Peter Baird and the nanny school of policing

Is it just me, or do other people also get irritated by the increasing tendency for the police to lecture the public as if we were a class of backward children?

In the Dominion Post this week, Wellington district road policing manager Peter Baird was quoted as saying that police had noticed an increase in the number of drivers with alcohol in their system in the middle of the afternoon – due, presumably, to end-of-year lunchtime celebrations.

While it was clear from the report that no one had actually been charged for exceeding the legal limit, Inspector Baird was still concerned that people were taking a risk by driving after a few drinks. “As soon as you have a drink you are impaired to some level.”

So people are now being warned for staying within the law. This is an intriguing new direction for policing. Can we also now expect to be pulled over and given a warning for driving at 98 kilometres per hour?

Not content that drivers are responsibly staying within the legal alcohol limit determined by the government, Inspector Baird is wagging a finger in their faces and tut-tutting that it’s not good enough.

Does this man not have enough to do? If the people being pulled up and tested by the police are under the limit, there’s an end to it. If anything, he should be congratulating people for drinking responsibly. Lectures on the perils of moderate alcohol consumption should be left to sanctimonious academics and health bureaucrats, of whom there’s no shortage.

In a recent issue of the Wairarapa News, the same Inspector Baird sounded almost disappointed at the low level of drunk drivers (0.44 percent) detected in a weekend blitz - a figure that inconveniently undermined attempts to portray New Zealand as a nation gripped by addiction to liquor. Rather than celebrate this encouraging result, Inspector Baird could only scold his fellow New Zealanders for “making the choice to drink and drive”.

He was at it again in this week’s edition of the same paper. Commenting on the results of the latest police operation (as a result of which only 0.41 percent of the 12,077 drivers tested will face charges), he huffed and puffed that even drivers within the legal limit were more at risk than if they were not drinking. “Every glass affects your impairment in some way.”

Inspector Baird went on to say that New Zealand’s legal blood alcohol limit – 0.8 mg per 100 ml – was much more generous than in most developed countries. “We are not currently in line with the OECD.”

In fact Britain, Canada and the US all have a legal limit of 0.8, and research is inconclusive about the number of lives that would be saved by reducing it to 0.5. (Bear in mind that most serious accidents involving alcohol are caused by drivers who are well over 0.8, and therefore wouldn’t have been avoided even if a lower limit had been in force.)

But that’s hardly the point. New Zealanders elect governments to make laws and the job of police officers is to enforce them, not publicly bemoan their supposed inadequacy. If Inspector Baird wants the law changed, he can stand for Parliament. If he's on a mission to achieve the perfect society, someone should gently explain to him that it's been tried already.

In the meantime, he should spare us the patronising lectures.

What's that yelping noise? Must be the Jackal

I stumbled today across a left-wing blog that I hadn’t encountered before. It’s called the Jackal.

I came across it because it had named me the “Asshole of the Week” for my recent column about Bryan Bruce’s hand-wringing documentary about child poverty in New Zealand.

Infantile abuse is par for the course on the web, so no surprises there. But I noted that the author of this blog, like so many other gutless non-entities in the blogosphere, is anonymous.

I posted the following comment: “A jackal is a cowardly cur that skulks in the shadows. I can’t think of a blog that’s more appropriately named”.

Half an hour later the Jackal had returned to the post, like a dog returning to its vomit, and responded to my comment. I reproduce his response here, complete with its puerile Net-speak and clumsy grammatical errors:

“LOL Thems fighting words.

“As well as being ignorant about inequality, you also appear to have zero education on eukaryotic organisms.

“Do you like how this post rates higher in searches than most of your articles Karl du Fresne?

“Hurray!”

I have no idea whether the Jackal’s blog is better read than mine and don’t give a toss either way. The fact that he thinks I might be jealous gives a clue to how his puerile mind works. (As for his bizarre reference to “eukaryotic organisms”, your guess is as good as mine.)

But here’s the interesting thing. When I tried to post a further comment, a notice came up advising that I was now blocked from the site.

Like the scavenging canine he names himself after, the Jackal attacks only when he can be sure his prey isn’t going to bite back. What a loser.

The teacher unions are at it again

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, December 20.)

AUCKLAND University academic Peter O’Connor at least got the first line right in his overwrought article in these pages last week attacking the proposed charter schools trial. “There is a fight brewing in schools,” he wrote.

Yes, there is a fight brewing. But we should be clear about who’s forming the battle lines, and why.

It’s the teachers who are gearing up for a stoush, and the reason is that they see a limited trial of charter schools as a threat to their control of the education system.

Teachers believe the only changes governments are entitled to make to education are those that they approve.

No other branch of the public service operates in this fashion. The police, the armed forces, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Treasury – all accept that governments are elected to make policy and the job of public servants is to put that policy into practice. Teachers alone consider themselves exempt from this principle.

The teacher unions haven’t revealed how they intend to oppose charter schools, but you can be sure they will do everything in their power to thwart the experiment.

As in the past (most recently with national standards) they will present themselves as taking a principled stand on the public’s behalf, but their primary motive is good old-fashioned self-interest. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo.

Unfortunately, timid governments have encouraged teacher intransigence in the past by backing down whenever the unions dug their toes in over reform initiatives.

It remains to be seen whether the Key government is made of sterner stuff. That it stuck to its guns over national standards suggests it may be.

Perhaps Hekia Parata, the new minister of education, should talk to Julia Gillard, the head of Australia’s Labor government. As minister of education, Ms Gillard overrode teacher opposition to push through some of the very changes the unions have steadfastly opposed here.

As for associate professor O’Connor, we should remember that what’s proposed is only a small-scale trial. To read his lurid rhetoric, you’d think the government was proposing a wholesale reinvention of the system from the ground up.

His slogan-laden article, in which he described charter schools as a “corporatist attack” serving the interests of a “transnational capitalist elite” was an example of the drearily predictable, left-wing group-think that passes for rigorous analysis in the universities.

The PPTA is even more hysterical, likening charter schools to Dotheboys Hall in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby – a place where boys are whipped, starved and abused by the ghastly headmaster Wackford Squeers.

In a provocatively insulting letter to John Key, PPTA president Robin Duff suggests the prime minister might like to watch the DVD of Nicholas Nickleby rather than read the novel, as it’s a long book with small print.

It would be idle to expect rational debate from these people. They have spent so much of their lives confined in classrooms with adolescents that their emotional maturity is irreparably impaired.

* * *

A CONSTANT refrain from the Left during the election campaign was that the National government had rewarded its wealthy mates with massive tax cuts.

Don’t expect this to let up any time soon. On TV3 last week, Greens co-leader Russel Norman claimed that only the top 10 percent who had got “$2 billion worth of tax cuts” from the Key government could afford to buy shares in Mighty River Power.

But does the tax system really favour the rich at the expense of low-income earners? Figures provided by national accountancy firm Markhams suggest that if anything, the reverse is true.

According to Markhams, households earning over $120,000 pay 97 percent of net individual income tax revenue, while the top 10 percent of households – the people Dr Norman reckons get favourable treatment – generate 71 percent of the individual tax take.

But wait, there’s more. Households earning less than $50,000 (43 percent of households) receive more in income support than they pay in income tax, on a net basis. Income tax paid by households earning between $50,000 and $110,000 effectively pays for this net refund.

Keep these figures in mind next time you hear a politician playing the envy card by claiming that the tax tables are tilted in favour of the wealthy.

* * *

FINALLY, a small but cheering antidote to the annual pre-Christmas deluge of anti-alcohol propaganda.

Of 68,000 motorists recently breath-tested in a nationwide police blitz, 373 returned positive results. That’s about 0.5 percent. In the Wellington region, 11,188 drivers were tested and 50 were over the limit – only 0.44 percent.

These figures are not only remarkably low, given that we’re constantly told we’re a nation of helpless drunks; they are also slightly down on last year’s.

They confirm that hazardous drinking is not a community-wide curse, as the wowser lobby wants us to believe, but is confined to a small segment of abusers. The rest of us should enjoy a guilt-free Christmas.

Documentary producer responds

The Dominion Post yesterday published a letter from documentary producer Bryan Bruce, responding to my latest Curmudgeon column. In the interests of fairness I reproduce it here:

Karl du Fresne's column on my Inside Child Poverty documentary contains many errors. He states that its message was "the welfare state has failed our poor ". Wrong.

The message was that the free market economic model fails about 20 per cent of our children. We need a "fair market" economy.

Du Fresne says the solution I propose is more welfare spending. Wrong. I suggested we spend smarter, re-distribute the existing money, spend more on prevention, and spend less on crisis management. I also advocated bypassing parents to get the aid more directly to children, as happens in Sweden.

He says, "Socialists never bother to ask where the money comes from". Wrong again. I asked, "So how are we going to pay for free meals and free health care for children" and supplied five possible sources and solutions within the existing welfare budget.

I don't expect balance in an opinion piece, but I do expect accuracy. Children don't get to choose their parents.

Solving the child poverty problem won't happen through poverty of mind and spirit.

BRYAN BRUCE
Producer

Capitalism has mislaid its moral compass

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 7.)

Cast your mind back to the 1990s. The Berlin Wall had collapsed, and with it the entire rotten edifice of Soviet communism. Democracy and free enterprise were taking root in countries previously kept under repressive state control.

Internationally there was a marked swing from left to right. Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the United States had radically changing the political landscape.

Even in countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the traditional parties of the left were shedding their socialist heritage and reaching a new accommodation with economic liberalism.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was sufficiently emboldened to write in 1992: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It was hailed as the ultimate triumph of capitalism over socialism. The great battle of the ideologies that had raged for much of the 20th century was proclaimed to be over. But was it?

