Investigate HIS, Oct-Nov 2012

INVESTIGATE

WATER RIGHTS How the Treaty has been reinvented

NEW ZEALAND’S BEST NEWS MAGAZINE

Gay Marriage

Exploding the myths

Dawkins Vs Design

Malcolm Ford challenges Richard Dawkins

In Harm’s Way The NZ defence dilemma

Obama’s Agenda Will a second term unleash the real Obama?

Oct/Nov 2012, $8.60

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features

contents

Oct/Nov 2012

12

TRICKY TREATY

As the water rights debate begins to boil, academic DR JOHN ROBINSON’s new book reveals how facts have been thrown out the window in pursuit of power

22

OBAMA NATION

Does the US president have a hidden agenda for his second term? IAN WISHART backgrounds a new documentary suggesting just that

24

DAWKINS VS DESIGN An essay on the theories of Richard Dawkins, by MALCOLM FORD

HERS

GAY MARRIAGE

What are the real implications? Will it affect you? IAN WISHART explodes the myths surrounding the same sex marriage debate

22

departments

contents

OPINION EDITOR

4

COMMUNIQUES

6

EYES RIGHT

8

STEYNPOST

10

Speaks for itself, really Your say

Richard Prosser Mark Steyn

ACTION INVEST

Peter Hensley on money

30

SCIENCE

Sleep mysterious but necessary

38

MUSIC

No Doubt – ’Push & Shove’ their way back

40

MOVIES

Arbitrage & The Master both rated high

44

GADGETS

38

The latest toys The Mall

36

High tech & free speech E-book price fixing

32 33 34 36

MINDFUEL

32 44

BOOKCASE

42

CONSIDER THIS

46

THE QUESTION

48

Michael Morrissey’s winter picks Amy Brooke

Matt Flannagan

50%

Lower printing cost vs coLour Laser*

65773

Editor

Let the public decide Helen Clark’s Labour Government of last decade is the gift that keeps on giving.

She may have been gone four years now, but the legacy of a party cobbled together with social engineering agendas means New Zealanders are once again debating issues we thought were done and dusted.

Back in the mid 1980s with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, we were promised by the promoters back then that all people were after was the right to be a couple in public without fear of arrest. Nothing more.

Then , in the mid 2000s, we were told it was simply about legalising partnerships formally so that gay couples could enjoy the same legal protections in relationships as heterosexual couples. Nothing more, they assured.

Cut forward to 2012, and it is now “gay marriage”.

To achieve this goal, Labour MP Louisa Wall’s private member’s bill requires New Zealand politicians – a motley crew at the best of times – to legally redefine marriage in a way that overturns eight thousand years of history.

Leave aside whether you personally agree or disagree with same sex marriage for a moment, because what any one of us personally believes in is

irrelevant. What kind of hubris have we fallen into if a) we think that 121 MPs in a tiny little country at the bottom of the world can redefine a concept that predates the existence of nation states?, and b) that politicians should be allowed to do so instead of putting the matter to a public referendum?

There is a huge danger in allowing the world to be governed according to ‘fads’.

One of those dangers is particularly great in New Zealand because we have an unwritten constitution. This constitution works on the basis of precedent, which means if politicians get away with something it becomes precedent for the next time such a situation arises.

The same sex marriage issue is particularly important as a precedent setter, because it is hard to imagine an issue more suitable for decision by public referendum. It affects the lives of every single New Zealander and generations to come.

If parliament is allowed to get away with ruling on this issue via a conscience vote, you can kiss goodbye to ever having a binding public referendum on anything else in NZ. You might agree 100% with gay marriage

The same sex marriage issue is particularly important as a precedent setter, because it is hard to imagine an issue more suitable for decision by public referendum 4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

and be cheering from the sidelines when MPs pass it, but the next time a cause dear to your own heart comes up that you want to challenge, forget it, the precedent will have been locked in.

That’s the danger of being seduced by a bait and switch stunt.

The default position of the controlfreaks is that the public give MPs a mandate for three years, and if you don’t like it, vote them out. But a three year election cycle is too much of a blunt instrument. MPs know that the public don’t vote on single issues most of the time.

Using that logic, you could never have another referendum, and that’s the logic being offered by Labour MP Louisa Wall: trust MPs, they know best.

It should now be obvious that this magazine supports sending the same sex marriage issue to a public referendum. Anything else would be inappropriate and an insult to the democratic process.

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09 373-3676 sales@investigatemagazine.com Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, 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

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Name and address supplied, Afghanistan

BREAKING SILENCE

I have just read Breaking Silence, and just wanted to say thank you for making that possible.

I wish to write to Macsyna to pass on my thanks for her courage and to acknowledge her for her wisdom. I ask for your help, so that she receives my

6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

IAN WISHART BREAKING SILENCE

Volume 10, Issue 134, ISSN 1175-1290 [Print]

TIME TO SPEAK UP Good afternoon Ian, I have just finished reading your book The Great Divide and found it extremely fascinating for a number of reasons.

It has got my mind thinking of a thousand and one issues that face the country and I marvel at the fact that this has not been produced before in our short history.

As they say about many good books “Everyone should read this.”

However because of the fact that too many New Zealanders are apathetic and indifferent until too late on many issues, I do not believe this will occur. I believe that if this were to be made into a movie or primetime documentary it would have a larger national interest.

I am an ex-serviceman who loyally served my country for just short of 27 years and you will not find a more proud Kiwi anywhere than myself. I think it behoves all Kiwis to take your lead and challenge where we are going as a country and to get it sorted much better than it is currently functioning.

I have travelled extensively as I dare say you have and it is without a shadow of a doubt we live in one of the best places in the world. I have been in this country now for over eight years and have been able to view the world in all its glory, so to say, and have taken a real interest in the Geopolitical issues that face us globally. New Zealanders are incredible gifted and spoilt to have what they have in God’s Own and I hope your book inspires more to speak up and have their say to make it a better place and look after their own.

HATM

Publishing

BREAKING

SILENCE THE KAHUI CASE

MACSYNA KING AND THE REA L STORY OF THE MUR DER OF HER TWI NS

IAN WISHART #1 bestselling author

communication and am happy for it to go past you if you are able to pass it on.

What a story.

I am humbled that she rises above her pain, to share her journey, with whomever is ready to take the learning.

Don Macdonald, via email

Poetry The Christmas Donkey The night was dark and quiet, the wind stirred soft and low when Mary rode the donkey’s back long, long ago.

Joseph walked beside her, and he made Our Lady smile talking of Bethlehem’s beauty as they journeyed mile on mile.

The days were long, the nights so cold as on and on they walked, the donkey listening carefully as Mary and Joseph talked.

And as he grew to understand how precious was his load so he chose carefully where to step along the dusty road.

When at last the lamps shone out to light their little way the humble donkey’s heart was full and he began to pray: “Gentle Master, you chose me from camel, ox, and horse; far nobler beasts they seem to be but I have stayed the course.

I thank you for your faith and love.

You know how watchfully I trod.

I am so blessed that you trusted me... carrying the mother of our God.” Priscilla Dodwell.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 7

Richard Prosser

Liberty, Fraternity, Egality…etc Three times thus far, in the course of this, my first Parliamentary session, I have been given the option of casting a personal or “conscience” vote.

The first occasion was a matter of so little consequence that I confess I cannot recall the nature of its subject. The vote was called so close to the usual 10.00pm rising time of the House that many Parliamentarians mistook the division bells for the expected signal of close of play for the day, and the turnout was unusually low. Some will have been subject to subsequent castigation by their various Party Whips, though my own caucus do not number amongst them; that may be a subject for another day.

The other two have been of altogether greater import as far as ordinary citizens and their day-to-day lives are concerned.

The first of these was of course the vote on the First Reading of what has come to be known colloquially as the ‘Gay Marriage’ Bill. Regular readers and followers of politics in this country will know of course that Yours Truly was the first MP off the fence, declaring to an eagerly awaiting media that I would be voting against Louisa Wall’s Private Member’s Bill.

Subsequent discussions amongst our caucus determined that we would, as a body, be pressing for a referendum on the matter, and opposing the passage of any Bill which did not allow for this possibility.

The second was the vote on the first aspect of the Alcohol Reform Bill, that being the age at which citizens may purchase booze in this country, be that on licence or off.

We don’t have a drinking age as such, of course, but the legal age of purchase has come to fill that role in a de facto fashion.

Again, I voted conservatively, as did the entire New Zealand First caucus.

My vote was for 20/20, for both on- and off-licence purchases. We can argue the rights or wrongs of this or any other decision till the cows come home, but the bottom line is that this, the conscience vote, is the method by which such matters are decided in the New Zealand Parliament today.

Party Leaders and their Whips may not cajole Members, or dictate the nature of their respective votes in any

If You The People knew that the results of referenda would be binding on Government, I further believe that more such issues would become the subject of successful electoral petitions seeking plebiscites 8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

conscience matter; nor censure or penalise them on the basis of it afterwards. The Party Line does not hold sway in such determinations; rather, it is down to the individual conscience of each and every one of your 121 elected representatives to make the call to which their hearts and minds direct them.

This may be a grand thing, or indeed a terrible one. I ask the question, as have many others, that if a subject is so contentious, or so controversial or divisive, that the individual sentiments of Members of Parliament may be called upon to make determinations on it, rather than the policy platforms on which they and their respective Parties were elected, then surely the matter is better settled by a plebiscite of the entire nation, rather than by the temporal whims of a handful of fleeting politicians?

I happily admit to being a firm believer in the concept and practice of Direct Democracy. I believe in the use of referenda. I believe that You The People are more than capable of signalling your various desires and intentions to those of us who serve you in Wellington; that you are at least as blessed, and quite possibly more so, with the wit and intellect to determine the directions and outcomes that the nation should be following, than are many of the various Party hacks and acolytes who occupy the benches around me.

I trust The People to make the right

call, and I respect that call whatever it may be, even if I don’t necessarily personally agree with it. But my personal feelings are not what I’m in Wellington for. I’m there to represent You, the Voters. And I do think, based on what people have been telling me, that I made the right call on both counts, when the questions on gay marriage and the drinking age were asked. Certainly people both from within my own Party and without have thanked me for the stand I made on both subjects.

I base that stand on everything I have written and said these past ten years, the manifesto position of the Party on whose ticket I came to Parliament, and the views expressed to me in person, on the street, and in my mail and email from ordinary voters and citizens up and down the country.

But I am but one Member and one vote in the Parliament, and sometimes the most contentious of issues demand a greater level of investigation and input.

It concerns me deeply that the results of referenda, as they are currently practised in New Zealand, are not binding on the Government of the Day. To that end, I will shortly have a Private Member’s Bill in the ballot which will seek to redress this situation.

With the blessing of my Party, my Bill will seek to make the results of Citizens’ Initiated Referenda binding upon Government, plain and simple.

In line with party policy, it will include some provisions whereby a prescribed majority of Parliament will be able to overturn certain referendum results, but only if the decision of the plebiscite is below a certain threshold; and if it is above that threshold, the Parliament will not hold a power of veto.

Within that context, had the referendum on the anti-smacking Bill, for example, been held within the constraints of the BCIR Bill as I am proposing it, Parliament would not have had the option of disregarding the clearly indicated will and intention of the electorate as they did.

With regard to that particular issue, 83% of New Zealand voters expressed their clear opposition to the revocation of section 59 of the Crime Act, and yet all but eight of our 121 Parliamentarians voted in favour of the change.

Likewise, between 73% and 83%, depending on whose figures one chooses to believe, indicated that they wanted to retain the combat wing of the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

Under my Bill, in both circumstances, Parliament would not have retained the power of a veto against the clearly expressed wishes of the People.

Had the disbandment of the strike wing been the subject of a referendum, it is my belief that we would still have one. And if You The People knew that the results of referenda would be bind-

ing on Government, I further believe that more such issues would become the subject of successful electoral petitions seeking plebiscites.

This system works well in Switzerland, but not so well in California. As with all laws, it falls to individual legislatures to determine which particular laws and regulations work most effectively in their own jurisdictions, and to apply them as best suits their own individual circumstances. We may be best advised to look at the Swiss model rather than the Californian one, when it comes to designing and implementing a BCIR regime for New Zealand.

But the bottom line, as far as this writer – your favourite commentator, and now, also your representative – is concerned, is this; You The People hold the moral right to make the final determinations where matters of constitution and democracy are concerned.

That is why I support my Party’s policy position on binding referenda, and that is why I am putting my Bill into the ballot. It is you who need to be making these decisions, and it is you who I serve.

Let’s hope it gets drawn, let’s hope it gets support, and let’s hope it is the beginning of a brave and bold new era of New Zealand politics. You are, after all, worth it.

Richard Prosser

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 9

Mark Steyn

An act of war, not a movie protest So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets.

Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand that this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged Midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are

broken...” Yeah, it’s totally obvious And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going to say, and it takes a few moment but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The

The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

Pimp With A Limp.” In the real State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible – that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to

A burnt building is seen at the United States consulate, one day after armed men stormed the compound and killed the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi, Libya on September 12, 2012. UPI/Tariq AL-hun

overrun as the Belgian Consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen, asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments.

In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been

moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’ body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it.

The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’ body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cellphones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the deadeyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cellphone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’ body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

In a rare appearance on a nonshowbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice-president staggers around, pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating. ©Mark Steyn 2012

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 11

REINVENTING

THE TREATY How history gets changed at the stroke of a pen

A new book argues New Zealand’s history is being hidden from the public in a naked grab for power and money using new interpretations of the Treaty. In this extract from When Two Cultures Meet, DR JOHN ROBINSON outlines just some of his findings

T

he ‘revisionist’ history that has come to dominate amounts to a considerable rewriting of the story, moving away from and altering previous accounts.

“The changes in historical understanding that now characterise revisionist history are actually quite recent (post-1970s), and amount to a revolution in historical interpretation.”1 I have addressed some aspects of the process involving the Waitangi Tribunal, based on my own experiences.2 Others have voiced criticism, and in this chapter they add their voices to mine – and for that reason much of

the commentary is with direct quotes.

A major figure in that questioning is historian Bill Oliver.

