INVESTIGATE
NEW ZEALAND’S BEST NEWS MAGAZINE
GODLESS, FLAGLESS, HOMELESS
THREE ‘KEY’ ISSUES FOR NEW ZEALAND
GHOSTS OF ANZAC
CENTURY OLD WAR DIARY FROM KIWI HERO
ENGLAND’S LAST GASP
ARE BRITAIN’S DEFENCE FORCES ON THEIR LAST LEGS?
June/July 2015, $8.60
MARK STEYN AMY BROOKE & MORE
Contents June/July 2015
16
LIGHTNING YEARS
Godless, flagless, homeless. Look at what’s happened to New Zealand in the past 16 years. IAN WISHART revisits some of the issues Investigate has covered since February 2000.
20 ETERNAL IMPOTENCE
20
Are Britain’s armed forces going over a cliff? HAL COLEBATCH argues in the affirmative
26 BLACK OR WHITE?
Freddie Gray's death adds to the US police shooting toll
26
IN HERS
GHOSTS OF ANZAC
A 100 year old war diary from a decorated Kiwi hero sheds new light on the Battle of the Somme. DOREEN LANGSFORD previews the book release
Contents
40
06 Editor
34 36
Speaks for itself, really
08 Communiques Your say
10 Steynpost Mark Steyn
14 Right & Wrong David Garrett
34 Gadgets & Mall The latest toys
42 Science
Woolly mammoth sheds light on extinctions
36 Invest
44 Bookcase
38 Tech
46 Movies
40 Online
48 Consider This
Financial health Apple MacBook Better behaviour online
Winter reads Bravetown, The D Train Amy Brooke
46
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5
EDITORIAL
By Ian Wishart
The famous final scene
W
elcome to the last issue of the print edition of Investigate magazine. It’s been a wild ride. Heidi and I began this magazine in 1999, with the first issue in February 2000. Back in those days it cost $6.95 a copy. Today our former rivals are charging up to $11 a copy for their magazines. We held ours to $8.60 – a rise of only $1.65 in sixteen years. Now that’s delivering value to readers! When we were discussing the options for the print edition, we tossed up increasing the cover price, but in the modern market where people are more content to browse the web, we’d need to have priced Investigate at $15.90 a copy, and we thought that just wasn’t fair to our readers. In its heyday, Investigate sold 13,500 copies a month, compared to Metro’s 20,000. As the internet increasingly came online, and social media dominated people’s spare time, fewer people
have been consuming print magazines to read. Metro’s average net paid sales, for example, have dropped to 8,278 copies as of the start of this year. As magazine sales started to slide for many publishers, supermarkets and retail outlets cut back on both the range of magazines they sold, and the amount of space to display them. If you’ve been having trouble in recent years trying to find Investigate or other magazines in the shops, that’s the reason. In contrast to our print edition, our web traffic is significant – around two million pageviews a month from New Zealand and around the world. It is not that people are no longer interested in content, it is just that their methods of consuming that content have changed. Then you can throw into the mix advertising support. Over the years Investigate has enjoyed the support of some core clients – Thai Air, Danske Mobler, Epson, Pharma Health, Bvlgari in recent times, while in the early days you could add Nissan, Olympus and Minolta to name
It is not that people are no longer interested in content, it is just that their methods of consuming that content have changed 6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM June/July 2015
a few. But since the GFC advertising in print media has been harder to obtain. Budgets were cut back, and/or redirected to online media. We tried to halt that process with a radical redesign of Investigate into the HIS/HERS format in 2011 – a change that naturally delighted some readers and annoyed others, but the overall trend in magazine publishing could not be diverted so easily. Existing print subscribers will get access to our full digital archives of around 100 issues since 2005. Over the next few months we will be continuing to add content right back to our very first issue. Those of you who are not subscribers but who want to be alerted to new stories can “like” the Investigate Magazine page on Facebook, or follow us @ investigatemag on Twitter, or click on the “Follow Us” tab on our website, www. investigatemagazine.co.nz to be added to our news alerts. For those who’ve been with us since day one, our sincere appreciation that you’ve been part of the Investigate family for so long. For those who joined along the way, thanks for seeing the light and sharing the journey. As American rock icon Bob Seger sang it, “take it calmly and serene, it’s the famous final scene”.
