by Gordon Campbell

It is not only in pay rates that this country lags behind Australia. On average, New Zealand workers are also at more risk of harm in the work place than their equivalents across the Tasman. Both trends can be traced to legislation passed here in the early 1990s. Not for nothing did New Zealand politicians at the time describe our main piece of health and safety law (the Health Safety and Employment Act 1992) as being a “brother” piece of legislation to the Employment Contracts Act.

The ECA assisted employers to bypass union representation and cut the short-term cost of labour. In similar fashion, the HSE Act has sought to liberate employers from the former, more intrusive system of centralised workplace inspection and regulation, and promote in its place a ‘safety culture’ based largely on voluntary compliance. As union membership lapsed, New Zealand work sites began to atomise into a welter of contractors and sub-contractors, each with their own alleged responsibilities for a health and safety regime that has existed more on paper than in practice. In the current climate of price competition between independent contractors, health and safety elements tend to be among the first budgeted items to get trimmed in order to win bids for the work available – while at the other end of the spectrum, the DoL’s inspection and enforcement regime has been gradually drained of resources and technical expertise, in line with the preference for “light handed” regulation and largely voluntary compliance.

Some of the fruits of that approach are now being examined by the Royal Commission into the Pike River tragedy. The Commission findings are expected to range more widely than the immediate circumstances of the mining disaster – and will almost certainly indict the ‘light-handed’ regulatory culture that has prevailed within Department of Labour for the past two decades. Not only has DoL seen its mining inspectorate lapse, but its in-house technical expertise relevant on a variety of health and safety fronts has been allowed to deteriorate and/or be outsourced.

The same thinking that produced the ECA also shaped the HSE Act – and the advocates of both these pieces of early 1990s legislation have tended to demonise centralised oversight and regulation (and significant on-site union representation) as being obstacles to the ability of business to increase productivity, reduce labour costs and maximise short term profit. To those ends, New Zealand has paid a price in blood.

The statistical evidence is condensed within this graph from page 14 of Safe Work Australia’s Comparative Performance Monitoring Report, which shows the level and the trendline of New Zealand’s workplace fatalities to be strikingly out of kilter with those in other comparable countries.

Source: Safe Work Australia’s Comparative Performance Monitoring Report – 13th edition – Page 5

The most recent DoL figures show that 41 people were killed on the job during 2011 and 6,087 workers suffered serious harm.

While work fatalities decreased last year – largely because of the blip in the figures caused in 2010 by the Pike River disaster – the rate of serious injury incurred on the job has remained virtually static. The figures cited here do not include deaths in the maritime or aviation sectors, or fatalities due to work-related road crashes. The DoL figures also do not include the toll from occupational disease, which is estimated to lead to 700-1,000 fatalities and 17,000- 20,000 new and serious cases a year with asthma, skin diseases and asbestos-related cancer being the major contributors.

The role of work-related asbestos exposure in lung cancer deaths – which are commonly attributed to smoking – may well be significantly under- reported. According to the DoL health and safety advisor Dr. Geraint Emrys, (Safeguard magazine, May/June 2011) in comments about the 2010 National Asbestos Medical Panel report : “The taking of lung cancer history is still dominated by the smoking factor, and occupational factors are down-played.” In Emrys’ estimation, the steep rise in recorded asbestos-related cancers may not peak for another 20 to 30 years. In the wake of the Christchurch earthquake, both the initial destruction to buildings and their subsequent demolition has posed a fresh risk of asbestos exposure from wind-borne particles.

There are other ways of measuring the high incidence of accidents and injury in the New Zealand work place. During 2010, 187,300 New Zealanders lodged ACC claims for work-related injuries, comprising 209,700 claims in all. Just over 10% of these claims fell into the more serious “entitlement claim” category, where compensation and support goes beyond merely the re-imbursement of medical fees. Agricultural and fishery workers were the occupational group with the highest injury incidence rate. On the figures, a startling rate of almost one in four farming and fishery workers were injured on the job in 2010, as reflected in the incidence rate of 241 work-related injury claims per 1,000 full-time equivalent employees. Despite fewer ACC work related claims being lodged annually since 2006, the cost of such claims has continued on a steady rise. This is due either (or both) to a rise in medical costs, or to an increase in the severity of the accidents – along with the distinct possibility that the number of ACC claims lodged may have dropped not because of safety improvements, but in response to ACC raising the hurdle of acceptance.

Besides the suffering behind these dry figures, there is also an economic cost involved. In a June 2011 publication, DoL estimated the cost of workplace death and injury to be $16 billion (!) annually when direct health and ACC claim costs are added to the costs of rehabilitation and lost productivity and to the indirect costs and suffering related to premature death.

So, what preventive steps are being taken to deal with this elephant in the room? Currently, construction, forestry, agriculture and transport are being singled out for DoL’s special attention, as priority sectors where people are more likely to be harmed or killed at work. Last year, farming was the riskiest occupation – on average, one farmer or farmhand died every 24 days in New Zealand during 2011. Out of 41 workplace deaths last year, 15 were farmers or farmhands – with quad bike and tractor accidents being the leading cause of death on farms. Quad bikes are, in fact, second only to car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in rural communities.

The annual financial cost in ACC claims for quad bikes alone ( I’ve subtracted the claims related to all terrain motor vehicles from the figures supplied by ACC for this article) has risen from $4.51 million in 2004/2005 to $8.56 million in 08/09 with a slight dip to $7.51 million in 09/10. While my focus in this article is entirely upon the injuries and costs from work-related quad bike use, the same statistics show a rising trend in the cost of claims from their recreational use as well, and since 07/08 these cost of these leisure-related claims have in fact exceeded the cost of the work-related claims, in some years quite substantially. (In 07/08 for instance, recreational use of quad bikes cost the taxpayer $4.66 million in ACC claims while work use claims amounted to $3.7 million.) Clearly, the risk factors, injury toll and economic cost of quad bikes in a recreational context merits a separate story in itself.

For now, the work-related dangers of these vehicles have become the target of a special DoL educational and enforcement safety programme – which, in its essentials, promotes the message that

(a) quad bike riders should be trained in their use to a level sufficient to do the job safely
(b) children should be prevented from riding adult quad bikes,
(c) quad bike riders should always wear a helmet and
(d) the right vehicle should be chosen for the job, in line with manufacturer recommendations.

Despite the recurringly high rates of deaths and serious injury from quad bike use, DoL’s response remains weighted almost entirely towards education and persuasion, rather than to seeking behavioural change by means of mandatory compliance, penalties and prosecution. That tone has been set from the top. Last year, Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson (pictured left) stressed (Safeguard, May/June 2011, p 46) that the actions to enforce quad bike safety would be taken under the 1992 HSE Act, and not under any of the DoL’s new quad bike safety guidelines. Farmers, she indicated, could rest easy. “I’m aware there is some agitation within the [farming] sector about the notion of enforcement…there’s been talk of inspectors jumping over farm fences with their ’ticket books’ in their hands, ready to levy fines on farmers…The department [DoL] does not take this approach to enforcement.”

Indeed it doesn’t. In January, in the context of an inquest into a quad bike death accident that killed 21 year old beekeeper Jody Santos, Wellington coroner Ian Smith called on the authorities to investigate making helmets and roll bars compulsory on quad bikes, but was met with this hostile response instead :

Mr Smith’s decision has been sent to Transport Minister Stephen Joyce and Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson. A spokesman for Ms Wilkinson said Mr Smith was an “interventionist” and was asking for something that had already been done.

In fact, it still hasn’t. An interview for this article with Ona De Rooy, DoL’s Central Division manager, confirmed that there are no compulsory rules (ie, with automatic penalties when breaches occur) that
(a) require the wearing of a helmet when riding a quad bike off road, or that (b) make it mandatory to undergo training before using a quad bike, or that (c) stipulate age limits on who can ride or be a passenger on a quad bike, or that
(d) make it mandatory for quad bikes to have rollover protection bars fitted, or that
(e) ensure the quad bike has been adequately maintained.

On that last point, since quad bikes that are being used off-road do not need to have an annual warrant of fitness, the upkeep of the machines to a safe standard of operation can readily be allowed to lapse :

More than half the 60 farms in Nelson and Marlborough visited by health and safety inspectors this spring have been issued with notices requiring them to improve the way they are using quad bikes. Most of the improvement notices and warnings have involved riders not wearing helmets or using poorly maintained bikes.

Note the wording there : “improvement notices” and “warnings.” Although life and limb are on the line, the language remains one of persuasion, education and (almost exclusively) voluntary compliance. After the level where infringement notices are reached, subsequent prosecutions are still relatively rare. Under the HSE Act, the key wording is that employers are required to “take all practicable steps” to ensure safety. The trouble is, prosecutions are generally mounted only retrospectively in the wake of death or serious injury. For this article, DoL confirmed that only eight prosecutions have ever been mounted for quad bike misuse.

In the Jody Santos case, the employer was ultimately fined $78,000 and ordered to pay reparations of $60,000 for culpability arising from the fact that Santos was neither wearing a helmet, nor had been trained adequately in quad bike use. Interestingly, the sentencing judge C.N. Tuohy ruled that while farmers were free to risk killing themselves, they would be held liable for exposing their employees to the same risk. This, from Tuohy’s judgement :

Again, it is no excuse that a large percentage of farmers do not have a helmet on their property, which I accept to be true. That is their choice…[But] if they allow their employees to undertake those risks – that is, driving the ATV without proper training or without a helmet then farmers also could expect their culpability to be assessed at a high level if there is an accident…in this particular case, the explanation that “everyone is doing it’ is neither an acceptable excuse nor a mitigating factor….

What this confirms is that farmers are virtually free to do what they like (“That is their choice”) on the farm, while the courts try their best to protect the farmhands who work for them. A “do as I say, not as I do” unsafety culture is being perpetuated – apparently, out of deference to the rugged individualism and lobbying power of the farming community. One can reasonably ask what sort of safety regime shies away so resolutely from mandatory rules of compliance, and helps to preserve the right of farmers to kill or seriously injure themselves – and their children – at major emotional cost to the families left behind to grieve, and at major financial cost to the taxpayers left to foot the ACC and healthcare bills. Farmers may be renowned for having a “she’ll be right” ethos and a resistance to townies telling them what to do. Yet given the severity of the injuries and the prevalence of problems with these vehicles – Otago University research indicates that more than six out of ten farmers can expect, at one time or other, to lose control of their quad bikes.

– it is hardly surprising to find that some people have now had enough. The calls to frame the safety rules about quad bike use in terms of mandatory compliance – the compulsory wearing of helmets, the compulsory taking of training courses, age limits on bike riders and the mandatory fitting of rollover bars – are being issued by the likes of Wellington coroner Smith, who has plainly had his fill of presiding over inquests into the casualties of quad bike accidents.

The case for mandatory safety provisions is underlined by the scant resources that DoL can bring to bear to promote the four key messages central to its quad bike safety campaign. There are an estimated 80-100,000 quad bikes currently being used in New Zealand for a combination of work-related and recreational purposes, on and off the road. Some 5925 new bikes were sold in 2010, and 6570 more last year, according to figures supplied to me by the Motor Industry Association. Using a range of mid 2005 to 2007 data from the Ministry of the Environment and elsewhere, one can estimate that this country has some 13,905 sheep farms, 13,254 beef farms, 1,614 mixed farms, 1,617 deer farms and 12,786 dairy farms in New Zealand.

As De Rooy of the DoL confirmed, the department has only 150 safety inspectors in all, and all of them are being deployed to do farm inspections as part of the quad bike campaign. If they find evidence of unsafe behaviours, there is a tiered set of enforcement responses available, in the event of non-compliance. As mentioned, these range from written warnings to improvement notices to infringement notices to prohibition notices to prosecutions.

The DoL has just completed its first monitoring report on its quad bike campaign, and De Rooy is reasonably upbeat about the results. Helmet sales, she says, have gone up 200 % since the safety campaign began. Some 225 farms were visited and 76 improvement notices were handed out. ”The monitoring report has shown a “high visibility and knowledge of the key safety messages, from our internal data of what we saw on farms…We did 900 farm visits [last year] and served 300 notices of some sort, where there were improvements that needed to be made…It did show up we had some significant challenges.”

The DoL’s resources, she concedes, are thinly stretched. “As you point out, [it] is a few drops in the ocean, in terms of the size of our resource to do the visiting, and the level of farms and the use of vehicles.” In this situation, she indicates, the DoL does what it can and uses the media where it can to assist in public education. “If it turns out that harm was the result of a failure to follow the four safety steps then the farmer, as the employer, will be prosecuted.”

Right. However – as mentioned – despite the death and injury toll related to quad bike use, only eight prosecutions have ever been mounted related to quad bike mis-use. Moreover, as DoL informed me, only two infringement notices (which do not carry penalties) have been issued so far during the current safety campaign, So…if and when a written warning or an infringement notice or prohibition notice is issued, is a revisit then automatic to ensure that the warnings have been complied with? Apparently not. “It’s not automatic, “ De Rooy confirmed. But DoL does what it can. “It is involved in revisiting those properties where we issued notices in the previous phase of activity.”

OK, would DoL – for instance – support a mandatory annual warrant of fitness for these machines, given that they routinely get used on and off the road – and given that they get bought, and then get hacked around on the farm? Clearly, these vehicles have the capacity to inflict major harm, and keeping them in good condition would seem a reasonable request. So does DoL support there being a mandatory annual WoF?

Apparently not. “Our focus at the moment is in the four key messages,” De Rooy replies. “And while the inspectors are mindful of maintenance – and from the prohibition notices, are looking at maintenance issues…That’s not a priority for us, in this campaign.” Ditto, she indicates, when it comes to making helmets or rollover bars or competency training compulsory as a pre-emptive measure, or for having mandatory age limits for riders or passengers…Compulsion is not how DoL operates in this era of light-handed regulation, towards the farming sector in particular. “I think the discussions we are trying to have [with farmers] are less about regulation,” De Rooy says. “This is not about, you know, more rules and more detailed rules. This is about having discussion and engaging and educating around the levels of risk, and about really painting a clearer picture of the harm that can occur…”

Right. Well….since using the right vehicle for the job is one of the four key safety messages in its quad bike campaign, has DoL developed any set of guidelines as to what kind of jobs quad bikes can be safely used for, and which jobs they can’t? Using them, say, for carrying or towing heavy, sloshing containers of spray liquid could be problematic, given that such gear (or passengers) could easily upset a quad bike’s highly sensitive centre of gravity. But no, DoL doesn’t seem to have any special guidelines of its own to offer. “Within this campaign we’re relying on the manufacturers guidelines on what is safe use…and that’s what we very much rely on, “ De Rooy says. (Even if farmers bought their quad bike back in the 1980s, DoL is plainly hoping that they’ve kept the brochure.)

Back to those fiercely independent farmers….Given that a ‘she’ll be right’ ethos is still seen to be prevalent, how do the relative lack of penalties avoid being taken by farmers as a virtual mandate to persist with behaviours that risk killing themselves and their children? Surely, unless there is a short, sharp shock – a stick – the carrots on offer won’t change the behaviours in question? “I think that’s always the challenge as a regulator,” De Rooy says. “There’s a fine balance between the stick and the carrot. The department’s focus is on the three steps of engaging, educating and enforcing. There is a group of farmers as employers that we want to talk to and say, your workers and yourselves need to go home to your families safely, at the end of the night. And there are a group of farmers who may be wilfully non-compliant. This is a long term behavioural focus…and we are mindful of some of the culture of the farming community. We are very reliant on that strong attitude of ‘she’ll be right’ and ‘we can make this happen.’ But its about trying to harness that, within safe boundaries.”

While the DoL remains fixed on its chosen path of persuasion, townies could be forgiven for wondering…just what is it that makes quad bikes almost inherently unsafe in some conditions? Essentially, this comes down to the high centre of gravity on a quad bike, which makes them prone to tipping over when cornering, or when being driven on a slope. This inherent instability means that ‘active’ riding techniques are needed to ride the bikes safely on undulating terrain.

Although they are marketed and sold as ATVs – “all terrain vehicles “– this isn’t really the case. So much so that Australian coroner John Olle has advocated dropping the ATV term entirely :

In the wake of an inquest into several quad-bike deaths, Coroner John Olle told quad bike manufacturers this month to never again market or describe the four-wheeled motorbikes as all-terrain vehicles. Mr Olle said to describe a quad bike as an all-terrain vehicle was a “serious overstatement of its capabilities”.

During 2011 in Australia, a battle raged between safety proponents on one side, and farming organisations and manufacturers on the other over whether it should be made mandatory for rollover protection bars to be fitted on quad bikes. As Coroner Ian Smith pointed out in his September 2009 inquest findings into the on-road quad bike death of Philip Osborne “ Roll over is the leading cause of injury with riders being crushed or trapped under an overturned vehicle.” His coronial records showed that between 2000 and 2007, of the 98 deaths involving quad bikes, 32 were due to the deceased being pinned under the vehicle. Yet as Smith noted in his Osborne findings, “ The manufacturers of these ATVs apparently strongly recommend that neither ROP (rollover protection) structure or bull bars be fitted…”

This opposition to roll bars was endorsed by the NZ Transport Agency, who stated (pages 6-7 Osborne decision) that ‘fitting roll bars to this type of vehicle will raise the centre of gravity, therefore making the vehicle more prone to roll-over….as always it is regrettable that another life has been lost on the road. In this case, it is felt that the best course of action would be for the NZTA to focus on promotional, rather than regulatory interventions.”

Resistance to mandatory rollover devices –and helmet use – was also evident in Australia among the farming community and manufacturers at the outset of 2011, Quad bike manufacturers even mounted a public campaign against their compulsory use, arguing that the rollover devices themselves could easily do more harm than good in the event of an accident, by pinning or injuring the rider. In October 2011 however, the manufacturers’ anti-roll bars campaign came to a screeching halt after researchers at Monash University and released findings of serious shortcomings in the US computer simulation research being relied upon by the manufacturers to support the ‘more harm than good.” argument.

Australian engineers analysed the model and found it predicted 99 of the 113 rollover accidents would result in head injuries. Yet the US and UK injury reports showed just 16 suffered head injuries. The model predicted just four of the 113 accidents would result in trunk injuries (shoulder to groin). Yet the injury reports showed 50 of the accidents resulted in trunk injuries. Queensland safety consultant Geoff McDonald said it was clear the model failed to simulate real-life rollover injuries, yet it was being used to test the effectiveness of rollover protection systems on ATVs.

The manufacturers have since terminated their campaign of resistance and have since co-operated with Australian safety authorities in forming a joint trans Tasman working party on quad bike rollover devices, in which our DoL have participated. Reportedly, the manufacturers in Australia and parent companies in the US and elsewhere wish to head off any possibility of a class action suit for injuries and death that could be attributed to their public hostility to devices that might have prevented such outcomes. New Zealanders, because of our ‘no fault’ ACC scheme, would not qualify for inclusion in any class action.

For now, New Zealand remains so far behind the play on rollover devices that they do not feature at all within its four key messages on safe quad bike use – a lack of priority significant in itself. In its responses to the Santos inquest, the Dol conceded that the its current safety campaign “does not currently include the installation of lap belts and a roll over protection structure.” While the DoL had “extensively” investigated these devices, “it does not consider it appropriate to include them as part of the safety campaign at present.”

However, later in the same submission, the DoL admitted that such devices could help reduce death and injury, but that it was now up to the manufacturers to design one suitable : “ The Department considers that either a change to the design of quad bikes, or a fitting that minimises the risk that the full weight of the bike (260kg on average) impacts on a rider trapped underneath could feasibly contribute to a reduction in serious harm resulting from quad bike rollover, However, it is not the Department’s role to design or approve the design of such solution….fitting a ROPS (rollover protection device) to a quad bike needs to remain a matter of personal choice for the farmer until this matter is resolved…”

Just what still needs to be resolved is difficult to imagine As the Monash researchers pointed out :

….the experimental tests by the University of South Queensland indicate that the Quad Bar CPD is capable of either preventing a complete roll or modifying the roll event to reduce the risk and severity to the rider for both side roll and back flip scenarios.

Sounds plausible. This same standardised rollover crush protection device – the Quad Bar – is already on the market. Yet as of April 2012, the Dol is still choosing to remain agnostic about the state of the science about whether rollover devices are even advisable – let alone whether they should be mandatory – pending some (unspecified) further evidence that it is not in the business of generating. Would that ‘wait and see’ approach also be because if DoL did publicly endorse roll bars at this point, this could be used against the manufacturers in a possible class action suit taken overseas? “ I’m certainly not aware of that as a consideration,” De Rooy replies, “in decision-making about where we focus.”

Under the Coroners Act 2006, the Coroners Office is not merely required to issue findings retrospectively on the cause of death. It is also bound to recommend practices that it considers likely to pre-empt further deaths in future. The benefits of hindsight are supposed to be applied to the exercise of foresight, and is therefore required by law to be “interventionist.” Yet currently, coroners remain at odds with the DoL over the virtues of rollover devices on quad bikes.

In his concluding remarks to the Osborne inquest for instance, Coroner Ian Smith stated flatly : “The Court does not and cannot accept that the fitting of rollbars to these vehicles should be a difficulty. It is a problem that must be solved.” In the Santos inquest, Smith repeated the need for DoL to take urgent action. “The issue of a roll over bar is still an important aspect of safety. Given the high volume and usage within NZ of these machines, I believe that the Department of Labour and authorities are able to impose pressure on the manufacturers to adapt the machines to incorporate a roll bar configuration. It is not rocket science.”

Judge Neil McLean (pictured left), the Chief Coroner, shares the Australian view that quad bikes are NOT in fact, all terrain vehicles, and he consciously tries to avoid using the “ATV” term. “They’re inherently quite unstable. It doesn’t take much to tip one over.” Helmets? “I think there’s a fairly consistent view coming through from coroners that the mandatory wearing of helmets is worth looking at. It would be difficult to monitor, and to police. But really, this is much the same debate as helmets for cyclists…” Making helmets mandatory with all the attendant publicity would serve an educational role in itself, McLean agrees, among farmers, contractors and with the general public. “ And it would make the deterrent factor a bit stronger.”

So he’d advocate making the wearing of helmets compulsory for quad bike users regardless of whether they were being used for farm work or for recreational use? “ I think so. I can’t see any reason why it should not be. With cycling and with motor cycling, it is mandatory.“ The extent of head injuries associated with quad bikes, he adds, also supports the need for such a change.

As for the contentious issue of children using quad bikes on farms….”It would seem painfully obvious,” McLean continues, “but parents should be alert that these aren’t toys.” Can and should the fitting of roll over bars be made compulsory? “ I’m hesitant to go firm on that,“ McLean replies.” I don’t have the evidence-based information to be emphatic on that. But it seems to me that there is an increasingly strong case for some sort of protective structure. I’m aware of the countervailing argument that sometimes they can be a hazard in themselves.“

Right. So what weight does he give in practice to this argument from farmers and manufacturers that roll bars do more harm than good ? “ I’m sceptical about it.” Mind you, in some cases, he’s aware of the claims that some fortunate individuals have been flung clear, and thank goodness there wasn’t a roll bar to stop them. Speaking in general terms though, does McLean think it is beyond the genius of manufacturers to come up with a roll over protection device that (a) doesn’t trap or impale the farmer and that ( b) doesn’t de-stabilise the bike ? “ I wouldn’t have thought so.” The next round of this increasingly testy exchange between the Coroners Office and the DoL will occur in Whangarei around September of this year, when a joint inquest into several quad bike related deaths in Northland is expected to be held.

Currently, a sea change in attitudes towards workplace health and safety regulation is in the wind. Whichever way it goes, the Royal Commission inquiry findings into the Pike River disaster will be decisive in setting the tone and the direction of occupational health and safety practices in New Zealand for the next twenty years. The owners of Pike River and the decay of the inspection regime for mining in New Zealand can expect to receive harsh criticism from the Commission – but the state of the mining inspectorate is only symptomatic of the wider attitude towards enforcement that made a disaster like Pike River not only possible, but virtually inevitable.

As mentioned, the 1992 HSE legislation passed in the full flush of the country’s romance with deregulation created a climate of voluntary compliance. In effect, employers were entrusted with setting the terms on those health and safety measures deemed practicable and/or affordable. Even in the worst case scenario, the risk of being caught out and fined for not taking “all practicable steps” to prevent accidents, is still being treated by some employers as an acceptable condition – and an acceptable cost – of doing business. Take for instance, this hair-raising testimony to the inquest into the fatal coolstore fire near Hamilton in 2008.

… The gas detection system at the coolstore was not designed for the highly flammable refrigerant being used. An inspection three years earlier had found some safety issues, but there was no obligation for that to be followed up. Department of Labour inspector Keith Stewart told the Coroners Court that it is the owners of coolstores who must make sure plants comply with the law, because the industry is self-regulating. He says no-one can be sure a similar event will not occur again.

And this repeat offender, to whom DoL had extended every latitude:

In the latest incident, Kiwi Plastic Company Limited was convicted of failing to guard two of its bag sealing machines. During an unannounced visit, Department of Labour inspectors found that the guards had been removed for approximately three months. The Department’s investigation also found that an employee had been taught to over-ride automatic shut down mechanisms. Kiwi Plastics and its director, Angelus Tay, were prosecuted for similar offences in 2002 when three employees were seriously injured. The Department has made several visits to the company since then and issued a number of warnings and improvement notices.

Clearly, firms have to consistently and flagrantly put workers at risk before they can expect to be caught. Even when found to be at risk of seriously injuring workers, such firms can still be left to behave for years afterwards with similar disregard for the safety rules. Think of how this situation will currently be interacting with the 90 day trial period for new workers. Would a young worker still on a 90 day trial period be more – or less – likely to query whether the conditions on site are putting their life and health at risk? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Even after the Pike River findings are released, it seems unlikely the current government would be inclined to change its basic approach. The HSE Act of 1992 was seen at the time to be a National government baby, and still is. Regardless, there are stirrings in the heartland, among rural women, normally regarded as the backbone of the National Party when in its gumboots.. Through the likes of the Rural Women New Zealand website farmers’ wives (and in some cases, farmers’ widows) are receiving more comprehensive and up-to-date information about quad bike safety developments on both sides of the Tasman than any mainstream news source currently offering to its readers and available.

Once the Pike River findings are made public, it will probably be left to the Opposition to push for a change in the cultural climate at the Department of Labour. Twenty years of laissez-faire attitudes to compliance will not be changed overnight – but we owe it to the victims of the current policy settings to at least make the effort.

ENDS

by Alison McCulloch
Photos by MUNZ and by Alison McCulloch

Chris has been a “seagull’ at the Port of Tauranga for 12 years, and knows first-hand what it’s like working on a waterfront lauded by many as the “model” for the Ports of Auckland Ltd (POAL) in its current dispute with its workers. Just like the birds they’re named after, the “seagulls” get to pick up the leftovers – the shifts and hours unfilled by the permanent and guaranteed-hour workers. Like hundreds of other seagulls, or casuals, Chris is on-call and can be asked to work at an hour’s notice, never knowing when – or whether – the next shift is coming. Say “No” to an offer of work because you have other plans, and you might not be called back. Sure, Chris would love to get some guaranteed hours, or better yet be made a permanent – or a ‘perm’ as they’re called – but under the Tauranga “model” of efficiency, competitiveness and lower cost, that’s not likely to happen.

“You’ll probably never become permanent on the ports,” Chris says, “but guaranteed hours would be good. If they could guarantee you 28 hours, if they could guarantee you 35 hours. It doesn’t happen, and there aren’t any opportunities to apply for that”. It can be tough to plan a life, and, for those with families, even to make ends meet. “I get by,” Chris says. “Generally you’ll pick up a shift or two and generally you’ll pick up as many hours as the perms, but I don’t have children to feed and I don’t have a mortgage – for anybody looking for a job that’s going to cover a mortgage and a family they’re looking in the wrong place”.

For Chris, it’s not just a local Tauranga issue, or even one limited to the waterfront. “It’s not the port’s fault,” Chris says. “They’re taking advantage of what the government – or the employers association – did years ago: casualization, everywhere in New Zealand”. Chris is not this worker’s real name. It turns out that it’s not so easy to find casuals at the ports of Tauranga willing to talk. And not so hard to understand why. Tauranga is a competitive place to work – get on the wrong side of a stevedoring company, and your career on the wharfs might be a short one.

Casualisation has been the norm at the Tauranga for years now, and it’s really only the old-timers, and the port’s dwindling number of permanents, who know what it’s like to have a reliable, stable job on the waterfront. Jim Gibson was a wharfie for 32 years, and held posts in the old Waterfront Workers Union, a precursor to the current Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ). Back before 1989 under the Waterfront Industry Commission, a government body that registered and employed waterfront workers – and before the Employment Contracts and Employment Relations acts of the 90s – Gibson and his fellow wharfies had a guaranteed 40 hours work a week, earned different rates for things like dirty or extra dangerous work, and had benefits including a superannuation fund subsidized by the employer.

Gibson knows a young wharfie for whom that kind of job security is hard to imagine. He sometimes works as much 126 hours in 10 days which, at just over $20 an hour, is definitely good money – while it lasts. And not all casuals get that rate, with some on around $16 an hour.

“They’ve kept their casuals with the false promise you’re going to be made permanent next month- next month – next month,” Gibson says. “They don’t become permanent because the employer is quite happy, he’s got shipping, the guys are there, but what was happening was they over-supplied the casual labour, and people were only getting maybe $20 or $30 more working for a week over there than they were by being on the dole”. Unsurprisingly, Gibson – an honorary lifetime member of the union – backs the Auckland’s Local 13 in their contract dispute aimed, in part, at keeping the Tauranga model at bay. “They’re not arguing for more money,” he says, “All they want is a permanent condition of employment and believe you me they’re entitled to it – anybody is”.

So how did Tauranga end up with such a different waterfront than Auckland? Professor James Reveley, of the School of Management and Marketing at the University of Wollongong, has been researching and writing about New Zealand port labour relations since 1990. He says it’s mainly because Auckland’s union was simply stronger. Although obliterated after the 1951 strike, the union managed to rebuild itself into one of the strongest in the country. “In fact the term often used in employer circles and also within union circles is ‘Fortress Auckland’,” Reveley says, “because they’ve been very successful at keeping rates of casualization/casual labour low and keeping their workforce unionized, whereas Tauranga’s been a lot less successful”.

‘Company’ Unions
Indeed, even Tauranga’s unionized workforce is dispersed across four unions, two of which are widely seen as “company” (or less politely – “yellow”) unions, and which aren’t affiliated with the Council of Trade Unions (CTU). These unions, the Surfside Employees Association (SEA) and the Amalgamated Stevedores Union (ASU), both formed in 2000, prefer to limit their memberships to workers at particular companies.

The rules of the Surfside Employees Association, for example, state that “membership of the Association shall be open to any person who is employed or engaged to be employed as a stevedore by the firm Independent Stevedoring Ltd (ISL) and as the Committee shall from time to time decide”. The ASU, meanwhile, is linked to another major stevedoring firm, ISO, which said in a submission to the Productivity Commission that it has more than 400 workers under contract with New Zealand Associates Limited, “who are members of the independent Amalgamated Stevedores Union”.

According to membership returns, which every union has to provide the Department of Labour, Surfside had 82 members last year while the ASU had 308. (Nationally, MUNZ had 2,580 and while the biggest union at the port of Tauranga, the CTU-affiliated Rail and Maritime Transport Union, had 4,747.)

The two non-affiliated unions are hard to pin down. Werewolf could find little to no information online or elsewhere about them. We did reach the president of the ASU, who said he was headed out of town and wouldn’t be able to comment until he returned in a couple of weeks. In an effort to find a contact for Surfside, we called the offices of ISL, which states on its Web site that its staff “decided to form their own union, the Surfside Employees’ Association, more than nine years ago”. A staff member at ISL said he did not know how to reach the union, adding that the company had nothing to do with it.

According to Garry Parsloe, the president of MUNZ’s Auckland Local 13, unions like the Surfside and ASU aren’t represented on the Auckland waterfront – another of the things that would surely change if MUNZ loses its current dispute there. One reason to set up boutique unions is to enable company-wide collective employment agreements – something for which you need a registered union. For smaller outfits without big HR departments, being able to set wages and conditions across the company’s workforce has obvious advantages. Other less benign reasons include having better control of the workforce, weakening traditional union power, and, in some cases, helping employers win the public relations wars that are so important in industrial disputes.

Reveley expands on this latter point in a 2002 paper he wrote on the impact of the Employment Relations Act on the waterfront. In a 2001 dispute at South Island ports that involved the ASU and the then Waterfront Workers Union, he explained, “employer interests were able to define the confrontation variously as a ‘classic example of a demarcation dispute’ between two unions”. Reveley quoted the National Business Review, which described the dispute as being “about an entrenched union trying to muscle aside another union and hold back progress on New Zealand wharves”.

‘Seagulls’
Among the things Werewolf was interested to ask the company unions, if we’d managed to get hold of them, was what percentage of their members are casuals and what percentage are permanents, or have guaranteed minimum weekly hours. As with so much about the ports, getting data on things like casuals isn’t easy. A spokesman for the Port of Tauranga Ltd said the company didn’t gather hard data on port-wide casualization rates, and those cited to Werewolf ranged from 80% casuals (from a union member) to an estimated 12 percent -20 percent (from the Port of Tauranga Ltd). The port company’s own workforce of about 160 includes roughly 12 percent casuals, the port said, while according to the CTU, the national figure for CTU affiliated members working the waterfront is 25 percent casual. The levels of casualisation among non-union workers and those who are members of the company unions are likely to be higher.

Reveley suspects that a lack of information on issues like casualisation is actually a political and economic strategy. “Any government is going to be concerned about a core industry like that … about how much casualization there is on the waterfront,” he says. “And firms aren’t going to give it out because it’s commercial and confidential information”.

Whatever the number of casuals among Tauranga’s roughly 1,200-strong workforce, it’s clear that it’s been rising over the years. Under the Tauranga model, there’s no cap on the level of casuals, something that is in place in Auckland where, according to MUNZ’s magazine, The Maritimes, the maximum is 20 percent. (Another 27 percent are permanent but only guaranteed 24 hours a week, while 53 percent are permanent full-timers.)

In the late 1970s, according to Reveley, there were almost no casuals on the waterfront – a situation that was to change dramatically in the wake of port reform in 1989 and the subsequent labour relations overhauls. In the four years to 1997 he wrote in a paper published that same year, “numbers of casual workers have increased dramatically, casuals are now being utilised in skilled positions (like operating forklifts and shipboard cranes), and the level of unionization of casuals has declined”. But Reveley, too, found reliable figures hard to get, pointing out that since the abolition of the Waterfront Industry Commission in 1989 “no figures are kept by any government agency that could be used to indicate the numbers of casuals”.

All sides agree that port work has special flexibility requirements, with labour needs dependent on the unpredictable arrival and departure of ships. Werewolf asked the Port of Tauranga Ltd if it saw itself as a model or example for other port operations like Auckland, and while the company didn’t offer a yes or no answer, a spokesman, Terry James, said it was “satisfied” with its current model, “which is in our view best suited to handle the vagaries of work demands within the shipping industry”. James continued: “We understand Ports of Auckland still work traditional roster patterns so we assume that they incur significant downtime, which is ultimately a cost borne by the importers/exporters using Ports of Auckland”.

For its part, MUNZ says its Auckland agreement already allows for the kind of flexibility the port needs, and what POAL really wants is to take away guaranteed weekly hours. As well as the impact on the incomes and quality of life of its workers, Local 13, like its branch in Tauranga, worries about the health and safety implications of allowing more and more casual workers onto the wharves.

‘A Very Dangerous Environment’
For Chris, the Tauranga “seagull,” safety is a huge concern. “Always new casuals,” Chris says. “It makes it dangerous for the people that work there … they’re barely there long enough to be called experienced”. When the company is busy and short on staff, Chris says it brings in inexperienced labour hire workers – and the port “is a very dangerous environment to be in even if you are experienced”.
The issue is a sensitive one on both sides, and in Tauranga it has been at the centre of a very public disagreement between MUNZ and the port company, with claims and counter claims filling the pages of the local daily, The Bay of Plenty Times. MUNZ’s Tauranga organizer, Selwyn Russell, told the newspaper in February that casual workers were too scared to report accidents, and it was not uncommon to have incidents involving “digits, little bits of fingers, arms and sprained ankles”. The newspaper also reported that according to the Department of Labour, there had been five serious harm incidents at the port in 2011 and it went on to quote an anonymous casual worker who said that when faced with reporting an injury, the consensus was “oh nah, keep your head down and do the job”.

The port company hit back, issuing a press release disputing the union’s claims and arguing that it was using the issue to “advance their position on the current dispute with Ports of Auckland”. The port told Werewolf something similar: “We are convinced that this ‘revelation’ from MUNZ was designed to remove the raison d’etre of POAL’s campaign to move to the Port of Tauranga model”. The port gave several reasons for this conclusion, including that MUNZ had not mentioned this issue at the port’s monthly health and safety forum. “We don’t see why a worker would not wish to report an accident to his supervisor and we reject the notion that any employee should feel intimidated in doing so,” the company said.

Russell stands by his comments, describing the situation as a vicious Catch 22: if a contractor or worker sticks their head up, they might lose contracts or work. He said it wasn’t just casuals who had suffered injuries that weren’t recorded – to digits, ankles, arms and legs – and that an independent inspection regime was needed. “[The port company is] saying, ‘we don’t have any of this information, we’ve never heard of anything like this going on’, and I say, ‘of course you haven’t, why would they?’”

‘Horribly Efficient’

Another major focus in the war of words over the “Tauranga model” has been productivity – that, and the other watchwords of the business side like efficiency, flexibility, profitability and lower costs. On those points, the union doesn’t necessarily disagree that Tauranga rates highly – but it has questions about the price. “It is horribly efficient,” Russell says, “but at the detriment to the workers”. The CTU agrees. It has challenged both the philosophy and draft findings of the government’s Productivity Commission on international freight transport services – findings that have been heralded in the news media as more evidence of the superiority of the Tauranga model. ( The Commission’s report and the various submissions are available here ). In its submission on the commission’s report, the CTU criticized both its analysis of productivity data and its “single-minded” focus on efficiency and profit. In adopting the narrow focus that it has, the CTU says, the commission:

walked away from its ostensible mandate to focus on ‘the wellbeing of New Zealanders’ and has instead allied itself with the most reactionary elements in the business community. The result is more a political document than an economic analysis, and while this may well coincide with the outcomes the present Government seeks, it represents a missed opportunity to establish the Commission as a professionally-detached analytical agency providing genuinely disinterested advice based on economic analysis of international standard.

The CTU is particularly scathing about the chapter on employment relations, arguing that it shows “capture” by “extremist anti-union submitters – most notably the stevedoring company ISO”. Instead of analytical detachment and balance, the CTU says, “the report exhibits only a zealous desire to promote casualisation of labour and weaken CTU-affiliated unions”.

And however flexible and productive the Tauranga model, it’s clear from the submissions that employers would like to go even further. In its August 2011 submission, the Port of Tauranga Ltd says “inflexible labour practices and difficulties in employer-union relationships” are a significant obstacle to increased efficiency and productivity, noting that “a number of Unions [are] currently pushing the boundaries of the freedom of association principles of the Employment Relations Act”. ISO agreed, telling the commission that “inflexible labour practices and
certain union activities” were hampering productivity improvements. ISO is particularly critical of CTU-affiliated unions, accusing them of causing “economic harm and reduced competition”, and urging the Commission to investigate.

Of particular interest to workers in Auckland, ISO included in its submission an excerpt from the collective employment agreement with members of the ASU, or Amalgamated Stevedores Union, in which it details some of the conditions enjoyed by workers classed as “regular hourly associates” and “casual associates”.According to the excerpt, a “casual associate” is “an Associate engaged and paid by the hour on an ‘as and when Required’ basis pursuant to an individual casual employment agreement for each job with no guarantee as to the period of engagement or of any subsequent engagement(s)”. Regular Hourly Associates, or RHAs, have a “minimum guarantee or retainer”, but even they can be stood down, albeit “on rare occasions”. ISO says its workers are free to turn down work “to accommodate family life”, and that guidelines on minimum notice and maximum days worked are in place.

As far as Jim Gibson is concerned, the push for the kind of lower costs, greater efficiencies, and higher profits sought by port companies represent little more than a race to the bottom. If Auckland has Maersk, Tauranga undercuts them, he says, so Auckland undercuts Tauranga, and so on. “They’re diving headlong into a bottomless pit, where no one is making any money”.

For now, port jobs remain sought after, and a lot of wharfies love the work they do. But casualisation is having an impact. “You know everybody wants to work on the wharf,” Chris says. “I suppose the money’s a bit better than the New Zealand wage, and it’s easy enough to get in, but you’ll never be anything more than a casual and they have no obligation. … You’re called in for your shift, you do your shift, once you drive out of that gate, you’re not employed by them any more. Even if you could pick up a bit of medical insurance or superannuation – casuals don’t have any rights whatever”.

Images by Alison McCulloch and from the MUNZ Flikr photo stream

References:
James Reveley. “Waterfront Labour Reform in New Zealand: Pressures, Processes and Outcomes”. The Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 39, No. 3, September 1997.

James Reveley. “From ‘Supplementary Seagulls’ to ‘Cut Price Casuals’: Changing Patterns of Casual Employment on the New Zealand Waterfront 1951-1997. Labour & Industry, Vol. 10, No 1, August 1999.

by Paul Hamer

When asked on his deathbed in 1983 what his proudest achievement had been, Keith Holyoake replied ‘Kinloch’ [1] — the holiday resort on the northern shores of Lake Taupō he had developed with the Gibbs family since the 1950s. Holyoake’s dealings at Kinloch are a reminder, in the wake of Nick Smith’s resignation from Cabinet, of just how far we have come since the 1950s and 1960s, in holding ministers to account over conflicts of interest.

When Kiwi Keith, Barry Gustafson’s biography of Holyoake was published in 2007, Michael Bassett criticised the lack of explanation about ‘the accusations leveled at Holyoake over his influence to get essential services into Kinloch that appears to have turned him and his partners into wealthy men’. ^[2] Bassett was referring to the fortuitous building of a government road to the edge of the partners’ property. But in truth there is much more to scrutinize than Holyoake’s influence in having the road built. There are the circumstances, for instance, of his acquisition of Māori land there in 1956.

