s merciless paparazzi.

Neither are we ornithological by nature. Any interest I had in birds was extinguished by a childhood in poultry. My father kept hundreds of hens, to whom I was enslaved as egg-collector, muck-raker and slaughterer; an experience that scarred me for life. Sylvia, growing up in the shadow of Liverpool’s docks, believed wildlife existed only in picture books until she came to New Zealand.

But we are fond of the outdoors and we joined the bird count mainly for the pleasure of spending a day strolling down the river. My expectations of actually counting birds were very low. Years of tramping have taught me that there are few birds in New Zealand’s great outdoors. There is a gulf between the iconic image of New Zealand as a country teeming with exotic bird life and the reality of bush and mountain landscapes where nothing moves or twitters except the occasional wood pigeon or fantail.

Like many who enjoy the mountains and bush my imagination has been captured at times by stories from early settlers in New Zealand describing vast flocks of wildfowl, forests shaking with birdlife and the deafening peal of the dawn chorus. A childhood hero was Richard Henry, New Zealand’s first genuine wildlife ranger, who fought the rising tide of rats and stoats in a doomed effort to save the kakapo of Dusky Sound.

For years I foolishly allowed myself to believe that the decimation of our native birdlife was firmly in the past. The publicity attached to heroic “snatched from the jaws of extinction” stories of the takahe, the kakapo and the Chatham Islands Robin suckered me into believing our wildlife’s darkest days were over.

Only recently, when I realised it has been years since I saw tui on Banks Peninsula, did I discover that life for our native bird populations is as bad as it has ever been – and often worse.

And we – humans – are the problem. We’re not always the immediate cause of birdlife decline - I believe the tuis of Banks Peninsula were devastated by the big snow of ’92 – but our activities, especially the destruction of habitat and food sources, are behind all the disasters.

Nowhere is this more true than in Canterbury where only tiny scraps of indigenous habitat remain and native birds eke out a poor existence on the fringes of highly modified environments. Efforts to revive and extend native ecosystems, creating ‘islands’ of bush and wetland that enable remnant populations of birds to connect, are taking shape and need urgent support.

With all this in mind we were delighted to find that the Ashburton River bed, while not exactly teeming with birdlife, is home to more varieties of birds than I imagined. By the end of the day I had recorded 19 species of birds, some in quite large numbers.

I enjoyed myself. I can now tell a tern from a plover, a stilt from an oystercatcher. I know that blue herons are really called white-faced herons and that a dotterel is not a thrush.

I discovered too that on a fine spring day, with wildflowers abundant and the sound of birdsong in the air, the Ashburton River bed possesses greater charm than I imagined. It will never become a tourist attraction but it’s a fine place to spend a little time, even in a silly hat and gaiters.

2007-11-19T10:37:00.000+13:00

The Passionless People?
17th November 2007

Thirty years ago the New Zealand journalist and broadcaster Gordon McLauchlan wrote a book called The Passionless People in which, with surgical precision, he laid bare our shortcomings and rubbed salt into them.

‘The outstanding characteristics of the New Zealander,’ McLauchlan spat, ‘are his drab sameness and his emotional numbness, his inability to relate one to another with warmth, and his fear, even horror, of change.’ Don’t feel smug, girls, he meant you too.

McLauchlan castigated us for having no moral or social philosophy and no dreams beyond a slavish devotion to materialism. Our society was wholly divided among factional pressure groups ‘which exert their power almost exclusively for selfish needs without any sense of a total community.’

To read his book today is a slap in the eye for aging liberals like me who hark back to pre-Rogernomics New Zealand as a place of social justice and equal opportunities. ‘It all went wrong in the dreadful 80s,’ we whine, ‘when we sold our souls to the market place and pawned our ideals for the quick fix of consumerism.’ To believe McLauchlan we were as venal and self-centred thirty years ago as we are today.

McLauchlan’s writings from the 70s, and my own misgivings about the state of society today, may be nothing more than the lurch as one hits the downdraft of middle age. I notice in myself how thinning hair and narrowing prospects slide easily into cynicism.

But I’m intrigued by the word ‘passion.’ Are we a passionless people? In my memory the 70s brimmed with passion, usually in the back seats of cars. There we casually flipped the noun into a verb. We pashed.

Today we claim passion in all things. I have attended three secondary school prize-givings in the past week where speaker after speaker has exhorted our school leavers to embrace life with passion.

The message is getting through. The CVs I’ve been reading from beginning teachers ooze passion at every pore. These brave young people are passionate about all sorts of things: netball, snowboarding, various educational theorists, their cats, children and, mercifully, teaching.

This is commendable but I don’t think it’s what McLauchlan meant. He would say we have become too glib with the word, harnessing it to serve ego and ambition. In his mind the passion we lack as a people is not the passion of individual pursuits but of engaging with others at a level that transforms relationships and, eventually, society. According to McLauchlan we need to become ‘people-orientated’ and ‘express our emotions.’

