(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, April 13).
WHEN we think of conceit and arrogance, we normally associate it with overt displays of superiority: the swaggering walk, the braying voice, the overweening air of self-assurance.
Yet there is another type of conceit and arrogance that dresses down, cladding itself in the garb of modesty and humility. It can appear self-effacing and even holy, but it is no less vain.
It was this sort of disguised hubris that we saw on display in the trial of the so-called Waihopai Three. Anyone observing the defendants’ scruffy clothing, their unworldly manner and their air of righteous sincerity could have concluded these were humble men of Christ, driven by the purest of motives. The jury obviously did.
I don’t dispute the sincerity of the three men who vandalised the Waihopai satellite dish, but I do question the popular perception that they are simple men of faith, untainted by pride or vanity.
On the contrary, I believe they exhibit a deeply unattractive type of conceit: namely, the unshakeable moral conviction of zealots.
Their beliefs trump anyone else’s. If their fellow New Zealanders objected strongly enough to the Waihopai satellite dish, it would be a political issue. They don’t, and it isn’t. Yet the Waihopai Three decided their moral convictions entitled them to act on our behalf, and to hell with the repair bill that the taxpayer will now have to pick up.
Even Helen Clark, hardly a right-wing warmonger, condemned the attack on Waihopai in 2008 as a senseless act of criminal vandalism.
The inflated self-regard of the Waihopai Three emerged in full view last week when Solicitor General David Collins QC suggested the Crown might sue them for damages. One of the three, Adrian Leason, scoffed at the government for being “sore losers or cry babies” and virtually taunted it to have a go.
A damages case would only promote their cause, he said; and besides, the three had only $1000 between them (a statement now open to doubt after revelations that Leason and co-defendant Sam Land have property assets valued at half a million dollars).
The third Waihopai vandal, Dominican friar Peter Murnane, seemed serenely confident that public opinion would force the government to back off. We shall see.
Murnane, incidentally, was one of the priests who gave sanctuary to the oily queue-jumper Ahmed Zaoui. He represents a highly politicised branch of the Catholic clergy that rarely hesitates to let reason get in the way of emotional fervour.
The motivation of the Waihopai vandals is as much political as religious. Their rhetoric is that of the neo-Marxist left which pursues its agenda under the banner of peace and justice.
They claim to have acted on behalf of the women and children killed by the US war machine in Iraq, but theirs is a highly selective morality. They condemn the killing of innocent Iraqis by American forces, most of which is unintentional, but they say nothing about the rampant and wholly deliberate murder of innocent people – mostly of their own kind – by Islamic fanatics seeking to extinguish democracy and impose their own repressive dogma.
If it ever occurred to the Waihopai Three that the eavesdropping network operated by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand might be preventing more wholesale slaughter by these murderous fundamentalists, they probably pushed the thought from their minds. It doesn’t fit their warped worldview.
Muslim terrorists probably regard these woolly-headed, pretend prophets in much the same way as Lenin viewed the “useful idiots” in the West who supported the murderous Soviet state.
* * *
AM I ALONE in objecting to the melodramatic use of the word “survivors” to describe anyone who has been sexually abused or spent time in a psychiatric institution?
“Survivors” are people who have lived through truly life-threatening experiences. I wouldn’t make light of the awful experiences many victims of sexual and psychiatric abuse have suffered, but the integrity of the language is worth protecting.
Their lives were generally not at risk. To describe them as survivors devalues the word and detracts from the ordeals of true survivors – those who lived through Nazi concentration camps, for example, or were plucked from the sea after the Wahine sank.
You can see, though, why lobbyists for people seeking compensation for abuse have adopted the word. “Survivors” is an emotive term that makes their claims sound more pressing.
* * *
THE LEFT keeps moaning that wages in New Zealand are too low, which is perfectly correct. They complain that the government hasn’t delivered the promised higher-wage economy – again, all true.
But just let anyone suggest that something meaningful be done to free up the economy, increase productivity and stimulate income growth – such as reducing taxes and government spending – and who’s the first to howl in protest? Why, it’s the Left.
Unionist Matt McCarten recently grizzled that an increase in ACC levies would negate the 25 cents an hour rise in the minimum wage. Yet if anyone proposes dismantling the ACC behemoth, the unions are the first to rise up on their hind legs.
Until the Left can reconcile these contradictions, it’s stuck with a credibility problem.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
A phrase Private Eye would have been proud of
Back in the 1970s, the British satirical magazine Private Eye coined the wonderful phrase “Ugandan discussions” as a euphemism for illicit or surreptitious acts of sexual congress.
The origin of the term is disputed. I always understood it referred to Princess Elizabeth of Uganda, a statuesque diplomat (and famous model) during the rule of Idi Amin who, having been caught in compromising circumstances with a white man in a toilet at Orly Airport, Paris, while travelling on government business, purportedly gave the explanation that they had repaired to the toilet cubicle for talks about affairs of state.
However an entry in Wikipedia gives an alternative explanation, suggesting the phrase arose from an incident in which the Irish journalist and feminist Mary Kenny retired upstairs with a former cabinet minister in the Ugandan government of Milton Obote during a London party and later claimed they had been discussing events in his homeland.