Beginnings: purchase of Whangamata No. 1 and help from officials

Holyoake’s own narrative can introduce us to the origins of Kinloch. In the silver jubilee history of the settlement, an account written by Holyoake was made available by his family. In it, he related how he was told in June 1953 by friend and National Party stalwart, Theodore Nisbett (T.N.) Gibbs, that the latter’s son, Ian, was interested in purchasing a block of land on the north-western shore of Lake Taupō. The land comprised the best part of Whangamata No. 1, which had been purchased from Māori in 1884, and after a succession of owners was now in the hands of Ian Gibbs’ employer, New Zealand Forest Products Ltd. The block comprised some 5385 acres and was largely covered in scrub and fern. Holyoake, who was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture at the time, inspected the land the next weekend and ‘advised the purchase of the block’. ^[3]

Exactly when the purchase took place is unclear. Ian Gibbs had secured a 14-day option to purchase by the time of Holyoake’s June 1953 inspection, ^[4] but the certificate of title for the land states ‘Transfer N. Z. Forest Products Limited to Ian Ogilvie Gibbs of Tokoroa engineer and Theodore Nisbett Gibbs of Wellington public accountant as tenants in common in equal shares produced 23/11/53’. ^[5] In any event, Holyoake was quickly in on the deal. He recorded that his experience as a ‘practical farmer’ soon led T.N. Gibbs to offer him a stake in the block, which he accepted. The partnership, which was called Whangamata Station, was formalized in October 1953. T.N. and Ian Gibbs held quarter shares each, Holyoake three sixteenths, and each of his five children a sixteenth each. ^[6]

By the time the partnership was formalized, Holyoake had already made good use of the expertise at his disposal in the Department of Agriculture in assessing the Whangamata land’s potential. Amongst his papers is an unsigned and undated memorandum that reads ‘I would appreciate a statement setting out the cost of development of Taupo pumice land as a sheep farming proposition on the basis of, say, a 500 acre unit, the statement to show the cost of each operation kept separately.’ There then follows a list of expenditure items, from ‘rabbit proofing boundary’ to ‘shearing machinery’. The note ends with a request for ‘an estimate of the carrying capacity of such a unit showing the types of stock which would be most advisable, having regard to the necessity to continue it as a separate farm unit’. ^[7]

This request seems to have elicited a detailed account from Holyoake’s officials, forwarded to him as minister by E.J. Fawcett, the Director-General of Agriculture, on 22 September 1953. ^[8] These notes, written by P.W. Smallfield, the Director of the Extension Division, described the soil types on the north and north-west of Lake Taupō and the best methods of pasture establishment. They also set out the costs of fencing, buildings, equipment, livestock and obtaining water supply and the overall development costs on the land per acre. The notes concluded with the following suggestion: ‘Advice on development could best be given on the area itself and the prospective settler would be well advised to have the land inspected by Fields Instructor Taylor, Rotorua.’ This latter comment suggests that Smallfield was neither aware of the exact location of the land nor the identity of those with an interest in it. The reality was, however, that Holyoake was sizing up the outlay that confronted his friends and was contemplating his own investment in the block.

Click for big version
The present-day settlement of Kinloch showing Maori land block boundaries. Drawn by the author.

The officials’ work on the cost of developing the land led to a series of estimates that appear in Holyoake’s papers of the necessary expenditure over the six years from 1953. These include a total outlay of £111,350 (necessitating the borrowing of £60,000 and expenditure by the partners of £41,350 ^[9]) off-set by savings from tax deductions (£18,600) and the sale of beach sections in 1958 and 1959 (£10,000), leading to assets by 1959 of £167,000. ^[10] This equates to roughly $7 million in 2012 terms – a handsome return, after a lot of hard work, on the modest £3000 (around $150,000) purchase price of the land.

That Holyoake used his influence as a minister of the Crown to secure the best possible advice for the development of his property — and thus increase his personal wealth — is quite clear from other correspondence. Included amongst his papers is a letter of 21 November 1956 from Ian Gibbs to his father:

Dear Dad
You will remember that I summarised the factors which could have affected the lambing adversely. One mentioned was possible copper deficiency through excess molybdenum being present.
Am not quite clear yet how to go about solving this. Haven’t discussed it with K.J.H. – his promised visit by agriculture department top scientists did not eventuate the other day and we need a thorough study not a casual inspection.

The visit must have occurred shortly thereafter. Holyoake wrote in December 1956 that he had ‘invited Dr McMeekan, Director of Ruakura Animal Research Station, down to advise us’, and that he was ‘very good and helpful’. During Easter 1955 he had also ‘arranged that Gavin Brown [of the Lands Department] and his surveyor, a State Advances Corporation man and two Agriculture Department wool men should be on the block to give advice on a number of things, i.e. the siting of the wool shed, grassing, stocking, etc. – very helpful’. ^[11] This was not the last time that Holyoake deployed his officials to help him out at Kinloch. T.N. Gibbs must have known he was onto a good thing. As his biographer, Paul Goldsmith, observed: ‘It was not a bad idea to tie one’s fortunes to those of a future Prime Minister.’ ^[12]

The road construction: ‘marvels will never cease’

Advice on siting the wool shed was one thing, but what Whangamata Station really needed was road access. Just before Christmas 1953, according to Holyoake, Ian Gibbs had a track bulldozed from the Putaruru Road to the lake at the cost of £150. This track was improved from time to time, including a new piece in 1954 ‘from the top bluff almost due east to the Old Taupo Road’. The Lands Department, in the meantime, was developing the adjacent Oruanui Block and, wrote Holyoake, ‘decided and commenced to construct good roads out to and also a spur road down to our boundary. This latter was, of course, the beginning of the main road that was planned to cross Whangamata to and through the Tihoi Block.’ ^[13] Holyoake described this decision as something of an unexpected windfall for him and his partners:

We could scarcely believe our good fortune in this and, to add to it, we learned later in the year that the Department intended to continue its development programme further south and to come right up to our boundary where the road last mentioned joined the Whangamata station. …When this road work is completed it will mean that, instead of struggling along ten miles of track of our own making some of it steep and much of it rough – we will have very good roads up to our boundary and then less than four miles of fairly good and even going down to the lake. We felt that marvels would never cease. When we commenced operations less than three years before we could not have dreamed [that] civilization would come so close so quickly. Wonderful, and again wonderful, is all we could say.

In researching his biography of T.N. Gibbs, Goldsmith interviewed both the Secretary for Lands at the time, who claimed that Holyoake had applied considerable pressure to get the road started, and a Lands Department official (who later became Director-General of Agriculture), who recalled Holyoake ringing him one night and asking him to realign the road a mile further south so as to give easier access to Whangamata Station. In both cases Holyoake’s approaches paid off. Gustafson also noted the recollections of Harry Lapwood, the MP for Rotorua from 1960, who expressed concern to Holyoake about the ongoing rumours of impropriety and who felt there were people who believed Holyoake and his business partners were ‘exploiting the system’. ^[14] Goldsmith remarked upon Holyoake’s ‘great ingenuity for turning events to his advantage’ and the fact that many thought the road construction ‘had the smell of fish’ about it. ^[15]

Holyoake would have known for some time that the Crown was going to build roads to access the land being developed to the north and west of the lake. This was, he wrote in about 1958, ‘normal procedure in all similar land developments’. To that extent he knew a road would end up running ‘through Whangamata’ and indeed leading ‘round Lake Taupo’. ^[16] In September 1959 the Taupo Times reported that construction of a highway up the western side of the lake would soon commence, and added in October 1960 that ‘The actual construction of the new 33-mile highway is only incidental to the network of roads which must intersect the whole of the Western Bay area now that the development of the new farmlands is well under way.’ ^[17] It seems more than likely that the Deputy Prime Minister was well aware of all these impending developments. The question really boiled down to one of timing.

The purchase of Tihoi 3B1

In his comments in the silver jubilee history, Holyoake remarked that ‘In the early stages of our occupation of Whangamata Station we were often worried about who our neighbours on our west would be as the years went by. T.N.G. had suggested that to secure our position we should endeavour to purchase part of the Tihoi block No. 3 from the Maori owners.’ ^[18] Just quite what prompted this ‘worry’ is not clear, but it seems likely that the partners were concerned that the neighbouring level lakeside land in Whangamata Bay would be developed by others, thus potentially creating a rival market for their planned sale of holiday sections in Kinloch. The comment also seems to reveal an assumption on Holyoake’s part that Tihoi 3B1’s Māori owners would eventually be parted from their land; T.N. Gibbs’ suggestion was in essence to buy it before someone else did.

The owners of Tihoi 3B1 — a 769-acre block of land with twice the lake frontage at the head of the bay than that enjoyed by Whangamata Station — had long resisted sale. The Crown offered to buy the various partitions of Tihoi 3B in 1919 and a meeting of owners was summoned at Mōkai. At the meeting ‘The owners absolutely refused to entertain the proposal or even discuss it.’ It seems they might have been willing to sell, but not for the amount offered by the Crown. ^[19] The Crown tried again with an increased offer in 1920 and a further meeting of owners of 3B1 was called. On this occasion the owners requested at the outset that the meeting not proceed. ^[20] Undeterred, the Crown kept trying, motivated as it was by the ‘immensely valuable stands of matured standing timber’ on Tihoi 3B. ^[21] It was aided in this by its ability under section 363(1) of the Native Land Act 1909 (as well as similar provisions under successor legislation in 1931 and 1953) to prohibit for a period not exceeding one year all alienations (including leases) of proclaimed lands other than to it. ^[22] When the year was up it could simply reissue the proclamation. The Native Land Act 1931 removed reference to the proclamation remaining in force for a period not exceeding a year, thus meaning that an alienation restriction effectively became indefinite. Owners became starved of an income and usually relented to a sale. The Waitangi Tribunal has called these powers ‘draconian and completely unjustifiable in terms of the Treaty’. ^[23] This, however, is what the owners of Tihoi 3B were subjected to.

Alienation of the Tihoi 3B partitions was first so restricted on 17 June 1919. ^[24] Further restrictions followed in subsequent years, ^[25] including a proclamation in 1933 that remained in force for 23 years. ^[26] It was not until 28 March 1956 that the prohibition of alienation was finally revoked by Order in Council. ^[27] While 3B1 was only one of 15 partitions subject to the restrictions, the timing of the Order in Council does not appear to have been a coincidence. Moreover, Holyoake did not excuse himself from the Executive Council meeting that made the decision. ^[28] Having prevented the Tihoi 3B owners from gaining an income from their land for nearly four decades through these restrictions, and having acquired the bulk of Tihoi 3B in the process, ^[29] the Crown appears to have lifted the restrictions to enable a private sale to the Minister of Agriculture. On 19 March 1956 the assembled owners of Tihoi 3B1 agreed to sell their land to Holyoake.

In the early years of Whangamata Station, therefore, Tihoi 3B1 was not in danger of being sold (or even leased) to other private interests, because that was prohibited. By 1956, with its own purchasing programme complete, the Government should in theory have been looking at ways to assist the block’s Māori owners to develop the land rather than lifting the alienation restrictions to allow a private purchase. As the Minister of Māori Affairs of the time, Ernest Corbett, said in 1954, his aim was to ‘assure for Maori settlers a good title to their farms, to assist them to develop the land, to teach them modern methods, and to establish farming as a way of life that can be regarded as economically and socially rewarding’. ^[30]

The alienation of 3B1 did not represent a significant diminution of the remaining Ngāti Tūwharetoa estate, which was larger at the time than that retained by most other iwi. But the Crown’s vigorous purchasing in the Tihoi and neighbouring blocks had left 3B1 as one of the few small parcels of Māori-owned land between Kawakawa Bay and the township of Taupō. Isolated and without road access, and without any means for the owners to develop it, it was vulnerable to sale. That vulnerability was realized in 1956.

Holyoake commissioned his friend Jack Asher to act as his agent in the 3B1 transaction. Asher was a member of Ngāti Pūkenga and Ngāti Pikiao who had married into Ngāti Tūwharetoa and lived at Tokaanu. On 21 September 1955 he wrote to the registrar of the Māori Land Court in Rotorua attaching an application for a meeting of owners of Tihoi 3B1 to consider a sale to Holyoake’s son Roger. The name of Holyoake’s other son, Peter, had originally been entered on the application but was crossed out and replaced with his brother’s. Asher sought a valuation of the block, which was issued by the Valuation Department on 17 October 1955 and assessed at £1080. Despite this, Asher told the court ‘we will offer not less than £2 per acre’. ^[31]

On the face of it, Holyoake and Asher had absolutely no business in initiating the purchase of 3B1. The law clearly disallowed any negotiation over land subject to an alienation restriction in favour of the Crown. Section 256(1) of the Maori Affairs Act 1953 stated that ‘Every person who, after the gazetting of any such Order in Council, and during the currency thereof, enters into or continues (whether on his own behalf or on behalf of any other person) any negotiations in breach of the Order in Council shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or to a fine not exceeding two hundred pounds.’ It is a moot point as to why the activities of Holyoake and Asher were not deemed by the Māori Land Court to be in contravention of this Act.

While Holyoake was determined to set his sons up in farms of their own, as Gustafson relates, ^[32] it seems that the reason Roger Holyoake was nominated as the purchaser of 3B1 was to circumvent section 227(1)(c) of the Maori Affairs Act 1953 which stated that the Māori Land Court could not confirm a sale of land unless it was satisfied that ‘the alienation, if completed, would not result in the undue aggregation of farm land’. This clause was to be read in conjunction with the provisions of the Land Settlement Promotion Act 1952, which in section 31 defined ‘undue aggregation’ as an increase in land ownership that would be considered ‘by ordinary and reasonable standards’ to be ‘excessive’ or more than necessary to support the farmer and his family ‘in a reasonable standard of comfort’.

Asher’s application was heard on 14 November 1955, months before the alienation restriction was lifted. He told the court that Roger Holyoake was ‘a young man serving his cadetship in a farm at Taumarunui. … He has no farm land. … The father of the applicant is interested in the company which is breaking in the adjoining land.’ Judge John Harvey referred the matter to the Māori Affairs Department’s land utilisation officer ‘for a full report’ and noted that ‘The applicant is required to file a declaration that the proposed sale will not contravene the provision in the act aimed at preventing undue aggregation of farm land.’ ^[33] Roger Holyoake signed his statutory declaration on 30 December 1955. In it he affirmed, amongst other things:

3. That at the said date [20 September 1955, the date of the application for the meeting of owners] I did not hold any land as the beneficial owner, lessee, or otherwise thereof, whether jointly or in common with any other person,
4. That I am acquiring the land stated in the said application for purchase solely for my own use and benefit, and not directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person
And I make this solemn declaration conscientiously believing the same to be true, and by virtue of the Justices of the Peace Act, 1908.

This statement bears some scrutiny. The 20-year old Roger held a one-sixteenth share in the adjoining Whangamata Station partnership, rather than in the land itself, which may possibly mean that his declaration that he held no land interests was correct. But he clearly was not acquiring the land solely for his own use and benefit. Holyoake wrote at some point, presumably late in 1956, that ‘This block, 700 acres, was acquired by Roger during the year. … After some reservation of lake frontage the block will be included with Whangamata station in the partnership.’ ^[34] In addition, the Department of Statistics wrote to the Department of Māori Affairs on 2 May 1958 seeking farm production statistics for Tihoi 3B1 prior to its recent sale. The letter explained that advice had been received ‘from Whangamata Station that they have purchased an additional 769 acres – Tihoi 3B No. 1.’ ^[35]

Amongst Holyoake’s papers there is also an agreement between the Whangamata Station partners of March 1959, which states that, ‘In view of present urgent requirements for finance for the carrying on of the farming project’ there would, inter alia, be ‘a transfer’ of part of the purchased Tihoi 3B1 Block. Most tellingly, the agreement stated that ‘The Tihoi 3B Block of 769 acres was acquired by Roger Holyoake with funds provided by the partnership and he will when called upon transfer the area to the partnership.’ ^[36] Holyoake senior himself sent the payment to the registrar of the Māori Land Court on 10 August 1956, writing his covering letter on ‘Office of the Minister of Agriculture’ letterhead. ^[37]

There may have been additional reasons for Roger Holyoake being chosen as the purchaser of Tihoi 3B1. T.N. Gibbs apparently decided that Holyoake senior’s name should best be left off the title to Whangamata Station (see below), and the same reasoning may have been applied to the ownership of Tihoi 3B1. As noted above, the title to Whangamata Station was registered in November 1953 in the names of T.N. and Ian Gibbs only, despite the Whangamata Station partnership having been formalised the previous month.

The association of Holyoake with the goings-on at Kinloch was clearly a matter of some sensitivity. When a farmer from the Waikato wrote to Holyoake in March 1958 inquiring about the availability of holiday sections at Kinloch, Holyoake wrote back to him pointedly that ‘You refer to this as my farm, whereas in actual fact I am only one of a group of twelve people interested in the development of this property.’ ^[38]

Further improprieties in the sale

As noted, the land utilisation officer was asked by the court to provide a report on the block. The officer, Murray Linton, received this instruction on 21 November 1955. By mid-January his report had still not been completed and this led to a letter to Linton from John Grace, the private secretary to the Minister of Māori Affairs, asking him to hurry up. ^[39] Grace was a member of Ngāti Tūwharetoa himself and, like Asher, a friend of Holyoake’s. ^[40]

Linton completed his report on 27 January 1956. In it he described the block as ‘an isolated piece of Maori land. … 3B1 has no access unless it can be arranged with the Crown when development to the north takes place. The area would make a very good economic unit when developed as it is fairly well watered and has a carrying capacity of 2 ewes per acre.’ Bearing in mind Corbett’s statement of intent in 1954 about Māori being assisted to farm their own land, this comment alone should have called the sale into question. Crucially, Linton also made the following observations:

There appears to be about 20 chains of very good beach frontage at the eastern edge of the block. I should think that sections here would lease very readily though access would necessarily be by water. I have some recollection of hearing that proposals were in mind for the subdivision of the beach frontage adjoining but no scheme plan has yet been lodged. The amount by which this potential subdivision area would enhance the value of the block is the only complication I can see in the proposals.

In other words, Linton described the land in favourable terms, with poor access but good potential for future development. Moreover, the Holyoake-Gibbs plans for holiday sections next-door would have raised its value, especially given its good area of beach frontage.

In the meantime, Asher forwarded Roger Holyoake’s statutory declaration and asked how soon the meeting of owners could be called. An annotation from Linton dated 27 January 1956 appears on the bottom of Asher’s letter. It states: ‘Report herewith. See Judge Prichard re calling meeting of owners – Perhaps Court will require to know if Lands Dept will be developing in area & so open the land up for Maori farming – Please ascertain[.]’ ^[41] Nevertheless, Judge Ivor Prichard consented to the application to call a meeting of owners and Asher was informed on 6 February 1956. He was also invited to ‘advise a date sometime after the 1st March and a place most suitable to the majority of the owners concerned’. ^[42] A copy of this letter was forwarded to John Grace so he could be kept informed. Asher replied on 28 February 1956 and explained that Holyoake would attend on behalf of his son. Asher gave several dates in mid and late March that Holyoake could attend a sitting in Tokaanu. ^[43] The meeting was accordingly set down for 19 March 1956.

Notice of the meeting was given on 1 March, which gave owners 18 days to make arrangements to attend or be represented by proxies. It is clear that some lived in Tokaanu, but they were not the majority. ^[44] For whatever reason, when the meeting took place only six owners were present out of a total of 51. A further five voted by proxy, with their votes having been collected and witnessed by Asher himself in the preceding days. ^[45] At this stage, of course, the alienation restriction was still in place.

At the meeting Hepi Te Heuheu welcomed Holyoake and stated that the owners had debated the matter at length and had come to a decision ‘favourable’ to Holyoake. Said Te Heuheu: ‘We are very pleased and proud to think that your visit today will commence a long association with Tuwharetoa. I might say that our decision is unique, as in most cases L.s.d is the main factor, but in this case we have taken you as a man into consideration, & we have decided to approve of the resolution.’ Tuhi Te Waha then said the decision had been ‘unanimous’: ‘Hepi our chief has already expressed our good wishes to you, and I can only endorse what he has said. I must also congratulate the owners on their decision, and formally second the motion.’ The resolution was carried and Holyoake ‘spoke at length thanking the owners’. ^[46]

While Hepi Te Heuheu, ariki of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and chair of the Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board, was a person of considerable authority, the owners were not unanimous about the sale. The Māori Land Board in Rotorua received an urgent telegramme on the afternoon of the meeting from Rore Rangiheuea, of Foxton, who owned a 34.6 acre share of the block, stating ‘Will not sell Tihoi 3B1’. But such a protest was forlorn, for all that was needed to pass the motion was a vote in favour by a majority (in terms of shares held) of those who voted. ^[47] The interests of those present or represented by proxies amounted to only 218 acres out of 769.

The confirmation hearing took place on 12 July 1956. Asher is recorded as telling the court: ‘It is a precipice to beach. No access. No beach value whatever. The family will be an acquisition to the district.’ ^[48] Judge Prichard duly confirmed the sale. But Asher’s advice to the court was in marked contradiction of Linton’s assessment earlier in the year. It is not possible from the limited court minutes to know the context of Asher’s remarks. He seems to be justifying the purchase price and emphasizing why sale made sense. But he may even have been directly disputing Linton’s description. If this is so, Prichard evidently took his word for it rather than that of the Māori Affairs Department’s own land utilisation officer.

“Keith Holyoake (centre) of the National Party tours his orchard at Umukurī, near Motueka, in 1949. (The man without a tie is Anthony Eden then deputy leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom who went on to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1957). Holyoake was a member of Parliament in the 1930s, and was dubbed ‘minister of tobacco’ as he lobbied on behalf of the tobacco growers of his region. ” Source : Te Ara/Alexander Turnbull Library

Dissatisfaction over the sale

Goldsmith noted that the sale ‘created a stir in the local community’, and the ‘quick appearance of a road opening up the area heightened the irritation of those Maori owners who had opposed the sale of 3B1’. ^[49] This is no wonder: the owners had needed roads for decades. At the Native Land Court partition hearing of Tihoi 3B in 1915, Tuturu Honetere Paerata had told Judge Browne:

We have arranged a partition of this block but I would first ask that roads be laid off as follows
1 To branch off the Taupo Oruanui Road to run in a westerly direction to the Waihaha Block
2 To branch off from the Atiamuri Road and to run South West through the Block so as to join Road No 1, and then to branch off to Kakaho.
3 Branch from the Atiamuri Road so as to give access to 3B No 1

In 1956, however, 3B1 remained isolated and landlocked.

In August 1964 N. Z. Truth published a front-page story about the establishment of Kinloch under the title ‘PM in hush-hush deal’. The item mentioned the construction of the highway and the purchase of Tihoi 3B1 by Roger Holyoake. The main thust of the story seems to have been that the extent of the Prime Minister’s involvement had not been revealed. T.N. Gibbs was reported as saying, for example, that Holyoake’s name was kept off the title to Whangamata No. 1 to avoid the public jumping ‘to the wrong conclusions’. The article concluded: ‘The pity of the affair is the secrecy that has surrounded its promotion. Had the venture been carried out in an open straightforward manner there would have been no encouragement for the tide of whispered suspicions that high-level participation has made the Kinloch scheme tick.’ ^[50]

Taupō’s mayor, J.E. Story, was quick to leap to Holyoake’s defence, arguing in the subsequent edition of Truth that the Kinloch development was taking place on lands that had long been idle: ‘The central part of the North Island has been a no-man’s land long enough. Any development within 30 miles of our town is to our benefit — so the Prime Minister or anyone else is welcome to take any interest.’ Truth responded that Story had ‘missed the whole point’ of its article, ‘which was: Why was Mr. Holyoake’s name not recorded on the title of the land?’ ^[51]

Writing in 1995, journalist Ross Annabell — who had covered the development of Kinloch in the 1960s — first described the extent of Māori disquiet about the loss of Tihoi 3B1. ^[52] He quoted from a ‘press statement no newspaper would publish’ issued at the time by Paani Otene, who was secretary of the Waipahihi Māori Tribal Committee. Otene wrote that the interests of the majority of the owners had been overlooked:

The proceedings revealed by the Maori Land Court files are surprising — such an attitude by the Elders when considering other owners’ interests may have been custom a hundred years ago but is certainly not custom today. The days of the tomahawk and red blanket have gone. The absence of so many of the owners is not surprising when one considers the over-aweing presence of a Minister of the Crown so far as a simple Maori is concerned. Of course, not many Europeans would dream of taking advantage of position and circumstances to obtain Maori land interests at the nominal Government valuation as has happened in this instance. But the whole thing is a pity — it does not help inter-racial harmony.

Annabell received a copy of this statement from C.J.N. Newbold, a Labour Party official who was attempting to expose what he saw as Holyoake’s questionable ethics. Annabell submitted stories about the Tihoi 3B1 transaction over the years, but it was not until the Independent published him in 1995 that a newspaper finally agreed to run the story. ^[53] That year Māori occupying Moutoa Gardens in Whanganui replaced the head on John Ballance’s statue with a pumpkin in protest at his treatment of Māori in the nineteenth century. Annabell suggested they may have got ‘the wrong guy’. ^[54]

Annabell retains in his possession a statement written by Newbold in September 1964 in response to both the Truth article about Holyoake and the defence mounted by Mayor Story. Newbold wrote: ‘I feel these gentlemen should be taken to task on this vital question of ethics that concerns all people of principle, a question above party politics’. He continued:

The point at issue is: Not whether Mr Roger Holyoake contrived to obtain Maori Land Court sanction to the sale of a valuable 700 acre block of lake front land at a reported £2 per acre, although this is of course of considerable public interest; not whether a syndicate purchased a valuable block of lake front land from an afforestation company at a reported 14/– an acre, although this is possibly of interest to the ordinary shareholders of that company; not whether a Prime Minister should participate in land development in the Taupo district — of course he should provided all is fair; not whether Lands and Survey or any public money provided roading in the area, although this is also of considerable public interest; but whether any person in public office should, with the extra knowledge that must inevitably be available to them, participate in land dealing, speculation or the acquisition of wealth in such a manner.

Newbold may have been the Truth letter-writer who was published on 29 September 1964 under the name ‘Interested Party’ of Taupō. This correspondent wrote that the Labour Party ‘was advised of the transaction and of the names of those concerned immediately following the purchase of the land’ but ‘Labour Party leaders’ decided to ‘take no action on the matter’. The ‘whole business’, stated the writer, ‘reflects no credit on either party, National or Labour’. ^[55]

Over the years interest in Holyoake’s acquisition of Tihoi 3B1 has not gone away. The registrar of the Māori Land Court in Rotorua, Henry Colbert, wrote a memorandum to the court’s head office on 6 November 1985, attaching the key documents from the Tihoi 3B1 alienation file (including Linton’s report, Roger Holyoake’s statutory declaration, and the minutes of the 19 March 1956 meeting) and rather cryptically stating that ‘These extracts paint a crystal clear portrait.’ Colbert also referred to his colleague Harris Martin recalling ‘the File being called on a[s] regularly as Elections’. ^[56] On the file, as well, someone has added underlining to Linton’s remark about the ‘20 chains of very good beach frontage’ enjoyed by Tihoi 3B1.

There are two claims to the Waitangi Tribunal that raise grievances about Kinloch, both filed in 2004 by Tawiri-o-te-rangi Hakopa on behalf of Ngāti Parekawa, Ngāti Te Kohera, Ngāti Wairangi and other hapū. ^[57] Hakopa held an 11-acre share of Tihoi 3B1 at the time of the sale to Holyoake and was not amongst the 11 owners who participated in the transaction. In evidence to the Tribunal’s Central North Island inquiry, Hakopa explained the long-term isolation of Tihoi 3B and the alienation restrictions imposed upon it and added that, after decades of this, ‘Holyoake purchased the Tihoi Block 3[B1], and then the Western Lakes highway was put through to Kinloch across the Crown’s lands. As a result the value of Tihoi Block 3[B1] rose enormously because it included over 20 chains of Lakeside land.’ ^[58] In a further statement, Hakopa queried the legality of the Māori Land Court process given the prevailing alienation restriction, and asked ‘did the status of the purchaser (he did attend the meeting of owners on 19th March 1956 although he was not going to be the eventual owner) have any influence on any of the aforementioned proceedings[?]’ With respect to the 37 years of prohibition on alienation, Hakopa wrote ‘Sounds like legal raupatu to me.’ ^[59]

Kinloch’s growth: a ‘long association’?

The first sections sold in Kinloch in 1959. Sales were ‘phenomenally rapid’, according to the Taupō County Commissioner, with prices ranging from £550 to £1500. ^[60] One 32-perch section, therefore, sold for about the same amount that the 769 acres of Tihoi 3B1 had sold for three years earlier. Kinloch’s transformation from isolated rural land to a playground for the well-off had begun. The partners’ early intention was certainly to subdivide 3B1 when the opportunity arose, although in March 1959 they agreed ‘that any subdivision and sale of land in the Tihoi block west of Whangamata Stream shall be deferred until a more substantial area of Whangamata No 1 (say 300/400 sections) is subdivided and sold’. ^[61]

In December 1960 the partners in Tihoi 3B1 advised the Taupō County Council of their plans for the second stage of the subdivision, which they felt would need to be at least 150 sections ‘over and above those already provided for on the scheme plan’. The response of Mr U.R. MacDonald was that the developers should be told ‘in no uncertain manner that [they] would have the county’s support on the proposals’. Said MacDonald: ‘There should be no doubt in their minds that we will be right behind them. We should put no arbitrary limit on the number of sections they want.’ ^[62] A 1973 proposal for an additional 500-600 sections (including the use of Tihoi 3B1), however, was rejected by a council planner because it made ‘little reflection on landuse proposals and neither relates a comprehensive policy necessary for co-ordinated and orderly development’. The partners’ problem was that ‘environmental protection for both the Lake and its environs’ had become a significant issue in planning policy. ^[63]

It was only a matter of time, though, until holiday homes covered parts of the former Tihoi 3B1. Plans were revealed for a major extension of Kinloch on the north-western side of the Whangamata Stream in early 2001, prompting vehement opposition from existing residents. But approval was granted by the Taupō District Council and Environment Waikato in July of that year. When the six lakefront sections in the ‘Holy Oaks’ subdivision (on what was Tihoi 3B1’s ‘very good beach frontage’ that would lease readily for sections, according to Linton in 1956) were auctioned in early 2002, they fetched prices of between $555,000 and $630,000 each. ^[64] The latter sum was nearly ten times the equivalent payment for the entire Tihoi 3B1 block in 1956.

A representative of local Māori, Sam Andrews, told a gathering of Kinloch residents in February 2001 that Māori were concerned about impacts on the Whangamata Stream of the proposed Holy Oaks development. The developers (Lisland Properties Ltd, who had acquired the land in the 1990s), he said, had not consulted with them. ^[65] Effectively, Māori had been reduced to mere supplicants, along with other members of the public, during council-run consent processes over Kinloch’s development. The Tihoi 3B1 sellers do not seem to have enjoyed the mutually beneficial relationship (the ‘long association’ with Holyoake) that Hepi Te Heuheu hoped for in 1956. Within a few years of the sale of 3B1 the Whangamata Station partnership was promoting Kinloch sections in such a manner that makes this unlikely. Said one brochure:

Around the shoreline of Whangamata Bay itself and within 20 minutes by small boat from the marina are many small beaches backing into bush and these are perfect for swimming and family picnic trips. For those requiring more of a challenge, cliff climbing and cave exploration both on the Whangamata headland to the east and the Te Kauae point headlands to the west provide the opportunity as does hunting in the undeveloped portion of Whangamata Bay. Several caves in the cliffs referred to still contain skeletons and human remains and it is certain that exploration will provide interesting finds. For those with an interest in geology or Maori history this is a rich field.

Te Heuheu, Asher and Grace, for all their National Party connections ^[66] and strong support for Holyoake, would surely have cringed at this, even though Te Heuheu defended Holyoake stoutly in a letter published in Truth on 15 September 1964. ^[67] The new owners promoting the sale of holiday sections through extolling the opportunities for fossicking in Māori graves was certainly not something the Tihoi 3B1 sellers would have been contemplating in 1956.

More broadly, Ngāti Tūwharetoa undoubtedly felt greatly aggrieved by the passage by Holyoake’s government of the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, under which the title to Māori land with fewer than five owners was Europeanised. Te Heuheu was amongst those who strongly opposed the introduction of this legislation, seconding a resolution by the chair of the Te Arawa Trust Board that unsuccessfully sought a delay of 12 months to give Māori more time to consider the ‘revolutionary changes’ in the Bill. ^[68] As Gustafson himself has written with respect to the Act, it ‘damaged National’s reputation among the Maori and started a major campaign of opposition from many younger Maoris’. ^[69] As it happens, the 1967 Act followed a government-appointed inquiry into Māori land laws by no other than Ivor Prichard. ^[70] Like Asher, who was awarded an OBE by Holyoake’s government in 1965 ^[71], Prichard had received a CBE in 1964. ^[72]

Influence and favours

All of this begs the question as to just when both ministerial insider trading (as one might describe the purchase of Tihoi 3B1, given Holyoake’s almost certain knowledge that a road would shortly end the land’s isolation) and the pulling of official favours become impropriety. Holyoake seems to have walked the line like an art form. When the Kinloch marina was completed in 1962 — having set the partners back some £35,000 — Ian Gibbs wondered if Holyoake might perform the official opening, although he acknowledged ‘you may well feel that it would be inappropriate because of your financial interest in the project’. Holyoake must have felt so too: as he told Ian Gibbs, ‘I have been trying, but unsuccessfully, to have one of my Cabinet colleagues perform the opening ceremony’. In the end he resorted to Lapwood as the local MP, who readily agreed. He wrote to Lapwood that ‘You know how interested I am in this project but it would be quite inappropriate for me to take a prominent part at the official opening and I can think of no safer course than to ask the local member.’ ^[73]

Marina opening in May 1962 – ‘Hamer family collection’ – Click for big version

Holyoake enlisted the help of his ministers over Kinloch on other occasions. In May 1967, Ian Gibbs wrote to Holyoake explaining his ongoing efforts to deal with the problems of algae and weed in the marina. He said that he had been in contact with Acquatic Controls Corporation of Wisconsin and suggested to Holyoake that ‘an evaluation of the equipment’ this company offered might be ‘opportune and beneficial’. Holyoake had Brian Talboys, his Minister of Agriculture and Science, provide him with a reply to Gibbs. When this was received, however, Holyoake sent it back with a note from his principal private secretary, Phil Barnes, to the effect that Gibbs’ questions had not been properly answered. Wrote Barnes, ‘I am asked to point out that Mr Gibbs asked for an evaluation of the mechanical equipment offered by Acquatic Controls. The Prime Minister would also appreciate information on the possibility of this kind of equipment being imported and used under contract operation for the various authorities and interested parties. Could you please arrange for an alternative draft to be submitted to the Prime Minister?’

Several weeks later the alternative reply was furnished, but Holyoake thought it little better than the first. He wrote a letter to Talboys again asking for a ‘full and detailed evaluation’ of the efficiency of the Acquatic Controls Corporation equipment as well as the expense involved in purchasing it. In the meantime, in July 1967, Holyoake wrote to Ian Gibbs, apologising for the delay and suggesting he might consult directly with L. J. Matthews of the Ruakura Agricultural Research Centre. Holyoake was sure Matthews ‘would be glad to talk to you about the possibility of designing a suitable chemical control programme for our area at Kinloch’. Talboys eventually forwarded Holyoake a report by Matthews on ‘water weed in the Kinloch area’ in November 1967. ^[74]

Due to growing concerns in the 1950s and 1960s about the quality of water in Lake Taupō, in 1968 Holyoake’s Government established the Taupo Basin reserves scheme. The scheme was designed to create lakeside reserves in order to reduce the sedimentation and nitrate loading of the lake being caused by bush clearance and the fertilising of pasture. Some 22,000 acres of the 38,000 acres of land earmarked for inclusion in the scheme were Māori land, along with 13,000 acres of Crown land and 2500 acres of private freehold land. ^[75] This latter component included parts of both the former Whangamata and Tihoi blocks belonging to the Whangamata Station partners. The scheme was ultimately a failure, not in the least because of the extent of Maori opposition. But Holyoake and Ian Gibbs resisted as well, disputing Crown valuations and being particular about the type of land they would be prepared to accept in exchange.

Holyoake hardly kept his private interest in the matter separate from his public office. In 1971 he wrote several letters to the Director-General of Lands concerning his affected landholdings on Prime Ministerial letterhead, in which he expressed growing impatience over the pace of negotiations. When he returned to office with the Muldoon Government in 1975 as Minister of State, he did likewise, beginning one letter on Minister of State letterhead ‘Once again I am writing on behalf of the Whangamata Station partnership.’ Apparently without irony, he wrote on ministerial letterhead to his colleague, the Minister of Lands, on 28 July 1976 that ‘I have tried to deal with [the negotiations] in the normal manner as between a private citizen and a Department of State.’ In fact during his tenure as Prime Minister the division between his roles as an affected private landowner and the leader of the Government responsible for the scheme must have seemed rather blurred. On 13 August 1971 the Director-General of Lands annotated a memorandum concerning valuations of the Holyoake and Gibbs’ land ‘Minister [of Lands] rang – P.M. getting restive’. In November 1969 the Prime Minister’s office asked the Lands Department ‘for the current situation with Taupo Basin Coordinating Committee’, although it seems just as likely Holyoake’s request on this occasion arose from his private interests as from his Prime Ministership. ^[76]

There were, in fact, rules in the 1960s to guide ministers of the Crown over conflicts of interest. Elizabeth McLeay notes that, in 1954, Dean Eyre, the Minister of both Customs as well as Industries and Commerce, proposed to travel overseas in connection with his business as an importer. Sensing the potential for the perception of a conflict of interest, Prime Minister Sid Holland swapped his ministerial portfolios with those of the Minister of Social Welfare. Holland explained that ‘In public administration it is important that the actions of Ministers should not only be right in themselves, but that they should manifestly appear to be so to the man in the street.’ ^[77]

As an upshot of Eyre’s exchange of portfolios, a select committee was set up to establish written rules about ministers’ business interests. The committee was formed in April 1956, during Holyoake’s purchase of Tihoi 3B1, and reported on 25 October the same year. Its guidelines remained current until they were subjected to some amendments in 1990. ^[78] Holyoake sat on the committee, which established two ‘basic principles’. The first of these was that ‘A Minister must ensure that no conflict exists, or appears to exist, between his public duty and his private interests.’ By way of further explanation, the committee stated that the minister ‘should not allow a situation to arise in which his personal or private interests interfere with the proper performance of the duties of his office’. The second principle was that ‘A Minister of the Crown is expected to devote his time and his talents to the carrying out of his public duties.’ ^[79]

The committee then set out a series of rules to be followed in the application of the principles. Most notably, in Holyoake’s case, one of these stated that ‘A Minister who, prior to assuming office under the Crown, was engaged in the conduct of his own business whether alone, in partnership, or as an incorporated company, should cease to carry on the daily routine work of the business or to take an active part in its day to day management.’ The committee noted that, while the principles were not rules of law, they nonetheless ‘set the standard which Parliament and the people expect a Minister of the Crown to observe’. ^[80]

Holyoake thus subscribed to principles of behaviour that he arguably failed to live up to himself, given his active involvement in the Kinloch partnership ^[81], even if his business activities there began while already a minister. Looking back in 1983, the rules’ principal author, Sir John Marshall (who had been Attorney-General in 1956), reflected that ‘It is my experience that the rules are observed both in the letter, and the spirit. Our political life is happily free from public scandal, and Ministers do not end up as rich men.’ ^[82]

Kinloch aside, Holyoake tried to help his business partners in other ways. He corresponded with the Ministers of Industries and Commerce (Marshall) and Customs (Norman Shelton) in 1968 to assist Ian Gibbs in his development of the ‘Nova’ car. ^[83] In 1969 he supported Ian Gibbs in his approach to the Minister of Immigration (Tom Shand) to bring in Fijian labour to cut gorse on Gibbs’ Weiti Station property. ^[84] Holyoake was obviously also influential in Ian Gibbs securing Colombo Plan funds to design a road in Indonesia. The latter wrote to him on 24 April 1970 registering ‘my appreciation of your rapid and favourable decision in regard to the expenditure of Colombo Plan money in design of the Telukbetung-Sumur Road in Sumatra and the provision of specialists for cattle farming in the Eastern Isles of Indonesia and the Sulawesi’. ^[85] Holyoake even put a word in with the New Zealand High Commissioner in London in 1957 to support T. N. Gibbs’ daughter Wendelin’s application for presentation at a Royal Garden Party. ^[86] And in 1968, when T. N. Gibbs asked Holyoake for help when he moved into a new home in Auckland and was told that the Post Office would not connect his phone for six to eight weeks, Holyoake’s intervention saw it connected the following week. ^[87]

With respect to Kinloch specifically, Goldsmith noted that Holyoake felt the addition of Tihoi 3B1 had been ‘crucial to the whole enterprise and could only have been secured through his influence’. ^[88] But as Goldsmith’s research shows, the benefits went both ways. During an undated disagreement between the Whangamata Station partners, in which T. N. Gibbs evidently felt Holyoake was being selfish, Gibbs senior wrote to him that ‘You have benefited handsomely – indeed terrifically from the Gibbs efforts … there is so much money to be reaped from these efforts that a few thousands either way should not be an issue ….’ ^[89]

Conclusion

The influence of Kinloch has not vanished entirely from our political landscape. In her maiden speech to Parliament in 2005, National MP Paula Bennett explained that:

Although born in Auckland, I grew up in Kinloch, a beautiful bay on the shores of Lake Taupō where I learnt to fish and hunt and had a relatively carefree and easy childhood. ^[90]

Bennett’s father had run the Kinloch Store, a business established by the Whangamata Station partnership. And in 2010 Labour MP Trevor Mallard told Parliament, in an attack on Finance Minister Bill English over the latter’s ministerial living allowance payments, that for examples of such ‘false declarations in order to personally benefit’ one otherwise had to:

go back to Keith Holyoake’s time, [when] some of the actions of that Government were slightly questionable, especially to do with the western access road round Taupō and the personal benefit that the then Prime Minister gained from the opening up of Kinloch. ^[91]

In current publicity for another new subdivision at Kinloch, ‘Loch Eagles’, the developers inform potential purchasers that ‘Kinloch stands today as a testament to the clear foresight of [a] New Zealand Prime Minister’s magnificent early vision’. ^[92] While Holyoake did regard Kinloch as his proudest achievement, many of his dealings over it were at least at the edge of impropriety. Apart from the fortuitous road construction, his deployment of government resources to maximize the success of his investments was at times dubious. After 1956 his conduct was arguably in breach of the rules of ministerial behaviour that he helped write — while before that date it might itself have been the prompt for the very formulation of such rules, had the Prime Minister been aware of it or had it attracted publicity.

There is, of course, also the purchase of Māori land that Holyoake orchestrated, which has left a sense of grievance amongst local Māori to this day. By seeking to initiate a purchase when such an approach was disallowed, and having his son buy the land for him because of provisions about the undue aggregation of farmland, Holyoake was arguably circumventing the law. Nor does his participation in the Executive Council decision that allowed his purchase of Tihoi 3B1 to go ahead appear to have been appropriate.

At Kinloch, Holyoake took his place in the tradition of New Zealand politicians who have mixed official business with the personal acquisition of Māori land. ^[93] But while such activity was practically standard behaviour in the nineteenth century, ^[94] the rules around conflicts of interest for ministers in the 1950s and 1960s were not significantly different to those enshrined today in the Cabinet Manual, albeit with the important addition in 1990 of the register of ministers’ pecuniary interests. ^[95] This change aside, the level of public scrutiny of politicians today is clearly different, and a minister acting in a similar manner to Holyoake would likely come unstuck rather quickly. Nick Smith’s downfall is evidence enough of that. That is as much a reflection on changing times as it is on Holyoake himself; in his day a different culture clearly prevailed — despite the advent, even, of the 1956 rules. In the climate of the day Newbold got no traction, Otene’s complaint fell on deaf ears, and Annabell could not find a publisher for his story. Only Truth brought the matter to public attention.

In reflecting on Kiwi Keith and Kinloch we are, perhaps, left to decide whether John Marshall was right to say that ‘Ministers do not end up as rich men’. At Kinloch, at least, there was, as Gibbs noted in his chiding letter to Holyoake, ‘so much money to be reaped…’

An earlier, shorter version of this article, entitled ‘Kiwi Keith and Kinloch: A Closer Look at Holyoake’s “Proudest Achievement”’ was published in 2010 in the New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 44, no. 2, pp.157-173.

