Old Mugs Chase Auld Mug
16th June 2007
Headline writers around the country have been celebrating Emirates Team New Zealand’s win in the Louis Vuitton cup. “Airline Snatches Handbag!” is our favourite.
But celebrations have quickly soured with the Auckland City Council’s declaration that it no longer has room to host the event should Team New Zealand return with the Auld Mug.
Since New Zealand lost the cup in 2003 the Viaduct Basin on Auckland’s waterfront has been turned into upmarket apartments. Boatsheds and bleachers have vanished and the display case that housed the trophy now holds a model of a proposed motorway.
Auckland mayor, Dick Hubbard (nicknamed ‘Cereal-Killer’ by Council staff), holds little hope of the event returning to Auckland. “Frankly, we at the Council can’t imagine how we’ll accommodate the America’s Cup back in Auckland. The waterfront’s full. The only place we could redevelop is the container wharf and you saw what happened last year when some bloke suggested building a rugby stadium there.”
Mr Hubbard admitted that the prospect of Team New Zealand regaining the America’s Cup had never occurred to him. “Personally, we at the Council thought they were crap last time and couldn’t see them getting within a bull’s roar of challenging the Swiss. We were quietly relieved. After that last regatta we’d had enough of America’s Cup sailors with their skinny arses and blond tips.”
But the story is about to get messier. In an exclusive interview with The Ashburton Guardian’s Valencia-based yachting reporter, a source close to Team New Zealand has revealed that Auckland City Council staff have suggested to Grant Dalton and Dean Barker that they deliberately lose the final to avoid embarrassing the City of Sails.
The source, who can’t be named because we invented him (should we strike that out? Ed.), describes emails from Council staff offering strategies for losing races.
“Basically, they just lifted our ideas from the last campaign: you know, like losing the mast or filling up with water or putting all the fat guys on the boat at the same time. Basically anything that will slow us down but look like an accident.”
Dalton’s response has been swift. In a circular to crew and supporters he condemned the actions of Auckland officials and threw an invitation to other New Zealand towns to host the next America’s Cup should Team New Zealand beat Alinghi.
“Auckland sucks,” seethed a bellicose Dalton. “They argue about raising water rates but can’t provide a decent bit of water to hold a boat race.”
The prospect of hosting the next America’s Cup has excited local politicians throughout New Zealand. Councillors from Coromandel to Cromwell, with one eye on the forthcoming local body elections, are launching sub-committees and feasibility studies in an effort to lure the glittering prize to their district. Even being land-locked is no deterrent. Ohakune, in the central North Island, has formed a yacht club while the Hanmer Springs Community Board, in what must be the most poorly researched America’s Cup bid in history, has offered to build a new golf course.
In a further exclusive the Guardian can reveal that Ashburton District Councillors are also keen to get in on the act. At a series of late night meetings in Mare O’Malley’s woodshed Councillors have been putting the finishing touches to an America’s Cup bid that will stun both local rate payers and the yachting world. Our reporter, embedded in the hard drive of the District Engineer’s laptop, reveals a startling self-confidence among our leaders that their bid will succeed.
“Mid-Canterbury has a fine sailing tradition,” mayor O’Malley is reported to have said. “I regularly play with boats in the bath.”
Planning has advanced to the stage of selecting a local venue. Early discussions centred on the domain duck pond until ‘Commodore’ Councillor Holmes scuppered that plan with a few photos of America’s Cup yachts and some technical advice.
“They’re quite big,” he asserted.
Other venues were discussed and discarded, including the Rangitata Diversion Race (“too narrow”), Lake Hood (“too flat”) and the Ashburton river (“too upmarket”).
Eventually Councillors decided to construct a purpose-built America’s Cup lake as part of the new swimming pool and sports stadium. That project will be fast-tracked to be completed by mid-2008 should Team New Zealand win in Valencia. With Councillors favouring a downtown waterfront the preferred location for the lake is the block of land between Burnett Street and Walnut Avenue, running from West Street to the top of Alford Forest Road.