Many of us thought so at the time, but we reckoned without one very important factor – that old human impulse, greed.

Capitalism’s golden age – if that indeed is what it was – turned out to be disappointingly brief. The Western world went on a delirious spending binge using borrowed money, precipitating what is now known as the Global Financial Crisis.

Consumerism – the urge to acquire the newest and best of everything – was rampant. In New Zealand, we joyously threw off the shackles after decades of tight economic controls by going on a residential property spree that drove house values, especially in fashionable suburbs and coastal resorts, to preposterous levels.

The new princes of capitalism, the bankers and financial traders in centres such as London and New York, acquired wealth previously undreamed of. Taking full advantage of an environment that spurned regulation and control in the belief that markets could safely be left to govern themselves, they created complex financial instruments tied to real estate values; and as these continued their apparently limitless upward trajectory, the money men rewarded themselves with stratospheric bonuses.

In New Zealand, investors fell over themselves in their eagerness to entrust their money to dodgy finance companies, some of them run by the same sharks who had feasted on the gullible during the sharemarket and property boom of the 1980s.

As is often the case, those closest to the centre of the action were the least capable of foreseeing how it would play out. They seemed to think the party could go on forever, but of course it couldn’t, and didn’t.

A catastrophic economic collapse reverberated throughout the West. Once-solid banks fell over like dominoes and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, even as the bankers – by now completely detached from reality – continued to reward themselves with huge bonuses.

America was traumatised by unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. Thousands of New Zealand investors, many of them elderly, lost the savings they had counted on to keep them in their retirement.

More recently, the European Union has been through convulsions as incompetently managed economies collapsed under a mountain of debt and had to be rescued by more responsible member states.

Where this will end is hard to predict, but the unravelling of the EU can’t be ruled out. The industrious Germans can’t be expected to prop up the feckless southern Europeans indefinitely. And in the meantime, democracy itself is being undermined as elected politicians are replaced by technocrats appointed from Brussels.

Capitalism hasn’t covered itself in glory in Russia, either. There, assets that once belonged to the state have been corralled by a small coterie of ultra-rich and often corrupt oligarchs – hardly a good advertisement for the free market economy. Small wonder that the communist party still appeals to many Russian voters.

It’s fair to say, then, that capitalism is in crisis. In fact you could say it’s on trial.

You can sense a distrust of capitalism lurking behind public unease about our own government’s proposed partial selloff of state assets. People haven’t forgotten that when this last happened, state-owned businesses were flogged off at fire sale prices, stripped of assets and, in several instances, had to be bought back in order to save them.

There’s also a perception that unbridled capitalism runs counter to the spirit of egalitarianism that New Zealanders pride themselves on. I think too much is made of the gap between the rich and the poor; we shouldn’t worry that some people are stonkingly rich as long as everyone has enough, in the words of Listener columnist Joanne Black, to live decently. Yet there’s little doubt that social cohesion is undermined if people perceive that they live in a stratified society where status is determined solely by wealth.

One consequence of capitalism’s recent failings was the emergence of the Occupy movement, but it’s impossible to take seriously the ragtag protest groups that have taken over public spaces such as the steps of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, New York’s Zuccotti Park, Auckland’s Aotea Square and Dunedin’s Octagon. They are mostly young and their idealistic minds are unencumbered by knowledge or wisdom.

Their objections to capitalism are vague and often incoherent. They express a fervent conviction that there must be something better, but they don’t know what it is.

The truth is that if there is a better way than free-market capitalism, humanity has yet to discover it. Capitalism may have temporarily let itself down, but it remains the world’s best hope for prosperity and peace. The world’s most liberal, humane, peaceful and prosperous states are all capitalist democracies – something the naïve young idealists of the Occupy movement don’t seem to grasp.

Certainly, socialism is no solution. Capitalism may not work perfectly all the time (what human system does?), but socialism has never worked anywhere, under any circumstances.

What’s needed, then, is for capitalism to rediscover its moral compass. In the words of Ken Costa, a former chairman of international investment bankers Lazards, the markets have “slipped their moral moorings”.

Costa was asked last month by the Anglican Bishop of London to lead discussions on how a form of “ethical capitalism” might work. While he believes markets are still the best system for creating growth and jobs, Costa said the market economy had shifted from its moral foundations “with disastrous consequences”.

The challenge now is for capitalism to set about regaining public trust. It may be a long haul, but it must be done.

More on that emotionally manipulative doco

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 6.)

TV3’s RECENT prime-time documentary on child poverty in New Zealand had exactly the intended effect. Viewers were aghast at the evidence of sub-standard housing and preventable illnesses such as scabies and school sores. Anguished writers of letters to the editor wondered how this state of affairs could have arisen in a country once considered the best in the world for raising children.

In one respect, the viewer reaction was encouraging. It was a reminder that we are still a decent, compassionate society.

The problem is, the programme represented a very one-sided view. Its message was that the welfare state has failed our poor – and so it has, but not in the way that documentary maker Bryan Bruce wanted us to think.

The welfare state is now part of the problem. Originally designed to tide people over hard times, it has created a culture of long-term dependency, helplessness and entitlement.

There is ample evidence that dependence on benefits, more than any other factor, causes the poverty trap that Bruce professes to despise. Yet the solution he proposes is more welfare spending.

The documentary ignored the risk that more spending on benefits and state housing would serve to make a welfare-based lifestyle look more attractive and end trapping up even more people.

Neither did Bruce concern himself with the inconvenient fact that more welfare spending increases the burden on the diminishing productive sector of an already weak economy.

Socialists never bother to ask where the money comes from; they are interested only in spending it. But consider this: New Zealand in 1972 had 26 working people for every beneficiary. Today that ratio is down to 7 to 1 (in fact 3 to 1, if you include superannuitants).

This was a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme, but fortunately not everyone was fooled. This newspaper published letters from people who had grown up in state houses and pointed out that the mould Bruce was so appalled by in some of the homes he visited could be avoided simply by proper ventilation – in other words, opening windows – and wiping away condensation. But of course it’s far more dramatic to present state house tenants as the helpless victims of Dickensian indifference and heartless, right-wing politicians.

I agree with Bruce on one thing: child poverty is deplorable. But the problem is far more complex than this slanted programme would have us believe. As I wrote on my blog, a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation that Bruce finds so intolerable.

* * *

I KNOW NOTHING about cricket beyond what I read in the sports pages. I managed to navigate my way through childhood without ever playing the game and it remains a mystery to me.

However I was intrigued by a recent article in Britain’s Spectator magazine, prompted by the death of English cricketer-turned-journalist Peter Roebuck, which examined the abnormal suicide rate among former cricketers and asked: “How is that cricket drives so many players out of their minds?”

The best answer it could give was that top players devoted themselves wholly to the game and were left feeling lost and bereft when their careers ended. With no team at the centre of their lives, many didn’t know what to do with themselves and succumbed to drink and depression.

It certainly seems true that cricket, being a game that lasts days rather than hours, requires players to spend a disproportionate amount of their life with other young men in pavilions and hotel rooms. I wonder whether this results in some being emotionally stunted – trapped in an eternal adolescence of high-fives and howzats – and thus less able to cope with the rigours of ordinary life. Certainly some first-class cricketers give the impression of being unusually self-absorbed and perhaps even mentally fragile.

Spending a large part of your life in the company of other blokes, especially at a time when you’re biologically programmed to search for a long-term female partner, just seems downright unnatural.

Of course I didn’t grasp any of this when I decided never to play cricket, but I’m pleased that I made the right choice.

* * *

ANOTHER outbreak of Acute Sensitivity Disorder has made headlines, this time in Britain. Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said on TV that striking public sector workers should be shot – taken out and executed, preferably in front of their families.

It was a typical Clarkson line, clearly intended as a provocative joke. But even the Poms have lost their sense of humour.

The BBC, intimidated by unionists’ howls of outrage, apologised. Worse still, so did Clarkson.

When political correctness stifles humour and free speech in the country that once gave us such outrageously irreverent and wickedly funny programmes as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, we should all be very afraid.

Were we too quick to dismiss John Banks?

The announcement that National will trial charter schools in low-income areas as part of its coalition agreement with ACT suggests that John Key’s government will be a lot more adventurous in its second term than in its first.

It’s an extremely significant policy gain for ACT and runs counter to the suspicion expressed by many commentators (me included) that John Banks is a political impostor; a National MP in disguise. Charter schools and parental choice in education have been core ACT policy from the start but until now, have never looked like gaining mainstream traction.

It rather looks as if National is using its tiny ally in Parliament to advance policies that it knows will resonate with National supporters – and no doubt with many of its MPs too – but which it hasn’t had the nerve to embrace itself. Radio New Zealand political editor Brent Edwards also pointed out this morning that it’s in National’s interests to help ACT rebuild so that it continues to have a dependable partner on its right. Allowing ACT a few important policy gains – and several ministerial positions – would be consistent with that strategy.

That John Key went on Morning Report this morning to defend the coalition deal with ACT – and took a pot shot at the “vested interests” of the teacher unions that oppose charter schools – is another indication that National has experienced a testosterone surge as a result of its election triumph. In the past Key has only rarely been interviewed on Radio New Zealand, leading to accusations that he wasn’t up to aggressive questioning.

