A mild form of hysteria

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 25.)

At the time of writing this (Sunday), I have no idea how the America’s Cup will play out. But it doesn’t really matter, because this column is more concerned with the America’s Cup as a sociological phenomenon.

A different New Zealand has been on display over the past couple of weeks. We like to think of ourselves as phlegmatic people, slow to register emotion. There is no better example of this than New Zealand skipper Dean Barker, whose composure and measured understatement has been one of the most striking aspects of the entire contest.

In contrast, the national mood over the past few days has resembled a mild form of hysteria.

Encouraged by incessant, chest-thumping media hype, we quickly get carried away by the prospect of international sporting triumph. Nothing causes us to shed our inhibitions – or our modesty – faster.

But events like the America’s Cup also serve as a kind of social glue. I think of it as the spirit of Telethon. Just as in the 1970s the entire nation coalesced around the novelty of 24-hour television charity fundraisers, so an event like the America’s Cup pulls us all together. For a brief period we put aside the things that normally divide us and focus on a common cause.

This is very much a New Zealand thing, and it’s probably due to our size. We are small enough to feel connected.

One of the most intriguing aspects has been the way people felt the urge to indulge in communal bonding. Rather than watch in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, thousands chose to gather in clubs and public venues, often sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers. I can only guess this has something to do with feelings of excitement being heightened (and perhaps with disappointment being easier to take) when it’s shared.

None of this was orchestrated. In fact interest in the event built slowly.

I began watching at the time of the Louis Vuitton series, when it seemed not many people were paying much attention. I wouldn’t have bothered myself, except that an Italian-American friend in San Francisco (a keen supporter of Team New Zealand) began sending me YouTube links that captured my interest.

At that stage it wasn’t the prospect of a New Zealand victory that pulled me in so much as the sheer spectacle. Even when the New Zealand boat was racing by itself, its speed and agility was enthralling. This was sailing as it had never been seen before.

As Emirates Team NZ dispensed with the hapless Luna Rossa team and attention turned to Oracle, the media began to sit up and take notice. And when the New Zealanders won the first few races against Larry Ellison’s defenders, the momentum became irresistible.

Suddenly the TV and radio networks, sensing a big story in the making, were frantically dispatching their star reporters to San Francisco. We love our own myths, and there is none more irresistible than the one in which, by sheer grit and No 8 wire resourcefulness, we take on the world.

Even cynics who sneered at sailing as a rich man’s sport found themselves being sucked in. Doubtless the prospect of New Zealand giving the unpopular software billionaire Ellison a bloody nose helped overcome their ideological qualms.

We’ve been here before, of course. When the All Whites qualified for the FIFA World Cup in 1982, people with no prior interest in football suddenly became ardent enthusiasts. Work would cease when our underdog players took the field.

The same thing happened in 2010, when we took huge pride in the fact that New Zealand was the only team not to lose a game (something the critics unkindly pointed out wasn’t necessarily hard to do if you played a strictly defensive style of football).

In 1987, the hit song Sailing Away helped whip up a fever of patriotic enthusiasm when a young Chris Dickson skippered KZ7 in our first America’s Cup campaign off Fremantle. In 1995, red socks became the symbol of the nation’s passionate support for the ultimately successful Cup challenge led by Peter Blake, with Russell Coutts as helmsman.

There is an almost childlike delight in the way New Zealanders rise to such occasions. Sociologists and psychologists no doubt have their explanations, but I suspect it has a lot to do with our being a small, young country that’s over-anxious to prove itself.

We’re on the edge of the world and we don’t have much weight to throw around. So it feels good to be noticed, even if we sometimes over-estimate the amount of world attention we’re attracting.

Being a small, intimate society also means it’s relatively simple to galvanise the entire populace behind a campaign – a point cleverly exploited by the promoters of the 2011 Rugby World Cup with their “stadium of 4 million” theme.

But while there’s almost a naïve innocence in the way New Zealand gets behind its sporting heroes at such times, this aspect of the national character has its less attractive facets too.