Funding for the project will be a one-off special rate of $37,000 per household. Councillor Beaven complained that this would be hard for low income households. His objections were dismissed. “People can either get in behind this bid or start cheering for Alinghi,” growled Councillor Holmes.
The America’s Cup final has just got a lot more interesting.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Plandemic Panning
2nd June 2007
When the Man from the Ministry arrived at the seminar he was so encumbered with baggage I thought he was on his way to or from the airport. Apart from the obligatory laptop – the modern manager’s bowler hat and brolly – he carried an oversize shoulder bag and a smaller briefcase.
As we watched – twenty-five primary school principals in a stuffy room on a slow Monday afternoon - he unpacked his bags, producing a data projector, two large speakers and a tangle of cables which he meticulously re-ordered, his face a study in concentration. We waited, trying to guess his purpose.
When all was prepared the Man from the Ministry delivered a short prologue – “You are about to see Operation Cruikshank” – and pressed Enter.
Operation Cruikshank flashed onto the big screen at the front of the room. There was a news desk, a brief opening title, and a severe young woman describing an outbreak of avian bird flu spreading through New Zealand. We crossed to the parliamentary reporter standing in front of the beehive, cut to pictures of soldiers sealing off streets and a selection of closeups showing boxes of medication and white-coated health workers with face masks.
Operation Cruikshank rolled out like a snore. Talking heads from government agencies and security services described how they will react when the pandemic – bird flu or other – reaches our shores. A slightly deranged traffic light flashed coloured security levels as the epidemic expanded – from orange to yellow and final, fatal red.
By the end of the afternoon the authors of Operation Cruikshank had convinced us that when the long-anticipated pandemic strikes we will talk the bloody thing to a standstill.
I have endured several pandemic planning presentations. There is a small, bilious corner of the public service dedicated to, nay, enthralled by the theatrical potential of disaster preparation. It is a bureaucrat’s dream, a fantasy of forms and regulations, of action plans, backups and contingencies, of Orders-In-Council and sirens in the streets.
Civil service planners seem unphased by some small realities: the much-anticipated bird flu pandemic shows no sign of rousing itself and even if it does their plans will never work. On one hand pandemic planning is a no-brainer, on the other it is a hospital pass.
The plans will never work because there seems to be no coherent set of responses to mitigate the effects of a determined virus.
Take the influenza pandemic of 1919, for example. Even with the country on a wartime footing the epidemic went where it pleased. The Man from the Ministry reminded us that we are far less well prepared today.
“Oh, I dunno,” intoned a voice from the back of the room. “They may have had the army, but we have powerpoint.”
And sadly, we do. We have, through the miracle of information technology, the capacity to tie ourselves in knots.
I am exhorted by the Men from the Ministry to prepare a pandemic plan for my school. I am encouraged in this by the provision of hundreds of pages of forms
and spurred by the promise that the Education Review Office, the government’s pitbull, will audit my preparations on their next visit.
There are schools in New Zealand where pandemic planning runs to 40 pages of densely typed procedures, where committees and sub-committees have been formed, wardens appointed and students drilled to divert sneezes into their elbows. When pandemic strikes the students in these schools will be laid waste while staff decipher procedural point 44, sub-clause 23B.
Diligent schools hinge their preparation on sending work home to students. They conjure hopeful scenarios of teachers in their own homes emailing assignments to students, marking the completed returned work and generally carrying on as normal.
The Man from the Ministry burst that bubble. “Keep cyberspace free from unnecessary communications”, he said. With the population at home and the regular infrastructure curtailed the internet will be needed for essential communication. We must avoid overloading it with worksheets. Send home a few paper tasks when the kids leave and forget anything else.
As we suffer this plandemic I regret lost opportunities to join other, more vigorous, branches of the public service. I bet pandemic planning is more exciting for police or firefighters. I bet they don’t have to endure Operation Cruikshank. I imagine them throwing rings of steel around neighbourhoods, storming central city buildings, letting off smoke bombs, squirting fire hoses and shouting “bang! You’re dead!” All this while I sit on my backside in a stuffy room.