Whatever. The key point is that “Ugandan discussions” (or alternatively, “discussions of a Ugandan nature”) entered popular usage as a metaphor for sex, along with several other wickedly clever Private Eye expressions including “tired and emotional” for drunk and “Lunchtime O’Booze” for any bibulous, freeloading journalist (if that’s not a tautology).
The reason I relate all this is that I think we may, in future, be able to use our own New Zealand equivalent in place of Private Eye’s famous phrase.
Today’s Dominion Post recounts in some detail the events surrounding the death in 1984 of young Wellington woman Sacha Macfarlane, who was killed in a collision with a car driven by drunk Chilean diplomat Luis Lopez. Sacha’s death caused outrage at the time because Lopez, claiming diplomatic immunity, was able to scuttle back to General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile without facing charges. Only this week did the Chilean government formally apologise to Sacha’s family.
The Dom Post account by Tim Donoghue, quoting police files, retraces Lopez’s steps on the Friday night of the fatal accident and records that he spent several hours eating and drinking in the company of two Wellington women. Sometime after 11.30 pm, Lopez and one of the women went back to his apartment on Mt Victoria, where they stayed for about two hours. The fatal accident happened later when Lopez was driving his lady friend home to Khandallah, where she reportedly intended to introduce him to her husband.
The Dom Post records that the woman said, in a sworn affidavit, that she had gone to Mr Lopez’s apartment to read Chilean newspapers. This seems a rather unorthodox thing to do at 11.30 pm after a boozy night on the town and I think most readers of the Dom Post couldn’t have helped wondering whether a compelling interest in Latin American journalism was an entirely convincing explanation for her presence in Mr Lopez’s apartment.
Of course, whatever went on is entirely the woman’s own business, and it’s important to point out that she was perfectly within her rights to accompany Mr Lopez back to his place for whatever reason she chose, provided it was legal. It should be remembered too that she became an unwitting victim of this tragedy, though the Dom Post doesn’t say whether she too was injured in the crash.
Still, the statement does stand out as one of the more novel explanations proffered for a married woman’s presence in a man’s apartment late at night, and you can’t help wondering whether “reading Chilean newspapers” will become the new “Ugandan discussions”.
The origin of the term is disputed. I always understood it referred to Princess Elizabeth of Uganda, a statuesque diplomat (and famous model) during the rule of Idi Amin who, having been caught in compromising circumstances with a white man in a toilet at Orly Airport, Paris, while travelling on government business, purportedly gave the explanation that they had repaired to the toilet cubicle for talks about affairs of state.
However an entry in Wikipedia gives an alternative explanation, suggesting the phrase arose from an incident in which the Irish journalist and feminist Mary Kenny retired upstairs with a former cabinet minister in the Ugandan government of Milton Obote during a London party and later claimed they had been discussing events in his homeland.
Whatever. The key point is that “Ugandan discussions” (or alternatively, “discussions of a Ugandan nature”) entered popular usage as a metaphor for sex, along with several other wickedly clever Private Eye expressions including “tired and emotional” for drunk and “Lunchtime O’Booze” for any bibulous, freeloading journalist (if that’s not a tautology).
The reason I relate all this is that I think we may, in future, be able to use our own New Zealand equivalent in place of Private Eye’s famous phrase.
Today’s Dominion Post recounts in some detail the events surrounding the death in 1984 of young Wellington woman Sacha Macfarlane, who was killed in a collision with a car driven by drunk Chilean diplomat Luis Lopez. Sacha’s death caused outrage at the time because Lopez, claiming diplomatic immunity, was able to scuttle back to General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile without facing charges. Only this week did the Chilean government formally apologise to Sacha’s family.
The Dom Post account by Tim Donoghue, quoting police files, retraces Lopez’s steps on the Friday night of the fatal accident and records that he spent several hours eating and drinking in the company of two Wellington women. Sometime after 11.30 pm, Lopez and one of the women went back to his apartment on Mt Victoria, where they stayed for about two hours. The fatal accident happened later when Lopez was driving his lady friend home to Khandallah, where she reportedly intended to introduce him to her husband.
The Dom Post records that the woman said, in a sworn affidavit, that she had gone to Mr Lopez’s apartment to read Chilean newspapers. This seems a rather unorthodox thing to do at 11.30 pm after a boozy night on the town and I think most readers of the Dom Post couldn’t have helped wondering whether a compelling interest in Latin American journalism was an entirely convincing explanation for her presence in Mr Lopez’s apartment.
Of course, whatever went on is entirely the woman’s own business, and it’s important to point out that she was perfectly within her rights to accompany Mr Lopez back to his place for whatever reason she chose, provided it was legal. It should be remembered too that she became an unwitting victim of this tragedy, though the Dom Post doesn’t say whether she too was injured in the crash.