One is a tendency to pump ourselves up – never a good look. Not only do a few early successes lead us too quickly to a position of irrational optimism, thus setting ourselves up for bitter disappointment in the event of failure, but we also tend to take collective credit for something in which we have played no part.

Listening to talkback radio and watching fans being interviewed on the TV news, you couldn’t help but notice how the pronoun “they” – in reference to the New Zealand crew – morphed into “we”, as if the entire population was out there out on the water.

I think of this as the Little Red Hen syndrome. Few people took much interest in the America’s Cup bid in its early stages; in fact the government’s decision to back Team NZ with more than $30 million of taxpayers’ money was widely attacked. But once the team tasted success, we were all eager to be associated with it.

Elements of the media haven’t helped, some journalists and broadcasters abandoning all semblance of detachment as they assumed the role of cheerleaders. As Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch programme pointed out, their braying jingoism stood in stark contrast to the humility and graciousness of the sailors themselves.

 

Enough of the quirky shtick - just get us there on time

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 20.)

IT’S ALMOST a condition of citizenship that we shouldn’t criticise Air New Zealand. The national airline has much the same sainted status as Dave Dobbyn, Sir Peter Jackson and (as of a couple of weeks ago) Dean Barker.

We are conditioned to take pride in Air New Zealand as the quirky little carrier that out-performs the big international players and delights passengers with its hard-case safety videos and idiosyncratic livery.

But right now, I’ve had Air New Zealand up to here. In fact I’m well on my way to developing a full-blown Air New Zealand phobia.

Just when I’d finally forgiven them for the occasion several years ago when they offloaded most of the baggage from my flight to Tonga because the plane was overweight, then casually informed us of this fact as we were approaching Nukualofa, a recent run of bad experiences has left me convinced the national carrier is often complacent and lackadaisical.

Every time I check in these days, I brace myself for a delay due to “engineering requirements” or any of the other euphemisms Air New Zealand routinely uses to gloss over its failure to get passengers to their destination on time.

A common excuse is “late arrival of the aircraft”, as if this were some force majeure over which the airline has no control.

(A novel announcement earlier this year, on a night-time flight into Masterton which had already been delayed leaving Auckland, was that the pilot couldn’t find our destination because he had lost his satellite signal.)

In several instances when my travel has been disrupted, matters have been made worse by a failure to keep passengers informed.

Most people accept that planes can be delayed for legitimate reasons, but they find it much harder to forgive an airline that can’t be bothered telling them what’s happening.

Neither can they excuse the offhand response of some airline staff to the predicament of people whose plans have been thrown into disarray, often resulting in inconvenience and expense – as happened to me recently when a trans-Tasman flight was delayed by several hours because of a mechanical fault, which meant I missed the last bus to Canberra and had to stay overnight in Sydney.

On that occasion, after the initial announcement of a delay, Air New Zealand ground staff in Wellington magically vanished rather than deal with passengers’ questions. We were later consoled with vouchers for $6 which we could redeem at a café where nothing remotely edible cost less than $7.

An almost comical example of communication failure occurred on my most recent arrival at Wellington Airport, when it was decided the southerly was too strong for baggage handlers to unload the plane. (Strong winds at Wellington? Who’d have thought?)

Air New Zealand’s inability to keep people informed was pitiful. What struck me was the patience, or perhaps I should say resignation, of the passengers milling around the stationary baggage carousel. Perhaps we’re like stoical Soviet-era Russians, so accustomed to second-rate service that we accept it without complaint.

You can’t help wondering whether Air New Zealand could afford to be so slap-happy if it didn’t enjoy a monopoly on most of its services.

ALL OF WHICH brings me to the national airline’s gimmicky safety video featuring Bear Grylls.

The first time you see it, it’s mildly diverting (that is, if you don’t mind Bear Grylls). By the second viewing, it’s already starting to grate. By the fifth or sixth time, you’re ready to run screaming for the emergency exit.

Air New Zealand is at risk of overplaying the cute, quirky shtick that has become part of its brand.