We should all now brace ourselves for a furious co-ordinated offensive from the teacher unions, which have been remarkably successful in bullying governments in the past and will see the introduction of charter schools - even if only on a very limited scale - as a threat to their iron grip on the education system. To the teacher unions, parental choice is a seriously subversive concept. Inevitably, they will seek to forcefully remind the government just who the system exists for: the teachers.

The big question then will be whether the government stands up to the unions or shamefully capitulates, as National did over bulk funding in the 1990s. To its credit, the Key government stood its ground over national standards in the face of an almost hysterical outcry - the first setback for the teacher unions for as long as most people can remember. I hope it demonstrates the same resolve over charter schools.

It is, after all, just a trial, although we can rely on the NZEI, the PPTA and the school principals' organisations to portray it as tantamount to the sacking of our schools by Barbarian hordes.

The horses will remain unfrightened

(Written for NZCPR Weekly - www.nzcpr.com)

Let’s get the congratulations out of the way first. National’s election triumph was as emphatic as they get, at least under MMP. Admittedly, it’s rare for a government to be tossed out of office after only one term: it last happened in 1975, and the circumstances then were unusual. Norman Kirk had died in office and the Labour Party leadership had been assumed by the mild-mannered Bill Rowling, who was ill-prepared to deal with the aggression and firepower of a political streetfighter named Muldoon.

But for National to strengthen its hold on power after one term, especially following a year as challenging as any in memory, was some feat. Colin James reports that it’s only the fifth time in 75 years that a first-term government has increased its vote. (Labour did it in 2002, but not as resoundingly.)

Perhaps desperate to inject some drama into a dull campaign, the media talked up Labour’s chances, arbitrarily declaring Phil Goff the winner in two bland TV debates; but it only served to demonstrate – again – that political journalists in Wellington are poorly equipped to read the public mind. Even the predicted narrowing of the gap in the last stages of the campaign never happened.

The vital statistics – 60 seats for National (up two) and 34 for Labour (down nine) – tell only part of the story. Even more striking was the fact that in Labour strongholds such as Christchurch East, Te Atatu and New Lynn, National won the party vote. That humiliation was compounded by Labour’s loss of well-regarded up-and-coming MPs such as Stuart Nash and Kelvin Davis, and by the thrashing handed out to glamour candidate Andrew Little in the previously ultra-marginal seat of New Plymouth, Little’s home town. The ambitious former union boss still gets into Parliament at No 15 on the Labour list, but his star has lost a lot of its lustre.

So, a romp for National. But this was an election where the sub-plots were more interesting than the main action on centre-stage.

Everyone commented on what a great campaign the Greens ran. Certainly they seemed to pick up a lot of former Labour supporters, and their electoral appeal can only have broadened since the departure of polarising figures such as Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos. In fact it looks as if the Greens are re-positioning themselves as a mainstream party of the centre-left (watch out Labour) rather than one on the beansprouts-and-sandals fringe. Russel Norman’s stylish suit and tie are a clue to that; the eccentric garb of the late Rod Donald is already a distant memory.

But just wait: the Greens have yet to be fully tested. They have never been exposed to Minor Party Curse, the fatal affliction that strikes small parties once they formally become part of coalition government arrangements. That’s when the stresses start to tell and party discipline starts to fall apart.

As long as a party remains outside government, as the Greens have done, it can safely occupy the moral high ground. Its high-minded principles are unlikely to be compromised. But the moment a party is drawn into a coalition, deals are done and principles get stretched. Ambitions are unleashed and tensions arise between idealists and pragmatists. It happened to the Alliance and it happened to ACT – both parties, like the Greens, with a strong ideological base. Being in government also means a minority party is subjected to much more intense media scrutiny. All things considered, the Greens might have a more assured future if they remain in opposition. A memorandum of understanding with National may be as far as they can safely go.

Then there’s Winston Peters, whose comeback was the big story of the night. (Obviously, someone forgot to drive a stake through his heart.) Peters too has an unhappy record in government. This may explain why he declared before the election that New Zealand First wouldn’t align with either National or Labour – although as with all Peters’ hand-on-heart declarations, that vow could be relied on only for as long as it was expedient for him to stick to it. So Peters is back doing what he does best, which is opposing.

Being in government never suited him; the burden of office, with its requirement to toe the line, curb his tongue, make decisions and accept some form of collective responsibility, was far too onerous. Heck, he was probably even expected to read briefing papers. No, at his age (66) it’s much more fun huffing and puffing from the cross-benches, feuding with the media, stoking the fears and prejudices of his ageing support base and holding court at the Green Parrot. Already there are hints that Peters will set out to hijack the first sitting of the new parliament, as only he can, by using it to divulge the transcript of the secret conversation between the two Johns, Key and Banks, at the Café Urban.

And finally we come to ACT, a Shakespearean tragedy that has unfolded in slow motion. Its disintegration began with the acrimonious leadership struggle that split the party after Richard Prebble’s departure in 2004 and now we are observing the painful last act (pun not intended).

Where did they go wrong? Well, it’s clear that the leadership contest between Rodney Hide, Ken Shirley, Stephen Franks and Muriel Newman created tensions that have never gone away. (Deborah Coddington, who left Parliament in 2005, still can’t comment on her old party without sounding as if she’s settling scores.) Under Hide’s leadership, ACT’s focus drifted away from the party’s founding principles, thus deepening the divisions. In embracing the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s law-and-order agenda (a worthy enough cause, but hardly consistent with ACT’s classical liberalism), Hide strayed perilously close to Winston Peters territory. His foray into television on Dancing with the Stars – a misguided attempt to court mainstream popularity – not only devalued the ACT brand but gave the media a fresh excuse to belittle the party by showing endless replays of Hide dropping his dancing partner. The David Garrett sideshow didn’t help either, and neither did perkbuster Hide’s credibility-damaging acceptance of an overseas holiday paid for by the taxpayer.

For all that, Hide was a capable, committed and hard-working politician who knew the ropes and made some significant gains in parliament. So it seemed churlish and high-handed that when Don Brash launched his hostile takeover bid for ACT, he made it clear that Hide had to go. That now looks like a bad mistake. ACT has lost one of its most effective performers and Brash’s own political career is probably beyond resuscitation. History will record that while the former Reserve Bank governor's principles were unimpeachable, his political judgment was too often woefully astray. ACT is now represented in Parliament – nominally, anyway – by a man with no history in the party and no record of commitment to its philosophy. John Banks has some admirable personal qualities, but he presents the absurd image of a man wearing an ill-fitting suit tailored for someone else.

But back to National. Will the Key government show more daring in its second term than it did in the first? It has the excuse that the global economic crisis calls for bold action, but it could just as easily argue – and probably will – that a period of international uncertainty is no time for making radical changes that might create anxiety. And of course it won’t have an eager-beaver ACT caucus prodding it to take bolder steps to arrest our relative economic decline. So while we can expect modest reforms in such areas as welfare, youth wages, accident compensation, partial privatisation of state assets and the Resource Management Act, no one’s bracing themselves for tough action to curb the state spending binge that began under the Helen Clark government and has continued largely unabated under National. Stability is likely to remain National’s soothing mantra. The horses mustn’t be frightened.

Reflections on a carefully stage-managed campaign

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 23.)

Older readers of this column will recall a time when election campaigns were momentous events – part politics, part entertainment spectacle and part sporting contest.

Those were the days when party leaders such as Norm Kirk and Rob Muldoon attracted packed halls on barnstorming tours and local candidates were energetically heckled at street corner meetings.

Membership of political parties was much greater then (according to one estimate I’ve seen, 10 times greater) and the electorate was less jaded and cynical. Besides, there weren’t so many distractions competing for people’s attention.

There’s been precious little of that sense of drama and excitement, still less enthusiastic public participation, in the campaign that is now in its last days.

Election campaigns these days are carefully stage-managed affairs conducted largely through the media, notably television. The only big public event I’m aware of in this campaign was the leaders’ debate sponsored by the Christchurch Press – the one made famous by National leader John Key’s repeated taunts to Labour leader Phil Goff to “show me the money”.

Otherwise it’s all about sound bites and photo opportunities, principally with the 6pm news in mind. Everything is obsessively controlled by party strategists and PR advisers to minimise the risk of something going wrong.

Political reporters get very little advance warning of where the party leaders will be and are left scrambling in their wake, hoping for an unguarded remark, an unexpected drama – such as Mr Key being confronted by an ACT member unhappy that his party was getting the rough end of the stick over campaign arrangements in marginal seats – or a scrap of new information.

This campaign has lacked defining ideological issues. It has largely been about debt and borrowing figures – National’s versus Labour’s – and about who offers the best prospect of stability and progress in an extremely uncertain world.

Those figures are probably pointless, because they are of such magnitude that voters’ eyes glaze over. In any case, what credence can we attach to forward fiscal projections when the international environment is so unpredictable? Even at the best of times, forecasts are dodgy.

As the campaign has progressed, Labour has latched on to National’s proposed partial state asset selloff as the crucial point of difference between the two main parties. Obviously Labour’s polling has indicated this is the issue on which National is most vulnerable.

There’s an acute irony here, since the public suspicion of asset sales that Mr Goff hopes to exploit can be traced directly back to the actions of a former Labour government in which he was a high-profile minister. That’s politics for you.

Given the relentless focus on the two men vying for the prime ministership, the campaign has also been about leadership.

Neither man has turned in an entirely convincing performance. Mr Key came perilously close to seeing his campaign derailed over the symbolic cup of tea with John Banks (another exquisite irony, since the stage-managed meeting at the Café Urban was supposed to shore up their parties’ positions, not undermine them).

My view is that Mr Key and Mr Banks were too clever, too cocky, for their own good. That the stunt rebounded on them was poetic justice.