Still, the statement does stand out as one of the more novel explanations proffered for a married woman’s presence in a man’s apartment late at night, and you can’t help wondering whether “reading Chilean newspapers” will become the new “Ugandan discussions”.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Accountability - the Achilles heel of Maori self-help efforts
What an unhappy coincidence, at least from the Maori Party’s point of view, that the party's flagship $1 billion-plus Whanau Ora scheme was unveiled just as The Dominion Post was exposing misuse of taxpayer money by a Maori health provider on the Kapiti Coast.
The Whanau Ora scheme will channel public money direct to Maori community groups in the belief that they are in the best position to achieve the desired health and welfare outcomes. It’s surely worth a try, given that the present government-centered approach seems to be making little or no headway against the disproportionate incidence of illness, violence, drug use, welfare dependency and low life expectancy among Maori. But what confidence can the public have that Whanau Ora spending will be subject to rigorous scrutiny and accountability?
Accountability, or the lack of it, seems to be the Achilles heel of taxpayer-funded, Maori-controlled initiatives. The Dom Post’s revelation that $590,000 of health funding was unaccounted for by Te Runanga O Te Ati Awa Ki Whakarongotai came only days after similar allegations were made about the Tekau Plus project (see earlier post, April 3), which swallowed up more than $1 million of money intended to promote Maori business.
In both cases, it seems the money was shovelled indiscriminately into a black hole. Even worse, repeated attempts to alert government ministers and public servants to the alleged misuse of public funds by the Waikanae runanga were ignored until whistle-blowers – local Maori, as it happened – threatened to go to the media. When I wrote last week that politicians, frightened of appearing unsympathetic to Maori aspirations, were turning a blind eye to the massive rorting potential created by loose control over handouts to Maori interests, I didn't expect to be proved right quite so soon.
These scandals will only reinforce fears that Maori agencies are a protected species, exempted from normal rules of accountability. A sceptical public will need a lot of persuading that spending under the Whanau Ora scheme will be monitored more carefully.
The Whanau Ora scheme will channel public money direct to Maori community groups in the belief that they are in the best position to achieve the desired health and welfare outcomes. It’s surely worth a try, given that the present government-centered approach seems to be making little or no headway against the disproportionate incidence of illness, violence, drug use, welfare dependency and low life expectancy among Maori. But what confidence can the public have that Whanau Ora spending will be subject to rigorous scrutiny and accountability?
Accountability, or the lack of it, seems to be the Achilles heel of taxpayer-funded, Maori-controlled initiatives. The Dom Post’s revelation that $590,000 of health funding was unaccounted for by Te Runanga O Te Ati Awa Ki Whakarongotai came only days after similar allegations were made about the Tekau Plus project (see earlier post, April 3), which swallowed up more than $1 million of money intended to promote Maori business.
In both cases, it seems the money was shovelled indiscriminately into a black hole. Even worse, repeated attempts to alert government ministers and public servants to the alleged misuse of public funds by the Waikanae runanga were ignored until whistle-blowers – local Maori, as it happened – threatened to go to the media. When I wrote last week that politicians, frightened of appearing unsympathetic to Maori aspirations, were turning a blind eye to the massive rorting potential created by loose control over handouts to Maori interests, I didn't expect to be proved right quite so soon.
These scandals will only reinforce fears that Maori agencies are a protected species, exempted from normal rules of accountability. A sceptical public will need a lot of persuading that spending under the Whanau Ora scheme will be monitored more carefully.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
The affronts to the Tongan people continue
There were no surprises in the report of the royal commission of inquiry into the sinking of the Tongan ferry Princess Ashika. It was negligence, indifference and incompetence right down the line – from the prime minister and the minister of transport, down through the Shipping Corporation of Polynesia and its “deplorable’ chief executive and “evasive” secretary, to the ferry's master (who slept while the ferry was sinking) and the first mate. All could have acted to avert the tragedy. None did, due to either a shocking disregard for the duty of care owed to the public of Tonga, or to a catastrophic failure of imagination, or perhaps both.
While there is some satisfaction in learning that New Zealander John Jonesse, the Shipping Corporation CEO, faces a manslaughter charge, along with the Princess Ashika’s master and first mate, you have to wonder whether the charges announced so far get to the heart of the matter. They introduce an element of accountability, if only post-facto, that was otherwise lacking. But the evidence heard by the commission suggested a much bigger collective failing; one that couldn’t be pinned on any individual. It was all to do with not rocking the boat, if you’ll pardon an unfortunate pun. People who could have prevented the Princess Ashika sailing, knowing it was a death trap, appear not to have acted because they didn’t want to make a fuss or risk upsetting their superiors. This seems to have taken precedence over the need to ensure the safety of the ferry’s passengers.
Jonesse, the master and the first mate were easy targets (as was the pompous and self-important Lord Dalgety QC, the Shipping Corporation secretary, who has been placed under house arrest and faces a charge of perjury). But how do you pin charges on an entire government culture that encourages deference to authority at the expense of the public interest? That’s surely the bigger underlying issue.
Tonga is an oligarchy ruled by a small and wealthy elite; a country where, under present arrangements, 10 of the 14 members of the cabinet are appointed by the monarch for life. It is a country where the law decrees that traffic must pull over and stop when the king travels by – the same useless king who abandoned his people immediately after the sinking of the Princess Ashika so that he could dress up and hob-nob with dignitaries at the Edinburgh Tattoo. It is a country that suppresses freedom of speech and where you criticise the monarchy at your own risk.
