by Gordon Campbell

Arthur Allen Thomas, David Bain, Rex Haig, David Dougherty, Scott Watson…almost every major criminal case in New Zealand seems to have left large numbers of people with the feeling that our justice system regularly gets it wrong, and can’t be relied on to either (a) convict the right person or (b) manage the proceedings of justice in a way that instills confidence that the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ standard has been properly met.

Britain has done something about it. It took several notorious cases where a miscarriage of justice – or, as some have dubbed it, ‘a carriage of misjustice’ – occurred, before it did so. Namely, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four cases. In the mid 1990s, an independent body called the Criminal Cases Review Committee (CCRC) was set up by the British government to investigate applications from the public for the review of possibly wrongful convictions, after the appeal process has been exhausted.

Scotland has a similar system, with slightly different rules and powers. In fact, the Lockerbie bomber Ali al-Megrahi was well advanced with an appeal for wrongful conviction to the Scottish CCRC when the infamous plea bargain to release him back to Libya on compassionate grounds was struck, on condition that he dropped his appeal proceedings. If the politicians in Scotland and Britain had hoped that the al-Megrahi plea bargain would save them from the embarrassment of having jailed the wrong man, they were sadly mistaken. Gareth Peirce, the lawyer who defended the Birmingham Six, has summarised the al-Megrahi situation here.

In passing, the political machinations surrounding the Lockerbie bomber case provide some strong reasons why the New Zealand method of handling such cases – leave it to the executive, and the Justice Minister’s discretion – is a bad idea, and a violation of the proper separation of powers. Arguably, politicians should not be allowed to intervene in the work of the judiciary to fix things up, when and how they see fit.

Between 2003 and late 2008 the British CCRC was headed by Professor Graham Zellick, a recent Law Foundation visiting fellow to New Zealand. On Zellick’s watch, the CCRC had to grapple with one of its thorniest problems – what happens when expert witnesses are in conflict, and when juries have to guess which expert is the more reliable? The main case in question involved Sally Clark, a solicitor wrongly convicted of murdering her children – largely on the basis of expert prosecution evidence about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome given by Sir Roy Meadow, which was later found to be fallacious. Belatedly, Clark was exonerated, but she later committed suicide [See correction below].

The dodgy reliability of expert witnesses – and the reliance that juries place on them – is a worldwide problem. Cameron Todd Willingham for instance, was executed in Texas in 2004 for the arson murder of his children, on the basis of an expert analysis of the fire scene. More sophisticated forensic analysis – after Willingham [pictured left] had been put to death – has now proven that the house fire was an accident, and not an arson at all.

The Willingham case is one of the clearest examples of the US capital punishment regime executing an innocent man.

In New Zealand, expert ballistics evidence played a central part in the prosecution and eventual conviction of the recently paroled John Barlow, even though the work of the US expert concerned has since been discredited.

Charles Peters testified in 1995 that forensic testing known as comparative lead bullet analysis showed bullets found at the crime scene matched those belonging to Barlow. The tests have since been discredited worldwide for providing a high number of false matches.

Carrying out investigations into wrongful convictions is never likely to be a widely popular process. Politicians prefer to be seen to be supporting the victims of crime, rather than the victims of the justice system. Judges, while they may privately concede they are fallible and would welcome any competent body that created more confidence in the justice system, are also likely to have misgivings. The mere existence of a permanent body like the CCRC indicates that the Police and the courts routinely get the process of justice badly wrong. Some people would prefer to perpetuate the fiction that this doesn’t happen.

A few years ago, retired judge Sir Thomas Thorp issued a self-funded report that found our provisions for dealings with miscarriage of justice to be inadequate – and he called for New Zealand to create and maintain an independent body dedicated to investigating and helping to correct wrongful convictions. As Graham Zellick explained in this 2009 speech .

the mere fact of having a respectable place where conspiracy theorists and the genuinely aggrieved alike can take their evidence for expert assessment provides a social benefit in itself. More importantly though, the CCRC is a mechanism for detecting and correcting genuine cases of injustice. Werewolf editor Gordon Campbell spoke with Professor Zellick about the CCRC and its work, during Zellick’s recent visit to Wellington.

[Correction: in the copy above and in a question below there is a reference to Sally Clark having committed suicide. In fact, the coroner ruled that Ms Clark died of acute alcohol intoxication in her own home in March 2007 , but that there was no evidence she had intended to take her own life.]

Campbell : The CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) was set up in the wake of the Birmingham Six case. New Zealand doesn’t have such an independent body to investigate whether a criminal conviction is unsound. Is there an argument in principle for having such a body, with or without the catalyst of a famous miscarriage of justice ?

Zellick : Yes, there certainly is. It is often the case that major social reform is precipitated by some crisis or scandal or disaster. But all that does is provide the momentum for government to do something. There’d been discussion in Britain for ways to do something about miscarriages of justice for years. The idea of removing it from the executive and creating an independent body was not by any means novel, but governments often don’t tackle issues of this kind until something forces their hand. You mention one case – there were actually a whole series of serious miscarriages of justice which eventually came to light, and were corrected.

Leaving aside the political aspects – what is the principle involved that necessitates having such a body?

The fundamental principle is that the door to justice in criminal matters should never be firmly closed, however long after the trial and appeal. That’s something very different from the situation in civil justice where you have to have finality because people base their affairs on judicial decision, and finality is everything. But on the criminal side, finality is not necessarily justice. There’s a secondary point that arises, and that is – what is the principle that governs who should be there to deal with these things ? And there is a principle that says it shouldn’t be the executive…

That’s what I wanted to ask, because our current position is that we do have a royal prerogative of mercy, and we do have the executive in the shape of the Minister of Justice occasionally exercising his discretion to launch an investigation and recommend that matters be sent back to the courts for consideration. What’s wrong with that model?

Everything. New Zealand is not unusual. That is the common Anglo law Commonwealth situation, where the prerogative rests with the Crown and that translates into whatever the local arrangements are in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. It was the situation in Britain until the mid 1990s. What’s wrong with it is two fold : first of all, if you analyse it, it does not accord with the proper sphere of executive action. Interference in individual cases within the justice system is no longer, in principle, regarded as being within the proper sphere of executive action. I think that is now generally recognized as a constitutional principle. We’ve sharpened up our ideas on the separation of powers in recent years.

So the risk is that the situation may become politicized and the discretion exercised for political favour or gain?

Or even less sharply, that Ministers have more pressing matters on their agenda, they don’t want to be distracted, they don’t have the time to give it their attention, their officials may realize from time to time that the Minister isn’t very interested – or that he is very interested. It works in very subtle ways, It may not be as crude as to say that there may be direct political manipulation of the process. The political arena is a very sensitive and curious and turbulent one.

And the issue of public confidence in the process then arises.

Absolutely. And that, without doubt, is fundamental. No system involving a ministerial decision and the use of civil servants is ever – in my view – going to command sufficient public confidence. Also, those systems are very rarely transparent so you don’t have a clue what’s gone on, what’s going on, and how the decision was reached. And also they don’t normally have – though I suppose theoretically they could have – the necessary investigative powers that, in my view, are essential.

You made the point that there must be no point of finality in the criminal justice system, in that the door must always be left open to correct an injustice – but what comfort can that offer to the victims of crime?

You have to have other mechanisms for dealing with the victims of crime. In some respects of course with terribly serious crimes, you can’t make adequate recompense. It so happens that Britain happens to have the most generous system of compensating the victims of crimes of violence of any country in the world.

What I’m getting at is that finality is important for the victims of crime too, to enable the feeling that justice has been done –

And that their misery is at an end ?

Yes. Because only then, in the cliché term, is ‘closure’ possible.

That’s absolutely right. I have to tell you that any review commission has to tread warily, and has to be very sensitive. We certainly don’t go troubling families and victims unless you have to. And if possible – and in most cases this is what we manage to do – we can begin and complete a case without them ever knowing that it been the subject of an application. When we do have to open it up and possibly speak to them or – if we don’t, and make a referral – of course we understand this is not going to be easy for them. And we have in place elaborate protocols to ensure they are the first to know the outcome, that they are advised, and that there are authorities there to support them. The only thing I can say is that this cannot be, and could not be allowed to be, a reason for not reviewing a miscarriage of justice.

If only because closure also depends on the right person being convicted ?

It does.

The underlying assumption is that truth can be arrived at by investigations launched by the CCRC. Isn’t that a sign that the adversarial method has failed, and that there should be more room for the inquisitorial method within normal court proceedings?

I think there’d have to be a far larger number of cases where things had gone wrong to support that thesis. It’s a very small proportion of cases that give rise to any issues and on the whole, the adversarial system works very efficiently. If I were given the choice of trial by one method or the other, I must say I’d go for the Anglo-American adversarial method any day of the week. When you reach this point [of bringing in the CCRC] you have to use different techniques. Just as you don’t say to the Police, yours should be an adversarial process. Because it can’t be. And neither can a review commission’s.

Well, let’s look at those numbers. You get about 1,000 applications for review a year. You send back 40 or 50 a year for the original appellate court, and have about a 70% success rate off convictions quashed. Are those numbers relatively constant, year by year?

They are, curiously enough. They’re very constant. I’m no mathematician, and I don’t understand why it is – yet mathematicians apparently do – but these numbers hardly fluctuate.

That’s interesting. Because it indicates that there is a chronic, fairly predictable level of error in the British justice system. Certainly one high enough to justify the CCRC’s ongoing existence.

I have absolutely no doubt that if there were a similar Commission here, you would find the appropriate level would be very similar to the British experience, and the Scottish experience, in proportion. And for the same peculiar reason, it would remain fairly constant. You might get blips now and again – because there might be for instance, a rash of cases on a particular matter. We had some malpractice on the part of Customs and Excise at one point which necessitated us investigating and referring a terribly large number of cases to the Court of Appeal. All of which were quashed.

Given that the CCRC itself is not infallible, couldn’t there be a similar chronic level of error in the decisions the CCRC makes to turn down applications?

Oh, of course. And people come back to us. People are allowed to renew their applications any number of times. The only thing we say is that there has got to be something new…. And there have been cases where people have come back a second or third time, and it has been referred at that point.

And your decisions are subject to judicial review – so in terms of Who’s Watching The Watchers, there is someone looking over your shoulder?

Absolutely. Though the judicial review has to be on legal grounds. But I have to say there are cases where we say we found no basis for taking it forward, and that was because we found no basis for taking it forward – that doesn’t mean that such grounds might not exist. But we didn’t find them. There has to be some new evidence or argument – and that has to be discoverable – and sometimes..well, there may be a witness or a bit of evidence out there, but if you can’t find it, you can’t find it.

Just to be clear : a CCRC recommendation doesn’t establish innocence, but it assesses whether fresh evidence or a re-evaluation puts the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ test’ in jeopardy, correct ?

Yes. We don’t make any recommendation at all. We simply have to decide whether there is a real possibility the appeal court might quash the conviction – and that is on the basis of whether that conviction is safe.

The element of subjectivity here surely, is that you can’t have any idea whether the new evidence would have impressed the original jury as much as it impresses you?

Yes. And that’s why ultimately it is for the Court of Appeal and not for us, to decide. They have more experience than we do, and they are the people to make the right assessment.

And in this process, you don’t presume to recreate the original circumstances of the trial?

No. And of course, that’s not what the Appeal Court does. Put it this way. For the conviction to be safe, the Court of Appeal would have to be convinced that if that evidence had been before the jury, it would still certainly have convicted. If there’s a doubt about that, then that conviction isn’t safe. The answer then is to put it before a new jury, and you have a retrial. That’s where you balance the competing interests in the criminal justice system.

I wonder what impact you would think that cutbacks in legal aid will have on the CCRC’s work. Logically, wouldn’t cutting back on legal aid be likely to generate more miscarriages of justice?

Yes. It is worrying. As chairman, I never got drawn into the fairly fierce debate about the adequacy of criminal legal aid. I didn’t think it was right to do so. There is no doubt that the adversarial system is critical to the effectiveness of a criminal trial in the common law system. That pre-supposes competent lawyers. If there are serious cutbacks, all sorts of things can happen. Any diminution in the quality of the criminal bar for example, and any curtailment of adequate preparation time and so on, can impact very heavily. Even at the moment, a very significant proportion of applications to the Commission are based on inadequate legal representation.

In New Zealand, we’ve just had legal aid brought back under the control of the same Justice Minister [Simon Power - pictured left] and executive that also holds the discretion to re-open unsafe convictions. In Britain, is legal aid administered by a truly independent body?

There is some kind of agency or body – called the Legal Services Commission – that is responsible for it. Ultimately of course, it is the Ministry of Justice and the Treasury that determine the overall budget, and the Legal Services Commission that figures out how it will work in practice. Its under tremendous strain at the moment. There is, I know, much concern in the legal profession about its future.

This cutback in legal aid is occurring at the same time the CCRC’s own resources to correct those failings are also being reduced, correct? What cutbacks occurred on your watch?

On my watch? I can’t recall the exact figure.

What was your overall budget ?

It was about 8 point something million [pounds] in my time. We were expected to make so-called efficiencies of something like 3% a year.

I saw a figure of about 300,000 pounds in cutbacks a year, in each of three years.

Well, that’s right, that’s right. We certainly re-arranged our affairs so that in my time, we reduced our expenditure by probably about half a million pounds a year. But still there was the expectation was that each year the budget would reduce.

What was the rationale for that?

Just the curbing of public expenditure. I don’t think we were particularly singled out. I wanted us to be singled out because I said : look, you are applying these so called ‘efficiency savings’ even-handedly across all arms-length bodies like ours. Actually, that’s not the way to do it. Because the needs of some are different from the needs of others. It needs to be done selectively, and with discrimination. But they weren’t very interested in that argument.

The CCRC seems to be the sort of body that might be chronically lacking in powerful friends. Politicians always like to be seen as being friendly to the victims of crime. And the judiciary – though it wouldn’t wish you ill – mightn’t be too upset if hardship was inflicted on an organization set up to second–guess their decisions.