Kinloch location map – source Google Maps

Notes:
1. Barry Gustafson, Kiwi Keith: A Biography of Keith Holyoake, Auckland, 2007, p.88.
2. Michael Bassett, ‘Day of the Locusts’, New Zealand Listener, 211, 3,527 (16 December 2007), p.34.
3. Keith Holyoake, ‘Early development of Whangamata Station’, in Kinloch: A History of Kinloch Published in Conjunction with the Kinloch Silver Jubilee 1959-1984, Kinloch, 1998, pp.5–6.
4. ‘Whangamata Block No. 1 History’ (1959), Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (ATL); Holyoake, p.4.
5. Certificate of title 625/111, Land Registry Office, Wellington.
6. ‘Whangamata Block No. 1 History’ (1959), Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, ATL; Holyoake, pp.4, 6.
7. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, ATL.
8. Fawcett wrote that he was responding to a phone call from Holyoake.
9. There appears to be £10,000 missing from this calculation.
10. ‘Whangamata Estimates of financial outlay’, no date, Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814:87/4, ATL.
11. Holyoake, pp.8, 11.
12. Paul Goldsmith, T. N. Gibbs, Auckland, 2002, pp.99–100.
13. Holyoake, pp.6, 7, 11.
14. Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, pp.83–84.
15. Goldsmith, pp.102, 103.
16. ‘Whangamata Block No. 1 History’ (1959), Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, ATL
17. ‘Confirmation of plans for west lake road’, Taupo Times, 24 September 1959, p.1; ‘Back country could be brought closer to Taupo’, Taupo Times, 4 October 1960, p.1.
18. Holyoake, p.10.
19. T. Anaru (representative of the Board) to president, Waiariki District Māori Land Board, 9 December 1919, Māori Affairs file MA 12/9773, held at Māori Land Court, Rotorua.
20. Herbert R. Macdonald (representative of the board) to president, Waiariki District Māori Land Board, 6 July 1920, MA 12/9773.
21. Director of Forestry to Commissioner of State Forests, 29 March 1928. Quoted in Terry Hearn, Taupo-Kaingaroa Twentieth Century Overview: Land Alienation and Land Administration 1900-1993, report commissioned by the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, September 2004 (Waitangi Tribunal Wai 1200 inquiry document A68) , pp.321–2.
22. See section 442(1) of the Native Land Act 1931 and section 254(1) of the Maori Affairs Act 1953.
23. Waitangi Tribunal, Mohaka ki Ahuriri Report, Wellington, 2004, II, p.689.
24. New Zealand Gazette, 19 June 1919, p.1842.
25. See, for example, New Zealand Gazette, 10 April 1930, p.1131.
26. New Zealand Gazette, 13 April 1933, p.736. See also Hearn, pp.321–2.
27. New Zealand Gazette, 5 April 1956, p.476.
28. Minutes of Executive Council meeting of 28 March 1956, Executive Council (EC) 1/44, National Archives (NA), Wellington.
29. See Hearn, p.322.
30. Department of Maori Affairs, Annual Report, 1954, quoted in Waitangi Tribunal, He Maunga Rongo: Report on the Central North Island Claims, Wellington, 2008, III, p.901.
31. MA 12/9773.
32. Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, p.85.
33. MA 12/9773.
34. Holyoake, p.10.
35. MA 12/9773.
36. ‘Whangamata Station. Treatment of “excluded areas”’, March 1959, Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, ATL.
37. MA 12/9773.
38. Les Thomsen, Taupiri, to Holyoake, 31 March 1958, and Holyoake to Thomsen, 14 April 1958. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 82/1. It is not clear who all the 11 other people are that Holyoake refers to, unless they are the members of his and the Gibbs families.
39. J. H. Grace to Murray Linton, 13 January 1956, MA 12/9773.
40. The description of Grace and Asher as Holyoake’s friends is Gustafson’s. Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, p.82.
41. J.A. Asher to registrar, Waiariki Māori Land Board, 17 January 1956, MA 12/9773.
42. District Officer to J.A. Asher, 6 February 1956, MA 12/9773.
43. J.A. Asher to registrar, Department of Māori Affairs, Wellington, 28 February 1956, MA 12/9773.
44. According to court records, in September 1955 owners for whom addresses were known were dispersed between Rātana Pā (1), Foxton (4), Moawhango/Taihape (9), Mōkai (1), Taumarunui (15), and Tokaanu (10).
45. MA 12/9773. While this was allowed owing to Asher being a licensed interpreter, it seems to conflict with his role as the would-be purchaser’s agent.
46. Notes of Harris Martin, recording officer, MA 12/9773.
47. Section 311(1), Maori Affairs Act 1953.
48. Rotorua Minute Book 103 folio 26, MA 12/9773.
49. Goldsmith, p.103.
50. ‘PM in hush-hush deal — secrecy spoiled Kinloch scheme’, N. Z. Truth, 25 August 1964, pp.1, 7.
51. ‘Mayor defends PM’s land deal — but he missed the point’, N. Z. Truth, 1 September 1964, p.15. It seems the land title referred to here is Whangamata no. 1, but the 25 August 1964 Truth story also made a point of the contrast between Roger Holyoake’s purchase of Tihoi 3B1 and T.N. Gibbs’ view that it ‘belonged to the partnership’.
52. See, for example, ‘Now Kinloch will have everything’, Daily Post (Rotorua), 17 October 1963, unpaged clipping, Ross Annabell’s personal papers; ‘Land boom at Kinloch’, Daily Post (Rotorua), 1 February 1966, p.6.
53. Personal communication from Ross Annabell, 10 September 2008. In a letter from Annabell to Newbold in Annabell’s papers, dated ‘Tues.Feb.14’ (which, since it mentions the Truth story, is probably 1967, the first year after 1964 that 14 February was a Tuesday), for example, Annabell refers to an attempt to get the editor of Sunday News interested in the story. Annabell writes ‘I gave him a bare outline of the facts, and he wants to publish it. Reckons he’ll get it through, no matter what the board thinks. Got my doubts — but think I might give him a go.’
54. Annabell, ‘Holyoake and a tradition of land-grabbing Kiwi politicians’, p.28.
55. N. Z. Truth, 29 September 1964, p.24.
56. Henry Colbert, registrar, to Chief Registrar, 6 November 1985, MA 12/9773.
57. Waitangi Tribunal claims Wai 1193, 28 June 2004, and Wai 1207, 28 October 2004. The latter is also recorded as Central North Island inquiry (Wai 1200) document 1.1.167.
58. Statement of evidence of Tawiri-o-te-rangi Hakopa, Central North Island inquiry (Wai 1200) document D14, February 2005, p.3.
59. Second statement of evidence of Tawiri-o-te-rangi Hakopa, Central North Island inquiry (Wai 1200) document G14, 15 April 2005, pp.3, 4. Emphasis in original.
60. Taupo Times, 16 April 1959, p.3; Kinloch, p.17.
61. ‘Whangamata Station. Treatment of “Excluded Areas”’, March 1959, Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 87/4, ATL.
62. ‘Forward-thinking plans for Kinloch’, Taupo Times, 20 December 1960.
63. Peter Crawford, Development of Kinloch, Whangamata Bay, Taupo: A Study of the Policy and Planning of the Kinloch Settlement, Taupō County Council, Special Report No. 2, April 1974, pp.1, 16.
64. See ‘Hostile meeting on lakeside development’, Taupo Times, 8 February 2001; ‘Lakeside development no game for locals’, Sunday Star Times, 1 July 2001, p.7; ‘Holy Oaks attracts interest’, Dominion, 8 November 2001, p.20; and ‘Ex-Holyoake lakeside properties set record prices’, National Business Review, 15 February 2002, p.29.
65. ‘Hostile meeting on lakeside development’.
66. Asher stood for the Democrat Party (which merged with National in 1936) in Western Māori in 1935; Grace served much of the 1960s as Vice-President of the National Party; and Te Heuheu served time as deputy chairman of National’s Wellington Division. See Ringakapo Tirangaro Asher-Payne, ‘Asher, John Atirau’, DNZB, Vol. Four, 1921-40, Auckland and Wellington, 1998, p.21; Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, p.82; and Gustafson, The First 50 Years: A History of the New Zealand National Party, Auckland, 1986, pp.245-6.
67. Te Heuheu wrote that the way Kinloch ‘has been developed by private enterprise is a credit to those who have done it’. With respect to the purchase price for Tihoi 3B1, he said that his people ‘knew what [they were] doing’. Holyoake, he concluded, was ‘giving leadership to this country, and on our behalf overseas, as never before, in my time anyway’. N. Z. Truth, 15 September 1964, p.24.
68. Waitangi Tribunal, He Maunga Rongo, II, p.754.
69. Gustafson, The First 50 Years, p.251.
70. Ivor Prichard and Hemi Waetford, Report of Committee into the Laws Affecting Maori Land and the Jurisdiction and Powers of the Maori Land Court, Wellington, 1965.
71. Asher had been very helpful to the Ministry of Works in its plans to build Tūrangi township in 1964, acting as if he spoke for the land’s Māori owners when he clearly did not. As the Waitangi Tribunal has written, ‘The conclusion is inescapable that in relying principally on Jack Asher, as the Crown officials chose to do, they were not effectively consulting with the Ngati Turangitukua owners. Asher appeared to have his own agenda and sought to do all he could to ensure the project for a new permanent township at Turangi went ahead.’ Waitangi Tribunal, Turangi Township Report 1995, Wellington, 1995, p.340.
72. Te Heuheu was knighted in 1979, by no other than Holyoake himself, during the latter’s tenure as Governor-General.
73. Ian Gibbs to Keith Holyoake, 27 February 1962; Keith Holyoake to Ian Gibbs, 7 March 1962; Keith Holyoake to Harry Lapwood, 8 March 1962. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 175/2, ATL.
74. Ian Gibbs to Holyoake, 8 May 1967; Talboys to Holyoake, 7 June 1967; Barnes to Talboys’ private secretary, 9 June 1967; Talboys’ secretary to Barnes, 26 June 1967; Holyoake to Talboys, 30 June 1967; Holyoake to Ian Gibbs, 11 July 1967; Talboys to Holyoake, 13 November 1967. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 385/2, ATL.
75. Waitangi Tribunal, He Maunga Rongo: Report on the Central North Island Claims, V, Wellington, 2008, pp.1419-1420.
76. Director-General to Minister of Lands, 11 November 1969; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 16 June 1970; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 23 June 1971; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 9 July 1971; Director-General of Lands to Valuer-General, 30 July 1971; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 30 January 1976; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 29 June 1976; Holyoake to Minister of Lands, 28 July 1976; Holyoake to Director-General of Lands, 29 July 1976. Lands and Survey Department file AANS WS491 6095 Box 436 22/3606/8, NA, Wellington.
77. Elizabeth McLeay, The Cabinet and Political Power in New Zealand, Auckland, 1995, p.192.
78. ibid., p.193.
79. ‘Ministers’ Private Interests Committee’, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1956. I-7, p.3.
80. ibid., p.4.
81. As Gustafson notes, ‘Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, Holyoake insisted on being notified of everything that was happening at Kinloch, and whenever he could he visited it to plant trees, help with fencing, look after stock, and excavate the marina.’ Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, pp.86-87.
82. John Marshall, Memoirs: Volume One: 1912 to 1960, Auckland, 1983, p.246.
83. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 428/5, ATL.
84. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 475/3, ATL.
85. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 537/4, ATL.
86. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 75/5.
87. Holyoake Papers, MS Papers 1814: 428/5.
88. Goldsmith, p.105.
89. Quoted in ibid.
90. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 16 November 2005, vol. 628, p.192.
91. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 27 July 2010, vol. 665, p.12695.
92. ‘About Kinloch’, www.locheagles.co.nz/kinloch.asp (accessed 24 March 2012).
93. As an example, the Waitangi Tribunal has noted that ‘The leading lights in [nineteenth-century] Hawke’s Bay political and Maori affairs were heavily involved in the acquisition of Maori land, either indirectly from the Crown or later directly from Maori under the Native Land Acts.’ Waitangi Tribunal, Mohaka ki Ahuriri Report, I, p.134.
94. Russell Stone wrote in the first edition of the New Zealand Journal of History that the 1879–1880 ‘contest over the right to buy Maori lands outlined in this article is a reminder that political power was viewed by those who sought to exercise it as key to sectional and personal profit as well as to district advantage’. R.C.J. Stone, ‘The Maori Lands Question and the Fall of the Grey Government, 1879’, NZJH, 1, 1 (1967), p.50. Vincent O’Malley describes similar levels of self-interest over Maori land amongst politicians in the 1860s, many of whom were still in Parliament during the fall of the Grey administration described by Stone. Vincent O’Malley, ‘The East Coast Petroleum Wars: Raupatu and the Politics of Oil in 1860s New Zealand’, NZJH, 42, 1 (2008), pp.60-79.
95. A similar register for all MPs was introduced in 2002. The Cabinet Manual states that a pecuniary conflict of interest ‘may arise if a Minister could reasonably be perceived as standing to gain or lose financially from decisions or acts for which he or she is responsible, or from information to which he or she has access’. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Cabinet Manual 2008, Wellington, 2008, p.27.

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/public-office-private-gain/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/clever-people-dumb-politics/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/clever-people-dumb-politics/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:11:09 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3768 Just because you’re educated doesn’t mean you’re not dumb

by Gordon Campbell

Supposedly, education makes you smarter. Less prone to dogmatism. More reasonable, more able to see the grey areas and acknowledge the other fellow’s point of view. Isn’t it one of the comforting beliefs of liberal democrats that if we could only sit down and talk about things reasonably we’d find out what we have in common, and could go on from there? Education, surely, is one of the main gateways to this kind of civilised discourse. Won’t world peace be just round the corner, once everyone’s learned how to think?

Unless of course… education only makes us crazier, and even more inclined to be set in our ways. What are we to make of this recent piece on Salon via Alternet by Chris Mooney which explores the author’s encounters with what he calls the ‘smart idiot’ effect. On contentious issues, there is some evidence that the more dogmatic and less ‘rational’ positions tend to be taken by people with more education, not less. Opinion polling shows for instance, that Republicans with tertiary education will be significantly more likely to disbelieve in global warming and likewise, be more likely to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim – and that such beliefs are less widely held among less well educated Republicans. For Democrats, the reverse seems to be true on the same points : climate change denial and suspicions about Obama’s Muslim origins tend to be the hallmarks of the less well-educated.

Before this begins to look like an indictment of the idiocy of the centre right, one should look hard at Mooney’s explanation for this phenomenon. Basically, he argues, you need to know something about politics in order to become entirely confident about your beliefs. Education usefully helps to entrench those beliefs by enabling you to envisage the objections to your chosen system of political values, and reject them. In other words, education helps you to debate, not to think. The citadel of your political faith needs its defences, and higher education can help to supply them. Unfortunately, Mooney clearly thinks this tendency to practice faith-based political thinking is far more prevalent on the centre right than on the centre left. I think he’s wrong about that, but he does describe the process involved quite well :

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue. What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are….where-upon they become more resistant to change.

Dogmatism is of course, very much in the eye of the beholder. Put up policies about welfare reform, tax cuts, oil and gas drilling etc and I think you’d end up with the same pattern of educationally-defended prejudice. I’m not talking about the quality of the evidence for and against the particular positions : this is really about the degree of entrenchment, and the levels of resistance to what counter arguments may exist. Education helps to develop the tools and the arguments necessary to promote and to defend one’s political belief system – and that’s the case among among left and right wingers alike. In politics, facts get filtered in terms of their compatability with your prior ideological commitments. Never more so than among those clearly able to see just where a particular issue fits on the political spectrum.

This situation also goes some way to explaining the peculiarly intense heat that’s evident in online political discourse – which has little to do with even handedness or an interest in compromise. Good faith debating tends to be rare online. Instead, the marshalling of arguments and the deployment of supportive statistics are tools in something that’s much more like jihad than a search for the common ground.

I’m not lamenting this situation, or arguing for the superiority of the grey middle ground. Anger is a good motivator, and often it’s the only acceptable response to greed and stupidity. However, the smart idiot syndrome does signal a need (in individuals and political parties alike) to be selective about the tactics of persuasion – and to figure out when and with whom its worth the effort. And to repeat : more often than not, the real lost causes are not the rednecks or the silent majority – but the people who have schooled themselves into positions of intransigence.

So finally….if all of us really are bigots at heart when it comes to our core political values, we should at least try and get some feedback about where on the political spectrum we truly belong. The real advantage
of this particular test is that the results don’t simply place you on a right vs left divide, but include a dimension that tells you whether you’re emotionally hardwired to be a liberal or an authoritarian brand of left or right winger. It’s a multiple choice test. Hey….you’re smart, you’re educated, you know how that works.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/clever-people-dumb-politics/feed/ 12 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/hello-madness-my-old-friend/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/hello-madness-my-old-friend/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:09:20 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3769 Mental Notes, A Dangerous Method and Spider tackle mental illness in very different ways ]]> The films Mental Notes, A Dangerous Method and Spider tackle mental illness in very different ways

by Philip Matthews

Sometimes it can seem that madness is the shared New Zealand story – shared but also secret. You only have to scratch the surface of family histories. I did some genealogy once and a copy of a death certificate came in the mail: “Died December 27, 1903, Porirua Asylum.” That was both a surprise and not one. Last year, when the writer Damien Wilkins revived his musical career with a band called the Close Readers, he wrote a song called “Lake Alice” and told the Dominion Post that “mental illness seems to be – I don’t know if it’s the Janet Frame effect – but there’s a sense in which our whole cultural life is kind of haunted by going crazy, going mad”.

In the context of the song and the history, “callous” seems to be a natural rhyme for “Alice”. And he opens up the metaphysical issue: was there ever even a lake there? As for the personal background, at the Close Readers blog Wilkins explained that “one of my older cousins and her husband were nurses there in the 1970s. Then later on, another cousin, Peter Finlay, was committed to Lake Alice.”

Again, the shared stories: it turns out that Peter Finlay, Wilkins’ cousin, is one of those interviewed about their experiences of New Zealand’s asylums in Jim Marbrook’s documentary Mental Notes. There is a very good but problematic story to be told – one day – about this part of New Zealand history, and the way that asylums with what often seemed like deceptively cheerful names (Sunnyside, Lake Alice, Cherry Farm) existed both inside and outside New Zealand society.

There were 13 mental hospitals in New Zealand in 1960; in the mid-1960s, a decade before the long, slow process of de-institutionalisation began, more than 10,000 patients were hospitalised, or slightly less than 400 people per 100,000 of the population. In some cases – Lake Alice being a famous exception – they were landmarks within city limits, occupying a conceptual space that had aspects of a hospital and aspects of a prison but was not quite either. All sorts of emotions were attached to them if you were outside: shame, grief, disgust, fear of contagion. Even without direct experience, you assumed that they were places you did not want to find yourself in – places that people sometimes did not come back from.

Mental Notes has been greeted by some critics as the film that finally pulls back the curtain on all of this history, on the “bad old days of mental health care”, as the promotional material has it. It’s not quite as full a picture as that suggests, but as a sequel and/or counterpart of sorts to the 2007 Aiotanga report, it could do some good. If it can get beyond the festival circuit – right now, it is touring in the World Cinema Showcase – and into a decent television slot, it will do even more.

The Aiotanga report appeared in 2007 after the creation of the Confidential Forum for Former In-Patients of Psychiatric Hospitals, a truth commission that heard approximately 500 stories, mainly from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Former patients made up the vast majority of those taking part, along with families of former patients and ex-staff. The stories were then boiled down into a kind of meta-narrative which you could dub the New Zealand Psychiatric Experience.

It’s easy to scan the report for alarming quotes. This, for example:

“Participants spoke of having to sleep in large dormitories with beds very close together and of a highly regimented life with days spent locked in dirty, noisy, smoke-filled dayrooms with few activities available for them and with access to dormitories locked off during the day. Others talked of poor sanitation and the presence of cockroaches and rats. Many gave an account of a lack of privacy and routines being carried out in ways that they found degrading and humiliating. The latter included the absence of doors on toilets and having to use toilets in front of staff; communal showering with patients being lined up naked and hosed down before showering; or baths with cold water already used by others. Participants also spoke of not being allowed to use their own possessions, often being required to wear communal hospital clothing, and of their property disappearing while they were in hospital. Some spoke of being required to undertake housekeeping duties such as making beds, polishing floors, or washing soiled laundry, sometimes equating such duties with punishment.”

But the surprising thing about the report is the occasional glimmer of positive experiences and memories. These are especially unexpected if you imagine that the Forum would have been self-selecting to a degree – those with grievances were more likely to apply to be heard. However, the report says, “on the positive side, many participants told the Forum of their recognition and lasting appreciation of instances of caring they received from staff members or other patients”. And, “again, the positive experiences recounted at the Forum often involved instances of good communication between staff and the patient and family, and where the patient was treated with respect”.

None of that can, or should, belittle the negative experiences of so many over such a long time. But in almost completely leaving out any positive memories or benefits of the bigger “bins” in those years – asylums such as Sunnyside, Lake Alice, Carrington and Cherry Farm were mostly phased out in the 1990s – Mental Notes risks giving us an incomplete picture and might even leave some with the idea that the system at its worst (the adolescent unit at Lake Alice) was the norm. What happens is that, over time, the memories of entire systems and institutions become tainted by the publicity that surrounds the worst examples – as has happened over the past decade with Catholic institutions.

In a way, Marbrook’s film acts as a truth forum of its own, occasionally illustrated by memory-jogging trips back to the places where it all happened. The first participant is Roy Brown, who we see driving around Tokanui Hospital in the Waikato, which closed in the late 1990s. He wants to find the exact spot – his dayroom, his courtyard – and his struggle to locate the place becomes emblematic of the difficulty of remembering completely, or remembering accurately.Frances Ruwhiu’s story stretches back further, to the 1950s. At the age of nine, she was in Ngawhatu Hospital, near Nelson. In her late teens, she was in Porirua. She is one of those who have been compensated. The film shows her meeting a psychiatrist who believed in her – a rare depiction of a positive connection. Peter Finlay – Damien Wilkins’ cousin – is introduced launching a book based on his experiences, Blue Messiah, before a crowd at St Kevin’s Arcade in Auckland.

The book launch emphasises a mood of supportiveness that runs through the film, as former patients are often filmed with supportive people (partners, the psychiatrist in Ruwhiu’s case, the film-maker himself in Brown’s case). John Tovey, a former patient turned mental health worker, talks of finding himself in “seclusion” – solitary confinement, basically – in Porirua after a manic episode. Anne Helm, now a patients’ advocate and a member of the Confidential Forum, recounts experiences that include Lake Alice and the notorious deep sleep therapy at Cherry Farm.

All five speak with insight and surprising little bitterness. Experts from the other side of the fence round it out – psychiatrist David Codyre, who remembers a 1970s visit to Lake Alice as similar to waking up in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (“the same sense of unreality”), medical historian Warwick Brunton and former nurses and medical staff. In visual terms, Marbook is helped by the poignant decay of so many of these sites. Sunnyside is gone and Carrington has been renovated and re-purposed, but in many cases, the old “bins” are slowly falling apart, still fenced in but housing no one. Weeds grow through paths, pigeons roost in ceilings, furniture and children’s drawings are scattered across abandoned wards and dayrooms. The paint is peeling on institutional doors but Marbook, Brown and Finlay are free to wander through the remains of buildings and the residue of the past, catching some of the strange and spectral essence that attracts those who document abandoned institutional buildings more thoroughly (one of the best online examples is the urban exploration site Opacity). It reinforces a view that we’re taking a trip into history, into the way things were.

All this is covered in 70 minutes, which is simply not enough time to do the full story justice. But that isn’t the flaw in Mental Notes. Nor is it that it is easy to make the bad old days look bad – note how the camera lingers on now unacceptable language like “mentally subnormal person” and “mentally simple” in old reports – or that we should try not to judge the past by the standards of the present; the flaw is that the bad old days are not necessarily over. The architecture of institutions such as Hillmorton in Christchurch – the replacement for Sunnyside – still resembles that of prisons more than hospitals. Patients are still medicated against their will. Seclusion is still practiced. ECT is still practiced. Near the end of Mental Notes, John Tovey says that “for the most difficult people, a lot of the same practices of seclusion still have to be used ­– I don’t think anyone’s happy about that”, but for the most part, Mental Notes is concerned with the past tense. In short: things were really bad, now they’re pretty good. A more complete story would be more complex.

In closing, Anne Helm reiterates the message of Te Aiotanga, which has gone unheard – “Many expressed a hope for a public acknowledgment by the Government that their experiences in psychiatric institutions had been humiliating and demeaning and had often taken a lifelong toll,” the report said. As a more visible and accessible version of the truth commission itself, Mental Notes at least puts that hope before a wider public.

In related news, David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method opens with a vision more terrifying or unsettling – but also borderline comic ­– than anything seen in Mental Notes: Kiera Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a “hysteric” (diagnostic term) who is being brought by carriage in 1904 to a Swiss asylum, where her treatment will be supervised by Carl Jung. For Knightley, the acting is all in the chin, which juts out alarmingly as she grimaces in pain and screams. The effect is lycanthropic.

A Dangerous Method has had a long history. A non-fiction book became a screenplay written by Chris Hampton in the late 90s for Julia Roberts before Hampton switched it into a play (The Talking Cure) and then back into a screenplay. In the fact-based plot, Spielrein is treated by Jung (Michael Fassbender), only to fall in love with him. She also trains as a psychoanalyst. In the meantime, Jung is breaking away from his mentor, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

Surprisingly, for a film about the then experimental art of psychoanalysis and Jung’s growing, pre-breakdown interest in the occult, the visual style and dramatic approach is almost entirely buttoned-down and prosaic: a filmed play on a series of sound stages. As Sight and Sound critic Kim Newman noted, the Knightley chin joins the long list of rogue body parts with psychotic agendas in Cronenberg films over 20 years from Shivers to Crash, but otherwise, the film is nowhere near psychotic enough and devoid of the irrational eruptions Cronenberg’s work normally contains. It’s all strangely impersonal.

You might sense that this project was a stop-gap for Cronenberg, whose next film has already been trailered – an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis, starring Robert Pattinson as a young New York “multi-billionaire” within a scenario that drew on the anti-globalisation protests but somehow anticipated Occupy Wall Street (the long history of DeLillo prescience is a whole other story). One side effect of A Dangerous Method is that it means we’re surely unlikely to ever get a film of D. M. Thomas’ Freud novel The White Hotel, which has long been considered a cursed or just simply unfilmable project – a Vanity Fair story from 2009 said that the names loosely attached or at least interested over the years include Barbra Streisand, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, Emir Kusturica, Pedro Almodovar and, yes, Cronenberg.

Actually, that list makes me think I’d rather see a version of A Dangerous Method directed by Lynch or Almodovar – or especially, Guy Maddin. But the film also sent me back a decade, to Cronenberg’s masterpiece Spider. This one derived from the gothic age of mental asylums, with writer Patrick McGrath presumably drawing some of it from moments he witnessed when his father was medical superintendent at Broadmoor Hospital. Ralph Fiennes as Dennis “Spider” Cleg is a patient released back into the community after years locked up. The Fiennes performance is astonishing in its minimalism: there is no life in his eyes, he barely smiles, there is almost no clear speech. So much of him has been switched off.

Unlike, say, A Beautiful Mind or The Insatiable Moon – the latter a risible and largely unseen New Zealand entry – Spider does not treat the schizophrenic as gifted, prophetic or a holy fool. There is a constant sense of the tragic, of deep aloneness. Cleg’s halfway house is across the canal from the gasworks, which loom like a threat or a blockage in his memory. Time slips, and the present and the past become indistinguishable. The story is a tragedy driven by delusional thinking.

On the commentary track of the Spider DVD, Cronenberg acknowledges the “many Freudian resonances” in the McGrath story, but stresses that his is not a clinical approach – it’s a philosophical study rather than a medical one. If the current thinking is that schizophrenia and other mental disorders are biological in origin, then Spider is a flashback to earlier thinking, which is more romantic and less medical – as Cronenberg says, schizophrenia is never mentioned, but instead we see “the human condition when it is pushed to an extreme”.

The astonishing lead performance aside, the most impressive thing about Spider is the way that Cronenberg approaches its discrete world, a working-class East End of the post-war years, largely sourced from films and photos. It is hard to know whether the film really does have a heightened, almost dreamlike sense of Englishness or whether you are – to use the correct term – projecting it. But elements like gasworks and allotments were previously unknown to Cronenberg, and he has the perspective of an anthropologist. Among the new things he encountered was English “pub hostility” – an anger that seemed to be out of all proportion. Maybe the point is that Cronenberg found a way into the manners and mores of that East End pub world, but turn of the century Vienna kept shutting him out.

Footnote : The World Cinema Showcase screenings of Mental Notes continue in Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch until May 7
A Dangerous Method opens in New Zealand cinemas on April 26.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/hello-madness-my-old-friend/feed/ 2 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/from-the-hood-man-over-board/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/from-the-hood-man-over-board/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:07:25 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3776 Whereabouts is the nowhere man?

by Lyndon Hood

It was in December of 2012 we lost the Prime Minister.

We had lost things before, but they were the usual things: ballpoint pens, socks, helium balloons, finance company billions, valuables from demolition sites, the occasional central business district and – when the hot, dry nor’wester blows – our minds. Losing a national leader was a novelty.

He was here for the opening of the new Cathedral. Of course in hindsight it’s very easy to see the mistake there.

Because this particular Cathedral (despite popular belief, it is safe for a politician to cross the threshold of an ordinary church) was built from pieces cut out of cardboard. The moment the Prime Minister stepped inside, no-one could tell him from the architecture.

The diplomatic protection squad were chasing around the pews after their lost charge. Some say they could hear him. Explaining that he was relaxed about it.

His deputy went in after him, said that he of all people should be able to tell the Prime Minister from a nicely-presented cut out piece of cardboard. Perhaps, as the now-evacuated crowd listened anxiously though the open doors, he thought in the political magic of that place he might also find an economic plan. Judging by the results, he actually found a Boojum.

It was an anxious wait so we started telling ‘Your Mixed Ownership Model’ jokes. They were popular at the time. “Your Mixed Ownership Model is so ugly, seventy-five percent of the population are opposed to it.” “Your Mixed Ownership Model is so stupid, it thinks fifty-one percent of the voting shares is the same as fifty-one percent of the total stock.” You had to make your own fun in those days.

The rest of the Cabinet were diving in with their various solutions – cutting the budget, firing the staff, saying they were going to sell off half of it, selling off approximately half of it, then building a road through it (I’m not sure what those solutions had to do with the actual problem, but it seemed to make them happy) and Gerry Brownlee wandering around saying everything was fine and of course most of them disappearing as soon as they got anywhere near the place.

When we lost Judith Collins – she should have known trying to crush it was a bad idea – we dangled Trevor Mallard in on a piece of string in an attempt to lure her out. All we got for that was an empty piece of string.

In the end they turned the place into a casino. Well, they call it a convention centre. But it’s mostly used for conventions of people who are gambling. According to the operator’s statistics we lost fewer MPs there that day than the average annual rate for the rest of the world, so it’s actually a very safe place for politicians and should be expanded.

Anyway, I like to think they’re all happy in there somewhere.

That or they’ve been accidentally recycled.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/from-the-hood-man-over-board/feed/ 2 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/webs-of-maya/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/webs-of-maya/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:06:26 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3767 Underground film-maker Maya Deren still casts a spell

by Gordon Campbell

Artists who pour the same intensity into their private lives as they do into their work are always ripe for canonisation, and Ernest Hemingway would be the classic, almost cartoon example. Yet the life and work of Maya Deren – a pioneering figure in experimental film and a priestess of Haitian vodou to boot, is now virtually unknown outside of academic film circles and feminist studies courses. That’s a loss. Deren made her classic short film Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943, (when she was only 26 years old) and the film is still interesting to watch, and not merely because of her own beautiful screen presence.

Meshes influenced a whole generation of film-makers. The US director Stan Brakhage once cited Deren’s importance to avant-garde film culture with the simple tribute:“ She is the mother of us all.” (As I’ll explain later, the David Lynch film Lost Highway can be read as a homage to Deren and to the views on non-linear narrative she expressed in her 1946 essay ““An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film.”)

Deren was born in Kiev in 1917, and died in New York in 1961 at the age of 44, from a brain haemorrhage caused by extreme malnutrition related to her almost daily use of amphetamines. In between came the short films, three marriages, and the immersion in vodou that culminated in her 1953 book Divine Horsemen:The Living Gods of Haiti. The first paragraph of her preface to Divine Horsemen will still ring a few bells with any artist trying to survive outside the system :

In September 1947 I disembarked in Haiti for an eight month stay, with eighteen motley pieces of luggage: seven of these consisted of 16-millimetre motion-picture equipment (three cameras, tripods, raw film stock etc,) of which three were related to sound recording for a film, and three contained equipment for still photography, Among my papers I carried a certificate of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for “creative work in the field of motion pictures” (as distinguished from documentary film projects) which was reward for the stubborn effort that had been involved in creating, producing and successfully distributing four previous films with purely private and limited means, and in the face of a cinema tradition completely dominated by the commercial film industry on one hand, and by documentary film on the other. …I recite all these facts because they are evidence of a concrete, defined film project undertaken by one who was acknowledged as a resolute, and even stubbornly wilful, individual.

Stubborn is right. What Deren had in mind was a film in which Haitian dance would be combined with a variety of non-Haitian elements, and without reference to its role in vodou ritual. Footage for this planned film got shot, and fragments have been released posthumously as the film Divine Horsemen. Yet her work in Haiti had changed course dramatically. Four years and three trips to Haiti later, Deren ended up with a text about the nature of vodou, and with a sense of humility about the heightened reality she’d come to experience :

I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity: I end by recording as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognise its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.

In her work in Haiti she’d tried, she says, not to pry and to stare – and “was rewarded by a sense of human bond” which she did not fully understand until she had returned to the United States. As she put it:

In modern industrial culture, artists constitute in fact, an “ethnic group” subject to the full “native” treatment. We too are exhibited as touristic curiosities on Monday, extolled as culture on Tuesday, denounced as immoral and unsanitary on Wednesday, re-instated for scientific study Thursday, feted for some obscurely stylish reason Friday, forgotten Saturday, revisited as picturesque, Sunday. We too are misrepresented by professional appreciators and subjected to spiritual imperialism, our most sacred efforts are plagiarised for yard goods, our histories are traced, our psyches analysed and when everyone has taken his pleasure of us in his own fashion, we are driven from our native haunts, our modest dwellings are condemned, and replaced by a chromium skyscraper….

As Deren once said, she made films on the same kind of money that Hollywood usually spent on lipstick. True, the 14 minute long Meshes of the Afternoon can easily seem like a historical curiosity, and/or as a supreme exercise in self-indulgence. What Deren’s films run up against – in common with many other experimental films – is the brick wall of our addiction to linear narrative. We’re so accustomed to films following a narrative arc from A to D (with agreed stop-off points at B and C) that anything else tends to be rejected as self-indulgent nonsense. If it is lucky, a transgressive film might get called “ surreal” – the B-minus default adjective for anything experimental that can’t be written off entirely.

In the case of Meshes of the Afternoon, a narrative arc exists, but it is almost circular. The style owes a lot to German Expressionism and to Surrealism which (back in the 1930s in particular) were the natural refuge for experimental artists seeking to put distance between themselves and the grubby world of Hollywood commerce. As a result, the acting tends to be mannered and the lighting non-naturalistic, while a heavy mist of Freudian psycho-sexual symbolism commonly hangs over the proceedings. Meshes of the Afternoon survives all of that, regardless. Deren threw viewers a lifeline in an essay in Film Culture published four years after her death: “Everything that happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence – the knife, the key, the repetition of the stairs, the figure disappearing around a curve in the road.” From then on, you’re on your own.

As for plot…in Meshes, the woman asleep in the chair dreams a sequence punctuated by a series of domestic objects imbued with portents of the violence to which she is eventually subjected – by a man who assumes much the same posture as the hooded figure with the reflective face that she sees in the dream, and fruitlessly chases after. Like many of Deren’s films, it is best approached as a kind of dance piece captured on film. Hers is a ritualised version of reality, conveyed almost entirely through gesture, repetition and embellishment.

That’s not being offered as an excuse, or as a plea bargain. In her 1946 film Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren portrays social interaction (during the party scene in particular) as a disorienting dance of people being passed from one pair of grasping hands to another. Dance was always central to her personal and creative life. So was the frustration she felt in trying to use ritual movements (and beliefs) to control the stuff of existence, without having any reliable power to do so.

That seems obvious enough today. Yet in her diary in 1947, Deren was engaged in a lively personal debate with Gregory Bateson and his then-fashionable ideas from game theory, and its potential to deliver a deterministic science of social behaviour that still left some room for the operations of chance. That vision attracted and repelled Deren, who spent a lot of time and creative energy in the mid 1940s trying to resolve its implications. As she explained in her “Anagram” essay, the creative process in film and society at large has always involved a dialogue between structure and novelty, mediated by time – which for her is the element that subverts any tidy theory of behaviour, or film. “ Slow motion, “ she once wrote, “ is the microscope of time,” and that lens should ultimately be engaged in self revelation, or nothing “The fourth dimension,” she added in full priestess mode, “is you.”

In response to Bateson and Co, she proposed in the “Anagram” essay a solution available to anyone faced with the basic creative challenge of “compressing into a linear organization an idea which was stimulating precisely because it extended into two or three different, but not contradictory directions at once….” Her solution was to treat film as an anagram that would not generate teleologically determined outcomes – but would treat narrative as something that could be read in any direction, whether that be “horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even in reverse.” Rather than your typical Hollywood roller coaster ride of linear cause and effect, Deren was going to bat for a film experience that had more in common with feedback loops. Or certain forms of ritual.

Down the years, this approach has continued to interest the likes of David Lynch – especially in Lost Highway, which made a meal out of characters in different forms, presented in time-hopping twists, identity swaps and reversals. To a lesser extent, Mulholland Drive toyed with the same devices. On the other hand, Terrence Malick placed his subject matter in Tree of Life on a temporal plane so vast as to blow apart the normal Hollywood conventions of narrative cause and effect. The dots between Deren and Lynch have been connected in this 2002 essay :

Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to Meshes of the Afternoon in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters and in the incorporation of the “psychogenic fugue”, the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual.

Today, these kind of artistic concerns – Deren once described film structure as presenting a moral choice. as well as an artistic one – seem to belong to a distant, quaintly passionate era. She came by it honestly. As a young woman, Deren studied journalism, political science and literature when she first came to New York, and in 1939 she completed an M.A. literature thesis on “The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry.” Crucially, Deren then earned her living as an assistant for Kathleen Dunham, the great dancer, choreographer and anthropologist who – like Deren – later got initiated as a mambo, or vodou priestess. Dunham had written her own M.A. thesis on Haitian dance, and Deren edited the manuscript. In 1941, she became Dunham’s personal secretary and embarked on an unconventional lifestyle with her troupe :

Deren found inspiration and nomadic adventure with the innovative Katherine Dunham Dance Company, touring and performing across the US. It was in Los Angeles in 1941 that Deren met Alexander Hammid, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker working in Hollywood. In collaboration with Hammid [whom she later married] Deren produced her first and most remarkable experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon….)

Hammid taught Deren the technical skills she needed as a film-maker, and according to some film historians – including Brakhage – Hammid should be regarded as the actual director of Meshes of the Afternoon, even if the film’s subject matter and form came largely from Deren’s ideas. Meshes was shot in the house that Hammid and Deren were renting in Los Angeles. More than once, lack of money forced the couple into making a film set out of where they happened to live.

After they moved to New York for instance, they made a 22 minute film together called The Private Life of A Cat, which is an account (with a fairly graphic birth scene) of the habits of the cats that shared their apartment. When Hammid’s marriage to Deren hit the rocks in the late 1940s, he hooked up with Hella Heyman, who had shot Deren’s short films At Land and Ritual in Transfigured Time, which also features the composer John Cage. For her part, Deren eventually married Teiji Ito, who was 17 years younger. All these titles ( including the Divine Horsemen footage from Haiti) are now in the public domain, and available on Youtube.

While almost finishing this story and still fumbling with the links between dance, gesture and film technique in Deren’s work, I came across an extended analysis by Erin Brannigan that treats Deren’s background in dance as being a key influence.

At the start of her article, Brannigan quotes Deren writing about her preference for ritualised, incantatory elements, and for treating actors as mere objects in space :

The ritualistic form… creates fear, for example, by creating an imaginative, often mythological experience which, by containing its own logic within itself, has no reference to any specific time or place, and is forever valid for all time and place… Above all, the ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat de-personalized element in a dramatic whole…

As Brannigan says, dance provided Deren with a framework that enabled her to resist mainstream cinema’s reliance on literary models :
She opposes the dominance of a ‘literary approach’ to filmmaking, suggesting that the art form would be better off had it pursued the silent film form… a point given weight when one considers the absence of scores and dialogue in her films… Her meandering and often dream-like plot structures are the clearest proof of her rejection of cause and effect linearity…Her disregard for traditional film credits and of her own role as a performer are further evidence of Deren’s resistance to the hierarchical structures that dominate film production.

Deren drew a contrast (in her contribution to a 1953 symposium on “Poetry and the Film”) between “horizontal” film structure affiliated with drama – “one circumstance – one action – leading to another”, and indicated how this had (unfortunately) come to dominate the dramatic business of characterisation in film. That wasn’t the kind of film that she wanted to make :

Alternatively, “vertical” film structure, or “poetic structure”…probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or with what it means….

As Brannigan points out, elements of this approach predate the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s famous taxonomies of film imagery. To Deleuze, the classically linear “movement-image” of the pre-war film industry was to be distinguished from the “time-image” introduced by the French New Wave and Italian neo-realism, where past, present and future could be blurred, or could even coexist on film – thus outstripping our “sensory-motor capacities” and pushing back the boundaries of the imaginary. Oh, to be in Paris or New York in those times, when people could still get excited and inspired by such ideas, before post-modernism set up its fatal tent and ruined everything.

As I said earlier, Deren’s life and work remain virtually unknown today beyond feminist and film studies courses in academia. The closest thing to a full documentary account of her life and work is 2002’s In The Mirror of Maya Deren written and directed by Martina Kudlácek
This doco includes contributions by Stan Brakhage and by Rita Christiani, the Afro-Caribbean main dancer in Ritual in Transfigured Time.

Deren’s later life took a tragic downward spiral marked by drug use and despair about her career. Unfortunately, her much-anticipated 1958 film The Very Eye of Night was badly received, and with reason. It proved to be a kitschy collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School based on her ruminations about the starry constellations and their connections with her inner self. Deren’s brand of experimentalism had simply reached a dead end. Here are links to two of Deren’s earlier, better silent films. The soundtracks added later are distractions, so best to turn the sound down, or off.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/webs-of-maya/feed/ 1 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/what-would-katniss-do/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/what-would-katniss-do/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:05:57 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3770 Hunger Games heroine is a sign that women are adapting better to today’s economic realities….]]> The Hunger Games heroine is a sign that women are adapting better to today’s economic realities….

by Gordon Campbell

SPOILER ALERT : There are a couple of spoilers in this article for people who haven’t read all three books. Beware.

By and large, readers of the Hunger Games books have been reasonably happy with the film adaptation. The fact the box office numbers held up so well, week after week, indicates that the word-of-mouth on the film was that it didn’t suck. Significant, given the books had built their vast fan base since 2008 mainly by the same word-of-mouth process. On screen, the story does gain in immediacy. On the downside, we lose some of the conflicted emotions that Katniss Everdeen feels in the book, and this has repercussions for the apparent meaning of her actions – which get flattened out onscreen, especially in the depiction of her attachments to her two suitors, Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne. How much of this flattening out was inevitable? Some. But there is still room for legitimate bitching about what has ended up onscreen.

In an earlier backgrounder article I dealt with a few of the bogus criticisms commonly levelled at the books, such as the plot similarity to the Japanese film Battle Royale. A few other dodgy criticisms have surfaced since the film was released, such as (a) the extent of shaky hand-held camera work during the District 12 scenes in particular and (b) the criticism of the casting of the “good” characters (Rue, Thresh, Cinna) with black actors. Neither criticism amounts to much. The shaky cam was meant to convey Katniss’ personal point of view – in contrast to the fluid, omnipresent POV of the reality game cameras. Personally, I didn’t find its use excessive or obtrusive. It was plainly an attempt to distinguish Katniss’ perspective from that of the authorities running the Games.

