An ego punctured, but probably only temporarily

Tau Henare is reportedly bitterly disappointed at being passed over for the plum post of Speaker. But what inflated sense of self-regard could possibly have led this swaggering blowhard to believe he deserved the job in the first place? Henare's political career has been utterly undistinguished other than by his predilection for tweeting - which says a lot, given that it demands neither intellect nor application - and his exchange of blows with Trevor Mallard (so much for the dignity of Parliament, which the Speaker is expected to uphold). Appointing him to succeed Lockwood Smith would have made about as much sense as making me the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Who are the worst drivers?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 5.)

I am about to go where few male columnists are reckless enough to stray.

Having fortified myself with several stiff single malt whiskies, I am going to venture an opinion on the relative merits of male and female drivers.

This is high-risk territory, since it’s well established that women drivers are one of those subjects that only other women are allowed to comment on. But before female readers erupt in fury, anticipating another tiresome round of male derision, I should explain that I’m on their side.

In fact my purpose in writing this column is to defend them against belittling comments made by … a woman.

Writing recently in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Jessica Fellowes observed that when she saw motorists hogging the middle of the motorway while driving under the speed limit, or blocking an intersection while deciding which way to turn, or changing their mind about whether to let a mother with a pram cross the road, nine times out of 10 it was a female driver.

“It always makes me furious,” she wrote, “not because bad driving is dangerous, but because she is letting the side down.”

Fellowes went on to argue that while women may have fewer accidents, that doesn’t make them better drivers. “Pootling at 65 kmh in the inside lane on the motorway may prevent you from crashing into anyone,” she wrote, “but it is probably causing a pile-up in the outside lane as other drivers turn their heads to swear at you for forcing them to overtake at high speeds.”

She concluded that when all is said and done, men are generally better drivers.

This would be an incendiary claim if it came from a male, although many men may secretly agree. But I believe Fellowes is wrong.

Yes, men are technically better drivers, generally speaking. Most men have a more natural affinity with anything mechanical – although oddly enough, I’ve known far more men than women who didn’t drive at all.

A male driver is more likely to master a hill start without too much difficulty. He’s more likely to be at ease with a manual rather than an automatic transmission, less troubled by having to reverse (I know a woman whose husband has to back the car out of the garage for her) and more comfortable with parallel parking, which some women drivers go to great lengths to avoid – even if it means leaving the car several blocks from wherever they want to go.

Obviously there are exceptions to this rule – a British survey indicated that 11 per cent of men avoid parallel parking – but in general terms, men are more confident drivers: more willing than women to back a trailer down a narrow driveway, tackle a rough 4WD track or enjoy the thrill of driving fast on a twisty mountain road.

But does that necessarily make them better drivers in the broader sense? Confidence is a double-edged sword. Men’s mastery of the technical aspects of driving may lead them to take risks that women, for lack of confidence, avoid.

The great British Formula One driver Stirling Moss once said there were two things no man would admit doing badly: driving and making love.

Combine a surfeit of that self-confidence with the aggression and competitiveness that comes with testosterone, and you have a much greater risk of an accident.

It all comes down to how you define a good driver. Is it one who is technically competent, or one who doesn’t take silly risks – even if that means sometimes being more cautious than is strictly necessary?

Jessica Fellowes seems to judge drivers purely by their technical skills. In that case I wonder how she would rate boy racers, many of whom are skilful drivers – they know how to put a car into a controlled drift, for example, or apply opposite lock to control a skid  – but are tragically accident-prone because they lack maturity and sound judgement.

This much I can say with absolute conviction: in nearly 45 years of driving in several countries, the worst driving displays I have witnessed have invariably been by men.

Some of these men may have been technically competent drivers, but dangerous nonetheless because of their aggression and ego. Put some men behind the wheel and they behave like strutting bantam roosters, regarding every other male on the road as a (sexual?) rival. There are no road users more menacing than these macho primitives, and sadly New Zealand is full of them.

I don’t recall ever seeing such behaviour from a woman driver, although they are not without their faults. Despite being labelled the gentle sex, many women accelerate harder and brake more sharply than they need to. It makes for a jerky drive, burns fuel unnecessarily and wears the brakes out prematurely. But it could hardly be called life-threatening.

More worrying, and just as hard to explain, is the tendency of many women drivers to tailgate, often at speed. Some men do it too, but usually for the purpose of harassing or intimidating the driver in front – the human equivalent of the bantam rooster’s aggressive body language in the barnyard. Why so many women do it is a mystery.

Arguably the worst drivers of all are older men, who remain convinced of their superior driving skills but become stubbornly oblivious to every other road user. The worst possible combination, in my experience, is an elderly man wearing a hat and driving an old ute.

I’m not ashamed to say that only last week I dobbed one such older driver in to a highway patrolman after he crossed the Rimutaka Hill, between the Wairarapa and Wellington, at a pace that would have made a funeral procession look like the Monaco Grand Prix.

Despite having plenty of opportunities to pull over and let faster vehicles pass, he doggedly held his ground even when more than a dozen cars had backed up behind him. Inevitably, impatient drivers then began taking risks. Three cars pulled out and overtook in places where clearly it wasn’t safe to do so.