Well, that’s right. And the political imperative that gave rise to its creation soon passes. You become a bit of the furniture. And there certainly wasn’t the ministerial interest in us that there had been in the early days. Sometimes that’s not bad. You fall off the radar screen and than can have its advantages. But that was certainly true in my time. It was a Labour government under Prime Minister Blair, and you’re quite right – all the rhetoric was about re-balancing criminal justice, and favouring the interests of victims and so on. It was indeed a worrying time. The interests of justice seemed to have been effaced. I didn’t feel we were a high priority, and didn’t feel we were much loved by Ministers. We weren’t hated by them… But we did have influential friends. The senior judiciary were very great supporters. I worked with three different Lord Chief Justices, every one of whom was a fervent supporter of the Commission privately, and publicly. As were most of the senior judges in the Court of Appeal…and a good number of members of Parliament. I never felt friendless.

Lets talk about a really contentious issue in your work : the role of expert witnesses in criminal trials. You had Sir Roy Meadow, an expert witness in the infamous Sudden Infant Death Syndrome case who testified that the odds of two SIDS deaths in the same family were 73 million to one, when in fact, the more accurate figure was 200 to one. How can juries negotiate a situation where there are competing experts ?

Very difficult, isn’t it? You only have to think about it to realize that’s not really why we have a jury system. Its a very odd situation. Its one thing to drag ordinary folk off the streets and ask them to decide whether Miss X or Mr Y is telling the truth and which is the more honest person – that’s the sort of thing we expect juries to be able to decide. Is this dishonest? That’s what we expect them to decide, in certain kinds of property cases. That’s what juries are supposed to be good at.

But the notion that a jury can adjudicate between the expert opinions of Professor X and Doctor Y is ludicrous. It is absolutely ludicrous – and it is to place upon the jury a burden for which they are wholly ill-equipped. To make our system do that, to my mind, makes no sense whatever.

Given the tragic outcome of that SIDS case – where we had a grieving mother [Sally Clark pictured left] wrongly convicted of murder and who, even after being exonerated, committed suicide – you would think that would impel the system to give juries more assistance about how to cope when the experts on the stand can’t be trusted, or contradict each other. Has anything been done?

No. No, nothing, really. I should say that Meadow didn’t just give evidence on that one case, which was particularly notorious. He was the principal prosecution witness for the Crown in any number of civil and criminal cases involving children – so his evidence was very widespread, and was relied on very heavily by the Crown.

It is easy enough to identify the problem – but what sort of structural changes would actually help the jurors faced with this dilemma?

I think the fundamental change that has to be faced is that you can’t leave those issues to the jury. We don’t expect the jury to listen to prosecuting counsel and defence counsel on technical points of law and reach a view on which is the correct one. The judge tells them : ‘This the law, I direct you. Matters of fact are for you, matters of law are for me, and I will tell you.’ Of course, they have this residual constitutional right to ignore what the judge tells them, but that’s a different issue.

If, as you seem to be intimating, we should expand the judge’s instructional role to include scientific and technical expert evidence as well – wouldn’t we, at the very least, need to require the judge to provide a rationale for the direction he has given?

I’m sure that’s right. Otherwise there would be no way of knowing how he has come to that conclusion, and why they favour one view rather than the other. And then you may well say – what expertise does the judge have on technical issues? So you may have to find some method of ensuring that the judge is advised…and going a stage further. When you think about it, if you really do have a situation where there is a real conflict on a fundamental issue between the experts on either side – and that evidence is absolutely crucial to supporting any possible conviction – can you really say the Crown has proved its case beyond reasonable doubt?

We have had this [problem] in the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cases. We have had it in the Shaken Baby cases, where there is no certain science and the clinicians are very undecided as to when you can be certain – you can never be certain – that the baby has been shaken to death.

We had it in another notorious case, where parents were convicted of killing their baby by forcibly administering salt to him. That was over-turned on appeal, but they were initially convicted of murder. It turned, as I recall, on expert witnesses for the Crown saying that there was no way that a baby would somehow get this salt down a baby’s throat without someone really forcing it. And that was of course seized on by the jury. It later emerged that the whole thing was fallacious, and there were other explanations for the high concentrations of salt.

Given the inherent corroboration problems in rape cases, do you support the moves to spare witnesses from adversarial questioning?

Oh, I don’t think you can do that. But we’ve gone a long way in England to building a regime which balances the competing interests. In a matter as serious as a rape allegation where the consequences to the defendant are so significant and the sentence so severe –

And the nature of the crime is such there is usually no other witness to establish the facts?

Absolutely true. To remove that in any way from the adversarial process is actually unthinkable. What we have done is introduce limitations on some of the lines of questioning that used to be very common, and which have now been adjudged to be immaterial, and prejudicial.

Providing the guidelines of questioning are followed, is there anything inherently of concern about convictions based on the testimony of children?

I have no experience of that, to be honest. I think children probably present exactly the same sort of problems as adults. Some are believable, and some aren’t. Some know when they are telling the truth, and some don’t.

Point being – a conviction that relied on the testimony of a child or a group of children, might be seen by a bloc of public opinion as prone to fancy or influence or to the eliding of truth and fantasy, such that it would be inherently risky to rely on it. What do you think?

Its very difficult and slightly dangerous to generalise. You have to fall back and say that you have to treat every case as it is. It would be very dangerous, given the incidence of child sex abuse, to say that children can never give evidence that could support a conviction.

You’ve been publicly critical about lip reading experts and earprint experts. Are there any other kinds of experts that you think should not be recognised by the courts as being expert witnesses?

Can’t think of any at the moment. But I just think the courts need to be just a little bit more cautious about admitting people as experts, or as representing disciplines that can rightly have experts. We’re just a bit too casual about this in the English courts. The Americans have more rigorous tests of what can constitute a discipline whose experts can be called to give evidence in a criminal trial.

Finally, to summarise – why should the CCRC be allowed to second guess the joint work of the judge and the jury in the original trial, given that those parties heard all the evidence in context, and were able to judge in person, the relative reliability of witnesses?

And the answer is : we don’t. And it wouldn’t be right to do so, you’re absolutely correct. That’s why the jurisdiction only comes into play when there is something new, and which by definition, wasn’t before the trial judge and trial jury or indeed, the Court of Appeal. So, it is premised on the notion that something – whether it is legal, or factual – something new has emerged which justifies further consideration. And that further consideration is by the court, and by the appropriate and relevant appeal court. The CCRC system we have fully respects the role of the justice system, and of the judiciary. We don’t in any way replace or oust them. We simply provide a mechanism for laying before them something new that suggests the conviction isn’t safe.

That process must entail some initial guesswork on your part, as to whether the Court of Appeal will buy in and treat the new elements as substantive – and offering the chance of a re-evaluation.

Yes, that’s right. You know, if we went about our job in a reckless, casual or neglectful way, I don’t think we would have won the confidence of the appeal court that we have. I said earlier that successive chief justices and senior judges of the criminal division of the Court of Appeal have been very strong supporters of the Commission. While there may have been the odd case now and then that they thought ought not to have troubled them, and where we may well have spent our energies elsewhere, the fact is we have acquired a quite enviable record – which is a tribute to my colleagues that do the work, day in and day out – and which we would not have if we were putting rubbish before the Court of Appeal.

Yes, but to your critics that’s precisely the problem. They would regard a quota of referrals that’s satisfactory to the upper realms of the judiciary as being indicative of a problem. They strongly believe that you should be ruffling their feathers a bit more by sending them more cases, because the chances are – by playing footsy with the judiciary – you are neglecting cases that may have merit.

Yes, and the Commission has to tread that narrow line. Because you’ve got those on the one hand – the defence constituency – that says the Commission is far too cautious, and should be sending much more to the court. And you’ve got the court whose confidence one wishes to retain. How do you cope with that? You cope with that by simply following a line of integrity and carrying out what you judge to be your statutory duty. The fact is – 30% of the referrals don’t result in anything being overturned. It doesn’t have to be a cast-iron certainty to be referred.

I wasn’t there for the first seven years of the Commission’s life. But you can imagine…when it was set up and started work, the first group of commissioners felt their way gingerly, were very uncertain. They weren’t all by any means, criminal lawyers. They had to understand how the Court of Appeal dealt with these things. Over the years they got some feedback, and a sense of how referrals were dealt with.

The danger by the time I was there – and certainly by the time I’d been there a year or two – was that actually you could predict the final outcome quite easily in about 98 % of the cases. The danger is that then goes further, and you’re sitting on the Commission and you start thinking ‘Oh, there’s no way this conviction is going to be overturned.’ And the others say ‘Yeah, that’s right, there’s no way the Court is going to overturn this.’ And so you don’t refer it, and that 70 % then starts creeping up. We could hit 100% without the slightest difficulty. Or at any rate,95 or 96 %.

So that’s what you’ve got to guard against : of simply, through experience becoming the Court of Appeal and doing their job for them by sending them only what Lord Bingham once called the ‘racing certainties.’ So I think to have kept it at 70% is pretty good. It takes some effort to do that.

ENDS

by James Robinson

A few months ago I began an online fundraising project for funds to contribute to my study towards a Masters degree abroad.

I managed to gather some initial attention. I soon discovered that running a website and maintaining a steady stream of visitors is a vexing balancing act, and even more trying when placed concurrently with fulltime work. Quickly it became a site frequented mostly be family, and social networks.

Tracking the habits and patterns of traffic through your website becomes hypnotic. The most basic of internet hosting allows you to see what sites people clicked through to get there, what search terms were used, the amount of hits in a day, and where incoming links are coming from.

One morning I opened up my email to a raft of unpleasant website comments awaiting moderation. There was a certain comical violence to some of them, an unmistakable disdain in all of them.

The language was colourful to say the least.

“I hope your plane crashes into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where you have to survive on the flesh of one of your idiot “friends” who was stupid enough to sponsor you. Then, hopefully a bunch of Oceanic White Tip sharks will chew your c**k off…”

My web-traffic increased 500 percent in one day, with no surprise links to my website, and no new popular Google search combinations boosting traffic. The only lead I had was that someone, other than myself, and not a friend of mine, had posted a link to my website on Facebook.

This abuse continued, and I had to counter an unmistakable and surprising notion, that somewhere in the great wide internet I had attracted a faceless, nameless enemy. Buoyed on by the anonymity allowed by this format, a new screed of copy would await me every morning as I came to my screen.

“…please jump on that sinking ship that is the industry and sink to the bottom ya smarmy face git…”

“…you’re a c***, a priviledged, heart on sleeve, cancer-f***er…”

“…this is only going to get worse…”

There was a certain intimidation inherent in not knowing my enemy, or possibly even enemies. While I did not fear for my safety, I was troubled – my mind endlessly second-guessing at how this had, or who had forced this to, come about. (“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t…” sprang to mind easily.) Adding to it, most posts contained vague personal details about me, that couldn’t be ascertained from following the site. Whoever the author was they were, or had a connection to, someone that I knew personally.

All of this put me in an interesting position.

I have much the same relationship with my computer as I do with my car. I know the right things to do in order to work it, but if pressed for an answer would have no cogent explanation for a why or how.

I would imagine that likely this puts me in line with a vast majority of internet-users, and car-drivers for that matter.

These messages stirred at the edge of my mind for the following week. And I was quickly transformed from a computing everyman, into an internet-Sherlock Holmes.

For those in the know, the idea of tracing an IP (Internet Protocol) address would be common and obvious. But this was a new world for me to see up close.

All computers when logged into the Internet have an eight-digit Internet protocol address. Internet users either have a static address that stays the same every time they log on, or are assigned a different address every time they log in by their Internet service provider. (Largely due to the fact that the Internet has got so popular they’ve become a very moderated resource.)

Even if this was something I had a vague idea of, it was nothing I considered on any regular basis.

I quickly realised that every one of the forty comments left on the website over the week bore one of these digital fingerprints. Using an IP search tool readily available through a quick Google search – this nameless nemesis had a hometown – London, England and I even had the details of their internet service provider.

Sadly, a court order would’ve been required to take it any further than this. Generally, across most jurisdictions, IP addresses are considered to be private information and subject to strict privacy laws. Hypothetically, if the abuse escalated, I did have this option. Reportedly, however, Internet companies worldwide have vastly differing standards of record keeping when it comes to maintaining a record of who gets what IP address.

This is one of the more delicate areas of debate around Internet policing and privacy – it is difficult to regulate the actions of Internet users without giving up the privacy of Internet users. As it stands, you need to catch someone and work backwards from there.

My case caught a break. One of the IP addresses used was registered to a reputable worldwide not-for-profit company. Even more unfortunately for the poster, I was shocked to know that this post was the only entry that came attached to a valid email address.

From a whole mess of crude abuse, I was now armed with a place of employment, first name and last initial. I quickly reported this to the company in question, convinced that this culprit either was, or knew who was, the driving force behind this private campaign.

I received a decidedly serious response, from an extremely senior up:

…I would like to make to make it very clear that the views in the email are not those of my organisation and I would like to apologise unreservedly for any distress this has caused you. The individual concerned has been spoken to and appropriate disciplinary action has been taken. I can assure you that you will not be receiving abusive emails from the same source again…

My detective work had hit home, and as quickly as the messages had begun, they disappeared. I still had no idea the full name or information of who this was, but I had fired a shot back.

Case closed, somewhat. The whole episode left me completely fascinated.

This minor amount of Internet harassment visited upon me was taken immediately seriously. And rightly so – Internet harassment is serious, and an especially growing concern, especially amongst more cruel and impressionable teenagers. A recent study by the US Justice Department estimated that 23 percent of recorded harassment was electronic.

Internet harassment has led to several tragic teenage suicides, and New Zealand has not escaped this trend. Netsafe estimates that one in four school students are subjected to Internet harassment on some level.

One of the most covered instances internationally involved Megan Meier, in Missouri, USA who committed suicide at the age of thirteen in 2007, after a peer of hers set up a fake MySpace account with her mother and another older teenager. The account posed as a sixteen year-old boy, and was used to gain the romantic confidence of Megan, before those involved shared all personal information with Meier’s classmates, and quickly turned the correspondence abusive.

The mother was indicted, but acquitted. Internet harassment is slippery, and hard to place within clear guidelines. Is a clear threat to personal safety or a threat on family or property needed to execute a complaint? Or is a constant campaign of intimidation? Or is an implied level of threat within correspondence suffice?

A rabid explosion in online communication in the last decade, has in many ways, been fuelled by the new level of anonymity that this (still rather new) medium affords the user. Maybe a counter to these new and disturbing ways of intimidation would be to publicise the fact that this anonymity is only surface deep.

Even on the other side of the world I found my bully, in short time.