Polls indicate that National was correct to gamble that public dislike of the media would outweigh any concern about Mr Key’s supposedly indiscreet comments or the more general issue of electoral jiggery-pokery in Epsom. Yet he may still rue the meeting, since it had the undesired effect of breathing life into Winston Peters’ campaign.

Arguably the worst possible outcome of this election is that the former MP for Tauranga, a man who has exhausted his credibility several times over, should end up holding the balance of power.

As for Mr Goff, he has given the impression of sleepwalking through much of the campaign. He speaks in a whiny tone of voice that lacks fire or conviction. A capable senior minister in the Clark government, he appears to have risen above his level of competence. If he loses, as seems inevitable, it’s impossible to envisage him surviving as party leader.

And what of the other parties? The Greens have run a good campaign and been rewarded in the polls with their highest ratings yet.

Doubtless they have benefited from events such as the Pike River disaster and the Rena grounding, which have raised public consciousness about environmental fragility. But the Greens have also gone to some lengths to present themselves as a party with credible economic policies, presumably with a view to making themselves acceptable as a coalition partner for National should they find themselves in that position.

While that would stick in the craw of diehard Green supporters, it can’t be ruled out, especially when the Greens have been treated with such casual disregard in the past by their preferred partners, Labour.

And the Maori Party? People tend to give it the benefit of the doubt because Pita Sharples seems a likeable bloke, and even Tariana Turia is a lot less strident than she used to be. But there can be little doubt, after the past few days, about who the Maori Party represents, and what its agenda is.

It is the party of corporate Maoridom and its main purpose is to achieve privileged treatment for the Treaty-enriched tribes that it acts for. This couldn’t have been made clearer than when Dr Sharples said the Maori Party opposed partial asset sales, but would go along with them if the government gave iwi preferential purchasing rights. What’s “each-way bet” in te reo?

This might play well to the Maori corporate elite, but it can only have damaged the party’s credibility among the electorate at large. Perhaps the best that can be said about Dr Sharples in the present circumstances is that at least he’s honest.

What's going on at TV3?

In a post on this blog site yesterday I mentioned my reluctance to accuse media organisations of political bias. I have seen those allegations hurled about far too often and far too loosely, invariably by politically aligned people frustrated that their side wasn’t the only one getting newspaper space or air time. But in the past couple of weeks I have begun to wonder seriously whether TV3 is running some sort of political agenda.

My suspicions were aroused by political coverage that in recent weeks has too often seemed slanted to discredit National. An example was Patrick Gower’s report last week about a supposedly hush-hush meeting between John Key and the head of the international oil exploration firm Anadarko. As only he can, Gower reported this in such a way as to suggest that there was something underhand going on. (“TV3 can reveal that Prime Minister John Key made time in his diary this week for a secretive meeting with the boss of an oil company that wants to undertake deep sea drilling off New Zealand’s coast.”) Never mind that prime ministers probably have meetings with international businessmen all the time without necessarily alerting the media. If there was something dodgy going on, it certainly wasn’t substantiated by the TV3 report. But never mind: Gower nonetheless raised dark connections with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster in 2010 (Anadarko had a 25 percent share in the Deepwater Horizon rig) and generously gave Greens co-leader Metiria Turei an opportunity to link Key with “catastrophic oil spills”. In other words, the story was spun to put the worst possible complexion on what may have been an entirely innocent and legitimate meeting.

This technique appears to be something of a Gower specialty. On October 26 he reported: “3 News has learned that John Key has had a private meeting with a controversial right-wing British billionaire, Lord Michael Ashcroft.” Recognise the style? The loaded phrases “3 News has learned” and “TV3 can reveal” immediately create the impression that something sneaky is being covered up.

Gower went on to say that Ashcroft was “best known for pumping his time – and millions – into the British Conservative Party and right-wing politics.” Ah, so he’s a shadowy political manipulator, then. But hang on: Ashcroft is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party – hardly a secret society – and sits in the House of Lords as a life peer. Nothing overtly sinister there. He’s also a philanthropist who founded Crimestoppers, a crimefighting organisation now established in New Zealand, and he put up the reward money for the return of war medals stolen from the Waiouru army museum. All of these seem perfectly valid reasons why he and Key should get together while Ashcroft was in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup. But Gower seemed more interested in the fact that the left-wing Guardian newspaper had reported a controversy over Ashcroft’s tax status – a shocking blot on his character that he shares with innumerable British rock stars.

Gower’s report concluded: “Mr Key is usually quite open when it comes to his meetings with the rich and famous. His critics will argue he kept this one on the quiet because of Lord Ashcroft’s controversial baggage.” So there we are, then: the two men were quite clearly up to no good. This style of reportage, where two and two are added together to make 22, relies on innuendo and loaded phraseology and is devoid of integrity.

Then there’s Duncan Garner. When Labour recently announced its welfare policy for beneficiary families, Garner found a South Auckland mother on the DPB with six children whose desperate plight was clearly meant to impress upon us the urgent need for more spending on benefits. They were living in a four-bedroomed state house and getting by on $560 a week which, under a Labour government, would increase by $60 – enough, Garner informed us, to fill their fridge and freezer.

The oldest of these six kids would have been about seven and the youngest were toddlers. I waited for Garner to ask a few pertinent questions such as who the fathers were, where they were, why they didn’t provide any support and why she continued to have children knowing the taxpayer would have to pick up the tab. But of course these questions weren’t asked; they never are. Instead we heard Garner ask a leading question about what she would like to see as a result of this election, to which her reply – hardly surprisingly – was “more money for beneficiaries”. We then cut to Phil Goff talking about Labour’s empathy with the downtrodden before ending with Garner’s line that “help is on the way, but Labour has to win the election first”. Take from that what you will. Only a brief reference was made to the estimated cost of Labour’s desperate bid to win more votes by promising to expand the welfare state.

There was more in a similar vein on 3 News last night. In a review of the day’s campaigning, Garner praised Goff’s performance in the leaders’ debate the previous night and said the Labour leader’s message on asset sales and the minimum wage went down well on the campaign trail in South Auckland (well, of course it would). National, on the other hand, was continuing its “scare tactics” over Winston Peters. Then, just in case we hadn’t got the message, Garner referred again to National’s “scaremongering”. He wrapped up his summary of the day by referring to National minister Steven Joyce’s latest cost estimate of Labour’s election promises ($25 billion), and quoted Greens leader Russel Norman as saying that Joyce should consider a career with the “bankrupted and discredited Lehman Brothers”. The way this was reported implied that Garner endorsed Norman’s cheap shot, or at the very least considered it the most newsworthy statement of the day. A balanced assessment on a national television network just three days out from the election? What do you think?

Speaking of that TV3 leaders’ debate, some critics have suggested that John Campbell’s questions highlighted issues where National was on the defensive. Whether they did – and if so, whether it was deliberate – I couldn’t say; but I do think TV3 has now got into itself into such a position that even when it does something in complete innocence, people will be looking for signs of bias.

I should state here that I am not a supporter of Key or the National Party (I’m certainly right of centre, but I’ve voted for Labour far more often than for National), and I repeat that I’m not in the habit of alleging institutional editorial bias based on one or two examples. Now and again a report may lean one way or the other, but generally things balance out in the long run. What worries me about 3 News is that a persistent pattern seems to have emerged. And what finally convinced me that the channel has abandoned all semblance of political neutrality was its screening last night of a pseudo-documentary entitled Inside Child Poverty, written and presented by Bryan Bruce.

I say pseudo- documentary because it was an undisguised, overwrought piece of hand-wringing political polemic that made no pretence of objectivity or balance. To screen it at any time would have courted controversy, but to show it in prime time just three days before a general election couldn’t be construed as anything but a deliberate attempt to tilt the political playing field in Labour’s favour.

That couldn’t have been clearer than when the host – who clearly aspires to be New Zealand’s answer to the sanctimonious John Pilger – genuflected, metaphorically speaking, before the Michael Joseph Savage monument and reminded us of Labour’s proud historical commitment to feed, clothe and house the poor. Another overtly political moment occurred when Bruce asked rhetorically: “Who builds state houses? Labour. Who sells them? National.”

I waited at the end for the announcement that this had been a party political broadcast. It never came.

Inside Child Poverty was disgracefully selective in the way it approached its subject and nauseatingly pious in the way it attempted to manipulate viewers’ emotions. Bruce sought to demonstrate that the poor in New Zealand had been systematically beaten down by heartless right-wing politicians (cue shots of Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas) and called for a revival of what he called our “socialist” traditions to ensure there is food on every poor family’s table.

Lindsay Mitchell (www.lindsaymitchell.blogspot.com) has demolished some of Bruce’s flawed arguments more effectively than I could. Suffice it to say that he couldn’t even get basic historical facts right – recalling, for example, that he had grown up in "a socialist country". I grew up in New Zealand at the same time as Bruce and it was never socialist; a welfare state, yes, but not socialist. But why bother with such nitpicking distinctions? “Socialist” has such an uplifting, righteous ring.

He took us to Sweden to show his vision of a Utopian society where well-scrubbed, state-subsidised, middle-class Scandinavian fathers stay at home to look after their babies, and where doctors tut-tut when told of the incidence of scabies and school sores in New Zealand, but he ignored the huge cultural differences that make comparisons pointless (such as the fact that Sweden has no Pacific Island and Maori populations, the two groups that are grossly over-represented in New Zealand welfare statistics).