Under constitutional changes to be introduced later this year, the king’s powers will be reduced and a more democratic parliament elected. These belated reforms can partly be attributed to the riots of 2006, which caused $100 million worth of damage; even long-suffering Tongans can run out of patience. But in the meantime the culture of deference to authority persists, and you have to wonder to what extent it can be blamed for the Princess Ashika tragedy.
You also have to wonder whether the pending constitutional reforms will make much difference. The report of the royal commission was to be made public at the king’s pleasure (yes, the same king who clearly considered the sinking less important than the Edinburgh Tattoo). The findings were still being withheld from the Tongan public long after they had been reported in the New Zealand media. That would be unthinkable in any western democracy. It’s hard to imagine a more emphatic gesture of contempt for the Tongan people’s right to know.
While there is some satisfaction in learning that New Zealander John Jonesse, the Shipping Corporation CEO, faces a manslaughter charge, along with the Princess Ashika’s master and first mate, you have to wonder whether the charges announced so far get to the heart of the matter. They introduce an element of accountability, if only post-facto, that was otherwise lacking. But the evidence heard by the commission suggested a much bigger collective failing; one that couldn’t be pinned on any individual. It was all to do with not rocking the boat, if you’ll pardon an unfortunate pun. People who could have prevented the Princess Ashika sailing, knowing it was a death trap, appear not to have acted because they didn’t want to make a fuss or risk upsetting their superiors. This seems to have taken precedence over the need to ensure the safety of the ferry’s passengers.
Jonesse, the master and the first mate were easy targets (as was the pompous and self-important Lord Dalgety QC, the Shipping Corporation secretary, who has been placed under house arrest and faces a charge of perjury). But how do you pin charges on an entire government culture that encourages deference to authority at the expense of the public interest? That’s surely the bigger underlying issue.
Tonga is an oligarchy ruled by a small and wealthy elite; a country where, under present arrangements, 10 of the 14 members of the cabinet are appointed by the monarch for life. It is a country where the law decrees that traffic must pull over and stop when the king travels by – the same useless king who abandoned his people immediately after the sinking of the Princess Ashika so that he could dress up and hob-nob with dignitaries at the Edinburgh Tattoo. It is a country that suppresses freedom of speech and where you criticise the monarchy at your own risk.
Under constitutional changes to be introduced later this year, the king’s powers will be reduced and a more democratic parliament elected. These belated reforms can partly be attributed to the riots of 2006, which caused $100 million worth of damage; even long-suffering Tongans can run out of patience. But in the meantime the culture of deference to authority persists, and you have to wonder to what extent it can be blamed for the Princess Ashika tragedy.
You also have to wonder whether the pending constitutional reforms will make much difference. The report of the royal commission was to be made public at the king’s pleasure (yes, the same king who clearly considered the sinking less important than the Edinburgh Tattoo). The findings were still being withheld from the Tongan public long after they had been reported in the New Zealand media. That would be unthinkable in any western democracy. It’s hard to imagine a more emphatic gesture of contempt for the Tongan people’s right to know.
The black hole called Tekau Plus
It’s disappointing, though hardly surprising, that other media haven’t followed up investigative reporter Phil Kitchin’s revelations in The Dominion Post about taxpayer money disappearing into the black hole called Tekau Plus.
No doubt they have their reasons. Fear of litigation would be one, though previous experience suggests Kitchin will have done his homework very carefully and lawyers will have pored over every word before publication. Reluctance to acknowledge that a competitor has broken an important story is a more likely explanation – and make no mistake, this is a very damning exposé. But other media will pick up the story only if heads start to roll, and so far there’s no sign of that happening.
Kitchin revealed that large amounts of public money, sunk into a project supposedly intended to develop Maori export businesses, were essentially unaccounted for. A report on Tekau Plus accounts cited in his story revealed that nearly $1.2m of taxpayer funds was paid to Fomana Capital, which ran Tekau Plus for the Federation of Maori Authorities, yet there were no descriptions of the services provided by Fomana or third parties it hired. Management and consultancy fees, those old familiar gobblers of public funds, seem to have swallowed up much of the dough.
Judging by Kitchin’s account, the project was fatally compromised by conflicts of interest. When Te Puni Kokiri CEO Leith Comer made inquiries into what Tekau Plus was achieving, the high-profile Maori business figures running the show reportedly tried to fend him off with woolly management-speak. “Establishing soft network clusters” and “bigger picture value propositions – phrases straight from the corporate bullshit manual – were a couple of the priceless examples Kitchin cited.
To his credit, Comer appears to have blown the whistle on the project (it was frozen last November). But his acknowledgement that the Tekau Plus contract was extraordinarily loose and wishy-washy will have only confirmed fears that Maori agencies operate according to very different rules of accountability, transparency and integrity from other recipients of public money. And politicians, frightened of appearing unsympathetic to Maori aspirations, turn a blind eye to the massive rorting potential created along the way.