For a start, when slinking about the Internet, up to unsavoury deeds, your IP address means that effectively you’re leaving fingerprints everywhere, involuntarily. Following on from this, you can review what information Google holds on you at its new Database tool. Quickly you’ll see it knows you well. It has your friends and your habits, even employing word recognition software on your emails to match you up with relevant adverts.

All sorts of specific, individual information can be taken when performing every task online. Not to mention Google’s “inadvertent” acquisition of private Internet data from home wireless networks while canvassing for their Street View function, complete with personal browsing preferences and a potential capacity to be able to track the physical addresses of IP addresses.

Downloading music and movies is no safer, with most downloaders leaving themselves open to have their addresses and downloading history tracked.

So, with an estimated 90 percent of nighttime Internet traffic in New Zealand attributed to illegal file sharing it is probably worth pointing out the following. Even if straight harassment isn’t your kick, it is worth paying attention to just how anonymous one really is on the Internet.

You may be a little cyber-needle in the virtual haystack, but people can still find you.

I did.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

It may seem like decades since Len Brown, John Banks and sundry others began running for the Supercity mayoralty, but – believe me – the never ending contest will finally grind to a halt next month, on October 9th. Like many of the dreams of Rodney Hide, this one is not what it once was. As initially defined, the office of Supercity mayor had possessed virtually limitless, quasi-feudal powers – yet by last Christmas, even the New Zealand Herald (usually a reliable cheerleader for the Hide reforms) was lamenting that the mayor and Council could become virtual passengers in a corporatisation process that would deliver much of Auckland’s economic power and decision making to the non-elected heads of the so-called CCOs, or council-controlled organizations.

Cue another screeching change of gear. Last minute legislative changes led to a few – arguably cosmetic – changes, and the power to fire the CCO heads after their first term was placed back in the hands of the next mayor. Against Treasury and other departmental advice however, the huge Transport CCO was left outside direct Council control. On the upside, Hide’s plans to impose extremist Colorado style rates reducing referenda on the people of Auckland were consigned to the dustbin, and replaced by a vague accountability process nailed onto long term Council planning. If I can use an ancient television analogy, the whole Supercity saga has felt very Deadwood. It still is a work in progress – if progress is the right word for something that involves trying to shove the democratic stuffing back into a governance package whose very essence has involved throwing it to the four winds.

Like Auckland itself, the two main contenders for mayoral office have seemed to be on their own personal quest for a viable identity. At last count, the polls were deadlocked. For months now, John Banks has been trying to project a gentle, collaborative side of his personality that has been totally invisible during his previous 63 years on the planet. Evidently, Banks is now to be regarded as everyone’s favourite dotty uncle. It has been like suddenly being presented with the other side of the moon after looking at the arid, crater pocked lunar landscape for eons – who knew that Banks’ other side was a verdant rain forest, where predators lie down chuckling beside their prey?

Len Brown of Manukau has been making the reverse journey. Over the same period, he has been trying to project a toughness and composure not visible during his famous credit card spending meltdown a few months ago. In person, there is an inexorable, almost Pentecostal intensity to Brown, a one-man onslaught of decency who seems hell bent on convincing every last person in Auckland – one by one if he has to – that he will listen, he will consult, he will govern in their name, even if it kills him. Which it might do, at this rate.

Perhaps it is fitting that both of Auckland’s potential leaders are asking to be taken largely on faith, and on their good intentions. Which is the more (in)credible option? John Banks promising sweetness and light, or Len Brown promising to be a steady hand at the tiller? Still, it was always going to be a leap in the dark. The Supercity is unknown territory, an experimental model in truncated democracy for which no one has much in the way of relevant experience. But that’s Auckland for you though, isn’t it? It’s a spinner. Always in the process of becoming something else, yet never quite getting there.

Werewolf editor Gordon Campbell spoke to Len Brown in mid-August about how he plans to keep the CCOs in line, the mayoral campaign, his feelings about public-private partnerships, and who should pay for the CBD loop.

Campbell : What’s unique about the Supercity structure and the powers of its mayor – compared to the way other councils in New Zealand are run?

Brown : The powers of the mayor in particular are different. The mayor gets to appoint the deputy mayor, set up the Council political structure and appoint the chairs within that. Secondly, it is quite a distinctively and strongly corporate structure with a high number of CCOs – who are managing 75% of the assets of the Council – transport, water and waste water in particular. That’s quite unique also.

And what’s also unique about the Supercity is that in other councils around the country those CCO organizations are more directly under Council control, correct?

Oh yes. In Manukau we have seven CCOs. We’re well used to this type of corporate structure. But we developed that over ten years. And we developed it in liaison with our communities, and also with the business community, in terms of the appointment of directors. It was an incremental, organic growth. Yes, its different to that extent. And its different to the degree [of corporate control.]

All very well. Yet when CCOs control 75% of council assets, how can you re-assure Aucklanders that if they elect you, you’ll have the assets and resources at your command, to get done what they want done?

Because the CCOs will deliver out on our vision. That’s exactly the way it is going to go, and if they do not –

So you will be micro-managing them?

Oh no, I will not be micro-managing them.

How can you ensure they won’t run away with the ball?

Because in terms of the accountability of CCOs, we will set up a CCO review panel that will, on a quarterly basis, be managing the performance of the CCOs and their KPIs [Key Performance Indicators.] Secondly, I will be sitting with CCO chairs and CEOs on a monthly basis to get an assessment of how they are proceeding against those KPIs. Thirdly, I will ensure that CCOs are sitting with the community boards so that they are getting feedback from the local community as to how their management of the assets is working. So there are a number of accountability networks, checks and balances to ensure that the CCOs are absolutely delivering out on the policy and strategy of the Council.

So the CCOs will be a creature of the Council – is that what you’re saying?

Absolutely they are. Again, I’ll just reflect back on our experience in Manukau because its well beyond anyone else’s experience with this –

But CCOs of this size are in a whole different league

No, its not a whole different league. The CCO structures are the same as what we’ve got at the moment. Its just been imposed in a very short timeframe. And they are bigger. But the same principles apply.

Really? But the Transport CCO alone will control 54 % of rates money, some $680 million. If elected, will you be asking central government to remove its statutory basis, and put that particular CCO back under direct Council control?

I’m not going to be rash in my actions or my judgements. I’ll be very clear with the community that I will review that CCO after two years of its action. But I don’t want to arrive at the office on the 1st of November, and start clear felling the structure.

Do you think it desirable that the Transport CCO should be back under Council control?

Manukau’s view, and I represented that view to government as its leader, is that we should not have a Transport CCO. That it was inappropriate – that as a Council that has been strongly able to deliver out our own transport requirements at a local level with real pace and momentum and a minimum of fuss – we saw this as being a job that the new Auckland Council should do, particularly. It is in Transport that the biggest changes are required.

So let’s be clear – you do, or you don’t support the Transport CCO having a statutory basis ?

No, I do NOT support that. But I think ..well, I have to caveat that by saying that Parliament has made its decision around the structure. We have inherited it. I’m going to respect the Transport CCO for two years, and then make some judgements as to whether or not it is working. If its not working, I’ll be going to Parliament. If it is working, we’ll leave it.

Making A Dodgy Model Work

You call yourself a fiscal conservative. Do you intend to cap rates?

I’m going to have rates increases in and around the rate of inflation. I’ve been into a situation where I’ve tried to cap rates. And at times quite frankly it is [unintelligible] to do that. So for me, as a guide for me it’s the appropriate way for us to go forward…In Manukau for example, we’ve had no water rates increases over the last two years. Zilch. Before that, 2%. For residential rates, we’ve been sort of between two and four and a half per cent.

You see, my problem here is that there’s talk in the Hide legislation of a fiscal envelope, and a process whereby accountability will be measured against the Council’s long term plan. How can that possibly work, given that elsewhere around the country, Councils regularly re-jig their long term plans depending on community need, and depending on the rates revenue they wind up getting in the hand?

I’ll be quite pragmatic about that. I’ve been pretty much at the coalface of leading Manukau’s financial arrangements for the last 12-15 years, and I know and understand how our long term plan documents work, and I’ll keep in close to the communities on those. We will review them every year – and every half year – within that envelope.

So you don’t see the fiscal envelope as a legislative straitjacket?

No, I do not see it as a legislative straitjacket. I see the present framework as having as much scope for us to amend and re-direct as we think appropriate, and as mandated by the people. So I’m not constrained by that.

Are the powers and the boundary lines of responsibility between local boards and Council entirely clear to you?

No, they’re not. They haven’t been clarified as yet. I’m supportive of the general thrust of the ATA’s proposed rules, which I think the government will pretty much take on board. The areas where I think we could give a little bit more power to the boards is around having a significant role in the granting of building permits and resource consents in particular – through the capacity to join in hearings. I would have preferred to have seen the boards’ powers legislated into statute – so that the delineation was clearer. They have not done that.

Reason I ask, is that on my reading of the Auckland Council Act, it says that Council should delegate to local boards, but retain the discretion to over-ride them, if Council feels that matters should be better dealt with regionally. That’s not exactly crystalline clarity, is it?

Not only that. It’s a recipe for a significant punch-up, constantly. Because having been the mayor of a city for three years, a councillor for 12, and a community board member for 12 years, some of the areas of greatest challenge have been around determining who’s got what delegated authority, and whether or not its properly exercised by the board, or by the council. So I understand the politics of that, and its not easy. I would much rather prefer a clearly defined regime, put down in statute.

Going back to what was said earlier. The Supercity CCO’s are much bigger than those in Manukau. Why should we take it on faith that you can manage CCOs of the scale that the Supercity will entail ?

You can ask that of any candidate. Because every candidate has the same challenge. It just so happens that I am the leader of the second largest city in New Zealand instead of the first, at this point in time. And I am the leader of a council that probably has the best balance sheet in the region. Significantly the best. Lowest rates on average, lowest water rates on average, lowest debt to equity average. That background and experience in my view, fits me out very, very well for the role that we’re looking at.

Reportedly, Auckland will contain two million people in the not too distant future. You can only expand north, or south. If elected, would you be in favour of expanding the metropolitan limits – or would you be wanting to promote policies supportive of greater urban density?

Both, actually. There’s a strong case for taking on board the international experience with ‘smart growth.’ That’s been prepared to intensify – and build up and build down. That’s essential for us to do because we need economies of scale for public transport development – and also a recognition that significant and unbridled urban sprawl tends to give rise to massive financial cost and impact on the environment.

But we also have scope to take up the significant population growth we’re expecting – another million people in the next 20, 25 years – in and around some of our broader areas of notable development such as Pukekohe in the south, or Orewa into the north.

Can that be done without the usual bugbears of ribbon development and the lack of amenities associated with de-centralisation?

I absolutely believe so. In amongst that, I just want to say that there is a need for us to critically recognize the sustainability of our rural sector. We want to maintain our dairy farms , our viticulture and our crop growers within close proximity to the Auckland market.

Okay, so …does it seem ironic to you that many of the same people who promote the modern Supercity also promote the same old tired rezoning policies that will foster more ribbon development and more roading – where the main benefits get captured by the property speculators busily turning land into sections. How do you aim to you stop that?

Well I just want to reflect on your view of those who are promoting the Supercity…Mostly its promoted on the basis that they can get economic efficiencies from the large model. That’s entirely debatable, and its going to be a challenge. The amalgamations we’ve had thus far – and certainly Manukau is an example, in 1989 – don’t necessarily give economic efficiency. They do most certainly give economies of scale, and allow you to develop large scale infrastructure where previously you could not.

Fine. Yet what I’m getting at is the modern drive for economic efficiency seem to be going hand in hand with outdated notions that you can just expand outwards like Topsy – and not worry your pretty head about the lack of amenities and the provision of adequate public transport

You’re right. I think that people with that philosophy about amalgamation often do have a similar reflection on the need for us to not constrain growth, and to let the market prevail.

Not you though ?

I’m not included in that crew.

OK, lets look at your capacity to deliver. Last year, the Supercity mayor was being depicted as an all powerful feudal overlord – but given the extent to which Auckland’s assets has been corporatised by Rodney Hide, it is just as often depicted as a virtual captive of council controlled business organizations. In your view, which is the truer picture?

Neither. Its somewhere in-between. In terms of the lesser view, I think the mayor has a strong leadership role to play in clearly defining a vision, delivering it through the Spatial Plan and through Council, and delivering it through the CCOs, through the statement of corporate intent. So the mayor and the Council clearly set the direction for the CCOs in their management – and it is essential for them to follow that vision through. Secondly, the view that the mayoral office is all powerful – no, its not. The mayor is one vote in Council. The mayor is going to need to work collaboratively with other councillors, and with the community boards to ensure a high level of buy-in, one to the vision and policy and two for the community to get a sense of ownership.

The Campaign

What’s the normal level of turnout in Auckland local body elections, and what level would you expect this time around?

Average is 38, 39, 40 %. across the region. Dips up and down a bit through terms. I’m expecting we should realistically aim for 55%.

Are John Banks’ supporters more likely to turn out to vote than your supporters?

Well, my supporters will be from all across this region. When I became mayor of Manukau I drew support from all across the region, from Howick through Otara, Manurewa, Papatoetoe, Mangere to Clevedon. All of those areas turned out strongly for me. I’m campaigning in every part of this town, so I’m expecting that people who support me.

Without putting a value judgement on this, it seems like a no-brainer – doesn’t it – that the people who support Banks are more likely to get out and post in their vote than the people in Manukau ?

[In reply Brown and his aide Conor Roberts historical numbers for turnout in Auckland City local elections between 2001 and 2007, Banks’ vote stayed much the same – about 47,000 in 2001, 46,000 in 2004, 45,000 votes in 2007, He got fewer votes when he won again in 2007 than when he lost in 2004. Voter turnout overall went from 40% to 45% when he lost, to 40% when he won again. Point being, to Brown and Roberts, Banks is such a divisive figure that his turnout doesn’t vary much. Whether the overall turnout goes up or down, Banks’ vote stays the same.]

Even so, his main strength is in Auckland City, which holds 1/3 of the entire voting catchment. Therefore, he doesn’t have to add very much elsewhere to do too much to prevail. But your argument is that if turnout goes up by 5, 10 or 15%, that will favour you, right?

If its only 40 % I think we will have a good chance of winning. And anything beyond that, we will have a very good chance of winning.

Does geography matter very much in this election? Are there regional issues that matter ?

