(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, October 13.)
I CAN think of much more despicable people than the Crafar family of dairying infamy. The names of Clayton Weatherston, Graeme Burton and William Bell come to mind.
But if you were to compile a Hall of Shame listing people who had behaved appallingly without actually committing criminal offences, the names of Allan, Frank and Beth Crafar would surely be close to the top.
The Crafars are the dirty face of dairying. They are a blight on the dairying industry in the same way that paedophile priests are a blight on the Catholic Church and cops who rape are a blight on the police.
There are lots of dirty dairy farmers who don’t seem to care too much where their effluent goes, but the Crafars took it to a new level, and compounded the offence by allowing their livestock to suffer. Even dirty farmers would have balked at that.
Dairy farmers who are meticulous both about controlling pollution and caring for their animals – and there are plenty of them – would have been horrified.
The rampant growth of the dairy industry has triggered an economic boom, but in other respects it has been a catastrophe. Much of it has been driven by greed and disregard for environmental consequences, especially in regions unsuited to dairying.
The Crafars seem to have surfed the boom with very little thought about where it might lead. They just wanted more land and more cows – more! more! more! – and were prepared to mortgage themselves to the eyeballs, presumably in the expectation that milk prices would stay high forever.
They are by no means the only greedy, industrial-scale dairy farmers, but they certainly made themselves the most visible. In the end they created a monster that they couldn’t control.
I have heard apologists for the Crafars saying they have been unfairly scapegoated and demonised. The word bullshit – a highly appropriate epithet in this case – comes to mind.
The Crafars were greedy, and to make matters worse they don’t appear to be very bright. That’s a lethal combination.
* * *
THE TERM “moral panic” was coined by British sociologists in the early 1970s to describe the public reaction when something, or someone, threatens prevailing social or cultural values.
In New Zealand the term has become a catchcry of the Left, which uses it – usually with a tone of intellectual superiority – in an attempt to invalidate any concerns that are seen as reflecting the conservative values of the middle classes.
Public concern about violent crime? Moral panic, the lefties sniff derisively.
Public concern about family breakdown? Moral panic.
Public concern about P and other forms of drug abuse? Moral panic.
Public concern about boy racers and tagging? Ditto. And so on.
It’s a crafty way to dismiss legitimate concerns about anti-social behaviour. “Moral panic” conjures up an image of nervous, fretful fuddy-duddies getting their knickers in a twist unnecessarily.
Invariably, it involves issues that the vile capitalist news media are accused of blowing out of proportion in order to protect their class interests.
The irony is that the Left is very adept at whipping up moral panics of its own, when it suits. But of course it would never use the term.
The Left would never admit, for example, that the climate change scare, with its dire warnings of global apocalypse unless we all revert to a subsistence lifestyle, is moral panic on a grand scale; or that the repeal of Section 59 of the Crimes Act was the result of a moral panic, assiduously whipped up by the Left, which associated an occasional parental smack with gross violence against children.
Then there’s the furore over alcohol abuse, as a result of which the vast majority of New Zealanders who drink responsibly are likely to be penalised because of the behaviour of a minority who can’t; and the determined campaign to regulate the advertising and sale of supposedly unhealthy food and drink. Classic moral panics, both.
The Left would have us believe it’s a moral panic if it involves protecting the interests of the majority, but not if it involves a sanctimonious elite trying to bully and frighten others into living according to their dictates. Don’t be fooled.
* * *
WHO IS this mysterious person named Te Puni Corkery, whom prime minister John Key mentioned while discussing taxpayer funding for Maori TV’s bid to screen the Rugby World Cup?
I can only conclude it must be the little-known, part-Maori half-brother of Pam, the former Alliance MP. Clearly, this is a family whose political influence runs deep.
Are there any other Corkerys lurking in the corridors of power? To use Felicity Ferret’s famous line, I think we should be told.
Showing posts with label dairy farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dairy farming. Show all posts
Friday, October 16, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
In praise of aerial topdressing
(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, April 15.)
Driving through the Wairarapa back country recently, I saw a truck loading superphosphate into a topdressing plane in a paddock beside the road. I just had to stop and watch.
I’m no aviation enthusiast, but something about aerial topdressing fascinates me. It’s partly the skill of the pilots, partly the fact that it’s such a distinctive element of our rural heritage.
New Zealand pioneered aerial topdressing, using former World War II pilots to drop fertiliser in otherwise inaccessible places. It was a job that called on all their aviation skills. They flew low over hair-raising terrain and the death toll was high, but their work transformed vast areas of previously unproductive land into pasture.