No doubt they have their reasons. Fear of litigation would be one, though previous experience suggests Kitchin will have done his homework very carefully and lawyers will have pored over every word before publication. Reluctance to acknowledge that a competitor has broken an important story is a more likely explanation – and make no mistake, this is a very damning exposé. But other media will pick up the story only if heads start to roll, and so far there’s no sign of that happening.
Kitchin revealed that large amounts of public money, sunk into a project supposedly intended to develop Maori export businesses, were essentially unaccounted for. A report on Tekau Plus accounts cited in his story revealed that nearly $1.2m of taxpayer funds was paid to Fomana Capital, which ran Tekau Plus for the Federation of Maori Authorities, yet there were no descriptions of the services provided by Fomana or third parties it hired. Management and consultancy fees, those old familiar gobblers of public funds, seem to have swallowed up much of the dough.
Judging by Kitchin’s account, the project was fatally compromised by conflicts of interest. When Te Puni Kokiri CEO Leith Comer made inquiries into what Tekau Plus was achieving, the high-profile Maori business figures running the show reportedly tried to fend him off with woolly management-speak. “Establishing soft network clusters” and “bigger picture value propositions – phrases straight from the corporate bullshit manual – were a couple of the priceless examples Kitchin cited.
To his credit, Comer appears to have blown the whistle on the project (it was frozen last November). But his acknowledgement that the Tekau Plus contract was extraordinarily loose and wishy-washy will have only confirmed fears that Maori agencies operate according to very different rules of accountability, transparency and integrity from other recipients of public money. And politicians, frightened of appearing unsympathetic to Maori aspirations, turn a blind eye to the massive rorting potential created along the way.
Friday, April 2, 2010
The debate over dairying has come 10 years too late
(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, March 31.)
My mother was raised on a Taranaki dairy farm. I grew up next to a dairy farm myself. Our neighbours produced milk for the local hospital board (remember them?) and were good family friends. I would sometimes help out in their milking shed, though the word “help” is used very loosely in this context.
I disclose these facts in a probably futile attempt to head off accusations that I’m a one-eyed, intransigent opponent of dairying.
Truth is, I’m rather fond of cows. We had a succession of jersey house cows when I was a boy and I grew quite attached to them.
None of this, however, dissuades me from the view that there has been no more lamentable change to the New Zealand landscape in my lifetime than the rampant expansion of dairy farming.
The Clyde Dam, Lake Manapouri, the aborted Project Aqua on the Waitaki River, the Waihi gold mine, the toxic chemicals site at Mapua, the proliferation of wind farms – all these other celebrated environmental causes of the past few decades pale by comparison.
Quite apart from anything else, most of the above are (or were) confined to one location. Dairying, by contrast, has spread its unsightly blight from end of the country to the other.
Let me elaborate on this. Dairy farming strikes me as a perfectly appropriate activity where geography is conducive to it. That means Northland, the Waikato, Taranaki, the West Coast and pockets of other regions, including Hawke’s Bay, the Manawatu, Nelson and the Wairarapa, where there’s abundant rainfall and the fertile soil supports lush pasture growth.
In other words, all the regions where dairying has traditionally been carried out.
What has happened in the past couple of decades, however, is that dairying, driven by high prices, has spread into areas where it was not traditionally practised, and which are demonstrably ill-suited to it: areas of relatively low rainfall where intensive dairying can be sustained only by sucking vast quantities of irrigation water out of rivers and aquifers and by applying vast amounts of fertiliser to poor, often stony, soils.
Of course those nutrients find their way back into waterways, along with polluted run-off created by bovine urine and excrement.
The environmental damage is compounded by the size of these modern, industrial-scale farms, which dwarf the traditional cow cocky’s modest holding. The average herd size has more than doubled in the past 20 years, to 351. In Canterbury, where the environmental pressure created by dairying is felt most acutely, the average herd is more than twice that number.
What’s more, production per cow has increased as farming has become more intensive – up from 239 kg of milk solids in 1992-93 to 330 kg in 2006-2007.
I first realised the scale of this transformation on a trip around the South Island in 2005. In North Canterbury and parts of Otago, vast tracts of land – previously devoted to sheep and beef – had been converted to dairying.
Ugly irrigation machines, hundreds of metres long, marched across the land like creatures from a science-fiction movie. Tree plantations had been felled so as not to block their path.
Friends just back from the South Island tell me big dairy herds are now grazing around Twizel, in the beautiful Mackenzie Country. Closer to home I have seen dairy industry entrepreneurs buying up and converting every farm they could get their hands on in parts of the Wairarapa and Central Hawke’s Bay where, 20 years ago, dairy cows were unknown. Meanwhile the rivers run ever lower and dirtier.
And it’s not just sheep and beef country that’s being converted. I recently heard a Canterbury farming spokesman talking about the amount of prime grain and seed land being lost to dairying. Ten or 11 conversions are currently planned in mid-Canterbury alone, on some of New Zealand’s best cropping soil.
Let me bore you with some more figures. In 1990-91, dairying accounted for 1.35 million hectares of New Zealand farmland. By 2012-13, that area will have increased to 2.13 million ha. Roughly 800,000ha of prime sheep and beef land has been converted to cows.