The cop I alerted, who then stopped the errant vehicle (a tired old van), told me later that the driver, a man in his late 60s, was nonplussed; he didn’t realise he’d done anything wrong. Perhaps he thought that mirror thingy in the centre of the windscreen was for hanging things on.

 

Where do I get my ticket?

What a difference a hyphen can make.

Today's Dominion Post contains an advertisement for the annual Carols by Candelight concert hosted by Nick Tansley at Wellington's Waitangi Park.

It includes the words "Alcohol Free". If that were the case, every freeloading drunk in the lower half of the North Island would be there.

But put a hyphen between those two words and it conveys quite a different meaning - the one I'm sure the organisers intended.

Cooper's wine guide has become a door stop

Michael Cooper's latest Buyer's Guide to New Zealand Wines arrived in the mail a few days ago.

It's a veritable door stop. The very first edition of Cooper's annual guide, published in 1992, ran to 280 pages and listed more than 800 wines. The latest edition has 670 pages and reviews 3260 wines.

Whereas you could have stuffed the 1992 edition into your back pocket, at a pinch, while scanning the shelves at your local wine shop, you'd risk a hernia doing the same with the latest version.

Quite apart from being a useful reference book for risk-averse wine lovers, the Buyer's Guide doubles as a chronicle of the New Zealand wine industry. If you want to see how winemaking in New Zealand has evolved and grown, you need only compare the various editions over the years.

Whereas the 1992 edition reviewed only three syrahs, the 2013 edition has 30 pages of them. But the reverse is true too: the inaugural guide reviewed 34 muller-thurgaus (remember them?), but the latest book has only two. Many of the wine varieties listed in the new book - such as albarino, arneis, gruner-veltliner, tempranillo and nebbiolo - were unheard of, other than by wine nerds, when the first edition was published.

The book has evolved too. Cooper reviews the 2012 vintage conditions in the various wine regions (although whether casual wine buyers would be interested in such esoteric detail is a moot point), lists his two best buys of the latest releases (one white, one red - buy the book if you want to know what they are) and continues his practice of nominating "super classic", "classic" and "potential classic" New Zealand wines.

Unsurprisingly, he no longer feels it necessary to include, as he did in 1992, a section discussing the relative merits of cask (aka bag-in-box) and bottled wines. That's another measure of how the wine industry has matured.

Cooper has been writing about wine since the mid-1980s  (the first edition of his Wines and Vineyards of New Zealand came out in 1984) and has earned a full-time living from it since 1991, most recently as wine columnist in The Listener. In that time his annual guide has seen off at least two competitors.

His approach has changed little. He's meticulous and conscientious to a fault. For many wine writers, part of the attraction of the job is being schmoozed by wine companies - treated to free trips and lavish lunches, bombarded with free wine and generally made to feel very important (all of which wine companies do very well). But from my observations, Cooper is utterly immune to such blandishments. He has a job to do and he takes it very seriously.

In fact if I have a criticism of him, it's that he takes it a little too earnestly. Wine is about enjoyment, after all, and I sometimes feel that Michael could afford to lighten up a bit. But if that's the most damning thing that can be said about him (and I believe it is),  his reputation as "New Zealand's most acclaimed wine writer" (to quote the publisher's blurb) is safe.

[Michael Cooper's Buyer's Guide to New Zealand Wines 2013 is published by Hodder Moa and has a recommended retail price of $39.99.]

Public must own constitutional review

I recently wrote an article for The Listener backgrounding the constitutional review currently being undertaken in line with the confidence and supply agreement negotiated in 2008 between the National and Maori parties. I didn't take a position on the issue but thought (as did The Listener) that it was crucial people were aware the review was taking place, given its profound implications.

It can't be left to the political elite to determine our constitutional arrangements. On this issue, above all others, the public must have the final word - which is pretty much what constitutional law expert Professor James Allan is saying here in a commentary for Muriel Newman's Centre for Political Research.

Sellman resorts to demagoguery

An article in yesterday's Dominion Post shows how readily anti-alcohol campaigners resort to shonky propaganda techniques more often associated with demagoguery.

The article examines the influence of scientific advice on government policy and notes that the government appears to have ignored the views of chief scientific adviser Sir Peter Gluckman on alcohol law reform.

Commenting on this, Professor Doug Sellman is quoted as saying: "The PM gets advice from all sorts of places, and he's obviously taking his advice from the alcohol industry over his science adviser."

So ... if the government decides not to follow the advice of Sir Peter Gluckman, it can only be because it has been captured by wealthy liquor barons. This conveniently plays to  public prejudices in the same way as populist politicians like to blame identifiable "villains" -  whether they be black people, immigrants, Jews or foreign powers - for whatever's upsetting people.

But Sellman's statement disregards something that Gluckman himself acknowledges in the same article: namely, that governments have to weigh up all manner of factors in making policy decisions. "Expert" advice is part of that mix, but as Gluckman says: "Science and scientific knowledge is not the only thing that makes policy. We don't live in a technocratically dominated society, we live in a participatory democracy."