Yes, absolutely. The big issue for communities is that they will lose their identities, and that the new Auckland Council will not look after them, in their little villages. Auckland is a place of 100 villages. So the communities in Helensville and Waiauku, Otara and Grey Lynn and Avondale are looking at this election and saying hey, I’m just going to get buried in this, because all the money is going to go into the CBD and what’s going to happen to me ? So the thing people are most looking for is a mayor who will look after their local communities.

But you can’t be the fairy godmother to everyone, right?

No, but I can be the person who is the honest broker who will seriously be interested in them and will give a damn about their community.

But if the alleged advantages of the Supercity model are unity of vision and economies of scale, doesn’t that inevitably put paid to the regional niceties?

As the mayor, I’m not just there as mayor with my voice and with the councillors. The key role to play is that we have 21 local boards. How well they function and connect in with the local community, and be able to deliver for the needs of that community and deliver out at the local level a vision, strategy and policies of the mayor and Council will have a major impact on how Auckland comes together and unites.

Given that the job entails liaising with 21 boards people and assuring people that they are being listened to and that their regional concerns are being addressed….this isn’t a recipe for a divisive personality, is it?

No, it certainly is not. This is a recipe for someone who is seriously into alliance building, and collaboration. The Royal Commission had it right. Two key things for the leadership of Auckland : a vision and plan that we all agree to, and go with. Secondly, an inclusive nature. This is a hugely diverse region in terms of geo-political size….we have to address the huge diversity of this place, the 195 different ethnicities and cultures that go to make up Auckland. And that requires a leader who understands that, who is tolerant and understanding of those changes and who can actually bring people together.

The Meltdown

There was a point a few months ago when the anti-Banks vote seemed to be yours for the taking. Haven’t you squandered that with those personal episodes a couple of months ago. Jjust as people were getting to know Len Brown , you blew it. Hasn’t that done irrepairable damage?

Well, I’m out in the community all the time. Most people see that and recognize it for what it is. In terms of my actions..I’ve fronted up to it as I always do. Secondly, I made an apology as I thought was appropriate. Thirdly, learned a lot from it. Fourthly, won’t do it again. Most people also realise that in the scheme of things it was pretty blinking minor and they just want to get on with Len, what are you going to do for us? Mostly with me as mayor the questions are – how are you going to sort out crime? How are you going to sort out the transportation problems? What are you going to do for my kids, and their education?

The rest of that stuff they see as peripheral. They want to know where you stand and whether or not they can trust you. And whether you’re believable.

Do you think that John Banks by comparison, gets a free ride from the media?

No. In a campaign like this where it is intense – and where everything you do and say is under the spotlight – everyone has their good days and their bad days.

But Banks is one of those politicians where people say – when he hits a sour note or says something bizarre – that’s its just Banksy. Same way they say that’s Hone, or that’s just Rodney. You’re not one of those politicians.

That’s because people are still getting used to me. They’re still measuring me, and testing me. I accept that. I will win this election by persuading the community that I’m someone they can trust, and secondly that they approve my vision. If I can sit with a person in my community for more than ten seconds, I will get on a wavelength with them, and get something we can agree with.

But maybe your good intentions are not the issue. Maybe the incident a couple of months ago suggested that when push comes to shove, you can’t handle the pressure ?

I guess you’re talking about the way I was portrayed on television in our Council chamber. I’m a very, very passionate guy and if I feel strongly about something I express it. And I’m saying to the people of Auckland if you want a leader at this point of historical change, you’re going to need a leader who believes in what they believe and has got a passion for the place.

They also want a guy who can mind the store without melting down or getting quite so….passionate in the process.

Quite so. And that’s why we spent the first ten minutes of this interview talking about my fiscal prudence.

The CBD Loop and PPPs

Do you think local government should raise all the money for the CBD rail loop – and use fares from paying customers to pay it back? Or should central government make a significant contribution towards the transport infrastructure of the Supercity, given that this is this country’s economic hub?

The second, absolutely. But we have a role to play, definitely in terms of the funding.

What percentage do you think would be appropriate?

Well, we’ll work that through. I’m certainly not going to carry through my negotiations with the government with you, Gordon here today. We need a significant –

Are we talking 50/50?

No, I’m not going to talk about any sort of percentages. Because that’s a matter between me hopefully, as mayor of Auckland, the government, and potential private investors. These are significant issues of partnership in the building of critical transport infrastructure. I’ve said there are four options for us in terms of funding for it – one, rates. Two, central government taxation. Three, infrastructure bonds. I see the potential for us to issue out…. between $1-2 billion in infrastructure bonds over a 5-10 year period to balance or supplement the work we need to do to get paid. And fourthly, an area of funding where we have not been overly pro-active, and which this government is supportive of, and what I believe we need to be supportive of – is PPPs. We need to have the discussion in Auckland for public private partnerships and the delivery of one or two of these projects to enable us to do these projects in a 15 to 20 year period.

So there is a mix of those four options in front of us and how they come together, Gordon. I’ve got it reasonably clear in my mind, but we are talking about incorporating the government as one of the partners, and the private sector as the other in intense negotiations. And I don’t think I should conduct that in a situation where I could compromise a negotiating position for myself.

But on principle, you think central government should make a significant contribution?

Absolutely. I have a very good working relationship with this government, and with the Prime Minister. Professional – and political. And to some extent a shared philosophy in terms of the key issues facing Auckland.

And a shared passion for PPPs, it seems.

Yes, I – absolutely…

Since you don’t have problems on principle with PPPs, do you regard that 35 year Watercare contract as a good model ?

No.

Why not?

Well, I have a very strong commitment to strategic assets in the public domain. Auckland will own 23 % of airport shares. We will hold that. Auckland will own 100% of Ports of Auckland shares. We will hold that. Auckland will own all of its waterways and water assets – we will hold those and …I want to have flexibility around the management of those assets and I don’t to have any sense that someone is playing a long game for the privatization of those assets.

Yes, but PPPs can be privatization by other means. A 35 year term is effectively privatisation. In the PPPs that you would support, would you expect them to have a shorter contract term?

A lot of that will depend on the funding. And the period of time over which we would want – in effect, the loan, the debt repaid and the asset returned to us…but a 15-20 year time frame for most of these PPPs has been seen as an appropriate timeframe.

Right. And that sort of term for PPPs is a commitment?

But if we were to look at a PPP project for example, to do the biggest project – which would be a tunnel through to the Shore and rail. That could be something in the vicinity of $4-5 billion dollars. Then the arrangement might be longer, purely on the basis of economics. We need to be able to sustain our ability to pay it back and the shorter timeframe might prove to be too difficult, in terms of costing.

Hubbard, and Saying “ No”

Didn’t Auckland vote for the kind of consultative, inclusive type of leadership you’re offering once before – with Dick Hubbard? Aren’t you in a sense, Dick Hubbard II?

I’ve got a lot of time for Dick Hubbard. I think he’s a great Kiwi, and a great businessman. His time as the mayor was ..his time. I’m the mayor of Manukau. I was elected on a thumping majority because….I’d served extensively in my community and knew the community back roads, front roads, side roads, inside out roads. I’d done my porridge. I’d served my time. I will sit in that Council with a strong support base of people who come from a similar mind to mine – who will be people from the left and the right and the centre and residents and ratepayers. We will not have the kind of divisive Council that we have had in Auckland for decades ! We will have a collaborative Council, and I will lead that collaborative Council for those people who come from wherever.

Will the Supercity structure enable you to do things that Hubbard couldn’t ?

I don’t want to reflect or talk about Dick. Its irrelevant.

No, its not. Some would argue that the style – and the promise of consultation –are not dissimilar.

Oh, rubbish. I have a style that’s could be a mix of Bob Harvey, of John Banks, of Kerry Prendergast. We each bring our unique style to this. Mine happens to be collaborative and inclusive. But experienced, firm, and fair, right? My record in Manukau stands. And I have held the confidence of those people, overwhelmingly.

Collaborative is fine. But being the mayor, and managing a diverse range of competing interests and priorities is not a situation where everyone can always be sent home with a prize. Have you got it in you to say “No” to people?

How would you like it if you were having to make a decision in your Council, on putting in place outside someone’s house a cell phone site that they firmly believe is going to kill their children from radioactive waves, and is going to drop their property value by a third as soon as it goes up. And you’ve got the neighbourhood sitting in front of you in your chambers, screaming their heads off to NOT make that decision ? What do you think it takes to make a decision against that ? I’ve had to make some tough decisions in my time as the mayor. Basically, delivering out moral authority – you’re making a decision beyond the personal interests but about the public good.

Personally, if you want to know what’s making my motor tick, I had a choice to walk away from everything. I nearly lost my blinking life [from a heart attack] And I came back from that. And I came back from that because of the love of the blinking people.

ENDS

by Denis O’Reilly

Way back when Werewolf was just beginning to howl (Werewolf 5, November 2009) I wrote an article praising, in general, the Government’s initiatives to counter the importation into, and manufacture, distribution and use of methamphetamine in New Zealand. Now I appreciate that the talk of the moment is about the most readily available and destructive recreational drug available, alcohol – it is assessed that we incur around $1 billion dollars worth of economic and social harm because of illicit drugs but about $3 billion of the same because of alcohol. However, at the risk of seeming like a one trick pony, I’d like to reflect on the methamphetamine issue again and review progress to date.

Now in case you don’t know I’ll recap my own background, and explain my stance on this substance, methamphetamine, both to provide a context for what is to follow and to allow you the opportunity to bail and click elsewhere. I’m a life member of the Black Power gang (joined in 1972), hold a Masters degree in social practice, and am a recovering bureaucrat of some 20 years service

With a face and views that didn’t fit in the then emergent, and now actual, ‘public service’, in late 1999 I was sent off on my own. Despite all the niceties of managed egress it always feels like a kick in the guts when long term service ends. My introduction to methamphetamine came not long after the end of that period of service when I was feeling pretty low and run over. It came to me as if I was 18 again, bright, sparking, bullet proof and ready to take on the world. I became an instant and committed user. Meth is New Zealand’s second- most popular illicit drug because, for a start, the pleasure it brings outweighs the immediate consequences. I’d lit a wick – this is true whether you take it a little or a lot – and, accordingly, like every other user, slow fuse or fast fuse, the end was nigh. I had to make a change.

We often tend to ascribe dramatic change to some sort of epiphany, a moment in time when truth was revealed. In reality, rather than a Damascene insight, these moments of truth may equally be the tipping point of a thousand nudges and shoves by loved ones, family and friends and, I accept that in my case, this is what occurred. My lady Taape is a ‘no fuck around’ sort of partner and not given to putting up with crap – I think this captures the spirit of her views. Motivated, I looked around and saw, as if at a poisoned waterwell, victims galore. I put down my pipe. I still remember the internal argument, the caution to myself that I might need it one day, and the deliberate action as I pushed the pedal on the kitchen bin and smashed it

Still, in public terms, I never really came to my senses until the fried fiends finally finished my brother Hone Day. He was another Black Power member, a young chief for whom I held much respect. He rejected drugs and alcohol but somehow he succumbed to the allures of this initially delightful but ultimately disastrous chemical. Hone, in a state of methamphetamine – induced psychosis took his own life. The shock of Hone’s death served as a galvanizing iron. As his friends, brothers, sat around his coffin to talk and reflect, what had previously seemed to be an unfortunate cluster of suicides and unusual deaths began to emerge as a tragic pattern with one common denominator: use of methamphetamine.

This was in 2002. We may have been more innocent, naïve, or just overwhelmed by the impact of Hone’s death, but, in any case, the Black Power, as a group, agreed to come together and in one way or other take a cautionary stance against use of methamphetamine. Meth was still a Class B drug and its deleterious effects were less well known. I say a ‘cautionary stance’ because the most the crews will be prepared to do was establish a ‘kaupapa’ – a position against use – within their own ranks, but they won’t (and, pragmatically, can’t) exercise control over another chapter. There was however explicit agreement that I was free to campaign against the use of methamphetamine – the more cynical leaders may have thought “good on you, go for it, and argue against enjoyment in general while you are at it you dumb Mick!” Well I’m no wowser, and hold what might be described as liberal views about recreational substances and life in general. But, since Hone’s death, I have pursued an active and relentless campaign to build community resilience against meth and to convince people to give it a miss.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a team amongst the Mongrel Mob, the Notorious chapter, led by Roy Dunne, were having a similar realization. Roy has been very much influenced by Sam Chapman, who provided him with mentorship based on a fusion of new wave Christianity and ancient Maori values. Roy started working with his members to reflect on their general health and to understand that the high mortality rate amongst their friends and whanau was a result of lifestyles. If the Blacks were topping themselves the Mob were dying from high revving hearts. Again, a common causal factor was use of methamphetamine.

So here we have small but influential groups within the two major Maori gangs, the Blacks and the Mob, presenting a rationale for change, and building a constituency of members committed to a broad notion of whanau ora – families that are healthy, wealthy, and wise.

At this point the reader might say, as many others do, ‘what bullshit, this is just spin’. The prevailing majority view is that gangs (aka ‘Maori youth’ for most NZers) are synonymous with meth manufacture and distribution and rely on these activities to gather vast sums of wealth. Like most such social beliefs this view holds some truth – many of my brothers (and sisters) are players in the meth market. In the main, from my observation, this is to maintain the management of their personal addictions rather than accruing wealth. I may mix with a lower caste but I don’t see rich gangsters.

A closer look at the market reveals a different profile of those involved especially at the importation and first level of distribution. For instance if we reflect on those who our border guardians are identifying and our Courts are convicting as importers we find that they are almost exclusively Asian. No Treaty claimants there. This presents the first big gap in our current capacity to combat meth. You might recall back in mid 2008 when there were street marches in Auckland facilitated by an Asian “anti-crime” group. The march was essentially directed at Maori and other Polynesian youth and called on the Government for bigger hammers and more of them.

If there is a link between street crime such as burglaries and methamphetamine usage – and I think that this causality has been clearly established through Dr Chris Wilkins’ research for the NZ Police – then the way the NZ Asian community might best defend itself against this crime is by joining in on the broad movement to combat meth. Maori leaders like Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia and tribal elders are constantly challenged to step up in taking a stance against family violence and child abuse and such, but there is no such expectation made of Melissa Lee or Pansy Wong and the Asian community leadership when it comes to meth imports by their kith and kin.