No doubt it keeps a lot of bright young advertising things in work, but I’m sure most travellers would opt for dependable service – such as planes that get them to their destination on time – over novelty safety videos featuring Hobbits and All Blacks.

Besides, isn’t there a risk passengers will be so distracted by the visual cleverness that the safety message will be lost?

AND SINCE I’m on the subject of air travel, there should be a special place in Hell for the architects who designed Wellington Airport’s supposedly edgy international terminal.

Most of the controversy over the building arose from its external appearance, which one critic likened to dog turds.  But it’s the interior that matters most, and Wellington’s international terminal is gloomy and uncomfortable – as you discover when you have hours to kill waiting for your delayed flight to Sydney.

Airport terminals should be designed for comfort and convenience. They should be bright and airy, as the best overseas terminals are. Architects who want to make a creative statement should stick to public toilets.

Abbott had the last laugh

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 11.)

Right to the very end – even after he had convincingly won the Australian election, dealing his Labor opponents their most crushing defeat in a century – some of the Australian media continued to treat prime minister-elect Tony Abbott as a figure of ridicule.

In fact one of the most striking aspects of the election across the Tasman is that it demonstrated very clearly the extent to which the Australian media have become politicised. It also showed, not for the first time, how out of touch Australian political journalists are with the public they supposedly serve.

If the Australian Labor Party needs to examine itself thoroughly and honestly in the aftermath of the election, then so too do the Australian news media.

The Australian press has become arguably the most politically partisan in the Western world. Broadly speaking, the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the influential Fairfax Media papers – the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age – threw their weight behind the Labor government while the Murdoch press backed Abbott’s Liberal-led coalition.

The snarling feud between the leading media outlets – which of course are bitter commercial rivals too – became almost as much a theme of the election as the contest between the politicians.

Tough luck for Australian voters wanting a detached, objective assessment of the parties, the politicians and the policies. In my view this was a fundamental misuse of media power.

It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that many journalists – even those who accepted that the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government had become terminally dysfunctional – couldn’t stomach the thought of Abbott as prime minister.

Hence the continuing derisive references, even as Australians were going to the polls, to the “budgie-smuggler” Speedo swimming togs Abbott was once photographed in.

For heaven’s sake, that was in 2009. That journalists continued to mock him over what they perceived as an offence against good taste said more about them than it did about Abbott. It not only exposed their sneering antipathy towards him, but also their warped notion about what mattered to Australian voters.

And it revealed a strong streak of elitist liberal snobbery – as did the ridiculous fuss made over harmless comments made by Abbott on the campaign trail.

So he commented that a young female Liberal candidate had sex appeal, and on another occasion mentioned his good-looking daughters. You’d think, from the ensuing media hysteria over these supposed “gaffes”, that he’d advocated the bombing of boats carrying asylum-seekers.

To their great credit, Australian voters refused to be distracted by these media diversions. They recognised, even if the Canberra press gallery didn’t, that Australia urgently needed to be rescued from a desperate Labor government that had lost its way and was being led down a blind alley by the increasingly erratic, impulsive and egotistical Kevin Rudd, a man who gave the impression of being prepared to say or do anything in order to cling to power.

Don’t get me wrong: Abbott doesn’t exactly give the impression that he’s a political giant. (Then again, neither did John Howard, and he won four terms). But he certainly deserved better than to be derided in the media as the Mad Monk, presumably on the basis of his Catholicism.

He is, after all, a former Rhodes Scholar who attained a Master of Arts degree at Oxford.  Even former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke cautioned that Abbott was underrated by his rivals.

Now the shattered Australian Labor Party must rebuild. It promises to be a long and arduous process, but the party that produced such notable prime ministers as Hawke, Paul Keating, the wartime leader John Curtin and Ben Chifley deserves better than to be to be left in tatters by the unscrupulous, self-serving plotters and conspirators who came to power in 2007.

In New Zealand, of course, Labour is going through a similar reconstruction process, having tried two leaders and found them wanting since the formidable Helen Clark stood down following the election defeat of 2008.