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COMMUNIQUES
Your say – From The Archives
I think that it just shows that no matter how many good people there are in the world, you only need a few people to ruin things for everybody else. This applies with most things that we do. Why? Shelley Grierson, Year 10 student, Massey High
Volume 11, Issue 150, ISSN 1175-1290 [Print] Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart NZ EDITION Advertising Josephine Martin 09 373-3676 sales@investigatemagazine.com Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Heidi Wishart Design & Layout Bozidar Jokanovic Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Fax: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 SUBSCRIPTIONS Online: www.investigatemagazine.com By Phone: Australia 1-800 123 983 NZ 09 373 3676 By Post: To the PO Box NZ Edition: $85 AU Edition: A$96 Email: editorial@investigatemagazine.com, ian@investigatemagazine.com, australia@investigatemagazine.com, sales@investigatemagazine.com, helpdesk@investigatemagazine.tv All content in this magazine is copyright, and may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions of advertisers or contributors are not necessarily those of the magazine, and no liability is accepted. We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax. Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd
COVER: NEWSCOM/MAXPPP
MARCH 2000 What a breath of fresh air! After years of superficial journalism, Ian Wishart has produced real news with his breakthrough magazine Investigate which sold out the first copies. Investigative journalism is a rare commodity today. Crimes emanating from the corporate office are significantly greater than crimes in streets. The effects are more widespread and devastating, both to the environment and people. Robert Anderson, member of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Genetics
MARCH 2000 I missed your first issue, which sold out. I am particularly interested in “Constitutional Detonation”. I have been following the events in Australia for the last three years or so. Australia is in a real mess but the politicians want to go on ignoring it. Greg Bourne, New South Wales
NOVEMBER 2001 I often stop and think about all the things that are happening in the world today, and can’t help but feel useless. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two months since the terrorist attack on the United States – sometimes it feels like a year ago, other times it feels like only yesterday.
8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM June/July 2015
NOVEMBER 2001 A sigh of relief and a big ‘thanks’ to Chris Carter for his ‘a message to sickly, cringing liberals’ column. Exactly! The liberal ‘rightness’ has hoodwinked the perceptions of the bloke in the street. The word ‘evil’ has become unpalatable and not used in our society. This severe omission pervades our entire community and we find day to day madnesses like letting some evil raving nutter back onto our streets because some namby-pamby bunch of liberals reckon that the fact that said madman murdered half a village was not his fault but his sad bad childhood. Oh please! Evil is evil is evil. All these psychobabble excuses have placed the world in a very dangerous position. When Helen Clark said a few months ago something inane about no potential threat in this neck of the woods, therefore New Zealand only needs some fishing quota surveillance planes and boats or some similar rot, some of us wondered if she had heard of Indonesia. Glenda Ross, via email
June/July 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 9
STEYNPOST
By Mark Steyn
The war on extremism
E
ven the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on “countering violent extremism” is a bit of
a joke. Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit’s bumper sticker: “Religions Don’t Kill People. People Killed People.” It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I’m thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It’s in Abu Dhabi. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana’a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given
the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism. Marie Harf, meanwhile, assures CNN that her argument is “too nuanced” for you rubes to appreciate, with its exciting plans for community-college retraining programs in al-Baghdadi and midnight basketball in Raqaa. Sure, they don’t have enough basketballs, so they have to use severed heads. But c’mon, it’s a start... If you want the difference between the worldview that sets up an International Center for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Extremism and the real world distilled to a single Tweet, consider this contribution from senior pajama boy at Vox.com, Max Fisher: People who think Christian sectarian militias are the solution to Iraq’s
If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west – with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM June/July 2015
problems could stand to read a history of the Lebanese civil war. Richard Fernandez does a pretty good job analyzing the particular defects of this comparison, but give Mr Fisher credit: when it comes to preening, condescending analogy-deployment, at least, unlike the President, he’s come up with one that’s within living memory. Rather than the substance of his “argument”, it’s the near perfect metaphorical selfie-stick of preening attitudinal pose I find most interesting. As it happens, being an old-school imperialist, I read a lot of history. No doubt I “could stand to read” more, as Fisher advises. Before the civil war, Beirut was known as “the Paris of the east”. Then things got worse. As worse and worser as they got, however, it was not in-your-face genocidal, with regular global broadcasts of mass beheadings and live immolations. In that sense, the salient difference between Lebanon then and ISIS now is the mainstreaming of depravity. Which is why the analogies don’t apply. We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy. A lot of things have gotten worse. If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west – with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life. In such a world, we could all “stand to read” a little more history. But in Nigeria, when you’re in the middle of history class, Boko Haram kick the door down, seize you and your fellow schoolgirls and sell you into sex slavery.