Oliver “challenged the Tribunal with writing ‘counterfactual’ history …[with] an elusive way of writing and using history … [which is then] a type of history created in an atmosphere … clouded with retrospective recrimination.”3 Oliver reserved particular criticism for the Tribunal’s use and misuse of historical method, and pointed to the serious consequences. “… the Tribunal has, along with the law courts, become an important ‘voice’ of the Treaty in recent years, reinterpreting the Treaty and Treaty

12 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

principles in the light of present concerns.”4 The process by which history is rewritten has been labelled ‘presentism’

by Oliver. “… the reports exemplify an instrumental but – because never explicitly avowed – elusive way of writing and using history [with] a historical mentality less concerned to recapture past reality than to embody present aspiration. [Thus there is] an instrumental presentism which is remarkably evidence-free … shaped by a current political agenda …”5 In that way the Tribunal has generated “a ‘counterfactual’ history of policies and institutions” and the

construction of a “retrospective utopia” based on “a Maori view of history”.

This is counterfeit history, a fake, as “The adversary courtroom leads parties to seek and interpret the past to support or deny present claims, not to find what really happened in all its complexity.”6 Major events have been swept under the carpet in this ‘retrospective utopia’, including the killing of the intertribal wars. With inter-group warring, there was “virtual extinction in the 1840s. … A detached modern historiography lists battles, but makes the musket wars events without real effect. Yet the wars were a modern catastrophe for Maori, not a traditional one.”7

The Maori response was to change their way of life.

“In the 1830s northern Maori sought meaning in their post-contact experience through understanding how the foreigners ordered their world. This was a period of rational and intellectual response to European culture in which Christian teaching became a political primer for change.”

The transition required an end to tino rangatiratanga, “the paramount

authority of the chief over his autonomous community” for there was no longer an ‘autonomous community’.8 This is what actually happened, and the recent recreation of the past is deceptive.

Former Cabinet Minister Michael Bassett, who spent ten years (19942004) as a tribunal member of the Waitangi Tribunal, has provided a useful summary of the evolution of the Treaty industry, describing how it spun out of control, becoming dominated by claims and legal dispute.

“By the early 1990s the Waitangi Tribunal employed many people, and its appointed members gradually became advocates for Maori rather than inde-

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 13

pendent assessors on the claims put before them.

Money was given to Maori claimants to mount their cases. It came either from the Crown Forest Rental Trust (CFRT) or from Legal Aid funded by the taxpayer. Lawyers started helping themselves to the cash. By the time I joined the Tribunal in 1994 hearings were awash with lawyers, most on Legal Aid, with the claims before us being funded by the CFRT or the Tribunal’s taxpayer funded resources. Virtually none of the costly process was paid for upfront by the claimants. They therefore had no incentive to be careful with taxpayers’ money, or even with the Maori money that many were eventually to receive from the CFRT. Rorting the Tribunal process has become the name of the game. A whole industry numbering somewhere around 1,000 people gathered around new grievances that keep being dreamt up.”9 The conclusion is obvious.

“It would have made better sense to examine welfare and the huge damage it has done to Maori society. The Waitangi Tribunal should be scaled down.

The industry is of no use to 99% of the people it’s meant to serve.”

Bassett’s former colleague in Cabinet, Geoffrey Palmer, has also voiced concerns; he considers that “some of the scholarship surrounding [the Treaty] is highly suspect, fuelled as it is by political motivation rather than detached analysis”.10 Fellow MP Peter Tapsell warned that “we must not become emotional cripples over grievances” and “used the term ‘hui hoppers’ who were making a practice of attending hui after hui, stirring up trouble.” Bassett noted that, while the bill referred to ‘the

principles of the Treaty’, the definition of what this meant was not put into legislation.11 “Our omission was a gift to the legal profession, which developed some fanciful versions of what was meant by the Treaty of Waitangi …”

The National Government in turn abrogated their responsibility and handed over the law to the legal profession, as explained by Doug Graham, Minister in Charge of Treaty Negotiations, 1991-99.

“In the 1970s and thereafter, Parliament included a reference to the Treaty or the ‘principles of the Treaty’ in various statutes. This was no accident or inadvertence on the part of Parliament.

It had decided to leave the interpretation of the principles to the courts quite deliberately.”12

S

uch a lazy and shoddy approach to major legislation is inexcusable. The Tribunal and the industry it has spawned is not only useless, it is positively harmful. New Zealand history has become a tool of the law, with its very different approach and standards.

“The tension between legal and historical approaches to the past are reflected in the rudimentary principles of each discipline. Lawyers, as the practitioners of the law, are professional advocates who have a duty to argue the strengths of any case. They are expected to act in the best interests of their clients. … In highly adversarial contexts such as the Treaty claims process, this will involve a rigorous guarding against disclosure of information to third parties or respondent, and unwillingness to cooperate with other applicant groups … Historians

… reach their conclusions by a very different process from that employed by members of the legal profession …

They see the patterns and then locate the essential principles and the developing social norms.”13 A lawyer is guided by a duty to the client, a one-sided motivation. A historian must seek the truth, seeing all aspects of an issue. The application of a legal approach, with its inbuilt bias, results in a picture of history as racial conflict, with Maori the victim and British the wrongdoer.

It is highly simplified and false.

“Maori subjects, according to the Tribunal, were ‘active victims’ i.e. while they exerted agency through struggle and resistance, in the end this struggle was defeated by the imposition of a new colonial order.”14 This is a religion where one is either a true believer or an outcast from the debate, where the concept of a bicultural society – of two different races – is used both to separate Maori from other New Zealanders, and to disassociate disbelievers from the historical debate. The conclusion is determined in advance, and any deviance is rejected. “… biculturalists embraced an overtly ideological and largely exclusionary definition [of a pakeha identity]. This sharply delineated those who sought to atone for the colonial past to promote the unique cultural identity of Maori, from those who chose to reject such tenets.”15 There is considerable danger in all this. The rewriting of the accepted historical account provides a means of control by a powerful elite.

“The control of historical interpretation by emergent and ruling elites is a common policy strategy used to secure

A lawyer is guided by a duty to the client, a onesided motivation. A historian must seek the truth, seeing all aspects of an issue. The application of a legal approach, with its inbuilt bias, results in a picture of history as racial conflict, with Maori the victim and British the wrongdoer 14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

the ideological dominance required to maintain political power and privileged access to economic resources.”16 The revisionist history, the ‘presentism’ demanded within a distorted and controlled environment, and the influence of the Treaty industry are all leading down a very dangerous path.

The few outspoken critics in a sea of conformity must be heeded.

The new apartheid society

The new picture is of a divided people – not the one people of the Treaty but two separate peoples in a vague, undefined partnership. That racial division suits powerful interests who profit from it, and efforts continue to expand the special privileges of elite Maori and to set that race division in concrete.

This move, which has been made possible by the rewriting of history, is led by two political elites. The parliamentary leadership of the National Party, under former currency trader John Key, is ruling contrary to their policy and against the interest of most New Zealanders who voted them into office.

They act in the interests of the few who hold most of the wealth and power.

Their hold on power is strengthened by the support of the race-based Maori Party. Here too, the leadership is willing to gain position by joining with a government that is introducing legislation damaging to struggling Maori. The actions required to buy that support serve the tribal elite, and build a Maori capitalism that joins, and is supportive of, the rule of money. This ‘neotribal capitalism’ asks struggling Maori to protest and to fight for Treaty settlements to a select few rather than the unified action that will improve the conditions of all.

“In the absence of a recognised antagonism between the worker’s interests and the interests of capital accumulation, and its replacement by a false identification of common interests based upon ethnicity, the worker is trapped in a position of powerlessness. …Class consciousness and the resultant class identification are replaced by an ethnic identification with the very group that controls the worker’s conditions of existence.”17

Maori are required to set aside class differences and support their tribal chiefs, returning to the cultural pattern that was overthrown when the Treaty of Waitangi brought equality. They are separated from their fellow workers.

“The creation of a tribal mode of regulation removes the regulation of the worker-in-community from the democratic state to depoliticised locations within the tribe. Not only do the fundamentally different and antagonistic interests of labour and capital go unrecognised, but the site for that recognition, in parliament and in government institutions that regulate capital-labour relations, is abandoned.

There is no longer a place for unified labour, with a legitimated power base in the state, to challenge capital.”18 There are many examples of modern Maori leaders, the tribal elite, using Treaty settlement moneys to play at capitalism, joining the employer class and organising to maximise profit and not to benefit the community. One such is the sale of fishing quotas by Ngai Tahu to foreign vessels, in poor condition and manned by underpaid foreign crews, rather than to wellpaid New Zealanders in good ships – which would profit the ordinary members of the tribe. Much money has been lost by gambling on illchosen investments that have no relationship to tribal needs.

As one example, in 2012 a Taranaki iwi, Ngati Tama, lost almost $20 million, wiping out the total value of its $14.5 million 2003 Treaty of Waitangi settlement.19 The reinvention of a long-gone tribal rule by a clan of chiefs has taken attention away from the considerable widening of class differences. That support for ‘neotribal capitalism’ asks today’s Maori to focus on ethnicity and to ignore the reality of class. The impression that Maori are underprivileged by race rather than by the social experiences of class has been buttressed by the misuse and misunderstanding of mathematical techniques by a number of analysts – sociologists and economists.

A model, a procedure involving complex computer calculations, has been applied, despite being inappropriate.

While some of the ethnic difference is

then ‘accounted for’ as dependent on a number of social experiences (typical of class), the model fit is incomplete and a large amount is left over. This residue has been called ‘Maoriness’ and is considered as showing that Maori negative experiences are due to their ethnicity rather than to all other social conditions. This suggests institutional racism.

That analysis has no scientific validity, since the set of data does not satisfy the basic conditions required by the mathematical model. It is possible to mathematically analyse a complex situation, where there are many measures or variables, but only when just one measure is dependent on the others, and when all the other variables are independent of one another – but not otherwise. The model demands a simple linear relationship when the reality may be more complex. Trying to work with dependent variables (all tangled up together) is like a tripod with all its legs close together. That tripod and that model are unstable and will not stand.

Since the measures of health, education, wealth, imprisonment and ethnicity are known to be strongly related (not at all independent variables), that calculation cannot be applied to the

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 15

meaningful analysis of society. Yet it has been done, and the output has been touted as having meaning.

The basic data show that many Maori experiences are those of a class group.

That is all that can be said, and it provides a better guide to policy action than any falsely-derived talk of ‘Maoriness’. But since the message conforms to the dominant ‘revisionist’ beliefs, the misuse of mathematics has been accepted.

The emphasis on ethnicity is not a threat that New Zealand may be captured some time in the future. This country has been, and is, captured and ruled for the benefit of powerful interests. This is not difficult with a unicameral parliament, just one house whose decisions are final. The ease of capture was evident in the years following 1984 when a cohort surrounding Roger Douglas reversed traditional Labour Party policy, and is clear today.

A small number dominate, and decide, in Cabinet.

Other Members of Parliament in the dominant party then follow orders and vote as directed out of their own self-interest, such as ambition for a future Cabinet position. That majority carries the day, and the country can be transformed. This is widely seen as an elected dictatorship; there is no proper scrutiny and no second chamber for independent debate. And once in power, party policy no longer has relevance – the aim is to hold position and power and to work for dominant class interests In the 200811 parliament the National Party was will-

ing to pay the price demanded by their minority partner, the Maori Party, and replaced foreshore and seabed legislation, where all New Zealanders owned those commons, with the Marine and Coastal Area Act (2011), thus giving special privileges to iwi over all other New Zealanders.20 This was a complete reversal of previous National Party policy, as it had been outlined in 2004 by Gerry Brownlee (later a senior Cabinet Minister).

“National wants all New Zealanders treated equally before the law. It will end the iwi consultation rorts and remove divisive race-based clauses from legislation.” National “is being honest and upfront in its intentions and is telling the public that there is one party that can be trusted on Treaty issues.

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ational will ensure the beaches and lakes remain in Crown ownership … treat all people on the basis of need, rather than race … wind up separate Maori electorates”.21 The Minister of Treaty Settlements, Christopher Finlayson, continues with an extensive list of settlements drawn up in secret deals and in contravention of proper procedure. The Waitangi Tribunal has continued moving the goal posts, to extend the scope of its investigations and pronouncements far past the Treaty itself. Moves have begun to set that divisive policy direction in concrete with a politically motivated Constitutional Advisory Panel.

Settlements of claims based on Treaty of Waitangi grievances concern the funds, property and rights of every New Zealander, and those agreements

are made between iwi and the elected government. Yet there is no pretence of fairness, no recognition of the rights of all affected parties.

Government calls itself the Crown as if it were separate from and above the people. This is a fiction; the process has nothing to do with the Crown through its New Zealand representative, the Governor-General.

Negotiations then take place in secret, as if this were purely a financial transaction between two independent parties.

Discussions involve Maori only. The consultation process on the settlement process involved twelve regional hui – every one on a marae – and a national hui in the Beehive. These were for Maori, and not other New Zealanders, as “Maori will be invited to send representatives to the national hui.”22 The process set down by Government to deal with treaty claims was openly racist. This is an openly biased form of Government action, with debate and decisions reached away from public scrutiny. The guidelines on the negotiations process make it clear that a first step, before negotiations proper begin, is to establish the facts. Yet even those guidelines are broken by the current Minister, Christopher Finlayson.

“First, the historical basis for the claim will have to be established.

This will involve discussions between the Crown and claimants about the nature of the claim. Further historical research may be required. … Verification of the historical basis to the claim [is set down as step one in the process of] acceptance into the Negotiations Work Programme”.23 That ‘further historical research’ is

The Minister of Treaty Settlements, Christopher Finlayson, continues with an extensive list of settlements drawn up in secret deals and in contravention of proper procedure. The Waitangi Tribunal has continued moving the goal posts, to extend the scope of its investigations and pronouncements far past the Treaty itself 16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

often funded by the Crown Forestry Trust for the claimants, and is strongly biased in their favour. In the local settlement that affects my community, which I have taken an interest in, even that basic requirement was broken; the verification and the historical account were not completed before an offer was made by Finlayson to Ngati Toa, in 2009. My repeated requests over several years for that historical document have been refused, the latest being in March, 2012.

The simple reason is that it does not exist, being still “under negotiation”.

“The Ngati Toa historical account is still under negotiation between the Crown and Ngati Toa. It will be available to the public when the Ngati Toa deed of settlement is initialled. It is anticipated the Ngati Toa deed of settlement will be initialled in the first half of this year. At this time a copy of the initialled deed of settlement (including the historical account) will be made public … Once the deed of settlement has been initialled the Ngati Toa claimant community will then have an opportunity to ratify the deed of settlement. Dependent on the results of ratification the deed of settlement will be signed by the Crown and Ngati Toa representatives. …Subsequent to the signing of a deed of settlement a Treaty settlement bill (legislation) is introduced into Parliament dependent on the timetable set by the leader of the House. Once a select committee has had a Treaty settlement bill referred to it by Parliament, it invites the public, through public notices in the main newspapers, to comment or make submissions on the bill.”24 Three years after an offer from Gov-

ernment, the historical account that is supposedly the basis of the complaint is undecided – and here history is to be written by negotiation. There is not even a pretence of accuracy, honesty or proper scholarship; the takeover of history by legal wrangling is complete.