As in Australia, the party is dogged by factionalism, though not nearly to the same extent (or with such corrosive effects).

In both countries, Labour faces something of an identity crisis. Traditionally the party of the working class, it has been taken over by university-educated, middle-class, urban professionals – teachers, academics and the like – whose concerns are often far removed from those of Labour’s core constituency.

It’s largely due to the tension between the progressive and traditional wings of the party, which Miss Clark adroitly managed, that Labour has been destabilised. Whether the current three-way leadership contest will resolve matters remains to be seen.

The difficulty of reconciling the two factions is neatly personified by Grant Robertson, who is said to be the caucus favourite for the leadership.

Robertson is gay, which sits very well with the fashionable identity politics embraced by the party’s liberal wing. But Labour depends on the brown vote, especially in South Auckland, and church-going Pacific Islanders are hostile to homosexuality. A gay leader could well drive them into the arms of New Zealand First or the Conservative Party.

And there are other problems on the way. Eager to convince the party rank-and-file of their socialist credentials, the contenders have been busy outbidding each other in their determination to show how far to the left they are.

But far-left policies that play well to party stalwarts are unlikely to appeal to middle New Zealand. So whoever becomes leader must either moderate those policies further down the track – and face accusations of betrayal from Labour hard-liners – or risk annihilation at the ballot box.

Former leader David Shearer – a man whose intelligence is not in doubt, even if he lacked leadership skills – alluded to this danger in a candid interview with TVNZ political editor Corin Dann on Sunday.

Shearer, who clearly blames the party’s left wing for undermining his leadership, made the point that the activists want to take the party further left when it should be moving to the centre.

Nothing would give the National government more comfort than for the Labour left to prevail. I imagine that prime minister John Key and his strategists are delighted with the course events are taking.

A visit to John Steinbeck country

(First published in The Dominion Post, September 6.)

A FEW DAYS ago I visited the John Steinbeck museum in the town of Salinas, California. The Grapes of Wrath was the first “serious” novel I read. I would have been 12 or 13 at the time, and Steinbeck’s heartbreaking tale of the hardship and injustice endured by refugees from the Oklahoma Dustbowl during the Great Depression had a powerful impact on me.

The National Steinbeck Center, to give it its proper name, is a fittingly low-key tribute to a writer who would have recoiled in disgust from today’s celebrity culture. A shy man, Steinbeck was horrified at being recognised in the streets of San Francisco after the success of his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat. It probably wouldn’t haven’t have bothered him in the slightest that he has escaped the cult-like attention lavished on his contemporaries F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

A sense of place is central to much of Steinbeck’s writing. What was previously Ocean View Avenue in the charming old fishing port of Monterey is still recogniseable as the setting for Cannery Row, while the Mexican labourers toiling in the fields of the Salinas Valley in the late summer heat probably look much as they did when Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men.

Walking around Salinas, you get the sense that not much has changed since Steinbeck grew up there. It’s still unmistakeably an agricultural town – a Californian Masterton, if you like – but the main street has a decidedly moribund look. You get the feeling that, like many once-busy rural towns in America, its fate was sealed when it was bypassed by the freeways that began springing up in the 1950s.

One of the places Steinbeck would still recognise is Sang’s Cafe, just a couple of doors from the National Steinbeck Center. It looks pretty much as it would have when Steinbeck ate there.

Even the menu has a nostalgic look. Anyone for chicken sausage scramble ($7.95)?

* * *

IF AMERICA has a single defining characteristic, it’s noise. Americans find an infinite variety of ways to create noise and seem to have developed a remarkable tolerance toward it.

Much of the aural pollution is of automotive origins, due to their inexplicable attachment to rowdy V8s and Harley-Davidsons.

In New Zealand I wake to the sound of birds. But in the Californian town where my wife and I have been staying with our son and daughter-in-law, dawn is announced by the rumble of V8s as the neighbours fire up their pickup trucks and head off to work.

