Investigate, April 2006 by Investigate Magazine

PLUS: Mark Steyn on canaries Richard Prosser on NZ in 2046 Miranda Devine on climate change & James Morrow catches Fisk out

INVESTIGATE

April 2006:

Attorney-General Caught Filing False Documents

Attorney-General

Cabinet minister David Parker’s business dealings raise major questions - full story inside

Port Security

Bounty’s Legacy

Soviet Europe

NZ Port Security Threat

Issue 63

China’s richest man wants to buy NZ ports, but he’s linked to the Chinese military

Orwell’s 1984 stalks Europe An old foe is back and gaining power

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Volume 6, Issue 63, April 2006

FEATURES

HARD KNOCKS CAFE

Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paid to uphold the law. In fact, Attorney-General David Parker is arguably the highest judicial officer in the New Zealand constitutional process. But Parker and a former business partner have fallen out over a failed cafe renovation and property deal. Now, IAN WISHART has discovered evidence that Labour MP David Parker has filed false statements to the Companies Office, a situation putting his position as Attorney-General in jeopardy

THE TROJAN HORSE

28 32

Business pundits are hailing an attempt by giant Chinese multinational Hutchison group to purchase controlling stakes in major New Zealand port operators. But is it really a Trojan horse for the Chinese military? IAN WISHART profiles the murky dealings of billionaire Li Ka-shing and his ties to gun-runners, WMD components and spying for the Chinese government

BOUNTYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LEGACY

IS EUROPE THE NEW SOVIET UNION?

Last month we brought you a blow by blow account of the Pitcairn Island appeal hearings. Now, RACHEL ROBINSON is back with the verdict, and its impact on the island that time forgot

The push to unite Europe under a common flag is moving ahead at breakneck speed, but as PAUL BELIEN reports, a leading Russian dissident is warning Europe is well on the way to becoming the new Soviet Union, complete with its own version of the KGB, Europol, and he warns the impact on the rest of the world will be huge

46 64

Cover: PRESSPIX

EDITORIAL AND OPINION Volume 6, issue 63, ISSN 1175-1290

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft NZ EDITION Advertising

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Contributing Writers: James Morrow, Rachel Robinson, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Paul Belien, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow and the worldwide resources of Knight Ridder Tribune, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Design & Layout

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Editorial Pope on the ropes Miranda Devine on climate change Mark Steyn on canaries Richard Prosser on NZ in 2046 James Morrow on Robert Fisk Chris Carter on prison numbers Did Abraham really exist?

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

The role of the Fourth Estate

t cannot fail to have escaped the attention of some that Investigate has come under the most direct attack against a media organization by a sitting Government since at least 1982. Labour, unsurprisingly, was not impressed by last month’s cover story on David Benson-Pope or the magazine’s subsequent revelations on its website. The vitriol reserved for Investigate by the Government’s heavy-hitters in the debating chamber wasn’t reserved at all: they let it all hang out. Steve Maharey, described by John Tamihere last year as smarmy and by Christine Rankin in our January issue as a hypocrite, lashed out at Investigate saying ““no person in their right mind would use that journal as a source of information”, and “anything in Investigate magazine is a nonsense by definition”. On Newstalk ZB, Helen Clark tried to laugh it off initially by sneeringly refer“Labour is the party in power, ring to us as “that ridiculous the party levying taxes, and magazine”, while she told another radio station that Labour is the party that should Investigate was “a strange litbe held to account” tle magazine”. As more than one correspondent told us: “I’m not suggesting for a moment you should care what Maharey thinks. I’m sure you already knew you were on this moral wasteland of a government’s death list.” Yeah, we knew. But within 24 hours of issuing her challenge to Investigate and our witnesses to “put up or shut up”, Helen Clark must have been wishing she’d never said it as student after student emerged from the past to counter David Benson-Pope’s claims every time he made them. The fact that the government loathes Investigate is nothing new, although for the ninth floor it seems to be turning into something of an obsession. Truth is, we’re an equal opportunities publication. This magazine has annoyed the Right in the past, and probably will do so again once the government changes. But that’s the key point: it is Labour that is in power and has been since the first issue of Investigate six years ago, and it is the media’s role to act as “watchdog” on the excesses of the Executive. The Opposition is not in power. The Opposition has no vast swathes of public servants doing its every bidding. Labour is the party in power, the party levying taxes, and Labour is the party that should be held to account. In Benson-Pope’s case there is the added dimension of bul-

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

lying. This was a Minister who was regarded by many as a bully in Parliament, going beyond the call of duty in personally savaging his opponents. It has come as little surprise to discover that the bullying began in his school classrooms. And bullying is a serious matter. Just ask the family of the 12 year old Waikato girl who took her own life after being bullied by text message. Are we on the one hand to wring our hands in horror and call for full reports on the problem of bullying, but somehow sweep it all under the carpet if the bully is a teacher or Labour MP? Does it suddenly become a “witch-hunt” just because the bully bursts into tears and complains? Apparently so. Well, Labour probably won’t like us again this month, as we bring you the story of an Attorney-General in trouble with the law. The position of Attorney-General is an ancient and prestigious one, dating back to around 1200 AD when the King decided to put a lawyer on staff to represent him in disputes and provide advice on how to handle certain issues of state. David Parker, one of the new intake Labour MPs in 2002, has risen quickly through the ranks and was appointed Attorney-General as well as Transport and Energy Minister last October. He’s even been on a private tramp with Helen Clark. But again, is an Attorney-General who files false statements with the Companies Office really the guy you want as New Zealand’s top judicial officer? If he did it by accident, nine years in a row, what does that tell you about his attention to detail? If he did it knowingly, what does that tell you about his callous regard for the law he has sworn to uphold? That’s why the media need to pursue people in power and hold them to account, even if they do break down and cry: because if we don’t watch out for the public interest, who will? Speaking of battlers for the public good, a tribute to Orewa’s Ned Halliburton who passed away a couple of weeks ago. Ned is the reason you are no longer forced to pay a TV licence fee, after he and his supporters mounted a legal challenge to what they saw as an illegal tax. One man can make a difference. Our condolences to Grace.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006,

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES FOR THE RECORD

The following is an excerpt from the website-only version of the story we ran last month. We reprint it here to provide context for the following comments: One woman has told Investigate Benson-Pope walked unannounced and uninvited into the girls dormitory while they were getting changed after a mud run. “He knew we were in there. It was straight after the mud run, he knew we were all in there getting changed and things like that and he just wandered straight on in, and thought he had the right to do that.” The woman says up to twenty-five girls aged 14 and 15 were in various stages of undress, some fully naked, during Benson-Pope’s “visit”. “Girls were naked and in the process of getting changed.” She says the Labour MP lingered, staring, for 30 seconds, before finally getting out because of the pandemonium his presence was causing. “Screaming and yelling and telling him to get out, and all this swearing.” The woman says it was the second time that day BensonPope had attempted to see the schoolgirls undress. “He walked in on the showers one time, then later on that day walked into the dorm room while we were getting changed. Straight on in.” This incident happened at the fourth form camp in 1997. The woman told Investigate she and the other girls were embarrassed and dumbfounded that a senior male teacher felt he had the right to enter the girls’ dormitories at all, when it should only have been female staff permitted. “He’s an a***hole. He really is. I don’t know if any other students did, but me and my parents made a formal complaint about it, but nothing was done about it.” She says they took their concerns in the first instance to Bayfield principal Bruce Leadbetter. “We were told to write a letter and it had to go in front of the Board of Trustees. But that never happened.” Also for the record, this woman was not one of those who appeared on TV. Her full story remains exclusive to Investigate. Editor

THE BENSON-POPE AFFAIR

After just watching the John Campbell interview with Benson-Pope it reminded me of being hit over the hand

, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

with a wet bus ticket. Yet something else this Government will get away with; it is rotten to the core. We have paintings that are signed but not painted by the Prime Minister, a PM who let drivers take the fall for her so she could get to a rugby game, while telling us it dangerous to speed. Ministers short on the truth, Mr Benson Pope being caught out in parliament and not resigning. Mind you, I suppose that apart from this magazine the media in this country is gutless and will not stand up to them. I somehow think Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser would have turned in their graves. I grew up hearing stories about these great men what a pity that this bunch aren’t fit to lick their boots. Richard Cordell, via email

FEMALE STUDENT #1

I was a deeply traumatised child when I was at Bayfield High school. My home life was, to say the least extremely abusive, and I carried the weight of that. It made me a target of bullies when I was at school, I mean I had victim on my forehead. Looking back now I can understand the bullying from my peers, it seems the way of things. What I find hard to accept and understand now as an adult is that a number of the teachers joined in on this bullying. Benson-Pope was high on that list. Although he was never physically bullying towards me like some of the reports he seemed to take great glee in emotionally bullying me. Benson-Pope liked his status as a “cool teacher” amongst the popular kids, and seemed to enjoy joining in on the bullying of the weaker, different kids. He was my German teacher and I dreaded going to that class as I was made to feel inferior and stupid almost every session. I lived in fear from a lot of sources back then and I feared him. Not as I said because he was physically abusive towards me but that I took an emotional battering every time I walked into that class. He would laugh with the other kids, who thought his taunts were terribly amusing. His taunts were not just about my academic ability but my appearance, my voice, my demeanour. At the time, I put up with it because it was all I knew, but I have to say it hurt. I dropped out of high school as soon as I could, running away from an atmosphere that was hurtful and well, yes abusive. Name and address supplied, Dunedin

FEMALE STUDENT #2

He was not well liked among the kids in my year, or by too many people at all! He came across to me as really arrogant, self important and a little sleazy, and could be very domineering and intimidating to students who didn’t obey him. Benson-Pope also taught my mother at Bayfield High School in the 70s. He was new to teaching then and according to my mum he was not well liked then either. She says he quite often used scare tactics to get students to obey him. I do remember one incident involving him when I was in 4th form at a school camp at Tautuku [1998]. I remember that the girls were in their dorm getting ready for a tramp and we were all mucking around and taking ages to get changed. Benson-Pope got quite agitated and just marched on into the dorm without knocking or any warning at all and yelled at us all to hurry up. At this stage quite a few of us were still trying to get changed. I’m not sure if anybody reported this incident to the other teachers but it was talked about for a few years after that and it didn’t do much for his image with the students in my year! Name & address supplied, Dunedin

MUCK RAKING

Ian Wishart, in rasing the behaviour of a teacher 25 years ago, is contributing to the worst form of muck raking. Benson-Pope’s behaviour - by the vast majority of former pupils’ accounts - was within the bounds of what was acceptable behaviour for teachers back in that time. Investigate long enough and you will always find one or two ex-pupils that have it in for their former teacher. Society has changed hugely in the last 25 years. 25 years ago Mayor Tim Shadbolt went to prison for saying “bulls**t” in public, now Wishart writes it all the time and he hasn’t been sent to jail, yet. Destroying someone’s life just to sell your newspaper should be a crime. Ian Wishart is an idiot and not fit to describe himself as an investigating journalist. There is little or no balance to his stories. Many good capable people who may have committed a minor mistake in their younger years do not enter or serve in public life because of the kind of crap Wishart and others are putting a good hardworking cabinet Minister through. The pen is mighty than the sword, but with writing comes much responsibility. Wishart should think (if that is possible) about that before he destroys someone else’s life with his muck raking. Alex Dobie, Opotiki District Councillor, Opotiki Wishart responds:

For a politician you show a remarkable lack of appreciation of the democratic process. People elected to public office, like yourself, are open to public scrutiny because of the power and responsibilities they carry. They are not royalty. They wield, in our system at its highest level, absolute power. Clearly from the content of your letter, I believe you’re condoning a male teacher bursting into a girls dormitory while 14 year girls were naked or getting dressed as “within the bounds of what was acceptable behaviour for teachers back in that time”. I’m presuming that breaching the Education Act by applying corporal punishment to the thighs of schoolgirls eight years after it was banned was also “within the bounds” as you see it, along with punching a boy in the face for talking.

And then you preach to me about balance. Truth is not decided by a popular vote. Truth is decided by facts. Did Benson-Pope do it or didn’t he? I couldn’t care less if he was the most popular teacher in the country, or the most hated. The opinions of people who think he’s “a good guy” are irrelevant. All that matters are witnesses. Did he do it or didn’t he? Investigate is not investigating “any” teacher. We investigated the past of a pontificating, lying and arrogant cabinet minister in a pontificating, lying and arrogant government. The problem with this country is that so many people have lost sight of what is right and wrong that they get confused, like you, when wrong is exposed. And for the record, these events happened only eight years ago, not 25.

DON’T BLAME THE VICTIMS

I see from the ‘Oldfriends’ website that some people say that the allegations made were by ‘bad’ students and if something like that did happen, then it was justified. I do not agree with this point of view. Regardless of provocation and how ‘likeable’ the students are, teachers are not there to ‘punish’ children outside the allowed levels (sadly that was caning back then). If you are being truly fair in your investigation into teaching methods, I hope you mention the excellent teachers that some of them were, such as Dave Richmond (geography), Mr Prusad (maths), Mr Goldsmith, Mr Ross Nottman, and Peter Wilson (physics). All these teachers took an interest in their students often giving up their free time to coach teams, tutoring and so on. Michael Styant, London

A CULTURE OF BULLYING

The culture at Bayfield was certainly difficult. I was bullied myself during the fourth form which led to my parents removing me from the school at the end of that year, and sending me to Queens High for girls instead. Certainly Benson-Pope didn’t assist as far as doing anything about the bullying I suffered from the boys in my class, and nor did the principal. I do recall the boys in the class bullying the science teacher too (whose name escapes me) - until he cried! Nothing was done about the appalling level of teaching we were (not) receiving. I would certainly agree that there was a culture of accepting bullying behaviour within the school, although I don’t recall anything specific about Benson-Pope. Name supplied, London

NO FEMALE TEACHER PRESENT

In regards to the recent news articles about David entering the girls showering/changing room on the 1997 camp, I was on this particular camp and was around that area at the time. I saw him enter the room then exit only moments later there is no reason for me to believe anything untoward happened other than the fact that he entered an area which he should not have. In the time I knew David yes, there perhaps were a couple of times that it was felt he had crossed the line. Although I am sure that this is common for schools in general at one time or another. I can say that I hadn’t seen a parent or teacher walk in before him in fact I don’t recall any other authority figures around, to my knowledge male teachers were not allowed to enter within the show-

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006,

ering/changing rooms area. Besides, in this day and age it seems common sense not to even put yourself in a situation like that Name and address supplied, Dunedin

MISPLACED TRUST

Following the misplaced trust of some Bayfield High parents who put their children into Mr Benson-Pope’s care and protection, it is unthinkable that he now has authority for making decisions affecting all New Zealanders. Unshackled processes of law should be allowed to either clear Benson-Pope or bring justice. Humiliation and loss of dignity suffered by girls involved in “shower room and dormitory” incidents deserve an official apology. Respect for Parliamentarians suffered serious erosion following Paintergate, Corngate, Dalzielgate and Speeding Copsgate. While Benson-Pope remains, public cynicism, even disdain, toward MP’s is reaching a new low with increasing questions raised regarding his leader’s judgment and character. Issues of morality and justice are in virtually all legislation passed. The public needs confidence that MP’s given this responsibility are trustworthy and able to make just, fair, wise decisions, applying their reason, intelligence, conscience and character. The Ombudsman should not withhold any material of public interest regarding Benson-Pope’s character and judgment. Greater public disclosure should be demanded of MP’s, not lesser. Public should be confident that Benson-Pope has not used his position to exert pressure and prevented prosecution or release of public interest information. Jennie McKeown, Kaukapakapa

SUPPORT FOR BP

I think Mr Benson-Pope was a good teacher who simply ran a tight ship and didn’t tolerate nonsense. If you behaved etc, he’d look after you, as he did me. If you were a loudmouth, continually disruptive or a rabblerouser then he put them in their place effectively, but not over bearing. It worked. I’m appalled that in this now nanny state of over PC-ness that these incidents are being brought up. I was in England not so long ago, and a teacher took pics with her cellphone of a class out of control, why? Because PC-ness has gone so far she’s barely allowed to say the wrong words. In her photos she had views of pupils wielding chairs, the lot, and SHE got chastised for violating their privacy! This sort of thing against Mr BP is going to breed this sort of thing here. I’m not sure whether the allegations are aimed at claiming money, or just besmirching him, but I find it absurd, especially almost quarter century later. The man has gone on to do lots of good things for people here as a Labour MP, including the civil union bill, which for me may well be my hope to finding love, as I am gay. Name & address supplied, Dunedin

WITCH HUNT

You are an excellent investigative journalist. However I am afraid to wonder if you have crossed the barrier that entraps the professional investigator of any code.