The offer is extensive, including effective control over much of the public domain and an amazing $10 million for the ‘loss of maritime empire’ – the freedom held by Te Rauparaha to raid and kill across Cook Strait.25

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he final ‘public consultation’ – coming so late in the process when all is decided – is, in any case, a complete sham. In 2011 the Minister, Finlayson, even suggested changes to Parliament’s rules to fasttrack more than 20 settlements before the 2011 election, “because they stem from legal agreements which are already entered into”.26 The public is excluded from the process until the settlement is complete, and any such submission will be meaningless. I have been told to keep out of it by a descendant of a Wellington iwi conquered and driven out by Ngati Toa and Te Ati Awa.27 He is wrong to demand that I stop taking an interest in my place and my community, but he is himself acting sensibly by letting bygones be bygones and not returning to grievances far in the past, and so should Ngati Toa and Te Ati Awa. Their demands to my council and my Government for special position and payments are my business, the business of all of us. If Ngati Toa were to act responsibly they would apologise for the terrible harm done by their forefathers, and provide

recompense for those (Ngati Ira, Ngati Tara, etc.) whose lands they stole. Then get a life. But they, and other iwi, are promised a great reward of money and power if they can find or invent cause for grievance, declare a separate identity, sue the Crown for recompense and then be appeased by Finlayson.

That ready acquiescence has been encouraging outrageous claims. In such a culture, with Ministers willing to give away whatever public goods it takes (no personal loss to them, and politically expedient), why not ask for more? The full extent of this process is shown in the extraordinary comments by the Waitangi Tribunal on the recent sweeping claims by a group of tribes for control in a long list of demands, known by its classification as Wai 262.28 “Ko Aotearoa Tenei recommends reform of laws, policies or practices relating to health, education, science, intellectual property, indigenous flora and fauna, resource management, conservation, the Maori language, arts and culture, heritage, and the involvement of Maori in the development of New Zealand’s positions on international instruments affecting indigenous rights. These recommendations include law changes and the establishment of new partnership bodies in several of these areas.”

A permanent division of the nation by race is clearly specified. “New Zealand, the Tribunal says, is beginning a transition to a new and unique national identity. … The Tribunal said that the Treaty envisages the Crown-Maori relationship as a partnership, in which the Crown is entitled to govern but Maori retain tino rangatiratanga (full authority) over their taonga (treasures).

The final ‘public consultation’ – coming so late in the process when all is decided – is, in any case, a complete sham. In 2011 the Minister, Finlayson, even suggested changes to Parliament’s rules to fasttrack more than 20 settlements before the 2011 election, “because they stem from legal agreements which are already entered into Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 17

This partnership framework provides the way forward for the Crown-Maori relationship.”

This concept of ‘partnership’ shatters the nation, and reduces all non-Maori to a subservient position.

“If there were to be a partnership of Maori and the Crown, then by definition Maori could not be subjects of the Crown. One cannot be a partner and a subject at the same time. If there were to be a partnership of Maori and the Crown in the government of New Zealand, then it must follow logically that the only people who would be subjects would not be Maori – they would be partners – but rather non-Maori, who would be the subjects of the Crown and also the subjects of the Treaty partner who shares the Crown’s authority. The necessary and inevitable consequence of a Crown-Maori ‘partnership’ is the inferior status of all non-Maori citizens.”29

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considerable harm is advocated by the Tribunal; there should be no such parting. The following comment is by a neighbour of mine, Shiela Natusch of Owhiro Bay, who grew up in, and wrote about, Rakiura (Stewart Island) in a truly racially mixed society.

“As I stood listening to the speeches, I could not help reflecting that one of [Reverend] Wohler’s contributions, as well as [Bishop] Selwyn’s, had been a very real marriage between the races in the ‘until death do us part’ Christian sense. It has been a long marriage (I thought), and on the whole a happy one, and it seems a little late to think of divorce proceedings at this stage.”30 A modern desire to rip apart functioning societies has become customary in the international arena. The United Nations Special Rapporteur, after a brief fly-by visit to New Zealand

and meetings with Maori radicals, wrote of an imaginary holocaust.31 His report was a basis for a submission by Amnesty International to the UN Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights meeting in Geneva, claiming that New Zealand is continuing to discriminate against Maori through the Marine and Coastal Area Act.32 “Non-discrimination and equality are fundamental components of international human rights law and a crosscutting obligation under the Covenant.

While the right to non-discrimination is one of the few Covenant rights contained in the BORA, the historic and ongoing breach of this and other Covenant rights of Maori has lead to their extreme socio-economic disadvantage [reference here to Anaya] and has resulted in entrenched inequalities in health, education, employment, justice and housing in New Zealand.”

As I have shown elsewhere, that claim is simple nonsense; the Treaty has brought undoubted improvements to Maori and the remaining inequalities are a feature of class, not race. The Waitangi Tribunal promotes that separatism; its all-encompassing recommendations are for separation in almost every facet of life, as shown by its findings in the all encompassing Wai 262 case.

“The establishment of new partnership bodies in education, conservation, and culture and heritage; a new commission to protect Maori cultural works against derogatory or offensive uses and unauthorised commercial uses; a new funding agent for matauranga Maori in science; and expanded roles for some existing bodies including Te Taura Whiri (the Maori Language Commission), the newly established national rongoa body Te Paepae Matua mo te Rongoa, and Maori

advisory bodies relating to patents and environmental protection.

Improved support for rongoa Maori (Maori traditional healing), te reo Maori, and other aspects of Maori culture and Maori traditional knowledge.

Amendments to laws covering Maori language, resource management, wildlife, conservation, cultural artifacts, environmental protection, patents and plant varieties, and more.”33 A century ago Maori leaders (Carroll, Ngata, Buck, Pomare), who were familiar with the dire consequences of ignorant Maori traditional healing, supported a law to bring the Maori into the modern age – with considerable positive results in improved health and longer life expectancy. Now here is a suggestion to honour and support superstition.

Matauranga Maori too has elements of superstition and ancestor worship; it is not science, must not be confused with science, and must not be funded as science.

While Maori society has progressed considerably since first contact, significant differences remain. These can be overcome by continuing the progress towards integration in developed society, and not by regression into a mythical past. For sixteen years, between 1986 and 2002, the majority of my professional work involved gathering information on all aspects of Maori life – health, education, law-breaking and imprisonment, social life, childrearing, and so on. A frequent feature of the many reports from government departments and university academics was the construction of an unsupported picture of a flourishing traditional Maori culture. That new set of myths was used to support arguments for separate treatment and control of resources. Here is one typical example.

“Customary Maori thought con-

A modern desire to rip apart functioning societies has become customary in the international arena.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur, after a brief fly-by visit to New Zealand and meetings with Maori radicals, wrote of an imaginary holocaust 18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

ceived of good health as a state in which the interrelated parts of one’s being were in harmony. The body (te tinana) was never divorced from the state of mental wellbeing (te taha hinengaro) or from one’s spiritual aspect (te taha wairua); they were interrelated parts of a functioning whole which in turn was part of an interdependent community and natural world. Illness occurred when one or more parts of a person’s being were in disharmony with the other parts which shaped his existence. The subsequent diagnosis and treatment depended upon a holistic assessment of this totality.

“The Maori offender or prisoner of today can only be understood or ‘diagnosed’ if his total existence is similarly assessed. He is shaped by various internal and external forces which are interrelated. The functioning of the internal forces is a complex cultural and sociopsychological process.”34 Here the old superstitious belief in atua, or spirits, in the control of illness – which is the reality of customary Maori thought – has morphed into a ‘holistic’ treatment of disease. This is nonsense, as the most important aspect of health care, the scientific approach, is lacking. Nor is a ‘holistic’ approach specifically Maori, or lacking in standard health-care procedures.

This romanticised and false rewriting of a superstitious culture is re-labelled as ‘holistic’ and then paraded as a solution to modern ills. This demands an incredible step back into the dark ages, yet any critical judgement is outlawed.

“While it will naturally be necessary to also consult a wide range of Pakeha people involved within justice processes, the key consultative guide will be Maori. It is essential to draw out from the diversity of Maori opinion the hitherto largely untapped wisdom and perceptions which may render intelligible both the behaviour of Maori offenders and the systemic responses to that behaviour.

“The information gained from this consultative process will be difficult to quantify and impossible to fit within traditional Pakeha methodologies.

However it is the contention of this Paper that the recorded perceptions

and views will be developed within a Maori framework which is equally valid. It is a framework of whakawhitiwhiti whakaaro (shared thoughts) which encourages input from both old and young and then relies on accurate and impartial assessment to draw out the major issues of concern. It is a framework which needs to be taken to tribal, not court, districts, and to be held in the forums which each tribal group deems appropriate. Most importantly, it is a framework which will allow for a synthesis of Maori views.

The methodology is therefore specifically Maori.”35 One intriguing, and most disturbing, feature of this statement is that it has no meaning at all. There is no specifically Maori methodology, unless we are to believe in malign spirits. Yet behind (and based on) such mumbojumbo large sums of public money are disbursed and research is directed into Maori hands, with no possibility of any quality control. The output may be nonsense but is safe from critical review, for that would include ‘traditional Pakeha methodologies’. Maori practitioners can do what they like behind the smokescreen of separate cultural science and political correctness.

The inferior status of all non-Maori citizens implied by the partnership model is already well entrenched. It applies even to consideration of the

A century ago Maori leaders, who were familiar with the dire consequences of ignorant Maori traditional healing, supported a law to bring the Maori into the modern age – with considerable positive results in improved health and longer life expectancy.

very form of our government. An agreement to conduct a “wide-ranging review of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements” was part of the Relationship and Confidence and Supply Agreement entered into by the National and Maori Parties when they went into coalition after the 2008 general election. On 8 December, 2010, the Deputy Prime Minister Hon Bill English and the Minister of Maori Affairs Hon Dr Pita Sharples publicly announced a “wide-ranging review of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements”.

The promise that the review “would keep in mind that enduring constitutional changes generally require a broad base of support” is worthless and plainly insincere – as was Key’s previous promise not to proceed with the Marine and Coastal Area Act if there was not broad support for it. This was a purely political act, intended to keep Maori Party support for the National Government, with no call from the general public and no real need for

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such a constitutional reform.

The assumed priority of Maori in the intended constitution, under the umbrella of the rewritten Treaty, was abundantly clear from the outset. The Cabinet paper was pointing clearly in that direction, since the task of the Committee is to “seek the views of all New Zealanders … in ways that reflect the Treaty relationship”, and “in ways that reflect the partnership model and are responsive to Maori consultation preferences”.

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onsultation with Maori, in particular, “must be reflective of the Treaty relationship”. All this could surely be said to be begging the question and already assuming as settled what actually has to be established.36 The special Maori role has been evident in the first four meetings of the Committee. At the first meeting Minister Sharples met to outline the origin of the project and to explain his expectation – as if his expectations and those of his Maori Party for separatism should have a special importance.

The meetings included a presentation on the Treaty of Waitangi and Crown/ Maori relationships, again setting Maori somehow outside the Crown as a separate people. The second and subsequent meetings began and ended with karakia, asserting a Maori dominance.

The third meeting included a Te Puni Kokiri presentation on Maori engagement. This was the only group singled out for special attention. At the fourth meeting the Committee discussed the draft brief to Ministers and heard comments from Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Justice, before agreeing to changes to the draft. Action on the next steps included an approach to the organisers of Nga Manu Korero on the

possibility of including a topic or topics on New Zealand’s constitution in the competition. Nga Manu Korero is a Maori speech competition for secondary students.

There is no pretence of an evenhanded and inclusive approach. The arrogance is breathtaking. Only a group with a religious belief in their cause could have acted so brusquely, sweeping aside all others in the imposition of their rule. The rest of us are simply irrelevant. We can confidently expect that the putative constitution, assumed and imagined by those who set up this review for political reasons, will not challenge that power, and that it will not contain the senate or similar second chamber required to control and dilute dictatorial rule.

A constitution is a guide that may become a straightjacket, a means of control in a political environment, so that a powerful few may use (or misuse) the writings of a people in the far past. Those writing the rules do so in the hope, and expectation, that their particular political views will continue to hold in the distant future. This can create a dangerous situation where the interpretation of words from long ago can be used to subvert the popular will, and impede the working of democracy.

“It may well be unwise to tie ourselves down with any written constitution and entrenched bill of rights, for that would at once transform many political and moral questions into legal ones.

It would enable politicians to abdicate their representative and deliberative duties, deprive the people of any future say in fundamental questions, and hand over much power to (currently) unelected and unaccountable judges. … If judges were to be entitled to strike down statutory provisions because they allegedly breached such a fundamen-

tal right, then important political and moral questions, where judges have no superior knowledge, training or virtue, would at once become matters on which the public and their elected representatives would never again be entitled to make decisions.”37 That move of decision-making from elected government to the courts has happened here with the fanciful interpretation of ‘the principles of the Treaty’.

Court rulings on the constitution have been used to wield considerable power in the United States of America, as when the Supreme Court fought against Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its huge popular mandate, and again with the 2012 challenge to the healthcare bill.

It is that control that the Maori Party wishes to exert against all others. This is a dangerous situation. Indeed it has resulted in training for apparently armed insurrection by a largely Tuhoe group led by Tame Iti. Tuhoe claims for self-government have been received sympathetically by the National Government, who are readily prepared to oversee the breakup of the nation into separate Bantustans.

“A compact agreement is signed [in July 2011] between the Crown and Tuhoe recognising a commitment to achieving mana motuhake or selfgovernment for the region.”38 “Tuhoe’s lead negotiator is optimistic the iwi could sign a settlement including self-government of Te Urewera National Park and Lake Waikaremoana as early as next year. Tamati Kruger says Tuhoe has never been closer to reaching a favourable settlement – but it would continue to push for its desire to have maximum autonomy if expectations were not met. Among other conditions, the iwi wanted to self-govern the area stretching from Opotiki to Putere on the Wairoa side,

There is no pretence of an even-handed and inclusive approach. The arrogance is breathtaking.

Only a group with a religious belief in their cause could have acted so brusquely, sweeping aside all others in the imposition of their rule 20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

and the edge of Taupo and Rotorua on the other side.