As for the race question ….sure, Cinna could have been any race or colour, but no possible room for complaint there, since Lenny Kravitz did such a great job in the film. Yet the criticism of Rue and Thresh for being depicted as black was a really weird and fundamentally racist reaction.

After all, Rue is described in the text (page 45) as having brown skin and eyes :

…And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that’s she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor…
Later, Katniss describes Thresh:
The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He’s one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.

Furthermore, Rue’s homeland (District 11) is clearly to be taken as located in the American South, just as the District 12 mining region that Katniss comes from is identified in the text as being in the Appalachian mountains. (The actual site for the District 12 scenes was the ghost town of Henry River mill village, a former textile workers’ settlement in North Carolina built in the early 1900s, and finally abandoned in the 1960s.. There’s an article about it from the Charlotte Observer here.)

That’s why District 12 is portrayed onscreen in ways so similar to the famous photographs of Appalachia taken by Walker Evans during the 1930s. These photos – on the left is a Walker Evans photo, on the right a still from the film – make the connection.

Rue being black is also a crucial element in the logic of the story. Near the end of book one, Katniss is about to be killed, but is saved by the intervention of Thresh – who tells her the has decided to save her life, this one time, because of her kindness to Rue. Yet Katniss’s actions towards Rue would carry such weight with Thresh only if Katniss had crossed some external social barrier, such as race. Point being, few other whites would have displayed the loving respect that Katniss has shown. That was noticed bck in District 11. Ultimately, the way Katniss can unite poor whites and poor blacks in opposition to Panem makes her a focal point for the revolution and a perceived threat by President Snow. (BTW, how come Thresh knew about her kindness to Rue – did he pick up a TV set in the Cornucopia?)

OK – so where are the film’s genuine failings? Well, one of the strengths of the book is its depiction of the interactive nature of the Hunger Games and the clear message that if contestants are to survive they MUST learn how to play on the expectations of the viewers. This reflexive aspect of the actions captured on the TV screen is almost entirely lost in the film. That’s not entirely surprising : actions with dual meanings are easier to convey in print than on film. Yet Katniss, a slow learner about the rules of reality television, certainly manages finally to play that game. In the book, she decks Rue’s body with flowers as an intentional political message as well as a personal one – but onscreen, her motives are portrayed as being driven solely by sentiment.

The handling of Katniss’ romantic attachment to Peeta in the film is far more problematic. In the book, her demonstrations of affection to Peeta are as much a survival strategy aimed at the viewers as a genuine emotional attachment – for her, anyway –and she is only briefly confused about her feelings for Peeta. In the film however, this attachment is played straight, with little sense her affection is largely being feigned. This lapse has unfortunate consequences. It means that the moment when she glimpses Gale Hawthorne again makes her seem like a romantic yo-yo caught between these two hunks of hunkdom. Whereas, in the book, much of what makes Katniss an interesting (and unique) teen heroine is that she seems all but disinterested in any emotional commitment to either of them. She has more important things on her mind.

To appreciate just how unusual this is, consider the Twilight series and Bella (whose emotional world is a battleground for the brooding boy vamps and husky were-blokes competing for access to her body) or the relationship – if that’s the right word – between Ron and Hermione in the Harry Potter series, which becomes possible only after Ron belatedly realises that brainbox has turned into a babe. Katniss is cut from quite different cloth. At times in the book and as discreetly as can be managed in a YA novel, she turns to Peeta for body warmth and temporary comfort but this (as he complains) seems purely to satisfy her own needs – and is not to be taken by him as a sign of an unconditional and exclusive commitment.

In that respect, Katniss is a good exemplar of the women occupying the feminising workplace described by Kate Bolick in her recent Atlantic magazine article “All the Single Ladies” Bolick asks a reasonable question – what happens to women’s notion of commitment when they are better educated, have better job prospects and are more economically successful than the men who have – hitherto – traded on their superiority in all those respects to define marriage and commitment on terms that suit them?

If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up”—how else would they improve their lot? (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”) Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?

Which is how, in the books, Katniss behaves (almost) throughout. Not so much in the film. And SPOILER WARNING I would argue that even in the final chapter of the third book Mockingjay it is narrative laziness that finally casts her into a conventional commitment (with matching boy and girl offspring!) to a worthy Mr Reliable who continues to worship her on a pedestal. (But when you’re on a pedestal, it gets lonely at the top.) The more consistent and credible outcome for Katniss would not have involved a choice – Peeta or Gale ? – but would have at least considered the option of neither. Which, as Bolick says, need not entail spinsterish loneliness but a conscious rejection of the social and sexual isolation that the romantic ideal can often (but not always) entail.

The load now being placed on idealised and exclusive romantic relationships is, as Bolick points out, only a recent historical event : and one which the uniquely favourable economic conditions of the 1950s and 1960s briefly made feasible. Those conditions – which fostered the nuclear family unit and the primacy of the male breadwinner – are not going to return any time soon, not wjth the collapse of male jobs in manufacturing and agriculture, and given the current prevalence of offshore outsourcing. As Hanna Rosin pointed out a couple of years ago in her article “The End of Men” women now outnumber men in the US work force for the first time in history, most managerial and professional jobs are now held by women and for every two men who got a college degree in the US during 2010, three women did the same :

As we recover from the Great Recession, some traditionally male jobs will return—men are almost always harder-hit than women in economic downturns because construction and manufacturing are more cyclical than service industries—but that won’t change the long-term trend….

The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.

True, women have advanced in the work force partly because they continue to be paid less than men, on average. In that sense, women have been the genderised version of the low cost Asian and South American workers who have picked up many of the jobs sent offshore. Furthermore, in Wisconsin at least, there are Neanderthals in political office who are still living in denial about the very existence of a pay gap, and/or who believe that money is simply more important to men than it is to women.

Such craziness aside, the current pay gap (in developed countries the pay for women for the same or equivalent work still lags by roughly ten to twenty per cent) may – and I repeat may – erode as more women continue to move out of the relatively low paid service occupations in which they have tended to be concentrated :

Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the US Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

The process of suburbanisation has also made more women readily employable, as firms have located out of the city centre.

Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.”…When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable.

Among company directors and CEOs of course, the gender gap still remains in force. Yet what I’m getting at is that Katniss Everdeen’s romantic independence, her pressing responsibilities as the family breadwinner, and her political clout are all consistent with the changes that have been occurring in the real economy. Economic and political power – and the onus of decision making within relationships, within the family unit and within the workplace – are increasingly tilting towards an equality (or an outright feminisation) that mass entertainment has yet to embrace. In that respect, the Hunger Games saga is more sophisticated in its treatment of gender roles not only compared to the usual multiplex blockbusters, but compared to most film festival offerings as well.

Finally, if adapting the first Hunger Games book was hard, that task is due to get even more difficult from here on in. Reportedly Catching Fire, the second film hasn’t yet begun shooting and director Gary Ross will not be in charge of the sequel – which is still set for release in November 2013. Four films are planned, with the third book Mockingjay being filmed in two halves. For once, this doesn’t look like milking the franchise – there is simply too much plot in the last book (much of it terribly grim) to fit it into one film.

Suzanne Collins (pictured above) explicitly set out to write a book about war, and its effects – and not a story about the raging hormones of its main characters. Making the horrors of war as palpable and as random as they are in Mockinjay means that the tone of the story will become very dark indeed. Especially given how readily the District 13 rebels embrace the methods of the Panem dictatorship that ey are trying to overthrow. With films three and four, it will be all but impossible to send the punters out of the theatres feeling anything other than supremely bummed out.

Out of perceived necessity, the film-makers are going to grab onto whatever glimmerings of positivity can be gleaned from the romantic triangle. The first casualty of that process is likely to be the independent spirit that Katniss Everdeen has demonstrated for most of the story. Not even Suzanne Collins avoided that trap.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/what-would-katniss-do/feed/ 2 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/the-complicatist-songs-about-money/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/the-complicatist-songs-about-money/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:03:43 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3771 The economics of rhythm and melody…..

by Gordon Campbell

This month we’re doubling down on badness, so without further ado, here’s a selection of songs about money, and paying the price thereof. Prior filtering has removed Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Jessie J, Bruno Mars, Simply Red and Madonna from this mix. Because.

1. Barrett Strong : Money A classic of hard-earned realism. Money can’t buy you love, sure…but honey, your lovin’ don’t pay the bills.

The best things in life are free
But you can give them
To the birds and bees

I need money
(That’s what I want)
That’s what I want
(That’s what I want)
That’s what I wa-a-ant
(That’s what I want)

And besides :

Money don’t get everything it’s true
But what it don’t get, I can’t use
I need money

This working man’s prayer gave Motown its first hit and – aptly enough – provided Berry Gordy with the seed money he needed to build the Motown empire. Yet the idea/lyrics for this song have always been steeped in controversy. Strong cut this track in August of 1959, but John Lee Hooker had been performing a song for years beforehand that he called “I Need Some Money” with almost identical lyrics. That aside, if it was fusion it worked beautifully – especially in the way Strong’s vocals and arrangement took Hooker’s old r&b sound, sped it up and modernised it. Later, working in unison with Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong was responsible for some of Motown’s greatest tracks including “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” “War” “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)….”

2. Swans : Failure A few years after Michael Gira ended the industrial noise phase of the Swans he released an excellent album called White Light From the Mouth of Infinity which includes this immensely brooding track. Imagine what Leonard Cohen would sound like if he was really, really depressed and you’re not even close to the depths plumbed on this number, which offered some thoughts about money, and its corrosive power :

I’ve worked hard all my life
Money slips through my hands
My face in the mirror tells me
It’s no surprise that
I’m pushing the stone up the hill of failure….
They tempt me with violence
They punish me with ideals
And they crush me with an image of my life that’s nothing but unreal
Except on the goddamned slave ship of failure….

When I get my hands on some money
I’ll kiss its green skin
And I’ll ask its dirty face “Where the hell have you been?”
“I am the fuel that fires the engine of failure.” Etc etc

In 2010, Swans released a pretty good comeback album that contained a track called “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” – which goes some way to conveying Gira’s typical joie de vie. The song “Blind” – also on Youtube – is a killer, too.

3. Nina Simone : Pirate Jenny
Whew, scary. This is a revenge fantasy by one of the have-nots, directed against the people who possess everything that Jenny the maid can only dream about. “I’m counting your heads/ while I’m making the beds” is only the start of it. By the end, they’re piling up the bodies of her victims on the dock, and she’s hissing “ That’ll learn ya!” into their dead ears. In Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles he says this inspired him to write his own apocalyptic revenge fantasy “ When the Ship Comes In…”

4. Chamillionaire : I’m In Love With My Money Long before Chamillionaire became a punchline on 30 Rock – check out the references to him in the “Jack the Writer” episode in the first season – the Houston rapper released this engaging homage to the superiority of money and other material things, over good ol’ love and commitment :

Not engaged with no lady,
Fall in love with em no
You may think I’m crazy never knew this type of love before
I’m in love with my foreign [car],
Yes I’m married to my dough I’m in love with my money…
Most marriages blossom and die
When its over I’m tellin her bye
But she acts like I’m tellin a lie
While you fallin in love with a she
I rather be doublin a G
Could you see me in a car that rhymes with ‘rent me’
and starts with a B ?

Hip hop is rife with product placement, but this is the only one I know that turns it into a riddle.

5. Tennessee Ernie Ford : 16 Tons Songwriter Merle Travis was the Shakespeare of mining songs. Years after it was written, Ford made this into a gigantic smash, one of the biggest hits of the 1950s. It conveys pure blues sentiments of fate determined at birth : “ I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine / I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine…” And even though women couldn’t bring the singer to heel (“ No high toned woman gonna make me walk the line”) the simple pressure of making a living sure could : “ I owe my soul to the company store…” For completeness, I’ve included Travis’s definitive version of his other mining classic ”Dark As A Dungeon.”

6. Billie Holiday : God Bless The Child Legend has it that Billie Holiday got the idea for this song after having an argument with her mother.

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Yes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

7. Patsy Cline : Poor Man’s Roses Hard to resist the temptation to put an autobiographic spin on many of Patsy Cline’s songs. When she recorded this, she was trapped in a loveless marriage to Gerald Cline. Legend has it that her husband was the cold-hearted rich man in the song, with the “poor man” being Charlie Dick, who turned out to be the real love of her short and tragic life.
I must make up my mind today

What to have, what to hold

A poor man’s roses

Or a rich man’s gold 


One’s as wealthy as a king in a palace

Though he’s callous and cold


Even so, the song is generous. It says that salvation was still an option for the rich man, if only he could learn to be more kind :

He may learn to give his heart for love

Instead of buyin’ it with gold
Then the poor man’s roses
And the thrill when we kiss

Will be memories of paradise

That I’ll never miss…

Fat chance. In the song, the hand that brought the roses was the hand she would hold, and later marry. It would be nice to think this was Charlie Dick – but she recorded this track late in 1956, and didn’t meet Dick until May,1957.

8. Robert Earl Keen : The Road Goes on Forever There are entire film scripts that don’t pay as much attention to detail and the narrative arc as this song does…It relates the doomed love story of Shelley the waitress and Sonny, the gallant drug dealer who– eventually – gives his life in order to protect and provide for her. The need for money may have driven their brief foray into a life of crime, but it is also an expression of love – from the coin he flips into the tip jar after laying out the drunk who tried to put his hand up her skirt, to the dope deal proceeds that puts him in the electric chair and her on the road to freedom, behind the wheel of a brand new Mercedes Benz.

9. Liza Minnelli & Joel Grey “Money Money “and Abba “Money, Money, Money” Two celebrations of cash, one conveying decadence the other just fun, fun, fun. Obvious links exist between the two. Lasse Hallstrom, – who directed “Money, Money Money” and almost every other video made by Abba – doffed his hat here to the Cabaret musical from which Minnelli’s song came.

10. Mahalia Jackson “Satisfied Mind”

This song finds the right balance between money and everything else, and Mahalia Jackson adds the spiritual dimension :
How many times, have you heard someone say,
If I had his money, I would do things my way.
But little they know, that it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Money can’t buy back all your youth when you’re old
A friend when you’re lonely, or peace to your soul
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

The genius behind this song was Jack Rhodes, who also wrote “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and a stack of rockabilly classics including the once heard never forgotten “Action Packed “ and “Rockin’ Bones” for young Ronnie Dawson, plus “Woman Love” for Gene Vincent. His stepbrother was Leon Payne, the writer responsible for “ I Love You Because” and “Lost Highway.” I’ve picked Mahalia Jackson’s version over Jeff Buckley’s better known one, partly because Buckley himself rated this as superior.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/the-complicatist-songs-about-money/feed/ 2 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/womad-saved-by-the-sun/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/womad-saved-by-the-sun/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:02:17 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3772 Will the local government reforms put Womad in jeopardy?

by Gordon Campbell
(with images by Rose O’Connor and Alastair Thompson)

Thanks in no small part to great good luck with the weather –a storm blew in on the Monday just after campers moved out – the Womad festival racked up another successful outcome this year. Due to the golden weather, there was a late surge of walk ups by locals that compensated for the sluggishness of the early ticket sales, and – reportedly- a crucial 15 per cent of this year’s tickets were sold on the Friday of the festival and over the weekend.

All up, the final number of attendees over the three days was almost exactly the same as last year, although the numbers pitching a tent fell from 3,200 last year to 2272 this time around. Overall, the crowd was reportedly split about 50/50, between locals and out of towners.

Those slow pre-sales and the drop in numbers of tenters suggests that Womad did swing back this year at least, to being more of a local event -although this could just be a temporary reflection of the affordability of Womad during these recessionary times. Ironically, Womad wrapped up festivities this year just as the Key government announced its package of local government reforms, which include a direction to local councils to withdraw their support from social, cultural and environmental activities in their communities and concentrate on their “ core” or “essential” activities, yet to be defined. Womad stands to be in the firing line.

The vagueness about major aspects of the intended reforms is of concern to Taranaki Arts Festival Trust chief executive Suzanne Porter. Womad is just one of half a dozen successful arts and culture activities in which the local council is financially involved. As Porter told RNZ’s Arts on Sunday programme recently, just what is meant by essential services and who is to define them remains unclear at this point. “Personally what is of concern to me is that local communities are not allowed to define for themselves what they want to spend their rates on.” The arts community, Porter added, seems to be being blamed for blowouts in rates around New Zealand, yet on little or no evidence – given that the ratio of money being spent by councils on the arts is, on closer analysis, almost insignificant.

Paltry, but vital to the survival of the arts events being supported. For every dollar from the local council, Porter told RNZ, the Trust went out and raised a further $20 from the wider community, and some of the corporate sponsorship involved in Womad looked to the Council to provide that initial seeding money and burst of leadership. It pays off. “What we do in Womad is put Taranaki on the map. We build a town for a weekend…and the economic benefit is $7-8 million a year just on that one event. So we’re up for the debate. And we think there should be robust debate [about the local government reforms] before any decisions are made.”

Councils, she believes play a crucial role in providing startup money and leadership to events that lend a vibrancy to life in provincial New Zealand. “To attract people here there has to be more for them than good roads and pavements….I don’t want to live in a city where the celebratory things are gone. The pull and the beckoning of Aussie is so strong anyway from a money point of view, that if you take away those other things that make it worth living here, I think you’ll have changed the face of New Zealand.” ( In other countries as well, the economic recession and crisis in the Eurozone is badly affecting the funding of the arts. )

Even if it wanted to (and it plainly doesn’t) central government and Creative New Zealand couldn’t pick up what local government may be soon forced to abandon. Central government lacks the grassroots knowledge of local communities, and their needs and wants. In microcosm, Womad and the other popular events in which the Taranaki Arts Festival Trust plays a leadership role – the list includes an arts festival, a film festival and a garden show – will pose a sterling test of the ideology behind the current package of local government reforms.

Images by Alastair Thompson

Images by Rose O’Connor

Ends

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/womad-saved-by-the-sun/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/personal-archaeology/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/personal-archaeology/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:01:16 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3787 The Politicisation of Remembering —Judge Dredd and Horror Stories

by Mark P. Williams

I generally feel I have a clear sense of the cultural markers of my own generation; I can identify certain obvious landmarks in the terrain of my life. Despite this it was only relatively recently, while putting together materials for a serious study of key writers from within the last thirty years that I started to really identify the little crossroads where the things they write about had affected me directly and personally from an early age. These little crossroad-moments are the beginnings of the cascade towards a critical consciousness, responses to the interactions of literatures, music forms and TV, comic books and ‘current affairs’—I always used to be very amused to spot pulp horror author Shaun Hutson in the audience of TV debating show Central Weekend but there are interesting connotations there, particularly considering the knowing topicality of Hutson’s horror narratives.

It’s somehow gratifying to find that the same points of cultural reference which have a strong personal import have been shared by people who create books, art and music. My friend Joe was always surprised that I didn’t know the work of The Fall because of my own interests in things like post-1960s SF, Lovecraftian horror and the darker crime fictions of English urban life, and in particular, fictions set in the bleak, liminal landscapes of the North of England. I’ve found that the research project I’m developing has a dimension of personal archaeology to it: I’m uncovering links between disparate cultural fields that I’d encountered separately because they were part of the cultural air I breathed.

What started out as a contextual attempt to get back into the culture I was writing about through music and TV accompaniment is actually becoming significant in its own right. I find I’m listening to songs that I thought I didn’t know only to realise that I used to know them well; in some cases just because they would have been on the radio all the time and I’d just forgotten how popular they were, but in other cases because they were the favourite albums of friends—they form a kind of shared soundtrack to a personal history. That sounds nostalgic, and perhaps the distance from home makes it seem to have that quality sometimes, but I don’t think nostalgia really does justice to the political dimension of remembrance in this: I’m not longing for the past; I’m rediscovering past contemporary moments and their complex relationship with my own contemporary moment.

Perhaps I should say, the politicisation of remembrance that comes with understanding the wider context for personal events.

T he comics I grew up reading included Marvel and DC but my reading was dominated by the idiosyncratically British title 2000AD, which, like many readers, I followed very closely. It was 2000AD that gave us Judge Dredd in 1977. It’s not too big a claim to suggest that it was this very British series, set in a totalitarian, authoritarian future megalopolis in America, Mega City One, which helped define British comic book culture. 2000AD gave a start to most of the names who went on to form the ‘British invasion’ of American comics: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Garth Ennis have all contributed to either Judge Dredd or to Tharg’s Future Shocks. The overarching context for the satire was always that of mocking the social mores of conservative figures and Conservative politicians—restriction and authoritarianism were presented as genuinely insidious things, performed in the names of ‘safety’, ‘justice’ and ‘social good’ but always seeming compromised. Great characters like Johnny Alpha, mutant leader of the Strontium Dogs, out of the ‘Milton Keynes uprising’ where mutants, sick of bigotry and intolerance against them in future Britain (Brit Cit), became freedom fighters.

Classic Johnny Alpha lines in a scene from the ‘Judgement Day’ storyline (a zombie story where earth is being overrun thanks to alien ‘Necromagus’ called Sabbat—it was actually a crossover between 2000AD and its spin-off Judge Dredd the Megazine):

Hondo City [Japanese] Judge (named Sadu, I think): “And you’re a mutant too, you admit that.”
Alpha: “I declare it pal.”

Judge Sadu later sacrifices himself to save Dredd and Alpha—the poetics and ethics of the buddy-movie at work, yet somehow it’s not cloying, it retains a harshness that reinvests it with its critical qualities. (As an aside, I found it interesting that Sabbat physically resembles an Elf from some Tolkien epigone; he appears as a magical figure in an SF universe who has literally broken the rules of the world he appears in.)

Naturally, anti-authoritarians like Johnny Alpha came into contact and conflict with Dredd, being on the wrong side of the law—yet these meetings were always tinged with ambiguity: there was a fondness for Dredd in the 2000AD stories which didn’t extend to the system he represented; in the case of the Strontium Dog crossovers, Dredd and Alpha would reach a grudging respect for one another. Moreover, as a character, Dredd developed from simplistic totalitarian figure to a more nuanced satirical figure in the hands of a variety of new writers. He is obviously a Clint Eastwood character (he has an ‘apt’ in Rowdy Yates block, if there were any doubt) and over the years, Dredd’s characterisation would take similar shifts to those of Eastwood’s famous movie escapades: blending the unswerving contempt for liberalism of early Dirty Harry with something much more attuned to moral and political ambiguity of later films like Unforgiven and Absolute Power. Dredd also has the virtue of being a larger than life cartoon character who can be employed as a mask to fit over the face of any given British political figure who follows an authoritarian bent (The Guardian used a Judge Dredd costume in a cartoon to satirise one of Blair’s interchangeable Home Secretaries a few years ago). Dredd is a significant cultural marker: an American uber-authoritarian who represents something distinctive about contemporary British pop culture.

T hen there’s Horror fiction, which formed another significant node of my reading.

Clive Barker says in his A—Z of Horror: ‘I don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t genuinely interested in Horror in some form or another [;] [i]t was always the grisly bits of fairy tales that I was interested in [,] I’ve always liked fantastical literature of some kind, and I’ve always liked the darker aspects of that’. That approach to ‘Horror’ as the darker fantastic, the exploration of the hidden underbelly of culture, is a fruitful and positive one; I think it taps into what I perceived as the importance of the form when I was younger (which has a fairly subjective dimension).

During the 1980s and into the ‘90s Horror fiction seemed to gain cultural ground. Great writers like Ramsey Campbell who had been working in their own particular style, refining and evolving since the sixties and seventies had gradually become recognised as veterans of a singularly powerful fictional form. It would be too much to claim that Horror fiction had become ‘respectable’—it was remains and proud—but it had certainly become respected, particularly with the arrival of Clive Barker. For me it was about seeing Campbell and Barker on TV panel discussions alongside other literary luminaries of the darker genres being asked serious questions about the concept of fear and its social application—Cold War in microcosm, the terror which defined the ideologically overweening presence of a true unimaginable horror transmuted into the supernatural and the psychological. This was also a time of the birth of visceral horror and it’s impossible in retrospect not to see some kind of specific correlation between the acquisitive mentality of deregulating, privatising freemarketeering and the appearance of certain types of fiction.

We usually trace visceral horror back to Barker’s Books of Blood, which were something of a publishing phenomenon and are still being adapted into films (their continuing cinematic proliferation another reason for Barker’s popularity), but an essay ‘On Sex and Horror’ by John Nicholson, in Clive Bloom’s Gothic Horror (1998), traces a direct line between the extreme, visceral dismantling and recombining of the body in 1980s British Horror and an established tradition of Cold War British Science Fiction and psychological fiction.

Horror fiction felt hugely significant to me as a developing reader, my Mum would no doubt mention her introducing me to the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley at a young age, and this is clearly a personal factor but on a cultural level I remember perceiving genre fiction in terms of shelf space in book and video stores: the Horror sections seemed to have a read presence in the late 1980s and ‘90s. Partly this is about genre perception: the visual codes of the horror shelf are clear and strong, they present a kind of force field of genre unification with their black backgrounds and gold lettering (Shaun Hutson paperbacks are paradigmatic of this). Naturally, they carry expectation; you really know what you’re getting to a significant degree, this is a meticulously defined genre in many respects with a recognisable emotional palette to match its colour coding—whatever the text’s relationship with epistemology, whether the ‘horror’ comes from a supernatural or a psychological source, the design of the story is to excite a specific set of responses. For this reason it is considered a more conservative form than either science fiction or fantasy, with which it competes for shelf space. Farah Mendelsohn has argued persuasively in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction and Rhetorics of Fantasy that neither SF nor Fantasy should be considered genres in this sense, because unlike Horror, they do not define the limitations of the form of the writing as such. In that sense, Horror is more limited, but within its limits there has been much space made for play and subversion (as Barker, Gaiman, Brite, Newman and many others have amply demonstrated).

Stephen Jones needs a mention at this point. Jones’ anthologies brought together some of the most interesting an exciting short fantastic fictions around, all grouped under a loose rubric of ‘Horror’ that meant they were so much more than merely spooky stories. It was through Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror and Dark Terrors, and, of course, Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, that I encountered the writing of Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Poppy Z. Brite, writers whose work not only interrogated but really pushed the social boundaries of genre. Particular stories stand out from memory, serving as potent introductions to the work of important authors: Poppy Z. Brite’s New Orleans-based story ‘His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood’ dealing with sexuality and obsession through the concept of voodoo and vampirism in terms both frank and haunting; S.P. Somtow’s ‘Chui Chai’ presenting a blend of tropes from the European Gothic tradition and the more contemporary paranoias of globalisation in the context of Thai culture. Still more vivid is Kim Newman’s ‘The Original Dr Shade’, which mixed up a powerful brew of satire, comic books and a critical exploration of the darker underbelly of 1980s ideology. Pre-war comic book superhero Dr Shade is resurrected by a media company, with all and the artist assigned to handle his new adventures finds himself haunted by the character himself, while Right wing thugs known as ‘shadeheads’ roam the streets.

Although I was only reading SF magazines like Interzone sporadically, I was dipping into them to find works by this stable of writers whose work I’d encountered through the reliable sources of fascinating writing that were Stephen Jones’s anthologies, and from there I would branch out: reading novels by Paul J. McAuley, like the brilliant Fairyland because of his Frankensteinian ‘Dr Praetorius’ stories found elsewhere.

The texts of these writers and others were clearly invested in genre, and made their living selling to genre magazines, but they obviously had much to say about other matters, cultural and political and would happily use a ‘Horror’ text to say it. These texts took the limitations of genre seriously on one level (operating clearly within certain parameters of audience expectation—there is something horrible within) while subverting and playing with genre limitations on another (approach, tone and character-type—the horrible thing might be your expectation). Above all, that feeling, that sense of partaking in and following along with a collective expression of the expansion of the boundaries of the world, was a great thing. Through the horror anthologies and Judge Dredd comic books relationship with literary culture and ‘the Classics’ that I became aware of the presence and implications of self-reflexivity in fiction—initially through stories which made intertextual reference to Classics, to films I was just starting to watch and to the other fictions I was reading, and also to critical concepts about culture: serious critiques of Thatcherism and Mary Whitehouse’s social conservatism couched in pop-culture. These texts were critical, exciting and pushed against the visible limits of the world that surrounded us both politically and aesthetically; they helped lay the groundwork for a lot of other significant writers and, somewhere among the crowd of readers, they put down traces that I would eventually return to and rethink when I decided to study literature, and begin to uncover the political layers and artefacts in my personal archaeology.

Selected References

Barker, Clive, in Clive Barker’s A—Z of Horror compiled by Steven Jones (London: BBC Books, 1997), p. 86.
Nicholson, John, ‘On Sex and Horror’ (pp. 249—77), Gothic Horror ed. Clive Bloom (London: Macmillan, 1998).

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/personal-archaeology/feed/ 1 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/cartoon-alley-brent-willis/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/cartoon-alley-brent-willis/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:00:33 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=701 Brent Willis currently lives in Lyall Bay, Wellington and has been making underground self-published comics since the mid 1990s. Amongst his titles have been Fetus Boy Adventures, the Gimps, MoXon (co-written with Ari Freeman), Fungus Boy Adventures, the Eric (NZ comics) Award-nominated Maggot, a graphic novel Battle-van, and many more. He has also contributed comics to Salient, Caclin and various anthologies. Currently he edits Bristle, a quarterly Wellington comics anthology. Ranga is his first cartoon strip done in colour.

[Editor's note: Ranga is in reverse chronological order, so starts at the bottom.]
Last updated: April 18th, 2012

Click for big version.

Click for big version.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/cartoon-alley-brent-willis/feed/ 4 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/werewolf-issue-29-march-2012/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/werewolf-issue-29-march-2012/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:52:30 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3805
Are unreal media images of women doing real life damage?
The Hunger Games : Can a ritual of violence send an anti-war message? Do journalists have a clue about how to analyse polls?

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	Waiting For The Man An interview with new Labour leader, David Shearer by Gordon Campbell
	Lies, Damn Lies and Opinion Polls Are journalists prone to being dazzled by numbers? by Alison McCulloch
	Feeling Bad About Ourselves What should we do about the promotion of unreal image of women ? by Anne Russell
	Marketing the Mind How the tertiary sector in New Zealand is being hi-jacked into the service of commerce by Gordon Campbell
	Pedro Does Vertigo Pedro Almodovar’s fresh take on the Hitchcock classic about sex, obsession and second chances by Philip Matthews
	From The Hood : Moonbeam Dreams of Murder Feline fantasies of fame fortune and bloody vengence by Lyndon Hood
	Classics : The Hunger Games (2008) When life is a war game, you need friends to survive by Gordon Campbell
	Talking Sport : The Trashing of Alberto Contador Nothing that resembles natural justice was meted out to the champion Spanish cyclist by Lamont Russell
	Cartoon Alley : Mat Tait & Mike Brown Mat Tait is a South Island based cartoonist and illustrator. Mike Brown lives in Wellington and is currently writing a PhD thesis on New Zealand vernacular musics. by Mike Brown & Mat Tait
	Cartoon Alley : Brent Willis Brent Willis currently lives in Lyall Bay, Wellington and has been making underground self-published comics since the mid 1990s. by Brent Willis
	* * * * * WEREWOLF ISSUE 28, February, 2012 * * * * * By Werewolf

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/04/werewolf-issue-29-march-2012/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/waiting-for-the-man/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/waiting-for-the-man/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:15:57 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3746 An interview with new Labour leader, David Shearer

by Gordon Campbell
images by Selwyn Manning – click for big versions

David Shearer’s home territory in Mt Albert seems a long way from Parliament, and its ritualised bouts of arm wrestling at Question Time. The shopping centre looks careworn, and down at heel. Look for the door to his constituency office in Mt Albert and you’ll find it tucked away below road level, on the same block as the Homey Taste Restaurant and the Baker Boy Pizzeria, and just up the street from the Fall In Love bridal wear shop. Yet despite the frayed appearance of the shopping centre, the forces of upward mobility are also simmering away, just below the surface. A remarkable number of the local real estate notices for example, make the point that buying in here will put you right in the zone for Mt Albert Grammar School.

Locally and nationally then, the same questions face David Shearer and the Labour Party he now leads. Where do you put your focus? On the relatively affluent parts of town up towards the Domain, on the middle class trying to hang onto their place on the social ladder, or the people just down the road, living three families to a section? So goes the neighhourhood, there goes the nation. Because for now, the answer has to be : all of them, all at once. Luckily for Shearer, he seems one of those people who actually looks healthier when he’s under stress – its as if the challenge gives a slow metabolism more focus, and motivation. He comes in for the interview in shirtsleeves, after doing some constituency work nearby, and without any minders in tow.

It is an interesting time to be talking to him. In the coming weeks and months, Shearer plans on giving a series of speeches setting out his political views, and where Labour stands. These won’t be State of the Nation events, he assures me, but its hard to see how they won’t be treated as the first substantive indicators of what sort of political animal this new Leader of the Opposition really is. At this point, Shearer is still disarmingly frank and unrehearsed. Ask him whether he’s actually enjoying the new role and he replies simply that its hard. Hard to say something intelligible, he says, on every single topic that people now raise with him. Hard too, to learn how to STOP talking himself into trouble on issues he cares about, but where he now feels the need to be more circumspect. And hard to be circumspect at times, without appearing to be weak. Maybe, I suggest gently, he should watch a few John Wayne movies.

Regardless, the unrehearsed quality in Shearer is one of his strongest political assets, and one he’d be a fool to try and change. Voters may not mind if he seems at times to be groping for an answer, so long as they think he’s actually trying to get to the right answer, for them. (Glib is so last year.) As for his management style, it is evident that Shearer will be a chairman of the board leader, in the Holyoake mode – which is the kind way of saying that he seems petrified right now at getting too far out in front of his team. Even if that’s the reason, the tentative nature of some of the responses below should be of concern to party supporters. A leader after all, leads, and justifies it later.

Still, it promises to make for an interesting contrast over the next couple of years – a consensus style leader in Labour, up against a John Key who has pretty much carried the entire National Party cause on his shoulders.

Werewolf editor Gordon Campbell talked to David Shearer on Friday afternoon March 2, about his views on a range of topics :

Campbell : This major speech that’s been heralded. When will it take place, and what’s its intended purpose ?

Shearer : What I wanted to be to do is to put out some thoughts about where we’re going, a bit of a vision about what I’m looking for, and where I’d like to take Labour. The idea is not have a sort of State of the Nation speech as such – but to give a series of speeches over the next three months…The first one is obviously the most important because people are looking out for it. [But] I don’t want to talk about the content just yet.

When will it take place?

The middle of March.

And the intended purpose – is to give people a foretaste of where you stand and where you see Labour going during this term?

Yes. A little bit about myself, what I see as some of the key issues, and what are some of the key issues we’re going to face if we want to be in government in 2014.

A lot of the people who once voted Labour are now self-employed, or independent contractors or in small business.* In a speech a few weeks ago, you depicted them as the people sitting at the kitchen table filling in their GST returns. Which means they may be more socially and economically conservative compared to those on the left. To win them back, what do you think Labour has to do – and just as importantly, what does it have to avoid doing?

First of all, I’m not sure they are necessarily socially conservative. But I’m also not sure they see Labour as their natural home anymore. Many of them, I should say, are people who are not earning very much. They’re working really hard, and really long hours. But possibly even earning less than a minimum hourly rate. My feeling is that these people – they’re working hard, playing by the rules – are not being heard, and certainly not by the National Party. And I would argue, they possibly don’t see us as their natural home either. What we would like to do is to bring them into Labour and say yes, we understand where you’re coming from, and we’ll try to be the party for you.

But what do they need from you, as proof you are their home?

First, we need to acknowledge the sort of things that they’re up against. That they are working really hard. That they are trying to bring up their kids in the right way. That they are playing by the rules. That they are doing all those sorts of things. Bu they don’t see the Labour Party as being the party that’s naturally, standing up for them. Wee haven’t addressed them specifically as part of our…

But apart from a “David empathises with your situation” message, what do they want practically from you to convince them that you’re part of the solution, and not part of the problem?

There’s a few things we can look at in terms of small business in how we can help. People in that sort of situation. There are some areas we’re looking at, at the moment in terms of that.

You mean, tax issues?

It might be tax issues. But it might be more in the way of regulation issues. And this is something we’re working through. I don’t think we’ve got the absolute answer –

You mean, cutting red tape?

It could be that. I think the key thing about this, is that up ‘til now, a lot of those sorts of people haven’t been given the recognition, or haven’t been listened to. If there’s one thing I’m trying to do is get out and around the place, and actually understand what their circumstances are.

Go back to the second part of the question. What does Labour have to avoid doing, in order not to repel those people? If you’re seen as primarily being the party of the disadvantaged or of beneficiaries – and while there may be darn fine social justice arguments for standing up for such people – is there a risk you may then drive away the people that you say you’re trying to reach?

You mean if we stand up for people who are disadvantaged, we might repel the others?

Yes. You might repel the middle class strugglers we were talking about.

Everybody says this to me but I don’t.. it just doesn’t convince me that somehow, one excludes the other. I can’t understand why that argument is being made. That if we go this way, we can’t go that way. My feeling is that the Labour Party has been a party that’s been a pretty broad church in the past, and there’s no reason why it can’t be a broad church in the future.

Well, lets take an example: welfare reform. Welfare reform is something that many of those middle class strugglers we’re talking about happen to support. Do you think that solo parents on the DPB should be made to work full time when their youngest child turns 14,- and part time when their youngest child is five?

I think you’ve really got to be careful about making things compulsory. There are many, many people out there by now who are – at the age that their children are now – who are saying ‘ I’ll go back to work again, for a lot of different reasons, and for a lot of economic reasons.” There are two issues here for me here – if you want someone to go back out to work again, there are at least three pre-conditions. One, they need to have the skills to be able to get work. Two, they need to have good childcare to be able to do it And three, there has to be the jobs. Now if you don’t talk about those three things, then there’s no point in talking about compulsory or optional or whatever. Those three things are essential pre-requisites. And what’s happening is that the government is talking about compulsion, of pushing people out while actually not providing the enabling part of it.

But the point is, the struggling middle class don’t want to wait for those pre-conditions to be met. They’re happy to have welfare reform now, and seem to have a striking lack of sympathy for people on the DPB. Do you oppose the DPB planks of the welfare reform process?

I don’t oppose the encouragement of getting people into work. I don’t think there’s a party in Parliament that doesn’t believe working isn’t better than being on some sort of welfare cheque, particularly for unemployed people. For DPBs its obviously slightly more difficult, in that child must come first. And for us, that’s the key issue. The other issue…is that the majority of women who are having children, who go back out to work,- and I know, because there are tons of them in my electorate here – who put their children into childcare, and are able to cope. But there is another group of people and or whatever reason – jobs, skills, adequate childcare – where they can’t do that. They don’t have that option, even if you wanted them to, or felt that was the best thing for them. So putting the child first means that – if you want to get women back into the work force – you do need those other things in place.

But in the real world in 2012, we’re going to have the government enacting a welfare policy whereby solo parents on the DPB will have to work full time once their youngest child is 14 – regardless of the state of the job market. There’s no quid pro quo I can see on the government’s reform agenda. So, will you oppose that measure?

If there are no jobs, if there is no training, if there’s no ability for somebody to get childcare then –

So that’s a yes, you will oppose it?

I would like to encourage to get people back to work whenever they…as soon as possible.

I’m trying to get past your preference, and get at what are you going to do when it hoves into view into Parliament. Are you going to vote against any measure of this sort, within that section of the welfare reform legislation?

We have to see what it looks like.

You know what it looks like. Bennett and Co. have made their intentions very clear.

I’ll say to you again : I believe people should be going back to work, or going to work – because some of them haven’t been to work – whenever that is possible for them to do that, and whenever it is in the best interests of their children. But I say again – if there is no ability to get good work, either through jobs, or through skills or through decent childcare then that’s not….

And finally, can I say that those things are of such a priority to you as a pre-condition that absent of them, you will vote against that part of the legislation ?

I want to look at the legislation before I tell you how I’m going to vote. I’m not going to be sitting here in the absence of a caucus discussion and telling you how I – or the Labour Party – are going to vote.

Tactical Priorities

Tactically is Labour’s main priority this year – and I stress” main” priority – those voters who have gone rightwards to National, or those who have gone left to the Greens ?

They’re all up for grabs. I would argue they’re opportunities. First of all we lost some to the Greens and some to New Zealand First. My sense is – and its only a sense – is that some of the vote that went that way is not solidly anti-Labour, but they were looking for another home in the last election. That [defection] is quite soft – and with the right policies and the right way that we go forward, we can get them back. But we’re looking at the Greens going from whatever it was 9 per cent to 12 or 13 per cent. So there’s four percent there and perhaps three per cent of the New Zealand First vote. And its hard to tell where the New Zealand First vote came from – whether it was from the left or from the right…

The question was about your ‘main’ priority.

We don’t have a main priority of only focussing on there, and not focussing on there.

The reason why I’m asking is that National uses its partners as its ideological outriders, which gives it more room to seem moderate by comparison. Should Labour supporters expect to see Labour operating similarly in tandem with the Greens, rather than trying to outdo them on social justice and environmental issues?

With the Greens, there is the possibility that obviously on a number of issues, we are very, very similar. There nuances between us. So it makes good sense as oppositional parties to be looking at some of these same issues, in a similar way. But we are still contesting that vote, we are not going to sit back –

I’m not suggesting abandoning it. I’m talking about relative emphasis. There could be a de facto division of work where the Greens can pursue the centre left message while Labour focusses on wooing those who have defected to the centre right.

But..why would we want to do that?

Because its crucial to becoming the next government. Perhaps because it enables you to win the swing people in the centre.

I understand what you’re saying. It was a rhetorical question. Why would we want to give up that vote on the left ?

The reason would be to avoid deterring those who you will need to become a broad spectrum government. Isn’t this a natural MMP evolution whereby the major parties focus on being the parties of the stable centre, while their more ideological partners mop up the hard left or the hard right? The job of the moderate parties being then to occupy the centre – and that means arguably, that they shouldn’t be pursuing policies that will scare off or repel the moderate centre. That’s the argument.

Yeah, I’m not so sure about that moderate centre being scared off. I guess my sense is that centre is available if we do the right things. There are two issues with that overlap with the Greens. One is, I don’t want to cede ground to the Greens. One reason is we want to the dominant party in government. Of course we do, that’s what we’re here for. That’s the competition, the contest. But we have within the Labour Party, a strong left part of our Labour Party who would be absolutely horrified to think we were giving up on that part of the Labour Party. We would certainly not. What we are saying is that we will contest, right across the spectrum.

Even if it means you just shuttle the centre left votes back and forth between yourself and the Greens?

For someone like yourself – who is, I guess, left of centre – I can see the logic. But as someone sitting here as the leader of the Labour Party who wants to maximise the percentage vote it makes complete sense to me that we want to gain as much of the percentage vote as we possibly could.

And in the pursuit of that noble quest….is there anything about the policy mix that Labour took into the last election that strikes you as now as being a liability?

First of all, there’s a bunch of policies on the table at the moment. And they stay on the table until we collectively decide to take them off. All our policies at the moment stand as they are.

And that review is a work in progress?

Absolutely. We need to look really carefully at some of the policies that we came out with, and looking…we have now an economic situation and an economic outlook that is very different than when we went into the election. The PREFU that came in October is very different than what we have now.

Right. So given the state of the books as so revealed, can you still afford to make that first $10,000 of income, tax free ?

It was $5,000. Those are exactly the things we need to look at. Looking back and in hindsight there was some feeling that one of their most pressing concerns – we know – was the state of the country’s books, and the deficit, which has blown out to be the biggest deficit in New Zealand’s history, when we were saying at the same time that yes, we will attend to that and we will bring the country back into surplus at exactly the same time as National. It was more difficult to make that argument, when we were about to give the first $5,000 of income tax free. So there was a perceptional issue that I don’t think we overcame…So that’s one issue. The second issue is that the economic growth outlook around the election strangely enough, was a whole lot rosier than it is today.