10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

Rather than keeping your investigation objective, you have fallen prey I’m afraid to subjective analysis. Essentially, you have allowed your emotions to get the better of you and entered the realm of subjective analysis that unfortunately I believe you will lose. It is now apparently clear to the public of New Zealand that you are pursuing some sort of ‘Witch-Hunt’ for justice against David Benson-Pope through the media. Whether your motivation for such a ‘Witch-Hunt’ is indeed ‘justice’ is actually the true reason, leads me to suggest this is indeed what you ‘would like the public’ to believe too. However, as I believe you have crossed the barrier of objective journalism, I am afraid my perception of your investigation into David Benson-Pope has now become nothing other than a ‘ratings’ and/ or marketing ploy for not only the business you represent, more so self-promotion and the lowest common denominator an investigator can stoop to, money. Leighton Smith, Invercargill Wishart responds:

A couple of points to consider. Firstly, money wasn’t the object here and by releasing a major update to our printed story via our website for free, we undoubtedly will have harmed our sales of that issue. We made that decision in the public interest. Secondly, while the rest of the media pursued David Benson-Pope for months, this is the first time we’ve covered it and suddenly we’re responsible for the fall of Western civilization as we know it! Perhaps I can put this into context. I pursued the Winebox Investigation from the same motivation – a belief that the system needs to work properly or it affects all of us. I honestly wasn’t interested in the Benson-Pope saga last year because other media were covering it and doing a good job, by and large. It was only when Benson-Pope intervened to prevent the police report being released that our news antennae were tweaked. You need to understand, I was once a Labour Government PR advisor back in the 80s, so I understand spin when I see it. These were exactly the same skills I brought to the Winebox. I have no interest in pursuing him to the ends of the earth. I have no interest in seeing him jailed, nor would I expect him to be. But I also know that if the Fourth Estate fails to hold the Executive directly responsible when it lies to Parliament then the media is not doing its job. Benson-Pope is the human face of a bigger constitutional struggle going on here. Any investigator assembles evidence and weighs it up. In this case, we collected statements about Benson-Pope’s behaviour and determined that we had a prima facie case of wrongdoing which directly contradicted his assurances to Parliament last year. I had to prepare our stories to a courtroom standard because of the risk of being sued if we were wrong. I didn’t publish mere innuendo: I have complaints from named students either on tape or in writing. Ultimately the decision as to whether BP should resign or not is a political one, and it’s a debate properly conducted by the House, but at the same time there is no conflict in my role as an investigative journalist in continuing to test everything that BP and Labour say, and showing where conflicts exist that may by politically damaging. When I was young, I went through journalism school with the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate scoops still fresh. Those men didn’t topple Nixon with their first story. It took months of weekly

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revelations, each compounding the effect of those prior. Today, New Zealanders might see Woodward and Bernstein as muckrakers on a witch-hunt, but there was clear constitutional merit in their pursuit of the President. Modern journalism, sadly, flits from subject to subject without giving the indepth coverage that was once routine, and modern politicians know it is only a matter of time before modern journalists get bored with a story. I make no apologies for taking a more pitbull approach to investigating governments. Finally, this could all have been nipped in the bud had BensonPope or Helen Clark opted to do the honourable thing. Instead, the Prime Minister chose to up the ante by declaring at a news conference: “Put up or shut up!”. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, former students at Bayfield High spent the next week “putting up”, so much so that Labour then tried to get the public onside by bursting into tears and calling it a ‘witch hunt’. Helen Clark asked for evidence, and at every step it poured in, exposing her Minister’s statements as misleading at the very best, and outright fabrications at worst.

THE DEEPER YOU DIG…

First let me start by asking “what is inappropriate behaviour”? If you take the case of Benson-Pope and how he acted and lied about it, that to me is inappropriate yet he gets off scot-free. To me some of the teachers did act inappropriately, but I guess that is by my standards not theirs. These teachers are there to make sure that they teach to the best of their ability some ordinary and some difficult students. I feel that a few of the teachers at Bayfield let power go to their heads and this showed through in their teaching methods. I remember being told by teachers that I would amount to nothing because I was a bitch. When this teacher was confronted by myself and my mother she had Benson-Pope there with her and nothing was done. I was therefore called a liar. I was suspended by Benson-Pope because I got claustrophobic on a boat. So do I feel that teachers acted inappropriately? Yes. A lot went on in this school particularly in 97-98 when Mr Leadbetter was leaving. The school was a bit messy to say the least. I feel that you are looking into a never ending void because whatever you find out about teachers whether they were sleeping with students or something else, it will all be swept under the rug. Name and address supplied, Dunedin

WHEN I KISSED THE TEACHER

Bayfield has a bit of a reputation for pupils marrying, or getting into relationships with teachers, not necessarily while they were at school but certainly after. I can think of two at least that are still going strong. However, in my form there was a girl who was apparently sleeping with a PE teacher and now that we all think back she was in nearly every sports team he coached. He had team barbeques at his house too. He was “advised to leave” but the grapevine said that they were still together, at least for a while after he had left. The affair began while she was in sixth form and into the seventh form. Name and address supplied, Dunedin

AND THEN HE HIT ME

Yes, David Benson-Pope hit me in the face at the 1998 camp as well as my friend. He did go in to the girls shower area. Rory Gullen, Dunedin

CAA APOLOGISES

Last year I wrote to your magazine in response to an article entitled "Zulu Kilo Down" by Neill Hunter which had been published in your March issue. Unfortunately my letter contained incorrect information which led to my assertion that the families of the deceased had failed to provide flight and duty time information to the Civil Aviation Authority accident investigator. My letter stated that incomplete details of the pilot's flying in the days prior to the accident had been included in the draft report provided to the families and other interested parties in February 2004, and inferred that the missing flight records, which they held, should have been given to the investigator to enable him to correct the errors in the draft report. I have since been informed that the correct flying times had earlier been provided to a member of the staff of the company which employed the two deceased, on the assumption that the company would have passed the details on to the investigator. Unfortunately the company had no record of receiving the corrected information so the investigator was not aware of its existence until after his final report had been completed. I wish to apologise unreservedly for any distress which the content of my letter may have caused to the families and to assure them, and all of your readers, that any implied criticism of their actions was based on the mistaken belief that they had not made the corrected records available prior to publication of the final report. John Jones, Director of Civil Aviation, Wellington

CLARIFICATION

Given that I did not give myself a "role" or a designation, and you may not have kept up with what has happened within the IAS, the mistake of addressing me as "Hilary Butler is director of the Immunisation Awareness Society in Auckland" on pg 73 of the latest issue of Investigate, is an understandable lapse, both on my part and yours. I can't think of a suitable title to call myself. I am what I am. However, as I have not had any formal relationship with the IAS for some years now, the principle movers and shakers of the IAS will be surprised for me to have such a title. If there is such a role as "Director" it could be assigned to Sue Claridge, but there are also other member who likewise do very valuable work there. I am not one of them. I simply got annoyed at the Government's narrowly prescriptive approach of the Bird Flu issue, and wrote the article in the capacity of an annoyed potential consumer, or non-consumer as the case might eventually be. Hilary Butler, Auckland