Clearly, Gluckman accepts that governments don't make decisions just to gratify "experts". Politicians are often in a position to assess broader factors which academics, with their narrow specialist focus, may ignore or overlook. (If politicians get it wrong, we can vote them out - a fate that taxpayer-funded academics, no matter how flawed their arguments, escape.)

Sellman, on the other hand, suggests that if the government doesn't listen to the increasingly hysterical arguments of the anti-liquor propagandists, the only possible explanation is that evil capitalists have prevailed.

I wonder, does he really believe this? Is he  being wilfully dishonest, or is his view of the alcohol issue so black-and-white, so obsessively negative in its focus, that he's incapable of understanding that politicians might have perfectly legitimate and honourable reasons for not listening only to "expert" advisers?

People can make up their own minds on that. But either way, it confirms to me that Sellman is fundamentally an ideologue whose  title of professor confers a patina of academic authority.

Hobbit mania: where reality and fantasy converge

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 30.)

IN HIS WILDEST imaginings, J R R Tolkien could hardly have envisaged a world stranger than the real one.

The weirdness takes multiple forms. Busloads of overseas tourists descend on a dairy farm near Matamata to gasp in awe at a few holes in the ground; Tolkien obsessives from around the world travel to Wellington so they can they dress up in Hobbit costumes and hairy feet to attend a Hobbit party; and not least, star-struck reporters abandon all semblance of journalistic detachment – not to mention all sense of proportion – in their gushing coverage of the Hobbit premiere.

Somewhere along the line, reality and fantasy have converged to such an extent that it’s hard to know where one stops and the other begins.

Someone should have gently explained to the awe-struck fans pressing in on actor Elijah Woods at Monday night’s party that Woods isn’t really Frodo Baggins. He’s just an unusual-looking bloke pretending to be Frodo Baggins. This point sometimes seems lost on them.

Similarly, you have to wonder whether the tragic tourists gawking at the Hobbiton film set realise that Bilbo Baggins doesn’t actually live there.

It’s all harmless, and a handy boost for a beleaguered economy, but mystifying to anyone not gripped by Hobbit mania.

No doubt the experts can explain the popular obsession with fantasy as evidenced by the popularity of Tolkien, Harry Potter and the infantile comic strips that Hollywood has inflated into big-screen epics.

One theory is that they fill the belief void created by the decline of religion (something of an irony, given that Tolkien was a devout Catholic). Another is that people are so disenchanted with the real world that they seek refuge in an alternative universe.

Whatever the explanation, you have to hand it to Sir Peter Jackson and his associates. They have taken the work of a bookish Oxford don and built it into a billion-dollar franchise – although whether Tolkien would recognise his work, or feel comfortable with what has been done to it, is another matter entirely.

* * *

 

THE MOST important two hours on television are between 8am and 10am on Sunday mornings. That’s when TV3 screens The Nation and TV One follows it up with Q&A.

No other programmes take the time to illuminate important political and economic issues or expose politicians to in-depth examination.  

Sometimes the result is that you find yourself forced to revise previously held views. A recent interview with John Key on The Nation, for example, may have come as a revelation to anyone who previously dismissed him as a lightweight with limited command of policy detail.

On the other hand, existing prejudices can be reinforced – as when David Cunliffe, ahead of his thinly disguised play for the Labour Party leadership, came across on the same show as smug and evasive.

A diminishing segment of the population can remember when TV channels showed programmes like these in prime time. There was no competitive pressure then; viewers watched because they didn’t have dozens of other channels jostling for their attention with foodie porn, talent quests and home renovation shows.

Virtually everyone in the country saw the famous 1970 Gallery programme in which Brian Edwards mediated in the resolution of a long-running Post Office industrial dispute. Similarly, the exchange between prime minister Robert Muldoon and the fearless young upstart Simon Walker on Tonight in 1976 (“You’re not going to set the rules, my friend”) was a talking point for days.

We were probably a better-informed democracy then. These days, serious current affairs attracts a pitifully small audience. The ratings-driven networks have succeeded in their long-term mission to turn viewers’ brains to mush. Most people probably don’t even know the Sunday morning programmes exist.

Of the two, my preference is TV3’s The Nation. It’s less flashy and production-driven than Q+A, and all the better for it. Presenter Rachel Smalley manages the unusual feat of being a sharp interviewer while also looking elegant and cool.  

The Nation also benefits from its regular media panel consisting of the aforementioned Edwards, who is nearly always witty and insightful, and Bill Ralston – although I’m amused at how Ralston, an absolute bodgie in his heyday, has reinvented himself as some sort of elder statesman of journalism. 

* * *

 

IN MY last column I feigned indignation at the ageing BBC correspondents reporting on television from world trouble spots, and asked why the illustrious Beeb didn’t follow the example of our own TV networks by employing attractive young women.

I had hoped it would be obvious that I was writing tongue-in-cheek, but no – I have been condemned by some readers as ageist and sexist.

My apologies to anyone whose sensibilities were offended. Clearly such items should come with a warning that they are not to be taken seriously.