Moreover, at a systems level we are weak with our consciousness-raising about meth amongst Asian immigrants and students. We have only recently started to provide advisory material on the topic at the points of departure from Asia and entry to NZ. We have yet to form Asian advisory groups to encourage their communities to exercise moral suasion on their own members and to tap into Confucian and other value sets that educe behaviours consistent with citizenship and that demonstrate loyalty to their new home, Aotearoa New Zealand. We have to recognize that the methamphetamine market is dynamic and that there are strong push and pull factors at play. Based on research Dr Chris Wilkins concluded some time back that the NZ meth market had leveled out and was in the ‘maturity’ stage of the product lifecycle. We had moved from an epidemic to an endemic state.

Marketing theory holds that we would then normally expect a slow decline in demand unless there was ‘product re-launch’, a drop in price, a new feature, or a change in the production and distribution chain. I suspect that this has happened. My best intelligence is that what was once a bottle neck at the cooking stage (where the raw material precursors are processed to produce crystal meth) has been ‘syndicated’ by way of cooking schools where the craft of conversion is shared and manufacturing options are multiplied. Supply is strong and I anticipate that fresh research will show a new upward trend in usage. Because the street price has remained stable regardless, I anticipate that there is a new economy in play where a bigger share of the wealth is being gathered at the point of manufacture and the next tier of distribution. So everyone on the supply chain is a winner except the poor mug end-user.

And who might that be? Chris Wilkins’ work suggests the mean age of the typical user is 27 years of age. From my observation meth does not seem to be widely used by younger teenagers but the profile starts to build amongst an older segment of youth on the bridge of adulthood – say 18 years of age or so through to the fifty year olds (and beyond). Users seem to be mainly male but a Iarge number of especially younger women use as well.

In terms of ethnicity there seems to be a disproportionately high representation of Maori, younger and poorer than their Pakeha fellow users. Mike Williams, the Chief Executive of the Stellar Trust describes the New Zealand meth-user profile as looking like a weightlifting dumbbell. He says that there is a big ball of younger, less well off Maori on one end and an equal size ball of relatively wealthy older Pakeha users on the other end with a connecting bar of users running across New Zealand society. The Stellar Trust commissioned UMR to undertake research about awareness levels about and attitudes towards meth use in New Zealand and intend to release their findings early next month. Both Police and Ministry of Health are also engaged in meth use related research projects with Massey University so as time goes on we will get more clarity and less hype about the situation.

Regardless, as long as New Zealanders want to use methamphetamine and are prepared to pay an encouraging enough price then there will be suppliers. This is the immutable truth of the law of supply and demand. In the first five months of this year our border control agencies interdicted methamphetamine precursor products equal to the amount seized in the entire previous year. As a trend that’s bad enough, but when one takes into account that ‘world best practice standards’ for Customs’ interdiction is only 20%, and then multiply the quantities seized by a factor of four, the quantum that gets through is a cause for great concern.

Also consider that meth use is beginning to emerge as a global issue. Unlike cocaine or heroin, production isn’t reliant on material from a particular geography – it can be made anywhere as long as there is access to the constituent chemicals. A few years back there was a clan lab bust in Fiji. The cooks had produced crystal meth equivalent to a billion dollars in value on the street. If you were running a troubled island economy and had no love for Australia or New Zealand then….ouch!

At the moment our border issues are around unprocessed ContacNT which is easily and legally sourced, usually in China, and brought here as the key precursor for conversion into crystal meth. But the market is so dynamic that could change overnight. So, kia tupato on that front. And we have already seen that raising the penalty tariff, as we have done by reclassification of meth to a Class A prohibited substance carrying penalties of up to life imprisonment, hasn’t scared away importers, cooks or distributors. Equally, we have beefed up our ability to detect, track and interdict inbound shipments of meth or its related precursors, but the very volume of imported goods is such that unless we were to look inside every stuffed toy (or whatever means) we’re constrained there too.

So if we can’t stem supply, somehow we have to drive down demand. We will achieve that when people care enough to ‘self-prohibit’, that is, they choose not to use the stuff. At this point the consequences of the law become another aspect of the rationale to quit or not to use in the first place. Other drivers to quit are issues around health, work, money, and relationships. I think it is this latter aspect – the profound negative impact on interpersonal relationships – provides the point of differentiation between meth and most other recreational substances, both licit and illicit.

I’m just a layman but from what I understand meth usage amongst other things damages the synapses that enable the natural transfer of our brain chemicals, and, in particular, the natural uptake of and access to dopamine. In fact there is a meth-related illness called ‘anhedonia’, the inability to experience natural pleasure. To my mind this is why we see people who at one point may have been candidates for mum or dad of the year turn into callous unfeeling childbeaters; see, up until their addiction reared its head, otherwise loving longterm partners turn into feuding fried arseholes; and, witness previously perfectly well adjusted young adults morph into lying, thieving, scumbag, parasites. Meth kills the love button. Meth use and whanau ora are mutually exclusive. There!

So, since John Key put his hand up last year and said “I’ll take charge of this” what’s been done? There was an immediate re-deployment of some 40 frontline staff at Customs. The increased seizures may indeed mean we are doing better than average in that regard. The control of precursors by banning sale of pseudoephedrine based medicines from across the counter sale at chemists has been more complex to implement than was originally envisaged and that initiative seems still locked in limbo. There has been a raft of legislation introduced with the aim of breaking up criminal gangs, preventing money laundering and seizing assets gained from crime: this has involved the reversing of the burden proof and the presumption of innocence in some instances. These create are profound implications for the Bill of Rights and jurisprudence in general and these laws have yet to be rigorously tested in the Court of Appeal, so this is still an area of work in progress.

In the main, the energy has primarily been directed at reducing supply. But, as I’ve indicated, demand reduction through ‘self prohibition’ is probably the only sustainable solution. This is best facilitated by treating the matter as being primarily one of health rather than one of crime and raising awareness about necessary steps towards treatment and recovery. In my experience it looks like most people – lets go for the good old 80/20 split – can get off meth by going cold turkey and relying on the support of family and friends. For those who need clinical treatment the various DHB’s generally have good services available and they are front ended by 0800 787797 Drug Helpline.

Increased Government funds are also being put into providing more residential services and whilst this is good, as always, demand will outstrip supply. MOH have contracted the NZ Drug Foundation to provide a meth help website (methhelp.org.nz) and they have provided an advisory booklet and dvd as support material. I’m really impressed by the content. This is good, non judgmental, practical advice and clever use of short recorded vignettes of users, families, and those in recovery telling their stories and setting the platform for personal change. Furthermore there are over thirty MOH funded CAYAD sites (Community Action Youth and Drugs) with at least two dedicated staff spread across the country. Each site has to have an action plan for building community resilience against methamphetamine.

The project I manage – ‘Mokai Whanau Ora’, which aims to enroll the leadership of the Mob and Blacks in a movement to self prohibit the manufacture, distribution and use of meth – is funded through CAYAD. There are NGO’s in the field, often connected to a faith-based organization, that provide support services and fellowship. There are also private sector operations, like Mike Sabin’s Methcon, that offer consultancy services to businesses facing meth use by staff, and presentations to schools. The ‘new entrant’ is the Stellar Trust, a high profile high influence group headed by Burton Shipley and operationally led by former Labour party president Mike Williams. Paul Holmes is the ‘face’ and champion, and it is stacked with luminaries like Judge Peter Boshier. The Stellar Trust aims for a methamphetamine free New Zealand. When we step back then we can see that there are a large number of players trying to combat methamphetamine. But are we playing as a team and do we have a winning strategy?

I‘ve already declared my bias toward providing education and treatment as a lead response. There’s plenty of international evidence gathered over the past 50 years that the ‘war on drugs’ strategy is a loser. But on the other hand you better have a stick in your hand in some situations. The meth market is dynamic. A supplier with plenty of product can soon stimulate demand by distributing freebies to those who are vacillating, and building a new customer base amongst the curious. Whilst awareness about the deleterious effects of methamphetamine is high in New Zealand, the drug’s seductive characteristics, and the fact that new users can still initially function, leads to a honeymoon period of denial and enables a fresh wave of uptake.

At first tier importation level there are big sums of money at stake, and all along the production distribution chain the wealth is protected, often with firearms. A feature of the Asian importation network is their supply of guns as an additional lure to impressionable second and third tier distributors. Glock pistols are something of a current fashion item amongst the bad boys, and in a recent Auckland bust a dealer was allegedly armed with a machine pistol carried around in a computer bag. We need to be conscious of the possibility of ‘crack’ wars and appreciate the critical role that pro-social street gang leaders play in mitigating this eventuality.

That is one reason I am so supportive of the Mongrel Mob Notorious’ efforts to get rehabilitation services for their members who are addicted. Obviously an important aspect of the meth market is at the interface with the Police. I readily concede that I don’t know what I don’t know, but I was surprised that the two recently busted Asian distribution rings operating out of Skytower were allowed to operate for a long period under surveillance whilst they facilitated distribution of substantial amounts of meth – 3kg (300,000 points and a lot of fucked up Kiwi lives!) in a two month period. They laundered around $20M cash through the in-house pokies whilst authorities sat by. I appreciate that the cops may have been waiting to get a fuller understanding of the market and so forth, and there’s always going to be tension between the needs of the spooks and the wants of the prosecution team, but hell! that $20M of destruction and misery will have created a negative multiplier in terms of family break up, ill health and crime five times that sum.

There’s a similar story I hear at community level where there is common knowledge of meth market activity but the cops seem unwilling or unable to act. This may be because the Police consider that they need firmer or better evidence for a prosecution, whereas the community might well be satisfied if the market was just disrupted and the sellers moved on. In fact a more intelligent application of the principles of social marketing (wherein the ‘costs’ of selling meth were raised and the benefits reduced, and the ‘costs’ of quitting the market were reduced and the benefits of quitting were raised) would help us get a better mix at the interface of the criminal justice (supply reduction) and health sector (demand reduction).

Now try as it might Government will never be able to deliver integrated ‘whole of governmentt’ services from the top. It is not in the nature of the public service beast. Silo behavior is standard operating procedure and brands, turf and budgets are jealously guarded grails. Although John Key has instructed his departmental chiefs to work collaboratively on implementing his meth plan there is no will amongst them for the sort of dialogue that is necessary to resolve the Gordian knot of and intertwined problematics of low Maori economic and social participation, low educational achievement, and high rates of incarceration and drug abuse that are part of the solution to the meth problem. If the Wellington leadership won’t hold the necessary dialogue then there’s not a hope in hell that regional public sector managers will either.

Key is right. An integrated approach is needed and if it won’t come from the top leadership then it must come from the grassroots leadership. And that is what I think is happening. When faced with the same issues and some information communities tend to come to similar conclusions. There is a desire for action. Stimulated in part by the intuitive political parlaying of the Stellar Trust’s Mike Williams a network of community coalitions is starting to emerge, regional clusters, often comprised of otherwise uneasy bedfellows. For instance here in Hawke’s Bay where we are building a campaign for a methamphetamine-free region we are supported both by the left leaning Pilot City Trust and the right leaning Sensible Sentencing Trust. Both major political parties (Labour through Stuart Nash and National though Chris Tremain) have offered use of their election campaign billboards and sites for an awareness campaign we aim to commence in October. The regional commander of the NZ Police has appointed a senior officer to work with us as a point of liaison. The HB DHB has contributed to our communications campaign and we are in dialogue with clinicians and service providers. We intend to present to Rotary Clubs throughout the region.

Similarly we are presenting to Ngati Kahungunu Iwi in early September. This collaboration across organizations and across disciplines presents a potential point of synthesis for what seem to be two implicit required strategies, one being ‘Report’ (supply reduction based on community policing) and the other ‘Help’ (demand reduction based on addiction recovery services and family support). These strategies need to be integrated, but kept discrete, because the doctor can’t arrive with handcuffs. To move this development into a national movement beyond regional ad hoc displays of enthusiasm requires an avante garde, and this is the role I believe the Stellar Trust might best play: they are independent of Government, they have their own income streams, and they present a body of power brokers unrivalled in the sector.

There are broader issues to be resolved around recreational drugs in New Zealand including alcohol and that is difficult when these matters are so highly politicized. The Government seems only mildly interested in the recommendations made by its think tank on alcohol laws. Last year the Minister responsible for these matters, Peter Dunne, told an international symposium held at Te Papa, which was considering amongst other things arguments for the de-criminalisation of cannabis, that this debate would never be held during his watch. In the meantime it seems that we have a broader pan-community agreement around one substance at least, methamphetamine, and that is, let’s give it a miss.

ENDS

by Rosalea Barker

“Round, round, get around, I get around” the Beach Boys hit from 1964, could well be the theme song for California. Last 4th of July, for example, the equivalent of almost the entire population of New Zealand was expected to be travelling California roads to get to their holiday destinations. Famous for its car culture, the Golden State has always seriously neglected investment in mass transportation systems, whether they be for long-distance or commuter travel.

When I moved to California in the waning weeks of last century, the only direct flights from New Zealand went to Los Angeles. Rather than take another flight up to San Francisco, I opted to stay overnight and catch Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train. It was a leisurely, scenic, and lovely 12-hour trip, that ended with a Thruway Coach ride across the Bay Bridge. The beautiful vision of the twinkling lights of The City exploding into view as the bus exited the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island is etched in my memory forever. (Because the Starlight continues on to Seattle it has to offload its SF passengers in the East Bay.)

But the world moves on—it’s now possible to fly direct to San Francisco from New Zealand. And by the end of this decade, there will be a new rail link between LA and SF. On August 11, ground was symbolically broken to begin construction of a new downtown San Francisco intermodal transport terminal that will accommodate not just local Bay Area transit operators, but also a high speed rail link between the two great metropolises of Southern and Northern California. A rail trip that takes 12 hours today will take 3-and-a-half once high-speed rail is operational in 2020. By comparison, driving that same distance takes five to eight hours, depending on traffic. The same trip is just over an hour by plane.

I’ve been interested in High Speed Rail (HSR)since I arrived here, and was part of the slim majority who voted to approve a November 2008 bond measure to begin paying for it. So I trotted along to the sod-turning, which marks the beginning of actual construction, and which was largely made possible by the California High Speed Rail Authority securing the first of what is hoped will be much more federal funding for the project.

East Bay Congressman George Miller, Senator Barbara Boxer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whose district is in San Francisco), and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood were among the speakers, along with the mayors of San Francisco and Anaheim, and a representative of Governor Schwarzenegger.