Letters to the editor can be posted to: PO Box 302188, North Harbour, North Shore 0751, or emailed to: editorial@investigatemagazine.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 13

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE The climate change industry

controversial climate change advertisement made by Dr Tim Flannery for a solar company finally made its official debut this month on Adelaide television after a much-publicised “censorship” row. In the ad, Flannery, the director of the South Australian Museum and popular author of The Weather Makers, declares: “Climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity today. But there is something you can do about it.” That “something” is to buy solar panels from the Solar Shop, an Adelaide company with the motto “We’re doing Kyoto anyway”. The company donated a modest sum to Flannery’s museum in return for his self-scripted services, its marketing con“Anyone with the barest sultant, Leonard Lee, says. undergraduate knowledge knows The Solar Shop might have remained in obscurity if that computer modelling, on which not for a decision a week climate change science relies, is earlier by Free TV, the body representanything but a perfect science, industry ing commercial free-to-air no matter how powerful television, to pull the ad, the computer” on legal advice. With the South Australian election on March 18 and the Greens campaigning on solar energy, Free TV believed the ad could be political. Lack of proof for Flannery’s assertion that climate change was humanity’s “greatest threat” might breach trade practices legislation, so Free TV requested the words be changed to “one of” humanity’s greatest threats. The Greens screamed about “inexcusable censorship” and the Solar Shop got free plugs on every weekend news bulletin. On the Monday, Free TV reversed its decision. It was a marketing dream for the Solar Shop and a textbook example of the sort of intimidation and media boosterism that enables exaggerated green fear-mongering to run unchallenged. The Day After Tomorrow apocalypse scenario might be Hollywood gold and give nightmares to impressionable schoolchildren, but it will only backfire on the environmental movement. There is no dispute among scientists that natural climate change is occurring, and has occurred for millions of years, as evidenced by the “snowball Earth” scenario of 600 million years ago and the

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Ice Ages and “little ice ages” recorded between temperate periods. What is debatable is how much climate change is now caused by humans; that is, how much is the result of burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, creating the so-called “greenhouse effect” and global warming. The entire premise of the Kyoto agreement, which celebrated its first anniversary last month, and of the multibillion-dollar global warming panic industry rests on this debatable proposition. Of course, in an era in which most people haven’t a clue how most of the high-tech equipment they use every day works, it is easy to bamboozle them with science. But anyone with the barest undergraduate knowledge knows that computer modelling, on which climate change science relies, is anything but a perfect science, no matter how powerful the computer. A computer model is a simulation of reality, which begins life as a line drawing of inputs and outputs. The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO – garbage in garbage out. The confusion in the public mind about climate change is not helped by the unverified assertion that it is readily controllable, if only we sign Kyoto, drive hybrid cars and stick solar panels on our roofs. The misconception is fuelled by an unhealthy development in the scientific community: instead of engaging in open discovery, scientists who express scepticism about the extent of human-caused climate change are pilloried as despicable outcasts, and agents of oil companies. To survive they fall into line or keep quiet while their more ideologically pure peers are feted as super-heroes saving the world from catastrophe. The ABC’s Four Corners recently ran a story hailing as heroes some CSIRO scientists who claimed their warnings about greenhouse emissions had been censored by the Federal Government. Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier Group, Nine Lies about Global Warming, says the real censorship is applied by the scientific establishment to those scientists who express scepticism about the global warming “consensus”. A retired climate expert and founder of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, Garth Paltridge, says he

was threatened by the CSIRO with funding cuts in the 1990s if he expressed his doubts about the extent of the effect of greenhouse emissions. As for the supposed consensus among scientists about climate change, the Lavoisier report also cites a study (rebutting a more celebrated study) which found that of 1117 learned papers on a scientific database between 1993 and 2003, “only 13 (1 per cent) explicitly endorsed the consensus view”. Almost three times as many (34), “rejected or questioned the view that human activities are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’.” But as sceptics are silenced and consensus is feigned, increasingly confident pronouncements are made in the media and at climate change conferences about imminent catastrophe, without the necessary layer of scepticism or proof. For instance, a story from the Reuters news agency in December claimed that residents of the Pacific island of Tegua in Vanuatu were among the first, “if not the first”, climate change refugees, forced to flee sea level rises

caused by global warming. Yet the Lavoisier report points out that the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, funded by AusAID, has found no evidence to support increasingly hysterical claims that islands are being submerged because of rising sea levels caused by global warming. Tegua has had no overall sea level rise in the past 50 years, and there has been a decline in the number of tropical storms in the South Pacific. The Lavoisier Group – founded by Peter Walsh, a former Labor finance minister, in 2000 to counter the views of Kyoto boosters - is dismissed by green groups as an industry mouthpiece. But it is doing what the scientific community should be doing – applying scepticism to the near-religious fervour behind much of what passes for debate about climate change. Scientists are supposed to have open minds, and pose opposing theories without fear of condemnation. The consequences of crying wolf on environmental matters may be that future generations will stop listening. Which may or may not be a bad thing.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 15

STRAIGHT TALK

MARK STEYN Canaries in history’s mineshaft

n five years’ time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year old Paris disc-jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents’ apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam’s throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.” Is that a gripping story? You’d think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, another Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You’ve got the makings of a mini-trend there, and the “Even in the most civilized media love trends. Yet no major French societies, there are depraved newspaper carried the story. monsters who do terrible things. Last month, there was But what inflicts the real lasting another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found damage on society as a whole by a railway track outside is the silence and evasions of Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. the state and the media and the He died en route to hospibroader culture” tal, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan’s screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Koran. This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no antiJewish element. Just one of those things. Couldda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, “Jews equal money”. In London, The Observer couldn’t even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi’s, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, The Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but

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only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by “radical young Jewish men” who’d attacked an “Arab-run grocery”. At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture. A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59% of Europeans regard Israel as a “threat to world peace”. Only 59%? What the hell’s wrong with the rest of ‘em? Well, don’t worry: in Germany, it was 65%; Austria, 69%; the Netherlands, 74%. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews. As Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the University of Sussex, wrote in The Guardian recently, “I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee.” It’s not surprising, when you’re as heavily invested as the European establishment is in an absurd equivalence between a nuclear madman who thinks he’s the warmup act for the Twelfth Imam and the fellows building the Israeli security fence, that you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to your own backyard, too. “Radical young Jewish men” are no threat to “Arab-run groceries”. But radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don’t care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history’s coal mine. Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:

“We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.” Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English Common Law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Sharia, and the other half’s feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that’s being going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media. What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch film-maker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction, and always has. The only difference is that they’re now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claim-

“Radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don’t care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history’s coal mine” ing jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them – as it did to Salman Rushdie’s translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural “respect” by Bill Clinton, the European Union, the United Church of Canada, etc. The I’d-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it. © Mark Steyn, 2006