McLauchlan is not the first or most recent person to chide kiwis for lacking strong emotions. But while we are not usually comfortable with those among us who lay their feelings bare, as Tame Iti would vouch, I find it hard to accept that we do not possess strong emotions nor find ways to express these to the common good.

Here’s a case in point. I visited the Christchurch A&P Show on Thursday and found myself, as usual, absorbed by the wood-chopping. As a spectator sport wood-chopping has remained unchanged since my youth, except that the singlets are now blue where once they were black. It is everything McLauchlan complained about: pragmatic, physical and monosyllabic – an emotion-free zone. The focus is firmly on log and axe, human interaction is minimal, victory is largely unremarked.

But for me wood-chopping oozes passion; you just have to look carefully for the signs. There is passion in the total focus on the task and the close camaraderie of a common purpose. Above all, there is passion in the relationship between man, axe and log. These large, rough men handle their axes with gentleness and reverence. They treat the logs with the respect accorded to a worthy adversary. When the whistle blows and the call is made to ‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly. Then the count, heft and swing; the arc of the blade through the air and the first bite into the grain.

In a different culture these axemen would be bullfighters. They would wear tight, sequinned bolero jackets and small pointy shoes. They would pirouette and twirl their red capes, every movement perfectly balanced and crackling with emotion.

Gordon McLauchlan yearned for immigrants from rich and self-confident cultures whose influence would presumably arouse some passion in us and make us better than we are. Thirty years later his solution seems naïve. We look out at a world where even the oldest and most self-assured cultures are just as capable as ourselves at messing things up. Often those societies that seem most passionate are also the most destructive.

As a society we may continually struggle to express ourselves. We may seem dull compared to more flamboyant communities. But to say we are passionless is to confuse decoration with substance.

2007-11-19T10:32:00.000+13:00

Trevor Mallard – From Dead Duck to Albatross
3rd November 2007

I have never thrown a punch in anger and have only been on the receiving end once. That was when I eleven and had been a smart arse to Bruce Brown at school.

He said he’d sort me out and at the end of the day he invited me, this is true, around the back of the bike shed. I followed him around the back, a bit bemused by it all, and copped his fist full in the face.

I sat down in consternation and started crying. So did Bruce – he’d connected with my cheekbone and I think it hurt him more than me. There we sat, looking at each other, tears streaming down our faces. After a while we got to our feet and went off to our respective homes. We were so embarrassed neither of us ever said a word about it to anybody else.

Oh, how Trevor Mallard must be wishing he’d chosen a quiet bike shed or a bit of long grass where he and Tau could indulge their tie-grappling and face punching.

Like most stupid behaviour, it is not the action itself that does the damage. Trevor, I imagine, quietly replays that left hook to Tau’s head with a degree of satisfaction. No, it is being caught that brings shame. Even accepting that adrenalin triumphed over reason in those few critical moments in the parliamentary lobby it is still inconceivable that Mallard would do something quite so stupid in the least private place in New Zealand.

He could hardly deny it and, to his credit I suppose, he hasn’t tried to deny or even defend the act. A week ago he must have thought, as we did, that he was a dead duck, his political career finished. If you punch somebody at work you get the sack, right? There was no way Helen Clark could keep him in cabinet, and possibly even in caucus. Surely she would send him down the road in the footsteps of David Benson-Pope, Taito Philip Field and John Tamihere. She would reason that Mallard’s presence would open Labour to ongoing ridicule and do untold harm to her government’s remaining credibility.

But we were wrong. This week Mallard is resurrected. The cabinet is reshuffled, the deck is dealt and, crikey! there are the same old cards and, grinning up like the joker, is Mallard himself, down from seventh place to tenth but still in the game.

The opposition must be delighted. Mallard’s continued presence in the cabinet, where they can take potshots at him to their heart’s content, simply adds strength to their bow ahead of next year’s election.

The move to keep Mallard is so bizarre I wonder if a more subtle strategy is at work here. I was in England in 2001 when the deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, thumped a young detractor during an election campaign. The media gasped, Tony Blair’s government held its breath and – their ratings went through the roof. Does Helen think Trevor’s tiff will give her government the same bounce? It’s hard to imagine.

Or is there a dark logic in Helen’s choice of portfolios for Trevor in the cabinet reshuffle? Does she think the Environment, Broadcasting and Labour ministries need a pugilistic rev up? Will we see Trevor descend, fists flailing, into the greenie protest movement? He’d probably win a few votes as long as he doesn’t deck a giant snail or tuatara. Broadcasting of course cries out for biffo. Trevor will be itching to take on the journos after recent events and we have a fine tradition of politicians thumping reporters – remember Bob Jones?

But these are frivolous thoughts. In reality, the Prime Minister will rue her decision to stick with Mallard.

In Samuel Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor who kills an albatross brings a curse upon his ship and its crew. He is doomed to watch his crewmates die, tormented by thirst and demons. They in turn condemn him to hell on earth by hanging the dead albatross around his neck.

Helen Clark may find she has resurrected her dead duck only to discover she has an albatross hanging around the neck of the Labour government from here to the election.