A headless statue of Christian missionary St. Patrick stands outside a church in Baza, northeastern Nigeria, after the Boko Haram militant Islamic group's assault. /KYODO
Boko Haram “could stand to read” a little history, but their very name comes from a corruption of the word “book” – as in “books are forbidden”, reading is forbidden, learning is forbidden, history is forbidden. Well, Nigeria... Wild and crazy country, right? Oh, I don’t know. A half-century ago, it lived under English Common Law, more or less. In 1960 Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, second Governor-General of an independent Nigeria, was the first Nigerian to be appointed to the Queen’s Privy Council. It wasn’t Surrey, but it wasn’t savagery. Like Lebanon, Nigeria got worse, and it’s getting worser. That’s true of a lot of places. In the Middle East, once functioning states – whether dictatorial or reasonably benign – are imploding. In Yemen, the US has just abandoned its third embassy in the region. According to the President of Tunisia, one third of the population of Libya has fled to Tunisia. That’s two million people. According
to the UN, just shy of four million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond. In Iraq, Christians and other minorities are forming militias because they don’t have anywhere to flee (Syria? Saudi Arabia?) and their menfolk are facing extermination and their women gang-rapes and slavery. These people “could stand to read” a little history, too. But they don’t have time to read history because they’re too busy living it: the disintegration of postWorld War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy. These are Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, citizens of some of the most unlovely polities of the planet. But they had lives – homes, possessions, cars, children in schools, favorite restaurants... Twelve years ago,
I drove through al-Baghdadi, now seized by the Islamic State and where 45 people were apparently burned alive by ISIS the other day. It was a dump but it had streets and stores. I bought some warm, sugary soda from the local market and had a reasonably pleasant social interaction, and then motored on down the Euphrates. When you’re living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit. One of the things I appreciate about, say, Mittel Europeans of a certain age is that, when you meet them in their grand Paris apartments or rambling house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, somewhere deep inside is the memory of the 3am knock on the door or a little boy crouched under the eaves in the attic. A couple of years back, at a very agreeable cocktail party, I found myself talking to a Hungarian Jew about the last days of the war in Budapest. The jig was up but the German puppet regime had figured they might as well kill as many Jews as they could. No time for
June/July 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 11
niceties any more – for trains and camps and paperwork. There was a shortage of ammunition, so they tied the Jews together in a line, dragged them out into the Danube, and then shot the ones at each end. Everyone in between drowned. Aware of what was happening, a family took in my friend and hid him. He now enjoys a prosperous and comfortable life in the United States, but in his core, deep down within, he remembers his teenage self living day to day and never knowing whether the next morning would be his turn to be roped out in the river. Much of the world thinks it’s beyond all that stuff. Ukraine has a border with the European Union, and many of its citizens assumed that their future lay westward – eventual EU membership, and a Ukrainian flag at tedious Eurosummits listening to Brussels commissioners discoursing on beefed-up regulations on the curvature of cucumbers. Now in southern and eastern Ukraine a little short of a million people have fled. Like the Libyans and Syrians, they have reached that moment when you leave behind everything in your life except what’s necessary for the journey and a couple of treasured photographs. Why should that stop at the EU border? Laura Rosen Cohen is forceful and impassioned about those Europeans who object to Netanyahu’s call for Continental Jews to leave for Israel. In the most basic sense, she is right: Jews have no future in Europe – because the actions necessary to restore normality to Jewish community life on the Continent will never be taken by its ruling elites. But incremental evil is not as instantly clarifying as ISIS riding into Benghazi and running their black flag up the pole outside City Hall.