If you can’t – or won’t – give answers on some of the particular election policy issues – can you least indicate the principles on which the decisions are being made? Is the fate of the tax free policy being decided on genuine affordability, such that you have to sacrifice the social justice goal of the policy? Or are the focus groups telling you the policy is creating a problem of perception? How are you weighting your current analysis of the election promises?

I don’t want to go into each individual policy. Where we need to be in 2014, is for people to say – if the Labour Party came into power tomorrow – I would trust them to manage our economy. That has to be the end goal. They have to feel very convinced about that.

Who’s ‘they’ in that context?

The voters.

Not the corporate sector?

No, no, no. The voters. I haven’t actually asked the corporate sector…. I have asked voters. For nine years we managed the economy extremely well. Even to the point where we were being told we were being over-conservative – ironically, on the other side, by the right. We came out of 2008 – admittedly, going into a financial crisis – with the government’s books balanced. That’s the key point here. Because somehow, in three years, the National Party has become the natural party of looking after the economy in a bad time, and the Labour Party is not being as trusted on the economy. So what happened in those three years? But.we definitely need to get to the position where in 2014, we’re being seen as trusted administrators of the economy.

The short answer to your question is that Labour has never really shaken the ‘tax and spend’ stereotype. And by successfully peddling that stereotype, National has appeared to be the more responsible steward of the economy.

I think the National Party had a very consistent message. There’s no doubt about that. But they also had the advantage of the global financial crisis, the fact the earthquakes had hit and a whole bunch of other things that played to their advantage.

One of those other policies now under review will indicate where you end up on the political spectrum. That will be whether you will continue to argue that Working for Families tax credits will be available to beneficiaries, as well as to low income workers. There’s a heart answer and a head answer on that point.

Okay, the heart first. I’ve come from a position basically, where I’ve spent all my life helping people in poverty. So I’m not about to turn around and say : Labour is not going to access people in poverty. That’s the first thing. The widening gap between the rich and poor – or rather between the poor and the very rich, which is really the case –

What about the gap between the working poor and the beneficiary poor ?

There is a gap there. I’m not sure that gap is widening considerably. What I do know is that the widening gap is not only of concern to us, but is of increasing concern to New Zealanders, as a whole. How do you address that?

And what’s the ‘head’ answer ?

The tax credit to beneficiaries was one way of being able to do it. Would it have been successful? Certainly, it would have put money in the hands of beneficiary families. Is that the best way to do it? Why not a Universal Child Allowance? Why not a whole lot of things. I’m just throwing these out, I’m not making this look like that’s where we’re going. Is there a better way of being able to do it ?

You gave a quid pro quo before about people on the DPB. Are you saying that if you drop this Working for Families tax credit to beneficiaries, it would be only if there was a similar quid pro quo like a Universal Child Allowance?

We have too many kids in poverty. That for me is a blight on New Zealand.
Lifting those kids out of that poverty is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face.

So, what does that mean substantively, if you are now going to drop this policy? If you are, would you do so only if there was an equivalent measure to protect the people who would stand to be affected?

I believe you just can’t leave the situation currently as it is. Where there are – and I can’t remember the figure exactly – several hundred thousand children in poverty. It has to be a major concern of any government.[ Shearer digresses here to talk about the current government’s mooted Ministerial Inquiry into Poverty, his attempts to make it a Parliamentary wide inquiry, and the difficulties of doing so] I’m not saying that the policy is gone. What I am saying is that now we have another three years to think about it, we need to go back and have a good look and make sure that’s the right way forward. Because the one disadvantage of that policy…. is that for many people who are working, they believe it is unfair. I would also argue we didn’t get it across very well at the time. It wasn’t reported on very well, and we didn’t explain it very well before the election. It was too hurried.

Whatever you finally decide, can I get an assurance that you won’t simply be walking away from the people who stood to benefit from the policy?

That’s the point. We have to find the best way of doing it. And if there are some people who think the policy isn’t fair – and if you can’t convince them – then [the policy] becomes a bit problematic, in terms of how to help people that way.

Leader of the Opposition role

Do you see yourself as being in competition with the likes of Winston Peters – or do you currently feel more that – despite the obvious differences – that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Both.

Why I ask is that when the attacks by Winston Peters and Hone Harawira help to erode confidence in the government and promote a desire for change, then there’s a sense in which they’re both working for you – right ?

Look, this is something that a lot of commentators haven’t quite got, yet. They see me competing against Winston Peters. I don’t see myself competing against Winston Peters. Winston Peters – and this is no disrespect to him, I’ve got a lot of respect for him – can go out on a limb much further than we would feel comfortable about doing. By doing that, he has an impact. Now, is that growing his vote substantially to the detriment of us ? Probably not. But what we can then do is come in and provide a moderate voice into that void. And that seems to me to be a useful thing that opposition parties can do in –

That’s a perfect description of what I mentioned before – of using your potential partners as ideological outriders.

Exactly. And you’ve got it, but how come so many commentators out there think I’m in major competition with Winston Peters ? Look, we might be at the end of the year when it comes to competing for votes. But right now, there’s a difference.

When the government gets itself in trouble – as it has done this year – do you think it is sometimes better to leave them to flounder, rather than offer them an argument they can then use to counterpunch their way out of trouble?

So., who are you talking abut when you say “ they?”

When the government gets itself in a fix over asset sales or the crisis do jour, is it sometimes better, tactically, for the Leader of the Opposition to leave them to flounder, rather than jump in, become a distraction, and give them a way of counter punching their way out of the problem?

Ummm. I hope we don’t do that. (laughs) There is a balance here. There is a kind of a…New Zealand First can go a bit further than we can. There’s a risk that if we’re not seen to be part of the debate, then we’re not seen. And that’s a really big issue. Its an issue I’ve got to try and combat because in many ways in our party what I’m trying to do myself personally…(pauses) We’ve got some really able people working hard at getting some issues up, and what I don’t want to do is be the dog that barks at every passing car, and particularly that barks at the issue they’re running.

But….You can’t treat that as a license to under-achieve ?

Absolutely. And that’s the challenge…

OK. Is this why earlier in the year, you kept your mouth shut over the ports of Auckland dispute and the Affco lockout?

No. I mean… over ports of Auckland I didn’t keep my mouth shut, actually. Every time I was asked I commented. I never once turned down an interview.

Isn’t that revealing though? You waited until you were asked…

No. Because….for a couple of reasons. First of all, there was nothing I could do to resolve the issue. Absolutely nothing. I mean, I could wade in and call people a whole bunch of names if I wanted to. But I didn’t. I’ve spoken to every single party in that dispute at least twice, three times. Was down at the ports last Sunday. I spoke to Tony Gibson on the phone afterwards. I went and saw Len Brown last week. I actually think we’ve got [MPs] Darien Fenton and Phil Twyford who’ve been very actively following it, and Andrew Little. I actually think…and this is the real reason for not just getting out there and banging a drum and sounding loud, that I actually think we could do more harm than we could do good.

Because…for the government it would be better for them to be able to say, here we have the likes of the 1951 waterfront dispute, all over again ?

Well, its partly about positioning, but its mostly about the reality of what you can actually do in this sort of situation. If you can gently persuade – well, not gently, some of it has actually been a little bit harsh – people to come to the table, then that would be a good role for me to play.

Economic Policy

In the late 1990s, even the business community finally came to Labour and gave it donations because the centre right had plainly run out of ideas about how to promote economic growth. Do you have any concern that Labour’s support for a comprehensive capital gains tax could be a road block to that happening again?

You mean…from the corporate sector?

Yes. The business community could look at the Shipley/Bolger government and see that those guys had run out of gas. Labour, back then, may have seemed a better bet. But this time – holy cow ! – Labour is touting a comprehensive capital gains tax. So, they might well decide not to open their wallets to support that.

That’s interesting isn’t it. Because a lot of people in the business community think that a capital gains tax is the way to go. And the right way for New Zealand in terms of being able to shift our investment from speculative investment, into productive investment.

More than just Gareth Morgan?

Oh yeah. When you go round and talk to people. Now, they may not necessarily like it because it may be going to hit them some of them. Small and medium businesses in particular might feel that way as well. But many of the people I’ve spoken to would agree deep down, that this is a good way of being able to shift money into investment, and away from speculation.

Arguably, balancing the books has become something of a fetish, and an end in itself. One that’s being pursued almost solely by cutting back on government spending. National won’t address the revenue side of the equation. Is Labour, though, just as opposed to generating revenue via an increase in income tax and corporate tax?

What I believe –with David Parker – is about where we want to be..I think you’re right, National want to talk only about cutting government expenditure – and that’s an important thing to do, don’t get me wrong. But they don’t talk about growing the economy with government, in a sense, helping that process. Its ‘ hands off” with the rest of it. But in a small economy like New Zealand, the government actually can play a real part in developing an economy. Our economy is still probably pretty similar to the way it was in the 1960s in terms of our division between primary products, and things like manufacturing and IT and things like that.

Rod Oram is always banging on that the fundamental structure of the economy hasn’t changed, from our reliance on primary products.

If there is one thing that I will absolutely stand by, in concrete, is the need to grow that other part of the economy. The Rod Oram/Paul Callaghan argument ? Well, Callaghan advocates that you grow the IT sector and get into niches and you develop the high value, high quality niches and we will be able to grow the economy. That’s fine, but it takes a hell of a lot of time. Its good, and I’m not saying its not the right way to go. But what Rod Oram would say is that if you can add 2-3 percent growth through added value with our primary products then you also get a big hit. Essentially…you do both. We will put whatever it takes in place to be able to grow that economy.

Obviously then you’re talking abut a more active role for government, as a partner to business ?

In growing the economy? Absolutely.

People like Bernard Hickey are saying that the rebuild of Christchurch offers a golden opportunity to train and employ the young unemployed. Is that an example of what you might have in mind?

Yes. We should be moving into the area with post-war haste. Instead of kind of hands off, [Adam] Smithian type of values. Which will actually get us nowhere. Because what will happen right now there is actually no real demand for construction work. Because the rebuild hasn’t really started in earnest. They’re still knocking buildings down in the centre of Christchurch. Here in Auckland, our population has grown, but our housing stock I think has grown at less than half that rate.

Yes, Auckland has seen some 64% of the population growth and only 25% of the building consents in the past five years.

Then we’ve got leaky buildings, which in a sense have run over the top of that, again. So we know that there is this extraordinary bubble coming down the track and what we are going to end up doing is employing Irish plumbers and Filipino plasterers. That’s effectively what’s going to happen.

Why do you think the middle class here has become so opposed to higher increases to fund a more egalitarian society? How and when do you think the centre left lost that argument?

I’m not sure its lost it. I don’t think we’ve had the proper discussion about it. We put a lot of the discussion into the Tax Working Group which – obviously – came up with what you’d expect. You look across to Australia where they’ve got a 45% top tax rate, and you look to the Scandinavian countries which I would argue – are the small countries we would want to emulate. Singapore. Switzerland is a bit of an exception…but what we need to do is have a really good look at what is going to bring about what we need. The capital gains tax is an example. We re-factored the economy in terms of what will bring about the greatest growth. One thing Labour has been unfairly tagged with and that we have to shake is that we are “pie-dividers’ rather than “pie-growers.” We can’t allow ourselves to be put in that situation.

But the reality you face is that a large part of the middle class thinks that any further downward –redistribution would be unfair, and that’s because the relatively poor are perceived by them as not pulling their weight. Its a part of the harder, meaner society we have inherited. Can and should Labour be trying to change that perception?

Well I think people are actually a bit contradictory on that. One the one hand they don’t actually like the idea of a hugely unequal society – but on the other hand, they don’t like the…there is that that tendency…(pauses)

For handouts for the poor not to be widely supported?

I would argue and that is one of the things we pushed in the last election was a $15 minimum wage. Now, I’ve just been talking to a bunch of people about the rest home workers who are earning $13.61 and are about to get a one per cent increase. They’re the most unregulated environment in terms of their ability to get work. So they’re doing a 5 hour shift here and a 12 hour shift there and then they’re called back – this is casualisation in a sense at its worst. That one per cent is being offered by Oceania which is an Australian operation that ships its profits out of New Zealand. On top of all that, those workers are looking after the most precious thing to us, which is our families. Now, figure that. I don’t get it. But those people I’ll go into bat for. Because I actually think those people deserve a much better break than they’re getting.

And that’s the sort of thing in New Zealand…these people are working hard, playing by the rules. I mean – how do you get a mortgage when you don’t actually know how much you’re going to earn each week? How do you go to the bank and say – well, sometimes I get a 12 hour shift, and sometimes I get a five hour shift! The issue about that, and the thing that pisses me off more than anything else is that most New Zealanders don’t know that situation exists.

In my electorate here which has, literally three blocks up the road, $2 million properties while down the road there are three families living on a section with half the family living in a converted garage. Which is bloody cold in the wintertime, I can tell you. And people don’t know that exists. I actually believe New Zealand people are among the fairest people in the world. You only have to watch New Zealand peace-keepers in operation to realise they’ve got a kind of nose for fairness that you would never be able to see in any other place. And if New Zealanders are confronted with people in need, they’re extraordinarily generous. But right now…we are talking past each other, really.

MMP Review

What’s Labour’s diagnosis of MMP, and what is the top priority for change you’ll be pushing for in the MMP review ?

We haven’t finalised policies…But there are two issues personally that I will be chucking into the mix, with caucus. The big outstanding one is one party obviously wins an electorate and then can bring in four other MPs. On the basis of their percentage of the vote, into Parliament. I think that’s an anomaly which has to go.

Should it go in the context of lowering the 5% threshold ?

It might.. Look, if the threshold is –

Personally, you’d be more in favour of a 4% threshold?

I think if the electorate seat [provision] went, then 4% would.. Look, I’d like to have a look at it, to be perfectly honest. Because I also spent 4 and half years living in Jerusalem where I saw a Knesset absolutely and utterly …(he laughs and shrugs)

Not many people here are arguing for a 1% threshold

No, I think they [the Israelis] took it up to 2% in the end. It just got so ridiculous. With 1% here, the Marijuana Party would be in Parliament.

So where did you get to on that – are you saying that personally you would support a 4% threshold, in the context of a trade-off with the loss of that added MPs electorate provision?

I’d like to look at it seriously, and I’d like to think through the implications.

One thing coming down the pike with the MMP review stands to affect smaller, list-only parties. Such parties often use their strongest, most high profile MPs to harvest votes in the electorates. For that reason, will Labour oppose any reform of MMP that rules out a losing candidate in the electorate from entering Parliament on the list?

I haven’t thought about that issue before, actually, to be honest with you.

Obviously, it would affect a party like the Greens. Part of the Greens’ vote tally is dependent on being able to use their high profile MPs out in the electorates, for party list purposes. They wouldn’t be able to do that if people who lost in the electorates couldn’t come in on the list.

Yeah, I would be doubtful.. I’d want to think twice about that, actually. For the simple reason that I know David Clendon of the Greens stood against me here. And he campaigned on a party vote, and he did well. One of the reasons he stood was that when you go, for example, for a public meeting where the candidates are up, he wouldn’t have been able to get into those public meetings if he wasn’t standing. So I think there’s a quid pro quo there that I would want to think through before I sort of agreed with [barring] that [possibility.]

Surely it’s a no brainer List parties should be allowed to run their MPs as vote-catching machines in electorates.

That’s the whole point, that’s the advantage they have.

Is it a principle you feel is worth supporting?

Yeah, I don’t..(pauses.) Again, I’d like to think it through. But I don’t really see a major problem if a high profile MP…Michael Cullen might have wanted to stand in a particular area to bring something up, and would we have wanted to lose Michael Cullen? No. And therefore, we can’t stand him in as a candidate in an electorate? That doesn’t seem sensible and yet, he was a list MP..over the last two or three elections.

Foreign Policy

China is now New Zealand’s biggest export market [Correction : it is our biggest source of imports. It is our fastest growing and second biggest export market.] In your view, should we have any concern about China’s military potential in the South Pacific ?

This is a really interesting question. And it really speaks to the difference in attitude between say, an Australian perception of the Pacific and a New Zealand perspective of the Pacific. Our perception and it is certainly mine, is that you’re independent, you’re non-aligned, you’re non-threatening and essentially you develop by relationships. And you establish those links through a solid and a good relationship. I’m not particularly worried about China extending its influence in the Pacific. I haven’t seen it aggressively going in the Pacific. I know the Americans feel concerned about it.

Well, there’s an argument for pursuing a two track policy with China. We embrace them on trade, while being on guard against any potential expansionist ambitions they may have in the South Pacific. Our friends in Australia and America certainly see it in that light

Of course, we have to be careful in the way we look at it. We see how they’re expanding perhaps in the Pacific for example, and I don’t know, in Fiji perhaps. And into Africa. I’ve seen it. There’s been a massive amount of investment. Oddly enough, there is a certain kind of resistance that’s built up in Africa as well..There‘s an evolution of that expansionism –

So what’s the response? I’m assuming you don’t share the full blown paranoia evident in the Australian Defence White Paper a couple of years ago. If New Zealand doesn’t share that particular extreme view, what more should we be doing to be at least effectively on guard against China’s ambitions in the South Pacific ?

We don’t have too many arrows in our quiver as New Zealanders on this one, you know. We have a really good relationship and a pretty open relationship too, to be honest with you, from what I’ve observed when I’ve been in various meetings. And a pretty honest and straight up one. That’s basically the only arrow we’ve got in our quiver.

You mean…so far, so good ?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t see any overt signs of Chinese imperialism sweeping across the South Pacific. Of course they’re going to have relationships with countries with which they didn’t have relationships before. If I was China…it would be incomprehensible if you didn’t.

So the argument would be – this is just a process of learning to live with China becoming a global superpower and its [military] potential just comes with the territory ?

We’ve lived in a bipolar world before. I would argue this is a much more benign polar position than we had before.

Under Helen Clark, Labour opposed and didn’t overtly join a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, in order to remove its alleged weapons of mass destruction. Do you think the worst case scenario on Iran – that it may eventually become a nuclear armed state – would justify a pre-emptive attack on its nuclear facilities?

No.

So, would Labour’s position be that it would only lend support to any pre-emptive military action of that sort, if it had a strong UN mandate?

The UN would have to be a pre-condition, and I would argue that even then if it was a pre-condition you’d be …(pauses) After working in the Middle East, I have a quite different perspective on it. So it would have to be.(pauses) Without any UN mandate it would be inconceivable, put it that way.

Because all the spooks are banging away about the need for a pre-emptive attack, and one timed to catch Obama in a weakened position, before the US election.

My own feeling is that Iran has some serious problems about its democracy and human rights and that sort of thing. Its rhetoric is inflammatory and creates more problems than it solves but a lot of the time the rhetoric is actually for a Shia, and internally Iranian, audience. You look at Iran and where it is : Iraq on one side of it was invaded by the United States, and Afghanistan on the other side, also invaded by the United States. And if you were Iran sitting in the middle and looking across at the new found respect North Korea had….and I’m not in any way supporting the proliferation of nuclear arms… [At this point, Shearer asks to go off the record and chooses not to add anything further on this topic, beyond a call for engagement, rather than sabre rattling.]

Because the argument would be that if the world has learned to live with a nuclear armed Pakistan, it could possibly do the same with the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, Although… that’s not desirable.

No, its certainly not desirable. And if you attacked Iran what would the consequences be? I just hate to think.

Finale

Tactically over the next few months, how do you propose to exploit the government’s current weakness – by general agreement, it has had a pretty appalling start to its second term.

We have to attack where the government wants to go. Certainly, on the economic side of things if we take that as an example. I believe that its real weakness – and I really truly believe this – is that there is no plan for expanding the economy. What we’ve ended up doing is trying to sell assets, as an excuse for a plan. And that is supposed to fund our expansion of infrastructure, or whatever it is going to be spent on, we actually don’t know. It’s a bit of everything, according to John Key.

And it will address our social deficit with the money, at the same time.

Absolutely. That leaves you with precisely nothing. If we are able to run that line then I think it will undermine the government’s ability to be an economically credible government. What we have to do at the same time is run parallel with that, and make sure that we are economically credible and that we are responsible and people can see us as managers of an economy in 2014.

And is part of that message a commitment to not doing anything to frighten the horses unduly?

I don’t know about not being frightening….What we need to do is to make sure to project –

A message of moderation?

I think so. We have to be able to stand up and say yes, we can see where Labour is going, and yes, we can see in addition to being thrifty – my Finance spokesperson talks about a flinty, thrifty finance approach – that we can use the government effectively to grow the economy. Then we’ve got the balance about right. At the moment, I think [the government] is only talking about one side of the ledger.

Which leaves the public in the middle – between compassionate conservatives on one hand, and hard arsed, flinty liberals on the other.

Oh God, is that the only two choices? What about compassionate, hard arsed liberals? What about compassionate liberals?

• Hat tip to Chris Trotter for pinpointing that passage in Shearer’s recent Grey Power speech.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/waiting-for-the-man/feed/ 6 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/lies-damn-lies-and-opinion-polls/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/lies-damn-lies-and-opinion-polls/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:13:34 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3740 Are journalists prone to being dazzled by numbers?

by Alison McCulloch

“Conservative Young Cautious on Sex Education,” claimed a headline in the Sunday Star Times early in January. According to the paper, “sex education could be too much for conservative Kiwi youths” who, it concluded, hold “conservative views on sex issues”. In the face of recurring moral panics about our over-sexualised, over-sexed drunken youth, it was certainly a surprising claim. Could it be that the nation’s teenagers are all ensconced in their bedrooms doing their maths homework after all?

The Sunday Star Times’s article was based on a poll commissioned by the conservative lobby group Family First, whose media release on the same day had pretty much the same take, bearing the headline: “Teens Conservative on Sex/Abortion Issues – Poll”. “A nationwide poll of 600 young people aged 15-21 has found that they hold conservative values on sex issues,” the release began.

A cursory glance at the survey data actually tells quite a different story – different, at least, depending on the story you want them to tell. What’s more, Family First’s own release provided evidence of less – rather than more – sexual conservatism, with its expressions of concern at New Zealand’s high teen pregnancy and abortion rates, and “out of control” sexually transmitted infections. None of which seemed to disturb the Sunday Star Times in its desire to run with a headline that wasn’t just perkily counterintuitive, but also got to include the three-letter “s” word. Nor did any doubts plague The Dominion Post’s columnist Karl du Fresne, who was heartened that the survey showed teenagers “see through all the fraudulent b…..” about sex education .

The “conservative teens” survey was one of around a dozen opinion polls released by Family First in the past year on a range of hot-button moral issues, many of which, just like the youth survey, attracted some surprisingly uncritical attention by the mainstream media. But of course it’s not just Family First surveys that sometimes get an easy ride. Under the “polling” category on their StatsChat blog, faculty from the University of Auckland’s Statistics Department list numerous examples of poor use of polls on issues ranging from smoking to students fleeing overseas to the media’s own “self-selected web site polls”. “We’ve commented before on the annoying tendency of newspapers to claim that self-selected website polls actually mean something,” Prof. Thomas Lumley wrote in a January post. “The media usually refers to the results as coming from an ‘unscientific poll’, but a better term would be ‘a bogus poll’”.

Are journalists really so dazzled by figures that they suspend critical judgment in the face of a percentage or margin of error? Let’s take a closer look at that youth survey. The question that led Family First’s the poll was this: Do you think sex education in schools should teach values, abstinence and consequences such as pregnancy, or just teach safe sex? The results, with a 4% margin of error, showed 34% opted for “values, abstinence and consequences”, 19% for “just…safe sex” while a plurality of 42% rejected the either/or options offered by the pollsters and, unprompted, said they’d like both. (For the questions and full results on this and other Family First polls, look for “Family Issue Polls” under the “Research” tab on Family First’s homepage. [ http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/])

So how did the Sunday Star Times get from those figures to youth conservatism on sex issues? The paper, through its deputy editor, declined to comment, leading to the suspicion it got there the same way Newstalk ZB did – with a little help from Family First. Newstalk also ran the story in at least two bulletins, arguing that the survey showed “more conservative views about sex are developing amongst young people”.

Family First won’t reveal how much it spends on polling, but its director Bob McCoskrie says the organisation generally budgets $1000 a question. With at least a dozen questions publicised in 2011 as well as some internal polling that’s not made public, a tab of $15,000 is undoubtedly conservative. Whatever the total, it’s clearly money well spent, and a drop in Family First’s total budget. Accounts available on the Charities Commission Web site show the organisation’s income last year was a healthy $352,448, with almost $320,000 of that coming from donations.

McCoskrie says Family First is pleased with its opinion polling and plans to continue. “There’s been some polls that we’ve released that the media have completely ignored,” he says. “And yet there’s been others that they’ve loved.” McCoskrie describes it as a bit like fishing. “You can put on really good bait and it’s not taken and other times you can put something out and people love it.” He points to a poll released in March 2011 that asked respondents whether the government should set up an independent complaints authority for Child Youth and Family (CYF). Despite 65% support, the media didn’t touch it. “Then it came up in January, and I re-released the results and said, ‘look we polled people on this issue back in March and here’s what they said, and suddenly the media are interested.”

It’s all about the timing.

And the wording. Just how those questions are constructed is crucial, and a look through the past year’s surveys suggests this is carefully done. Another question asked in the poll of 600 youth asked: “Provided it won’t put the girl in physical danger, should parents be told if their school-age daughter is pregnant and considering getting an abortion?” Although the question doesn’t make clear who “should” be doing the telling (The daughter? The school? The authorities?) and doesn’t talk about the law, Family First’s interpretation was that the 59% who answered “yes” were providing a clear rebuke to politicians who didn’t amend the relevant legislation in 2004 to make such parental notification mandatory. (By way of full disclosure, the author is an active member of the pro-choice group ALRANZ [http://www.alranz.org/], which frequently disagrees with Family First on reproductive rights issues.)

Dr. Peter Thompson, a senior lecturer in the Media Studies Programme at Victoria University, took a look at several of Family First’s polls, including the youth survey. One problem he identified was the condensing of multiple factors together in a single question. “The question about whether sex education classes should include values, abstinence and consequences could be measuring young people’s responses to any one of those factors,” he says. “It’s not really possible to be sure what’s being measured here.” Thompson says the yes/no framing of questions and inclusion of multiple factors limits the validity of inferences you might draw. “It’s not clear whether this stems from poor research design by the market researchers/company or very careful (but biased) research design by the commissioning party.”

So who designs Family First’s questions? McCoskrie says they get tossed around by the organisation in conjunction with an advisor, whom he won’t name but describes as “one of the top guys in the country in this area”, and the polling firm that conducts the surveys, Curia. “We get quite a bit of input from David Farrar – there’s been some changes he’s made that we might not have thought of,” McCoskrie says.

Farrar is Curia’s principal and runs the well-known conservative Kiwiblog. [http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/ ] In his disclosure statement, Farrar says he’s been a member of the National Party since 1986 and worked under National politicians in Parliament for almost eight years. “My politics are well known, but I try not to mix politics and business,” Farrar says, explaining he’s done polling work for left-wing politicians at the local body level as well as for the National Party. Other clients willing to be publicly identified include John Banks, Independent Liquor, the Wanganui Chronicle, the Northern Advocate and the Republican Movement.

Farrar says there are always multiple ways to write a question and disputes suggestions that Family First’s are designed to get a particular outcome. “[They’re] not designed to get particular results, [they’re] designed to get answers to specific questions, but they’re not the only questions that can be asked.” What’s crucial, Farrar says, is transparency.

“The absolute key is to make sure that full question is known so people can come to their own interpretation,” he says. “You can agree or disagree with what they put out in their press releases, but they are, when you look at other groups out there, meticulous about making sure they always link to the full questions and answers. And I don’t actually think there’s necessarily any other groups that do that.”

Farrar’s right there. Family First provides easy access to the reports issued by Curia, which include the survey questions, results, number and demographics of respondents, among other details. But do journalists ever bother to look? Media coverage of a suite of around nine questions asked last March and released periodically throughout the year would suggest they often don’t. Topics covered in the March survey of 1000 people included abortion, brothels and street prostitution, binding referendums, same-sex adoption, smacking, a commission of inquiry into family violence and child abuse, and the need for a CYF complaints authority.

None of the reporting found by this writer, for example, noted that the March 2011 polls over-represented older age groups, women and those living in rural and provincial areas – something senior research fellow at Victoria University’s School of Government Dr. Jenny Neale pointed out after taking a look at the polls. “If you look at Stats NZ you’ll find that metro – people living in the big cities – makes up 72% of our population and they’ve got 42% coming from metro. And provincial areas should be 14%, they’ve got 27%, while rural – all areas that are not metro or provincial – they’ve got 31% and it should only be 14%,” Neale says, adding that research has shown older people and those living outside metro areas tend to be more conservative.

Farrar acknowledged that March 2011 suite of polls didn’t strictly match the population, and although Curia would usually weight the results to take that into account, it didn’t do so in that case. “I’m not sure why I didn’t weight that one,” Farrar says, “but having says that, let me tell you that weighting doesn’t normally drastically change the results.”

Indeed, the margin between those who agreed with Family First’s position in those polls was probably wide enough to be largely unaffected by weighting, but not in every case. Questions about the definition of marriage (“The law currently defines marriage as being only allowable between a man and a woman. Do you support this?”) and same-sex adoption (“Do you think same sex couples should be allowed to adopt children?”) were relatively close. (On the marriage question 52% said “yes”; 42% “no”; with 6% listed as “unsure/refuse”, while on same-sex adoption, 50% answered “yes”; 40% “no”; with 10% “unsure/refuse”.) This writer couldn’t locate any mainstream media coverage of either of those polls.

Pattrick Smellie, a former corporate communications and brand manager in the energy sector and now co-owner of Business Desk News Services, has seen advocacy polling from both sides of the aisle. “A lot of NGOs do polling in a selective fashion,” he says. “I’m a bit jaundiced, but my general observation is that NGOs get away with murder compared with the corporates.” Journalists, he argues, tend to be more suspicious of polls issued by businesses than those put out by NGOs.

Smellie thinks the kind of selective polling Family First and others carry out undermines their integrity, and he distinguishes good polling from bad by whether the poll is “trying to listen” or “trying to speak”. “What Family First does when it takes a poll is it is trying to speak,” Smellie says. “They are pushing a particular button, which does sell, which plays to that kind of terror of catastrophe … crime and violence, what constitutes ‘appropriate’ family behavior.”

But he also finds fault with the media’s often uncritical use of selective or advocacy polling. They should at least do the basics, Smellie says, giving the question, the sample size, the demographics and distribution of respondents and the source of the poll. “You have to put those things in otherwise you’re reporting a poll that is meaningless.”

Farrar, too, thinks the media could do a much better job of reporting on polls, including linking to the full poll results online, something McCoskrie also suggests. For his part, McCoskrie says Family First is completely up front and appreciates that there’s a lot of scrutiny of polls. “That’s why we specifically ask for 1000 people to be polled to reduce the margin of error, we go to an independent company, we take input from that company as to the wording and we publish the full results so if people can pick it to pieces and say we’ve completely misinterpreted or misrepresented, then we stand accountable to that,” he says. “To date it hasn’t happened and it won’t because they’ve stood the test.”

It’s hard not to agree that Family First is pretty transparent about its polling, or to begrudge the success it’s had with journalists given its sharp, well-organised and committed media relations operation. Ultimately, Farrar is right that the onus is on those who use the polls to do the legwork. But how much can we expect from a 40-second spot in a radio bulletin?

Thompson says public relations firms and lobby groups know very well that journalists are under pressure and not resourced to do their own research. “So it is quite common for ‘information subsidies’ to be provided in the hope that reporters and editors will accept the statistics at face value and not dig much further to check the facts or identify countervailing perspectives.”

Add to that what he calls the “rather unfortunate assumption” that if something is quantified it is scientific and objective. “The statistics being produced by these polls – and many other similar types – are only as meaningful as the questions being asked.”

END

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/lies-damn-lies-and-opinion-polls/feed/ 3 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/feeling-bad-about-ourselves/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/feeling-bad-about-ourselves/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:11:10 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3745 What should we do about the promotion of unreal image of women ?

by Anne Russell

At some point in the motivational chain, almost all forms of shopping rely on feelings of personal insecurity or need. And if those needs, desires and insecurities don’t already exist among consumers, advertisers must create them, and propose their product as the happy solution. As a consequence, much of our consumer economy is built on the ever-thinning backs of women who hate their bodies.

In February, Next magazine provided some alarming local evidence of this process. The results of their survey on New Zealand women’s body image tell a pretty dismal story :

• 86% of respondents think about their weight on a daily basis;
• 75% are unhappy with it;
• 89% believe that looks are crucial to success in life; and
• 63% would consider getting plastic surgery.

While the causes of women’s low bodily self-esteem are many and varied, some part of the explanation must lie with the media’s very narrow portrayal of what women look like. A woman’s low body image may be an internal problem, but it is fostered by social pressures, which are, in part, enabled by a lack of regulatory control. Is it desirable and/or possible to uphold stronger guidelines on media practice that would avoid such pitfalls, and without seriously compromising media freedom?

It is not merely that very few women have the body shapes commonly used as the aspirational ideals in advertising – in many cases, no human woman on the planet actually looks like the women in the ads. The use of airbrushing and photoshopping to ‘enhance’ the images is ubiquitous, and has become treated as the norm. In 2011, only one complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority in relation to ‘enhanced’ images of women in an advertisement for exercising equipment. The ASA chairman ruled there were no ground to proceed because : “The likely consumer take out would not be one of being able to achieve the ‘model like’ body, but to see results as were shown in the comparison photos of Bun and Thigh Wave users.” This response disregards the issue that the model was enhanced in the first place. Small wonder that few bother to go through the complaints process in New Zealand for individual ads.

Elsewhere in the world, severe restrictions on the practice of airbrushing and photoshopping – for the purposes of advertising— are now being mooted, in an effort to put a lid on the practice. Such legislation has been discussed in the UK, Norway and France. Britain had calls for a blanket ban, where France has proposed that advertisers be required to label airbrushed images to show that they aren’t real.

In order to explore what our Parliament thought about the issue, I requested an interview with Jo Goodhew, the current Minister of Women’s Affairs. The aim was to explore her views on the impact that advertising and media images have on women’s sense of worth, in the light of the reporting by Next magazine – and the overseas legislative proposals to limit (or label) the use of photo-shopped images in advertising. “The impact of such imagery overseas includes excessive attention to dieting among pre-teens and young teens,” I pointed out, “which raises health issues that may be of particular interest to the Minister, given her prior experience in nursing.” Also, such an interview might serve “as a useful introduction to the views of the Minister on the priorities that she sees in this portfolio.”

Goodhew’s office replied that “the Minister has no comment to make on this issue at this time.” Nor on any other issue involving women, it would seem. At the time the interview request was declined, her ministerial Beehive site contained a total of two press releases related to her other portfolios, while indicating that she had issued no press releases and made no speeches whatsoever in her role as Minister of Women’s Affairs. Labour’s Spokesperson for Women’s Affairs Sue Moroney, however, had published press release in response to the Next article, and did agree to be interviewed.

Moroney feels reluctant to enact legislation in New Zealand along the lines being contemplated elsewhere. “There are things that we can do with the mechanisms we already have,” she said. “Let’s try get them working better first before we go down any other pathway that has been untried anywhere else in the world, and that we don’t know the effect of.” She referred to both the Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Advertising Standards Authority. “What I’m hearing a lot—not just around the body image issue but also the alcohol advertising issue—is that people are unhappy about how standards have slipped in that regard,” she said.

It is unclear what measures could be taken to ensure that the existing framework of standards are strengthened – but there are codes in the Advertising Standards Authority which could be brought to bear more directly in this debate. Code of Ethics (1996) could be applied to the manipulation of images of women:

2. Truthful Presentation – Advertisements should not contain any statement or visual presentation or create an overall impression which directly or by implication, omission, ambiguity or exaggerated claim is misleading or deceptive, is likely to deceive or mislead the consumer, makes false and misleading representation, abuses the trust of the consumer or exploits his/her lack of experience or knowledge. (Obvious hyperbole, identifiable as such, is not considered to be misleading). [emphasis mine]

Airbrushed ads are not being presented as an artist’s impression of how women should look, but as a depiction of how they actually do look. It is quite different from other types of advertising in which, say, one can rely on the existence of enough information elsewhere – such that I could hardly justify being righteously outraged if and when Jack White doesn’t start playing in the background every time I drink Coke. By contrast, there is a comparative lack of visible information about how different all real women look. Saturated in fake imagery before we learn how to walk, how are any of us are meant to really know and believe that the women in these ads aren’t real?

6. Fear – Advertisements should not exploit the superstitious, nor without justifiable reason, play on fear.

Making women afraid about them having healthy weight levels is hardly ‘justifiable’. Moreover, it’s arguable that such ads exploit the superstitious. The beauty religion is often incomprehensible to outsiders, but to the 89% of the Next magazine survey respondents who think weight loss will improve every aspect of their lives, this stuff can be a daily reality (and ideal) higher than any communion with the gods.

7. Violence – Advertisements should not contain anything which lends support to unacceptable violent behaviour.

Is cosmetic vaginoplasty considered unacceptable violent behaviour yet? We call it genital mutilation when it happens in the Third World. Cosmetic surgery isn’t directly supported by most advertising, but it does help cosmetic surgeons to find their market, anyway. By contrast, unbottled water doesn’t need advertising because people don’t need convincing that it is a necessity. It is marketed as a convenience, rather than a need. Cosmetic surgery however, has come to be perceived as a necessity by many, in this social environment. When unrealistic ad images tell women that sculpting their bodies is the way to become an acceptable and desirable human being, they’ll find a way—and cosmetic surgery is sometimes the quickest route. If not cosmetic surgery, anorexia and bulimia are alternative paths to salvation via thinness.

Few would suggest a prohibition on cosmetic surgery or dieting. Castigating people for starving or cutting themselves is as offensive and unhelpful as jailing someone for attempted suicide. If women must practice these things, they should be made as safe as possible. Perhaps, however, we could start by restricting the activities of those who make large profits off encouraging women to despise – and in some cases – hurt themselves. Image manipulation in advertising is a substantial part of this.

This issue has direct effects on men as well as women. Sexuality may be a personal matter, but it is influenced to some degree by surrounding media. Ariel Levy wrote in Female Chauvinist Pigs that “a tawdry, tarty cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality.” It is a sad state of affairs when men and women model their own sexual expectations and behaviour on falsely enhanced images.

The problem could be addressed by education – including the topic of self image and its sources in the school curriculum would be helpful – but public debate on whether regulation is (a) desirable and could be made (b) practical might also help that process along. Given the current neo-liberal climate when it comes to social behaviour, Moroney (pictured left) knows that enforcing regulation would be an uphill battle. “I’ll have the finger pointed at me for being ‘nanny state’; for saying that the community should have a say over what images are projected at them,” she says. She mostly uses her position to make sure community voices are heard in Parliament. “What I’ve been using my role to do is to say let’s be proud of ourselves. We don’t have to beat ourselves up about not being the perfect size or whatever we think is portrayed by an airbrushed portrait.” Evidently, it still remains difficult for the links between capitalism and sexism to be taken seriously; in her six years in government, Moroney has never participated in a parliamentary debate on the issue. However, she says such issues are often discussed in cross-party groups, such as select committees.

Moroney is optimistic that issues around sexism are increasingly being brought to attention in the media. “On Backbenches, the Tui ads [accused of sexism] came up. The National MP said he didn’t see any problems with it, and the three women from Labour, Greens and NZ First all said yeah, absolutely [this is sexist]. Then one of the male hosts said he thought they were sexist as well, which was pretty interesting. It hasn’t hit mainstream debate yet, but it’s starting in fringe elements, which means it’ll find its way.”

Finally….aside from the fact that 51% of the population is not a minority, this issue does affect everyone. Men, too, are affected when their beautiful, wonderful partner complains about her upper arm fat, or when their female friend throws up dinner they cooked for her, or when their co-workers of employees feel chronically depressed about how they look – and when a few end up being force-fed in hospital. To the extent that we do nothing to confront the media that foster this kind of thinking and the advertisers who prey on it, we are complicit in women’s subsequent self-destruction.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/feeling-bad-about-ourselves/feed/ 10 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/marketing-the-mind/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/marketing-the-mind/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:09:59 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3744 How the tertiary sector in New Zealand is being hi-jacked into the service of commerce

by Gordon Campbell

The state of tertiary education is one of those issues that can readily trigger quite contradictory responses. Tertiary education is easy to portray as being incredibly important to society, the nation’s route to the Knowledge Economy etc. etc. It is just as easy to stereotype as being hopelessly detached from the country’s pressing needs. If anything, the arguments on both sides are becoming more intense. On the one hand, access to tertiary qualifications and to subsequent, well paid employment is becoming an increasingly unaffordable route for many – while on the other hand, there is growing resistance by government to continue the funding of those areas of academic study that do not deliver quantifiable economic returns.

David Robinson, a visiting Canadian expert on the commercialisation of tertiary education has heard both sides of this argument many, many times before. Robinson is the senior advisor to Education International (the global federation of teachers’ unions) on international trade and higher education issues. Given the funding cuts that are being made to tertiary education in New Zealand – and the impact this is having on the quality of teaching and research – it is easy to portray the sector in fairly apocalyptic terms. Yet are we at risk of mourning the loss of a Golden Age in tertiary education that never actually existed? Has the sector ever really been an Eden where knowledge is pursued and celebrated, free of economic care?

“We certainly don’t defend a mythical Golden Age in universities,” Robinson replies. “ Universities still have to be creative in many ways. The challenge that we’re facing right now is that market imperatives are steering the university in a certain direction. Everyone would probably agree that its important that universities engage with markets to an extent – after all, they train the students to take over jobs. But they do much more than that. There are other important functions. They protect the public interest. They’re a repository of knowledge and culture. And they’re one of the few places – probably the only place – in society where knowledge can be pursued, or should be pursued, for its own sake.”

Are those other functions necessarily at odds with the market-oriented drivers? “ Ideally they shouldn’t be…The problem, globally, is that there has been a pressure from governments to increasingly narrow the focus of universities only to what can be marketable, and only to what can be commercialisable. That shows up in a couple of ways : the increasing cost we place upon students in user fees, in research funding. It means we see a lot of focus on research that will have – or will allegedly have – immediately commercialisable outcomes at the risk of the more basic ‘blue skies’ kind of research.”

The trend lines for the funding of tertiary education in New Zealand do make for grim reading. In a March 2010 speech to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce had made it clear that money for tertiary education would be tight :
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/speech-wellington-chamber-commerce
“ It is highly unlikely that there will be any significant cash injections in the foreseeable future.” In fact, there hasn’t simply been a freeze on further funding – there has been a cut as this chart (p 72, table 6.8) from last year’s Pre-Election Fiscal Update makes clear :

In their recent briefings to the incoming Minister, officials also readily conceded the deteriorating financial situation of the tertiary sector :

“Total expenditure on tertiary education as a percentage of gross domestic product (excluding student loans) fell from 2.0 percent in 2009/10 to 1.9 percent in 2010/11. Total tertiary expenditure, excluding student loans, will fall by a further 4.8 percent over the next five years.”

While government funding of tertiary education has declined – and is set to steeply decline further – student fees have risen sharply in recent years :

At the same time, the numbers of full time equivalent staff has fallen in every year, and under successive governments, since 2005 :

This has been happening with the full knowledge in government and among Ministry officials that the demand for tertiary education is on the increase, due to the twin impacts of the economic recession and the demographic effects of the last baby boom. As the Education Ministry explained in its Tertiary Education Strategy 2010-2015 document :

“The economic recession is also raising demand for tertiary education, both in new enrolments and existing students increasing their study load or enrolling in further study. As firms put off growth or downsize to cope with the impact of the recession, more people are seeking to enter education and training to improve their skill levels, and be in a better position to take advantage of opportunities when economic conditions improve.”