He didn’t bother to consider the capacity of the fragile New Zealand economy to fund the potentially limitless demands of the enlarged welfare state he seeks. He didn’t consider the probability that providing more generous welfare assistance will simply encourage more people to become dependent on it (the so-called moral hazard). He talked loftily about morality but didn’t consider the morality of having large families sired by multiple fathers and then expecting other people, working people with mortgages to pay and their own children to raise, to pick up the tab. All too inconvenient.

Instead he marshalled every half-baked assertion and catchy bumper-sticker slogan he could think of (example: “The we society became a me society”) to make his point, and he was careful to interview only people who agreed with him. (It was no surprise to see Gareth Morgan, who has positioned himself as New Zealand’s leading capitalist-with-a-conscience, pop up.) But here’s the thing: a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency, entitlement and helplessness it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation Bruce professes to despise. Trouble is, NZ On Air would never fund it.

This was the first Bryan Bruce documentary I had watched and I won’t be bothering with him again. I’m tired of being lectured by smug, self-righteous baby boomers (a generation of which I, unfortunately, am one, and which has largely created the unholy mess we’re now in).

But the bigger issue is why TV3 chose to show this particular programme, with its very explicit political message, in this particular week. I’m not entirely averse to the screening of ideologically one-eyed, intellectually dishonest and emotionally manipulative crap, but I think TV3 needs to explain the timing. Perhaps someone will complain to the Electoral Commission.

Scalp hunting: the new style of political journalism

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 22.)

THE ELECTION campaign has brought to the fore a new style of television journalism.

It is aggressive, confrontational, highly opinionated and designed to provoke a reaction. Its chief practitioners are Patrick Gower and Duncan Garner of 3 News.

Both are astute political journalists who clearly see their role as much more than simply reporting. When Garner announces “This issue isn’t going away”, under the guise of making an objective statement about the political controversy du jour (such as the Café Urban furore), he does so with the certainty of a man who will make damned sure it doesn’t go away.

But it’s Gower who has obviously been designated TV3’s resident attack dog, with a brief to get in politicians’ faces.

3 News recently showed Act leader Don Brash saying to Gower outside Wellington’s Amora Hotel: “You are a deceitful bastard, quite frankly, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

To goad the almost painfully polite Brash into responding so vehemently must have taken some doing, but I bet Gower went home that night feeling pleased with his day’s work. It’s just a shame that 3 News didn’t explain the background to the exchange so that viewers could decide whether Brash’s accusation was justified.

Former Act MP David Garrett subsequently wrote on Kiwiblog: “Gower is the prick who tried to goad me into dropping my bag and dropping him at Wellington Airport a year ago.” Garrett, who was up to his eyeballs in political strife at the time, accused the journalist of blocking his path at the security gate until a security man pulled him out of the way.

I watched that news item and agree that Gower seemed intent on provoking the volatile MP into lashing out. But as Garrett said, that would have played into his hands.

Tripping politicians up, catching them out, is an honourable journalistic tradition. Gower had the usually cocky John Banks on the ropes last week over what was said over tea at the Café Urban, and even John Key looked rattled in the face of Garner’s questioning. Neither journalist lacks guts.

Yet there’s something disconcerting about Gower’s approach. You get the feeling that its purpose is to claim political scalps for the sheer sport of it.

He is a journalistic picker of scabs, a scavenger who swoops on the wounded. He scans the political landscape looking for any story that, with judicious editing and sneering voice-over, can be manipulated for maximum effect.

The Gower approach illustrates two trends in modern political journalism. One is to strive at all costs for what former British prime minister Tony Blair called “impact” – something to excite the public blood lust.

The other is to put the journalist at the centre of the story. The modern political reporter is no longer content to be a passive observer, but wants to be a player – a maker and breaker of careers.

* * *

HIGH COURT judge Forrie Miller acted sensibly and compassionately in discharging without conviction the mother of a toddler who drowned in the family swimming pool while she was distracted inside the house.

Mary-Anne Illston will serve a life sentence anyway, metaphorically speaking. She hardly needed a conviction to realise the terrible consequences of not supervising her daughter more closely.

But the case raises an important question about the need for consistency in the way police deal with such matters.

Illston was charged with manslaughter. Similarly, last April, Ashish Macwan was charged with careless driving causing death after his three-year-old son Aarush drowned in Lake Dunstan. The family van, with the boy inside, rolled into the lake after Macwan inadvertently left the handbrake off. In that case too, an enlightened judge discharged the bereaved parent without conviction.

Most people would say that in both instances, the parent’s grief was punishment enough. Yet police followed the book.

It will be interesting to see, then, whether they take the same uncompromising approach in the case of two-year-old Sukhraj Singh, who recently drowned in the Taruheru River at Gisborne. News reports said Sukhraj and his cousin, who also nearly drowned, wandered off from Sukhraj’s home and it was 10 or 15 minutes before anyone noticed they were missing.

The family blamed Gisborne District Council for not fencing the river. But the primary cause of this terrible accident, if news reports are accurate, was a failure of parental supervision.

Only the stony-hearted could not feel sorry for the Singh family. But as Justice Miller pointed out, there have been 85 pre-school and infant deaths in the past decade, most of them the result of adult complacency. Water Safety New Zealand accepts that prosecuting parents can compound their grief, but says it’s an effective way of drawing attention to the problem of child drownings.

What’s important, surely, is that the police are seen to be even-handed. The law should not be a lottery.

* * *

AT AN ELECTION meeting last week, Wairarapa MP John Hayes mentioned that of 25 young men who went on a forestry work course, 22 subsequently failed a drug test.

This is an aspect of the drug problem that the pro-dope lobby doesn’t mention. Present laws may not be very effective, but at least they serve as some sort of curb on usage. Legalise cannabis, and even more young men may be condemned to lives of uselessness.

"Undecided" voters strangely decisive

I’m not one to shriek “bias!” at the drop of a hat and I’m no cheerleader for John Key, but there was something decidedly suspicious about the behaviour of the “worm” in last night leaders’ debate on TV3.

As Stephen Franks pointed out on Morning Report, the worm moved up every time Phil Goff opened his mouth, even before anyone had a chance to digest what he was saying. David Farrar joked on Kiwiblog that Goff could have confessed to the Crewe murders and the worm would have gone up.

The reverse happened the moment Key began to speak. The worm immediately tracked downward.

The 65 people in the studio audience, whose responses determined the worm’s movements, were supposedly non-committed voters. Perhaps this means that undecided voters are those who can’t quite make up their minds between Labour, Mana and the Greens.

The funny business at the Cafe Urban

My first reaction, on hearing the Herald on Sunday had obtained a clandestine recording of John Key’s meeting with John Banks in Newmarket last Friday, was to let out a groan of dismay and disbelief. Did we really need this London-style tabloid sleaze?

Now, having learned the full circumstances, I’m inclined to take the paper’s side.

I could understand Key getting up on his hind legs, but I heard HoS editor Bryce Johns on Morning Report and his explanation of how it happened struck me as plausible. Besides, I worked with Bryce for several years and unless he’s changed, I don’t think he’s a journalist in the Clive Goodman/Rebekah Brooks mould.

Quite apart from anything else, leaving a recording device on the table right in front of the two politicians, even if it was in a little black pouch, seemed too clumsy by far to be a serious attempt at eavesdropping. It was sure to be spotted, and it was.

The fact that the paper chose not to report what was said during the conversation supports its case. The HoS appears to have acted ethically. This is not the behaviour of an editor bent on getting a sensational story that might blow the election wide open.

In any case, why go to the trouble of planting a recording device, and risking the inevitable hullabaloo that would ensue, if you weren’t going to take maximum advantage of it by splashing the taped exchange all over page one?

This affair has the potential to rebound on Key. He dismisses his exchange with Banks as “bland” but refused permission for the HoS to publish the transcript of the recording, on the ground that he didn’t want to give the paper the satisfaction of getting the story after behaving unethically (if indeed it was unethical).

The problem now is that there is real public curiosity about what was said, and about the contradiction between Johns’ claim that the recording is potentially game-changing (the political phrase du jour) and Key’s insistence that it’s really of no interest. The stakes have been raised to the point where it becomes increasingly likely that someone will divulge what was said.

TV3 disclosed tonight that it too has a copy of the tape, and there are likely to be others circulating. There are hints that the recording contains statements about ACT leader Don Brash that would not look good for either Key or Banks. I’m picking that it will all spill into the public arena sooner or later. That’s the way these things normally play out.

It demonstrates that even at this late stage in a carefully orchestrated and generally successful National campaign, things could still go pear-shaped for Key. It only takes one indiscreet comment, and Johns hinted at such a comment in the tape from the Café Urban.

In fact it would be exquisitely ironic – you might say poetic justice – if the meeting between Key and Banks blew up in their faces. It was a PR stunt staged to attract maximum media attention. People talk about the cup of tea as being symbolic, and so it was – not just in the strictly political sense, but also because it was symbolic of a tightly controlled media operation in which political journalists are expected to dance to a ballet choreographed by Beehive spin-meisters.

It was assumed the media would turn up en masse at the Café Urban and film the palaver; indeed the whole pantomime would have been pointless if they hadn’t. But the journalists and photographers were then expected to retreat to a respectful distance, noses pressed up against the window (almost literally), and allow the two men to go into a cosy huddle.

It was a highly public event, deliberately so, yet at crunch time Key insisted on asserting his right to privacy. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking there’s a bit of a contradiction, a double standard, here. The whole affair was conducted entirely on the politicians’ terms, for the politicians’ benefit, and to that extent, pretty much summed up what the modern election campaign, with all its jiggery-pokery, has become; and I have to admit I’d find it quite satisfying if something hideously embarrassing came out of it all.