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 17

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER The sins of the sisters

t’s a warm Sunday afternoon in late February, and I’m sitting in my office, browsing through some old files, doing a little research for a history text. Most are stored in fluid form in the plasma drive, but I have to fire up the old smart-chip reader to access the ones which I saved from the antiquated DVD format (only in 2-D, unfortunately), and, dare I admit it, there even a few pages printed on paper, using chemical ink! It’s been an unusually hot summer, anno domini 2046; one of the climatic glitches we are told to expect as the Earth cools through the rapid slide into the Ice Age. To think that we used to believe that the climate was getting warmer, and that we had something to do with it! They say this cycle may last “Contrary to what learning-age anywhere from 4,000 to junior citizens are being taught in 12,000 years. That’s a long time to be cold, and it’s their e-cubicles today, I remember comforting to know that the United States as being a the new pebble bed reactor down near Dunedin will friend of our country, looking keep the home “fires” burnafter us even while we refused ing long after I’m gone. I some folks still have to look after ourselves” know qualms about the emissions from fission plants, but I’m pushing eighty and I’ll qualify for the pension soon, and damn it, I want to be warm in my dotage. Besides, Premier Xu-Chin says they’re safe enough, and it’s true that we haven’t had an incident since we gained protectorate status back in 2029, which is more than can be claimed for the North Australian Muslim Territories. Safe fusion? Yeah, right. I’m reading about the early 21st century, the tumultuous decades which saw the old New Zealand fractionated, reassembled, fallen into decay, and finally absorbed into the Greater Chinese Empire in 2017 – appropriately enough, the Year of the Rooster, or as it became popularly known in New Zealand, “the Year the Chickens came Home to Roost.” It’s always been a fascinating time for me; I lived through it, and reading over old articles, “newspaper” reports, blogs, and even history books, it’s sobering how so few people realised what was happening. With hindsight, of course, it’s easy to pick where the causes of many

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of the old problems began; anyone could stand for office back then, even those without parenting experience, and politicians were allowed to pay people to vote for them – though naturally it wasn’t called that; “welfare” was the name given to such payments. Reading a few regular commentators, it becomes apparent that the world order was changing as early as the turn of the century. Mother China was emerging as a global power even then, and the United States, without moral or effective military support from the old European Union (and from only one of the three blocs into which it split), found itself overstretched in dealing with the twin threats posed by the expansion of pan-Islamism, and the SinoIndian confrontation. I shake my head when I recall how so many of us believed that America would last forever; even as she has faded into a secondary power, as did Britain and Rome before her, I and many others of my generation remember the awesome might with which the old US kept the world’s peace. We took it for granted, rode on its back, and some even resented it. Contrary to what learning-age junior citizens are being taught in their e-cubicles today, I remember the United States as being a friend of our country, looking after us even while we refused to look after ourselves. That the Government of those times had an unrealistic pacifist agenda is well documented and acknowledged these days. However the degree to which such a stance was endangering the citizens of New Zealand wasn’t fully realised by the public, en masse, until shortly after the Iran War of 2007. New Zealand’s military, effectively destroyed by the Last Labour Government during the early years of this century’s first decade, had no capacity at all to protect this country when the US was jolted from its perch towards the end of that same decade. With reluctant – and limited – support from NATO, the United States had acted to take out the developing Iranian nuclear capability (and conveniently, the Eurodenominated Oil Bourse as well) late in 2006, followed by a ground invasion intended to achieve regime change. They had tacit approval (of the “we’ll turn a blind eye” type) from both Russia and China, and the legal if embittered support of the UN (allowing the abduction and beheading of a team of IAEA inspectors probably

counts as a faux pas on the Iranians’ part); but no-one predicted that a desperate North Korea, fearing they would be next, would take it upon themselves to attack the United States. Only four of North Korea’s twenty nuclear-armed submarines made it through the US Navy cordon, but their successful warhead strikes on Houston, Miami, New York, and San Francisco did enough damage, and placed so much strain on the medical and industrial infrastructure of America, that she was forced to withdraw not only from the Middle East, but from Europe and Asia as well. There’s little reference to what used to be the country of North Korea after that date, and although legally it’s still a protected region of Mother China, it will be a very long time before it’s habitable again. That the nuclear exchanges never went any further than the North Korean strikes on America, the US retaliation, and the opportunistic Indian annihilation of Pakistan, is something we should all be grateful for, though the resulting Indo-Chinese standoff has probably done more to shape our world than any other event this century. When global trade stopped because of the conflict, in 2008, New Zealand suffered more than most nations. It was the restrictions brought by that enforced isolationism which led to the South Island briefly declaring independence, and Maori gaining sovereignty in Northland and the East Cape. Now that Japan has the bomb, I’m actually relieved – if not entirely happy – that Mother China can protect us, and that we’re a unified, if not united, nation again. Perhaps things would be better without garrison troops, but in all honesty, social control broke down so badly in the generation after the anti-smacking laws were passed, that I don’t think we could manage our young people without the discipline of the Chinese police anyway, and with half our population now being new colonists (and their offspring), they probably have a right to be here. I don’t think it had to be this way; Australia managed to preserve all of her sovereignty and most of her territory. When they ceded the lands north of the 20th parallel it was accompanied by a promise and a resolve to defend the remainder of Australia with armed force. Once again, old writings reveal differences between Australia and New Zealand back then. Australia knew it couldn’t hold back the tide of Indo-Muslim expansionism without the help that America was no longer able to provide; but they had invested in a Defence infrastructure which gave them the ability to act independently, and they were fiercely nationalistic. New Zealand, conversely, had experienced years of pacifist-oriented social engineering, driven by a powerful group of childless women – who came to be known as ‘The Sisterhood’ – who supported globalism, and opposed the maintenance of military forces. When the PLA warships sailed into Wellington Harbour in 2014, all that the crews of our Navy’s shiny new toy boats could do was salute. The Prime Minister prior to that time, one Helen Clark, had already been accepted as Secretary-General in waiting by the United Nations, when New Zealand first felt the effects of this lack of defensive capability. In 2008, a Malaysian Airlines A380 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Vancouver was hijacked by its own Muslim cabin crew and flown into the Skytower in Auckland, killing several thousand people on the ground as well

The things which caused New Zealand to go into decline were done deliberately, by people following an agenda entirely their own; that pacifism, socialism, feminism, globalism, and a profound dislike of the family, the military, men, industry, and democracy, were the motivating factors for the grouping who dominated the country at that time”

as all 800 on board. The attack was, naturally, in retaliation for the UN-approved US strikes against Iran. New Zealand’s Defence chiefs watched the radar helplessly for four hours as the aircraft approached on its suicide mission, lacking the air combat capability to prevent it. New Zealand, being a western country and UN member, was specifically chosen as the target of the alQuaeda linked terrorist group involved, because it was known to be defenceless. It is somewhat ironic that Clark, who was personally responsible for the axing of New Zealand’s air defence force only a few years previously, was amongst the casualties when the new UN headquarters in Brussels was bombed by another Muslim group, barely a year later, in 2009. Reading other commentators, it seems that social decay had affected other aspects of New Zealand society as well. Welfarism was deeply entrenched, and successive Governments had displayed singular and protracted ethical and moral corruption. Ministers of the Crown had been accused of such charges as forgery, electoral fraud, lying, drink driving, brutality, advocation of sodomy, and sexual impropriety. Historians have remarked that such behaviour would naturally be reflected within the wider population, leading to further social breakdown, and an accompanying reluctance on the part of the younger generation to take active part in the defence of their own society, or preserve their way of life. Looking back, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the things which caused New Zealand to go into decline were done deliberately, by people following an agenda entirely their own; that pacifism, socialism, feminism, globalism, and a profound dislike of the family, the military, men, industry, and democracy, were the motivating factors for the grouping who dominated the country at that time. I’m old and cynical, I know, but the events of the past halfcentury irk me somewhat. I look at what New Zealand was, as I remember it, and at the potential it had, and at what it could have been; and its decay from once-proud nation state, into weak socialist Chinese colony, just seems so unnecessary to me. I’d like to read further, but there’s a technician coming to fit new fuel cells in the hover van, and I have to cover up the converters before the next scheduled rain cycle. In the meantime I still have to think of a title for my history essay. Its focus is on how our present, and not our past, shapes our future; maybe I’ll call it something like The Sins of the Sisters being Visited upon our Sons.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 19