Jews cannot safely ride the Paris metro with identifying marks of their faith, or walk the streets of Amsterdam, or send their children to school in Toulouse, or attend a bat mitzvah in Copenhagen. As much as those Nigerians and Libyans and Yemenis and Ukrainians, Europe’s Jews are living history rather than reading it. They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe – and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists. Sure, it’d be nice to read a book – maybe Obama could recommend one on the Crusades. But you’ve got to be careful: in France, in 2015, you can be beaten up for being seen with the wrong kind of book on public transportation. As Max Fisher says, we could all stand to read a little history, and the Jewish Museum in Brussels has a pretty good bookstore, but, if you swing by, try not to pick one of the days when they’re shooting visitors. This is Europe now, 2015. What will 2016 bring, and 2020, 2025? And yet France or Denmark is all you’ve ever known; you own a house, you’ve got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts... How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent’s most integrated Jews – in Germany – faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it’ll all blow over. Or maybe it won’t, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you’ll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won’t be able to get out at all – like the Yazidi or those Copts. If you’re living history as opposed to
Jews have no future in Europe – because the actions necessary to restore normality to Jewish community life on the Continent will never be taken by its ruling elites
reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make – in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana’a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris... In my book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available for the Boko Haram warlord in your family), I write: For all the economic growth since World War Two, much of the world had gone backwards – almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What’s to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: The new Jew-hating Sweden… The French banlieues where the state’s writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year old daughter’s heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran… We could all stand to read some history. Alas... Reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment. History is written by the victors, and from West Africa to the Hindu Kush the victors are illiterate. And in the halls of power the “leader of the free world” gives exclusive interviews to favored nuancy boys in which they can backslap each other about the sophisticated rationale behind their inertia. Boko Haram hate books, so it probably wouldn’t help to carpet-bomb them with the latest Fareed Zakaria opus. The Islamic State is destroying musical instruments, so parachuting in James Taylor is unlikely to work – because, although his cheery rendition of “You’ve Got A Friend” can light up a room, in Ramadi the room would light up him. So the global hyperpower has been reduced to convening a symposium on whether they need to open up more communitycollege scholarships at the new Center for Outstanding Achievement in Analogies of Extremism. © 2014 Mark Steyn
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Available at Whitcoulls, The Warehouse, Paper Plus, Take Note and all good bookstores, or online at
www.ianwishart.com June/July 2015 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 13
RIGHT & WRONG
By David Garrett
Secret plea bargaining a reality in NZ
F
or a long time, elements of the American justice system have slowly been creeping into ours. While lawyers here do not – yet – stroll around the courtroom while questioning witnesses, other much more significant changes have occurred behind the scenes – the worst of which is, in my view, an unacknowledged system of plea bargaining. We have all see the American TV shows. In part one, the villain is banged to rights, and the prosecutors are confident of getting conviction for “murder one”. In the second part, the case somehow becomes much less certain, and tense meetings ensue between the prosecutor and the defence attorneys. After a bit of to and fro-ing, a deal is done whereby the defendant pleads guilty to some strange lesser charge unknown to our legal system, and everyone is happy. Or if not happy, at least grimly satisfied. Many people are blissfully unaware that a similar system has been operating for here for at least twenty years. Although the official line is that “plea bargaining” doesn’t exist in New Zealand it does, and here is how it works. A couple of thugs hire a taxi with the intention of – at the very least – robbing him. They have the driver take them to a secluded spot and threaten him with a hammer. They demand his money, but he is reluctant to give up the proceeds of his night’s work. One of the robbers starts screaming “I’m gonna f…ing kill you”, and starts hitting the driver with the hammer. The driver is severely bashed and left for dead. The