The Ford F150 pickup, in particular, is ubiquitous. It has been produced continuously since 1948, was the best-selling vehicle in the US for several decades and is rivalled only by the Toyota Corolla for total sales worldwide.

America has long since grown out of its love affair with the grotesquely large and ostentatious cars that Detroit used to build. Generally speaking, the cars you see on US roads now are not so different in size and appearance from those in New Zealand.

But the fondness for pickup trucks persists, especially away from the big cities. Every major car company produces its own equivalent of the F150 – even Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota and Nissan, which have cashed in by making their own V8-powered F150 lookalikes, just for the US market.

Then there’s that other uniquely American creation, the Harley: the only motorbike in the world that assaults the aural senses even when it’s merely idling. (Incidentally, someone has analysed the lazy throb of an idling Harley and decided it most sounds like the words “potato potato potato.”)

I suspect that exhibitionism is the key to the Harley’s popularity. It’s a “look at me” bike – or perhaps I should say a “listen to me” bike, since it insists on being noticed simply by virtue of the appalling din it creates.

* * *

OBSERVE any group of Americans over the age of, say, 50 and you can’t help but notice that a significant number appear to have difficulty walking. The degree of lameness and infirmity among older Americans is striking.

Doubtless this is partly due to the fact that many carry excess weight. Their hips, knees and ankles have failed under the strain.

But there’s another factor. You don’t have to be Marcus Welby MD to deduce that their limbs have seized up through lack of use.

America is such a car-focused society that it has almost forgotten how to walk. You can do virtually anything from the seat of your car, from banking to picking up your prescriptions from the pharmacy.

Try pushing a stroller to the local supermarket and you quickly realise that pedestrians are an afterthought. This is not something New Zealand wants to emulate.

What a lily-white lot we are

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 28.)

It received very little coverage in the New Zealand media, but for six months this year the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption conducted an inquiry into extremely dodgy dealings involving former ministers in the NSW state government.

The commission presented its findings to the New South Wales Parliament several weeks ago. It found that two former Labor Party ministers, Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, had engaged in corrupt conduct involving the issue of lucrative coal mining licences.

In a nutshell, the commission alleges that Obeid – a former powerbroker in the right wing of the faction-ridden NSW Labor Party – acquired several rural properties over which the state government subsequently issued a coal exploration lease. Macdonald was the Minister of Mining at the time.

Obeid’s family and friends were in on the deal too. They made an estimated $30 million not only from selling the land, but also by investing in the company that eventually won the mining exploration licence over the area – a very tidy little arrangement.

The commission heard that Lebanese-born Obeid, whose political career was repeatedly dogged by allegations of sleaze in one form or another, had advance knowledge of the exploration lease and influenced the mining licence process.

There was an enormous amount of colourful background detail which I won’t go into here, other than to mention that the commission also heard that former champion boxer Lucky Gattellari and a wealthy property developer named Ron Medich provided Macdonald with a prostitute named Tiffanie (he was given a choice of four) in an attempt to secure favours from the government.

In an unrelated action, Gattellari is the key witness in a court case in which police allege Medich ordered the 2009 murder of a former business associate.

Meanwhile the commission is concluding a separate inquiry into claims relating to another mining licence granted by Macdonald to a company chaired by a mate who was a former trade union boss.

Google some of the names involved in this saga and you are led into a labyrinthine network of connections between politics and crime. In Australia, and especially in Sydney, the boundaries between the two worlds are often blurred.

When we hear of corruption we tend to think of Chicago and New York, but there’s very little the Americans could teach our trans-Tasman neighbours about graft and political fixing (or police corruption, come to that). The mere fact that NSW has had a permanent commission investigating claims of corruption since 1988 speaks volumes.

From a New Zealand perspective, all this seems extraordinary. We're a lily-white lot by comparison. The only New Zealand politician to be convicted of corruption is former Labour Party minister Taito Phillip Field, whose offence – getting a tiler from Thailand to work for him on the cheap in return for help with a work permit – wouldn’t cause so much as a raised eyebrow across the Ditch.