DOUBLE SPEAK

JAMES MORROW

Just unfiskable

s much as we like to think that in an age of high-speed internet access, satellite communications and jet travel, we who live Down Under are just as plugged into the global culture as those who hang their hat in England or the US the reality is somewhat different. Sure, it doesn’t take weeks on a steamer to get to Auckland or Sydney, but no matter how small the world gets, 24 hours from London or New York is still a long way to travel by plane – even when you’re sitting in the pointy end. Which is why whenever a celeb who rates b-list or above lands on our shores, it’s an occasion for big-time photo shoots and interviews. Such was the case with Robert Fisk’s recent visit to Australia “Robert Fisk, for those who still and New Zealand. Robert Fisk, for those haven’t heard of him, embodies who still haven’t heard of everything that is wrong with him, embodies everything today’s feral left. Like his that is wrong with today’s feral left. Like his ideologiideological compatriots, he is given cal compatriots, he is given to wild conspiracy theories, wrong to wild conspiracy theories, wrong and incomprehensiand incomprehensible to the point ble to the point where his where his name has become a name has become a verb, oh yeah, is notoriverb, and, oh yeah, is notorious for and, ous for backing the wrong backing the wrong horse” horse. No wonder he is, like all the best post-modern radicals, very, very well off. Fisk – who became a household verb a few years ago when he was beaten up by some kids in Afghanistan and wrote a column declaring that, had he been his assailants, he would have beat himself up to, and thus “to Fisk” became synonymous with a particular kind of point-by-point intellectual takedown – had occasion this month to visit Australia and New Zealand in the course of promoting his latest book, The Great War for Civilization. As a reviewer in America’s Commentary magazine notes about this 1,000-page doorstop of Fisk’s, it is hardly a work of careful scholarship: “First there is the problem of simple accuracy. It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in

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Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a “Gulf tribe” but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein’s rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth.” Of course, none of these inconvenient facts stopped the Australian and New Zealand media from paying due obeisance to this great crusading (can one still say “crusading” without getting into trouble?) journalist and hero. Fisk, who shortly before boarding his flight in London filed a column with The Independent blaming global warming (or is it “climate change” now?) on depleted uranium (atomically heavier than lead) floating around in the upper atmosphere in the wake of the first Gulf War, continued his sense-making once he landed. Consider this exchange with the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Eleanor Hall: ROBERT FISK: Somebody wants a civil war. I mean, if you really try hard and you kill enough people you may be able to produce this. ELEANOR HALL: So somebody wants a civil war? ROBERT FISK: Yes. ELEANOR HALL: You must have some clues about who. ROBERT FISK: I don’t have… I have suspicions, I don’t have clues. I spend a lot of time, when I’m in Baghdad, trying to find out who this is and what this is. Ah, yes. Suspicions. Fisk went on unchallenged in this and several other interviews; naturally, his book is destined for the best-seller list.

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LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER Te Henake

hat we now have locked up in the Henake 7651 prisoners, housed, incidentally at a cost per inmate of around $80,000 a head, is scarcely cause for community celebration, especially as most of us are well aware that if the police simply pursued and caught only half our current crop of car thieves and burglars we could quite easily double those numbers. In fact, in recent times one could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the reason that our previously very effective police force now seems to be largely ineffective in catching and prosecuting these types of thieves, is that there is really little point in doing so, because quite plainly there is nowhere to put them and, even if there was, the costs involved would be simply “Indeed most guys whether they will staggering. Add to this the now quite clearly emergadmit it or not would just love to give by ing trend where Judges are their V8 its head on an apparently increasingly handing out quiet bit of suburban road, but we pat-a-cake sentences for even quite serious crimes and one don’t, in the main, because of this gets the distinct impression healthy fear of the consequences” as a mere citizen/taxpayer that the wigged ones have received the word from their political masters, that with no more room at the inn, as it were, ”knock the Judge Jeffreys bit on the head” has become the new dictum, with increasing home detention or community service, fast becoming about the worst thing that a poor old judge has left in his or her bag of judicial tricks. OK, where does this all leave us then: the increasingly bewildered citizen who, on the one hand, is being told that we already have the second highest number, proportionately, of our citizens behind bars in the Western world, that as a matter of urgency, well according to the Minister of “Corrections” Damien O’Connor, we should think seriously of releasing/and/or no longer locking up in the first place “low level criminals” (whatever that might mean but presumably not including anyone who might burgle or rob a politician). All of which I guess leaves us with a seemingly insoluble problem. Crime and criminals are growing at an alarming rate despite the rigged crime statistics that the Government regularly trots out that cynically overlook the fact that enormous amounts of crime these days are simply not reported at

22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

all, because all but the truly stupid are well aware that the police do nothing beyond adding your report to their well stuffed unsolved crimes archive. Nevertheless, the facts are that we are locking people up wholesale, it is, without a doubt, costing us an absolute fortune to do so, and a high proportion of those that should have been “corrected”, apparently can’t wait to do another crime and thus return to that which appears to be a little other than their home away from home. Prison jargon describes a chronic recidivist as being a “boobhead” or in other words, a person who for a number of reasons has no fear at all about having received yet another custodial sentence, but evidence quite clearly shows that life on the “inside” for some people is apparently preferable to fending for yourself on the outside. Which brings me to the word “Fear”, which in its old English form describes a condition whereby an individual might have cause to be afraid or even terrified as to the consequences of proscribed wrongdoing. In other words, the law having as its very basis the application of fearful consequences, it might well be fairly considered that today we have simply allowed the fear factor to decline to the point where people no longer having cause to fear the law or its application, simply go ahead and do pretty much what they please. Now the normally law abiding citizen reacts pretty well to the legal “Fear Factor”, this being clearly demonstrated in the fact that the majority of New Zealand motorists stay fairly well within the posted speed limits on our roads, after all, most of us are fearful are we not, of collecting a hefty fine or even losing our license should we drive Toad-like through the city streets. Indeed most guys whether they will admit it or not would just love to give their V8 its head on an apparently quiet bit of suburban road, but we don’t, in the main, because of this healthy fear of the consequences. Yes, I know some will claim it’s a sense of responsibility that in fact stops you from doing this sort of thing and indeed this may be true, but nevertheless fear of the consequences remains a powerful disincentive to the normally law abiding, you can bet on it! So with all of this in mind, may I suggest, humbly, that I think that I may have found the answer. For prison to be an effective tool in our perennial fight against crime, logically it should be feared. Plainly, at the moment it is not, indeed as has been noted, a high pro-

portion of ex-prisoners apparently just can’t wait to be re-incarcerated. Why should this be? Well quite plainly, far from prison being viewed with any fear factor at all, quite the reverse state of affairs appears to be the norm amongst those who currently choose a life of crime, so perhaps this is where we could begin to reform the system, which in its turn might well begin to reform some of the people that we might otherwise have to imprison. We could begin by selecting a date in the not too distant future; say for no particular reason at all the Queen’s Birthday June the 5th. This will be the day that we will completely empty out our prisons of all offenders with the exception of the truly dangerous, including of course murderers, rapists, child molesters and the like, at which point those released will be free to go in every sense of the word, with no probation, home detention in lieu or community service etc. But in the weeks leading up to this (for the ex-prisoners at least) happy event, they, and every other citizen in the land will have been made well aware with a massive media campaign, as to the future consequences of committing any crimes at all, because henceforth, from June 5th onward, a prison sentence will be an entirely different ball-game. Let us begin with an entirely new design of prison. No longer these monolithic over-engineered demonstrations of advanced paranoia, bowl them over, excepting for say Paremoremo for the real baddies, and sell the land to largely finance the all new, cheap to construct, miles from anywhere barracks and razor wire prisons we shall build out there in the sticks. Little will be needed to pay in the way of architects fees, the plans are already in existence, like take your pick from the Featherston POW Camp, or perhaps Stalag Luft 111, both of which designs feature, long wooden barracks surrounded by a perimeter fence approximately six metres high constructed of coils of razor wire, not too dissimilar to the new Queensland prisons set up. Enclose several hectares, using prison labour, of scrub/forest whatever, adjoining the prison for future prison farm development, and manufacturing units. Right ho, prison’s built and operational, and at a minimum cost, the general idea being to reduce from $80,000 per prisoner currently to around ten to twenty thousand dollars maximum as essentially these prisons will end up being largely, economically self supporting. The first customers for the all new, no frills places of confinement and punishment? Well it could and should be just about anyone who commits a jailable offence. For instance to restore everyone’s necessary fear of consequences, we should begin to whack the first time offenders with a short sharp sentence that they will remember and certainly not wish to repeat. Even a relatively simple offence like D.I.C. You are stopped by the coppers, tested and found to be drunk in charge, off to court you go, same day, or to a night court if necessary. Found guilty, off you go for seven days digging potatoes at Her Majesty’s new prison somewhere out the back of Turangi where it’ll be alternatively as hot as hell or cold as a frog’s tit. Imagine trying to explain to your boss where you have been for the last week and why you have no idea what’s been on the telly or radio because there have been none at all where you have been for the last seven days. Repeat offenders would simply get double the sentence next time, to be doubled and doubled evermore until they either spend years in the Henake, or more likely just stop drinking and driving. Notice that no fines are mentioned here? Simple, no one seems to be paying the damn things anyway do they?