I’ve thought hard this week about pandemic preparations for my school. I’ve consulted staff and community and we’ve come up with a plan. It is simple and, we believe, effective.
1. Close the school.
2. Reopen when we’re told to.
That should do the trick.
2nd June 2007
When the Man from the Ministry arrived at the seminar he was so encumbered with baggage I thought he was on his way to or from the airport. Apart from the obligatory laptop – the modern manager’s bowler hat and brolly – he carried an oversize shoulder bag and a smaller briefcase.
As we watched – twenty-five primary school principals in a stuffy room on a slow Monday afternoon - he unpacked his bags, producing a data projector, two large speakers and a tangle of cables which he meticulously re-ordered, his face a study in concentration. We waited, trying to guess his purpose.
When all was prepared the Man from the Ministry delivered a short prologue – “You are about to see Operation Cruikshank” – and pressed Enter.
Operation Cruikshank flashed onto the big screen at the front of the room. There was a news desk, a brief opening title, and a severe young woman describing an outbreak of avian bird flu spreading through New Zealand. We crossed to the parliamentary reporter standing in front of the beehive, cut to pictures of soldiers sealing off streets and a selection of closeups showing boxes of medication and white-coated health workers with face masks.
Operation Cruikshank rolled out like a snore. Talking heads from government agencies and security services described how they will react when the pandemic – bird flu or other – reaches our shores. A slightly deranged traffic light flashed coloured security levels as the epidemic expanded – from orange to yellow and final, fatal red.
By the end of the afternoon the authors of Operation Cruikshank had convinced us that when the long-anticipated pandemic strikes we will talk the bloody thing to a standstill.
I have endured several pandemic planning presentations. There is a small, bilious corner of the public service dedicated to, nay, enthralled by the theatrical potential of disaster preparation. It is a bureaucrat’s dream, a fantasy of forms and regulations, of action plans, backups and contingencies, of Orders-In-Council and sirens in the streets.
Civil service planners seem unphased by some small realities: the much-anticipated bird flu pandemic shows no sign of rousing itself and even if it does their plans will never work. On one hand pandemic planning is a no-brainer, on the other it is a hospital pass.
The plans will never work because there seems to be no coherent set of responses to mitigate the effects of a determined virus.
Take the influenza pandemic of 1919, for example. Even with the country on a wartime footing the epidemic went where it pleased. The Man from the Ministry reminded us that we are far less well prepared today.
“Oh, I dunno,” intoned a voice from the back of the room. “They may have had the army, but we have powerpoint.”
And sadly, we do. We have, through the miracle of information technology, the capacity to tie ourselves in knots.
I am exhorted by the Men from the Ministry to prepare a pandemic plan for my school. I am encouraged in this by the provision of hundreds of pages of forms
and spurred by the promise that the Education Review Office, the government’s pitbull, will audit my preparations on their next visit.
There are schools in New Zealand where pandemic planning runs to 40 pages of densely typed procedures, where committees and sub-committees have been formed, wardens appointed and students drilled to divert sneezes into their elbows. When pandemic strikes the students in these schools will be laid waste while staff decipher procedural point 44, sub-clause 23B.
Diligent schools hinge their preparation on sending work home to students. They conjure hopeful scenarios of teachers in their own homes emailing assignments to students, marking the completed returned work and generally carrying on as normal.
The Man from the Ministry burst that bubble. “Keep cyberspace free from unnecessary communications”, he said. With the population at home and the regular infrastructure curtailed the internet will be needed for essential communication. We must avoid overloading it with worksheets. Send home a few paper tasks when the kids leave and forget anything else.
As we suffer this plandemic I regret lost opportunities to join other, more vigorous, branches of the public service. I bet pandemic planning is more exciting for police or firefighters. I bet they don’t have to endure Operation Cruikshank. I imagine them throwing rings of steel around neighbourhoods, storming central city buildings, letting off smoke bombs, squirting fire hoses and shouting “bang! You’re dead!” All this while I sit on my backside in a stuffy room.
I’ve thought hard this week about pandemic preparations for my school. I’ve consulted staff and community and we’ve come up with a plan. It is simple and, we believe, effective.