Topdressing is part of the same number-eight wire tradition that gave us the electric fence and the Hamilton jetboat. All were New Zealand innovations that caught on around the world.
Waikato farmer Bill Gallagher made his first electric fence in the 1930s. The Hamilton-based company he founded is now an international leader in the design and manufacture of high-tech animal control systems.
Sir William Hamilton – another farmer, this time from South Canterbury – ingeniously adapted the principle of jet propulsion to boats, realising it would be the ideal way to navigate the shallow, fast-flowing rivers of the Mackenzie Country. His ideas have been adopted worldwide in craft ranging from jet skis to coastguard and naval vessels.
Such men represented something of a golden era in New Zealand – a time when resourceful and imaginative individuals, often with little formal education, made significant contributions to the country’s economic development.
How much less efficient farming would have been without the invention of a fence that could be picked up and shifted around, providing farmers with previously unimagined flexibility; and how different the vibrant tourist industry would seem without jet boats operating on our spectacular rivers and lakes.
Topdressing’s economic impact has been huge too. I see from a comprehensive entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, that a John Chaytor of Wairoa is credited with the first use of aerial means to enhance agricultural productivity. In 1906, he spread seed from a tethered hot air balloon.
By the 1920s, the Americans were using planes for crop dusting. (Any Alfred Hitchcock fan knows about American crop dusting from the famous scene in North By Northwest, in which Cary Grant is attacked by a crop dusting plane and hides in a cornfield.)
But it was New Zealand that pioneered the application of fertiliser from the air. To use a phrase from crime novels, it had both the motive (large areas of the central North Island were deficient in trace minerals but too hilly to fertilise using trucks or tractors) and the opportunity (a lot of ex-RNZAF pilots were keen to apply their flying skills in civilian life, and there were war surplus planes available for conversion).
Private farmers acting on their own initiative were among the pioneers of agricultural aviation but the government, recognising the potential economic benefits, got behind it too.
I was intrigued to read that in 1949 one Stan Quill, a WWII flying veteran whose son was a friend of mine at school nearly 20 years later, was appointed head of an RNZAF research and development wing with the task of carrying out topdressing trials. Those trials culminated in a demonstration drop before an audience of farmers and reporters near Masterton, where I’m writing this.
The 1950s wool boom, triggered by the demand for warm uniforms for troops serving in the bitter cold of the Korean War, came along just at the right time, providing farmers with surplus capital that they spent on fertiliser and other improvements. By 1958, according to Wikipedia, there were 73 aerial topdressing firms flying 279 aircraft.
I grew up in a country town during that period and the noise of topdressing planes was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. There was a farm airstrip just a few hundred yards along the road from our house where planes would land on a slight uphill gradient and take off using the downhill slope to gain momentum.
All manner of aircraft were adapted for topdressing – puny Tiger Moths, lumbering twin-engined Bristol Freighters, Lockheed Lodestars and DC3s, De Havilland Beavers, noisy Ceres (a civilian adaptation of the air force Harvard) and, of course, the ubiquitous New Zealand-built Fletchers.
The Fletcher was purpose-built for flying in difficult hill country, often operating off tiny airstrips fiendishly sited on wind-swept ridges and nasty-looking spurs – anywhere there was a few metres of land that was more or less flat.
Originally designed in the US as a short-takeoff military attack aircraft called the Defender, the Fletcher was modified for topdressing purposes and in time became, to all intents and purposes, a New Zealand aircraft. From 1961, it was made in Hamilton.
The Cresco, direct descendant of the Fletcher, is a Kiwi success story that deserves greater recognition. It’s bigger than the old Fletcher and has a much more powerful turbo-prop engine, but with the same unmistakeable buzz-saw engine note.
When I see these planes weaving low through hills and gullies, I can’t help stopping to watch. Once, driving through a narrow gully on a winding gravel road in a remote part of the King Country, I damn near wet myself when a Cresco suddenly appeared under full power only metres above my head.
Aerial topdressing peaked in the mid-1960s. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now see that it had some adverse effects. One was fertiliser runoff, but perhaps a more damaging consequence was that some steep back country was turned into pasture when it would have been better used for forestry, thus avoiding erosion.
Still, we can’t – and shouldn’t – overlook the contribution aerial topdressing made to our most important industry.
Now that I’m living in a country town again, I often see and hear topdressing planes flying out at first light and heading back to base at dusk. They are the bookends of the rural day.
It’s a good sight – a sign that farmers are spending money. When topdressing planes are mothballed because farmers can’t afford to buy fertiliser, as happened in the 1980s, we should all start to worry. We forget too easily that much of this country’s wealth still comes from the land.