“Mr Kruger believed Tuhoe’s expectations were realistic – something the office of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson would not be drawn to comment on yesterday.

The iwi had already proven it could self-govern, and was ‘interdependent’ before Parliament was established, Mr Kruger said. ‘That was our state before the Treaty of Waitangi and we prospered in that state. It has always been a realistic proposition.’”39

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hat claim is made seriously. At the very time that this Minister was negotiating for the separation of powers, a case was before the Court of four leaders of a group who were gathering weapons, dressing in camouflage gear (not appropriate for hunting game), often hiding their identities and training in bush camps for apparent armed combat. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on whether they were guilty of participating in an organised criminal group, since the poorly drafted legislation of the Terrorism Act required an understanding of their intentions as well as their actions.

They were found guilty of firearms charges. If this was not preparation for armed insurrection, then what on earth was going on? The actions are clear. The rhetoric is clear, that of grievance and the need to overthrow an oppressive power. As the judge commented when making sentence: “As I view the evidence, in effect, a private militia was being established.

Whatever the justification, that is a frightening prospect in our society, undermining of our democratic institutions and anathema to our way of life.”40 The story put before the public of the ‘struggle’ of Tuhoe, these ‘children of the mist’, gives legitimacy to past killing, suggesting that perhaps this continuing struggle should be met with sympathy rather than condemned as unlawful and potentially murderous. A respect for terrorism has been voiced by revisionist historians such as Michael King.

“Maori leader Te Kooti and his followers begin what historian Michael King calls ‘the most effective guerrilla

war ever waged in this country’.”41 Tame Iti’s lawyer likened Iti to Nelson Mandela, saying history showed Mandela too was misunderstood. There should be no confusion here – at the time of his arrest Mandela was a member of an armed guerrilla group aimed at overthrowing the South African State. That uprising is widely judged to have been justified, a necessary stage in the destruction of the evil of apartheid and the freedom of black people, to become equals in their land. There is no comparison. All New Zealanders are equal. Iti and Tuhoe are arguing, and arming, to break with equality and common citizenship to introduce a divided apartheid state.

The Treaty was an agreement between people alive in 1840 and a promise for the future. ‘Now we are one people.’ It was never to be a straightjacket or a source of endless dispute around the translation of words or ground for separate identity some 170 and more years later.

The rewriting of history – with Maori presented as passive victims of massive British wrong-doing, and the glorification of murderous rebels – together with funding of a substantial industry to seek out and amplify an ever-growing list of grievances have provided the intellectual and ideological platform for armed insurrection.

FOOTNOTE: Just as this magazine was going to press, the Tuhoe settlement was announced. It includes a degree of administrative self-government for the Tuhoe people.

This article is a brief extract from John Robinson’s new book, When Two Cultures Meet: The NZ Experience, available from good bookstores or direct from Tross Publishing, 280 pages, illustrated, $40p&p. Available from P.O. Box 22 143, Khandallah, Wellington 6441

References: 1. Butterworth G. Historical revisionism in New Zealand: always winter and never Christmas. In Rata and Openshaw 2006, page 187 2. Robinson 2011 3. Byrnes 2004, page 152

4. Byrnes 2004, page 2 5. Oliver W H. The future behind us, the Waitangi Tribunal’s retrospective utopia. In Sharp and McHugh 2001 6. Sharp A. Recent juridical and constitutional histories of Maori. In Sharp and McHugh 2001 7. Head L. The pursuit of modernity in Maori society. In Sharp and McHugh 2001 8. Ballara A. The innocence of history?

In Sharp and McHugh 2001 9. Bassett 2008a 10. Palmer 1989 11. Bassett 2008b, pages 135 and 136 12. Graham 1997, page 19 13. Byrnes 2004, page 78 14. Byrnes 2004, page 114 15. Openshaw R. Putting ethnicity into policy: a New Zealand case study. In Rata and Openshaw 2006, page 113 16. Butterworth G. Historical revisionism in New Zealand: always winter and never Christmas. In Rata and Openshaw 2006, page 185 17. Rata 2000, pages 226 and 227 18. Rata 2000, pages 226 and 227 19. New Zealand Herald, April 18, 2012 20. Barr 2011, Robinson 2011 21. Brownlee 2004 22. Office of Treaty Settlements 1994 23. Office of Treaty Settlements 1994 24. Finlayson 2012. Letter to the author, 15 March 25. Robinson 2011, page 29 26. Dominion Post, April 8, 2011 27. Ray Mercer, a Wellington City Council councillor 28. Waitangi Tribunal 2012 29. Round 2012.

30. Natusch S 1992, page 71 31. Anaya 2011 32. Radio New Zealand 2012, at http:// www.amnesty.org.nz/files/New-Zealand-PSWG-Briefing-FINAL.pdf 33. Waitangi Tribunal 2012 34. Jackson 1987, page 41 35. Jackson 1987, page 43 36. Round 2011 37. Round 2011 38. Dominion Post, Wednesday March 21 2012 39. New Zealand Herald, March 28 2012 40. Sentencing notes of Rodney Hansen J. [47] 24 May 2012 41. Dominion Post, Wednesday March 21 2012

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 21

LOVE HIM. HATE HIM.

I

n March 2012, a live microphone caught US President Barack Obama in a John Key ‘teapot’ moment, while he discussed US defence plans with the then Russian president: President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: (reaching over and putting his hand on Mr. Medvedev’s knee): This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

“Vladimir” was, of course, Russia’s real powerhouse, Vladimir Putin, then serving as Prime Minister. But it’s Obama’s hand on the knee reassurance that caught policy analysts by surprise: “This is my last election,” he soothed. “After my election I have more flexibility”.

In other words, if the voters re-elect him, Obama can carry out his real agenda.

We’ve seen it in New Zealand with both the Clark and Key administrations; softly softly in the first term, and then increasingly ideological as contempt for the voters grows and

A new documentary on Obama is taking the US by storm ahead of the elections. IAN WISHART backgrounds the controversy surrounding 2016: Obama’s America the need to stay popular becomes less important.

But what of President Obama, defacto leader of the Free World – what’s his agenda if he gets re-elected?

That’s the subject of a blockbuster new movie sweeping America, 2016: Obama’s America. Based on a bestselling book by Christian commentator Dinesh D’Souza, the documentary has leap-frogged over Michael Moore’s Sicko or Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth to become the #2 ranked political documentary film of all time, grossing more than US$31 million at the time of writing.

D’Souza argues that Obama has kept his cards close to his chest and won’t be revealing his real agenda until his second term as president is locked in and beyond the reach of voters. Liberal movie critics have heaped dung on the film, but the Obama administration has played right into D’Souza’s hands.

“From ‘the most open and transparent (administration) in history’,

22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

inquiring minds want to know about President Obama’s “regulatory agenda” should he win re-election,” reported one US news service this month.

“But the White House, contrary to law, is guarding its official red-tape wish list like a June bride guards her secrets. Under the Regulatory Flexibility Act, along with Executive Order 12,866, the Obama administration was supposed to publish its Spring 2012 Regulatory Agenda, says Diane Katz of The Heritage Foundation. That deadline passed on April 13, reminds U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.”

Is Obama making promises to lobby groups and even foreign powers, and keeping secrets about an agenda that he doesn’t want voters to know about?

While the rest of the world focuses on Islamic unrest caused by largely false outrage over an old Youtube clip, more sobering is a massive naval buildup in the Persian Gulf – with ships from a number of nations including New Zealand – gathering in readi-

ness for trouble if conflict breaks out between Israel and Iran.

Obama has been noticeably frosty towards Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu. The latter is understandably becoming increasingly nervous that Iran may only be weeks away from achieving weapons-grade nuclear material from its reactor programme.

The Iranian leadership have promised to wipe Israel from the face of the planet, and with new Iranian missiles capable of striking Israel within 20 minutes of launch, Netanyahu is stating the obvious when he warns his country won’t stand idly by and let Iran go nuclear.

D

inesh D’Souza’s hit movie argues that Obama is a closet globalist, planning to actually weaken the US financially and militarily out of allegiance to a wider socialist blueprint for global governance. Part of Obama’s strategy, he claims, is to hang Israel out to dry when the time comes by promising much but delivering little.

The documentary claims may sound ‘conspiracy theory’, but they’re grounded in certain inconvenient facts. Some of Obama’s key advisors, for example, are members of left-wing global governance organisation Socialist International, as was New Zealand’s Helen Clark and a number of NZ Labour MPs. Socialist International seven years ago indicated America’s powers needed to be reined in so as to remove an obstacle to an emerging world government.

Once again, what did the US president mean when he told the Russians to be patient until after he had won his second term in office?

D’Souza argues that Obama’s views are driven by his Kenyan father’s hatred for “colonialism”.

“Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized,” intones D’Souza in the documentary. “America has a dream, from our founding fathers that together we must perfect liberty and America must grow so liberty grows. Which dream will we carry into 2016?”

Although the movie is doing heavy box office business, not all conserva-

Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized tive reviews are through rose-coloured spectacles. The American Spectator, for example, fears that 2016 creates bogeymen where it actually didn’t need to: “But when there is so much genuinely to be frightened of, I can’t help wondering how useful it is, in raising the alarm, to concentrate quite so heavily on things doubtful and speculative at the expense of things open and obvious. The academic left whose ties to President Obama are pretty unmissable certainly ought to be a national scandal, but not because

it is using him as its revolutionary catspaw. There is plenty to regard with alarm about its corruption of America’s intellectual life, as there is about what the Obama administration is doing to the nation’s defenses, its legal system, its economy and its Constitution, but a doubtful attempt to connect the two things will only give the left and the media an excuse to dismiss both.”

The real test may come long before 2016. With Israel and Iran set to come to blows, Obama’s true colours may emerge sooner than later.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 23

biology

Ill-Fated “Flight of the Concorde WORDS BY MALCOLM FORD

I

f the famous supersonic Concorde were still flying today a new model to supersede it with modifications could be made to save significant material and production costs. This would be the half-wing version conforming to the design specifications of Richard Dawkins. Well, we know that Dawkins is a famous Cambridge scientist and doyen of the evolution theorists but that he had such a profound knowledge of aeronautics has been kept in the dark until now.

But his views have come to light in his recent publication, The God Delusion.

In The God Delusion Dawkins introduces his scathing attacks on God with a list of vitriolic epithets that might make Nietzsche blush were he alive to hear them. Leading the phalanx of modern atheists in the crusade against God and religion, Dawkins tries to fill the spiritual and philosophical vacuum with some explanation for the origin of life and has become the modern champion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

But Dawkins has had to admit to some problems in trying to explain how various parts of an insect or animal could perform their respective functions well before they had reached a stage as a fully developed component 24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

of a creature’s anatomy. The eye and the wing stand out as examples that cry out for special attention – even Darwin is reported to have admitted that the problem of the eye made him feel sick!

Dawkins devoted a chapter each to the eye and the wing in his book Climbing Mount Improbable. But his answers are quite inadequate as are his references to the problems in The God Delusion.

This is how critical the problem is in the evolutionary rationale that it evokes such attention!

Dawkins believes that half a wing is better than no wing. To quote from The God Delusion, p123: “Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height.” (but not from his imaginary Mount Improbable!). But why is Dawkins wasting time illustrating his theories with a half-winged man on top of a tree? Let’s talk about real wings that allow insects, birds and aircraft to fly: not just some gliding wing strapped to a tree-mounted bird-man. Dawkins desperately needs a half-wing because there had to be millions of intermediate stages in the development of a wing over eons of time in the evolutionary plan, and a half-wing would be one of the intermediate stages. He is using a half-wing analogy to describe the process attributed to natural selection in which an anatomical part can fully develop incrementally over millions of years.

In the case of an insect’s or bird’s wing he is suggesting that a tiny “secretion” or emerging group of molecules begins to eventually compose a bony or fleshy structure that will, over millions of years, eventually become a filament of an insect’s wing or the feathery cladding of a bird’s wing. But he fails to describe the actual form or condition of a half-wing at any intermediate stage of a wing’s formation. There must be some “intent” in the process of the molecular build-up to a “limb” that has the capability of performing the intricate manoeuvres of an aerodynamically shaped structure such as will propel an insect or bird through the air. In other words, from the very beginning of the formation of a “wing” until a few million years later a final stage is reached when the wing is fully formed to lift and propel the weight and shape of the parent body through the air.

By way of example, let us translate to an imaginary similar process in a much less complex model such as an aircraft. Let’s take the wing of the famous Spitfire fighter plane. I use this example because the Spitfire has a beautiful elliptical wing form and also because a modified clipped-wing version was designed for special purposes. Now the wing of a Spitfire is designed according to specific aerodynamic laws primarily to lift the aircraft and with the aid of its ailerons allow it to turn and bank. And the clipped-wing version is nowhere near a half wing! But what does Dawkins mean by “half-wing” as being better than no wing? Does he mean half the length of the wing-span or half the area? So let’s reduce the Spitfire’s wing area by one half. It wouldn’t even take off let alone fly! And what do people do who want to prevent a domesticated bird from flying away from home? They clip its wings – not even reduce it by half, and it still can’t fly!

What about the aircraft designed to operate from aircraft-carriers that have wings that fold upwards to allow for more compact storage between decks and for being able to fit on the elevators that lift them from between-decks to the flight deck? What would happen to such an aircraft if the extended parts of the wings broke off at the hinge?

Would the plane continue to fly? Even someone with limited aeronautical knowledge but familiar with the overall dimensions of a typical plane would not expect to see a half-winged plane in flight! Only someone like Richard Dawkins could visualize such an aeronautical conundrum.

You may say – yes, but it’s a crude analogy to compare an insect’s or bird’s wing to that of an inanimate machine like a Spitfire. But when a world famous scientist such as Dawkins, who

is forever harping on about the unscientific methods of Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, – when he tries to explain the actual mechanism of natural selection he is never able to show any sequential intermediate forms and give a step-by-step outline in practical theory or by fossil records of how the process is accomplished.

His answer is that it must have happened because the product has been delivered! It wasn’t created by God and not designed by any influence of Intelligent Design. Evolution is the only alternative! But is it?