Parading our inferiority complex

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 9.)

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, defines “mania” as a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/ or energy levels.

Sound familiar? Strike out that word “irritable” and you’ve got an accurate description of the mood that gripped the country for the duration of the Rugby World Cup.

Like any patriotic New Zealander, I was pleased at the outcome of the event; but I was also relieved when it was over. The media hype was relentless and overwhelming.

Harmless fun? Yes, most of the time. Yet occasionally there was a nasty edge to it, and it didn’t escape attention.

A columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Sheehan, brought the collective wrath of the nation down on his head in the last week of the tournament when he criticised the throat-slitting gesture in the All Blacks’ Kapa O Pango haka.

The criticism came at the tail end of what I thought was a fair and perceptive column in which Sheehan commented on the “immense emotional stake” New Zealanders had invested in the RWC final, which was to be played the following weekend.

“The cumulative weight of the 24 years since the All Blacks won the World Cup for the first and only time has become a burden on the nation that can be lifted only when the All Blacks captain lifts the cup once more,” Sheehan wrote.

Had the Wallabies won the semifinal against the All Blacks, he added, the result would have been a “psychic scar” across New Zealand.

The column concluded with Sheehan saying that the violence implied by the throat-slitting gesture had no place in sport.

To say he touched a raw nerve would be to understate the case. More than 560 comments were posted on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website, many of them from outraged New Zealanders. When Fairfax Media’s Stuff website in New Zealand picked up Sheehan’s comments, a further 868 comments were posted – depressing proof that nothing, not even politics or religion, arouses New Zealanders’ emotions more than sport.

Some readers remonstrated with Sheehan for supposedly misunderstanding the throat-slitting gesture. A handful sided with him. But most readers accused Sheehan of being a sore loser because the All Blacks had beaten the Wallabies a few days before.

This was a lazy and churlish response. Far easier to accuse Sheehan of sour grapes than to engage with his arguments, which were that the Kapa O Pango haka sends an unfortunate message (whatever its defenders may claim) and that New Zealanders depend far too heavily on one sport, rugby, for their national pride and sense of identity.

A few readers seized Sheehan’s column as an opportunity to boast of New Zealand’s superior race relations and to condemn Australia’s treatment of Aboriginals – hardly relevant in this context. One commenter labelled Sheehan a convict.

The tone of the responses was overwhelmingly vitriolic and depressingly puerile. A fairly typical comment (anonymous, of course – they always are) ran: “I think [the haka] is awesome. What have Australia got? That Waltzing Matilda crap.”

Another, in similar vein, went: “Thanks for your input skippy, now back to Waltzing Matilda, and leave us to our affairs.”

At such times we New Zealanders reveal an ugly aspect of the national character: touchy, defensive and acutely sensitive to criticism, especially when it comes from our big, brash neighbour. It wasn’t just the silver fern on display during the RWC; we grabbed the opportunity to parade our national inferiority complex too.

Sheehan was provoked into writing a second column in which he described the torrent of condemnation as “an outpouring of dog-in-the-manger, chip-on-the-shoulder, small-country-small-minded, defensive churlishness on an industrial scale.” I have to agree.

He reminded readers that he had described the haka as “the greatest ritual in world sport” (it was just the Kapo O Pango version he disliked), and had also acknowledged that it would be an injustice if the All Blacks didn’t win the RWC (so much for the accusations of sour grapes). But as I’ve learned myself in 40 years of writing newspaper columns, you can’t control the meaning readers choose to take from what you write.

The response to Sheehan’s column wasn’t the only unattractive New Zealand trait on display during the World Cup. The demonisation of New Zealand-born Wallaby Quade Cooper, encouraged by idiotic elements of the media, was just as distasteful. The booing whenever Cooper touched the ball was a disgrace.

One Australian commentator on The Roar website paid tribute to the good-natured reaction of New Zealand fans after the All Blacks had demolished the Wallabies. But how would we have behaved, I wonder, if the Aussies had won? It’s easy to be gracious in victory; much harder in defeat.

The most telling point Sheehan made in his original column was that rugby occupies too big a place in the New Zealand psyche, and our response to the All Blacks’ narrow win in the final proved his point.

Like any patriotic New Zealander I was pleased by the result, but the euphoria that enveloped the country for days afterwards was over the top. Our national pride must be very fragile if it rests on something as ephemeral as a sporting trophy.

I found the self-congratulatory tone of the celebrations intriguing too. Anyone would think the entire country had been playing the French on Eden Park rather than an elite team of highly paid professional sportsmen.

And I couldn’t help wondering about the ugly flip-side of victory. The consequences if the All Blacks had lost don’t bear thinking about.

The nation would have been plunged into a mood of dark despondency. If previous experience is anything to go by, the incidence of domestic violence would have soared as neanderthal males took out their frustrations on their partners and children.

Graham Henry and his team would probably have needed police protection. Former All Blacks coach John Hart received death threats and hate mail after the defeat by France in the 1999 semifinals. Just imagine how much more extreme the reaction would have been had they lost again this time.

Sheehan was right. New Zealand had too much emotion invested in the RWC and some of the side-effects weren’t pretty. As an Australian living in New Zealand commented on the Sydney Morning Herald website, we need another way, besides rugby, to define ourselves on the world stage.

What we need is a Lange - or even a Muldoon

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 8.)


THE ELECTION campaign reminds me of a catchphrase made famous by British television comedians Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. “What do you think of it so far?” Morecambe would ask halfway through their show. And the answer was always the same: “Rubbish!”

One of the consequences of MMP is that the major parties have become more risk-averse and more centrist. The defining ideological differences that once separated National and Labour have narrowed to the point where they are reduced to fighting over a shrinking patch of centre ground.

What this means is that election campaigns are matters of tone and nuance rather than the great contests of ideas that they should be. It’s all about “branding”.

There’s no fire, no galvanising vision. At a Business New Zealand pre-election conference addressed by the party leaders last week, it was the minor parties that presented the bold ideas (and Pita Sharples the wit).

In difficult times like this, an election campaign provides an opportunity for the nation to debate whether to tear the house down and start again. But John Key and Phil Goff are like a married couple squabbling over which shade of off-white to paint the kitchen.

Both are decent, well-meaning men, but this campaign could do with the fiery idealism of a Norman Kirk or the biting wit and charisma of a David Lange.

In fact it’s almost enough to make you yearn for the days of Robert David Muldoon. He may have been a nasty little bully, and a socialist to boot (despite leading a supposedly conservative party), but at least he stirred people up.

* * *

NONETHELESS, election campaigns have a way of bringing certain things out into the open.

Asked on TV3 News which major party the Maori Party would support, co-leader Tariana Turia replied: “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

Here, in stark relief, is one of the fatal shortcomings of MMP. We have no control over what happens after we cast our votes. We don’t know who will get into bed together, what compromises will be made and what policies will be traded off.

The politicians, having gone through the three-yearly ritual of prostrating themselves at our feet in order to win our support, will be back in the driver’s seat and the voter will be merely an impotent onlooker.

Opponents of FPP say that things were no better under that system; that once in power, governments were free to do whatever they liked regardless of any promises made beforehand. But the difference is that under MMP, post-election horse-trading behind closed doors is more than just a risk; it’s an integral feature of the system.

Under FPP, governments that broke promises or introduced policies without consulting the electorate knew they risked being punished at the next election. Now parties can justify almost any breach of faith with their supporters by saying it’s the price we pay for a system that depends on compromise and negotiation.

I won’t be voting for a return to FPP, which was a demonstrably unfair system, but neither will I vote to retain MMP. We have replaced one seriously flawed setup with another.

* * *

MR SHARPLES illustrated another unattractive aspect of the new political environment when he attacked the rival Mana Party on the basis that it has Pakeha candidates, namely John Minto and Sue Bradford.

How can people with white skin, Mr Sharples asked, pretend to represent Maori?

This was a naked appeal to identity politics, whereby people define themselves according to whatever minority group they belong to – be it Maori, gay, fundamentalist Christian, disabled or whatever – and frame their political goals accordingly.

Identity politics runs counter to the idea of communities acting in concert for the common good. It also promotes the divisive idea that to represent someone with brown skin, a politician must be of the same colour.

Mr Sharples’ party depends heavily on identity politics for its appeal. So does Hone Harawira’s Mana Party, though it seeks to mop up disaffected ragtag Pakeha as well as Maori.

In a useful report on the forthcoming voting referendum, the centre-right Maxim Institute highlights the choice voters will be given between systems that elect MPs to represent the community as a whole and ones that emphasise representation for narrow interest groups.

The report describes identity politics as “murky ground” but also acknowledges the unfairness of electoral systems that don’t give minority parties any chance at all.

Maxim doesn’t come out in favour of any one system, but on the basis of its analysis STV and SM, while far from perfect, look to be the best compromises between the two unpalatable extremes.

Call me sceptical, but I suspect that whatever electoral system we come up with, the politicians will find a way to turn it to their own advantage.

The avoidable death of Sukhraj Singh

WHEN A CHILD dies an avoidable death, it’s not entirely surprising that the grieving family looks for someone to blame.

In the case of toddler Sukhraj Singh, who drowned in the Taruheru River at Gisborne last week, blame has fallen on Gisborne District Council for not fencing off the river.

Only the flint-hearted could not feel sorry for the family. I can't think of any event more heartbreaking than the death of a child. But the primary cause of this terrible accident, if news reports are accurate, is that the mothers of Sukhraj and his cousin Achilles Kaui – who also nearly drowned – didn’t notice that they had wandered off.