But the statistics tell only part of the story. What’s more significant is the type of land converted, and the consequential degradation of the environment.
There’s no getting around the fact that dairying, compared with most other forms of farming traditionally carried out in New Zealand, is unsightly and dirty – especially where it clearly doesn’t belong. Dairy farms can look quite pretty in parts of the Waikato but no one can pretend that dairying aesthetically enhances the Mackenzie Country or the valleys of North Canterbury.
The problem is, all this change has taken place largely without public debate. Much of it has gone unnoticed, at least until recently, because most of the population lives in cities. Out of sight, out of mind.
Besides, it has been a gradual process. The government didn’t suddenly announce that 800,000 ha of farmland was going to be converted from sheep and beef cattle to dairy cows. If it had, alarm bells might have started ringing in the same way as they do when a new hydro dam or opencast mine is proposed.
It’s probably also true that dairying, because of its economic importance, has enjoyed a large measure of political protection. Only tourism matches it as an earner of the overseas revenue that the economy depends on. That makes the dairy industry very powerful politically – probably more powerful than the meat and wool sector was in its heyday, half a century ago.
With a sluggish economy struggling out of recession, there’s an especially strong temptation for politicians to look the other way when official reports portray a greedy dairy industry preoccupied with increasing production without proper regard for the environment. Only last month, a report issued by the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry showed that dairy farmers' compliance with the much-vaunted "Clean Streams Accord" was actually slipping backwards.
Only now are we having something approaching a proper national debate over land use. Controversies over toxic runoff, the Crafar farms fiasco, the odious proposal to put “factory farms” in the Mackenzie Basin and the squabble over the management of Canterbury’s precious water have finally alerted New Zealanders to the scale of dairying’s march across the landscape and the detrimental consequences for the environment (to say nothing of our image as “100 percent pure”, which is looking decidedly dodgy). It’s just a shame the debate is taking place about 10 years too late.
My mother was raised on a Taranaki dairy farm. I grew up next to a dairy farm myself. Our neighbours produced milk for the local hospital board (remember them?) and were good family friends. I would sometimes help out in their milking shed, though the word “help” is used very loosely in this context.
I disclose these facts in a probably futile attempt to head off accusations that I’m a one-eyed, intransigent opponent of dairying.
Truth is, I’m rather fond of cows. We had a succession of jersey house cows when I was a boy and I grew quite attached to them.
None of this, however, dissuades me from the view that there has been no more lamentable change to the New Zealand landscape in my lifetime than the rampant expansion of dairy farming.
The Clyde Dam, Lake Manapouri, the aborted Project Aqua on the Waitaki River, the Waihi gold mine, the toxic chemicals site at Mapua, the proliferation of wind farms – all these other celebrated environmental causes of the past few decades pale by comparison.
Quite apart from anything else, most of the above are (or were) confined to one location. Dairying, by contrast, has spread its unsightly blight from end of the country to the other.
Let me elaborate on this. Dairy farming strikes me as a perfectly appropriate activity where geography is conducive to it. That means Northland, the Waikato, Taranaki, the West Coast and pockets of other regions, including Hawke’s Bay, the Manawatu, Nelson and the Wairarapa, where there’s abundant rainfall and the fertile soil supports lush pasture growth.
In other words, all the regions where dairying has traditionally been carried out.
What has happened in the past couple of decades, however, is that dairying, driven by high prices, has spread into areas where it was not traditionally practised, and which are demonstrably ill-suited to it: areas of relatively low rainfall where intensive dairying can be sustained only by sucking vast quantities of irrigation water out of rivers and aquifers and by applying vast amounts of fertiliser to poor, often stony, soils.
Of course those nutrients find their way back into waterways, along with polluted run-off created by bovine urine and excrement.
The environmental damage is compounded by the size of these modern, industrial-scale farms, which dwarf the traditional cow cocky’s modest holding. The average herd size has more than doubled in the past 20 years, to 351. In Canterbury, where the environmental pressure created by dairying is felt most acutely, the average herd is more than twice that number.
What’s more, production per cow has increased as farming has become more intensive – up from 239 kg of milk solids in 1992-93 to 330 kg in 2006-2007.
I first realised the scale of this transformation on a trip around the South Island in 2005. In North Canterbury and parts of Otago, vast tracts of land – previously devoted to sheep and beef – had been converted to dairying.
Ugly irrigation machines, hundreds of metres long, marched across the land like creatures from a science-fiction movie. Tree plantations had been felled so as not to block their path.
Friends just back from the South Island tell me big dairy herds are now grazing around Twizel, in the beautiful Mackenzie Country. Closer to home I have seen dairy industry entrepreneurs buying up and converting every farm they could get their hands on in parts of the Wairarapa and Central Hawke’s Bay where, 20 years ago, dairy cows were unknown. Meanwhile the rivers run ever lower and dirtier.
And it’s not just sheep and beef country that’s being converted. I recently heard a Canterbury farming spokesman talking about the amount of prime grain and seed land being lost to dairying. Ten or 11 conversions are currently planned in mid-Canterbury alone, on some of New Zealand’s best cropping soil.