And what a love-fest it was, with everyone praising everyone else and absent friends, such as President Obama. Secretary LaHood, who is a Republican, genially ragged Mayor Gavin Newsom—who had told him that when Willie Brown is on stage with him, SF is the only city in America that has two mayors at one time—and suggested Californians should support Newsom for Lieutenant Governor “just for his humor. He knows how to make the Secretary happy.” (Former SF Mayor/former Democratic CA Assembly Speaker Willie Brown arrived on the stage late during the introduction for Anaheim Mayor/former Republican CA Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle—on purpose, suggested the woman standing next to me, because the two are arch-enemies.)

Sadly, for all the day’s talk of the SF terminal being “the Grand Central Station of the West” and the boost the system’s construction will give to California’s economy in the form of jobs, there are very real fears that it will turn out to be a “low-flying rail boondoggle”. On the libertarian website reason.com, Tim Cavanaugh writes: “Like wildfires and earthquakes, the California High-Speed Rail project is one of those chronic threats to life and property in the Golden State that seem to menace the common good even when they’re not happening. Which, in the case of the bullet train, is always.”

The problem lies not just with the partisan bickering and point-scoring the California legislature is famous for, which guarantees that appropriation of state funds for the project will be uncertain; nor just with the current state of the economy, which makes federal and private funding problematic as well. All that is scary enough if you visualize funding for the project as a three-legged stool that has to grow its own legs and so far has only a nub of one of them definitely in place—the $2 billion Recovery Act grant the Obama Administration awarded to California in January this year for “purchasing right-of-way, constructing track, signaling systems, and stations, and completing environmental reviews and engineering documents.”

But the biggest problem is likely to be the time- and money-consuming parochialism of the cities along the HSR corridor. Forty years ago, when the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuter rail system was being built, its construction was held up for years because some East Bay cities didn’t want the tracks to be above ground. More recently, the construction of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge was delayed and its cost ballooned when East Bay residents and their municipal representatives insisted that it be not just functional but beautiful and have a bike lane and pedestrian walkway. First mooted in 1989 following the collapse of a section of the roadway on the span during the Loma Prieta earthquake, the bridge is still not finished.

Almost as soon as the CA High Speed Rail Authority was created in the late 90s, a spat broke out about how the link from the system’s Central Valley backbone would gain access to San Francisco, with San Jose lobbying against a proposal for the link branching off at Stockton and coming through the Altamont Pass down the center of the interstate highway into the East Bay then across a new bridge to the San Francisco peninsula. Current plans call for the line to branch off further south, in Merced, and enter the South Bay (and San Jose) instead. As an example of the kinds of challenges the HSRA will face, see this April article about a letter the Palo Alto City Council wrote to them decrying the “incomplete analysis of the rail line’s impacts on Palo Alto businesses, historic landmarks and air quality” contained in the recently re-released Environmental Impact Report.

Small wonder then that the newly appointed CEO of the project says in this video on the HSRA website that he needs “partnership and support”. South African born and educated Roelof van Ark has a background as a senior executive of companies such as Siemens and Alstrom, which both make high-speed trains. In the HSRA press release announcing his appointment, van Ark says: “As someone who has devoted his career to this industry, there’s no doubt in my mind that California is the place to be, and I’m honored to be given the opportunity to work with all partners to move California’s high-speed train project forward.” I doubt if anything he has encountered in his previous management of projects in Europe and Asia has prepared him adequately for what he will have to contend with here.

Still, we can dream:

ENDS

I, Simon James Power, hearby swear before God and Man that I shall never shave until I have reformed every aspect of the New Zealand justice system. Yea, from moving towards inquisitorial evidence for particular crimes, even unto the colour of ink required for conveyancing forms.

I do not take this vow lightly. My vision has always been total reform. Facial hair will simply serve as a physical manifestation of my determination, and an encouragement to haste. Especially during that itchy stage.

I know the current system is the product of centuries of evolution towards fair and principled justice, but I really want to get the whole thing done before the election, because you never know. Lesser men might settle for incremental, well-thought out changes. Me, I don’t want to just be remembered as’ the cuddliest Minister of the fifth National Government’.

Therefore shall I abjure the razor until I have unmade the court system and rebuilt it in my image.

It’s like I said in my speech, more courts and judges are sticking plaster solutions for serious systemic problems. Besides, we need to make things cheaper so we can pay for all those extra prisons.

None shall thwart me! Least of all those lawyers and judges with their degress and their ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’, their histories of jurisprudence, their ‘natural justice’ and their ‘things are that way for a reason’. Drinking their snooty cocktails and not talking to me at parties. Stealing my lunch money. I’ll show them!

BWAH -HA! HA HA HA HA!!!!

So yeah.

Screw those guys. I’m gonna go with my gut on this one.

And they should be grateful: If I wanted to be be really efficient we could just convict everybody who got accused of a crime. Except of course we can’t because… There’s probably some reason. MEMO TO SELF: Check this out – might be really good idea. I mean, as a group everyone calls defendants ‘criminals’, so it’s not much of a change.

It’s all very well to talk about the need for fair trials, but the pendulum has swung too far. What about the public’s right to a good show? What about the victims right to have whatever random bastard ends up on trial convicted?

It’s obvious to everyone New Zealand’s justice system needs to be more victim-friendly. Possibly if we went looking for data to back this up, we might find the opposite – so it’s just as well it’s so obvious. Besides: political statistics? I’ll just divide whatever the number are by the GDP and subtract inflation or something.

But because I’m also all for coherent and consistent systems, I’m gonna make the media call them “alleged victims” until the defendant is found guilty.

Some of my reforms may seem radical, but they are the result of long thought and careful consultation. Except for the ones that just seem like a good idea at the time, or that I came up with by opening a legal dictionary at random.

But let’s be clear: I am open to ideas.

For example I’m not sure how to go about completely overturning the established traditions of Tort Law. Except there definitely should be a bit near the beginning explaining it’s not got anything to do with cakes.

But openness does not lessen my determination to fulfil my destiny. You might have noticed my oath’s deliberate echoing of Harald Fairhair, who the sagas say swore never to comb or cut his hair until he was the sole king of Norway. The ‘Fairhair’ refers to how he looked after wards.

Similarly I shall after my triumph be popularly known as ‘Simon Smoothface’, though the official histories will call me ‘Simon the Reformer’. Prior to that, I’m thinking ‘Simon Beardyman’.

The fact that I am a ZZ top fan has nothing to do with it.

Again I declare: Never shall I let blade touch my chin all this system of earthly justice is reformed!.

Simon James Power, by the Grace of God Her Majesty’s Minister of Justice, on this 27th day of August in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten.

ENDS

by Brannavan Gnanalingham

Spike Lee is a filmmaker whose public persona is frequently given more attention than his films, and his third and best film Do the Right Thing was no different on its release in 1989. The film created a storm of criticism for its ending, and for a perceived inflammatory depiction of urban life. However, the film was also critically lauded, and helped make Lee into one of the most talked about young directors working in Hollywood.

Yet, despite Lee’s status as a critically well regarded filmmaker, he’s also been linked to one label in spite of whatever his films may be about – Lee is “black”. Lee’s status as a filmmaker has so consistently been tied into a perceived ethnicity that his films have always been read through racial frameworks. Whereas other “white” filmmakers never have their ethnicity tied into how they’re described e.g. they’re simply filmmakers, Lee has never managed to escape being seen as a spokesperson because he is seen to be a black filmmaker’ rather than simply a filmmaker – despite the deeply problematic results from such a reductive label.

Do the Right Thing came after Spike Lee’s commercially successful She’s Gotta Have It (a film that grossed $7 million at the US box office on a budget of $175,000) and the profitable but less critically well received School Daze. Do the Right Thing was originally going to be made by Paramount, but the studio baulked after Lee refused to change the ending. It ended up being made by Universal. The film premiered at Cannes, and although considered a frontrunner for the Palme D’Or, the award ended up going to Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape. Lee’s reaction – accusing the Cannes Jury of racism – did little to quell the talk around the movie.

The reaction to the film was divided, and media like the Village Voice ran eight reviews of the film. The reviews almost immediately defined Lee as “black” (for example, Newsweek saying Spike Lee is the “most important black filmmaker…[who] muscled his way into the mainstream with films uncompromisingly about black lives, black problems”) – ignoring everything else about Lee (e.g. his educational background, his gender, his social position, his filmic influences etc.). This occurred even in most positive reviews of the film – the film couldn’t escape being read in a racialised way. Lee’s status of a filmmaker was immediately tied into racial politics, and this helped frame the way the film was viewed and read by the critics. It also meant that any controversy was due to ‘Lee’s viewpoint’ and his obvious “blackness”, rather than the fact it came from a Hollywood studio, or from a New York filmmaker.

One of the key talking points about the film was the ending – in which a pizzeria is demolished by an angry mob, following the killing of a “black” man by “white” police. A number of film reviews read the film as having a different effect on “black” audiences and “white” audiences. Micah Morrison review in the National Review said the “black” audience in her screening were yelling at the screen to “go get ‘em” at the end. Joe Klein in New York magazine wrote that Do the Right Thing would incite riots by “blacks”.

One Village Voice review said Spike Lee “will be responsible in part for any race riots which flare up in America”. The Economist’s review agreed with the viewpoint of that Village Voice review and directly quoted it by saying “these charges are not ridiculous”. The New Yorker denounced the film as an incitement to riot against “white” property. The reviewers had assumed that “black” audiences would riot upon watching the film – no such fears were held for any “white” audiences who may end up watching the film, or for “white” audiences with other hit movies of the time such as Die Hard or Rambo III. Further, the reviewers didn’t consider the impact that watching “white” policemen strangling “black” men would have on “white” audiences. The reviewers essentially worried more for “white” property than ‘black” lives.

Further, the reviews homogenised “blackness” as a unified concept, and assumed that “black” people would react in the same way. In the process, they ignored the diversity that suggests racial categorisation is an outmoded cultural concept. In fact, the film itself hardly presents race as a unified concept – the “black” characters in the film are made up of all different classes, tastes, ages, ethnic backgrounds and social situations.
Similarly, the film’s soundtrack is composed of different types of music and therefore, different kinds of voices : soul, jazz, hip-hop, and silence.

The film is also explicitly critical of viewing people in simplistic ways, and Lee criticises his characters for adopting such simplistic viewpoints of the world. For example, Lee presents the Korean shopkeepers as being maligned by some in his community, yet Lee shows what a little hard work and perseverance can do (though some critics called Lee racist for his depiction of Koreans). Lee’s character Mookie’s own casual racism is criticised by the goings-on (and by Mookie’s sister). Lee also problematises “whiteness” – Sal is explicitly Italian rather than simply being “white”, suggesting the “black vs white” way in which the film was read was a little too simplistic.

As Lee was read as a “black filmmaker”, he was also given the task by many reviewers to explore other therefore apparently “black” issues. Newsweek said the film couldn’t be a depiction of reality in the ghetto because “there’s not a single reference to drugs”. Time wrote that “there was no crack dealers, hookers or muggers”. Other reviewers criticised Lee for not engaging with issues such as AIDS or mugging, or for the streets being too clean, despite their irrelevance to the story itself. The reviewers were using stereotypes of “blackness” to criticise the film, and rather than engaging with the film as a stand alone text, brought in their own stereotypes of the “blackness” to read the film.

However, this was after all, the period of Willie Horton (the infamous mugshot of a “black” criminal used by George Bush Snr to accuse his presidential rival Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime), the Cooke scandal (in which the Washington Post invented a story about a “black” eight-year old drug addict and won a Pulitzer Prize) moral panics over gangsta rap and NWA, and just before the racial turmoil surrounding Rodney King and OJ Simpson. As Lee caustically noted at the time, why was no-one asking where the drugs were in Wall Street or Working Girl?

Of course, the film does explore concepts of race throughout, which would explain why the reviewers would use such frameworks. For example, Lee makes sly digs at “white” basketballer Larry Bird, makes references to murdered “black” youths at the hands of “white” people, and uses quotes by civil rights leaders. The film is about racial politics – e.g. the explosion at the end comes from a debate about “black” people on the walls of a pizzeria. Spike Lee has also talked about race throughout his career – though in a much less simplistic way than he has mostly been read. Yet, despite all of this, he has had little control over how the debate to Do the Right Thing was framed by audience members, and the way the critics read the film was almost in complete defiance of Lee’s own viewpoints.

This suggests that if a person is defined as a minority, or at least sets the debate about the way the minority-ness is defined, then audience members will read that minority via their own individual conception of how it should be defined. An example of this in contemporary times was Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, in which he explicitly refused to call himself “black” – yet a considerable amount of the rhetoric around him by the media debated concepts like race, and racial stereotypes.

Other figures such as Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan have had similar things happen to them whereby they were reduced to being a racial minority. Interestingly, Michael Jordan’s teaming up with Spike Lee for a Nike commercial to promote Jordan’s then new Air Jordan shoes, led to the two being criticised for inciting “black” ghetto kids to steal shoes. The reaction to Do the Right Thing also highlights a problem that filmmakers and artists who are defined as “minorities” commonly face (e.g. in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class etc. They end up being reduced down to their “minority-ness” even if their films aren’t about their minority-ness, or indeed criticise the construction of that minority-ness.

Contemporary reactions to films such as Brokeback Mountain or The Hurt Locker suggest that such a simplistic approach still takes place. Which suggests that for as long as minority-ness continues to be seen as the sole determinant in defining something, it will remain an important, if problematic, way of defining a film.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

Catherine Storr killed herself in January 2001, at the age of 87. She had been depressed for some time – but ‘not clinically’ she had told friends – due to her failure to get any of her recent works published. She had kept on writing right until the end, regardless. In her teens and 20s, Storr had endured any number of rejections from publishers – but this time, she believed her style had gone irrevocably out of fashion. In an obituary in the Independent, Ann Thwaite quoted from a witty letter that Storr had written to her shortly before her death :

I see that my time must henceforth be spent in making waistcoats for [ daughter] Emma’s children’s soft animals. I have already made a smocked dress for a Miss Pig, and a silk waistcoat for a rabbit. Now I am about to make two beautiful black waistcoats for a dog and a panther. But it doesn’t seem to me a very promising profession. I’d rather be writing, if I thought what I write was ever going to be read by anyone else.