“No need to be rough or brutal to our prisoners, just serve them up a life that is considerably more unpleasant than that enjoyed by ordinary folk on the outside. If anyone from the Howard League for Penal Reform starts to jump up and down just point out the healthy lifestyle we are now offering our prisoners” Car theft and burglary, short tough no frills incarceration… very basic food, no entertainment and lots of hard work. Do it again, simple...much more of the same. What, after all is really the point in firing someone into the slammer for three months or three years for that matter when all they currently get to do is watch TV, read, listen to the radio, use the gym, play cards and simply wait for their next, well balanced and frequently delicious meal to be served. Chances are that a large number of our current inmates have never ever had it so good. Surrounded with friends or at least people with a common interest, like rape and pillage and stuff like that, lifetime friendships are formed, the finer points of how to become a more successful criminal are eagerly learnt by the younger crims, and this whole, bloated and hugely expensive system simply carries on sticking back into society people whose only lesson learnt has been that the Corrections Department is run by complete dick-heads who never the less don’t run a half bad holiday home for crims in need of a bit of a rest. So let’s give the whole system a radical shake up shall we? Ask yourself this, like returning to the relatively common offence frequently committed by otherwise pretty law abiding folk. Drinking and driving. At the moment, apart from this offence becoming increasingly unacceptable socially, it never the less is pretty common. Question...at the moment, if you are caught, you will on average be pinched 600-800 bucks and lose your license for six months, re-instateable for business use if you have a good lawyer…Is this a great deterrent? Well not from the reports we read in the daily press it sure isn’t, but an instant seven days in a wooden hut surrounded by various lowlifes, eating food grown by the inmates in the paddocks next door or bought from the “Basics” shelf at the local supermarket, then having to dig and hoe the ground from dawn to dusk everyday, in all sorts of weather! Yep. You’d really want to come back for an increased second offence sentence of that sort of jail time wouldn’t you? So why don’t we do just that...? No need to be rough or brutal to our prisoners, just serve them up a life that is considerably more unpleasant than that enjoyed by ordinary folk on the outside. If anyone from the Howard League for Penal Reform starts to jump up and down just point out the healthy lifestyle we are now offering our prisoners, and that as a hidden benefit we are now able to separate out the truly insane from the real criminal, because it’s only the nutters who now keep coming back, and who we can now begin to at last treat humanely as being mentally ill, rather than to continue concealing what has been a huge injustice that’s been going on for decades behind the current system’s grey prison walls. What do you reckon?

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 23

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART Did Abraham really exist?

eaders familiar with “Tough Questions” will know that in recent months we’ve covered whether the Old Testament is historically reliable. One of the magazine’s regular correspondents, Terry Toohill, is taking issue with me, particularly in regard to Abraham. Because of its size, I’ve posted the full correspondence up on Investigate’s weblog, The Briefing Room, in the Religion section. But it’s worth a summary and an overview here for others who may have the same questions. Abraham is believed to have lived around 1900 BC, and with his family to have traveled from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) down through Syria into the promised land where he is widely “Toohill falls into a trap of regarded to have been the accepting the accuracy of an progenitor of Israel. Because of the time historical source outside period we’re dealing with, the Bible, and assuming that 4,000 years ago, and the of much evidence at all the Bible must be wrong” lack from that time period, trying to prove the historicity of Abraham is a little like trying to pin the tail on the donkey. Toohill correctly pulls me up on the fact that Abraham did indeed meet Philistines. In Toohill’s eyes, this proves Abraham, if he existed, must have done so after 1200 BC because that’s when the Philistines appeared. The logical conclusion from this, he argues, is that the Bible contains a major error and cannot be relied on. Case closed. Except, it’s never that simple. Toohill falls into a trap of accepting the accuracy of an historical source outside the Bible, and assuming that the Bible must be wrong. It is true that the few archaeological records from the time that have been found talk of the “Sea Peoples”, who included the Philistines, appearing around 1200 BC in the region. But all that tells us is what was happening then. Like a photographic snapshot, it doesn’t give us context, and it doesn’t tell us whether the Sea Peoples had attacked and settled before. Like the Viking raids on the coast of England over several hundred years, it is entirely possible that the Philistines, hailing originally from Crete, had made repeated sorties across the Mediterranean down to the coast of Palestine, and could have done so since as early as 2000 BC, given that by that stage their civilization on

24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

Crete had reached the stage of building palaces. So just because we have historical records that mention Philistines in 1200, doesn’t mean they hadn’t landed in Palestine during the previous 800 years while no one was taking notes. There are other reasons to trust the Bible on the Abraham story. Abraham, and indeed many of the Jewish personal names of the Bible, can be found in much more ancient writings from between 2200 and 1800 BC in the Mari and Ebla civilisations. After that, those names fell into disuse in the region, except within Judaism. Why would the Jews continue using names 1,000 years after they were last spoken elsewhere, unless they were significant? After all, if the Old Testament was invented in 650 BC as some skeptics believe, how did the Jews manage to reach back into the mists of time and resurrect names buried in the sand aeons earlier? There is one other thing to keep in mind before you doubt anything in the Old Testament: the testimony of Christ. While archaeological evidence from OT times is scarce, the time of Christ is extremely well documented, and there is more direct evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than for any other historical figure before him from any culture. There are, for example, only 10 copies in existence of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the oldest of which was written in 900 AD, nearly a thousand years after Caesar was born and recently enough for the story to have been embellished or fabricated in parts. In contrast, there are 5,366 copies of the New Testament, the oldest portions of which date to within 50 years of when the Gospels were written, a couple of decades after the crucifixion. The point is this: Abraham is referred to as a real historical figure by Christ. And if the evidence strongly suggests that Christ was indeed God (and it does, but that’s a story for another time), then what Christ says should be treated as true and faithfully reported by the Gospel writers, unless there’s extremely strong evidence to counter it. Christ talks of Adam and Eve as real historical people, likewise Noah and the Flood, King David and a host of other events and figures. And as far as Abraham and the rest of the Old Testament goes, there’s no beyond reasonable doubt evidence that justifies questioning it. Read our full debate online at http://www.thebriefingroom.com, and feel free to contribute your own opinion.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 27