1. Close the school.
2. Reopen when we’re told to.
That should do the trick.
Monday, May 21, 2007
The Lessons of Salem
19th May 2007
As a child I was taught not to tell lies: “a lie will always catch you out,” my parents told me. I taught the same message to my children.
Lies, of course, do not always catch you out. Some lies remain watertight. Some even become enshrined as truths.
Fifty years ago Arthur Miller wrote about lies in his play The Crucible, which was brilliantly staged at Trott’s Garden this week by Ashburton College drama students. Miller explored how a lie can take root within a community and spread its branches to ensnare the good, the bad and the indifferent.
The Crucible tells the story of the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, three hundred years ago. A group of young girls, caught dancing in the forest in breach of the puritanical strictures of their community, lie to protect themselves by laying accusations of witch-craft. At first the accused are the powerless and outcast in the community. As the lie gathers strength, nurtured by religious hysteria, it is used to settle old scores and remove rivals.
As the community devours itself confession becomes the only lifeline. If you confess to being in thrall to the devil, declare the priests and judges, you are on the path to redemption. Your salvation will be assured if you help identify the perpetrators of evil.
Eventually hundreds of Salem’s citizens were accused of witch-craft and demonology. Seventy-two were sentenced to death and half of these were hanged.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible not simply to retell an old tale. He wrote it at the height of the Cold War, when America was swept by a wave of anti-communist hysteria. Senator Joe McCarthy conducted an inquisition to uproot communist infiltration of American society and business. ‘McCarthyism’ became a synonym for witch-hunt.
The Crucible reminds us that however civilised we may believe ourselves to be we remain vulnerable to our imaginations. When imagined fears are manipulated into collective hysteria we are no more civilised than the puritans of Salem.
Recent history is thick with witch-hunts. Technology and the instruments of power have enabled many of these to be enacted on a scale unimaginable in seventeenth century Salem.
In the most successful cases an entire nation can be subdued through a regime of terror and lies, where the only safety is to become an informant. Stalin did it brilliantly in the Soviet Union. Hitler, Mussolini and Mao Tse Tung were masters of the craft. The catalogue unfolds - apartheid South Africa, North Korea, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and poor Zimbabwe today.
Even in New Zealand – a relatively level-headed society - we are not immune to witch-hunts. At moments we are as vulnerable as any other community to evil portent, bubbling conspiracy, cloak-and-dagger intrigue and the ever-present threats of our neighbours.
For evidence we need look no further than this week’s press. Sandwiched between David Bain and the budget was yet another story about sexual deviancy and corruption in the police. This time it centred on the viewing of a pornographic video 25 years ago.
At one level the story seems a scurrilous attempt to malign the police commissioner, Howard Broad, who was present at the event. Broad took his cue from Salem, owned up to his part in the incident and re-directed the media’s attention to the real culprits.
The story then focussed on two former Dunedin police officers trading accusations to settle old scores. Then, like all witch-hunts, it grew rapidly into a story of widespread corruption among Dunedin police in the 1980s and 1990s, with harassment and violation of women police officers, stand-over tactics at local brothels and a culture of machismo and bullying.
By day two it was drawing in the Exclusive Brethren, David Bain and suggestions of a cover-up in the recently completed enquiry into police conduct.
Watching this story unfold I was reminded of the atmosphere in Christchurch during the trial of Peter Ellis in the early 1990s. The city was enthralled by the story of sexual abuse of children at the Civic Creche. There were allegations of satanic cults, of secret rooms in the Cranmer Centre where children were detained and abused by leading members of the community. It was rubbish but it poisoned life for a group of innocent people and made many others edgy for years.
The media often plays a mischievous role in these stories. Once a story gathers momentum few journalists pull their punches or stop to consider the veracity of what they are about to print or broadcast.
In Salem it took extraordinary courage to restore sanity. A few leading citizens, accused of witch-craft, refused to lie in order to save themselves. Their executions, patently unjust, jolted the community to its senses.