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce shares the same view – that demand for tertiary education is projected to rise (see para 13 in this link to Budget 2010 Cabinet papers) while no new money is being allocated to meet that increase in demand.

“The recession has increased demand for tertiary education in 2009 and 2010 and the increased demand is forecast to remain high in 2011 and beyond.”

The government response in the face of that known increase in demand for higher learning and employment-enhancing skills training – has been to cut and/or freeze funding, watch from the sidelines as the cost barriers to student participation continue to rise and staff numbers fall. Staff / student ratios continue to deteriorate :

For now, as this recent Colmar Brunton study suggests New Zealand graduates seem to be voting with their feet – over the twin concerns about the debt they have accumulated in getting a tertiary education, and pessimism that the New Zealand economy can deliver a job able to justify and repay that investment :

Colmar Brunton youth specialist and qualitative research director Brunton Spencer Willis said fears about jobs stood out in the survey.

“Concerns about just getting a job – any job – featured overwhelmingly high on a number of the questions we asked, much more than the usual student concerns of debt and what to do next. It is no surprise, then, that heading overseas is the plan for many.”

Amid these undesirable trends, the management of demand – at a national level – is also resulting in a considerable waste of scarce resources. Even though there are more students seeking tertiary education in New Zealand than there are places available for them, the country’s universities, polytechnics and wananga continue to be pitted in a costly and competitive race to attract students to their particular facility. A total of $18 million was spent on marketing by 16 tertiary institutions alone, in 2009. As Dr Sandra Grey, president-elect of the Tertiary Education Union has pointed out :

“Why would tertiary institutions spend all this public money promoting themselves when many of them are complaining that they have too many students already ? ”

Cumulatively, the current condition of tertiary education offers a telling snapshot of New Zealand’s failure to plan adequately for its future. Yet taxpayers do happen to fund this sector. When funding for everything else is tightening up, shouldn’t they reasonably expect to see a drive for efficiencies, and for a reasonable economic return from this sector ? “Oh, I think they do get an economic return,” David Robinson says. “And I think one of the things that tertiary institutions haven’t done very well is actually talk about what those returns are, both in economic and non-economic terms. There is a lot of research into [demonstrating] the role of universities for regional and community economic development…”

Theoretically at least, an adequate level of funding for tertiary education should be a win/win for everyone : for individual students, for corporates, and for society as a whole. So, what barriers are preventing it from being seen as a priority area in government spending? “Its largely politicians who are looking for immediate returns, “ Robinson says. That attitude, he believes, tends to chase after false economies. The micro-management of outcomes – especially in an environment that used to be governed and funded on the basis of trust and professional respect – often ends up defeating the very goal it is trying to achieve. “ It is the focus of the Ministry of Sharp Pencils to find out what the exact number is, what the exact economic impact is. Some of the impact can be measured immediately – but with some, it’s a long term issue. My own sense is that we have to work very hard to keep a balance. That is, to keep a balance between funding for basic research and funding for programmes that might not seem to have an immediate market outcome, but which have broader social objectives and impacts. As well as making sure that graduates do get jobs. I don’t think we want to go back to the 15th century institution where universities existed merely for training the elites to take over the machinations of the state, right? We want to make sure we have a broad-based, accessible – and also, equal – higher education system.”

Right now, that wider worldview seems a long way from the mindset in the ascendant at Treasury and within the Beehive. Whereas reasonable access to higher education has been seen as a virtual right within a civilised society, it is now increasingly seen as a privilege, and treated as only one more item among many in the government’s toolkit for generating economic growth. In the light of that change of emphasis, the stakeholders are no longer primarily seen to be students, or society at large via the pool of knowledge that the university creates and maintains, for the common good. Instead, the stakeholders are seen to be students viewed only as prospective employees, government, and business. As a consequence, universities are being treated as something of an assembly line, and one geared primarily to the production of obedient, work-ready recruits for the corporate sector. The same Education Ministry 2010-2015 strategy document cited earlier puts this in bald terms :

“The Government wants a tertiary system that rewards successful providers who demonstrate that they meet the needs of students and employers, for instance through their connections with firms. The system will also reward providers who respond to market signals, including the changing skill needs of industries.”

“Funding allocations to tertiary education organisations will be linked to their past performance. Initially this will be focussed on results achieved by students but will include outcomes, such as post-study employment, as this information becomes available.”

Teaching is of course, but one aspect of this process. The notion of universities as a service centre for business is also, however, intended to spill over into the funding criteria for the research and generation of knowledge that also occurs within tertiary institutions. Here’s the same Tertiary Education Strategy document again :

“As well as underpinning good teaching, high quality research is critical for economic growth. However, public investment in research on its own does not drive economic growth: it is firms’ use of research that increases productivity and improves economic performance. We need better linkages between firms, tertiary institutions (particularly universities) and Crown Research Institutes in order to increase the economic returns of publicly funded research.”

“Research in universities needs to combine excellence with impact. In particular, we will ensure that the Performance-Based Research Fund recognises research of direct relevance to the needs of firms and its dissemination to them. We will also ensure there are further incentives for tertiary education organisations, other research organisations and firms to work together.”

It is very hard to square this approach – which aims increasingly to put the functions of tertiary education at the service of the corporate sector, and seeks to channel the available funds accordingly – with section 161 of the Education Act, which makes it mandatory for all parties concerned to respect and support a far wider vision of academic freedom :

It is declared to be the intention of Parliament in enacting the provisions of this Act relating to institutions that academic freedom and the autonomy of institutions are to be preserved and enhanced.

(2) For the purposes of this section, academic freedom, in relation to an institution, means—

(a) the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions:

This section of the Act goes on to underline the freedom of staff and students to engage in research ; the freedom of the institution and its staff to regulate the subject matter of courses taught at the institution; the freedom of the institution and its staff to teach and assess students in the manner they consider best promotes learning etc etc. True, it also cites “ the need for accountability by institutions and the proper use by institutions of resources allocated to them.” But section 162, which deals primarily with the role of tertiary institutions in higher learning goes on to impose wide obligations on the relevant Minister. It requires him at clause four, for instance to recognise that :

(i) they [tertiary institutions] are primarily concerned with more advanced learning, the principal aim being to develop intellectual independence:

(ii) their research and teaching are closely interdependent and most of their teaching is done by people who are active in advancing knowledge:

(iii) they meet international standards of research and teaching:

(iv) they are a repository of knowledge and expertise:

(v) they accept a role as critic and conscience of society…

These older and far wider aims of tertiary education and the role of the university are enshrined in law as something the government of the day must observe and uphold. These aims are clearly in grave peril, as the government makes its funding dependent on prescribed outcomes that place a compelling onus upon universities to service the needs of business. As of mid 2012, 5% of the Student Achievement Grant ( which is the main bulk fund for teaching in tertiary education) can be with-held, if results are not satisfactory.

Accountability is not the issue. Most tertiary institutions would welcome a true reckoning of their performance and worth, provided the worth being measured was to the society that is paying the funds, and not merely to the business sector that is employing their graduates. Arguably, even the economic returns to business and to the country could be increased in an environment where something more than the readily quantifiable, short term value to business is the prime, or only, accepted yardstick.

One reason being, it is often the so called “blue skies” research that in the end, can be the most profitable, both socially and economically. By micro-managing the outcomes – and prioritising only those academic areas where the costs and benefits can be quantified – are we at risk of killing the goose that in time, might lay the golden eggs? “ That’s certainly the case in research, “David Robinson says. “We have seen some striking examples of that. I can give you an example from Canada that I’m familiar with. In 2000, the federal government launched what it called the Innovation Agenda. It defined ‘innovation’ very narrowly as bringing new products to the marketplace. And it reached an agreement with the universities saying that we will double the amount of research funding that we will give you – but in return we will ask you to triple the amount of the products that you patent, via your commercialisable outcomes.”

All very market logical, one would think, and admirably hard-headed. Yet the result in medical research in Canada for instance, Robinson continues, has been a re-orientation “towards research that essentially ends up with minor modifications to existing drugs and devices. Things that are easily patentable. Yet which don’t really advance the body of knowledge that much. And which don’t really question the causes of diseases in the first place…So when you leave it only to the market, you’re going to crowd out some broader public interest issues.”

In one respect at least, the powers-that-be may be taking section 162 of the Education Act all too seriously : namely, the bit about how tertiary institutions “must meet international standards of research and teaching..”Anecdotally, this may be being perversely translated into a preference, within the publish-or–perish environment of the modern university, for international research that is more of interest to overseas publishers and scholars, and is less New Zealand- focussed. As yet there is little evidence to support this contention, one way or another. But this graph of the percentage of Marsden Fund grants that contain the word “ New Zealand” in the title, suggests it may be a thesis worth exploring :

Graph data supplied by Tertiary Education Union.

What we do know about the available sources of research funding for the tertiary sector in New Zealand is that it is increasingly being channelled through funding vehicles external to the university. Funding via the Marsden Fund for instance grew from $85 million in 2001/02 to $186 million in 2009/10. The Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) grew from zero in 2003/04 to $244 million in 2009/10.

The ethos driving the growth in PBRF funding in particular is quite evident. Here’s the Education Ministry Tertiary Education Strategy 2010-2015 document again :

“As well as underpinning good teaching, high quality research is critical for economic growth. However, public investment in research on its own does not drive economic growth: it is firms’ use of research that increases productivity and improves economic performance. We need better linkages between firms, tertiary institutions (particularly universities) and Crown Research Institutes in order to increase the economic returns of publicly funded research.

“Research in universities needs to combine excellence with impact. In particular, we will ensure that the Performance-Based Research Fund recognises research of direct relevance to the needs of firms and its dissemination to them. We will also ensure there are further incentives for tertiary education organisations, other research organisations and firms to work together.”

Note especially the line about “We will ensure that the Performance-Based Research Fund recognises research of direct relevance to the needs of firms and its dissemination to them…” (My emphasis.) University research apparently, is to be funded in part at least on its demonstrated ability to disseminate its research findings to business. Given the exceptionally low level of investment in research and development made by the private sector in New Zealand….the aim would appear to be to turn tertiary institutions into the research arms of commerce, as taxpayer funded forms of Corporate Welfare.

One of the obvious problems in the ongoing battle for adequate funding for tertiary institutions is that the political cycles in New Zealand run in short, three year cycles. University research, on the other hand, can be 10 or 20 years in the making. Devising a model that balances a reasonable level of accountability to the taxpayer without putting the tertiary researcher/teacher into a fiscal straitjacket is not an easy thing. For better or worse, the days are long gone when universities could simply be given funds and trusted as professionals to do the right thing with it. How then, are tertiary institutions to be held accountable – if not, ideally at least, in terms of short term financial delivery?

“We are accountable,” Robinson maintains,“ in a much broader sense, in terms of the public interest. There is for instance, the medical research that shows the dangers of certain medications or the environmental impacts on illnesses that can be prevented, and that helps the public in the long run.” [Here, Robinson gives an example of Canadian research with long term public health significance into a certain kind of stomach ulcer theorised as being caused by bacteria. For years, research funding for the project was denied – yet some cobbled together funding for the research ultimately vindicated the thesis, and medications have been derived from it.] Such outcomes will not happen, Robinson maintains, if only the market and the government are allowed to judge the worth of the research.

In many cases, Robinson openly concedes, the returns from university research can’t be quantified. ”I don’t think you can measure it. That’s the problem. If you’re going to measure it only in simple economic returns, you’re going to come up with zero. Or something close to zero. There are certain values, and certain things in life that are outside the market and that are still important. There’s more to life than working and shopping. There are a whole lot of things that enrich our lives like art, culture and so on, and institutions like universities are one of the few places that are repositories.”

Even so, it still remains to be explained why, in New Zealand at least, the downward slide of our universities is so poorly understood by politicians, and attracts little sympathy among the public at large. Part of the explanation may be that universities play – or are meant to play – a kind of “fifth estate” role alongside the media in holding governments to account, and in providing critical thought on the public debates of the day. Could this explain at least some of the suspicion and resentment that has existed in government (since the 1960s and 1970s at least) towards the tertiary sector?

That’s certainly the case in large parts of the world right now, Robinson says. “Part of what I do is deal with academic staff unions around the world. And in the Middle East as the Arab Spring broke out, the first targets were academics. They were the first, because they were the conscience of society, and were the people speaking out. We see it elsewhere around the world, in Colombia, which is one of the most dangerous places to be an academic right now…I think from democratic governments it is more a case of not understanding what the sector does, or what it should do. There’s a kind of economic reductionism that we talked about earlier. And I think there are certain people who don’t like what academics have to say, across the political spectrum.”

Yet the public too, also appear to have relatively little sympathy for the plight of academia. Is this because the style in which the debate is usually couched means that academics all too often seem to be seeking to preserve a bygone era of privilege? That tendency, Robinson replies, may be country specific. “That’s certainly the case in the United States, where universities and colleges have been dragged into the so-called Culture Wars and there has been concerted effort by various Republican forces to try and crack down on so-called leftists hiding out in universities. And there have been campaigns waged against particular individuals. Overall though, in large parts of Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, academics are still held in fairly high regard. They’re seen as people who are independent. And they’re not seen to be corporate shills, or shills for the government – but as people who have a certain independence of thought that they can freely express.”

One thing the public has to do, he concludes, is to take back the ownership of their institutions. “These institutions are embedded in communities. Those communities have to take ownership of them. That means closer ties, and closer co-operation. One of the things that individual professors and institutions don’t do a good job of is to talk about what people do in [tertiary] institutions, and they don’t talk about the research that’s being undertaken. That goes for the research with immediate economic outcomes and for the longer term research. Universities do a bit of that, but the messages often don’t get out.”

Surely, one reason they don’t is that many academics tend to look down their noses at those of their colleagues who take part in public discourse, and who try to engage with the brutal simplicities of mainstream journalism. “That’s true,” Robinson concedes, “ but its also a reflection of the real world structure of universities. In most parts of the world now, there’s a really intensive production-driven research culture that‘s all about publishing x number of research papers each year. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for engagement. That’s not recognised. One of the things that universities could do – in a practical way – is to start recognising people, for playing the role of public intellectuals.”

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/marketing-the-mind/feed/ 7 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/pedro-does-vertigo/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/pedro-does-vertigo/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:07:24 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3742 Pedro Almodovar’s fresh take on the Hitchcock classic about sex, obsession and second chances

by Philip Matthews

She’s dead – can he bring her back? In Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), Antonio Banderas is Robert Ledgard, a wealthy plastic surgeon living in a castle-like mansion on the outskirts of Toledo. In the kitchen downstairs, closed-circuit television shows him and his housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) what’s going on upstairs. He has a few screens that give him a selection of views. Mostly, what is going on upstairs is that he is keeping a woman captive.

Her name is Vera (Elena Anaya), and she’s the experimental subject. She’s not dead; rather, she is the replacement. Twelve years earlier, Robert’s wife Gal, killed herself after being horrifically burned in a car accident. It’s taken a while but now Vera has Gal’s face. The next step is to give her burn-resistant skin.

This is sombre and painstaking work for Robert. He has a surgery in his home, which is convenient as some of his procedures and the thinking behind them might be considered a little … unorthodox. But again, this is serious work – if he is heading towards some kind of pleasurable reward, there seems to be little joy in it.

Now 51, Banderas has moved a long way past the boyishness that made him a star in Almodovar films like Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1992) and is well into distinguished middle age. (Fact: Almodovar is the best director of both Banderas and Penelope Cruz). The middle-aged male obsessive? If the basic idea of The Skin I Live In wasn’t already reminding you of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), then Banderas’ new-found proximity to 50s-era Cary Grant and James Stewart should.

So, Vertigo. Of all the approaches to this kind of story – she’s dead, can he bring her back? – Vertigo must still be the best, the most mysterious, the most seductive, the most gut-wrenching. Scottie Ferguson reconstructs his lost Madeleine only to … what is the appeal of this? It’s a dream-life sensation in which one encounters the dead and finds that time has been magically erased. You can go back. Chris Marker might have nailed it in his essay on Vertigo, “A free replay: notes on Vertigo” (remembering that Marker’s La Jetee was itself a note on Vertigo). You should probably read the whole thing – linked here — but this is the key bit:

“Whether one accepts the dream reading or not, the power of this once ignored film has become a commonplace, proving that the idea of resurrecting a lost love can touch any human heart, whatever he or she may say. ‘You’re my second chance!’ cries Scottie as he drags Judy up the stairs of the tower. No one now wants to interpret these words in their superfi­cial sense, meaning his vertigo has been conquered. It’s about reliving a moment lost in the past, about bringing it back to life only to lose it again. One does not resurrect the dead, one doesn’t look back at Eurydice. Scottie experiences the greatest joy a man can imagine, a second life, in exchange for the greatest tragedy, a second death. What do video games, which tell us more about our unconscious than the works of Lacan, offer us? Neither money nor glory, but a new game. The possibility of playing again. ‘A second chance.’ A free replay.”

Okay, but whereas Scottie seemed emotionally overwhelmed by the possibility of playing again, even enslaved by it (he drags, he cries), Robert is more – no surprise – clinical. Not just because the resurrection of his lost love is a long series of surgical procedures but because Banderas’s acting is so minimal, so expressionless – Almodovar directed Banderas to Jean-Pierre Melville’s minimalist noir The Red Circle (1970), and in particular, asked him to pay attention to the inscrutability of Alain Delon.

Equally, while Vertigo was a police procedural so warped by morbid romantic longing that it could be claimed as surrealist, The Skin I Live In is within the mad scientist tradition, as a cold and elegant horror. The horror references pile up: Eyes Without a Face (1960) most famously.

Discussions of Almodovar films don’t get far without an accumulation of references, usually to American cinema. In this respect, his Spanish cinema is roughly equivalent to, if slightly later than, the new German Cinema – especially Fassbinder’s treatment of Hollywood melodrama. Over the decades, the style has been toned down, now less in thrall to Warhol, Waters and Sirk-via-Fassbinder, less flamboyant and garish – qualities that were partly a kind of perverse response to the sudden freedom of Spanish culture at the end of the Franco era – and has, since 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, been subject to a remarkable level of control and consistency. He is a one-man genre. You can tick off the abiding concerns: obsession, gender roles, disappearances, reinvention, “the body as the agent of flexibility and change,” as film academic Steven Marsh has put it (all these themes are present and accounted for in The Skin I Live In). He is fascinated by Old Hollywood’s use of glamour and disguise, the thriller as a cold revenge genre, the way that separate lives collide, secret backstories. His trademark, as a plot device, is the long, seamlessly-integrated flashback, beautifully deployed here.

You might notice that I’m trying to avoid expanding on the plot outline of The Skin I Live In. This is a story that depends upon surprise, so let no one spoil it (Almodovar and his brother and co-writer Agustin have freely adapted a French novel, Mygale by Thierry Jonquet, which is unlikely to have been widely read in this part of the world). But let’s just say, by way of consumer warning, that the film includes at least two rapes, plenty of sex and gender confusion, the sudden and shocking appearance of a man dressed in a tiger costume and less comedy than usual. And that there are enough direct conjunctions of sex and death to keep psychoanalysts in work for years.

If you’re talking about themes, art is another. No surprise, really, if Almodovar is interested in the construction of selves – which is not just a metaphor this time. There is a way in which the urge to create and document is part of the impulse to stay sane in captivity. The clinical room, with its stainless steel surfaces and sleek screens, resembles the antiseptic modern gallery space as much as a medical institution. As Banderas’ Robert gazes at the sleeping Vera, via his high-def screen, you might be reminded of real time art like Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) or Sam Taylor-Wood’s film of the sleeping David Beckham.

A book on the work of the late Louise Bourgeois is among the cultural supplies delivered to the captive Vera; she works on her own versions of Bourgeois’ “Femme Maison” (“woman house”) pictures, and if there is a feminist reading to be drawn from all this, it could be about the folly of the Vertigo project as an objectification – what kind of say do the Madeleines and the Veras get in the process? This is also a film in which you sense that the books seen – or the art glimpsed on the walls of the Ledgard mansion – have something to tell us. There is an Alice Munro book and, if you’re one of those people who likes the shock of a New Zealand reference turning up unexpectedly, you should know that Vera is reading Janet Frame’s An Angel At My Table – “which is also about a survivor,” Almodovar has said, adding that “I don’t show the cover of the book, but it’s useful for the actor to have this information to ground this character”.

The story may be off-putting – or absurd, if you try to offer anyone a full synopsis – but it is expertly done (at a personal level, I haven’t been as gripped by an Almodovar film since 2004’s Bad Education). It’s a film in which total insanity is rendered with a strange kind of aesthetically pleasing yet eerie calm (Marisa Paredes’ housekeeper: “I’ve got insanity in my entrails”), and in which narrative and melodramatic pleasures are so thrillingly delivered, that it could only be the product of an artist in his mature prime, an artist so identifiable and consistent – this is his 18th film, after all — that he almost risks being taken for granted.

The Skin I Live In opens in New Zealand on March 15.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/pedro-does-vertigo/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/from-the-hood-moonbeam-dreams-of-murder/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/from-the-hood-moonbeam-dreams-of-murder/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:06:58 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3748 Feline fantasies of fame fortune and bloody vengence

by Lyndon Hood

Monday

We propose, during this week, to eat, sleep, clean Ourself and to receive attention. Absent any developments in the Grand Plan, We may also engage in some vanishing-mysteriously-for-hours.

Ate.

Slept.

Progress satisfactory.

Subject returned home. Received attention from Subject. Purr purr purr.

Tuesday

A thought on Subject’s role in human society: Does that mean We are de facto leader of all local humans?

This does not count for much, in feline terms, but may be useful as a tiebreaker.

Another thought: If Subject died, which part of him to eat first?

Wednesday

Mister Bigpaws from across the road called and told Us to put on Parliament TV live stream. Normally avoid this ‘Internet’. Makes no sense. Pictures of cats with misspelled captions: Why? Come the execution of the Grand Plan, humans, permission to have a hamburger with cheese on it will be the least of your problems.

We can now see Subject, yet Subject is not feeding Us. Subject is being asked about MFAT ‘change consultants’. They have said acquiring another mouth too feed when you might be about to lose your job is a good idea – provided it is a pet and not a baby.

Subject seems to agree with this. Commendable. What reward? Perhaps We shall present subject with a mouse. It is obvious Subject cannot hunt to save self, needs all the help Subject can get.

Then Subject publicly professes belief that Our love for Subject is unconditional.

Success! Moving to Phase Four.

Thursday

Internet actually quite interesting after all. But We feel ‘Invisible Children’ a better idea for a Dr Who episode than a charity. Proven fact humans consider freakiest thing ever to be disembodied children’s voices singing songs slightly too slowly. Also any toddler We can’t see is the stuff of Our nightmares.

When will we get some new Dr Who? Perhaps Subject can help. Subject has shown an interest in arranging television schedules.

Licked self.

Friday

Spent day preparing plan to rebalance Subject’s obligations and incentives. We understand the need for Subject is to receive Our love but this ‘unconditional’ arrangement is unusustainable. It is reasonable for Us to have certain expectations on how our affection is recieved.

Also, if Subject thinks Our love so far has been unconditional, We are interested to see what We can get away with in future.

Subject returned. Acquired lap.

Explained that from now on Our love will be granted on a if-you-stop-stroking-Us-or-try-to-stand-up-We-will-claw-out-your-groin basis.

After three hours Subject tried to dispute Our policy. But having been returned to Our position We mean to carry out our programme. Dug claws into subject’s thigh. Subject went back to patting Us.

Subject called for Diplomatic Protect Squad. Attempts to remove Us lead to Subject begging them to stop.

We understand that is what humans call ‘unconditional love’.

Received attention from Subject.

Purr purr purr.

Saturday

Hour twelve. After much kneading, have got lap just right.

Permitted Subject a brief sleep. Possibly a mistake. Awakended Subject renewed claims our policy had unjustified side effects and spent morning trying to slide out from under Us. But it became clear that was not permitted.

On one occasion subject tried to move from the armchair without disturbing Us, by keeping legs in lap position and hobbling about the room bent double. This experiment, though no doubt amusing to watch, was regretfully terminated due to claws. Perhaps it will one day appear on ‘YouTube’.

Subject began arranging to conduct human business via telephone and laptop while patting Us at the same time. Which just goes to show Subject is capable of achieving something given the right incentives.

Towards evening sun entered lounge and struck armchair. Slept.

Wake to find Ourself on rapidly cooling hot water bottle.

This will not do at all.

Sunday

Subject is displaying avoidance behaviours. These include not sitting down, backing out of rooms.

We have entered talks with Google on provision of automated warm seat/stroking service. Bigpaws insists We are taking enormous risk to trust something so important to a corporation subject to foreign law. He’s just sore because he had his hotmail hacked.

Sat on the windowsill and made chittering noises at birds. One day.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/from-the-hood-moonbeam-dreams-of-murder/feed/ 3 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/classics-the-hunger-games-2008/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/classics-the-hunger-games-2008/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:05:32 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3739 When life is a war game, you need friends to survive

by Gordon Campbell

True, it may seem weird to try and warn teenagers about the horrors of war, by writing them a story about teenagers who kill each other in a TV reality show. Nine times out of ten, you’d end up with yet another example of our violence-soaked culture, rather than a cautionary tale about it. So all credit to author Suzanne Collins for pulling it off with The Hunger Games trilogy. The anti-war message is unmistakable, but be prepared – to make a point, Collins is not averse to killing off one or two of her best-loved characters, without any warning whatsoever.

Judging by the size of the global audience that already exists for the books, the release of the first Hunger Games film on March 23rd is almost bound to generate a cultural tsunami of Twilight-size proportions. And the only reason I’m saying ‘almost’ is because the film’s director is Gary Ross, the plonker who directed the films Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, which weren’t exactly roller coaster adrenaline rides. But since the producers wanted all along for The Hunger Games film to get a family friendly PG13 censorship rating, Ross’s blandness was probably seen to be a virtue – and as I’ve indicated, thrills and action were not Collins’ main reasons for writing this story.

To get the Twilight and Harry Potter comparisons out of the way at the start ….there are no brooding vampires or jolly japes in wizardry class this time around. This story’s central figure is a 16 year old girl called Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic version of the United States called Panem. Everyday life in Panem’s high-tech Capitol – which has every medical and technological marvel known to humanity – is vastly different from the struggle for subsistence faced by nearly everyone else in the twelve Districts that are under the thumb of the Capitol. However, the wealthy 1% living in the Capitol are about to get their social order shaken up in very unexpected ways.

To underline the Capitol’s power, Panem holds an annual ritual known as the Reaping, in which two adolescents (one male, one female) are chosen at random to take part in the Hunger Games – which is a wildly popular televised reality contest in which the selected teenagers are required to fight each other to the death. Viewers can sponsor competitors and send in packages of food, medicine, tools and weapons to help their favourite contestant win the contest. To spice up the proceedings, the Capitol’s game-makers also regularly send in mutant animals, and alter the weather conditions inside the vast arena.

The first book in the trilogy is the most straightforward in that it deals with the Hunger Games itself, while the later books are about the rebellion against the Panem dictatorship. Katniss gets involved in the Hunger games only after she bravely volunteers to replace her young sister Prim, who was unexpectedly selected to represent the mining region where the Everdeen family live, in what was once the Appalachian mountains. Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son selected as the male representative from the same District, has loved Katniss from afar since childhood, and once did her family a favour that has left her in his debt.

Ever since it was published in 2008, The Hunger Games has been accused of being a rip-off of the Japanese action movie Battle Royale, which also features a televised fight to the death among teenage schoolkids. At the time, Battle Royale never got an official release in the United States – partly because it came out just after the killings at Columbine had sharply reduced America’s appetite for a story about teenagers killing each other. Certainly, there are some similarities between the two stories, beyond the central game. In both cases, there is a regular roll call of the dead players, and in both stories the game-makers introduce fresh elements selectively, into certain parts of the arena.

Having said that, plenty of other stories share a similar plotline. (For example, there’s the 1987 Arnold Schwarzengger action film The Running Man, or the 2001 film Series 7, which also featured a reality TV show fight to the death among contestants chosen by lottery.) Battle Royale is set on an island, and has some elements in common with Lord of the Flies. Collins claims to have never seen or read Battle Royale before delivering the first book to her publishers. She has cited older, classical Greek influences on her work, such as the story of the Minotaur – in which seven pairs of male and female youngsters were ritually offered each year to the Beast, before it was finally killed by Theseus. Spartacus, the slave who led a rebellion against Roman rule was also, Collins claims, an inspiration for how the storyline of The Hunger Games developed in her mind. Finally, Collins told the New York Times last year that the basic premise for The Hunger Games came to her one night when she was channel-surfing, and happened to flip from a reality-television competition to news footage of the war in Iraq.

Personally, the differences to Battle Royale struck me as being far more important than the similarities. The storylines diverge in two main respects. Firstly, one of the striking things about The Hunger Games is the way it shows that even in a contest where there can be only one winner, survival is utterly dependent on the ability to form alliances, however temporary they may be. (Katniss is taught this lesson by Rue, a doomed child contestant who reminds her of her sister, Prim.) Lone wolf protagonists survive for a time – such as the contestant called Foxface in the first book – but they don’t prosper for very long. By contrast, strategic alliances provide only a fleeting and secondary aspect of the Battle Royale storyline.

Collins’ emphasis on the need for collaboration within a winner-take-all game is fascinating, because Katniss’s previous life as a hunter and archer could easily have qualified her as a lone wolf heroine. Initially, the need for collaboration is depicted as a necessary response to the power of privilege, given that some contestants from wealthier areas come to the Game possessing an unfair advantage in physical strength, education and training.(They are called “Careers” in the text.) Only co-operation among those with limited resources can offset the advantages enjoyed by the Careers. Again, this is an interesting subtext – given a real world that still tends to glorify individual achievement, and that downplays the advantages enjoyed by the children of the privileged.

The other big difference from Battle Royale is the sophistication with which The Hunger Games deals with the interactive nature of the Game. Katniss and Peeta can’t succeed strictly on their own abilities, even after they’ve begun to co-operate. They survive only through manipulating the viewing audience by role-playing a romantic relationship that delights the audience into sponsoring them – oh, how they adore those star-crossed lovers from District 12 ! Yet in the process, the romantic ruse begins to confuse Katniss as to her own real feelings about Peeta. There is nothing like this level of interplay between actors and viewers, media factoids and inner reality in the Battle Royale film. Ultimately, it is the power derived from this romantic artifice that enables Katniss to survive, and to eventually become a political threat to the regime. Yet even when Katniss does finally ally herself with the rebellion against the Capitol in book three, she quickly comes to realise that once again, it is her artificial, media-constructed identity that is of more use to the rebellion than her own, real life contributions.. There’s a quite sophisticated commentary on the interplay between real and media modulated identities running through the entire story.

For a blockbuster teen adventure, this message in The Hunger Games is also quite subversive. The book is explicit about depicting political power as something that’s bestowed by a fickle and credulous audience – whose responses have been manipulated by a media owned by people who, in turn, can become ensnared by the rules of the media game they have created. Katniss is shown to be very conscious of her shortcomings in this respect. In the second book Catching Fire in particular, her job is to carry out actions that have meanings about which she is being deliberately kept in the dark. As her mentor Haymitch finally tells her, the rebel leadership decided that she’d do a much better job if she wasn’t made aware of the actual context for her actions. Unfortunately, this means the reader has been kept in the same boat, too. So much so that my heart sank a little near the end of Catching Fire (p.464) when Haymitch has to take Katniss aside, sit her down and tell her (and the reader) exactly what the heck has been going on for the previous 200 pages.

For fear of spoiling the story for new readers, I’ve deliberately avoided talking at length about Mockingjay, the third book in the series. Suffice to say that the rebel leadership and Coriolanus Snow, the dictator of Panem turn out to have a great deal in common, both ethically and tactically – andf this creates a whole new round of trauma and heartbreak for Katniss, however hard she tries to find a way of walking a morally acceptable line between both camps. In this dystopia – the grim second half of Mockingjay is about as much fun as the siege of Stalingrad – no one is left undamaged. Compared to what Katniss is put through in The Hunger Games, Harry Potter’s struggles with the forces of evil are a walk in the park.

So who exactly, is Suzanne Collins? The 48 year old author (pictured left with Amandla Stenberg who plays Rue in the film) spent well over a decade of her working life in creating storylines for children’s television TV shows, in everything from Clifford’s Puppy Days to Wow Wow Wubzy! Last year, Collins filled in the blank spaces in her life story during this interview with the New York Times,

She was raised, she told the NYT, as the child of a military family who moved frequently during her childhood. In her mid 20s, she began her writing career in children’s television. She has two children (a boy of 17 and a girl aged 11 who are now roughly the same ages as Katniss and Prim. Collins was 41 years old when her first book for children was published. As the NYT put it :

Collins’s move from writing about an oversize red dog to writing about weaponry and military strategy may seem unexpected, but she was falling back on years of informal schooling on the subject of war. Her grandfather was gassed in World War I, and her uncle sustained shrapnel wounds in World War II. Some of Collins’s earliest memories are of young men in uniform drilling at West Point, where her father, who later made lieutenant colonel, was on loan from the Air Force, teaching military history.

In 1968 the family moved to Indiana. It was the year Collins turned 6. It was also the year her father left to serve in Vietnam. War was a favourite topic for her father; and war, she understood at a young age, determined her family’s fate.

As the NYT noted, absent fathers has been pivotal elements in Collins’ published fiction to date. At the start of The Hunger Games, Katniss’ father has been killed a few years before in a mine explosion, leaving her to provide for the family. Collins told the NYT that her father returned from Vietnam burdened with nightmares, which dogged him for the rest of his life. As a child, she would awake to the sound of him crying out in the night. Similarly, much is made in the first book of Katniss’s nightmares, caused by her experiences during the Game.

Collins has been refreshingly upfront about her intentions. She does not encourage allegorical readings of her book – which she intends to be read as written, as a warning about the realities and the consequences of war, especially for children. As the NYT astutely concludes, “In The Lord of the Flies, the children are in an amoral free fall; [but] in The Hunger Games, young people, even murderous ones, are for the most part innocents, creations of adults’ cruelty or victims of adult weakness in the face of power.” For good reason, other characters explicitly comment (in Catching Fire, pages 259- 260 in particular) on the innocence that Katniss projects. As someone almost devoid of guile, she acts in her own defence, and in order to defend people she loves or for whom she feels compassion. Everything else about the world is still something of a mystery to her. In this and a few other respects, she’s a very convincing 16 year old.

Some fans of the book have feared this quality of naivete will be sacrificed in the film, given that 21 year old Jennifer Lawrence has been chosen for the role. They can probably relax. Lawrence is good at this sort of thing. A couple of years ago, she made her Hollywood breakthrough in the indie film Winter’s Bone, in which she played a 17 year old girl searching for her drug dealer father, amid his creepy associates in the Ozark Mountains.

In Winter’s Bone, Lawrence also played a teenager left prematurely in charge of her family, exactly the same situation faced by Katniss in The Hunger Games. Onscreen, Lawrence gave off an air of stoic innocence, and that quality seems exactly right for the role of Katniss. Her mentor Haymitch is being played by Woody Harrelson, whose brand of debauched energy was last seen onscreen in the film Zombieland. Though there are only three books, each main actor has signed on for four films. Again, this makes sense, given that Mockingjay has too much plot to fit readily into a single film.

Ultimately, what makes Katniss Everdeen an interesting culture hero – and a genuine improvement over Bella in Twilight – is that she is not the tremulous prey of a brooding male anti-hero, waiting to be bitten by the power of love and sex. Katniss is an action hero, rather than a thinker or a strategist, though her impulses often prove to be strikingly apt. Which means that in a gender role reversal, the action hero in The Hunger Games is female, while the two thinly drawn bimbos hanging around the plot and vying for the hero’s affections, are both blokes.

Not that Collins is interested in focussing all that much on the hormonal turmoil of her main characters. “I don’t write about adolescence,” she told the NYT. “I write about war. For adolescents.” With the last book in particular, one has to respect the way she’s gone about bringing the horrors of war home to her readers, young and old.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/classics-the-hunger-games-2008/feed/ 2 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/talking-sport-the-trashing-of-alberto-contador/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/talking-sport-the-trashing-of-alberto-contador/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:04:03 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3741 Nothing that resembles natural justice was meted out to the champion Spanish cyclist

by Lamont Russell

The February 6th decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to impose a two year ban on the Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador will have left few people convinced that justice has been done. The minority who believe that Contador is quote, a “drug cheat” unquote, are likely to have been enraged by the retrospective nature of the ban imposed. While it has ruined Contador’s reputation and stripped him of his 2010 Tour de France title (and forced him out of this year’s Tour) he will be able to recommence professional riding in August of this year.

A middle bloc of opinion will lament the tortured judicial process that laboured for so long to deliver its verdict. Conversely, another significant minority who bother to read the CAS verdict will probably emerge feeling somewhat disturbed that Contador was found guilty at all. The only thing on which all parties are agreed is that yes, a tiny trace of clenbuterol (a bronchiole-dilating chemical in humans, and used to increase the ratio of lean meat to fat in cattle) was found in Contador’s body after a drug test administered during the Tour de France, July 21, 2010.

The structure of the CAS case against Contador was presented in the form of three possible scenarios. Firstly, Contador’s defence was that he had ingested the clenbuterol from eating a piece of contaminated veal during the rest day during the middle of the 2010 Tour. The International Cycling Union (UCI) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) submitted two other explanations : that “the adverse analytical finding” was caused by either a blood doping transfusion, or by the ingestion of a contaminated food supplement. Ultimately :

“The panel found that there were no established facts that would elevate the possibility of meat contamination to an event that could have occurred on a balance of probabilities. Unlike certain other countries, Spain is not known to have a contamination problem with clenbuterol in meat. Furthermore, no other cases of athletes having tested positive to clenbuterol allegedly in connection with the consumption of Spanish meat are known.”

However, the main trouble with the verdict is that the CAS report also downplays in very strong terms the likelihood of its own alternative scenarios. The CAS conclusion on the blood doping option is particularly interesting, because the report gives a lot of room for its doping expert Michael Ashenden to develop the evidence for that theory, As Mark Rendell points out in his excellent review of the CAS report :

…The UCI and WADA worked on their hypothesis that (paragraph 336) ‘Mr Contador undertook a transfusion of red blood cells on 20 July 2010 and then – in order to preserve a natural blood profile and mask the use of such transfusion, which can be detected through the Athlete’s Biological Passport … – the next day (21 July 2010) injected plasma (to hide the variation of haemoglobin values) and erythropoiesis stimulation’ – they mean EPO – ‘(to hide the variation of reticulocytes) into his system.’ They suggest it was ‘the transfusion of plasma of 21 July 2010 which would have contaminated the sample with clenbuterol …’

This, as Rendell says, “is a scientifically respectable and intellectually satisfying explanation” and one that was well supported in the Lausanne courtroom by WADA’s expert witness Michael Ashenden, who also happens to be one of the creators of the Biological Passport system of drug detection in sport. Ashenden’s testimony was summarised by Rendell in these terms :

‘Contador’s reticulocyte values (i.e., the population of young, recently-born red cells in his blood) … during the 2010 Tour de France were atypical, and opposite to what would have been expected’ (paragraph 132, on page 25). Later we read ‘They [were] also significantly higher than the values measured during his previous victories at the Tour de France (2007 and 2009), the 2008 Vuelta and the 2008 Giro, while they should be comparable’ (paragraph 351a).

Ditto his haemoglobin concentration (paragraph 351b). ‘Such values are not consistent with Mr Contador’s normal values and are difficult to reconcile with physiological variations. As such they provide indications which would be consistent with blood doping’ (paragraph 132, on page 25).

However, as Rendell also says : “After 18 pages of dense argument on the subject of the blood transfusion theory, the tribunal then concluded that is was ‘very unlikely to have occurred’ (paragraph 454).” The report’s conclusions amount to a strong rejection of the blood doping theory. Moreover, it was not as if the Biological Passport evidence hadn’t ever before been regarded as providing a reliable basis for a drug conviction in cycling. Last year, the New York Times reported on the banning of two Italian cyclists, in a story headlined “Court Upholds Cyclist’s Ban Based on Biological Passport” and stated :

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, considered the supreme court of sports, ruled against the Italian riders Franco Pellizotti and Pietro Caucchioli, saying they were guilty of doping and must be barred from the sport for two years. Those decisions came not because they failed drug tests or were nabbed in a criminal investigation — the conventional ways athletes are caught doping — but because several telltale changes in their blood signalled that they had illicitly manipulated their blood to improve performance.

To which then, one might well ask – why did the CAS, having effectively exonerated Contador from a conviction based on Biological Passport evidence, then impose on him exactly the same two year sentence as it imposed on two others who were convicted on Biological Passport evidence? The process seems more about a gesture to protect the image of professional sport, even if it means sacrificing the reputation, career and earning power of the athlete affected.

The alarming thing about the structure of the CAS judicial proceedings was it made it all but impossible for Contador to be exonerated. Essentially, the prosecution did not have to prove Contador’s guilt – the onus was on him, under the conditions of strict liability that apply in such cases, to prove his innocence. Since, as the Spanish Cycling Federation pointed out, the nature of his defence – that he had ingested the trace of clenbuterol via a piece of veal he had eaten on the rest day – meant that he had eaten the relevant evidence, it was a logical impossibility for him to produce the only truly compelling evidence of his innocence.

Regardless, Contador did what he could. As Rendell says, his defence team produced evidence that the brother of the farmer who provided the meat had a prior conviction for feeding clenbuterol to his animals. This line of argument was rejected by the CAS not on substantive grounds, but by analogy – that if Contador was presenting a ‘guilt by association’ argument, couldn’t the CAS also be free to conclude that since 12 of his current or former associates had tested positive in dope tests, shouldn’t they find him guilty as well? Again, this response by CAS left it a mystery as what Contador could possibly offer as proof, if circumstantial evidence supporting his explanation was to be rejected, a priori. The more substantive ground for rejecting Contador’s “contaminated meat” defence would appear to be this finding :

Clenbuterol has been outlawed since 1996 and it showed up only once in 83,203 animal samples tested by EU countries in 2008 and 2009, with zero positive cases in Spain from 19,431 samples analysed.

Those stats do seem fairly conclusive. Could Contador really have struck the rare to zero incidence of contaminated Spanish veal? But again, it comes down to the level at which the EU sampling is commonly being done. Keep in mind that as, the Guardian also says :

Contador’s clenbuterol reading was discovered at a German lab in Cologne, which is one of just four of the world’s 34 accredited anti-doping laboratories cutting-edge enough to have detected the minute traces of clenbuterol.

One can safely assume that not all – or even any – of the Spanish EU cattle are being tested at levels likely to detect the micro-levels involved in the Contador case. The amount was not only infinitesimal, but insufficient, of itself, to boost performance. The trace element of clenbuterol found in Contador’s urine after the July 21 test was a mere 50 picograms/ml, a value 40 times below the value the laboratory should be able to detect. In late 2010, Contador’s scientific adviser Dr Douwe De Boer called into question the lab’s declaring of an Adverse Analytical Finding for such a low amount, and argued that 50pg is 180 times less than the amount shown to induce physical benefits from the drug. Regardless, WADA sets no threshold for declaring a negative finding for clenbuterol. Instead, it sets a “Minimum Required Performance Level” (MRPL) instead, which serves effectively as a zero tolerance policy, in that any amount detected can be treated as the basis for issuing an Adverse Analytical Finding. It is doubtful whether tennis – which in the era of Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic places a similar premium upon endurance – would impose such financial and reputational penalties as those that have been imposed on Contador, for such a barely detectable presence of a banned substance. The case of French tennis player Richard Gasquet – who tested positive for cocaine and escaped any meaningful censure after arguing that he had ingested the drug from kissing a girl in a nightclub – suggests that top tennis players would not survive the level of scrutiny now being faced by top cyclists.