A scandal on the scale of the Obeid affair is unheard of here and would cause a sensation. But Sydneysiders are so inured to allegations of corruption that they take it in their stride.

All of which raises an intriguing question. Why, when Australia and New Zealand have so much in common, are they so different from one another in this respect?

Criminality is deeply embedded in Australian culture. It not only intrudes into politics but crosses over into trade union affairs too.

I once interviewed Norm Gallagher, head of the militant Builders Labourers Union in Melbourne. There was intense rivalry between the Victorian and NSW branches of the union at the time, and while I was with Gallagher he took a phone call supposedly warning him that a contract had been taken out on his life and a hit man was on his way from Sydney. Gallagher, who seemed unfazed, showed me a loaded shotgun that he kept behind his office door for such contingencies.

The Melbourne office of the Sydney newspaper I worked for at the time was in the same street as the docklands headquarters of the notorious Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, which was essentially a front organisation for criminals. I recall driving past on the day of the union elections and seeing men openly packing shotguns.

Not long after that, Pat Shannon, the union secretary, was shot dead in a South Melbourne pub. It was a professional hit – a relatively common event in Melbourne then. Melbourne was a very violent city, as it has been again in recent years, and many of the gangland feuds could be traced to members of the Painters and Dockers Union.

Here’s another intriguing thing about Australian crime: the people in the thick of it are often migrants, or the children of migrants.

In the 1960s one of the kingpins of the Sydney underworld was Malta-born Perce Galea, a devout Catholic whose power was based on gambling rackets. Another Maltese criminal, Joe Borg, owner of a string of brothels, was killed in 1968 by a car bomb, detonated when he turned on the ignition of his Holden ute in Bondi. 

These days the bad guys are more likely to be Lebanese, Italian, Serbian, Albanian or Asian (although we shouldn’t forget that when the Mr Asia drug syndicate was at its most active in the 1970s, the most violent criminals in Australia were New Zealanders).

New Zealand has immigrant communities too. Nelson and Wellington, for example, have substantial populations of Italian descent, but they are untainted by criminal associations. On the contrary, they are respected as honest, hard-working and community-minded.

Contrast that with Robert Trimbole’s murderous Mafia drug ring in the marijuana-growing New South Wales town of Griffith, or the Italian-dominated Carlton Crew gang formed by Alphonse Gangitano in Melbourne.

To explain the difference, we may have to look to history. We make jokes about Australians having convict ancestry, but there may well be something in their collective heritage that makes them more tolerant of crime and corruption.

Australia’s very first settlers, after all, were taken there as punishment, against their will. New Zealand, on the other hand, was colonised by people who came of their own volition and were motivated by a powerful desire to create a better society than the one they had left behind.

You have to wonder whether those contrasting origins have left permanent imprints on the two countries.

The river of filth

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 23.)

YOU MAY not have heard of the veteran British actor Steven Berkoff. He hasn’t had an especially illustrious career on screen: mostly minor parts, often playing villains. His most notable work has been in the theatre.

But Berkoff said something recently that must have resonated with anyone who struggles to see merit in the strange phenomenon known as Twitter.

In Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, Berkoff gave an interview in which he poured scorn on people who post their thoughts on Twitter and then recoil in horror when Internet trolls – the malevolent misfits who infest social media looking for people to attack – inevitably turn on them.

“There’s a lot of talk about people being abused on Twitter, women being savagely insulted and degraded,” Berkoff said. “I think, why get into that in the first place? If I jump into a garbage bin, I can’t complain that I’ve got rubbish all over me.”

Warming to his subject, he went on: “It [Twitter] is like a river of filth. If you jump into that river, you are going to be contaminated.”

He made the comment in the midst of a media storm over rape threats on Twitter against the feminist Caroline Criado-Perez, who had campaigned (successfully, as it happens) for Jane Austen to replace Charles Darwin on the £10 banknote from 2017.

Labour MP Stella Creasy, who supported Criado-Perez, also received death and rape threats, including one accompanied by an image of a masked serial killer from the Halloween horror film series.