When faced with a witch-hunt of any sort we must refuse to buy into it. We must not blindly believe the last thing we heard on the news. And we must not tell lies – even to ourselves.
19th May 2007
As a child I was taught not to tell lies: “a lie will always catch you out,” my parents told me. I taught the same message to my children.
Lies, of course, do not always catch you out. Some lies remain watertight. Some even become enshrined as truths.
Fifty years ago Arthur Miller wrote about lies in his play The Crucible, which was brilliantly staged at Trott’s Garden this week by Ashburton College drama students. Miller explored how a lie can take root within a community and spread its branches to ensnare the good, the bad and the indifferent.
The Crucible tells the story of the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, three hundred years ago. A group of young girls, caught dancing in the forest in breach of the puritanical strictures of their community, lie to protect themselves by laying accusations of witch-craft. At first the accused are the powerless and outcast in the community. As the lie gathers strength, nurtured by religious hysteria, it is used to settle old scores and remove rivals.
As the community devours itself confession becomes the only lifeline. If you confess to being in thrall to the devil, declare the priests and judges, you are on the path to redemption. Your salvation will be assured if you help identify the perpetrators of evil.
Eventually hundreds of Salem’s citizens were accused of witch-craft and demonology. Seventy-two were sentenced to death and half of these were hanged.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible not simply to retell an old tale. He wrote it at the height of the Cold War, when America was swept by a wave of anti-communist hysteria. Senator Joe McCarthy conducted an inquisition to uproot communist infiltration of American society and business. ‘McCarthyism’ became a synonym for witch-hunt.
The Crucible reminds us that however civilised we may believe ourselves to be we remain vulnerable to our imaginations. When imagined fears are manipulated into collective hysteria we are no more civilised than the puritans of Salem.
Recent history is thick with witch-hunts. Technology and the instruments of power have enabled many of these to be enacted on a scale unimaginable in seventeenth century Salem.
In the most successful cases an entire nation can be subdued through a regime of terror and lies, where the only safety is to become an informant. Stalin did it brilliantly in the Soviet Union. Hitler, Mussolini and Mao Tse Tung were masters of the craft. The catalogue unfolds - apartheid South Africa, North Korea, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and poor Zimbabwe today.
Even in New Zealand – a relatively level-headed society - we are not immune to witch-hunts. At moments we are as vulnerable as any other community to evil portent, bubbling conspiracy, cloak-and-dagger intrigue and the ever-present threats of our neighbours.
For evidence we need look no further than this week’s press. Sandwiched between David Bain and the budget was yet another story about sexual deviancy and corruption in the police. This time it centred on the viewing of a pornographic video 25 years ago.
At one level the story seems a scurrilous attempt to malign the police commissioner, Howard Broad, who was present at the event. Broad took his cue from Salem, owned up to his part in the incident and re-directed the media’s attention to the real culprits.
The story then focussed on two former Dunedin police officers trading accusations to settle old scores. Then, like all witch-hunts, it grew rapidly into a story of widespread corruption among Dunedin police in the 1980s and 1990s, with harassment and violation of women police officers, stand-over tactics at local brothels and a culture of machismo and bullying.
By day two it was drawing in the Exclusive Brethren, David Bain and suggestions of a cover-up in the recently completed enquiry into police conduct.
Watching this story unfold I was reminded of the atmosphere in Christchurch during the trial of Peter Ellis in the early 1990s. The city was enthralled by the story of sexual abuse of children at the Civic Creche. There were allegations of satanic cults, of secret rooms in the Cranmer Centre where children were detained and abused by leading members of the community. It was rubbish but it poisoned life for a group of innocent people and made many others edgy for years.
The media often plays a mischievous role in these stories. Once a story gathers momentum few journalists pull their punches or stop to consider the veracity of what they are about to print or broadcast.
In Salem it took extraordinary courage to restore sanity. A few leading citizens, accused of witch-craft, refused to lie in order to save themselves. Their executions, patently unjust, jolted the community to its senses.
When faced with a witch-hunt of any sort we must refuse to buy into it. We must not blindly believe the last thing we heard on the news. And we must not tell lies – even to ourselves.
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