Let me bore you with some more figures. In 1990-91, dairying accounted for 1.35 million hectares of New Zealand farmland. By 2012-13, that area will have increased to 2.13 million ha. Roughly 800,000ha of prime sheep and beef land has been converted to cows.
But the statistics tell only part of the story. What’s more significant is the type of land converted, and the consequential degradation of the environment.
There’s no getting around the fact that dairying, compared with most other forms of farming traditionally carried out in New Zealand, is unsightly and dirty – especially where it clearly doesn’t belong. Dairy farms can look quite pretty in parts of the Waikato but no one can pretend that dairying aesthetically enhances the Mackenzie Country or the valleys of North Canterbury.
The problem is, all this change has taken place largely without public debate. Much of it has gone unnoticed, at least until recently, because most of the population lives in cities. Out of sight, out of mind.
Besides, it has been a gradual process. The government didn’t suddenly announce that 800,000 ha of farmland was going to be converted from sheep and beef cattle to dairy cows. If it had, alarm bells might have started ringing in the same way as they do when a new hydro dam or opencast mine is proposed.
It’s probably also true that dairying, because of its economic importance, has enjoyed a large measure of political protection. Only tourism matches it as an earner of the overseas revenue that the economy depends on. That makes the dairy industry very powerful politically – probably more powerful than the meat and wool sector was in its heyday, half a century ago.
With a sluggish economy struggling out of recession, there’s an especially strong temptation for politicians to look the other way when official reports portray a greedy dairy industry preoccupied with increasing production without proper regard for the environment. Only last month, a report issued by the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry showed that dairy farmers' compliance with the much-vaunted "Clean Streams Accord" was actually slipping backwards.
Only now are we having something approaching a proper national debate over land use. Controversies over toxic runoff, the Crafar farms fiasco, the odious proposal to put “factory farms” in the Mackenzie Basin and the squabble over the management of Canterbury’s precious water have finally alerted New Zealanders to the scale of dairying’s march across the landscape and the detrimental consequences for the environment (to say nothing of our image as “100 percent pure”, which is looking decidedly dodgy). It’s just a shame the debate is taking place about 10 years too late.
Media label dogs Kurariki at every turn
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, March 30.)
IF Bailey Junior Kurariki becomes a hardened lifetime criminal, as now seems inevitable, then I’m afraid my fellow journalists will have to accept a large measure of responsibility.
The media were captivated by the image of the 12-year-old Kurariki’s wide-eyed face peering over the top of the dock when he was found guilty of the manslaughter of pizza delivery man Michael Choy in 2002, and they haven’t been able to leave him alone since.
He immediately became branded as “New Zealand’s youngest killer”, a tag that has dogged him at every turn.
In a very narrow, technical sense, I suppose the description is correct. But does that justify its endless repetition? I’m not so sure.
It’s important to point out that Kurariki didn’t actually kill anyone. He was a decoy who gave the signal for one of his older partners-in-crime to leap out and hit Mr Choy. He must have known the plan was to assault Mr Choy, but there was no proven intent to kill – otherwise the charge would have been murder.
In any case, Kurariki was under the influence of older associates. Significantly, we don’t hear anything about them these days. Of the six who were convicted, Kurariki was singled out for continued media attention solely because of his age.
I would have thought this very factor was a compelling reason to leave him alone, so that he might have had some chance of rehabilitation away from the public eye.
In fact the exact reverse happened. Kuraraki has been subjected to such unrelenting media attention that he had no chance of settling back into a normal life after his initial release from prison.
The media played a direct hand in his latest brush with the law. Two female journalists from the Herald on Sunday, a reporter and a photographer, went to interview him after he finished a one-month sentence for wilfully damaging a TV camera. (The media again. Fancy that.)
Kurariki is alleged to have exposed himself to the two, masturbated and groped them. Naturally they lodged a complaint with the police, which in turn led to his latest arrest last week after he failed to appear in court.
I hope the two Herald on Sunday journalists feel pleased with themselves. For two apparently attractive women to visit a troubled and unstable young man in his home was perilously close to baiting him. But never mind, the paper got what it no doubt wanted: a story headlined Child killer becomes sex pest.
Kurariki’s life is a tragedy playing out in slow motion, and it’s not hard to predict how the storyline will unfold. This is not the New Zealand media’s proudest moment.
* * *
THERE IS a certain type of officious Englishman whose image is seared into the New Zealand psyche.
We have all encountered him. He carries a clipboard and has a pocket bristling with pens. A typical example of the subspecies pommus pettibureaucratus has a moustache and wears a white dustcoat. He loves to give orders, preferably citing the minutiae of council bylaws and Acts of Her Majesty’s Parliament.
He has an accent which identifies him as a member of the English lower-middle class, a social status of which he is probably acutely aware and possibly resentful.
Though thousands of miles from home, he has found an ideal habitat in the lower regulatory branches of government.
Here he has secured a form of employment which enables him, at one stroke, to fulfil his dream of improving his social and economic standing – to “make something” of himself in a country blessedly free of class rigidities – while simultaneously asserting authority over people who, in different circumstances, might be his betters.