This was seriously creepy behaviour – the more so when you consider it was over something as unexceptionable as a woman author’s image on a banknote.

But as Berkoff tried to point out, it’s par for the course on Twitter, a medium that provides a perfect platform for psychopaths and embittered nobodies. Twitter is a gift to such people because by enabling them to remain anonymous, it confers a sense of power without personal risk.

The most bizarre aspect of the affair was that Criado-Perez, Creasy and other feminists – including the British Left’s columnist-of-the-moment, Caitlin Moran – turned on Berkoff as if he were trying to suppress their right of free speech.

All he was doing was pointing out the obvious: that Twitter can be a cesspit. As noble as the ideal of free speech is, it’s idle to expect that the Neanderthal trolls on Twitter will show any respect for it.

Demanding the right to exercise one’s freedom of speech on Twitter is like asserting the right to self-expression by strolling into a fundamentalist mosque in northwest Pakistan wearing a bikini. The best you could hope for would be a fleeting moment of satisfaction, knowing you’d struck a blow for individual rights, before you were decapitated. 

* * *

EVEN MORE perplexing than feminists’ insistence on their right to attract rape threats, and infinitely more tragic, is the addiction of vulnerable teenagers to social media sites where they are taunted and humiliated, sometimes to the point of suicide.

The Latvian-based website ask.fm seems to be the principal offender. The deaths of four British teenagers have been linked to the site, which allows semi-literate trolls to place vicious messages such as “go die u pathetic emo” and “u ugly – go die evry1 wuld be happy”.

The solution, for any teenager being victimised, seems blindingly obvious: just don’t go there. But they seem incapable of tearing themselves away.

Here’s the bewildering thing. Affected teenagers seem gripped by an addictive malaise which, like self-mutilation and eating disorders, defies logical explanation (as does the unrelenting malice of the perpetrators).

This is the dark side of the digital revolution. The Internet may have empowered people by providing access to information on a scale never before imagined, but it has also created unforeseen opportunities for those bent on doing harm.

* * *

IN THE COURSE of deleting hundreds of spam emails from my computer recently, I noticed a peculiar thing.

A large proportion promised ways to shed weight, backed by the irreproachable authority of celebrities such as Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Jenifer Aniston.  Paradoxically, others held out the prospect of miraculous weight gain – but  only in a part of my anatomy that propriety precludes me from mentioning. 

These things seem to go in cycles. For a long time, most of my spam emails purported to be from various banks and urged me, in comically bad English, to click on a link so that I could remedy a pressing problem with my account.

Those have now abated, to be replaced by emails assuring me that with an enlarged mumble-mumble, I will induce paroxysms of ecstasy in my sexual partners.

The really worrying thing is that obviously, enough mugs respond to these emails to make the spammers’ efforts worthwhile. 

New admissions to the judicial hall of fame

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 14.)

When I was a novice reporter in Wellington, my duties including covering what was then called the Magistrate’s Court (now known as the District Court).

Naturally, I got to know some of the magistrates – not personally, you understand; they were far too magisterial for that. But by observing them from the press bench I did become familiar with their habits and idiosyncrasies.

The regular magistrates included J A Wicks (they were always referred to by their initials in those days), D J Sullivan and M B Scully.

Mr Wicks – later to become Sir James – had glasses and wispy hair. He was quietly spoken and gave the impression of being a kindly man, but he brooked no nonsense.

Mr Sullivan (later to become Sir Desmond, and chief judge of the District Court), was younger and less aloof. He seemed a sympathetic type and I wasn’t surprised to read in his obituary in 1996 that he believed in giving people a second chance.

Mr Scully, known by everyone as Ben (but not to his face), was a different proposition. He was short and pugnacious and had a reputation as being irascible and unforgiving.

Everything about Ben Scully, from his choleric complexion to the impatient way he strode into court, as if he couldn’t wait to pack the first miscreant of the day off to prison, gave warning that he was not a man to be messed with. 