thugs flee into the night with his money. The driver fortunately survives but is permanently disabled. His assailants are quickly apprehended, with enough physical evidence – including bloodstained money in the victim’s wallet – to put them at the scene. One eventually starts talking to the police, and blames the other for instigating the attack; the other in turn blames his co-offender, and says there was never intended to be violence, just threats. Meanwhile the victim remains in a coma. Thirty years ago the assailants would have been charged with attempted murder, together with, in the alternative, wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, or wounding with intent to injure, both charges carrying significant terms of imprisonment. The case would come to trial, and the facts presented to the jury. The prosecutor would highlight the threats to kill, the severity of the injury, and the
14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM June/July 2015
taxi driver’s bleak future. The defence would argue that there was only ever an intent to rob, and never an intent to kill. The thugs’ lawyers would point to the quick arrests as evidence of no coherent plan. Each thug would blame the other. The jury would then be instructed by the Judge on the essential elements of each charge, and the law relating to parties, under which a person does not have to actually inflict the physical damage to be guilty of the charge arising from it. A co-offender is just as guilty if he knew what was intended, and took part in the villainy anyway. A jury would then decide whether the thugs intended to kill the taxi driver, or only to rob him, and the violence which ensued arose in the heat of the moment. While they intended to seriously harm him, they did not intend to kill. Now things are very different. For some reason, charges in the alternative
In my view, the best option is a return to the old system of laying charges in the alternative, and letting the jury decide what happened, and whether the facts justify the more or less serious charge
fell out of fashion over twenty years ago. In a fact scenario such as the above, the Police would now probably lay a charge of attempted murder at the outset, and then effectively wait for the inevitable approaches by lawyers for the two defendants, each of whom would point to potential difficulties in obtaining a conviction for attempted murder. Both would make pious noises about sparing the victim the ordeal of giving evidence – presuming he had emerged from his coma – and the advantages to society of saving the costs of a trial. The outcome would probably be that the attempted murder charge was dropped, and instead one of the lesser charges – wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm perhaps, a “strike” offence – would be laid instead. Given a weak prosecutor and/or an assertive lawyer, the charge might be downgraded still further to a non-strike violent offence. The defendants would then plead guilty, and “justice” would be served. What is wrong with the above scenario? In my view, a great deal. Firstly, the victim’s views are of no relevance to the macabre Dutch Auctions which occur daily between prosecutor and defence lawyers. While his or his family’s views might be taken into account, more often than not the first time the victim or his family finds out about the deal is in Court, when one charge is withdrawn and another laid in its place. Secondly, the system we now have is the opposite of transparent – officially it’s not happening at all, and all the negotiations occur in closed offices. The Judge himself does not get to hear about the deal until it has been done – and if he doesn’t like it, there is very little he can do about it. This is the very opposite of the open justice which our system supposedly provides. What should happen? In my view, the best option is a return to the old system of laying charges in the alternative, and letting the jury decide what happened, and whether the facts justify the more or less serious charge. Over the past 50 years or so, juries have been treated with less and less importance. In the days of capital punishment, we trusted “12 good men and true” with deciding not only whether an accused was guilty, but whether or not a man should be hanged, since death
was the mandatory sentence for murder. Now it seems, we can’t trust our fellows to work out whether some unpleasant thugs intended to kill a poor victim or only to maim him. If we must have the system of bargaining over charges which has developed, at the very least the victim should be a part of it, perhaps to the point of having the right to veto the laying of a lesser charge in substitution for a more serious one . The informal clandestine plea bargaining system we have now must be made transparent, with it being openly acknowledged that a deal has been done between prosecution and defence
regarding the charge. Ideally, a Judge should have the ultimate power to decide what charge(s) a defendant faces. Judges should not be forced to preside over cases in which they believe a defendant has been “undercharged”, and where in his or her view, the facts justify potentially much more serious results for the defendant. The Judge after all is supposed to do justice to the man grievously injured, not rubber stamp a deal done to save taxpayers’ money – and the lawyers some effort. References: 1. These are the facts of a real case which occurred in New Plymouth in the mid 1990’s.
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