Again, one has to return to the structure of the proceedings against Contador. As Rendell says :

Contador, the accused, was saddled with the burden of proving (whatever that means), on the balance of probability (whatever that means), that the infinitesimally small trace of clenbuterol found in his urine that day got there through ‘no significant fault or negligence’ (see paragraph 241b) of his [brief.]

Although his accusers – cycling’s world governing body, the UCI; and WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency – had to demonstrate no intent, fault, negligence or knowing use on Contador’s part to achieve a conviction, they were obliged to contest his version of events; not just to pour scorn on the famous contaminated meat hypothesis but to suggest alternative scenarios of their own and back them up with evidence. Just not quite as much evidence as Contador, since (paragraph 252) ‘it must be avoided that the prerequisite for contesting an allegation result in a reversal of the burden of proof.’

In other words, the CAS didn’t face a high hurdle of proof for its alternative explanations, because to do so would reverse the burden of proof which – in contrast to the usual legal situation – rests in such proceedings upon the accused, and not on the prosecution. As mentioned, the CAS proceeded to shoot down its own most plausible alternative theory, but decided to find Contador guilty, anyway. It stripped him of his Tour De France victory in 2010 and all the other titles and prize money he had won since, and imposed – via the damage done to his reputation and brand image – a financial penalty estimated to amount to some 5 million euros .

All for a tiny trace element. If you happen to have watched the 2009 Tour and saw the final brutal ascent of Mt Ventoux on the last day of that race, one would have few doubts about Contador’s right to be considered a genuine champion of the sport. In this case, we are not talking about anything like Floyd Landis and his testosterone sample on the 2006 Tour, that registered at three times above the allowed limit.

Finally, the Contador case will do nothing to lend credibility to the anti-doping movement in sport, as we head into the 2012 Olympics. Clenbuterol has been an accidental presence in food and food supplements before, and will be again – and the system simply cannot distinguish between the conscious cheats, and the innocent victims of that situation. In July 2008, the American swimmer Jessica Hardy tested positive at the U.S. trials in July 2008. She served a one-year suspension, having claimed she unknowingly took the drug in a contaminated food supplement – and has subsequently made a successful comeback.

Last year, five players on Mexico’s national football team tested positively for the presence of clenbuterol in their bloodstream but were later acquitted by WADA after they successfully claimed that the clenbuterol had come from eating contaminated meat. The story is here :

Contaminated beef can be a legitimate excuse for clenbuterol in an athlete’s blood sample, the World Anti-Doping Agency said Wednesday, in a decision regarding five soccer players who blamed their positive test results on eating Mexican beef….WADA reversed course Wednesday when it withdrew its appeal of a FIFA decision to absolve five Mexican soccer players of doping charges. WADA said recent evidence lends credibility to the players’ explanation.

WADA has subsequently received compelling evidence … that indicates a serious health problem in Mexico with regards to meat contaminated with clenbuterol.

Which takes us back to the Spanish veal consumed by Contador. Apparently, if he had been able to produce a number of other Spanish athletes similarly infected, he might have been in the clear. But then given the minute trace in his system and the cutting edge technology necessary to find it, it may not be fair to condemn him, ultimately, simply because no one has (yet) been able to find similarly microscopic traces in anyone else.

Ultimately, the drug testing system is stacked against the athlete – and if, every now and then, a few get sacrificed on dubious grounds to uphold the image (and earnings power) of the rest of professional sport, then tough luck for them. That, more or less, is William Fotheringham’s final verdict in the Guardian on the Contador case :

The finding is a vital one for anti-doping, because it reasserts the fundamental principle of strict liability: that the athlete is responsible for a banned substance that is found in his or her blood or urine and that the absence of proof that it has been ingested deliberately is not in itself proof of innocence. The athlete is guilty of doping unless he or she can prove they hold no responsibility for the presence of that banned substance. They have to provide that proof.

Contador’s defence was that the clenbuterol must have got into his system through contaminated meat, not because that fact had been proven, but because there was no other possible explanation. The absence of conclusive evidence was claimed to be evidence. Had that principle been upheld, it could have established a precedent and driven a coach and horses through the strict liability rule. It seems harsh, but the balance of probability has to remain against the athlete.

Actually it doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. Especially not if – as in the case of Alberto Contador – preserving the tenet of strict liability endorses a process that seems to share more in common with the Salem witch trials than with any modern form of natural justice.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/talking-sport-the-trashing-of-alberto-contador/feed/ 1 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/cartoon-alley-mike-brown-mat-tait/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/cartoon-alley-mike-brown-mat-tait/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:02:48 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3384 Mat Tait is a South Island based cartoonist and illustrator. Mike Brown lives in Wellington and is currently writing a PhD thesis on New Zealand vernacular musics. ]]> Mat Tait is a South Island based cartoonist and illustrator. His self-published comics collection Love Stories was Best Comic winner at the 2010 New Zealand Comics Awards.

Mike Brown lives in Wellington and is currently writing a PhD thesis on New Zealand vernacular musics. Among the comics he has enjoyed over the years are 2000AD, Love and Rockets, and RAW, and work by Charles Burns, Chester Brown, and Mœbius. Previously having made short films and radio documentaries, and written articles on various subjects, this is his first foray into comic scripting.

These comics depict some our favourite New Zealand folk tales, back-country yarns, ghost stories, urban myths, and other folklore. We have both had a long interest in the folk legends of overseas cultures, but until recently little suspected the existence of New Zealand equivalents, aside from traditional Māori mythology. Then, during academic study a few years back, I (Michael) was surprised to discover how many had been collected here over the years. And that some of these stories were very fine indeed! They also began to awaken memories of urban myths encountered in our own pasts (ever heard of the hitchhiker who flagged rides on the road near Plimmerton, then disappeared leaving the seatbelt still buckled?). Thus was born the idea of translating a select few into the comic medium.

As well as being funny, spooky, or simply cracking yarns, these New Zealand folk tales are interesting for a number of reasons. Some are local variants of an archetypal story or “tale type” found elsewhere in the world; others use motifs that crop up time and again in human narrative. Several could only be set in New Zealand, however, whether for their atmosphere, sense of humour, or for the mingling of Māori and Pākeha elements. Not all are unadulterated folklore, either, but have roots in historical events which have taken on the quality of legend. Each of these stories includes a short précis of such matters.

Since starting work on this idea a few years ago, we have discovered others have already covered similar territory using the comic format. As far back as the 1950s, there was Ross Gore’s It Happened in New Zealand (c.1953, Digest Print), while a fine recent example is Chris Slane’s Maui: Legends of the Outcast (1996, Godwit Publishing). We also plan to eventually collate the comics into a publication. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our particular take on these New Zealand stories.

Last updated: March 12th, 2012 (Due to small size of original lettering please click to expand pages.)

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]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/cartoon-alley-mike-brown-mat-tait/feed/ 6 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/werewolf-issue-28-february-2012/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/werewolf-issue-28-february-2012/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:00:19 +0000 alastair http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3759
Is this book the perfect children’s story?
Can the law stop the US government from taking your money? Is Brad Pitt really at thee intersection of the personal and the cosmic? You bet.

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	Why State Capitalism Is Beating The Free Market And why New Zealand is no good at either… by Gordon Campbell
	Human Rights, Pinochet and Asset Freezes An interview with Baron Collins of Mapesbury, recently retired judge from the British Supreme Court by Gordon Campbell
	Nature’s Boy The films of Terrence Malick, from Badlands to Tree of Life by Philip Matthews
	Left Coasting : Undaunted Oakland Attempting to dream, amid gunfire by Rosalea Barker
	Classics : Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) Life (and love) is a dream shared, in Philippa Pearce’s classic novel by Gordon Campbell
	From the Hood: Howdy Neighbour! From a past life as a Muppet by Lyndon Hood
	The Complicatist: Alan Lomax A biography of the man responsible for much of the folk, blues and subsequent pop music traditions we know today by Gordon Campbell
	Worlds At A Distance In literature, do the avant-garde and the whimsical serve the same function? by Mark P. Williams
	Cartoon Alley : Brent Willis Brent Willis currently lives in Lyall Bay, Wellington and has been making underground self-published comics since the mid 1990s. by Brent Willis
	* * * * * WEREWOLF ISSUE 26, October, 2011 * * * * * The October 2011 Edition of Werewolf by Werewolf

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/03/werewolf-issue-28-february-2012/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/why-state-capitalism-is-beating-the-free-market/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/why-state-capitalism-is-beating-the-free-market/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:17:53 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3713 And why New Zealand is no good at either…

by Gordon Campbell

Lead image Lyndon Hood

Late last month, the Economist magazine published a debate on state capitalism, in which it proposed that state-led market economies are fast becoming a global rival to the old models of liberal, free market capitalism. The chapter and verse it provided is indeed pretty impressive. More than three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves, the magazine reported, are controlled by state-backed companies, ranging from the world’s biggest natural-gas company, Russia’s Gazprom to Brazil’s Petrobras. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation is the world’s second largest diversified chemicals company, Russia’s Sberbank is Europe’s third-largest bank by market capitalisation. Dubai Ports happens to be the world’s third-largest ports operator, and Emirates is one of the world’s fastest growing airlines.

Reportedly, state companies comprise 80% of the value of the stockmarket in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil. Together, the Economist summarised, they accounted for “one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms: three Chinese state-owned companies rank among the world’s ten biggest companies by revenue, against only two European ones.”

All of which suggests that long ago, the real world made up its own mind about whether government belongs in business. The trend seems very relevant to New Zealand, given our history of dependence on the state for building social and physical infrastructure, fostering innovation and investing in research and development – and our habit of living in denial about this discomfiting reality. Yet as the financial analyst Brian Gaynor points out by way of illustration, the current share market is full of companies like Solid Energy, Air New Zealand, Telecom etc that owed their origins to the state. Paradoxically though, our political rhetoric since the mid 1980s has been dominated by liberal exhortations to cut regulatory red tape, lower taxes, reduce labour protections, privatise assets and thus release the entrepreneurial spirit alleged to exist within our private sector. For all the free market noise, little in the way of sustainable growth has eventuated.

In other words, economic reality in New Zealand tends to differ from the political rhetoric that is routinely in play. If it is to succeed, the mixed model economy depends on a active, state-led partnership between government and business, in which government does a lot more than simply try to get out of the way. Yet there have been few signs of the inclination – let alone the ability – to foster and manage the collective forms of capitalist endeavour that are increasingly the global norm – especially within those emerging countries that like, New Zealand, have been trying to graduate from dependence on agricultural based exports. Last week for instance, the Washington Post described the new reality in these terms:

…Innovation is increasingly coming from groups, not solitary heroes. Capitalism as a communal enterprise — dare we call it collective capitalism? — is the new engine of innovation, in America and beyond, but it doesn’t seem to square with our culture.

Yet, theories about solitude and creativity notwithstanding, the basic innovative grunt work is now more likely to be done not by a lone wolf but by a wolf pack; there is simply too much information and too much complexity for it to be otherwise…. Already we are seeing how this new innovative collaboration works: in the browser Firefox, which is a product of a community of thousands of programmers; in the Netflix algorithm, which is a result of teams of researchers working together;…

This new reality doesn’t draw on the American entrepreneurial myth of singular achievement. It is based instead on something deeper — our roots as social beings who desire collaboration. We may like to continue thinking that…..individualism has shaped and will forever shape the modern world, but here is where cultural self-perceptions and economics can clash. We have got to overcome our hyperactive sense of exceptionalism and embrace the more collective, cooperative and globalized forces shaping the planet

There is no sign of that collaborative approach in Treasury’s recent briefing paper, which repeats (sigh) the old neo-liberal policy menu of (a) shrinking the state (b) lowering taxes on capital and (c) shifting costs onto the captive consumer, or in the case of education consumers, onto the child in the classroom – where the “savings” from bigger class sizes would be used to fund performance-based incentives to those teachers who can cope with the related classroom pressures. This approach has been tried in New Zealand for decades, and has failed to achieve sustainable economic growth, while creating one of the fastest growing rates of income inequality (and with it, the diseases of poverty) in the entire OECD. It has also failed to make any inroads into New Zealand’s chronic dependence on agricultural exports. Collaboration by contrast, means including workers and consumers in the policy mix, and not treating them as obstacles, or as cash cows.

In that sense, the recurring criticism that the Key government has no economic plan seems somewhat beside the point. The plan being followed by government merely reflects the indecision that exists amid the corporate sector that it seeks to serve. More of the same though, is bound to fail. For the past 25 years, almost everything business has asked for has been given to it – lower tax rates for business and high income earners, less restrictive labour practices, greater freedom from environmental regulation…and yet, sustainable economic growth remains a mirage. To outsiders, it would come as no surprise that given a small country of four million situated far from global markets and with relatively few natural advantages, a decision to promote policies that involve government abdicating its leadership role would turn out to have been self-defeating. Worse, many of the tools and processes of economic activity that have proven successful in state-led economies elsewhere – in Germany, Brazil, Scandinavia – have been sold, or abandoned.

We may now be in the terminal phase. One of 2012’s main political stories for instance, will continue to be the partial sale of state assets. Bathetically, this marks an attempt by government to invigorate the New Zealand sharemarket, in an economy which has shown itself incapable of producing a sufficient influx of healthy firms able to attract investors on their own merits, without assistance from the state. Again, the reduction of state ownership is based on the wrong-headed premise that this will enhance efficiency and productivity – when there is no empirical evidence that the state companies in question have anything whatsoever to learn from the private sector.

So far, critics of the state asset selldowns have focussed on the spectre of eventual foreign ownership of the shares, but the more pressing concern is the extent to which private speculators ( whether home- grown or foreign) will seek to recoup their investment by raising energy prices. This would require the collusion of the state. Under a mixed model system of modern state capitalism, the real issue may not be ownership so much as pricing – and whether the state sees its main role as being (a) to protect the citizenry from price gouging, or (b) to assist private capital to maximise its returns, regardless of the social cost. On past performance (b) is likely to be a clear winner.

Should New Zealand actively embrace the state capitalist model, given the failure of the neo-liberal alternative? First, some definitional issues. In the process of going to bat for old school liberal capitalism in the Economist, political scientist Ian Bremmer defined state capitalism as being a system in which the political elites control the vast bulk of economic activity, for their own political and personal gain. To Bremmer, the most typical examples of state capitalism tend to be oligarchies —China obviously, but also Russia and various Arab countries. Not surprisingly as the moderator of the Economist pointed out, Bremmer’s criticisms of state capitalism flow directly from his definition :

Given that the primary purpose of state capitalism is to keep oligarchs in power, the system will inevitably fail at producing wealth, at least in the long run. State capitalists cannot tolerate the two things that make for dynamic economies: the free flow of information that empowers entrepreneurs and consumers and the creative destruction that allows vigorous new firms to replace tired old ones.

According to this view, the current flaws of liberal capitalism are not terminal problems : “Liberal capitalism has survived huge challenges in the past. It will do so again.” Unless of course, it doesn’t – and the problems evident in parts of Europe prove to be beyond the powers of the market or its corporate chieftains to self diagnose, and cure. In which case, there is room for a much broader definition of state capitalism, as advocated by economist Aldo Musacchio of Harvard Business School. Such a system – which will sound familiar to New Zealanders – is one where governments, whether democratic or autocratic, “exercise a widespread influence on the economy, through either direct ownership or various subsidies.” In successful emerging economies such as Brazil, the state has chosen to take a leading role in picking those sectors and companies likely to prosper –with the state oil company Petrobras being a prime example – and will then support them to the hilt in whatever ways it can. As the Economist’s points out:

This hybrid form of capitalism—state support disciplined by the market—gives state capitalism three huge advantages, according to Musacchio. It produces global champions that have quickly risen up the ranks of the world’s top companies. It gives companies the freedom to invest for the long-term rather than obsessing about short-term profits. And it smooths the economic cycle: state-capitalist countries such as China were much faster to cope with the consequences of the financial crisis than liberal-capitalist countries.

So where does that leave New Zealand on the spectrum – given that as business commentator Rod Oram has argued, our agriculture commodity economy is peculiarly vulnerable to the swings of the economic cycle, both domestic and global. Superficially, it could be said that New Zealand has always had a state capitalist system (in both senses outlined above) run largely for the benefit of its political and corporate elites, which merely changed their membership during the 1980s – as those elites that had profited from protectionism were replaced by the elites that profited from financial de-regulation.

At the same time, in adopting the political rhetoric and much of the practice of liberal free market capitalism, New Zealand also went through substantive change in the scope and role of government. Vital infrastructure (in telecommunciations, transport, banking and soon, energy companies) was either sold outright, or had the state’s role significantly reduced. At the same time, New Zealand has atomised its work force in ways avoided by other, more successful state capitalist economies – ie Germany, Australia, Brazil – which tend, as the Economist also pointed out, to use the disciplines of the market to strengthen their national champions, rather than promote policies that merely protect them from global competition. (Old school protectionism isn’t a hallmark of state capitalism, at least not anymore. )

New Zealand has now largely divested itself of the ability to do likewise. If anything, it has simply exposed its private sector to global competition and hoped for the best. For the past 25 years successive New Zealand governments have tried to make a virtue out of selling its existing or potential champions, and encouraged work practices (casualisation, contracting out) geared to short-term profit taking, rather than to long term performance and viability. The focus has been on reducing the cost of labour, rather than seeking ways to utilise organised labour to national advantage. The current attack by Ports of Auckland management on the work conditions on the Auckland waterfront – which is occurring despite productivity at Auckland already being higher than in comparable Australian ports, and where Auckland’s health and safety record is better than exists in Tauranga, the model being advocated. Similar short-sightedness ( and abdication of the duty of care) exists in environmental policy, where government appears intent on defeating its own target of 90 % renewable electricity generation by 2030. A hat tip is owed to No Right Turn for pointing out this contradictory segment of the Ministry of Economic Development’s briefing paper to its new Minister, a classic of the “government getting out of the way” genre:

The Ministry’s view is that commercial enterprises are best placed to identify the lowest cost generation mix, the government’s role is to ensure there are no undue barriers to invest in generation of any type, and environmental effects are priced wherever possible. The relative economics of generation types is dictated by exchange rates (a higher exchange rate favours high capital cost options such as wind), emissions price (a high emission price favours renewables) and input resource availability and price (the availability and price of gas has a major bearing on gas plant economics).

Unfortunately As No Right Turn also points out, the latest New Zealand Energy Outlook shows the market likely to achieve only 81% renewables by 2030, thanks to new builds of gas, oil, and even coal generation.

A competent Ministry would highlight this discrepancy, and present options for resolving it. A government which cared about the target would demand they did so. Instead, MED’s “leave it to the market” approach puts us on the path to failure. But its worse than that – because while they’re ignoring renewables, MED is also talking up new non-renewable generation.

For now though, the state energy company selldowns – and the campaign to casualise the work force by the Ports of Auckland – remain the most telling examples of government bailing out on its managerial role in the economy – even when it is the only significant player able to serve the national interest, and even if it means foregoing significant amounts of revenue. Given their recent healthy annual returns, the four energy companies now being put on the auction block have little to gain from further exposure to the disciplines of the market given that – under full state ownership – they are already exceeding the performance of the private sector. Similarly Air New Zealand, while almost entirely in state hands, has survived the global recession in surprisingly good shape under its current ownership structure.

New Zealand has an identity problem, in other words. We are state capitalists who have been trying – for the last 25 years – to be funky liberal capitalists, a process that has all but eviscerated our ability to be successful in either role. Thankfully, some building blocks of this approach are now being re-thought. Not in Treasury, which seems determined to go down with the neo-liberal ship, even if that means taking the country down with it. But a more pragmatic and activist role for government is being argued by the likes of financial columnist Bernard Hickey:

The surge in our currency this week to a five-month high against the United States dollar and a record high against the euro highlights how we are losing in a race to the bottom. Britain, Europe and the United States are determined to print more money to devalue their currencies to protect their own economies….

This Northern Hemisphere strategy of print and hope is fine and understandable for them. Their export sectors become more competitive and they can preserve or create jobs in exporting and import substitution. But it is in effect a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy in which investors can borrow at near zero per cent interest then buy assets in higher interest rate currencies to make an easy profit. It is fuelling a surge in cash around the globe on a hunt for hard assets such as farmland, mines and oilfields….

New Zealand’s manufacturing exporters should now be very worried. The print-and-hope strategies look set to leave anyone who doesn’t follow suit sprawling in the dust. We saw the inevitable results of that with yet another collapse of a manufacturing exporter this week. Auckland’s Criterion Furniture called in the receivers after a decline in exports into these markets. There are now 180 workers wondering if they will keep their jobs.

They are the ones left standing. How long before New Zealand has to join the game? And can we afford to stand by and just let it happen to us? Our Government seems comfortable as a spectator. At some point it may have to become a player.

Right. That’s if the Key government (a) had the inclination, and (b) the ability. Theoretically, the recent resignation of Reserve Bank governor Alan Bollard – due to take effect later this year – might also have been an opportunity for a re-think. Unfortunately, as Brian Gaynor has indicated, the need for the RB to have a wider regulatory role may be there but the personnel don’t appear to be:

A recent research paper by the Brookings Institution – Rethinking Central Banking – recommends changes to central bank mandates. The paper argues that the recent property and financial bubbles, followed by the Global Financial Crisis, have shown that central banks need wider objectives. The institution believes that central banks should be able to implement policies to counteract rapid credit growth, asset price bubbles and other financial excess even if it means that inflation targets are missed.

If the Reserve Bank had a financial stability objective then it could have taken action to control the finance company sector excesses but it had no mandate to do so. This issue is particularly important because the main candidates to replace Bollard are “economic dries”. These are individuals who generally believe that the Government and its agencies should play a minimal role in the economy.

The “dries” believe that markets automatically self-correct before excesses develop, although recent worldwide developments contradict this widely held belief. A good example of a “dry” is former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan who continues to believe in the power of the market and advocates minimal government and central bank intervention.

….The next Reserve Bank governor needs to have a wider mandate, as recommended by the Brookings Institution, because it is unlikely that any of Bollard’s obvious replacements will be willing to embrace a wider role unless specifically required to do so.

To be successful, state capitalism needs intelligent activists in government. There are countries, Gaynor told me for this article, that believe in the positive role that governments can play, and those that don’t. “And we of course, are the latter. Its very hard to go from one to the other, because the thinking has become so entrenched…Sorry if this is a bit off the point, but I see New Zealand as an agricultural-based economy that has been unable to make the transfer to a more diversified economy. That’s why we have these big debates over the sales of farms because farming dominates the economy here, probably more so than in any other Western country…”

Roger Douglas, Gaynor continues, tried to end the government’s domination of the non-agricultural sectors of the economy “ But he didn’t come up with any replacement. He just said the market will deliver a replacement. And the market hasn’t delivered a replacement.“ But since the government is the only significant domestic source of risk capital, won’t any escape from New Zealand’s current situation need to be state-led? “Yes, Gaynor replies, “ but there would be huge opposition to it.”

Most people in New Zealand, he continues, are “incredibly reticent” about anything these days that smacks of risk. “Therefore, if the government started doing something different, it would more than likely be subjected to severe criticism from the electorate…For any government to sponsor innovation or to be a seed capitalist or whatever, is going to be very, very difficult in New Zealand. Because the mood at the moment – and this can change of course over time – is unbelievably negative towards that kind of thing.” Much of the resistance to the state asset selldown, he points out, is motivated by a conservative impulse to retain what we have. “At the same time, they don’t want to fund anything that is new and developing. It’s a funny mixture that we have here…”

Personally, Gaynor did think 10, 15, or 20 years ago that politicians could play a major role in the necessary transition but now…easy answers strike him as being in short supply. For now, the Key government’s plans appear to begin and end with the book-keeping task of trying to generate a surplus by 2014/15, which it is achieving (in large part) by cutting back on spending, services and jobs in the state sector. This goal seems to be an end in itself. Getting there will involve significant reductions in the state’s scope, revenue and ability to deliver services.

Not that there is any clarity about the road intended. When announcing his Cabinet late last year for instance, Key signalled that job creation would be at the very top of his government’s second term economic agenda, and Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce was being vested with the powers to make it happen. Except….a month later in his Economic Priorities speech to the Waitakere Business Club, jobs and the potential role of business in helping to deliver them doesn’t rate a mention.

At the best of times, Key routinely fails to distinguish between what level of job creation is required merely to keep pace with the annual influx of new entrants into the work force – and that’s before any inroads can be made into the backlog of unemployment generated by the recession. Of course, this demographically-driven part of the employment picture is also affected by the rate of migration, and by the extent to which older workers remain in the work force, whether that’s by choice or through economic necessity.

Unfortunately, demographic trends may reward doing nothing. What we know from the five year Labour Force projections (that juggle varying levels of economic growth, migration, mortality and labour force participation) is that the influx of younger workers entrants will have peaked by in 2016 and subsided by 2021, before increasing again towards rhe end of that decade. Which means that government neglect of youth employment will get a demographic tail wind from around 2016 – and from even as early as 2011 onwards, given a scenario of medium rates of fertility and mortality, relatively low net migration, and depressed labour force participation. So if we do nothing – and economic activity continues to flatline – a dormant government will still be able to claim some success on youth employment, thanks to these kindlier demographic conditions.

That is depressing enough. But migration will also be a key player in the employment mix. Currently, some 495,000 New Zealanders are estimated to be living in Australia – ie, one tenth of the entire population of this country – and they comprise a large proportion of the total of 700,000 to one million Kiwis who live offshore.

For years, Australia has functioned as a social safety valve for our skilled workers and for those relatively unskilled New Zealanders ( many of whom are Maori) unable to find a job here at home. If as projected, the Australian economy slows down noticeably during 2012 – and China does likewise – the Gillard government is unlikely to be generous when it comes to offering welfare assistance to Kiwis left out of work. A lot therefore, will then be riding on the Christchurch recovery in 2013 to reduce the ranks of the unemployed here, as well as those likely to be winging their way home from across the Tasman, during the latter half of this year.

To conclude : the prevailing sense is of a government sitting on the sidelines like a spectator at Wimbledon – and watching the economic volleys and rallies pinging back and forth across the net, while living in hope that the game will (somehow) go into the fifth set before they have to pack up and leave.

One basic problem with free market prescriptions is that there is no counter factual. Failure is treated as success, or “creative destruction” whereby the “inefficient” go to the wall, only for others to rise phoenix like from the ashes. The upside of this process – which is destructive not only to firms but to communities, families and individual lives – is supposed to be innovation, as the competition for survival leaves only the fittest still standing. (In reality, creative destruction is just as often the result of the workings privilege and near-monopoly, rather than anything based on merit.) IN any case, there is little evidence that state-led capitalism is any worse than free market capitalism in fostering innovation. (Quite the contrary. Profit-driven science is more likely to be conservative, and driven by short term results.) As Harvard economist Aldo Musacchio pointed out during the Economist debate, modern state capitalist governments lead innovation – they do not stifle it :

Innovation requires risk capital, and governments usually tolerate more risk than individual investors do. Innovation in deep-sea drilling by Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, is one example of how a risk-tolerant, long-term investor can succeed. Petrobras invested for decades in research on deep-sea drilling, even though it was not clear there was any oil off the coast of Brazil. A private company would have given up looking and investing money in research when there was no sign of oil. By adopting foreign technology and developing its own technology in its own research centre, Petrobras found one of the largest offshore basins in 1974 (off the coast of Rio) and more recently off the coast of São Paulo. Scientists at Petrobras have won many times the Offshore Technology Conference award for innovation.

If innovation is the key driver of economic growth, then New Zealand ( for all its neo-liberal rhetoric) remains a prime example of a capitalism reliant on the state, and not on the private sector. The trouble is that there is not enough r&d spending from either source. Spending on r&d by the New Zealand government dwarfs the private sector r&d spend, and always has done – even if the rates of investment in both cases lag well behind the OECD averages.

All too typical. Routinely, our private sector has looked to government to do the heavy lifting on exchange rates, interest rates, corporate tax rates and the country’s labour laws. Rather than seeing labour as a partner in productivity – as in more successful economies – business has been empowered to treat labour as a disposable cost. This situation has given ordinary New Zealanders no faith in the country’s ability to manage public/private partnerships in future in ways that will prevent rorts – mainly because we have been given every reason to think that the strength of public investment will not be matched by regulatory discipline in how the contracts are written and enforced.

Regulation, finally, is the big part of the story. The regulatory failures that led to the recent global recession have discredited the free market model, and validated state capitalist alternatives. The lesson could hardly be more clear. If Gaynor is right and we cannot stomach a state-led capitalist recovery along Scandinavian lines, perhaps we could at least go part of the way, and endorse a situation whereby the courts, the Commerce Commission and the other regulatory agencies were given the power to police the market adequately. In essence, a trustworthy kind of “umpire state” may be the best we can hope for. One where the rules of the game exist not solely to facilitate profit-taking by business. Alas, a country where Bryce Lawrence and Billy Bowden are our most famous referees probably doesn’t inspire much confidence in our capacity to create a satisfactory umpire state, either.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/why-state-capitalism-is-beating-the-free-market/feed/ 13 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/human-rights-pinochet-and-asset-freezes/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/human-rights-pinochet-and-asset-freezes/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:16:51 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3709 An interview with Baron Collins of Mapesbury, recently retired judge from the British Supreme Court

by Gordon Campbell

Click to enlarge Lawrence Collins, back row, second from right, UK Supreme Court

Politicians are always tempted to take pot shots at judges, who have relatively few friends among the general public. As the late Tom Bingham pointed out in his terrific little book The Rule of Law, the public hold a range of views about judges, not all of them consistent, but often unfavourable. “One minute they are senile and out of touch, the next the very people to conduct a detailed and searching inquiry; one minute port-gorged dinosaurs imposing savage sentences on hapless miscreants, the next wishy-washy liberals unwilling to punish anyone properly for anything…”

Supposedly, a creative tension exists between Parliament and the courts – one passes the laws, the other gives them meaning. Sometimes, the relationship is merely tense. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron and his Home Secretary Theresa May mounted a series of attacks on Britain’s highest court over its rulings on prisoners right to vote, the registration of sex offenders, and issues to do with forcibly arranged marriages. Much of this controversy has been a product of Britain’s incorporation in the late 1990s of the European Convention on Human Rights into British domestic law. The Tories in particular have been making noises since 2005 about creating ways to avoid the consequences, given the British courts’ tendency to pay heed – as by law, they must – to the Strasbourg rulings on human rights issues.

When Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury – a very recently retired judge on the UK Supreme Court – visited New Zealand last December, he cited Cameron’s political attacks on the judiciary during the public lecture he gave in Wellington. Werewolf editor Gordon Campbell interviewed Collins about the likelihood of Britain creating its own Bill of Rights, and also explored some cases in which Collins had been involved before being elevated to the judiciary. Namely, the 1986 case triggered by Ronald Reagan’s attempt to freeze Libya’s economic assets, and Spain’s 1998 attempt to extradite the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from Britain, in order to face charges over his regime’s use of torture, and its other human rights abuses. Both cases raised issues of extra-territoriality, and the reach of law beyond US and UK domestic shores. Unfortunately, this interview was conducted before the arrest and extradition proceedings against Kim Dotcom – which have raised a whole new set of disturbing questions about the extraterritorial reach of US law, and the ready compliance with it (so far) by New Zealand judges and Police.

Campbell : I’d like to begin with a comparison between the UK Supreme and its US counterpart. Routinely, we refer to the US Supreme Court as the Warren Court or the Roberts Court, and justices with huge personalities – the likes of Scalia and Brennan – emerge there on a regular basis. By contrast, do you think there’s more of a collegial blurring of identities in Britain’s highest court– and if so, why is that the case ?

Collins : The answer I think, is that the issues that arise [in the UK] don’t raise the same sort of ideological issues as in the United States. Secondly, there is a much more uniform background [with] the members of the Court. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some very, very strong personalities on the Court – I won’t mention anyone on the present Court but no-one could say that Lord Bingham and Lord Hoffman weren’t very strong personalities, and had enormous influence…But there aren’t the same divisive issues coming before what was the House of Lords and is now the Supreme Court, that come regularly before the US Supreme Court.

Isn’t it the extent of factionalism among the judges, and the process of building consensus, merely a less visible process in Britain?

Again, this is very much connected with my answer to the first question. The issues are nothing like as divisive as they normally are [in the US] Its not easy to think of cases where there is even a strong division of opinion that goes to the same level as you find in the United States.

Well, lets look at some contentious cases thrown up in Britain in the wake of 9/11. Such as Lord Bingham’s rulings against the Blair government for its use of immigration law for detention purposes, and against evidence gained by torture, and with all the subsequent furore that we saw over control orders and 90 day detention. Much as we like to think that the tension between the courts and the executive is creative, do you think the attacks on the Court in 2011 by David Cameron and his Home Secretary Theresa May, actually owe their origins to those human rights judgements made by Lord Bingham?

I personally don’t think so. [But] it is quite possible. In the Court under Lord Bingham certainly, successive Home Secretaries were unhappy about the way in which the Court dealt with security issues, and with crime issues…. There was an incident – I hope its public knowledge – where after one of the terrorist decisions, the Home Secretary asked to see the Law Lords to see what the right way forward was. And Lord Bingham said that was not appropriate. [Because] In his view, it didn’t respect the separation of powers.

Right. So where do you think this recent breakdown of respect between politicians and the highest Court has its origins? Lets set aside the particular instances, and talk in the general.

I think it has its origins in a populist approach to law and order. And a populist approach to issues of immigration and asylum. Which is fanned by the tabloid press, and which inevitably has an effect on the government. I don’t actually think the government has any less respect for the judiciary than it did before. But it is prepared to use language that it would not have been thought appropriate in the past.

In the process, the old convention about not attacking a judiciary that can’t fight back is being routinely ignored. You mention immigration and asylum issues. On the other side of the fence, many of the public feel the judiciary has been more concerned with the rights of potential terrorists than with the maintenance of public security. In that sense, the Court is beset on both sides – and what should be its response ?

One of the real problems of course is that its very hard to persuade the public about the importance of the rule of law. Because that it seen as something abstract, until it affects them. Its always been said that it is the unpopular cases that really test the system. And if we’re not prepared to deal properly with the unpopular cases, one day someone will come knocking on your innocent door.

One of the more pointed criticisms of late is that un-elected judges have been making the law in Britain – for example on prisoners right to vote, or on the lifelong registration of sex offenders – when that should be decided by Parliament. In one recent very vigorous dissenting opinion from the UK Supreme Court, we even had Lord Simon Brown saying very much the same thing. What’s your response to that line of criticism?

Well, the formal answer is that the United Kingdom government of the time ratified the Human Rights Convention. It eventually accepted the individual right of petition to the Strasbourg Court, and eventually incorporated the Human Rights Convention into UK law….and as a result of the provisions of that Act, the UK courts are certainly not making law – they are applying the law that was first ratified by the government, and eventually enacted by Parliament. That’s the formal answer. The less formal answer is that yes, in difficult cases, judges do have to make law. And in this area, the law is being made by a group of judges [in Strasbourg] of whom we [the UK } have only one representative. And it may be that the views and policies of those judges are not the same as ours, and that they come to decisions that we would not necessarily come to ourselves…But this is true of other international tribunals like the Luxembourg Court [of European Justice] and the International Court of Justice [in The Hague.]

The response to that line of reasoning by the populist likes of Michael Howard is to say, all very well…but the incorporation of the European Human Rights Convention into British domestic law was only supposed to be about setting broad standards for how states should treat their citizens – but these guys in Strasbourg seem to be socially micro-managing the lives of our citizens. Surely, that wasn’t the intention?

Well, this is also the view expressed by Lord Hoffman, in several places I think. It has a lot to be said for it. There is room for a dialogue. In the [UK] Supreme Court we recently had a case in which we said that the Strasbourg Court has got to look again at an important decision that it made outlawing hearsay evidence in criminal trials. We think we have the right balance in our law and they said : we don’t.

Lets look quickly at a couple of the mechanisms by which Britain could gain more legroom on Strasbourg decisions. Again, Howard recently resurrected this notion of the so-called ‘ margin of appreciation’ – that would allow member states to have some discretion on how they interpret European Convention rights, according to local circumstances. Do you think there is any mileage in that proposal?

Well,, its not a proposal of any novelty at all. It is, in fact, what the European Court says is the law. Its simply that the way the Strasbourg Court applies it seems in some cases to remove the margin of appreciation. Certainly, it is embodied in European human rights law.

Right. And it does seem that there are amber lights in some of the Strasbourg judgements – that allow you to take account of the rulings, as Lord Philips has recently pointed out, but not to be constrained to follow them. Along similar lines, there have been attempts to say there should be a ‘democratic override’ in the shape of a provision to empower Ministers on the Council of Europe to determine that a Strasbourg ruling should not be enforced if it goes against a clear and recent expression by a national Parliament. So if these alternative avenues really do exist how come they haven’t been used more often? Why has Britain tended to get the sharp end of Strasbourg, rather than the soft line?

Um..well…I wonder if that’s really true. I wonder if much of what has happened in Strasbourg has really affected our daily lives in any real way. Many of the issues are headline-type issues that don’t affect ordinary people at all. Take prisoners’ voting rights, for example

Or whether spouses aged 18-21 can bring in foreign nationals to marry them. Which was intended to restrict the incidence of forcible arranged marriages [and which was struck down by Strasbourg as a violation of the Article 8 convention protections of family life] but which doesn’t really affect millions of Britons.

No. They are all marginal, but they can all generate headlines.

Okay, yet regardless of their outreach, they are creating a snowball whereby this notion of Britain creating its own Bill of Rights – has been gaining momentum. This option has been mentioned since 2005 by the Conservatives. Do you think that would be a genuine solution to the problems that have emerged?

No. Because any Bill of Rights – just like the American Constitution. or the New Zealand Bill of Rights or the Canadian Bill of Rights or the Refugee Convention – will be based on essentially the same ideas. The perceived problem with Strasbourg is that it has interpreted those rights in a way which various governments are not very happy with. That it to say, it has extended those rights to protect individuals in a way that governments (a) are unhappy with and (b) are able to exploit for political purposes.

It does seem like a lose/lose situation for the judiciary. On the one hand they’re being whacked for being too political – and yet the suggested cure is to become even more politically attuned, and to look over their shoulder at what the boundary of tolerance is for the government of the day.

And I don’t believe the judiciary is, or can be politicised in that sense. Nor do I think the judiciary looks over its shoulder at what the government is saying.

But that’s what its critics are urging the judiciary to do.

And we’re still very far from that, fortunately.

You talked in your Borrin lecture here about the respect of the public for the judiciary and by extension, for the legal profession as a whole. I wonder if some of that disrespect hasn’t been self-inflicted. Especially in the aftermath of 9/11, we’ve seen an unvirtuous circle whereby politicians signal their intention, get lawyers to devise a rationale, and then the politicians go out and cite that work as a justification for the policy. Lawyers then can hardly be surprised if politicians now regard them as part of the game – and thus, fair game.

Well, lawyers have often had a bad reputation. It doesn’t necessarily rub off on the judiciary…Governments often bring pressure to bear – just as corporations bring pressure to bear – to give them a view in a certain sense. Its up to lawyers to give their own independent view – and if it doesn’t co-incide with their clients’ view, so be it. That’s the over-riding duty. And it is up to the judge in any particular case, whether they comply with that duty.

Perhaps it is the amping up of the climate in the wake of 9/11 that has made the process more visible.

Yes, but I don’t think it is any different. You had the same with Suez. With Suez, the government by-passed the Foreign Office, because it would get no [inaudible] from the Foreign Office. And there was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. In those days, the US was very keen to be seen to be complying with the law – and no doubt, still is – but it was willing to manipulate it in a way to ensure that it got what it wanted.

Torture, Bush and the Pinochet case.

Campbell : Late in 1999, A British court finally ruled that Chilean general and former ruler August Pinochet – who had been arrested in London while on a visit – should be extradited to Spain to face charges of torture and crimes against humanity. Didn’t you represent the government of Chile as an intervenor in that process?

Collins : Mmm-hmm… That’s right.

Was it your defence that as, head of state, he was immune from extradition – and in any case, could only be charged with crimes committed post 1988, after Britain had ratified the Torture Convention?

Well, the government of Chile at that time was a left-leaning coalition, several of whose members had been imprisoned, tortured or exiled by Pinochet. But they felt that Spain was not the right place for him to be tried, as he had very little connection with Spain – and the Spanish judge
was [proceeding] on the basis that the Spanish court had universal jurisdiction over torture wherever committed, and [because] some of the victims were Spanish. And the government of Chile took the view that this was a matter for Chile.

Now, there were some who were sceptical about that and believed that if he went back to Chile, nothing would happen. But there were some members of the government who were quite keen that he be sent back to Chile and tried. In the end, and despite the decision of the court that he should go to Spain, the British Home Secretary [Jack Straw] exercised his discretion not to extradite him, and did send him back to Chile. And he was not tried in Chile because – and, I believe, genuinely – he was not able to stand trial due to him having Alzheimers, or something.

Even though he was seen to be virtually leaping from his wheelchair once the plane hit the tarmac in Santiago. Still, what the court ruling to extradite him has been interpreted to mean is that it gave torture something akin to the status of a peremptory norm – and that has created a line in the sand, even when it comes to the conduct of heads of state.

Yes, that’s right.

And the ruling would be welcomed by you now, in that respect?

Yes.

The reason I raised it was that in President Bush’s recent autobiography, he confirmed he had personally authorised waterboarding. Given that the Pinochet ruling affirmed that torture is an international crime subject to universal jurisdiction, do you think President Bush would be well advised to stay at home in future?

(Laughs) I couldn’t possibly answer that. But there’s no doubt that nowadays government officials are very, very conscious of the scope of war crimes and humanitarian conventions and their effects in international law – as are military leaders. And at least in those countries which adhere to the rule of law, it has made a difference.

Trade Law, and the Libya Case

Campbell : Over the last three decades, international conventions have increasingly been incorporated into domestic law in the countries of the Commonwealth. Yet the internationalisation of trade law has been more controversial, mainly because the process has been seen to over-ride the autonomy of the countries concerned. I’m thinking of foreign investment rules where the treatment of foreign investors appears to trump the ability of countries to enact health and environmental laws and regulations to protect their citizens – if such rules happen to impinge on foreign investment. Is there anything in this process that causes you any concern ?

Collins : This is not my area, but this is nothing new. Since the 19th century, developing countries have both welcomed foreign investment and yet resented the consequences of it. If you strike a balance sheet as to whether its been good for the world or bad for the world….I think the answer is that is has probably been good. But I’m not an economist. Or a business man.

The difference – and the source of the problem – is that these issues have become more formalised and precise, as various adjudications have determined where the balance should fall. And it has fallen mainly in favour of the foreign investor, at the expense of the health and environmental goals of national governments..

And the answer again, is that we have been dealing with these things since the 19th century. We no longer have gunboats dealing with these matters. That was [thanks to] the Drago Doctrine, where it said that questions about payment of South American bonds should no longer be dealt with force, but by arbitration. It goes back even to the internationalisation of the Soviet Union.

Trade law, I suppose, is preferable to gunboats. But one area where this convergence is currently occurring – and I’m talking about the use of trade law as a weapon in the political arsenal– is over asset freezes on those people and states deemed to have breached international law, or to be supporting terrorism. Some precedents that established the primacy of foreign investors emerged from the asset freeze arbitration involving Iran and Libya in the early to mid 1980s, in which you were involved.

Oh yes. I was heavily involved in those.