Lawyers were intimidated by Ben Scully, and any defendant who made the mistake of antagonising him soon regretted it. Barristers old enough to remember him still mention his name with something approaching awe, although away from court he was apparently regarded with affection as well as respect.

Magistrates in those days were lords of their domain and you forgot that at your peril. Even reporters on the press bench took care to behave with decorum.

I was reminded of that era last week when I read an excerpt from a new book called Grumpy Old Men, in which Auckland District Court judge Russell Callander sounds off about some of the things that irritate him. No, make that many of the things that irritate him.

Judge Callander is in his 70s and sounds like a throwback to those magistrates I recall from the late 1960s. His is a magnificent rant that will warm the hearts of curmudgeons everywhere. Allow me to quote some of the juicier bits:

■ “People who dress badly when they appear in court can make me tetchy. Courts are solemn places: not the beach or the public bar of the local boozer.”

■ “Epidermal self-mutilation with grotesque ill-drawn graphics so frequently flaunted by defendants, their associates, and witnesses are most irritating. When a man can’t even successfully spell four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, it makes me worry either about the standards of teaching in our schools, or the intelligence quotient of some of our more delinquent citizens.”

■ “Certain guilty paedophiles selfishly elect trial by jury on serious charges of sexual violation of children. They force innocent children to testify about traumatic and sensitive sexual issues in the usually futile hope a jury will acquit. They deny their offending. They lie through their fangs. And then, after being sentenced to imprisonment, they confess all to a prison psychologist and ask for a rehabilitation programme and the earliest possible release date.”

■ “Benefit bludgers and tax cheats make me growl with indignation. When people improperly take benefits, they steal from the state – from the rest of us who obediently pay our taxes. I have seen people live cheerfully in well-paid jobs while for years they supplement that with unemployment benefits totalling thousands of dollars – in one case nearly $100,000. Often they have the cheek to look very disgruntled when they are caught, convicted and ordered to pay it all back. Then, adding insult to injury, they smile sweetly and offer to pay it back at $15 per week over the next 128 years. Naturally, without interest.”

■ “A huge amount of court time is wasted by Maori activists who profess that Maori sovereignty renders them somehow immune to the laws of New Zealand.”

■ “Over the years I have dealt with scores of men who have fathered children and then totally abdicated any responsibility for them. They don’t provide any financial help. They don’t play any parental role. They are selfish, uninterested, inhuman and irresponsible. They deserve the condemnation of us all.”

■ “And then there are the liars, the perjurers, the fabricators and prevaricators. Gone are the days when people admitted their crimes and told the truth. The oath is mainly meaningless. The mantra is ‘Get off the hook by any means’. It is shameful and destructive. It makes me not just grumpy but angry.”

I find it hugely refreshing and encouraging that a judge should throw political correctness to the wind and so vigorously express sentiments felt by many of his fellow New Zealanders.

I wonder if there’s a trend building here – an overdue backlash against misguided tolerance of bad behaviour and disrespectful antics in the courts.

In the same week that I read Judge Callander’s expostulations, another District Court judge, Judge Russell Collins, delivered a scalding judgment in the case of lawyer Davina Murray, who was found guilty of smuggling contraband to Mt Eden prison inmate Liam Reid, a convicted murderer and rapist with whom she was having a relationship.

Murray obviously got right up Judge Collins’ nose during the trial, and he didn’t hold back. He castigated her for turning up late in court, repeatedly talking over himself and witnesses, playing up to the media benches while she was being addressed from the Bench and making gratuitous comments after rulings had been given against her. At one point, Judge Collins was moved to remind Murray that she wasn’t in an American television show.

Courts are institutions of the people and deserve to be treated with respect. We should applaud Judges Callander and Collins for making a stand against those who abuse their dignity.

They will stand alongside Hawke’s Bay judge Tony Adeane – who in 2008 declared that he wasn’t going to have his court turned into a circus and packed a man off to the cells for 24 hours after he made a gesture to a mate in the dock – in my own judicial hall of fame.