As is typical of evolutionists generally, Dawkins deals with the highly intricate problem of the eye or the wing in just a few pages, 119-124; but much more at length, yet no more convincingly in his Climbing Mount Improbable. That book has the mysterious, amorphous plasma worming its way up the dark side of the mountain to finally emerge at the top in a glorious revelation of evolutionary triumph! But at the end of a few relevant pages in The God Delusion he quite casually signs off – “I devoted a whole chapter each to eye and wing, demonstrating how easy it was [my italics] for them to evolve by slow (or even, maybe, not all that slow) gradual degrees, and will leave the subject here.” p 124. Easy indeed! He takes on almost supernatural airs and his emotional appeals for understanding become almost evangelical – “But perhaps you need to be steeped in natural selection, immersed in it, swim about in it before you can truly appreciate its power.” p117. This statement, almost naive in its pleading, demonstrates how easily the ‘brilliant scientist’ succumbs to mere sensationalism in pandering to the ‘religious’ sentiments of his readers – readers who are grasping in a gesture of faith at something which defies reason.

He is using a half-wing analogy to describe the process attributed to natural selection in which an anatomical part can fully develop incrementally over millions of years Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 25

analysis

Being Put in Harm’s Way WORDS BY LEON HARRISON

O

nly a few hours after I read Richard Prosser’s piece in the last issue of Investigate I watched the Dutch film Winter in Wartime, about Holland during Nazi occupation. There are countless examples of films, books, poems, paintings and the words of our elders, if we choose to listen, which serve to remind us of the difficult and dramatic past. If all one can garner from these things is entertainment then it is no wonder we are on the course we are. Unlike this country most display enough collective memory to ward off the gamble of holding their security as, at best, a mild concern.

As if to punctuate our warped perception of these matters I was recently told that children do not see those in military uniform as familiar, unlike life guards or firemen. If that doesn’t suggest quite strongly New Zealand’s apathetic attitude towards our Defence Forces nothing will. My guess is that most children in Christchurch could now identify a New Zealand soldier if they saw one in a line up with other

soldiers from around the world. Without the distinctive Kiwi badge or New Zealand flag on a uniform shoulder very few New Zealand adults could do the same.

The crippled state of the NZDF has nothing to do with bad economic times or a zero budget. It has everything to do with political correctness and a very unrealistic outlook on both human behaviour and nature itself. You get out what you put in – at least that’s what I was taught as a youngster.

Do we need an earthquake to appreciate that our military is the only institution within our society that can coordinate a unified logistical response in every required capacity? Since it very rapidly became a thing about money, and numerous Kiwis, through no fault of their own, endured tarpaulins and holes in the ground in their backyards for so very long, it is not hard to see why many do not consider us a first world country at all.

And so, as the response to the Christchurch earthquake and its aftermath has shown clearly, our conduct in terms of deploying to a war zone has similar fundamental flaws.

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

As one soldier who has served in Afghanistan was heard to say, New Zealand needs to grow a backbone.

Those who serve over there are trained and as prepared as best they can be, given mitigating circumstances. Each knows well the risks involved. Each is serving their country, which is a heck of a lot more than many New Zealanders who are quite keen to make outlandish claims of their standing up for humanity.

The Bali bombings should remind us all that this is a global war, and that those on the other side are quite willing to kill and to die. If we don’t sort out our attitudes there will be a much higher price to be paid. We are in harm’s way, whether we like it or not, whether our people are in Afghanistan or not. Our enemies in this particular war consider this country a “Christian” country whether you deem it so or not.

It has nothing to do with statistics.

In the enemy’s efforts to ramp up the tempo of war, the I.E.D. which killed three Kiwi soldiers was powerful enough to deal to a L.A.V. had one been struck. With a dismount section in the back, more soldiers are likely to have ended up casualties as a result. That the government suggest Humvees are the best vehicles available is reprehensible at best. It took just a month for a New Zealander to get properly designed mine resistant vehicles for his private sector company.

The role of the infantry is to track down, engage with and kill the enemy, day and night in any terrain, in any weather. Our soldiers are in a war zone.

As a young soldier I was taught that aggressive patrolling and dominating the terrain is key to achieving your mission. Modern thinking doesn’t change that, but it does put those who serve at unnecessary risk through ineffectual and unreasonable war-time policy.

If a government can put people on the ground, yet handicap their capability to achieve their objectives on behalf of their nation that government misrepresents that nation and those who serve. Democracy means an informed people who demand their leaders represent them. It is clear that such a world is getting further and further from our grasp.

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Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 27

drive

by ian wishart

Hybrid sports: Honda CRZ

“ H

ey man, is that a Ferrari?” asked the kid lounging in the afternoon sun with his mates outside the local village store. You can’t blame a 12 year old for making the mental leap, and he wasn’t the only person to do so during a week long test.

Back in the 90s Honda’s little pocket rocket was the CRX. Twenty years later the brand is trying to sneak fun back in a green package called the CRZ – green in the

sense that it uses hybrid technology, although the car doesn’t boast about it. There’s no badge to proclaim to the driver behind you that you’re a selfrighteous eco-snob from Grey Lynn, no sir. The CRZ is the hybrid for people who prefer to keep their good deeds to themselves.

I’ve had a long affinity with Honda, owning VTEC Preludes (x2), luxury Accords (x3), 4WD CR-Vs (x2) and V6 Odysseys (x2), so hopping into the CRZ

28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

wasn’t entirely unfamiliar territory.

The manual test vehicle boasts a six-speed box matched with a VTEC engine that begs to be used to the furthest extent of the law, and the little car is a joy to drive. With just a 91kw output the car is noticeably slower to accelerate in the overtaking powerband than the V6 people-mover I’m currently using, but it is only a 1.5L engine and the CRZ’s nimbleness on the road is something else to behold.

There’s no badge to proclaim to the driver behind you that you’re a self-righteous eco-snob from Grey Lynn, no sir. The CRZ is the hybrid for people who prefer to keep their good deeds to themselves

Being a hybrid, Honda offers three pre-programmed driving modes – sport, normal and econ. With a dashboard reminiscent of 1950s retro and neon, it’s easy to see which mode you’re in and a series of control buttons on the steering wheel conjure up a range of computer displays. The most useful is arguably the fuel economy meter.

Put your foot down and you can watch it tut-tut disapprovingly.

At traffic lights, the computer

switches the engine off to save fuel, but thanks to the electric battery it is instantly on when you depress the accelerator again or put the car back in gear. Officially, fuel economy of 5L/100km is achievable, I averaged 7.

All things being equal, the CRZ in Milano Red is fun on a stick. The car is a head-turner and conversation starter.

Prices start from $44,900 for the CRZ SR through to $52,300 for the topof-the-range Mugen version.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 29

invest

by peter hensley

Saving common sense

M

oira retorted “If you look around you will find that common sense isn’t so common”.

She was responding to a comment by Janelle that it was common sense that share markets increased in value over time.

Janelle went on “But companies are in business to make a profit, everyone knows that. Most years the profit is shared amongst the shareholders and if it is a publically listed company then the public can collect dividends by owning the shares of the companies that make profits.”

Moira added, “And because some of the profit is retained by the company, then it is common sense that the company is that much more valuable than it was the year before. This is generally reflected in the company’s share price.

“Some years the profit is down a little, but as long as the company retains a little for expansion then it is obvious that the share price will rise over time.

The trick is to find companies that are selling stuff that sells.”

Janelle’s husband, Phillip, chipped in “You guys are supposed to be talking common sense. That statement is silly; of course they are going to sell stuff that sells.”

30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

Jim thought quietly to himself that it had been a while since anyone had called Moira silly. It would be interesting to see how she responded to this.

Jim need not have been concerned. Moira was calm and was able to explain to Phillip that it was not a silly comment. For over a 100 plus years an immensely profitable company called Kodak sold photographic equipment and supplies. They grew into a billion dollar corporation by selling stuff that sold. They failed to adapt to the digital world, got stuck in time and in the end were trying to sell stuff that didn’t sell. They filed for bankruptcy a couple of months ago.

Jim smiled to himself. He was proud to be married to Moira. He always said that she was the brains and he was the brawn. Not that he did a lot of work these days. He and Moira had been retired for many years. Moira’s common sense approach to budgeting over their life time saw them practice the two fundamentals of wealth creation. The first was to spend less than they earned. Second was to understand that it was smarter to collect interest than pay it.

They frequently shared this wisdom with all that inquired but had learnt that only about one in ten were able to implement the changes necessary in their lifestyle. For the rest, the attraction of short term lifestyle options proved stronger than the allure of long term financial security.

Jim had thought that she would become less tolerant as the years slipped by, but it was quite the opposite. Whilst Moira enjoyed working with those who were prepared to help themselves she saw her efforts to work with the rest as a challenge because she knew the benefits that could accrue if the students were willing to change.

Jim and Moira started off married life like most others with one exception, they were both fiscally aware. Moira more than Jim and he was smart enough to recognise it. They had both worked for

wages all their lives, with Jim working as many hours as he could. They had very clear job descriptions. He helped Moira clip coupons, grow their own vegetables, helped out at school galas and went to night school.

Moira looked after the kids, became extremely skilled at home baking, sewing and managed their finances. She was a diligent saver, inherently knowing that a penny saved is a penny earned. She soon learnt that those who understood interest collected it and those that did not paid it. Their mortgage was eliminated in just over seven years and she saw to it that they never have had to borrow since.

She had a natural ability to accumulate financial knowledge and as simple as it may seem, they prospered financially. Frequently Moira reflected on their progress and it had recently dawned on her that anybody who followed the same path as they did would have to become wealthy. It was because of this faith and conviction that she and Jim were willing to share this knowledge with all who asked.

Jim often said that their house was like a bus stop, with people coming and going most days.

This was how Phillip and Janelle came to be at their house. Janelle was the daughter of their previous next door neighbour. Jim fondly remembered how Janelle used to spend a lot of time at their house playing with their own children. One day she innocently asked Jim “How come you guys are so rich?” Jim remembered it well, Janelle would have been all of six or seven and Jim certainly did not think them as being rich. He recalled muttering something about being a lucky man and being married to Moira. Almost twenty years had passed and he doubted if his answer would be much different.

Janelle’s next comment jolted Jim back to the present. “So all we have to do is look for a company that sells stuff.”

“Sort of,” says Moira. “You have to look for a company that sells stuff profitably and one that is willing to pay dividends. As a rule of thumb companies based in the United States tend not to pay dividends and prefer to reinvest their profits in expanding the company. I suspect this behaviour could be related to management bonus structure rather than a desire for world domination.”

“But aren’t we in the middle of a recession?” Phillip chipped in quickly.

“Sure we are,” said Moira, “But that doesn’t stop people from queuing up to buy the latest iPad and it doesn’t stop the courier companies delivering the new iPads. It also doesn’t stop the telecommunication companies from selling broadband plans.

The store that sells iPads also has to pay rent to the landlord who owns the store.

“And people don’t stop eating during a recession, they still go to the supermarket and instead

of going out they choose to stay at home and watch Sky,” Moira continued.

Jim could see the excitement building in Janelle’s eyes then Moira reminded her that they still had a mortgage and that had to be their first priority.

Analyzing the share market could wait a year or two yet.

“But we could take out a margin loan and use our home equity to invest,” Janelle said excitedly.

Moira brought her back to earth quickly by saying that their home was a lifestyle choice and it should not be considered an investment nor placed at risk. Jim noticed that Phillip could see the wisdom in this approach.

Moira reminded Janelle that they should focus on eliminating the final part of their mortgage and that she could use this time to commence her share market studies.

Jim saw this as his cue to start clearing the afternoon tea dishes. Moira noticed and said “And we will have none of your disappearing magic tricks either, make those left over biscuits end up back in the tin.”

“Yes dear” Jim responded as he muttered to himself that no one would miss one.

Copyright © Peter J. Hensley April 2012.

This article is meant to be Class Advice and a copy of Peter Hensley’s disclosure statement is available on request and is free of charge.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 31

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32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

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1

Onkio TX-NR5010

From the gold-plated A/V and speaker terminals through to the massive toroidal transformer at its heart, the TX-NR5010 is built to uncompromising standards of excellence. For example, to limit the effects of interference, the pre-amp block and power amplifier are housed separately. There are dedicated transformers for audio and video processing. Anti-resonant aluminum side panels are fitted to reduce vibration. This abundance of clean power, advanced processing technology, and generous build specification are what allow the TX-NR5010 to drive your home entertainment to previously unimagined heights. www.onkyo.com

2

Seiko Astron GPS Solar

At last, the search for totally precise time, everywhere on the planet, is over. By developing our own, patented, low-energyconsumption GPS receiver, Seiko has been able to create a watch that can receive GPS signals and identify time zone, time and date data using the global network of GPS satellites. It recognizes all the 39 time zones on earth. This breakthrough timepiece is called Seiko Astron. Like its celebrated 1969 predecessor which was the world’s first quartz watch, the new Seiko Astron developed under the supervision of Seiko Epson Corporation, ushers in a new age of timekeeping technology. www.seikowatches.com

3

Micro Luggage

Checking in the evening before is not going to happen.

Time is short, just grab new batteries for your mp3 player, and a sandwich and race for the gate. Two simple moves and you’ve converted your case into a kickboard and glide casually past the crowds hurrying in confusion to reach the gate on time. No mistake, you’re the main attraction and you’ve beaten the stress of it all. You then slip your case into the hand luggage compartment on board, easy and simple. A perfect trip thanks to micro luggage. www.micro-mobility.com

4

Travel suit protector

Set to revolutionise business travel, Working Style’s exclusive new travel suit protector will ensure you and your whistle arrive at your destination in wrinkle free condition. Created in Italy and shaped like flat foam body, the protector sits inide your suit jacket to prevent creasing when it’s folded for travel. It comes in a small drawstring bag, with “how to” instruction on the back, for added convenience. Available instore now for $99 each. www.workingstyle.co.nz

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 33

tech

by michael doyle

High tech and free speech collide

“ L

ike” the First Amendment? Then prepare for a fight, as courts and employers figure out whether a simple click on Facebook deserves free speech protection.

It’s 21st-century technology meets an 18th-century Constitution, and the real-world implications are starting to erupt.

In rural Mississippi, two firefighters and a police officer are serving 30-day suspensions because they hit “like” on a controversial Facebook post.

In Virginia, a sheriff’s department employee said he was fired for “liking” a page sponsored by the sheriff’s political rival. One federal appellate court already is being asked to weigh in; others surely will follow.

“As we continue to develop new media and new means of expression, it is important to ensure that they are constitutionally protected,” Rebecca Glenberg, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said in an interview.

When users click “like” on a Facebook

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post, their names are displayed next to the post.

They’re also visible to other users.

The Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering the case of Hampton, Va., sheriff’s department employees allegedly fired for using Facebook and other means to back their boss’s rival. One employee communicated the support by clicking “like.” Another wrote a Facebook post.

A trial judge concluded last April that “merely ‘liking’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection.” He said it wasn’t the kind of “substantive statement” that courts traditionally have protected.