According to the Dominion Post’s account, 10 or 15 minutes passed before the two women realised the little boys were gone – more than enough time for a child to get into fatal trouble.

It’s now almost a kneejerk reaction to blame some imagined bureaucratic failing whenever awful accidents happen. A similar thing happened in 2009 when Aisling Symes fell into a manhole in Henderson.

But the primary responsibility for children’s safety will always rest with parents. Far more children die because their parents were distracted at a crucial moment than because councils didn’t put up fences or follow up reports of manhole covers coming loose.

Public authorities can never identify, still less eliminate, every potential hazard, and it’s not their function to do so. Active, inquisitive children will always find ways to put themselves at risk; that’s why their parents need to watch them at all times.

When there’s water nearby, the need for vigilance multiplies.

In the same week that Sukhraj died, an inquest was held into the drowning of a two-year-old girl at Waiwera Thermal Pools north of Auckland. The coroner was told that Nylah Vau wandered away from the kiddies’ pool while her parents were otherwise occupied.

The Vau family will now have a lifetime in which to mourn the tragic consequences of inadequate supervision. Such incidents are far too common.

If events follow the usual course in Gisborne, the district council will feel compelled to conduct an inquiry into the death of Sukhraj Singh and will very likely announce some time later that action has been taken to prevent a recurrence.

The trouble with such outcomes is that they perpetuate the dishonest pretence that public officials can eliminate risk – and even more lethally, they encourage the mindset that it is the responsibility of public officials, rather than parents, to ensure that tragedies don’t happen.

Oz Spectator honours Kerr

The latest edition of The Spectator Australia, out today (well, in Australia, anyway; New Zealand gets it next week) devotes an editorial to the late Roger Kerr, crediting him with helping to kick-start a dramatic reform agenda – “cutting income and business tax, privatising state-run industry, floating the exchange rate, slashing agricultural subsidies and protective tariffs, changing the rules of welfare, deregulating the labour market (and eroding the source of union power)” – that made Paul Keating, the champion of economic reform in Bob Hawke’s government, blush.

The editorial tribute, written by Spectator Australia editor Tom Switzer, describes the long-serving Business Roundtable head, whose funeral service yesterday packed Old St Paul's in Wellington, as a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. “His wit, civility and intellectual honesty contributed hugely to the respectability of the cause of free markets and small government in a nation with deep socialist roots.”

Rolling across America

(This article was published in the travel section of The Dominion Post, October 26.)

THERE can be few better ways to travel than in the observation car of an American train on a golden autumn afternoon with a cold beer in hand.

I’m on the California Zephyr, speeding westward through the gently undulating farmland of Illinois. We’re about four metres above the ground, on the upper of two levels, and the train is quiet and smooth.

To my surprise, the observation car is half-empty. Either my fellow passengers have all done this trip before and become blasé about the sights, or they are unmoved by the beauty of the landscape.

The view through the floor-to-ceiling windows gives new meaning to the line from America the Beautiful about amber waves of grain. Cornfields stretch to the horizon in all directions, interrupted here and there by dark clumps of trees indicating the presence of a lonely farmhouse. Some of these habitations look like exquisite little doll’s houses.

We are at the start of the great Midwestern prairie and it will take us the rest of the day and all of the night to cross it. The landscape changes little but it’s easy on the eye and I’m never bored.

As evening approaches, we cross the Mississippi into rural Iowa. The sunset is like molten copper. Much later, in the darkness, we rumble across the inky-black waters of another mighty river which a fellow passenger confirms is the Missouri, the border between Iowa and Nebraska.

My wife and I boarded the California Zephyr in Chicago at two in the afternoon. If we were to stay on the train all the way to Emeryville, near San Francisco, it would be a 52-hour trip. But because we couldn’t get a sleeper compartment and didn’t fancy sitting for all that time, we’ve decided to break the journey for a day and a night in Denver, Colorado, before resuming.

We could have saved time and money by flying, but it goes without saying that you see a lot more from a train than you do from 30,000 feet. Rail remains one of the most rewarding forms of travel – and sociable too, since you naturally fall into conversation with your fellow passengers. As on a ship, a camaraderie soon develops among the people temporarily brought together in this confined space.

In the dining car on our first night we sit opposite a genial young man from Perth, Australia, and a shy female student on her way back to Stanford University after the summer vacation. Because space is limited in the dining car, people are required to share their table with strangers; but rather than being an imposition, it adds to the enjoyment of the journey.

Our companions at dinner on the second night are a charming elderly couple, retired teachers from Wisconsin, who are on their way to visit relatives in Oakland, California. They have a sleeping compartment but complain that it’s claustrophobic – that once they’re in there with the door closed they feel shut in.

It’s a comment we hear from other passengers too, and we’re pleased that we’re travelling coach class. We even sleep reasonably well, since the train is barely half-full and each of us is able to stretch out over two seats. The only problem on the first night is that it’s cold – a malfunctioning thermostat, apparently.

The food in the dining car could be described only as basic – at best, on a par with airline meals. It’s not cheap, either, but you either eat it or starve, since there’s no opportunity to buy food along the way. But the dining car serves wine and beer, which makes the meals seem more palatable; and in any case, no one ever travelled on an Amtrak train for the innovative cuisine.

It’s the scenery that makes this journey unforgettable. The prairies, pretty as they are, are merely an appetiser; the main course, in visual terms, is served once the train starts climbing into the Rockies west of Denver.

Here the California Zephyr passes through terrain that makes the usual superlatives seem feeble: spectacular rocky bluffs, deep canyons, rushing mountain creeks and idyllic alpine meadows. Though it’s only early autumn, the forest foliage at this altitude (the railway climbs to nearly 3000 metres) seems to show off every colour in nature’s palette, from pale yellow to brilliant scarlet.

We’re soon following the upper reaches of the Colorado River, where we pass parties of white-water kayakers, the occasional fly fisherman and even a prospector panning for gold. Here the railway passes through Upper Gore Canyon, whose walls rise nearly 500 metres and seem to reach out menacingly over the train.

But wait: there’s more. After the Rockies come the vast deserts of Utah and Nevada – a lunar landscape where wind and rain have sculpted the rock into all manner of improbable shapes. In the distance I see massive buttes, similar to those of the famous Monument Valley, rising from the desert floor.

The train rolls through the desert all night, occasionally passing desolate little towns almost hidden in the sagebrush. At 3 am we stop briefly in a place called Elko, Nevada, where there’s not even a station – just a shelter with room for two or three people. Obviously someone got off, or on, the train at Elko and I can’t help thinking the latter would have been the better option.

We also pass the town of Winnemucca, where the conductor, a man with a voice that reminds me of Fozzie Bear in The Muppet Show, tells us Butch Cassidy robbed the bank in 1900.

But there are more mountains to come yet – namely, the majestic range known as the Sierra Nevada. Here we cross the Donner Pass, scene of one of the darkest episodes in the history of American settlement. Trapped by thick snow in the terrible winter of 1846-47, 39 members of a party of 87 settlers died of malnutrition and exposure. Some members of the party famously resorted to cannibalism.

It’s hard to reconcile this grim story with the scene presented by Donner Lake on a gloriously sunny day, shimmering under a powder-blue sky criss-crossed by vapour trails.

Once out of the mountains, the train makes a last dash across California’s broad Central Valley and skirts the shores of San Francisco Bay before reaching its ultimate destination. From Emeryville, we catch an Amtrak bus across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, where we say our goodbyes.

We’ve spent 33 hours on the California Zephyr since Denver but it doesn’t feel like it. In fact we get off the train feeling infinitely fresher than at the end of a 12-hour flight cooped up like battery hens on a Boeing 747. Even as lowly coach-class passengers we have experienced travel as a pleasure in itself, rather than merely as a means of getting somewhere.


EXTRA STUFF YOU MIGHT WANT TO KNOW ...

State-owned Amtrak operates the California Zephyr service daily each way between Chicago and Emeryville, in the San Francisco Bay area of California – a distance of nearly 4000km. The train leaves Chicago at 2pm and arrives at 4.10pm two days later. In the reverse direction the train leaves Emeryville at 9.10am and arrives in Chicago two days later at 2.50pm. Cities it passes through include Burlington, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Reno, Nevada; and Sacramento, California. “Superliner” sleeping accommodation is available and the dining car provides a full meal service, including wine and beer. Smoking on the train is prohibited. Prices range from $US152 for a coach-class seat (not including meals) to $US1396 for a superliner bedroom for two (meals included). Superliner bedrooms are self-contained with their own hand basin, toilet and shower. Note: fares may vary depending on the time of year.

A tribute to Roger Kerr

News of the death of Roger Kerr, executive director of the Business Roundtable, comes as a shock even though we were primed to expect it. He died last night of metastatic melanoma, a particularly evil form of skin cancer that was diagnosed last year.

I wouldn’t describe Roger as a close personal friend, but I had known him for more than 20 years. He had led the Business Roundtable since its inception in 1985, having come to it from a distinguished career with Treasury and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

I admired Roger for his formidable intellect and grasp of the big issues confronting New Zealand, but even more for his dogged perseverance and optimism in pursuing what he believed in. He was an articulate and persuasive champion of an open economy, free markets, smaller government, deregulation and individual freedom – causes that he pushed tirelessly despite vicious attacks from the Left and apathy from politicians for whom bold economic reform was just too hard.