Driving through the Wairarapa back country recently, I saw a truck loading superphosphate into a topdressing plane in a paddock beside the road. I just had to stop and watch.
I’m no aviation enthusiast, but something about aerial topdressing fascinates me. It’s partly the skill of the pilots, partly the fact that it’s such a distinctive element of our rural heritage.
New Zealand pioneered aerial topdressing, using former World War II pilots to drop fertiliser in otherwise inaccessible places. It was a job that called on all their aviation skills. They flew low over hair-raising terrain and the death toll was high, but their work transformed vast areas of previously unproductive land into pasture.
Topdressing is part of the same number-eight wire tradition that gave us the electric fence and the Hamilton jetboat. All were New Zealand innovations that caught on around the world.
Waikato farmer Bill Gallagher made his first electric fence in the 1930s. The Hamilton-based company he founded is now an international leader in the design and manufacture of high-tech animal control systems.
Sir William Hamilton – another farmer, this time from South Canterbury – ingeniously adapted the principle of jet propulsion to boats, realising it would be the ideal way to navigate the shallow, fast-flowing rivers of the Mackenzie Country. His ideas have been adopted worldwide in craft ranging from jet skis to coastguard and naval vessels.
Such men represented something of a golden era in New Zealand – a time when resourceful and imaginative individuals, often with little formal education, made significant contributions to the country’s economic development.
How much less efficient farming would have been without the invention of a fence that could be picked up and shifted around, providing farmers with previously unimagined flexibility; and how different the vibrant tourist industry would seem without jet boats operating on our spectacular rivers and lakes.
Topdressing’s economic impact has been huge too. I see from a comprehensive entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, that a John Chaytor of Wairoa is credited with the first use of aerial means to enhance agricultural productivity. In 1906, he spread seed from a tethered hot air balloon.
By the 1920s, the Americans were using planes for crop dusting. (Any Alfred Hitchcock fan knows about American crop dusting from the famous scene in North By Northwest, in which Cary Grant is attacked by a crop dusting plane and hides in a cornfield.)
But it was New Zealand that pioneered the application of fertiliser from the air. To use a phrase from crime novels, it had both the motive (large areas of the central North Island were deficient in trace minerals but too hilly to fertilise using trucks or tractors) and the opportunity (a lot of ex-RNZAF pilots were keen to apply their flying skills in civilian life, and there were war surplus planes available for conversion).
Private farmers acting on their own initiative were among the pioneers of agricultural aviation but the government, recognising the potential economic benefits, got behind it too.
I was intrigued to read that in 1949 one Stan Quill, a WWII flying veteran whose son was a friend of mine at school nearly 20 years later, was appointed head of an RNZAF research and development wing with the task of carrying out topdressing trials. Those trials culminated in a demonstration drop before an audience of farmers and reporters near Masterton, where I’m writing this.
The 1950s wool boom, triggered by the demand for warm uniforms for troops serving in the bitter cold of the Korean War, came along just at the right time, providing farmers with surplus capital that they spent on fertiliser and other improvements. By 1958, according to Wikipedia, there were 73 aerial topdressing firms flying 279 aircraft.
I grew up in a country town during that period and the noise of topdressing planes was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. There was a farm airstrip just a few hundred yards along the road from our house where planes would land on a slight uphill gradient and take off using the downhill slope to gain momentum.
All manner of aircraft were adapted for topdressing – puny Tiger Moths, lumbering twin-engined Bristol Freighters, Lockheed Lodestars and DC3s, De Havilland Beavers, noisy Ceres (a civilian adaptation of the air force Harvard) and, of course, the ubiquitous New Zealand-built Fletchers.
The Fletcher was purpose-built for flying in difficult hill country, often operating off tiny airstrips fiendishly sited on wind-swept ridges and nasty-looking spurs – anywhere there was a few metres of land that was more or less flat.
Originally designed in the US as a short-takeoff military attack aircraft called the Defender, the Fletcher was modified for topdressing purposes and in time became, to all intents and purposes, a New Zealand aircraft. From 1961, it was made in Hamilton.
The Cresco, direct descendant of the Fletcher, is a Kiwi success story that deserves greater recognition. It’s bigger than the old Fletcher and has a much more powerful turbo-prop engine, but with the same unmistakeable buzz-saw engine note.
When I see these planes weaving low through hills and gullies, I can’t help stopping to watch. Once, driving through a narrow gully on a winding gravel road in a remote part of the King Country, I damn near wet myself when a Cresco suddenly appeared under full power only metres above my head.