The subsequent appeal is the first to consider whether a Facebook “like” falls under the First Amendment, Glenberg said.

Underscoring the case’s importance, the ACLU and Facebook have filed separate friend-of-thecourt briefs urging free speech protections.

“I am not aware of any other instances of an employee being fired for ‘liking’ something,” Glenberg said. “There is, however, a trend toward employers monitoring employees’ social media use, so the potential for this sort of thing is certainly there.”

The potential for conflict is so great, in part, because social media are so omnipresent. In its 26-page amicus brief, prepared by attorney Aaron Panner, Facebook – with 800 million users worldwide – says that “over 3 billion likes and comments” are posted daily.

In Columbus, Miss., for instance, city officials suspended firefighters Damon Estes and Erik Minga and police Officer Lance Luckey after the men “liked” a Facebook post by firefighter Brad Alexander. Alexander had written critically about the whereabouts of a woman whose 2-year-old child was hit by a car.

Alexander subsequently apologized and resigned.

As first reported by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, the Columbus City Council then voted 4-3 on Tuesday night to suspend the three public safety officers who’d “liked” Alexander’s posting.

“When you start talking about social media, it’s a new frontier,” Columbus City Councilman Kabir Karriem said Friday in a telephone interview.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 35

online

by michael hiltzik

US helps Amazon tighten grip on e-book sales

E

veryone knows that new technologies can upend old industries, whether the victims are makers of horsedrawn carriages or television broadcasters. A settlement made this month in a federal price-fixing case involving book publishers, Apple and Amazon.com shows that they can also turn the law upside down.

To hear the government talk, this is all about breaking up a conspiracy to drive up the price of e-books on your Kindle, iPad or other device. “Ensuring that e-books are as affordable as possible,” as Attorney General Eric Holder declared in announcing the original settlement in April.

What’s wrong with nipping a nefarious scheme in the bud, especially if the result is that Amazon.com, which was the supposed target of the alleged conspiracy, is liberated to resume selling e-books to you at the rock-bottom price of $9.99?

Plenty, if that price is designed to drive off all of Amazon’s e-book competition – and kill off the last remaining brickand-mortar bookstores too – so it can set its own prices as it wishes down the line.

To recap: In 2010, five major book publishers decided to change their sales method for e-books from the conventional model, in which online booksellers paid wholesale prices for the books and sold them for whatever retail price they chose, to an “agency” model, in which the publishers set every book’s retail price and the sellers took a fixed

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percentage of every sale.

The idea was (1) to entice Apple, which was just about to bring out the iPad, into the e-book market by guaranteeing Apple a profit on e-book sales, and (2) to create competition for Amazon. Amazon’s $9.99 price often meant it was selling books at a loss, presumably to cement its dominance of a market that it then controlled to the tune of 90 percent. The publishers imposed the agency model on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-book sellers too. The prices of e-books, which were keyed to the hardcover price, moved up to as much as $14.99.

The feds howled “price-fixing,” brought an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the five publishers, and settled with three of the five. Apple and two publishers, Penguin and Macmillan, refused to settle and are scheduled to go to trial next year. This month, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote approved the settlement. It requires the settling defendants to terminate their agency deal with Apple.

Amazon hasn’t commented recently, but did say when the settlement was announced in April, “We look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books.”

Before looking deeper at the background of this case, some obligatory disclosures. Of the three settling publishers, Simon & Schuster is the publisher of two of my books (and a forthcoming third) and HarperCollins two others. The four already published are sold in all e-book formats, including Amazon’s and Apple’s.

Moreover, while I still browse in bookstores and seldom exit one without a purchase, I do most of my reading on a Kindle; I’ve already ordered one of Amazon’s new “Paperwhite” Kindles, which look like a major advance in resolution. And I can’t stand reading on an iPad. As a book buyer, I’d love to get all my books at $9.99 or less; as a book author, I’d like my work to sell for more. As a reader, I delight in discovering new writers and new works that impinge on my consciousness from left field, as happens in a bookstore but never via the rigorously algorithmed recommendations pushed at me on Amazon.com.

So I’ve got all the conflicts faced by

any average reader, and a few more. But the most important concern that should be shared by all participants in the publishing world – readers, publishers, retailers, device manufacturers – is that it’s in no one’s interest to have a single company controlling 90 percent of the market.

No one, that is, except the big player, which is Amazon.

Amazon’s position in the e-book market was so close to unassailable at the time the publishers reached agreement with Apple that many in the industry are still reeling from the government’s response.

“I’m amazed the Department of Justice is so myopic in bringing this case,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the publishing market research firm Codex Group.

In essence, the government walked blithely past the increasing threat of an Amazon monopoly and went after the stakeholders who were trying to keep it from taking root.

Publishers have grounds for anxiety about Amazon. In 2010, they feared that the point had almost arrived at which no one would be able to enter the e-book market to compete with Amazon. Apple, in fact, already was muttering about the difficulty of turning a profit from e-books in a world ruled by Amazon pricing. Barnes & Noble, the dominant brick-and-mortar book chain, had zero percent of the e-book market and was staggering toward oblivion.

And it wasn’t as though Amazon has acted as a benevolent dictator. Instead, it seemed to delight in testing its market power over publishers. In early 2010, for example, it responded to the publishers’ deal with Apple by picking a fight with Macmillan, removing the “buy” buttons from its pages featuring Macmillan titles and removing Kindle versions of those books from sale. After a few days, Amazon backed down, but no one in the trade missed this sign of what the future might hold.

Therefore, it’s rational to believe that once it drove all its e-book competition into the ground by predatory pricing, Amazon would feel free to stop subsidizing e-books as loss leaders and set prices high to maximize its profits at the expense of publishers, authors and readers.

Cote bought the Justice Department’s argument that such an outcome was “speculative.” Well, yes, the future is always speculative. Yet the same federal agency fought Microsoft for years over very similar allegations – including the contention that by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser in its Windows software, Microsoft was aiming to drive browser competitors, especially Netscape Communications, out of the market so it could control pricing and distribution by itself.

And it’s worth noting that publishers were so terrified of this speculative prospect that they agreed to an agency deal that made them less money in the short term – the online sellers’ commission on e-book sales was an enormous 30 percent – on the reasoning that having more competition in the market would help them in the long run.

In any event, the publishers’ counter play did work. Amazon’s e-book market share fell to 60 percent from 90 percent after the publishers moved to the agency model. Ironically, the surprise winner was Barnes & Noble, which now has at least 25 percent of the e-book market, served by its Nook e-reader. In May, Microsoft shored up the company’s efforts

Amazon’s position in the e-book market was so close to unassailable at the time the publishers reached agreement with Apple that many in the industry are still reeling from the government’s response

by pledging to invest $605 million in the Nook business over five years.

Critics of the government’s e-book case, and of the judge’s endorsement of the settlement, say the fundamental error lies in treating the relevant market as the book market. It’s not. What’s at issue is the e-book market, which is inextricable from the sale of proprietary e-book readers like the Kindle.

“An e-book has no value to the consumer outside the device,” said Bob Kohn, a music and copyright lawyer who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case – inventively presented in graphic novel form to meet the judge’s directive that it be no longer than five pages. That introduces the “network effect”: because an e-book sold by Amazon can be read only on its Kindle or a special Kindle app for other devices, such as an iPad, every e-book purchase from Amazon tends to enhance its grip on the market, and thus its power to set prices as a gatekeeper.

Kohn has asked Cote to stay her ruling until it can be appealed. If she refuses, Amazon will be free as soon as next week to resume $9.99 e-book pricing. Book buyers will think they’ve gotten a bounty, but Amazon will have some of its old power to build toward a monopoly, albeit from a lesser competitive position.

Technology is confronting publishers with plenty of stories. Finding an audience for unfamiliar new literary voices is immeasurably harder online than in the aisles of a physical bookstore. People may read more after buying a Kindle, but buyers of the iPad and the multimedia Kindle Fire may not. Games, video, Facebook, Twitter, all compete with books for the customer’s attention.

The last thing publishing needed was to compound all that with the resurgent threat of a single domineering retail behemoth. Yet with this settlement, that’s what they’re getting.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 37

science by celina kareiva/mct

Sleep remains a mysterious – but necessary – process

T

hese days it’s easy to dose a bad night’s sleep the day after with coffee or energy supplements. But research now reveals that nightly eight hours might affect more than just whether we feel drowsy during an afternoon meeting. Sleep can affect how much money we make, what we eat and where we live.

That’s what journalist David Randall discovered in researching: Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (Norton, $25.95), which explores the little-understood world of sleep, a science that many believe is on the cusp of its golden age.

Randall says he was inspired to write the book after he started sleepwalking and went to a doctor for help. “Science doesn’t know much about sleep,” Randall’s doctor said. His advice: Take it easy and hope it doesn’t happen again.

“People forget about sleep because they think it’s this break from life, this elegant on-off switch,” Randall says. “You forget it’s a third of our lives.

That third is really a missing part of the puzzle in terms of how we live.”

He spoke by phone from New York; this is an edited version of the conversation.

Why is sleep such a little-understood science?

We still don’t really know what (the evolutionary purpose) of sleep is. It’s not just rest, because you can rest in a hammock all day long, but after about 24 hours, you’re going to be in bad shape.

That’s one reason why sleep scientists feel like they’re in the golden age of this science. Sleep scientists only discovered REM sleep in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. Before that, most scientists and most doctors thought their responsibilities ended as soon as you fell asleep. Now there are over 75 sleep disorders recognized.

You’re unpacking an everyday part of our lives. What did you find most interesting about this topic?

The chapter on how sleep helps us learn was

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fascinating to me. It looks like dreaming is the time our brains make connections to what’s important.

You pick up so much information throughout the day: what my voice sounds like, what the person next to you is wearing. Maybe sleep is the time where your brain chucks what’s not important You say that more than 75 sleep disorders have been recognized. What do studies reveal about insomnia?

For a long time people thought that insomnia was a by-product of depression, and now they’re realizing that perhaps depression is a by-product of insomnia. Somebody who suffers from insomnia, it’s almost like they need sleep so badly, they can’t get it. So you can think yourself into that cycle.

How does the culture of sleep differ around the world?

One of the problems several multinational companies have when they open offices in China, is that people there still tend to have an afternoon nap.

They might fall asleep at their desks. An American manager thinks: “This guy is sleeping at work, what’s going on?” It’s a bigger cultural issue. In Spain there are still siestas, but in 2008 the government severely curtailed them for government workers. A lot of it is cultural. You don’t want to give up the natural rhythm of life.

There’s this growing industry around fatigue management – money being poured into energy drinks, caffeine pills and sleep aids. What do you make of this?

There are two parts to it. There’s the stimulant side of it, which is the caffeine and coffee drinks – that part is more the reflection of the times. It’s so much easier just to forget about sleep, it doesn’t necessarily have a really high importance for most people.

The other side is the fatigue management, and that’s growing. Researchers, businesses and governments are realizing that especially for people who have to make important decisions again and again, some

really bad things can happen if you have sleep-deprived people.

In the book I talk about this big fire at Texas City. A refinery that made jet fuel blew up, and it was a terrible accident. The report afterward tended to pin much of the blame on fatigue.

That’s what helped some of these big, global oil companies realize we need to put fatigue-management systems in place.

It’s not an altruistic thing. We’re realizing that these accidents are leading to a loss of money.

Did your research help with your own sleepwalking?

It did, but I have a 6-week-old baby at home, and it’s our first. All that goes out the window the first couple of months.

But if you talk to as many scientists or read as many research studies as I did, you have a much healthier respect for it.

I feel calmer and more aware of my surroundings. I feel like I pick things up quicker – and much of it’s because I’m no longer sleep-deprived.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 39

music

by randy lewis

No Doubt may ‘Push and Shove’ its way back to the top

A

couple of big questions loom before the members of longrunning rock group No Doubt as they prepare to re-enter the fray of contemporary pop music with their first new album in 11 years, “Push and Shove”: Does the world even remember who they are and, if so, does it still care?

“Where do we fit in?” bleach-blondMohawk-coiffed drummer Adrian Young, 43, asked during a break in rehearsals recently in Hollywood ahead of a string of high-profile TV appearances the group is making in coming weeks. “I still don’t know. (The first single) ‘Settle Down’ is on the radio right now, but I don’t know where this album is going to fit in. It may carve its own niche.”

Singer Gwen Stefani took an even more pragmatic view of the question: “Where did we ever fit in?”

That realization spurred frontwoman, main songwriter, fashion designer, cover girl, celebrity mom and solo pop star Stefani to embrace a Zenlike attitude while working for the last 2 years with her long-time cohorts on the album they’ll present to the world this month.

“It wasn’t like we were trying for anything more than just to enjoy the moment, and to be in the moment,” said Stefani, 42, looking like, well, the rock star she is in a monochromatic black, asymmetrical-collared jacket, white tank top, trim slacks and fourinch silver stiletto heels, her blond hair pulled back in an anarchic ponytail, one small perfect wave curled above her right ear.

“It took so long,” she said. “If we were just waiting for it to be done, it would have been a waste of life.”

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Dan Jackman/WENN.com

To almost any other act, an 11-year gap between albums would constitute several lifetimes outside the fast-churn world of pop music. But No Doubt has remained committedly resilient through a 25-year career that produced one of the cornerstone pop albums of the 1990s in “Tragic Kingdom.” It spent nine weeks at No.1, and spawned one of the defining singles of the era, “Don’t Speak,” Stefani’s soaring ballad about the dissolution of her seven-year romance with the band’s bassist, Tony Kanal.

“That’s the story of No Doubt,” said Kanal, 42, as he sat across from Stefani.

They co-wrote all the lyrics for the new songs – a first in the still-evolving musical partnership that long ago transcended their romantic relationship. “Through all the tough stuff we’ve gone through – and you can name 50 things – we’ve always persevered. And through all those obstacles – it sounds really cliché to say it – but we’ve always come out stronger.”

Is it possible, though, for a band that’s been around this long to exert a significant influence in a world now dominated by the frothy youth pop of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and American Idol – none of which existed when No Doubt got started?

In that regard, No Doubt is virtually unique.

“We don’t feel like they’ve ever left, because Gwen is in the forefront of pop culture,” said John Ivey, program director at Southern California Top 40 radio powerhouse KIIS-FM. “With her and Gavin (Rossdale, Stefani’s rock-star husband) and the babies, her (product) endorsements, her clothing line: When you have all that other stuff going for you and your brand is so big, you can be a little bit slower in putting out your music.”