The Libya case seemed to be one time when the system really worked, as the British courts picked their way through the issues involved. [ Briefly : In January, 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued a presidential order freezing funds held by Libya in a Bankers Trust bank account in New York, and then tried to do the same thing to Libya’s linked account at the same bank’s branch in London. Bankers Trust told the Libyans that sorry, we can’t pay out your money held in London because – international banking being structured as it was via the SWIFT banking system – such a payout would involve shifting US dollars, which the Reagan directive forbade under pain of criminal prosecution. Muammar Gaddafi’s lawyers then successfully went to court in Britain to unfreeze at least the London account.]

] The British court methodically resolved some basic conflict of laws issues, and identified what realms of Bankers Trust business they had jurisdiction to deal with. It then worked out mechanisms by which Bankers Trust could pay that money without breaching US law and the presidential directive – and thus saved the bankers from the need to commit illegal acts….

Yes. The only reason the banks were resisting payment was not because they didn’t want to pay. They were resisting paying because if they had paid they would have been subject to criminal penalties in the US.

Right. Exactly.

They would have been in a position of double jeopardy, in effect. Now in terms of policy, there are only two policy issues in that case. I don’t think one would have had a lot of sympathy with the Iranians in their [quite separate] case. They were holding hostages, and this [asset freeze] was just a reaction to the detention of the hostages. With the Libyans, I don’t know. But the policy issues were firstly – should you give extraterritorial effect to US law in order to aid a US ally on one hand? And then (b) should you preserve the integrity of the London banking system, such that any country would feel safe depositing their money in London, and feel free from US regulatory action. In the end, the policy – as decided – was very, very welcomed in British banking circles.

Which is why I brought it up. Because it showed the legal system working its way through to clear decisions on jurisdiction, the actual nature of the transactions and a fair outcome – which did not leave the security of the UK banking system subject to arbitrary regulation by the US President.

The case, remember, was decided only in the context of Libya. If the same [outcome] had happened in the case of Iran, the hostages might never have been released, and we might be thinking very, very differently about a decision by the English courts. What happened in the Iranian case was that a decision was very cleverly delayed by the judge at that time, which had the effect of ultimately allowing the US government and Iranian government to negotiate through the Algerians – so that eventually the money found its way through to a joint account under which claims between the US and Iran could be dealt with.

Yet in tracking the current relevance of the findings in that case, the more recent issues around extra-territoriality are those regarding the people detained at Guantanamo – where the US Supreme Court did finally decide that even though the facility was on land not formally part of the United States, the same rules should apply.

The arguments there were totally different though. How to articulate those differences off the cuff, is not so easy. But essentially, the Guantanamo point is in parallel in some ways to the Jason Smith case, which was an inquest case about whether the UK has jurisdiction over bases in Iraq, and so on. It’s a question of…what is your territory for the purposes of your Constitution, or your human rights? So although Guantanamo is owned by Cuba – does the fact that it is leased by the United States and that has prison facilities there make it for certain purposes, as if it were part of the United States? Similarly, are our bases in Iraq run by the British Army, in effect part of the UK? That type of extra-territoriality is quite different from the question whether American law can reach over and make it a crime to do something in London.

Is it really all that different? Because in the Libyan case in the 1980s, the US lawyers seemed to be saying something similar about the mooted payout to the Libyans in Eurodollars – namely, that even though it is a form of currency that is not controlled by the Federal Reserve, it is sort of American currency just the same. Or enough so that you can create a grey area where dealing in Eurodollars or dispersing them in London could be deemed to be an illegal act [for American bankers] under US law.

And it was a very respectable argument. Because money is a kind of fiction. What is a dollar? It certainly wasn’t dollar bills. Because the evidence was, there would be no way of ensuring and carrying the amounts of money involved in that case in cash. So what are dollars? What is it that the Iranians or the Libyans owned? According to one view, it was simply book entries in London. On another it was in effect, real dollars or gold held by the Treasury in Washington. It became a very metaphysical argument.

And New York happens to be the financial capital of the world, and the convergence point of all these global financial institutions. Again, doesn’t that render the whole global banking system potentially at the mercy of arbitrary Presidential decree – given that the currency of global commerce can almost always be claimed either to be actually – or at one remove – denominated in US dollars?

Yes, and the US has always got the power to nullify its currency or say that its no longer legal tender. Your currency – as some very old English case once said – is the essence of your sovereignty. So it is not ludicrous to think that dollars always remain under the control of the US, especially when in very large sums.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/human-rights-pinochet-and-asset-freezes/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/natures-boy/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/natures-boy/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:15:48 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3715 Badlands to Tree of Life ]]> The films of Terrence Malick, from Badlands to Tree of Life

by Philip Matthews

Of all the approximately 20 million words written about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life since it debuted at Cannes last May, maybe the best – or at least the funniest — came from John Waters in December, in his Artforum top ten for 2011. Waters wrote: “You’d think I’d hate this film, and I almost did — until I realized it’s the best New Age, heterosexual, Christian movie of the year.”

Almost everyone else had The Tree of Life in their top tens as well. It won the Village Voice poll of 95 American critics, with 307 votes ahead of A Separation’s 251 and Melancholia’s 246. It was film of the year for the American Film Institute, the Sight and Sound critics, the Film Comment critics, the Cannes judges, the Chicago film critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics and so on and so on, although the same crowd who think Ricky Gervais is funny – the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – failed to nominate it as one of their best at last month’s Golden Globes.

If you think such things matter, then the biggest and last hurdle will be the Oscars later this month, at which The Tree of Life is one of nine movies nominated for best film and Malick is one of five nominated directors (he was also nominated back in 1998 for The Thin Red Line). But you would be foolish to put money on him winning either of those. The Oscar buzz – or the group mind of entertainment journalists and voters – appears to be backing Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a film famous for its revival of the silent era. Which is nice, but in The Tree of Life, Malick achieved something beyond that – he came up with a new silent film language that is experimental, subjective and deeply emotional. It was the culmination of a process that started about 40 years ago.

“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return. I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.”
Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands.

It’s easy to think of Malick films coming in pairs. In the 1970s: Badlands and Days of Heaven. Before those, according to the very sketchy biographical information we have, he grew up in Oklahoma and Texas as the eldest of three brothers, studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford – the Oxford stint was as a Rhodes Scholar – but quit before finishing his doctorate. Then he studied film-making at the AFI Conservatory and got Badlands out just before he was 30.

Click to enlarge

In the early scenes of Badlands, the green suburbia of 1950s small-town South Dakota looks much like the suburbia of Waco, Texas in the same era in The Tree of Life, and we know that the setting of the latter was at least partly autobiographical. How much was Badlands a memory film? Malick was a teenager when the real case of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate – homicidal drifter and teenage runaway – happened. The film initially feels like perfunctory 70s realism – the boy meets the girl, they kill her dad, they burn the house and hit the road – and it really opens up about 30 minutes in, once Malick is through with the set-up. The outlaw romance road film is an artefact of the era, although there is no Bonnie and Clyde-style idolisation and it’s clear that Malick has little sympathy for the sullen anti-hero (Martin Sheen as Kit Carruthers), thus inaugurating a career-long interest in the interrogation of machismo, of the clash between a man’s public role and his inner life. Richard Gere, a similar rogue figure in Days of Heaven, is taken even less seriously than Kit.

Badlands is essentially a poetic film about juvenile delinquency – the camera takes in a yellow moon over the plains, cloud formations, car lights at night – that anticipates the more self-conscious beauty of Days of Heaven, a film of impressive sights but less narrative drive. In these first two films, the protagonists are unstable men but their stories are narrated by naïve young women – sometimes, it’s unreliable narration and sometimes it opens up a gulf between what we hear and what we see. If we can’t entirely trust the narration, and if we only hear from the young women who follow them, then what do we make of the male heroes? Sheen’s Kit is all posture, self-stylised as a James Dean figure, even celebrating his notoriety by the end, but lacking in charisma. Gere’s Bill in Days of Heaven is even less readable, little more than a cypher for Malick’s moral questions. “There is half-devil and half-angel in him,” the girl (Linda Manz) says, but that’s too grand. He’s just another feckless opportunist.

In both films, an idyll comes after the set-up, making a second act. In Days of Heaven, this is about the pleasures of not working (“The rich got it figured out”); in Badlands, it’s scenes of Kit and Holly hiding out in a tree house in the woods, which was apparently an idea of production designer Jack Fisk, a career-long collaborator. In both cases, a Malickian gallery of the good life begins to develop: close-ups of grass and trees, sunlight, people splashing in rivers. Holly even speaks of trees rustling overhead like spiritual whispers, a weird anticipation of the Malick soundtrack from The Thin Red Line on. Inevitably, there is a Fall: in both films, the end of the idyll introduces the third act. In both films, a rapturously observed fire creates a break in the story: early on in Badlands, late in Days of Heaven.

From the beginning, improvisation was an important part of the method. One senses, purely by the results on screen, that some actors are more open to such methods than others (how to account for the strange flatness of the acting in Days of Heaven?). On the Badlands DVD extra “Absence of Malick” – and yes, of course the publicity-shy Malick is absent – Fisk talks about a long shoot of 16 weeks with some crew walking off, unable to cope with Malick’s open-ended directorial approach. By Days of Heaven, the camera had become more mobile and the editing more experimental.

“Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.”
Private Train (John Dee Smith) in The Thin Red Line.

Watch out for animals in Malick films, they usually mean something (he’s a philosopher so everything means something). When rewatching Days of Heaven, one of the most startling things was seeing herds of bison in some shots, on a Texas farm during World War I. We associate bison with pre-European settlement and during the idyllic parts of the film, you might even imagine that the whole nightmare of American history had been rewound.

After Days of Heaven, it was 20 years before he directed another film (he travelled and read and bird-watched, got divorced and remarried, lived in Paris for a time, wrote some screenplays).The next pair of films – The Thin Red Line and The New World – were more complex than the first. Both had multiple narrators and drew on historical sources. In both, the idyllic scenes are at the start, as “primitive” worlds made to look holy, operating without selfishness, property, needless violence and obvious hierarchy. It is almost an ethnographic sensibility and perhaps a little old-fashioned. In The Thin Red Line, they are Melanesian people in the Pacific; in The New World, Powhatan Indians in Virginia. In each film, a western man enters this world and is either part of the process by which it is damaged completely or is so changed by his war experiences that he cannot return to it. Versions of the Fall, in both cases.

In The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones’ novel about Guadalcanal, Witt (Jim Caviezel) has gone AWOL and is living among Melanesian people. He is brought back to the war by Welsh (Sean Penn) and a scene follows that would lead those who are trawling for Christian symbolism to think of the confrontation between Christ and Pilate. “I can take anything you dish out,” Witt tells Welsh. “I’m twice the man you are.” Witt tells Welsh that there is a world beyond this one; Welsh refuses to see or acknowledge it. Witt talks with a peaceful certainty; the more macho and militaristic Welsh never looks entirely convinced of his own position (ten years later, Malick would get Penn back to do much the same thing in The Tree of Life).

The voice-overs do something entirely different from here on. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz is good on this, and his Malick video essay is worth watching (link here). After The Thin Red Line, the Malick voice-over no longer has any connection with the standard Hollywood show-and-tell and instead becomes a way of relating the thoughts of a range of characters. It is not an interior monologue or comment on action but is closer to unvoiced or even unsayable feeling: “What’s this war in the heart of nature?”; “You are my sons, my dear sons”; “What voice is this that speaks within me?” Imagine the characters simply saying these lines under their breath to themselves and they might seem risible and pretentious, so instead you should see these voice-overs as an attempt to get to the very base of consciousness. The result is a point of view that is both introverted and observant.

There are family dynamics in The Thin Red Line than anticipate The Tree of Life. It is Staros (Elias Koteas) who thinks of the troops as his “sons”. He is more pacifistic and defies the suicidal orders of Tall (Nick Nolte); together, they mirror the saintly mother and autocratic father in The Tree of Life. As noted, Penn’s Welsh is akin to the older brother and Caviezel’s Witt to a younger one. As in The Tree of Life, Penn has something to learn from his brother’s death. But beyond all this, it is a highly effective war film – few others have been as good as showing the psychological failure, the fear and terror, of soldiers in the field. If you held a gun to my head, I might say it’s his second best film.

In The New World, the almost childlike life of the Powhatan Indians is interrupted by the arrival of English ships, much as the sight of an American ship means the end of Witt’s timeless, dream-like life at the start of The Thin Red Line. Like Witt, John Smith (Colin Farrell) defects and briefly lives in a pre-European paradise with Pocahontas, although he too must go back (“Where would we live? In the woods? In a treetop?” he asks Pocahontas, reminding us of Badlands). By the time Smith’s commanding officer (Christopher Plummer) is telling the English that “Eden lies about us still”, we can see that it has already been corrupted. Again fire – the burning of the Powhatan settlement – marks the end of things.

The closing minutes of The New World are almost a master class in storytelling through images rather than words. The religiosity was becoming more overt, too: characters were not just thinking, they were addressing a supreme being, asking it questions (and not just a Judeo-Christian supreme being). In both films, there is another new motif: shots of people swimming underwater, filmed from below. You can read it as a form of freedom, a closeness to nature, but it took on a different meaning in The Tree of Life, after which it was possible to look back and reconsider what the image might mean in The Thin Red Line and The New World.

“I’m your father. A family can have only one head and that is the father.”
Captain Bosche (George Clooney) in The Thin Red Line.

By now you know that Malick likes certain images. Sunlight through leaves as you look up at the trees (the last shot of The New World). Legs of swimmers, grass swaying in the wind, waterfalls. Flocks of birds moving as one. The images feel like straightforward visual shorthand for a divine presence, and if you aren’t willing to appreciate religious art – which you don’t have to be religious to do – then they are easy to mock as New Age, corny, treacly, whatever. That and all the whispered, heartfelt voice-overs, now directed at God in the more overtly Judeo-Christian sense (“Where were you? You let a boy die”).

What kind of film would The Tree of Life be if you cut the 20-minute “creation” sequence – the birth of stars and planets, the controversial dinosaurs with their origin of pity – and the “resurrection” epilogue? If you lost the – hate the phrase – cosmic dimension. It would be like taking the apes and the star child out of 2001: it would be saner, more accessible, less risky, less ambitious, more ordinary. But actually, the discussion of those trickier, polarising bits of The Tree of Life has tended to overshadow the real achievement of the down-to-earth middle section, which is closer to the simple storytelling of Badlands. The intimate, closely observed scenes of family life over a number of years in suburban Waco, Texas, with the autocratic father (Brad Pitt), the gentle mother (Jessica Chastain) and the three boys is remarkably open, fresh and intuitive film-making. The storytelling is almost entirely free of dialogue; it could be done with the occasional silent-movie intertitle and you would miss nothing.

In an accompanying documentary, “Exploring the Tree of Life”, you get a sense of a method that was more improvisational than ever on The Tree of Life. Malick and his small crew – including the excellent cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki – roamed entire suburban blocks which were open as one large, outdoor set, often without a script in mind and using only natural light. Jack Fisk talks about some of that in the clip at this link. That approach accounts for the deep feelings in this film: it feels like the childhood of almost everyone who sees it, or at least the selective and replayed memories of childhood. The way weather felt, the way spaces felt, the perspectives you had. The simultaneous love and anger. A growing sense of the world beyond the family, of people who are richer and poorer, of injustices and unfairness. A realisation that there was a time before you existed (“Tell us a story from before we can remember”). All the attendant emotions come back as you watch it.

Now, the swimming underwater motif is powerfully recast as a metaphor for being born. Bodies of water are intermediary spaces and the very last shot in this life and death haunted film is a bridge over a river. But why is there a shot of a mask in water near the end, within the resurrection, when there are no masks worn in the film? (Maybe Kierkegaard’s idea about the “midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask”). And what could the sunflowers mean? All of the film’s many images can be obsessively replayed and analysed until the end of time by legions of cultists, as has happened to The Shining, according to this New York Times story, which might also have one of the world’s most unusual newspaper corrections (link here).

You know that The Tree of Life film was both ambitious and personal – Malick had a brother who died young, who was musically gifted – but the family scenes also get to a universality of experience. In The Thin Red Line, there was some musing on the family of humanity, which has been broken up by violence. In The Tree of Life, that is the literal family, before fall outs and separation, before your identity is fully formed. The idyllic world is no longer historically or geographically remote, but is a time in your own life that you long to get to but cannot (“How do I get back, where they are?”). Hence the daydreams that Penn’s Jack O’Brien has of a kind of resurrection of the dead on an endless beach.

This is a utopianism in which your own life was utopia. A common enough emotion: nostalgia, the sense of lack. In his book Living in the End Times, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about our feelings of exclusion from nature, or the utopia we imagine nature to be, as “external observers of the paradise barred to us”. Try as we might, we can never fully be in it. In his first four films, Malick shows us moments of paradise and moments of exclusion, but in his fifth and most personal one, Malick got right to the source: exclusion came with gradual self-consciousness and self-awareness and is impossible to undo. At the end of The Tree of Life, Jack O’Brien at least has accepted it.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/natures-boy/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/left-coasting-undaunted-oakland/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/left-coasting-undaunted-oakland/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:14:51 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3707 Attempting to dream, amid gunfire

by Rosalea Barker

It gets really tiring living in Oakland. Practically every television newscast is straight from the police blotter. Murders. Marches. Mayhem. Mayoral recall. (Oops! That last one’s not from the blotter but from the OPD to-do list.) And it’s depressing that about the only optimistic thing to do last Martin Luther King Day (this year, January 16) was to attend a gathering called “Stop the Gunfire”. Here’s a report about the event on Tonya Love’s WordPress blog Love, Health, and Advocacy.

Like the confusing multiplicity of police forces and church ministries here in the Bay Area (and the States at large), the plethora of events that have been held aiming to curb the gun violence that plagues some sections of Oakland is mind boggling. Forums. Neighborhood meetings. Summits. Nothing seems to change, and yet the efforts continue, often completely under the media radar, but more commonly getting a few inches of column space or a minute on the news and then immediately forgotten.

But there may be one thread that will tie all the efforts together to have some lasting effect, and that is the notion of the New Civil Rights Movement for the Twenty-First Century:

Brother Earl Nicholas of Allen Temple Baptist Church imagining what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say to people who weren’t around in the Sixties civil rights era.

Several of the speakers at the event mentioned “the new Jim Crow”—referring to the use of mass incarceration as a means of racialized social control, and described in the book of the same name by former Oakland attorney, Michelle Alexander. One such speaker was Uncle Bobby, whose nephew Oscar Grant was shot in the back by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer as he lay on Oakland’s Fruitvale BART platform about to be handcuffed. The street violence in Oakland, Uncle Bobby believes, won’t be ended until police brutality comes to an end.

Two mothers who had lost sons to gun violence, and have since started non-profits, also spoke. Brenda Grisham started a foundation after her son died, granting scholarships to assist students from the neighborhoods where violence is most prevalent with training in the performing arts. Lorrain Taylor founded a group that provides a “family-focused continuum of care”, including “mental health and grief support, groceries, outreach, networking and advocacy”.

According to the event’s organizer, Rev. Harry Williams, both Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and a representative from the Oakland Police Department received invitations to speak at the gathering, but neither came, although a local city council representative did attend and said she wants “the movement to wage peace to build and build and build”.

The event ended with the appearance of local rap artist Mistah F.A.B. (Money Is Something to Always Have — FaEva Afta Bread), who read a poem he’d written just for MLK Day:

Mistah F.A.B “Still I Dream”

And, yes, the last word is “dream”.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/left-coasting-undaunted-oakland/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/classics-toms-midnight-garden-1958/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/classics-toms-midnight-garden-1958/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:13:45 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3708 Life (and love) is a dream shared, in Philippa Pearce’s classic novel

by Gordon Campbell

For anyone trying to write about it, Tom’s Midnight Garden poses a significant problem. The twist ending will be well known to anyone who has read the book, but first time readers would justifiably want to kill anyone who spoils the surprise, which provides one of the most satisfying and moving resolutions in children’s fiction. So if I seem to circle somewhat mysteriously around aspects of Philippa Pearce’s classic novel, that’s the reason why.

The basic plot for Tom”s Midnight Garden is simple enough. Tom Long, a young schoolboy, has his summer holiday spoiled when his brother Peter contracts measles, and he is packed off to stay with his kindly aunt and pedantic uncle who rent a boring house with an old and erratic grandfather clock in the hall downstairs, and an elderly landlady in the flat upstairs. Unable to sleep soon after his arrival, Tom hears the clock – at midnight – strike 13, and curiosity drives him out of his bedroom to investigate what time is showing on the dial. He finds himself in a Victorian garden, some sixty or more years in the past.

Each subsequent night at the 13th hour, Tom has a brief period of time to explore the garden, where he meets a young girl called Hatty and strikes up a deep friendship with her. Yet on each visit, what to Tom is merely the next night is experienced as a period of months and years in Hatty’s life, and she gradually grows up and away from him, into a young woman. Tom’s sense of loss, and his attempt to puzzle out the nature of the twin realities he is inhabiting – is Hatty a ghost, and/or if this garden is a dream, whose dream is it? – are merely one dimension of this beautifully crafted story, which becomes a meditation on time, memory, and the scope for communication between the very young and the very old.

None of the deeper themes of the book get in way of the enjoyment that younger readers can take in Tom’s story. Pearce portrays her characters and the physical setting so vividly that the fantastic time travel/dream/ghost story elements of the tale seem totally credible. However, the elements of nostalgia and loss may also explain why adult readers love the book so fiercely. Even at the time of its publication, the reviewer John Rowe Townsend – by no means a critic easy to please – had this to say about it :

It is as near to being perfect in its construction and its writing as any book I know. I think only a woman could have written it ; girls should like it, and adults, and thoughtful boys, but not the lovers of the rough stuff.

The book has a profound, mysterious sense of time; it has the beauty of a theorem, but it is not abstract ; it is sensuously as well as intellectually satisfying. The garden is so real that you can have the scent of it in your nostrils… I have no reservations to make about it. If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children’s literature since the last war it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book.

One explanation for the precision of Pearce’s description of the walled garden in her story is that she actually played in it herself, as a child. Born in 1920 as the daughter of a miller, she was – as she told interviewers Ronu Natov and Geraldine DeLuca in 1986 – something of an “isolated” child, being younger than her three siblings, and so sickly that she didn’t start school until she was eight or nine. The garden where Tom and Hatty meet was inspired by the mill house in which she lived, which also had a walled garden with a sundial set into one wall. As she explained to Natov and Deluca, the family attachment to this Cambridgeshire house went back for generations, and as a adult she lived in a cottage just across the road from the same house. Once, her father had walked along the high narrow wall that Tom so memorably walks upon mid way through the book. And like Tom, her father had once skated all the way along the frozen river, to Ely Cathedral. As Pearce said :

My father was born in that house because my grandfather was also a miller. We moved in when I was very small, my grandfather died and we took over. This is the house and the garden with its sundial on the wall in Tom’s Midnigfht Garden. The garden was absolutely the image of that walled garden in the book…”

Ingeniously plotted as it is, and resting on solid memories for its physical setting, Tom’s Midnight Garden would still have been nothing without the skill that has gone into the deceptively simple writing. The book is a series of short, lucid sentences and perfectly observed details. Townsend was absolutely right about Pearce’s attention to the sensuous texture of the world she created. Here for instance, is a passage near the beginning of the book, where Tom climbs a tree. Only someone who has climbed a lot of trees could get it so right :

The first branches grew conveniently low, and the main trunk had bosses and crevices. With the toes of his left foot fitted into one of these last, Tom curved his hands around the branch over his head. Then he gave a push, a spring and a strong haul on the arms: his legs and feet were dangling free, and the branch was under his chest, and then under his middle. He drew himself still further forward, at the same time twisting himself expertly; now he was sitting on the bough, a man’s height above ground.

The rest of the ascent was easy but interesting: sometimes along the spreading outermost branches, sometimes working close to the main trunk, Tom loved the dry feel of the bark on the main trunk. In places the bark had peeled away, and then a deep pink showed beneath, as though the tree were skin and flesh beneath the brown. Up and up he went, and burst at last from the dim interior into an openness of blue and fiery gold. The sun was the gold, in a blue sky. All around him was a spreading tufted surface of evergreen. He was on a level with the tall south wall….

Click to enlarge Ely Cathedral, circa 1896.

Towards the end of the book, Tom and the now near-womanly Hatty go skating down the icy river together. The sweeps of the prose mimic the blades on the ice, and convey a vast sense of freedom – and of contentment in each other’s company, and the joy that comes from simply being in the world together :

The skates were on, and now Hatty and Tom were ready for the ice; two skaters on one pair of skates, which seemed to Tom both the eeriest and the most natural thing in the world. A new skill and power came into him, as though these skates knew their work better than the skater: he could skate as well as Hatty, because these were her skates…

They did not skate with linked hands, as many skating partners did, for fear of the odd appearance being noticed but once they had left behind the thick crowds of sociable skaters just below the town, they skated abreast, keeping time together, stroke for stroke. There was no wind at all that afternoon, and they cut through the still air, faster and faster.

Hatty had pinned her skirt up above her ankles, for greater freedom of movement; and now she abandoned the use of her muff, the better to swing her arms in time with their skating. Their speed made the muff fly out behind her on its cord, and at last a stroke gave it such a violent fling that the cord broke and the fur ball shot away and landed in the middle of a game of bandy and somehow became part of the game and was never seen again. Hatty saw it disappear, and neither stopped nor faltered in her course but only laughed, as though she cared nothing now for muffs or improprieties or aunts. They skated on…

Since its publication in 1958, Pearce’s book has been adapted for the stage and twice for television, most successfully in the 1989 adaptation written for television by Julia Jones. An excerpt from that production has been posted on Youtube here and the less rewarding 1974 adaptation by John Tully is also available online. The 1998 film version, which suffers from terrible miscasting in almost every role – the actor playing Tom was 17 at the time, and looks every bit of it – is best ignored.

Thankfully, there is something about Tom’s Midnight Garden that brings out the best in the critics who have analysed it. Humphrey Carpenter for instance, in his book Secret Gardens (about the golden age of children’s literature ) brilliantly likens Pearce’s novel to an inverted version of Peter Pan. It is best seen, Carpenter maintained, as “a rewriting of Peter Pan from Peter’s point of view” with Tom’s sorrow about losing the garden and Hatty being akin to Peter’s fervent attempts to persuade Wendy to stay with him in Never Never Land forever. Hatty does grows up, falls in love and leaves Tom behind as a ghost from her childhood. The last time he tries to visit the garden it is no longer there. Paradise has been paved, leaving behind only a yard filled with dustbins.

Gardens lend themselves readily to symbolic purposes. In this case, the garden feels real and tangible, albeit experienced with dream-like intensity. Yet it also carries a degree of symbolic meanings so un-obtrusively that I missed them entirely, or glossed over them on first reading. They are there, though, in at least two respects. Firstly, from the book of Genesis : it is hardly accidental that the grandfather clock that serves as the gateway to the garden carries the image of an angel, and Tom later dreams of the same angel barring his way back to the garden with a flaming sword. Secondly, amidst the book’s many insights and ruminations about the nature of time – is it circular, or continuous, or does it co-exist in parallel ? – is a quote from Revelations (Rev 10. 1-6) about the dissolution of time. Like a good, Sunday school Victorian girl, it is Hatty who first suggests this quotation, and later on the point is picked up explicitly : “Tom said : “We’re both real. Then and Now. Its as the angel said : Time No Longer.”

This spiritual dimension is present, but is not omnipresent. In interviews, Pearce has said that most of her own thinking about the nature of time was inspired by J.W. Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time which her brother and friends were reading when she first started to write Tom’s Midnight Garden : “ I never understood it properly, but it was a sort of theoretical base for the book. ”

For all its poignancy, Tom Midnight Garden is neither pessimistic, nor maudlin. By means I can’t divulge without spoiling the ending, Pearce finally manages to portray the transition from childhood fears and desires to adult compassion in an entirely optimistic fashion. In his Northern Lights trilogy, Philip Pullman also likened this rite of passage to the Fall in Genesis. To Pullman, the Fall marks a positive moment when humanity first started to think and act for itself, and to live in a world where happiness and pain our are own responsibilities. Tom, by the end of this story, is ready to do likewise.

For this essay, Gordon Campbell drew upon material contained in volume 9 of the Children’s Literature Review and volume 129 of the Something About the Author series – and most notably, the interview with Philippa Pearce by Roni Natov and Geraldine DeLuca published in The Lion and the Unicorn, volume 9, 1985.

ENDS

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/classics-toms-midnight-garden-1958/feed/ 0 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/from-the-hood-howdy-neighbour/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/from-the-hood-howdy-neighbour/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:12:58 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3720 From my past life as a Muppet

by Lyndon Hood

During the holidays I finally got to clear my cellar of some junk left by a number of previous tenants.

Under a pile of unused plastic spoons I happened to find an old tin of film. There was no clue as to its contents, and it was just made more mysterious by a note scrawled on the label…

This is not what we discussed, Jeff. Try again.

… a mystery which examining the film has not really resolved.

I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with faded film stock?

I tried enhancing the video but the people still came out all distorted and multicoloured. In the end I took a copy of the audio – for which see below – and put the tape in the recycling.

You’ll probably say that was a mistake. And I admit, it didn’t have any number stamped on it at all – but I was all out of the council bags and they frankly seem to take anything.

Anyway, perhaps you’ll have some idea what it’s all about.

Click a link to play audio (or right-click to download) in either
MP3 format or in OGG format.

Leaving aside some irrelevant chatter, I’ve transcribed the lyrics as follows:

Oh who are the people in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood?
Say who are the people in your neighbourhood –
the people that you meet each day?

I’m keeping the economy on track
by laying down a lot of tarmac
but once I’ve finished all that toil
don’t know what we’re going to do for oil.

Yes, a road worker’s a person in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood
in your neighbourhood.
Oh, a road worker’s a person in your neighbourhood –
a person that you meet each day.

I check you’re safe riding your bike
and I can put surveillance cameras anywhere they like;
and as a small reward for them,
I investigate journalists for the PM.

A policeman is a person in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood.
A policeman is a person in your neighbourhood –
a person that you meet each day.

I’m living proof you win some and you lose some,
because I don’t have sufficient income;
but you’ll give me enough (arguably),
in exchange for my dignity.

A beneficiary is a person in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood,
in your neighbourhood.
A beneficiary is a person in your neighbourhood –
they’re a person that you meet each day.

For being really mean to you and me,
we put them in the penitentiary
and hope they will learn better when
we do mean things to them.

A prisoner is a person in your neigbourhood,
in your neigbourhood,
in your neigbourhood,
or they’ll eventually be a person in your neighbourhood
and a road worker’s a person in your neighbourhood
and a policeman is a person in your neighbourhood
and an beneficiary’s a person in your neighbourhood
they’re the people that you meet,
when you’re walking down the street –
they’re the people that you meet each day!

********

]]> http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/from-the-hood-howdy-neighbour/feed/ 6 http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/the-complicatist-alan-lomax/ http://werewolf.co.nz/2012/02/the-complicatist-alan-lomax/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:11:24 +0000 David http://werewolf.co.nz/?p=3706 A biography of the man responsible for much of the folk, blues and subsequent pop music traditions we know today

by Gordon Campbell

So who was Alan Lomax? The first person to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, for starters. His work was a family vocation. Back in 1910, his father, John A. Lomax, published a book of cowboy ballads that John had travelled around and collected on his clunky Ediphone recording device, and that publication did a lot to save songs like “Home on the Range” and “Get Along, Little Dogies” from oblivion. Frankly, it is quite scary to realise how much of the music tradition we now take for granted – in country, blues, gospel, rock’n’roll, etc – has been a fluke of history. What has survived has done so often by chance, and largely thanks to the efforts of a few obsessive folk and blues collectors.

Take Blind Willie McTell as an example. He had made recordings as far back as 1927, and again during the 1930s. Yet McTell would probably have been lost to history if John Lomax and his wife hadn’t gone driving around the backstreets of Atlanta in October 1940, looking for him. Finally, as they were driving past a Little Pig food stand, Lomax’s wife said : “ There’s a man with a guitar.”

They stopped, McTell conceded that his takings as a blind street singer hadn’t been too good that day so…. okay, he’d come back to their hotel room and record a few tunes. That Lomax session in their hotel room for the Library of Congress put McTell back on the radar and – decades later – inspired Jack White, and saw Bob Dylan write one of his best songs about him. McTell, Leadbelly, Bukka White, Skip James, Son House, Muddy Waters, Mississippi Fred McDowell…all were part of a cultural landscape that mainstream America blithely ignored, and that could easily have been lost forever. If it had, the history of rock’n’roll and popular music would have been vastly different. Would there have even been a Jack White, without the miles the Lomaxes clocked during the 1930s, finding and recording the great country blues musicians that White and the rest of us revere today? Probably not.

Click to enlarge John A. Lomax, with Uncle Rich Brown, 1940

Without the Lomaxes, it is not only the musical landscape of 20th century American music that would be unrecognisable. The same would go for what is known of the musical traditions of Ireland, Spain, Sicily, England, Scotland, Haiti and everywhere else that Alan Lomax set up his microphones. This well-researched biography of Alan Lomax puts that achievement into perspective. Any reader will make their own discoveries. I had no idea before of the key role that Alan Lomax played in the career of Woody Guthrie. Nor that the groundbreaking Miles Davis jazz album Sketches of Spain owed its origins to folk recordings made by Lomax in Spain in the mid 1950s, and forwarded to Miles’ arranger, Gil Evans.

From birth, Alan Lomax seems to have been a sickly kind of child. Yet someone blessed (and cursed) with unbelievable energy, of the sort more commonly found among 19th century Victorian polymaths. At one point, author John A Szwed notes Alan’s legacy when he died in 2002 : it comprised 5,000 hours of sound recordings; 400,000 feet of film; 2,450 videotapes; and a sizeable number of books, journal articles and databases. That’s not counting the innumerable letters and documents that added up to more than 120 linear feet of shelf space. And its also not counting the vast array of folklore projects, recording missions, and film and television proposals that Lomax kept on planning, writing out and promoting – and which, for wont of money or a lack of vision by his sponsors, never got made. The man’s mental and physical energy fairly leaps off the page. Read this book and you’ll never complain about your own crowded schedule and workaholic tendencies ever again.

And always it seems, there were the long list of female companions who came along with Lomax on his trips into the wild unknown – to Haiti in the 1940s , to rural Spain, Sicily and Ireland in the 1950s – and to help him set up the recording gear, and dance with the locals. They also helped Lomax with the basic task of approaching total strangers, and asking them to share their songs. Folklore and its analysis was a job to which Lomax brought a unique mixture of blazing energy and at times, stupefying pedantry. Easy to see why some in Ireland complained that he’d roared through the country like Attila the Hun, and ridden roughshod over the sensibilities of other folk music collectors. He got the job done, though.

Many of the lasting images I carried away from this book came from the early years with Alan’s father. John A. Lomax had been the trailblazer. He began doing folklore work well before Alan finally accepted that this was his own true vocation, too. It proved a very strange way of working out one’s paternal demons. Father and son were both intensely competitive individuals. They would drive the back roads of the South together in the 1930s – accosting people on the porches of general stores, visiting congregations in clapboard churches, and wooing suspicious prison superintendents into letting them set up their primitive recording gear in hellholes like Angola and Parchman Farm, to record convicts both individually, and in work gangs.

The entire time, the two men were jammed in their small car in the middle of nowhere arguing from their fiercely opposed political viewpoints about the social causes and wider meaning of the great music they were saving from extinction. John Lomax died in 1947. With the advent of McCarthyism and the communist witch hunts, Alan Lomax left America behind for a while. The FBI had repeatedly interviewed him and kept him under surveillance ( he consorted after all, with blacks and poor people) and the Bureau eventually amassed an 800 page file on him. For most of the 1950s, Lomax lived in London, and worked at the BBC.

Click to enlarge Baptist women, False Rivere, Lousiana, 1934 (Lomax Collection).

My own favourite story about the Lomaxes is not even mentioned in this book. But if you ever happen to listen to Blind Willie McTell’s 1940 Library of Congress session, there’s a point where you can hear John Lomax query McTell about the whereabouts of McTell’s former musical partner, the great gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson. He’s dead, McTell tells Lomax, citing a letter he’d received from Johnson’s former wife. In fact, this wasn’t true. Johnson died in utter poverty five years later, of malarial fever caught from sleeping under some wet newspapers amid the ruins of his burned out home in Beaumont, Texas.

Was McTell honestly mistaken – or lying? Think about it. Out of the blue on this very same day, he’d just been blessed with the patronage of these two weird white people who must have seemed like meal tickets sent from heaven. That is, until they’d started asking the whereabouts of an even greater blind musician. The temptation to put them off the trail would have been nigh on irresistible. One can only speculate about what might have been. If the Lomaxes had pressed on with their search for Johnson, they might have saved one of the greatest figures in American music from obscurity and a premature death – just as they’d discovered Leadbelly in prison in 1934, and helped him find an audience. So yes, we do have that crucial meeting in Atlanta to thank for McTell’s legacy – but the price may have been losing what could have been with Blind Willie Johnson.

Szwed has two other excellent musical biographies under his belt, on Sun Ra and Miles Davis. This book begins by tracing how the Lomax family got into folklore, and turned it into a profession. The early sections of the book contain useful background context on fore-runners like Cecil Sharp and Francis Child, whose book of collected ballads is another essential strand in the Appalachian folk tradition.

The crash of 1929, and the subsequent impact of the Depression on the academic career of John Lomax helped propel the family from a part-time interest in folklore into treating it as a full time activity. However, it was only with the advent of President Roosevelt’s New Deal that the work began to get anything like adequate backing. (As an aside, those allegedly ‘make work’ government work schemes of the 1930s ended up leaving behind an immense legacy. Besides the Library of Congress recordings, the New Deal also funded the creation, care, and access to many of America’s national parks. Clearly, government –created work schemes do work )

Huddie and Martha Ledbetter, 1935.

The Lomaxes story is not without controversy. For decades, people have slammed Alan Lomax for making money out of folk lore. At the time of his death I got involved in an online fight with someone on the Counter Punch website who had used Alan’s death in 2002 to resurrect the old leftist canard about the alleged exploitation of Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) , which – in reality – was very much a two way affair, if it was exploitation at all. After he was paroled, Leadbelly did work as a driver on a few of the Lomax field trips, and did sing and play to illustrate some of their lectures, and later became the subject of a book written by John Lomax.

In return…as well as helping secure his release, the Lomaxes had Leadbelly live with them (not a picnic) and tirelessly promoted his career. Yes, they derived some benefits from their relationship with Leadbelly, and from a similar one with Jelly Roll Morton – but arguably, the artists benefitted just as much, or more. This book also deals fairly with the issue of the Lomaxes’ part copyright on “Goodnight Irene” – a song which had a long pedigree going back well before Leadbelly himself was born. In any case, Alan Lomax never made much money from his work. Any copyright money was plowed straight back into a further string of folklore projects. As Szwed points out, Alan’s income in 1981 – when he was still working insane hours on a myriad of projects – came to only $41,218, of which $36,088 came from the sale of stock left to him by his father. If this was exploitation, it never paid well, and things didn’t get any better :

When President Reagan awarded him the National Medal of the Arts on July 4, 1986. Alan was surely the financially poorest recipient of that honour ; his tax return for the previous year showed that his adjusted gross income was $11, 531.

Click to enlarge Fields Ward, Bog Trotters Band, Galax Virginia, 1937, (Lomax Collection).

For someone with an unjustified reputation as a purist snob, Alan Lomax was in fact, very positive about rock’n’roll. Szwed’s book lays to rest the folk legend that he – or Pete Seeger, or both – had angrily tried to cut the electricity cable during the famous set when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. He did however have a roll on the ground fight at Newport with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, after Grossman objected to the disdainful introduction Lomax had given to another one of Grossman’s clients, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. If you do get ahold of Szwed’s book – and I hope its clear that I’m strongly recommending that you do – read it in conjunction with what Dylan says about Lomax in his own Chronicles autobiography. It fills out the picture, somewhat. .

Ultimately, Alan Lomax was a highly strung, exuberant, at times annoying figure who changed the face of American popular music by being – nerds of the world, unite – a committed fan and advocate. Not only of folk music, but of the people who made it. Lomax’s contribution will endure in more ways than one. When NASA launched Voyager 1 and II in the 1970s, the spacecraft contained samples of music created by humans, for the edification of any intergalactic aliens who might come across them in future. Lomax himself ended up by choosing about half of the contents : which helps to explain why Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry sit there alongside Bach, Stravinsky, Beethoven and Bartok, plus folk music from Peru, the Solomon Islands, Japan, Mexico and Java. Long after life on earth has ceased to exist, these selections from Lomax’s jukebox will probably still be tootling their way through deep space, looking for an audience.

For all his infuriating qualities, he was – to the end – a fretful, self doubting individual. Like a good folklorist, Szwed conveys this aspect of the man by simply letting him speak in this riveting excerpt from a private tirade – almost a Workaholic’s Manifesto – that Lomax once wrote down, to himself. Forgive me for the lengthy extract but to do it justice, I think it needs to be read in something close to full :

There was a cold frenzy in the way I worked. In the field, collecting, I was never satisfied with what I had found that day – no singer could ever make me feel that I had gone far enough. No schedule of driving and interviewing and recording, begun no matter how early and continued no matter how late, was enough to make me feel satisfied with the day’s work. In the office at the Library, the same thing was true. It seemed to me impossible to quit at the end of the day. When I did get home, I slunk home, with a mountain of worries and anxieties about things undone on my shoulders.

This cloud of anxiety hung so darkly over everything I did, that the work itself suffered. In the field, no matter how hard I tried, I could never keep a systematic notebook. In the office I could never seem to get around to cataloguing or classifying the songs. So behind me year by year, there accumulated an ever-growing black mountain of unfinished and unorganised work…so when, at CBS they called me a folklore expert, and even today when here at Decca they refer to me as the foremost authority on American folksongs, I get an inward feeling of nausea, due to guilt, and what else?

What were my own purposes in living this way? What were my reasons for immersing myself deeper and deeper in this quagmire of folklore? I know objectively that it is a world of beauty and wonder and that within it lie truths and beauties and discoveries about the soul of man that will help this world and [make] the life of man upon it be a greener and less sorrowful thing. And yet, unless I meet folk-lore in terms of a living voice – on a record or in person – something which I can control – I really have no interest in it. I think about only how to use it to my own advantage, or to the advantage of my friends…

What are my own purposes, then? What do I like? What do I think about? What do I want? Why am I here? What path shall my feet follow? All the paths that have opened up before me so far have been the paths of other people – my father, Dr Spivacke, Charley Seeger…Its not that I don’t know where I stand in my own field of folklore. I stand very much alone, very much in my own place making my own direction, carving a new direction for others to follow. But I am too uncertain of myself to feel strong in this. My convictions are strong – they are an earnest of my years of study in college, my firm political emotions, and the confidence that comes from months and months of actual collecting in the field. I know the kind of intellectual, moral and emotional structure that can be made out of folklore. It is a lack of personal conviction that is my problem.”

The personal and artistic contradictions that explain such spasms of self-doubt were genuine, and rooted not only in his paternal rivalry, but in the nature of his work. Szwed is right when he concludes that Lomax’s influence can still be seen in the distortions of the funhouse mirror of American culture, where a hard-fought idea can be perverted through the countervailing forces of social and technological interests, and the discourses of fashion. Pandora.com for instance, is one reasonably close approximation of Lomax’s vision of a Global Jukebox that could codify and disseminate folk music of all traditions, worldwide. Even as I was writing this review, I came across this link that suggests that – on what would have been Alan Lomax’s 97th birthday – the Global Jukebox may, at last, be finally becoming a reality.

“The Man Who Recorded The World – A Biography of Alan Lomax” is written by John Szwed, and published by Arrow Books, 2011

ENDS

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