Aerial topdressing peaked in the mid-1960s. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now see that it had some adverse effects. One was fertiliser runoff, but perhaps a more damaging consequence was that some steep back country was turned into pasture when it would have been better used for forestry, thus avoiding erosion.
Still, we can’t – and shouldn’t – overlook the contribution aerial topdressing made to our most important industry.
Now that I’m living in a country town again, I often see and hear topdressing planes flying out at first light and heading back to base at dusk. They are the bookends of the rural day.
It’s a good sight – a sign that farmers are spending money. When topdressing planes are mothballed because farmers can’t afford to buy fertiliser, as happened in the 1980s, we should all start to worry. We forget too easily that much of this country’s wealth still comes from the land.
Friday, March 20, 2009
When the ACC first morphed into a welfare agency
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, March 17.)
MUCH has been said about the blowout in ACC spending that resulted when the Labour government extended coverage to include medical misadventure, work-related stress and free physiotherapy. But anyone seeking to identify the point when the ACC strayed from being an insurer to a welfare agency should go back to the 1980s, when it began subsidising the sexual abuse counselling industry.
In 1988, the ACC accepted 221 claims for sexual abuse – or, more precisely, mental illness arising from alleged abuse – at a cost of $1.9 million. By 2004, claims were running at an average of 5000 a year and annual costs had risen to more than $27 million.
One claimant got more than $150,000 in backdated compensation and several were being paid more than $60,000 a year in weekly compensation payments based on their earnings before their “injury” was diagnosed.
No doubt many claims were legitimate – but 5000 a year? And was compensation for alleged sexual abuse ever envisaged by the architects of the scheme?
No corroboration of the alleged abuse was required other than a supporting statement from an ACC-registered counsellor. There was no requirement that the supposed victim lay a complaint with the police, still less obtain a conviction. The alleged abuser didn’t even have to be identified.
In many cases the alleged abuse was far in the past, raising suspicions about “recovered memory” syndrome.
This was a tidy little racket that benefited both the claimants and the burgeoning counselling industry, which pocketed generous fees from the ACC for two-hour assessment sessions which invariably resulted in the counsellor confirming that sexual abuse had taken place. Acceptance of a claim usually led to further counselling sessions, thus ensuring a steady income stream for the therapists.
“Counselling” was a rubber-stamp process similar to the charade women go through when seeking a state-funded abortion.
The Bolger government curbed the worst excesses of the scheme in 1992 by stopping lump-sum payouts, but otherwise the rort continued. I remember questioning the then ACC Minister Bill Birch about the potential for bogus claims and being fobbed off with bland non-replies. He didn’t want to rock the boat.
One of the few politicians with the guts to speak out was ACT MP Heather Roy, who in 2004 compared sexual abuse payouts with Lotto prizes. By then Labour had reinstated lump-sum compensation, which predictably led to a quadrupling of costs.
At the same time the ACC funded a $600,000 study of the mental effects of sexual abuse – a nice gravy train for Labour-voting academics – and spent $200,000 bailing out an Auckland counselling service that was about to fall over. Whoever said New Zealand governments had given up subsidising industries?
Interestingly enough, an Auckland survey of women being counselled for sexual abuse found that 30 per cent had undergone 100 or more ACC-funded sessions of therapy. Despite that, many expressed disappointment that they were not getting enough.
This confirms that in a grievance-obsessed culture, there can never be enough nannying.
* * *
WELL, well, well. Some greedy dairy farmers, having invested millions converting sheep and beef properties into industrial-scale dairy farms, have been caught out now that Fonterra has reduced milk payouts from last year’s giddy $7.90 per kilogram to a sobering $5.10.
They should have seen this coming. Agricultural commodity prices have always been cyclical and it was inevitable that what went up would come down again. But some of the new dairy millionaires were blinded by the dollar signs flashing in their eyes.
There has been collateral damage too. Farmers who grow maize and other fodder crops for the booming dairy industry are now in trouble because financially hard-pressed cow cockies either can’t afford, or don’t need, supplementary feed.
Unfortunately we will all pay the ultimate price for the mad rush into dairying. The aesthetic and environmental damage done by indiscriminate farm conversions, often in areas unsuited to big dairy herds, will not easily be undone.
* * *
MEMO to Patricia Reade, deputy chief executive of Work and Income:
Beneficiaries are not “clients”, as you referred to them in a recent letter to the editor. A client is someone who pays for professional services. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that the state – that means the taxpayer – pays beneficiaries, not vice-versa.