These days, Storr is best remembered for two books in particular. In Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, her kind and resourceful heroine regularly outwits the foolish and pathetic wolf who is out to catch and eat her. The remarkable novel for young teenagers called Marianne Dreams is another kettle of fish entirely.

In this book, Marianne falls sick on her birthday and is kept in bed and tutored at home for months, after catching what sounds like glandular fever. She finds relief from boredom with a pencil that she finds in her great-grandmother’s old polished mahogany workbox – and with it, she draws pictures that recur in her dreams. While asleep, she makes regular contact with a local boy called Mark who is suffering from polio, and who is being tutored by the same governess.

The pencil drawings that Marianne makes prove to be indelible. Nothing drawn can be retracted, or erased. The drawings define the physical and emotional landscape in which she and Mark are fated to meet, argue, and – eventually – co-operate, in order to survive the forces that Marianne has angrily unleashed in their dream world. In 1988, Marianne Dreams was made into a film called Paperhouse by the maverick British director, Bernard Rose.

Wrong choice, perhaps. At the time, Rose had just made a controversial (and much banned) music video for the band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and a couple of years later he made the very successful horror film Candyman. In his hands, the story became a peculiar onset-of-puberty melodrama complete with phallic lighthouse, fiery vaginal openings in the front yard and violent encounters with Marianne’s estranged father, who played no part in the book.In the film, he stalks her dreams. Paperhouse is visually flashy and has some striking sound effects, but it can’t be recommended for children, or to anyone who likes the book. Reportedly, Storr hated the ending in particular.

Down the years, the central role that dreams play in the narrative has helped to earn Marianne Dreams a fairly sizeable cult following in its own right. This happened long before the Nightmare on Elm Street series – or Inception for that matter – made the dodgy relationship between dreams and real life a familiar theme of mainstream entertainment. Certainly, something keeps drawing people back to this book. In 1972, it was turned into a workmanlike television series called Escape Into Night, and in 2004, the British composer Andrew Lowe Watson made Marianne Dreams into an opera, using a libretto that Storr had written in 1999.

I think the book endures for two main reasons. Storr is uncannily good at getting back inside a pre-teen girl’s emotional life. Marianne rings true – her naivety, enthusiasm, boredom, irritability, anger and resourcefulness are all there, pretty much note perfect. Secondly, while her dreams may be implausibly linear – they are as relentlessly goal-directed as the dream sequences in Inception – they also have a flat, two dimensional quality to them (especially in the sequences involving the Stone Watchers) that is also very convincing.

So who was Catherine Storr? She was born Catherine Cole in 1913, the daughter of a London barrister, and she wrote her first story – an impulsive ode to the moon – at the age of ten, and deemed it to be rather good. Good enough anyway, to spark a lifelong determination to make her mark as a writer. Success proved hard to come by. After a series of rejections from publishers, Storr threw herself at 27 into training as a doctor, and eventually became a psychiatrist – partly motivated by the touching hope that medicine would put her in contact with the realities of life, and infuse her writing with the depth that book publishers might be looking for. Ironically, Storr had just signed up for medical school when her first children’s book got accepted for publication. Reportedly, it was not reviewed, and vanished virtually without trace.

Like many of the heroines in Storr’s books, Marianne is something of a stand-in for the author. Storr was already in her mid 40s when she wrote this book, and yet – as mentioned – she is remarkably good at capturing the tone and temper of being a child. It seemed to come naturally to her.“ I started writing when I was 10 years old,” she once told the Something About The Author series, “ and it became an addiction. I think in story form…I don’t write with a child readership in mind. I write for the childish side of myself, and I find it often acts as psychotherapy.”

In similar fashion, Marianne pours out her feelings into her drawings, with good and bad consequences for everyone involved. A raging argument with Mark causes her to take it out on him in the dream drawings – and this almost kills him in real life. In passing, Marianne Dreams provides an accurate portrait of the anger and cruelty in children, and their capacity for remorse. Since the drawings cannot be erased, Marianne’s repentance requires her to add elements that may help to cure Mark, both physically and psychologically.

Eventually, the pair not only reconcile but try to escape together on bicycles from the dream house – which has become surrounded by malevolent Stone Watchers, whose fragmented threats to harm the children get picked up on the radio inside the dream house. The children manage to break through the hostile cordon set up by the Watchers, and they head towards a beacon of light that Marianne has added to the pictures. In fact, this book could easily have been called To The Lighthouse, if Virginia Woolf hadn’t got there first.

A few years later, Storr wrote an under-rated sequel called Marianne and Mark. This is a quite different sort of story set five years later – a teen romance, credibly handled, as the two 15 year olds try and cope with the stormy feelings of adolescence. Again, the story is true to a 15 year old’s infinite capacity for mistakes, and much of the story hinges on Marianne’s tendency to make wrong judgements about people, based on the flimsy evidence available to her at that age.

As it happens, Storr’s personal life was no more tranquil than Marianne’s. She married the psychiatrist Anthony Storr and had three children with him before they divorced in 1970. She then married the economist Lord Thomas Balogh, the chief economic adviser to Harold Wilson and the British Labour Party during the 1960s and 1970s. Balogh was an eccentric, polarizing figure and the relationship was said to be a ‘very interesting and very demanding one’ until his death in 1985. With both her husbands, Storr once wrote, their wit had been the basis of their initial attraction for her.

At times, it is all too clear that Marianne Dreams was written in 1958. The ‘ real life’ settings – the pony club, the governess, the patient upper middle class mother – seem to have wandered in from an earlier, almost pre-war era. What makes it feel modern is the dream engine that drives the plot. As mentioned, these dreams are very linear – there is nothing of the bent, multi-level logic that makes say, the “Restless” dream episode in Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the finale of season four) into such an effortless tour de force.

At the end though, Marianne finds a place of contentment. She reaches one of those points in childhood when the whole wide world seems to be benevolent, and waiting for what you will become :

Everything seemed to be resting; content;waiting.
Mark would come; he would take her to the sea. Marianne lay down on the short, sweet-smelling turf. She would wait too.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

It being past the three quarters mark for 2010, here’s a stock-take of five of the best albums released this year. This stuff lasts, though. Its not as if the Tune-Yards album Bird Brains isn’t still worth checking out from last year, either.

Sleigh Bells – Treats

Sick of Auto-tuned bogus perfection? Well, climb aboard. This one came out a few months ago amid blizzards of hype, most of it entirely justified. Everything (except the vocals) is projected here in messy, exhilarating overload. As someone said, this album sounds like Rick Rubin fell asleep over the console board and pushed all the faders up to eleven. As a result, Sleigh Bells are not low fi as we’ve known it from grunge or post-grunge outfits like Times New Viking a few years ago. This is loud fi, to the point where every sound is breaking up under the strain, except for the female vocal that wafts on through the storm.

Sleigh Bells are a Brooklyn NY duo, comprised of Derek Millar on guitar and bass, and vocalist Alexis Kraus. Together, they manage to straddle several genres at once – poppy bright melodies, huge punk/metal riffs that sound like Varese’s fire sirens and spacious rhythms that owe more to hip hop than to the usual indie antecedents. The songs are like wraiths of airy white noise, heavily compressed but also supple and springy…This is big, bright ear candy for all the family.

The band’s signature tune ‘Crown On The Ground’ in particular, has been pushed so far into the red zone of distortion that mainstream radio (if they ever played it) would probably insist on a disclaimer. “Rill Rill” is slower but inexorably catchy, and samples Funkadelic’s “Can You Get To That” to good effect. ‘Crown On The Ground’ has quickly become part of the cultural furniture, and I’ve chosen to feature it (far below) along with the album opener “ Tell ‘Em” and aa track called “Kids” – but really, there’s barely a dud track on the entire album.

2. Joanna Newsom : Have One On Me

A lot of people still see Joanna Newsom as some kind of fey folk princess singing about rainbows and unicorns. Don’t see why – given that on this album, she likens going through a relationship meltdown to a pair of jackrabbits with their necks broken. That’s a pretty tough image, and not a new stance either. On the flipside of her first single in 2004, in a song called “What We Have Known” she wrote an extremely angry song about the cultural amnesia that makes American wars in Iraq – and soon possibly, Iran – possible.

Newsom’s albums have kept getting better. Her voice, in the wake of an operation last year for throat nodules, is also firmer and stronger. Stylistically, there was a huge leap from the folk lyricism of The Milk-Eyed Mender to the ornate orchestration of the Ys album and another major progression is evident on this sprawling triple album (three hours of new music !) that was released in February. Months onwards, even fans are still coming to grips with the array of lengthy songs, given that only the catchy seven minute ‘Good Intentions Paving Company” offered any easy returns.

For now, “ Esme” and the aforementioned “Jackrabbits” seem like the standouts. ( Other people I know make a case for “ In California ” and “Kingfisher ”) On the surface, “Esme’ is a generous observation of a lovely young girl, expressed in the verse melody with a lightness and delicacy that matches its subject. By the time Newsom gets to the main melody though, it sounds so strong that Newsom can make a sentiment like ‘May kindness prevail’ seem like an achievable goal. It’s a great song, about benevolence and hope.

As for ‘Jackrabbits’ the biographically inclined will probably see this as a product of her break-up with Bill Callahan. As they say, Callahan may well be a bit of a creep but – as others have also noted – his romance with JN did kindle a ‘redeemed creep’ storyline that had a certain attraction. Somehow, I can’t imagine her current relationship with Andy Samberg – he was the gay brother in the Paul Rudd film I Love You, Man – will inspire much in the way of good music. It looks like a mismatch.

3. Li’l Wayne / My Sick Uncle – 500 Days of Weezy

My Sick Uncle’s mash up of Li’l Wayne with the soundtrack from 500 Days of Summer was an act of genius, because the fusion really works – mainly because the juxtaposition of Wayne with Regina Spektor, the Smiths and Simon and Garfunkel takes the sugar out of the originals, while giving Wayne the tight pop framework that he lacked on that misbegotten ‘rock’ album he did last year. The entire album can be downloaded for free from here, but here’s a couple of sample tracks, one being a musical setting of the Mumm Ra single ‘She’s Got You High’ – used here as the setting for Wayne’s interview with CBS news anchor Katie Couric.

4. Various Artists : Fire In My Bones

Another triple album, this time a wildly diverse collection of post-war gospel music, brought together by US music journalist Mike McGonigal. The styles that McGonigal has thrown together here range from a few throwbacks to country blues styles (eg. ‘I Know I’ve Got Religion’ by two convicts called Andy Mosely and Hogman Maxey) to shimmering, unearthly church gatherings (eg ‘Prayer/I Love the Lord”) to incipient rock’n’roll (eg, Flora Molton’s “I Heard It Through the True Vine”) to a group of senior citizens at the Madison County old folks’ home singing a spellbinding number called “Wasn’t That A Mystery.” Track by track, there’s no telling what’s coming next.

It is an endlessly fascinating collection, mainly because McGonigal has ranged so far beyond the great professional gospel groups of the 1950s and 1960s, like the Swan Silvertones or Mighty Clouds of Joy. This is far rougher stuff, but it also sounds more modern than the two terrific collections of country gospel music from the 1920s ( Half Ain’t Never Been Told Vols I and II) issued on Yazoo a few years ago. Ultimately, the fact that there is no linking thread whatsoever between this wild collection of styles gives the album a perverse strength. Truly, people worship their God in the most personal of ways.

I’ve selected one of the more conventional Fire album tracks, an uptempo song the Reverend Steward and Family called ‘I Made A Vow To The Lord’. Unfortunately the best track a sermon/song called “Power Is In The Heart Of Man” by Brother and Sister W. H. Grate, from North Carolina is not available online. So for extras here’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s terrific version of “Precious Memories”, which among other things was the theme song for the 1990 Charles Burnett movie To Sleep With Anger.

5. Fang Island : Fang Island

Positivity is a hard thing to pull off in music, much harder than heartbreak, pessimism and anger, which come fairly easy to all of us. (The fate of Andrew W.K. is a warning of how quickly good time party music can run out of gas.) Fang Island are a five piece band from Rhode Island that have managed to combine high energy and supreme good times without bringing say, a Christian vibe along to spoil the party. (If there is a god-like influence evident here, it comes from Animal Collective. In the vocals in particular.) An early Youtube clip of Fang Island playing a gig for what looks like a classroom of kindergarten kids, is particularly endearing.

To my mind, ‘Careful Crossers’ is the best cut from their debut album but ‘Daisy’ has been the closest thing to a hit that they’ve managed – and the video of the song incidentally features the best use of presidential face masks this side of the movie Point Break.

As an extra, here are Sleigh Bells again doing ‘Crown on the Ground.’ Plus a real oldie from 2007 – the Mountain Goats doing a live version of John Darnielle’s finest song “Going to Georgia.” Only this time, they perform it as a joyous crowd singalong. Really touching. Hope you enjoy the rest of 2010.

ENDS

How a girl with just a norm-plus intelligence quota, energo-efficiency and mating potential came to rule the universe
Review by Gordon Campbell

For me the re-emergence of this series has been a comics highlight of the past year. Futura was a Planet Comics saga that ran from 1946-1956. It told of how ordinary working girl Marcia Reynolds got snatched by aliens and then gradually – by force of circumstance and the untapped depths of her own feisty personality – became a sort of underdog warrior queen of the entire universe. I first became aware of Futura about 12 months ago on the terrific Lady.That’s My Skull website – which has now compiled all the links for Futura onto one invaluable page, which you can access here .

As the brain overlord who runs the LTMS site says, the Futura comic starts out in fairly conventional terms :

Marcia Reynolds, as Futura, was gorgeous, scantily clad, threatened by amorous bug-eyed monsters and tied up a lot. In fact, the story could easily be interpreted as both a dream by the character and a power-fantasy for the reader, the caveat being that the typical audience for the book was male and Futura usually extricated herself from difficult situations and often lead the charge into battle herself.

Boy, did she ever. Down the years, buccaneering space pirates and inbred, hyperbrained aliens alike never did come to realize that all Futura needed – from chapter one onwards – was the slightest glimmer of a chance of escape and blammo, she’d have the bad guys or girls on the deck, in an instant. (Much like the way Linda Hamilton escaped from custody in Terminator 2 armed with only a paper clip and an iron will.) The fearlessly impulsive side of Futura gradually – as the story evolved – helped transform her into an absolutely kick-ass feminine action hero. Once you’re into the story, it is compulsive stuff. Good writing and great art work too – not always, but consistently enough, especially during the last half as the story really kicks into stride.