Pop radio isn’t the only place where No Doubt is still generating interest this far down the line: The NFL featured the group during the kickoff game for the 2012 football season, the band performed in July on ABC’s Good Morning America, it will launch the two-day I Heart Radio Festival in Las Vegas on Sept. 21 and will visit The Ellen DeGeneres Show the week the album drops. It’s also playing six shows

Pop radio isn’t the only place where No Doubt is still generating interest this far down the line: The NFL featured the group during the kickoff game for the 2012 football season Nov. 24 to Dec. 4 in Los Angeles.

The album features a cadre of au courant programmers including Anthony Gorry, Jonas Quant and Wayne Wilkins, and Major Lazer and Busy Signal on the title track.

The guest talent helps bolster the album’s broad stylistic range – from driving electronic dance music (“Looking Hot”) and dreamy synth-pop (“One More Summer”) to romantically yearn-

ing dancehall reggae (“Sparkle”) and melancholy dance pop (“Undercover”) echoing No Doubt’s earliest efforts.

“We wanted it to sound modern,” guitarist Tom Dumont, 44, said, “but we’ve openly said the album is really made up of influences of things we grew up with.... It opens the question of what is modern? When I hear ‘Settle Down’ on the radio, it still doesn’t sound like anything else.”

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 41

bookcase

by michael morrissey

Diary of a millionaire MAKING A DIFFERENCE

By Owen Glenn Random House, $39.99 When I was a young man, New Zealand couldn’t muster a single millionaire. Now all it takes is owning a house in Ponsonby. Currently, we can boast several billionaires. None seem to enjoy the limelight more than Owen Glenn who has become our most high profile philanthropist.

Publicity has largely focused on his $7.5 million donation to the University of Auckland Business School which earned Glenn an honorary doctorate. Not bad for a boy from Mt Roskill who never enjoyed the privilege of a higher education. Less known is his providing of education benefits for rescuing exploited children in Kalimpong, India (where Glenn was originally born) through the Glenn Family Foundation.

Initially, Glenn worked in a bank, then he went to England in search of adventure, worked a number of low rent jobs, did time for TEAL but found his true calling with air freight forwarding. Since I am not a business person I found it hard to follow many of his short snappy jump cuts to success.

Sometimes he just says opportunities arose so he took them. No details. Or casually says he wound up with seven companies and 1800 employees.

It was only when the swiftly moving account gave clear specific details of undercutting the opposition that his formula for success became clearer.

His company charged $20 a kilo whereas his rivals charged US $50 a kilo. They gained business hand over foot. “My Initiative!” Glenn

understandably crows. At one stage, his business made Chinese economic growth looked retarded – they were expanding at 20-25 per cent per year.

Glenn, at least on his own account, comes across as a guy who continually looks for a way to undercut prices, expand or roll with the punches.

On the personal side, no details are given about why two marriages broke up. Wife Number One got the house and children and Wife Number Two walked out of the marriage. It seems that Glenn was as unlucky with marriage as he was lucky in business.

Mind you, the business success comes across as keen enterprise rather than luck.

Glenn is emotionally honest – on one occasion he admits to punching someone.

A combination of his second wife walking out and the might of the United States Federal Maritime Commission reduced him to tears.

On proving the severity of his divorce situation, the USFMA took a more lenient approach. So bureaucrats do have hearts!

If you think Glenn was intimidated by doing a course at the Harvard University you would be wrong. A combination of speed reading, up front attitude and cheeky humour saw him pass through with flying colours .His recent enormous grant of $80 million dollars to help the under privileged of Otara has had a hugely beneficial effect in several ways, among them neighbourhood watch schemes, murals and music.

As good business practice, Glenn advocates passion for the job, a good work ethic, integrity (no bribes taken

42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

or offered!) and generous in success while being gracious in defeat. All business folk, please take note!

It’s been bouquets so far, now for some brick bats. Glenn is too ready to praise himself and at times the text tends toward one long self-endorsement, if not admiration. Also the book reads as though it has been dictated and typed up rather than properly edited – clichés and repetitions abound. Glenn’s ace in the hole, so to speak, is several glowing testimonials affixed as an index. Yet in general, I believe Glenn is the beneficent force that the book affirms him to be.

Compare him with Indian or Russian billionaires, and I know who I’d prefer.

Throw in an endorsement from the much liked Mad Butcher and Winston Peters coming off second best, and Glenn looks good for more smooth sailing. Bon Voyage!

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

By Antony Beevor Weinfeld & Nicolson, $60 It’s been an article of faith that the Second World War began with Germany invading Poland on September 1, 1939 and ended with Japanese surrender in August 1945. Now brilliant historian Antony Beevor has reasserted what might have been the obvious – that in the Asian theatre, that terrible war began with the Soviets engaging Japan a month earlier and ended six years later with the same two sides in conflict. Japan’s defeat at Khalkhin Gol, he believes, was instrumental in persuading the empire to strike south into the Pacific rather than support Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Without the reinforcements Stalin was able to bring from the Soviet far east, having become certain Japan would not invade, Hitler might well have captured Moscow in 1941.

Like all of Beevor’s work, this book

reveals his engaging ability to switch from the military to the personal.

A sample of Londoners’ reaction to German bombing: “Red pillar boxes had yellow patches of detector paint sensitive to poison gas. Windows were criss-crossed with strips of sticky paper to reduce the threat of flying glass. The crowds had changed too, with many more uniforms and civilians carrying gas-masks in cardboard cartons. Railway stations were packed with evacuee children, luggage label tied to their clothes, indicating their names and addresses, clutching rag dolls and teddy bears.”

One would have liked more of such human detail but after all Beevor has the entirety of the war to cover. He is at his best when describing such cauldrons of war as Stalingrad, Kursk and Guadalcanal where he expertly conveys the furious energy, the appalling conditions and the sense that the battles could go either way until some decisive last minute factor enters the fray. In the case of Stalingrad, the arrival of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards.

The desperate but enthralling battle of Stalingrad has been described many times – and by Beevor himself in an earlier book – yet in this more compressed form, one is struck by the

number of innovations that ensured Russian victory – the use of small fighting units erupting out of sewers equipped not only with the usual weapons but sharpened spades, the devastating effects of katyusha rockets, and the extraordinary role of women. Not only did they excel at sniping, they flew obsolete Po-2 wooden planes over enemy lines. When they turned off their engines, the resultant eerie swishing sound earned them the name of night witches. The bravery of women orderlies in retrieving the wounded was also exceptional.

The beleaguered 62nd Army led by General Chuikov (his name oddly not indexed) held off the vastly larger Sixth Army until it was secretly encircled.

Beevor points out that had the more impetuous Rommel been in charge instead of subservient Paulus, things might have turned out differently.

Rommel’s notable skills as a military strategist are well explored. Like so many German generals he felt – though he less than most – he had to obey

Creole Belle

By James Lee Burke Simon & Schuster, $27.99 If all crime novelists were as thoughtful and nuanced as James Lee Burke, we could finally put to rest those groundless prejudices against genre fiction.

The specter of regret streams through Creole Belle, the 19th book in the series about Robicheaux, a New Iberia, La., homicide detective. Grim thoughts plague him: “My history is one of alcoholism, depression, violence, and bloodshed.

For much of it I have enormous regret. For some of it I have no regret at all, and given the chance, I would commit the same deeds again without pause. ... “ Robicheaux has good reason for wallowing in the uglier parts of his past: He almost made death’s acquaintance at the end of the previous book, The Glass Rainbow. He saw that ghostly paddleboat on the river with his dead parents beckoning and would have boarded it himself if not for a timely rescue by his brutish but loyal best friend, Clete Purcel.

That brush with mortality, though, has left Dave brooding – and a bit addled from morphine. He believes a local Cajun

Hitler’s orders which were more the stuff of grandiose fantasy than military reality.

The book is arranged in overlapping time segments so that the narrative switches abruptly from the eastern theatre of war to the western and vice versa.

This device makes clear that the tide of war began to turn in the allies’ favour from mid to late 1942. Freyberg, like Montgomery, receives praise and criticism but Chiang Kai-shek emerges more favourably than in previous accounts.

Every theatre of war is covered in this vast conflict. In the last chapters, Beevor does not flinch from describing the hideous experiments on human subjects, known cruelly as “logs”, and the systematic Japanese cannibalism of POWs – this gruesome practice was not dealt with in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal because it was considered too upsetting for the families involved. Overall, this is probably the best single volume history of the Second World War thus far.

singer, Tee Jolie Melton, visited him in the hospital and left him an iPod onto which she loaded some of her favorite songs.

But Tee Jolie has been missing for weeks. Her teenage sister is missing, too. And so Robicheaux sets off on a quest with Clete to find them, which leads him to the usual collection of malcontents, slackers and habitual criminals, the venial and the truly evil, including bickering members of a contentious, wealthy family; a bitter, racist former cop; crooked big businessmen; a death camp survivor whose story doesn’t quite ring true; and an abused, angry, mysterious young woman who may be an assassin – and Clete Purcell’s daughter.

As always, Louisiana comes fully alive, from the peaceful fog of the Bayou Teche to the manic streets of New Orleans.

Ever present is the state’s Achilles heel: its deal with the demon – oil – that fueled its economy and ruined it, too.

Such contradictions trouble Robicheaux, but for him, “the greatest riddle involves the nature of evil. Is there indeed a diabolic force at work in our midst, a satanic figure with leathery wings and the breath of a carrion eater?” Even if there isn’t, “Creole Belle” makes a strong case that there’s more than enough bad in humankind to drag us all down.

Reviewd by Connie Ogle

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 43

movies

by kenneth turan

Money, power and psychological baggage

A

rbitrage is not about greed or frustration or police corruption. It’s not about family bonds or loyalty or racial discrimination.

But all those elements are incorporated into this multi-layered, suspenseladen film.

Richard Gere stars as Robert Miller, a hedge fund magnate whose greed led him to lose hundreds of millions.

To save himself and sell the company before his troubles become known, he resorts to fraud.

In the midst of trying to close the deal of his life, Gere’s character is also trying to keep his mistress (French actress Laetitia Casta) happy. As they hit the road for a trip, Miller gets the pair into an accident, and the mistress dies.

He begins to dial 911, but he reconsiders and instead abandons the scene of the accident in the hopes that investigators might think that his mistress was alone in her car. From a payphone, he calls Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker) the son of

one of his longtime employees, for help.

Miller’s plan was carefully designed to eliminate any evidence linking him or Jimmy to the accident, but detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth) catches on anyway and decides he’s going to put Miller in jail for the crime no matter what he has to do.

On the business front, Miller’s daughter, played by Brit Marling, finds out about the company’s troubles, and the potential buyer engages in some underhanded pressure of his own to try to negotiate a better price.

Writer and director Nicholas Jarecki, has put together a wonderfully balanced film. Viewers will never feel overwhelmed as the numerous psychological elements play out, nor will they feel torn from one storyline to the next.

The production of the film strikes the perfect tone. Tight shots, dark scenes and a slow, intense score by composer Cliff Martinez (Contagion and Drive) will captivate audiences as they try to

Gere portrays his conflicted character with the exact depth the role requires. He’s the perfect worried, brooding businessman

cling to every word exchanged in the numerous tense one-on-one scenes.

And, finally, the acting talent in this movie is phenomenal.

Gere portrays his conflicted character with the exact depth the role requires. He’s the perfect worried, brooding businessman. The character’s intelligence and shrewdness practically pop out of the screen, yet you can still believe that he’s also a loving family man who adores his grandchildren.

His charm may leave some viewers actually rooting for his character to get away with everything.

Parker (a University of Oklahoma grad) delivers a strong performance as an ex-convict trying to put his life back together who’s struggling with his feeling of indebtedness to Gere, who helped him after his father died. A particularly strong scene involves Parker and Roth as the detective tries to get Jimmy to confess by telling him that Miller doesn’t truly care about him.

Marling also captures the nuances of her character well, as the loving daughter who has to decide whether to continue the charade once she realizes that her father is not who she thought he was.

And despite the little screen-time she gets, Susan Sarandon nails the scenes that portray her as Miller’s knowsmore-than-she-lets-on wife.

The final scene doesn’t wrap things up as cleanly as most films do, which works just fine, symbolizing yet another aspect of the messiness that is life.

ARBITRAGE Cast: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Nate Parker, Brit Marling Directed by: Nicholas Jarecki Running time: 100 minutes Rating: PG-13, for language, violence and drug use GGGG

44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

T

he Master takes some getting used to. This is a superbly crafted film that’s at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn’t want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness.

It’s a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behaviour, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing.

Its writer-director, of course, is the all-out visionary Paul Thomas Anderson, an all-in filmmaker whose previous work such as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood explored strong and compelling personal conflicts. But none are stronger than the one here between a man completely sure of himself and another who is completely not.

The latter would be Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix at his most ferocious), a troubled, tortured World War II veteran whose contrived cockiness can’t mask the torment he lives with. The intense connection he makes with Lancaster Dodd (an impeccable Philip Seymour Hoffman), the charismatic leader of a new human potential movement who claims he’s found a way to “return man to his inherent state of perfection,” powerfully affects them both.

The parallels between Dodd and his movement, known as The Cause, and the real-life presences of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology are plentiful enough to have attracted considerable attention, but those looking to The Master to be some kind of muckraking expose are going to be disappointed.

“Rootless” is a mild word to describe Freddie Quell’s life. We meet him on Guam in the closing days of World War II, a sailor getting so hellaciously drunk that simulating sex with a woman constructed out of sand seems like a hell of a good idea.

After making a mess of his post-war job as an in-house photographer in a department store, Quell gets into trouble because of the toxicity of the moonshine he enjoys cooking up. Then, one night in 1950, completely drunk, Quell wanders onto a yacht docked in the San Francisco Bay, passes out, and wakes up in a world he never imagined.

That world is under the control of Dodd, the master of all he surveys who in fact enjoys being called “Master” by his small group of followers. Dodd describes himself to Quell as someone who does many things – “writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher” – but who above all is “a hopelessly inquisitive man.”

On the yacht with his new wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), to oversee the wedding of his daughter, Dodd sizes up Quell immediately, frankly telling him “you are a scoundrel” but allowing him to stay on the boat if he promises to keep brewing the moonshine that Dodd approvingly sampled while its maker was passed out. What fascinates Quell and everyone else on the boat about Master is easy to see in a confident, magnetic performance by Hoffman that owes as much to Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane as anyone else. Dodd is a showman and an unexpectedly idiosyncratic thinker, someone with a gift for language who casually drops phrases such as “leave your worries for a while, they’ll be there when you get back. Your memories aren’t invited.”