Some dictionaries, bowing to political correctness, now permit the word “client” to apply to someone using the services of a social worker, but I don’t buy it. The fact that dictionaries have recorded a change in usage doesn’t automatically make the new usage valid.
No one concerned for the precision of the English language should be misled into thinking “clients’ have magically metamorphosed into people who get paid, rather than those who do the paying.
That a word should be so completely turned on its head is a demonstration of what happens when we allow the language to be politicised. George Orwell, bless him, was wise to this 60 years ago.
MUCH has been said about the blowout in ACC spending that resulted when the Labour government extended coverage to include medical misadventure, work-related stress and free physiotherapy. But anyone seeking to identify the point when the ACC strayed from being an insurer to a welfare agency should go back to the 1980s, when it began subsidising the sexual abuse counselling industry.
In 1988, the ACC accepted 221 claims for sexual abuse – or, more precisely, mental illness arising from alleged abuse – at a cost of $1.9 million. By 2004, claims were running at an average of 5000 a year and annual costs had risen to more than $27 million.
One claimant got more than $150,000 in backdated compensation and several were being paid more than $60,000 a year in weekly compensation payments based on their earnings before their “injury” was diagnosed.
No doubt many claims were legitimate – but 5000 a year? And was compensation for alleged sexual abuse ever envisaged by the architects of the scheme?
No corroboration of the alleged abuse was required other than a supporting statement from an ACC-registered counsellor. There was no requirement that the supposed victim lay a complaint with the police, still less obtain a conviction. The alleged abuser didn’t even have to be identified.
In many cases the alleged abuse was far in the past, raising suspicions about “recovered memory” syndrome.
This was a tidy little racket that benefited both the claimants and the burgeoning counselling industry, which pocketed generous fees from the ACC for two-hour assessment sessions which invariably resulted in the counsellor confirming that sexual abuse had taken place. Acceptance of a claim usually led to further counselling sessions, thus ensuring a steady income stream for the therapists.
“Counselling” was a rubber-stamp process similar to the charade women go through when seeking a state-funded abortion.
The Bolger government curbed the worst excesses of the scheme in 1992 by stopping lump-sum payouts, but otherwise the rort continued. I remember questioning the then ACC Minister Bill Birch about the potential for bogus claims and being fobbed off with bland non-replies. He didn’t want to rock the boat.
One of the few politicians with the guts to speak out was ACT MP Heather Roy, who in 2004 compared sexual abuse payouts with Lotto prizes. By then Labour had reinstated lump-sum compensation, which predictably led to a quadrupling of costs.
At the same time the ACC funded a $600,000 study of the mental effects of sexual abuse – a nice gravy train for Labour-voting academics – and spent $200,000 bailing out an Auckland counselling service that was about to fall over. Whoever said New Zealand governments had given up subsidising industries?
Interestingly enough, an Auckland survey of women being counselled for sexual abuse found that 30 per cent had undergone 100 or more ACC-funded sessions of therapy. Despite that, many expressed disappointment that they were not getting enough.
This confirms that in a grievance-obsessed culture, there can never be enough nannying.
* * *
WELL, well, well. Some greedy dairy farmers, having invested millions converting sheep and beef properties into industrial-scale dairy farms, have been caught out now that Fonterra has reduced milk payouts from last year’s giddy $7.90 per kilogram to a sobering $5.10.
They should have seen this coming. Agricultural commodity prices have always been cyclical and it was inevitable that what went up would come down again. But some of the new dairy millionaires were blinded by the dollar signs flashing in their eyes.
There has been collateral damage too. Farmers who grow maize and other fodder crops for the booming dairy industry are now in trouble because financially hard-pressed cow cockies either can’t afford, or don’t need, supplementary feed.
Unfortunately we will all pay the ultimate price for the mad rush into dairying. The aesthetic and environmental damage done by indiscriminate farm conversions, often in areas unsuited to big dairy herds, will not easily be undone.
* * *
MEMO to Patricia Reade, deputy chief executive of Work and Income:
Beneficiaries are not “clients”, as you referred to them in a recent letter to the editor. A client is someone who pays for professional services. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that the state – that means the taxpayer – pays beneficiaries, not vice-versa.
Some dictionaries, bowing to political correctness, now permit the word “client” to apply to someone using the services of a social worker, but I don’t buy it. The fact that dictionaries have recorded a change in usage doesn’t automatically make the new usage valid.
No one concerned for the precision of the English language should be misled into thinking “clients’ have magically metamorphosed into people who get paid, rather than those who do the paying.
That a word should be so completely turned on its head is a demonstration of what happens when we allow the language to be politicised. George Orwell, bless him, was wise to this 60 years ago.
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