He always seemed polite, upbeat and good-humoured. To his great credit, he never descended to personal abuse, although at times he must have been sorely tempted to respond in kind to the verbal assaults on his character. Perhaps he just developed a thick skin.

Roger persisted in giving politicians the message even when it was clear they didn’t want to listen. He gave them credit when they did the right thing but was always urging them to do more.

He kept up the pressure right till the end. His latest statement, stressing the need for more decisive action on the economy and government accounts, landed in my inbox on Wednesday, following Treasury’s issue of the pre-election economic and fiscal update.

Roger was often wilfully misrepresented by his opponents. He was characterised as a sinister, behind-the-scenes manipulator who sought favours for “big business”, but I don’t believe special treatment for business was part of his agenda. What he wanted was an economic and regulatory environment that would enable New Zealand to perform to its full potential, to the ultimate benefit of everyone. Above all else, he was a patriotic New Zealander.

My sympathy goes to his wife, Catherine Isaac, and to his family.

My cousin Brendan

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, October 26.)]

I was privileged last week to attend an unusual funeral in Nelson.

It was the funeral of a first cousin whom I barely knew. Brendan was born intellectually disabled and placed in care while still in in infancy. He was to remain in the care of the state all his life.

As was often the way then (this was 1953), his parents were advised that institutionalisation was the best course, both for him and for them.

Brendan was sent to the Braemar Home in Nelson. We can barely imagine the heartache this caused his parents, a warm and loving couple with one other child, an older daughter.

Letters that Brendan’s mother wrote to Braemar inquiring about his health and wellbeing give a small insight into the pain and grief she must have felt at giving up her baby son. Reading them today (they were kept on his file) is painful. But parents in those days were more inclined than they are now to defer to “expert” opinion. Doctors knew what was best.

In the wider family, Brendan was barely mentioned. It was normal in those days to draw a veil over such matters – not out of shame or fear of stigma, but more as a way of coping.

Attitudes were different two generations ago and it’s pointless, and I think unfair, to judge what happened then by today’s standards. People put heartbreaking events behind them and got on with life as best they could.

As it turned out, Brendan’s mental disability wasn’t severe compared with some, and, in hindsight, less limiting than his parents (who died many years ago) were led to believe. Today a child with his impairment would probably be raised at home and possibly even sent to a mainstream school.

Brendan grew up at Braemar and from the very start, it seems, was showered with love and affection by those caring for him. Although his communication skills were limited, people were drawn to him by his engaging, outgoing personality and obvious enjoyment of life.

In the 1980s the government adopted a controversial policy of de-institutionalisation which resulted in Brendan being moved from Braemar into the community. This meant living with other intellectually disabled people and caregivers in an ordinary suburban house.

The benefits of de-institutionalisation are still being vigorously debated today. It’s fair to say that the policy worked well for some but not for everyone.

In the case of mentally ill people, as opposed to the intellectually disabled, it often had adverse consequences. But Brendan seems to have thrived in the new environment.

The many photos displayed at his funeral were evidence of a full and active life. He enjoyed trips to the North Island, accompanied by a caregiver, to visit his sister and a much-loved aunty who took a close interest in him and encouraged his love of music.

When the plane touched down on these trips, a delighted Brendan would thrust his arms aloft in the thumbs-up signal and loudly call out “Good one!”, much to the amusement of his fellow passengers.

He was taken on a two-day kayaking trip in the Abel Tasman National Park. He took a flight in a light plane and drove a go-kart and dodgem cars (his caregivers drew the line, though, at bungee-jumping).

He loved Maori culture and the haka, which he pronounced “ha-ha”. One photo showed him proudly posing with a grass-skirted Maori entertainer in Rotorua. Brendan’s principal caregiver for more than 20 years, a cheerful, no-nonsense nurse named Lyn, joked that he had such an affinity for Maoridom that people wondered whether there was Maori blood somewhere in the family (er, not to the best of my knowledge).

Brendan’s physical state deteriorated in recent months and he was moved from the home where he had lived for several years to another that provided a higher level of care. He developed pneumonia and died peacefully on a Sunday morning, not in a frightening and unfamiliar hospital ward but in his own room, surrounded by people and things he knew. He was 58.

As I said at the start of this column, I barely knew Brendan. I now wish I’d known him better.

I went to the funeral with my sister not knowing quite what to expect, but it was a joyous occasion. Rain was forecast but never eventuated, so we gathered in the bright Nelson sunshine on the deck of the spacious, modern home in Richmond where he spent his last weeks.

Brendan’s caregivers, present and former, turned out in numbers, as did his fellow residents (or clients, as they’re called these days). There was a lot of laughter – they’re a jovial bunch, these caregivers – and a few tears.

The stories told about Brendan portrayed a man who, for all his disadvantages, led a full and happy life. He certainly deserved to be more than a dark family secret, as was once the fate of such people.

For me, it was something of a revelation to learn of the warmth and devotion that surrounded Brendan in death and in life.

Most of us think that looking after the intellectually disabled must be a particularly thankless field of health care, but there was no mistaking the love and dedication of the staff who gathered to farewell my cousin, or the reward they got in return. I was told that Lyn had postponed retirement several times so she could continue caring for him.

Another nurse told me Brendan would rush up and cuddle her when she turned up at work each day. “What other job is there,” she asked me, “where you’re greeted with a hug every morning?”

Some of Brendan’s fellow residents are immobile and incapable of communicating or doing anything for themselves. It takes a particular type of person to do this work: someone possessed of infinite patience and able to see that inside the helpless body and contorted face, there’s a human being who deserves love, attention and affection.

Very few of us are equal to this challenge, yet society’s ability to care for those totally dependent on others is a fundamental measure of our humanity. We are collectively in the debt of these largely unsung heroines and heroes.

A field day for kibitzers

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, October 25.)

KIBITZER is a wonderful Yiddish word for which there’s no precise equivalent in English. It means someone who stands around giving unwanted advice.

Kibitzers, usually men of a certain age, have had the time of their lives since the container ship Rena hit the rocks. Tune into any talkback show and you’ll hear them expounding on all the things the authorities have done wrong and how, with a pair of tin snips, a garden hose and a roll of duct tape, they could have had the containers offloaded, the oil pumped out and the ship safely refloated within 24 hours. If only someone had asked them.

Listening to talkback radio, I am agog at the depth of engineering knowledge – salvage expertise too, it seems – acquired by Kiwi blokes who have spent a lifetime changing the oil in Mark II Cortinas, sharpening the blades on the Masport and clearing blockages under the kitchen sink. I mean, who would have thought?

Speaking of the Rena, I worry for Britain because it seems we’ve pinched all their experts on maritime safety and salvage operations. As was also noticeable in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, a striking number of the officials who appear on the TV news each night to update us on developments speak with British accents.

There was a time in New Zealand when virtually every union spokesman had an accent that identified them as English or Scottish. Nothing puzzling about that; they were simply carrying on the class war. But can anyone explain why so many British immigrants end up working for regulatory authorities?

* * *

I WAS SHOCKED last week by the cost of a return air fare between Wellington and Nelson, particularly when compared with a recent international flight. So I did some sums.

Wellington-Los Angeles return via Auckland is a round trip of roughly 22,000 kilometres. Cost flying Air New Zealand: about $2400.

Wellington-Nelson return is a round trip of about 264 kilometres. Cost flying Air New Zealand: $361.

I’m no Einstein, but I calculate that flying to LA (with meals and drinks provided) costs slightly more than 10 cents per kilometre while the cost of flying to Nelson (with a complimentary drink of water) is $1.36 cents per km, or nearly 14 times as much.

You can’t help but feel the national carrier is taking advantage of its virtual monopoly on some provincial routes, particularly when a friend tells me he booked a return flight on Air New Zealand from Wellington to Queenstown for less than $160. The difference? Competition.

Oh, and I paid $27 for nine hours’ parking at Wellington Airport when you can get all-day parking for $12 in the CBD. But no one ever pretended that capitalism is perfect.

* * *

IN A RECENT column I complained that making a one-off donation to a charity invites a barrage of unwanted mail for years thereafter. The assumption is that having given once, you’re fair game.

More recently I’ve been reminded of another fundraising technique that’s even more intrusive. This happens when you respond to a telephone charity appeal and then get phoned annually by someone asking if you’ll be repeating your donation.

The expectation seems to be that you’ll comply. I object to this because it puts people on the spot in a way that a letter doesn’t. Many New Zealanders are too meek and polite to say “no” to someone soliciting donations on the phone.

Old-fashioned door-to-door salesmen knew that the key to making a sale was to get inside the house. Most householders – usually women at home alone – were then psychologically vulnerable because they thought the only way to get rid of the intruder without any unpleasantness was by making a purchase.

Telephone appeals use essentially the same technique. Once they’ve got you on the phone there’s nowhere to run.

Worse still, some charities follow up the phone call with what they call an “invoice”, which implies a legal obligation to pay. I accept that raising funds is a challenge in a market crowded with hundreds of deserving charities, but this is getting perilously close to a hard sell.

* * *

A MOMENT’S silence, please, while we mourn the loss of another good word.

“Passion” was once used mainly to describe a particularly ardent form of love. But like so many other words, its piquancy has been eroded by misuse.

“Passion” these days is something sports writers ascribe to sports teams. In future, no writer will be able to use the word without conjuring up images of Brad Thorn.

It’s just one of a grab-bag of New Age, psychobabble cliches that are now applied to sport. We constantly hear about teams possessing self-belief, having their character tested, being on a journey, wanting to express themselves and - perhaps worst of all - “living the dream”.

Good grief. I bet Colin Meads never talked like that.