So….all praise to Lady, That’s My Skull for bringing this gem back into daylight. Right now, the site is just starting to give the same treatment to another great Planet Comics series from the Golden Age : Mysta of the Moon. You can read the 1945 origin sequence that kicks off Mysta’s story right here :

But for now, its back to Futura. Here’s a few panels from chapter one to get you started, and then just follow the links on the LTMS meta-page cited above for the subsequent ten years of the story :

ENDS

By Eric P. Nash (Abrams ComicArts, NY 2009)
Reviewed by Tim Bollinger

Before television, there was kamishibai. A forerunner to modern Japanese manga and anime, kamishibai were comic strip-like picture stories that street peddlers displayed through the window of a box-like booth resembling a TV, to entertain large groups of children, while the storyteller narrated and sold home-made sweets.

Eric Nash’s book documents the history of this ‘forgotten’ art form, which in its heyday of the 1930s and 1950s, saw hundreds of stories being produced for kamishibai publishing companies who supplied urban Japanese street vendors with new adventures daily.

The development of kamishibai is traced from early picture scrolls sometimes cited as the first ‘manga’, through the war years as a portable propaganda and education tool, to its discussion of social issues like the bombing of Horishima in the post-occupation era.

Much of the ‘high-action’ imagery of modern manga is apparently derived from the kamishibai form, as is the stillness used to characterise ‘movement’ in some Japanese TV animation. The stylistic influence of this low-tech form of populist cartoon story-telling is evident in both fields. Like manga, kamishibai encompassed many genres including ‘gekiga’-style adventure to girls’ stories or ‘shoujo’ manga.

The book records some of the kamishibai artists of the ‘classic’ era, who included ninja manga master Sanpei Shirato (founder of ‘Garo’ magazine in the 1960s, see: http://vintageninja.net/?p=550). It reproduces extensive excerpts from some of the best picture stories of this early era of early Japanese ‘pulp’ (see selection below).

To read more about kamishibai and Eric Nash’s excellent book, see: http://www.kamishibai.com/store/manga.html

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

The rough and ready perception about left and right political parties – that National know how to run an economy but Labour know how to run a society – is reflected in the way that the support for centre right governments is generally far softer among women voters. (See evidence below) On the whole, women voters are significantly less gung ho about economic extremism than males, more aware of the impact of such policies on family budgets, and more concerned with cutbacks to social services. Over the past 15 years in New Zealand and in the UK, and for longer in the US – women have tended to be more sympathetic to liberal and centre left governments.

That is why whenever Prime Minister John Key announces or defends a policy on the economy – or industrial relations – the rhetoric is usually couched in ‘feminine’ terms. The tax cuts in the May Budget for instance – which went disproportionately to the wealthy, and made society more unequal – were mainly defended by Key in the language of even-handedness (no one would be worse off) instead of on economic grounds. In the Key version of compassionate conservatism, it is usually the male voters who get the conservatism, and the female voters who are delivered the message of compassion.

The fabled centrism of the Key government seems to be largely based on such understandings. As Key and Stephen Joyce are well aware, the more that any centre-right government is seen to be pandering to its circle of business cronies, the more it will drive away a far bigger swathe of women voters. Obviously, the challenge for the Opposition has been to portray the Key government as willing to put dogma ahead of compassion – but it is only at this point, mid-way through its first term, that National is finally helping to make that argument stick.

The backdown over mining in national parks for example, was a concession to public opinion, and to the softline. Yet it was made in the same week that National also got tough on industrial relations – an ideological bone for business – by announcing its intention to take the existing 90 day probation period that currently applies to the work force in small firms, and apply it to everyone starting a new job. Tellingly, the rationale for this was framed by Key in the womanly language of compassion and inclusion – job opportunities for immigrants, a chance for Key’s pizza delivery man to get ahead. Job creation (for our young people !) was also touted as being a prime motive for the initiative – even though the survey report cited by Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson had actually found no evidence to believe this would be the case:

“Removing the risk of a personal grievance case resulting from a hiring mistake encourages employers to grow their business and take on more staff,” Ms Wilkinson said. But the Department of Labour report released last week said there was no evidence a probationary period did this. The ability to use trial periods appeared to have encouraged 40 per cent of employers who had hired someone to do so, however without any counterfactual evidence it cannot be stated categorically that trial periods had created extra job opportunities,” the report said.

Clearly, some of the new industrial relations policy does put the softline at risk. Requiring workers to get a doctor’s certificate to explain a one day absence because a child was sick or because you had a migraine – days later, how could any doctor establish that ? – is an ideologically blokey sort of attitude. When such attitudes were seen to be in alliance with other ‘small government’ policies from a National government (tax cuts for the wealthy, cutbacks in services) they served to opened up a massive gender voting gap for Helen Clark at the end of the 1990s. Even as late as the 2005 election, women were still deciding the election outcome for Labour.

The TNS poll just before the election, which most accurately reflected the actual result, paints a revealing picture. Labour in this poll is supported by 47 percent of women, National by 34. With men, the figures are almost exactly reversed: National 43.5, Labour 34.

Between 2005 and 2008, that support eroded. The anti-smacking legislation and the replacement of Don Brash by the more personable, less threatening John Key helped to loosen the Labour/Green grip on the women’s vote. Mild and friendly appearances can however, be deceiving. Since it has assumed office, National has scrapped any moves towards gender pay equity, and disbanded the unit responsible for promoting it. In Parliament earlier this year, Womens Affairs Minister Pansy Wong managed to make a complete hash out of defending the government’s pay equity efforts, which appear to have consisted of research carried out in a deliberate policy vacuum. In January, support for a meaningful rise to the minimum wage was mainly coming from women voters.

Meanwhile, actual policy continues to contradict the image of moderation. The relationship between being able to work and having affordable childcare for instance, seems to have gone out the window with the Key government. The May Budget slashed $400 million over four years from childcare subsidies, and while doing so, it penalised in particular those centres and workers who had invested in training and qualifications for the job. The only winners in this situation would be the private sector that runs childcare centres willing to ‘warehouse’ the care of children. Associate Education Minister Heather Roy has also made it clear there will be no extra government funds for the education of children with special needs, despite an Education Review Office survey that shows up to 50 % of schools are failing at meeting the needs of such children within mainstream schooling, with inadequate funding being a prime reason.

On family budgeting issues, the government has signaled that eligibility for Family Support – which was one of the quiet sops to the middle class, given how much of the tax cut benefits are being captured by the rich – is to be narrowed in future. At the same time, the effects of the increase in GST that made those tax cuts possible, will fall most heavily on poor and middle class families.

In a related move, Revenue Minister Peter Dunne, tax experts such as John Shewan and Key himself have all opposed the proposal to exempt food items from GST lest this should compromise the purity of our ‘no exemptions’ GST system. For social reasons well recognized elsewhere in the developed world, foreigners treat the ability to feed their families as something well worth a few human imperfections in the tax model. So far, the claim that there are better ways of achieving the same result (ie, of more affordable prices for healthy food) begs the question somewhat, given that no other means are actually being tried.

In sum, this is quite a hardline array of highly negative policies for families and for the vulnerable – especially given that the alleged need to tighten our belts is being issued in tandem with tax policy whose lasting effect will be to compromise the ability of any government to meet those social needs in future.

Moreover, once the tax cuts have kicked in and the prisons are built at the cost of adequate social services, it will be women who will be staffing the voluntary agencies that will be expected to pick up the slack. Unfortunately for Labour, it has a leader in Phil Goff who is the sort of guy that most women would probably dread being trapped with in the kitchen at parties. The more that Goff tries to sound credible to the blokes running the economy, the less human he seems to everyone else.

As mentioned earlier, a lot of evidence has accumulated over the past 20-30 years to illustrate the gender gap split – with women tending to support the left, and men the right. In the US, the Ronald Reagan ‘landslide’ victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 was very much an avalanche among men – Reagan won the women’s vote 46/45 but took the male vote by a whopping 54/37.

There are caveats to this, of course. Like males, women tend to vote more conservatively as they grow older – and since they are more inclined to vote and also live longer than men, that can become significant. An interesting sub-theme in the US voting patterns is that while women as a whole have tended to vote Democrat in the past 20 years, married white women have voted Republican – with the main exception being Bill Clinton, who won the women’s vote right across the board in 1994. In the 2004 US presidential election, there was a striking contrast between young women voters (who went to the Democratic party by a wide margin) and married women, who supported George W. Bush. The explanation seems to hinges upon income :

Most unmarried women — 54% — have annual household incomes below $30,000, according to the Census; that’s twice the percentage of married women with incomes that low. Most married women — 51% — have household incomes of $50,000 and above; that’s double the number of single women with income that high.

That makes single women more anxious than their married friends about bread-and-butter issues, less confident of having health coverage and more likely to take an expansive view of what the government can and should do to maintain safety-net programs.
Having children seems to intensify views on both sides. Married women with children are even more Republican that those who don’t have children; single women who have children are even more Democratic than those who don’t.

In the United Kingdom, it was the advent of Tony Blair in the mid 1990s that marked the point at which women voters made the transition from being a reliably conservative voting bloc ( who used to leave boring old politics to the men) to being a reliable left liberal grouping. Some research findings from 2007 that illustrate this trend are reported here:

Women evaluate successful policies through the interests and experiences of the people they know or care for. Older women are more likely to vote Conservative than older men. Young women are more left leaning than young men. Men are more likely than women to prioritise the economy and the impact policies have on Britain as a whole. But women are more concerned about how policies will affect their families. Middle and high income mothers are more likely to support the Labour party than men from the same background.

Dr Rosie Campbell of Birkbeck College in London summarised her research in these terms : “We know that since 1997 the political views of younger women have been moving left-ward of younger men, but we know very little about what is causing the shift. This research finds the real gender gap is between middle and high income men, and women. “ More comprehensive voting data spanning the entire era data 1945-2005 can be found here and it contains much the same findings : a long post war period of conservative voting among women, and then a shift in the mid 1990s to much more liberal voting preferences, driven by younger, single women.

Lastly, while everyone recognizes that the views of parents can influence the voting preferences of their children ( for a while at least) the more fascinating question is the degree to which children and their gender, can affect the voting behaviour of their parents. This September 2008 study by the US/UK academics Andrew J. Oswald and Nattayudh Powthavee reached some quite startling conclusions in that respect. Basically, the pair built upon previous US research that showed how having daughters significantly affected the voting patterns of politicians in Congress –and not merely in voting to support such things as affirmative action for women, but on a whole range of social legislation. Astonishingly, the research went much further and found that the gender of children affects how their parents vote :

Consistent with the idea of causality flowing from the gender of children on to later parental attitudes, we find that, when compared to the year before the birth, men and women alter their political opinions. Daughters tilt their parents to the left; sons tilt them to the right…. The paper finds evidence that having daughters makes people more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Acquiring sons, by contrast, makes individuals more right-wing. Ceteris paribus, in our panel data, every extra daughter (or son) leads a person to be approximately 2 percentage points more likely to vote Left (or Right). Our data come principally from Great Britain, but we show that the basic result can be replicated on German micro data.

A long-standing idea in western society is that parents influence the behavior and psychology of their children. Following previous research, the analysis suggests the reverse idea, namely, that children shape their parents. The model describes a world in which, because of wage discrimination [ie gender pay inequities] and different female preferences over public goods [such as the chronic underfunding of health and education] parents rationally tilt to the left if they have daughters, and to the right if they have sons.

The best recent work on gender, work and family issues directly relevant to the New Zealand situation has been done by the Human Rights Commission. With the release of a major report entitled What Next? National Conversation About Work last month, the HRC has provided a useful roadmap for any government that was truly serious about promoting fair work conditions and comprehensive job creation – especially for the young, and among women. In compiling its report, the HRC carried out extensive consultation and spoke to over 3,000 employers and employees across the entire country. This stands in telling contrast to how Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson’s minions spoke to exactly 13 employees for their survey effort meant to justify extension of the 90 day probation period.

The HRC report contains useful data on the need for quality child care and early education, and the difficulty in finding and paying for this in rural and provincial New Zealand in particular:

In the workplace, the researchers found that the demands that are inevitably involved in raising children are still being allowed to pose a major barrier to career advancement. This situation is made worse by a culture of low wages, a related need for multiple jobs to make ends meet and extremely long working hours.

Such forces go hand in hand with the reluctance of firms and government departments alike to pay women equally either for doing the same work as men, or for doing work of equal value to the firm, and to the economy. The Equal Pay Act was passed way back in 1972. This was the same year The Godfather was released in cinemas, Jane Fonda was photographed in Hanoi on an anti-aircraft gun and Norman Kirk was elected Prime Minister of NewZealand. A lot has happened since, but the Equal Pay Act has still not been put into effect, and the law is still being broken – even by state agencies ! – with impunity.

As the HRC report says of this reality :

A group of Canterbury women lawyers told us that they had to work twice as hard to be seen as equal and that if you asked to be paid at the same rate as men you were seen as “greedy, unreasonable and ungrateful”. “Nice girls don’t get the corner office (i.e. become a partner). You have to be ballsy, push your position and ask.”

There appears to be no systemic follow-up to review progress. The proposed roll out of the Pay and Employment Women into local government and the wider state sector (Phase 2) is voluntary and uptake has been extremely limited….Discrepancies in starting salaries between men and women were found in many organisations in the state sector, in apparent breach of the Equal Pay Act. Women in the private sector advised us that this was also a problem for them. Lack of transparency about salaries, however, made it very difficult to raise awareness about pay inequality. There was little confidence in existing mechanisms to challenge gender pay inequalities.

In sum, women can be forgiven for being not being skeptical – or actively hostile – the next time they hear John Key using the language of fairness and equality to advance policies that contain no such elements. Smiling does not make it so. The reality is one where GST is being increased, food prices are rising sharply and the cost of childcare is heading beyond reach of many parents. As if inhabiting an alternative reality, the Key government is making plans to crack down on sickness beneficiaries and to require women on the DPB whose eldest child has turned six, to hunt for non-existent jobs, from which they can be fired at will. No signs of compassion there.

Right now, the Key voice track and the actual picture are almost entirely out of sync. As a consequence, women voters – who have some life experience of men who say one thing and do another – seem likely to decide the next election, once again.

ENDS