What Dodd sees in Quell is murkier and less straightforward. Wife Peggy says “you seem to inspire something in him,” and the man himself calls Quell “my guinea pig and protégé,” which may be closer to the truth. If his theories and practices can work on Quell, Dodd is perhaps thinking, they can work on anyone.

The ideas behind The Cause, as we get them in bits and pieces, turn out to be a witch’s brew of psychology, mind control and science fiction that involves outer space, past lives and a battle Dodd characterizes by saying, “this is something you do for billions of years or not at all.” It’s no wonder that Dodd’s son thinks his father may be making all this up as he goes along.

The heart of The Master are the scenes where Dodd and Quell have at each other, especially the situations where Dodd applies psychological methods he calls “processing” (a word Scientologists use as well) to his attimes reluctant adept. “Electricity” is a mild word for the formidable charge that passes between these two, and though it’s disconcerting that the relationship between them gets murkier rather than clearer as time goes on, that is perhaps the point.

The only other recognizable names in The Master’s strong cast are Adams, excellent as always as Dodd’s tough-asnails true-believer wife, and a fine Laura Dern as one of Master’s early disciples.

THE MASTER Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Price Carson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson Rating: R, for sexual content, graphic nudity and language Running time: 137 minutes GGGG

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 45

Amy Brooke

“Who will free us from the yoke of Western Civilisation?”

One of the most culpable things about the blatant untruths parents have been told about how well our children have been doing in schools, and what a great education system we have, is that supposedly international standards have been used to “prove” we are right up there near the top.

This is particularly relevant when it relates to the tools of thinking and the ability to use language well. New Zealanders’ use of language, both written and spoken, is in fact poor – very much because of the dereliction of, or deliberate planning by, our official educationists. Decades of withheld teaching became very obvious well before the end of last century.

Long curious about this, and knowing that my own research and practical experience – let alone following what four sons were encountering in their English classrooms (no sign of any challenge to excellence, nor highly capable teachers supposedly producing such great results in the muchquoted surveys) – I began to check out these international standards. One of the most well-known was the muchinvoked IPA literacy assessment of the 1970s, still trumpeted by the education bureaucracy in the early 90s. It was

apparently a feather in our cap, New Zealand children being right up there among the top achievers in literacy standards, writing and reading.

Only it was completely untrue.

Somewhere, feet deep in boxes of research material I still have the evidence that New Zealand children’s performance ratings ranged from about 49 to 51 % in formal literacy writing skills – their showing poor. We apparently performed adequately in informal tasks such as the non-demanding, colloquial language one might use writing to family or friends. When it came to evidence of well-structured learning and competence with words, using grammar and syntax well, those tools of analysis so fundamental to good thinking, we failed, in formal writing skills. These are now a lot worse understandably – for very good reason. But we’ll come to that.

In other words, the results were

Today, even Ph.D. graduates don’t know, never having been taught to understand when a sentence should end. Nor did this bright boy have any idea what a verb or noun was – let alone the extraordinary mystery of a present participle…

46 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

fudged, the country told the opposite of the truth. So, too, with an Australasian English competition won by one of my fourth form Latin pupils at a local state school where I’d agreed to teach part-time, two sons having thankfully avoided the tedious propaganda of Life Skills classes by opting for, and passing well, School Certificate Latin instead – one while in Form 3, the other in Form 4. (Incidentally, once this option appeared, other boys also asked to be transferred from Life Skills.

However, its teacher reportedly flew into a temper, pressuring the principal – not exactly famous for his courage, although a pleasant and helpful individual – and he lost his nerve. They remained very reluctantly excluded from Latin classes.)

However, what was interesting was that this pupil winning the English competition had minimal competence in written English, no idea even where he should use a comma or full stop.

Today, even Ph.D. graduates don’t know, never having been taught to understand when a sentence should end. Nor did this bright boy have any idea what a verb or noun was – let alone the extraordinary mystery of a present participle…

Particularly interesting is that it was very difficult for him trying to learn, at about the age of 14, rules of English grammar and syntax far easier to

assimilate down at the primary school level, before the adolescent brain moves into a different functioning mode. It was uphill work to teach him Latin grammar and syntax, even though our classes were fun – as he had no idea of the English equivalents.

What I then went on to discover made sense – there are optimum learning times when the pliable, younger brain can absorb far more easily what an older mind must set out to methodically learn, using tools of logic instead.

The reason this boy won the competition was that he had at home a wonderful heritage of English literature he was very familiar with – as his parents refused to have a television. It was his knowledge of stories and their authors which won him his placing.

I recall my incredulity, too, when reviewing the much-vaunted PISA 2000 literacy assessment written on in more detail elsewhere. Once again New Zealand pupils were apparently up there with the best. But in line with the new emphasis on anything except actually teaching English in schools, edged out by media studies, filming, advertising, computer technology – anything electronic substituting for actual language teaching – this vaunted assessment had very little to do with genuine literacy. Its jargonridden emphasis was on all the above, and being able to “recognise” icons, billboards, advertising slogans.

What changes? As recently as 2010, in an article sent to me by Craig C. Jackson, long fighting to re-introduce the very important practice of teaching spelling well, the Sunday Star Times pointed out that nine out of every 10 primary school children were failing to meet the new national writing standards...with the ministry holding this information back. No surprises there. The standards had been set to check how well young New Zealanders can put their thoughts into coherent sentences. Largely, only those who work very hard, or are lucky enough to come from a well-educated family, have any chance of achieving this. For the rest…? “It was like…he was like…I was like…awesome, Bro, Gidday mate…me and Sarah…I dunno…Him and me decided…”After all, just basic

“communication” is what our dumbeddown ministry decided was the most important thing when officially jettisoning teaching of grammar and syntax in the new English curriculum that Lockwood Smith, completely out of his depth, presided over in the early 90s.

The primary teachers union? Wonderfully true to form, they decided that if 90% of young New Zealanders were failing very basic standards, well, then, rather than teachers having to lift theirs, it was of course, the standards at fault.

To make sense of all this, New Zealanders urgently need to confront something very important – that, in the early 20th century, it was decided to destroy Western civilisation, with no more important battleground than that of the education arena. This is not a question of any conspiracy theory – the pejorative name-calling enemies of the truth use to ridicule opponents they fear…

Essential reading, for those with the sense to be seriously concerned about the highly destructive attack on our European-derived culture and the values that underpin it, should be The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan…* However, without far more realising that we already have another very real,

great war on our hands, it may now be too late. That “long march through the institutions…” the schools, colleges, universities, theatre and film, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, the arts…parliament and the judiciary all long infiltrated … “each had to be captured and converted and politicised into an agency of revolution…with fellow Marxists urged to form popular fronts with Western intellectuals who shared their contempt for Christianity and bourgeois culture, and who shaped the minds of the young”.* And for a highly accessible and excellent analysis of the battle for our children see Australian Commentator Bill Muehlenberg – http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/09/04/educationwars-the-battle-for-our-children/ The problem for our children and grandchildren is – who is actually winning? © Amy Brooke www.amybrooke.co.nz www.100days.co.nz www.summersounds.co.nz

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 47

Matthew and Madeleine Flannagan

Critiquing the case for same-sex marriage Equality and Non-Discrimination: According to the General policy statement of the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill (“the Bill”), the justification for affirming same-sex marriage as a human right is the notion of equality and non-discrimination.

The General policy statement provides: “This Bill amends the Marriage Act 1955 (the principal Act) to ensure that its provisions are not applied in a discriminatory manner”; it goes on to state, “Marriage, as a social institution, is a fundamental human right and limiting that human right to 1 group in society only does not allow for equality.”

The problem is that the Bill itself goes on to apply the provisions in an unequal and discriminatory manner.

Schedule 2 of the Bill provides a list of prohibited degrees of marriage; fifteen different classes of people are explicitly excluded from being able to marry. Further, the General policy statement and sections 4 and 5 of the Bill explicitly exclude unions where there are more than two people.

The Bill does this regardless of whether such unions are consensual, and the parties in question love and are committed to each other. It does this despite Sections 4 and 5 each repeating the idea that marriage should have no regard for “sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

In doing this the Bill itself blatantly and explicitly applies the law in a discriminatory manner, it limits “the human right to marry” to only 2 classes of people in society, while excluding many more.

If equality were a valid basis for rejecting the Marriage Act as it stands then it is an equally valid basis for rejecting the Bill. Proponents of the Bill cannot have it both ways; the appeal to equality either refutes both or neither.

The drafters of the Bill clearly recognise that it is not unjust to legislate Marriage in a discriminatory manner.

They make it clear, by the inclusion of Schedule 2, that they do not really believe that all classes of people should be allowed to marry if they want to; further they make it clear and that sexual orientation is a legitimate ground for marriage discrimination.

Of course one can gerrymander the position and claim that it is not unjust to apply the law in a discriminatory manner; rather, it is only unjust to do so when the union in question has only two partners and is not between people in

If equality were a valid basis for rejecting the Marriage Act as it stands then it is an equally valid basis for rejecting the Bill. Proponents of the Bill cannot have it both ways 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Oct/Nov 2012

the sorts of relationships the law restricts (which, incidentally, parallel the relationship restrictions prohibited in the bible identically). But if one does this then it is apparent that the only reason for adopting this modified position is that it both allows same-sex marriage and avoids other counter examples above.

The reasoning then is circular; one adopts the premise because it fits the preordained conclusion and then argues for the conclusion on the basis of the premise. The arguer assumes what he attempts to prove and commits the fallacy of petitio principii.

Slogans that people have a right to marry whomever they love are just that, slogans. People do not have a right to marry whomever they love. If someone loved their sister or brother, or mother, or loved their two best friends, they do not, in virtue of that fact, have a right to have the state solemnise or recognise these relationships as marriage. Nor does the Bill enable people to marry whomever they love.

Analogy with Inter-Racial Marriage: At this point, some play the race card. The state would act unjustly if it refused to recognise someone’s union on the basis of their partner’s race. It is argued that refusing to recognise someone’s union on the basis of their partner’s sex is analogous to this, and so it is unjust for the same reasons.

The analogy is questionable. First,

it assumes that discrimination on the basis of race is on par with discrimination on the basis of sex. It is not. If a mall had racially segregated toilets that would be an outrage, but having separate toilets for the sexes simply upholds privacy. Refusing pregnancy services to people on the basis of their race would be racist, but refusing pregnancy services to men is sensible.

The point is that there are important physiological differences between men and women that justify treating them differently in various contexts that are not present between races, so racial and sexual discrimination is not on par. Until proponents of this Bill are willing to offer pregnancy services to men and prosecute all mall owners that have male and female toilets, we can safely put to one side the idea that discrimination based on a person’s sex is on par with racism.

Further, anti-miscegenation laws differ in important ways from the prohibition on state recognition of same-sex marriage. Advocates of the former object to someone’s union because their partner is of a different race; the thinking is that people of different races are physiologically different, they come from different clans or ethnic groups. The position is based on the idea that other races are inferior; it is part of a broader attempt to keep people of different races apart to avoid the inferior contaminating the superior.

Whereas those opposed to same-sex marriages object to someone’s union because their partner is the same-sex.

Like the prohibition on incest, the issue stems from the physiological similarity between the couple. The objection arises because the couple are from the same group as each other. This means the rationale is very different; the position is not based on the idea that other sexes are inferior, neither is the intent to keep members of the same-sex separate to avoid contamination. On the contrary, it is based on notions of other sexes being equal and complementary.

Imposing views on others in a Pluralistic Society: Other slogans fare little

better. It is argued that the Marriage Act presupposes a controversial moral

position that homosexual conduct is wrong, which many people now reject in a pluralistic society. One cannot, therefore, impose it on others who do not share that view (but apparently one can impose the view in reverse).

The problem is that the Bill also presupposes a moral position which many today reject: that consensual adult incest, polygamy and polyandry is wrong. Under this Bill the state will not recognise such unions even though some in a pluralistic society accept these practises. If this Bill passes then the new law will be imposed on others in the same way the present law currently is.

Again, if this argument refutes the status quo then it refutes the Bill.

Rejoinders to the Incest, Polygamy, Polyandry Argument: Above we have

offered arguments that reference incest, polyandry and polygamy. Note: we are not here making a prediction; our argument is not that if we recognise same-sex marriages then inevitably, at some point in the future, the state will pass laws recognising incestuous, polyandrous or polygamous unions.

Rather, our point is that several of the major arguments for same-sex marriage employ premises which, if true, logically entail that incest, polyandrous and polygamous unions should be legally recognised; those who make arguments from equality, nondiscrimination and pluralism are rationally committed to this conclusion.

It is true that legislators are unlikely, in the present climate, to recognise such unions and do not advocate doing so – Schedule 2 being Exhibit A of the case in point. This, however, is the point, their actions in doing so show that their stance is irrational. When the topic is not same-sex marriage they recognise that these arguments do not work, and they do not advocate acting in accord with them. If they are to rationally advocate for same-sex marriage proponents need to offer different arguments – ones that are sound!

Many people will undoubtedly respond with outrage and will apply derogatory labels to us over this article.

They re-join that sex with member of the same-sex is totally different to

incest or polyandry or polygamy; they will point to features of these practises which mean there is good reason to not recognise them in law.

None of these responses will be adequate. Expressing outrage is not an argument, it is simply an expression of dislike for another’s position; casting labels is not an adequate response either, doing so commits the ad hominem fallacy. The issue is not whether you like what we say but whether our arguments are sound.

Pointing to differences between incestuous and same-sex unions also misses the point. We never said that homosexual conduct was like incest in all respects. We pointed out that the premises of the arguments in question commit one to drawing conclusions about incest; this is not the same thing.

Finally, pointing out that there are good reasons for not recognising incestuous, polyandrous or polygamous unions, actually proves, rather than rebuts, our argument. Those who make this point illustrate that one can legitimately discriminate against sexual practises and sexual orientation.

They show that one can discriminate against people on the basis of how many partner’s they have and on the basis of whether the partners are of the same kin as them – same-sex relationships between relatives cannot be state sanctioned. They hold this position despite the fact that such unions may be loving, consensual and between adults.

This shows that the issue is not equality, discrimination, love or consent. It is about whether good reasons exist independently of these features for the prohibition in question (apparently social norms based on biblical texts amount to good reasons in any context other than same-sex relationships). Consequently, appealing to these features as though they themselves provided good reasons is a red herring and it is not good enough to justify a law change.

Matthew Flannagan is a Auckland based Theologian, and Ethicist Madeleine Flannagan is a Lawyer at Coast Legal. Together they blog at MandM.

Oct/Nov 2012 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 49