Any career with the word “inspector” in the job description – health inspector, building inspector, fire safety inspector – is irresistible to him. If there’s a uniform with the job, so much the better.
Local government is rich in such openings. In this capacity he is able to indulge his natural talent for nitpicking and gleefully pouncing on the supposed shortcomings of others.
We have seen a striking example of this personality type in a recent “reality” TV show. I leave it to readers to guess which programme I’m referring to.
* * *
PEOPLE used to suffer harm. They exhibited different types of behaviour. They demonstrated competency of one sort or another. Sometimes they would indulge in misconduct.
Then someone decided, for no obvious reason, to append the letter “s” to words that had managed perfectly well without it. So now we have harms, behaviours, competencies and misconducts.
Even worse, I’ve recently seen reference to knowledges, evidences and learnings (this last from a police officer talking about the lessons police learned from a security breach at Premier House during Prince William’s visit in January).
Happily these atrocities haven’t yet crept into everyday English, but it may be only a matter of time. Predictably, teachers, social workers and other “caring” professions have adopted them with gusto. Or should that be gustos?
IF Bailey Junior Kurariki becomes a hardened lifetime criminal, as now seems inevitable, then I’m afraid my fellow journalists will have to accept a large measure of responsibility.
The media were captivated by the image of the 12-year-old Kurariki’s wide-eyed face peering over the top of the dock when he was found guilty of the manslaughter of pizza delivery man Michael Choy in 2002, and they haven’t been able to leave him alone since.
He immediately became branded as “New Zealand’s youngest killer”, a tag that has dogged him at every turn.
In a very narrow, technical sense, I suppose the description is correct. But does that justify its endless repetition? I’m not so sure.
It’s important to point out that Kurariki didn’t actually kill anyone. He was a decoy who gave the signal for one of his older partners-in-crime to leap out and hit Mr Choy. He must have known the plan was to assault Mr Choy, but there was no proven intent to kill – otherwise the charge would have been murder.
In any case, Kurariki was under the influence of older associates. Significantly, we don’t hear anything about them these days. Of the six who were convicted, Kurariki was singled out for continued media attention solely because of his age.
I would have thought this very factor was a compelling reason to leave him alone, so that he might have had some chance of rehabilitation away from the public eye.
In fact the exact reverse happened. Kuraraki has been subjected to such unrelenting media attention that he had no chance of settling back into a normal life after his initial release from prison.
The media played a direct hand in his latest brush with the law. Two female journalists from the Herald on Sunday, a reporter and a photographer, went to interview him after he finished a one-month sentence for wilfully damaging a TV camera. (The media again. Fancy that.)
Kurariki is alleged to have exposed himself to the two, masturbated and groped them. Naturally they lodged a complaint with the police, which in turn led to his latest arrest last week after he failed to appear in court.
I hope the two Herald on Sunday journalists feel pleased with themselves. For two apparently attractive women to visit a troubled and unstable young man in his home was perilously close to baiting him. But never mind, the paper got what it no doubt wanted: a story headlined Child killer becomes sex pest.
Kurariki’s life is a tragedy playing out in slow motion, and it’s not hard to predict how the storyline will unfold. This is not the New Zealand media’s proudest moment.
* * *
THERE IS a certain type of officious Englishman whose image is seared into the New Zealand psyche.
We have all encountered him. He carries a clipboard and has a pocket bristling with pens. A typical example of the subspecies pommus pettibureaucratus has a moustache and wears a white dustcoat. He loves to give orders, preferably citing the minutiae of council bylaws and Acts of Her Majesty’s Parliament.
He has an accent which identifies him as a member of the English lower-middle class, a social status of which he is probably acutely aware and possibly resentful.
Though thousands of miles from home, he has found an ideal habitat in the lower regulatory branches of government.
Here he has secured a form of employment which enables him, at one stroke, to fulfil his dream of improving his social and economic standing – to “make something” of himself in a country blessedly free of class rigidities – while simultaneously asserting authority over people who, in different circumstances, might be his betters.
Any career with the word “inspector” in the job description – health inspector, building inspector, fire safety inspector – is irresistible to him. If there’s a uniform with the job, so much the better.
Local government is rich in such openings. In this capacity he is able to indulge his natural talent for nitpicking and gleefully pouncing on the supposed shortcomings of others.
We have seen a striking example of this personality type in a recent “reality” TV show. I leave it to readers to guess which programme I’m referring to.
* * *
PEOPLE used to suffer harm. They exhibited different types of behaviour. They demonstrated competency of one sort or another. Sometimes they would indulge in misconduct.
Then someone decided, for no obvious reason, to append the letter “s” to words that had managed perfectly well without it. So now we have harms, behaviours, competencies and misconducts.
Even worse, I’ve recently seen reference to knowledges, evidences and learnings (this last from a police officer talking about the lessons police learned from a security breach at Premier House during Prince William’s visit in January).
Happily these atrocities haven’t yet crept into everyday English, but it may be only a matter of time. Predictably, teachers, social workers and other “caring” professions have adopted them with gusto. Or should that be gustos?
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