HARD KNOCKS

CAFÉ

He’s paid to uphold the law, but our Attorney-General has broken it

PRESSPIX

28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

COVER STORY

Barely a month after the David Benson-Pope affair exploded under an unsuspecting Beehive, Helen Clark’s administration is being rocked by more alleged illegal activities involving a Cabinet Minister, this time no less a figure than new AttorneyGeneral David Parker. IAN WISHART has the exclusive story:

e’s one of Labour’s youngest Cabinet Ministers and, at 45, being groomed as a future Labour leader. David Parker’s fast track to the top began with his election to Parliament in the Otago seat in the 2002 election, and within just three years he was given three key portfolios by Helen Clark: Energy, Transport and Attorney-General. It’s the latter role that is perhaps the most sensitive – as Attorney-General David Parker has duties not just to his party but also as the Crown’s top legal officer, a constitutional position dating back to the 1200s. But according to one Dunedin businessman, the man Labour has chosen as Attorney-General is not only unfit for the job, he may also have broken the law. Property developer Russell Hyslop is alleging he was swindled out of more than half a million dollars back in the late 1990s when he and David Parker were business partners in a company called Queens Park Mews Ltd. Much more seriously, however, Hyslop has given Investigate information and documents showing that the man Labour has appointed Attorney-General has allegedly been filing false statements to the Companies Office – a claim that if proven could be punishable with a five year jail term and/or $200,000 fine for each of anywhere between five and nine years that false statements appear to have been filed: 2001 through 2005 inclusive, and possibly 1997 through 2000 inclusive. The case on the evidence appears absolute: section 196 of the Companies Act 1993 requires all companies to appoint auditors each year to audit their accounts, unless a unanimous resolution of shareholders is passed waiving the requirement. David Parker, his father Francis Parker and businessman Russell Hyslop are all listed on the current Companies Office register as each having a one-third shareholding in Queens Park Mews Ltd, a Dunedin-based property company. For at least the past five years – four of them while he was a INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 29

“

Hyslop claims Queens Park

Mews Ltd and his dealings with business partner David Parker were the sole reason Hyslop was forced into personal bankruptcy in July 1997, and he’d like to know where $500,000 Parker and Queens Park Mews allegedly owed

”

him went to

Labour MP - David Parker has personally filed declarations to the Companies Office where he has answered “Yes” to the following question: “Did the shareholders pass unanimous resolution not to appoint an auditor for the current year?” [our emphasis] The Attorney-General’s problem? One of the three shareholders says he hasn’t been consulted about the company’s affairs since 1997, and certainly has never been asked to approve a “unanimous” shareholders’ resolution each year waiving the right to audit the company’s accounts. If Parker has created a shareholders’ resolution purporting to be “unanimous” then Hyslop believes it to be a false document, and if Parker has told the Companies Office the waiver was “unanimous” he would be making a false declaration, Hyslop believes. Nor would Russell Hyslop have agreed to waive the audit. “I would have asked for a look at the accounts,” he says. With good reason: Hyslop claims Queens Park Mews Ltd and his dealings with business partner David Parker were the sole reason Hyslop was forced into personal bankruptcy in July 1997, and he’d like to know where $500,000 Parker and Queens Park Mews allegedly owed him went to. Instead, Hyslop claims he took the rap personally for something Parker was involved in as well. It was the early 1990s, and the future Attorney-General was still at that stage a partner in Dunedin lawfirm Anderson Lloyd, an established practice that Hyslop had used for all of his business legal requirements since the 1970s. A property developer by trade, Hyslop recalls Parker telling him he wanted to get more involved in business than law, so when an opportunity arose to buy land for development in Invercargill, Hyslop mentioned it to Parker. “I at the time was dealing with a big property development in Dunedin at the old Parkside hospital, Balmoral Park Estate. I’d bought that off the hospital board for half a million dollars and I was putting up 53 units on it. Now the guy that had sold it to me and in turn was onselling the units was a fellow by the name of Bob Robertson. He owned Robertson First 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

National which was a reasonably big real estate agency and they had branches through the southern South Island. Now he had problems with his Invercargill branch and he and his wife had to go down to run it, but the minute he got down there he found out that Mobil Oil were selling a block of land in Invercargill so he immediately rang me up wanting to know if I was interested in doing it or not. “I said no, I couldn’t afford it, they were looking at something 140 miles away and investing more money in it which I didn’t have. But I said to him, ‘look, this solicitor of mine David Parker is talking about doing bigger and better things, you give him a ring’, so he did. “And lo and behold, Parker had the money but he didn’t have the nous to do something like that, so he put a proposition to me whereby I would run the thing, he would fund it, and we’d share and split the profit. In a nutshell, that’s how it happened. He came to me with a proposal and because I didn’t have to fund it financially I was able to do it.”

he end result was the company Queens Park Mews Ltd, a partnership between David Parker, his father Francis Parker and Russell Hyslop, each owning 33.33%, or a parcel of 50 shares in the 150 share company. The company purchased a block of land adjacent to McMaster and Tay streets and Queens Drive in Invercargill. Hyslop was old school – a man’s word was his bond, deals were done on a handshake. And perhaps an illustration of that – never seen today – was that Hyslop had done all of his property development up to that stage as a sole trader: he didn’t even shelter under the protection of a limited liability company. Parker did, however. And according to Hyslop the future Labour MP was cunning enough to structure the deal so that two of the three shareholders would enjoy limited liability, but the third wouldn’t – although Hyslop didn’t appreciate this at the time. Instead of the company directly handling the property devel-

opment, the arrangement was that Queens Park Mews Ltd would hire Hyslop the sole trader to control the construction projects, with the alleged further proviso that no project bills were to be made out in the company name, but that Hyslop the sole trader would be responsible for all debts, and in turn would invoice the company each month for recompense. In other words, if Queens Park Mews wanted to spend $100,000 constructing an apartment, it was up to Hyslop to personally hire the subcontractors through his own business to get the job done, and then seek reimbursement from QPM. When the Official Assignee asked David Parker about this during his investigation of Hyslop’s affairs, Parker admitted he’d put Hyslop at risk. “I suppose so, and I don’t think any of us thought that through. If he had wanted to purchase materials through QPM

Ltd that could have been done but the question never arose.” Hyslop’s response? “Rubbish! Parker didn’t want any bills coming in in the name of the company except mine,” Hyslop says. “By channeling everything through me, I became the only creditor of Queens Park Mews Ltd.” While it kept the accounting simple for the Parkers, it meant Hyslop was taking the complete business risk on his own shoulders. He may have been a one-third shareholder in a limited liability company, but he was personally guaranteeing every expense the development incurred, while his two business partners were protected. A Heads of Agreement annexed to the Official Assignee’s files clearly notes “The parties will share equally in profits earned and losses incurred by the company”. Further through the agreement it states: “If any additional work capital is required INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 31

then the parties will provide such finance equally.” Despite these clear admissions of an intent to share the profits and losses equally between all three shareholders, the future Attorney-General told the Official Assignee that he’d drafted the agreement badly, and what was really intended was protection for him and his father. “I know that clause 2 of the agreement is ambiguous and poorly drafted for which I accept responsibility because I drafted it,” said Parker, “but my intention was that my father and our liability under the project was limited to our investment in the company and our liability under the bank guarantee.” The Official Assignee sought to clarify: “Mr Hyslop was therefore effectively in a different position in relation to the project from you and your father, is that correct?” “Yes.” Hyslop says he was an ingénue when it came to companies back in the 90s: “I was to present the company with a bill each month and they were to fund it. Now I knew nothing then about companies, I’d never formed one, never been involved in one. I didn’t know what they were. I certainly know now. But everything I’d done had been as a sole trader, and I’d done quite well at it too. Nothing fantastic, but I’d made a bloody good living.” The danger for Hyslop in the set-up was that if, for any reason, Queens Park Mews Ltd didn’t pay its bills, it would be Hyslop in the gun in the first instance when subbies came looking for their money – a point the Official Assignee understood perfectly when he put it to David Parker: “If the project failed would that not place him in a much less advantageous position than the position that you and your father enjoy?” “That is correct,” confirmed Parker. David Parker and his father were each supposed to put in $80,000 of capital, but Hyslop soon discovered that was the first financial irregularity involving the future AttorneyGeneral: “His father paid in full, but David only paid up just over half the capital he owed the company, so that was the first problem.” Even so, Hyslop assumed it was only a hiccup. When Queens Park Mews decided to buy a prime piece of land in Dunedin, Hyslop claims it was he who reached into his own pocket to provide the bridging finance while he waited for the $30,000 cheque from David Parker that never came. “But we bought other land in Dunedin and mortgaged that and so on, and that was fine – Parkside was going quite well and we could personally afford to fund it – notwithstanding the fact that they owed me the money. In the meantime we started to do the St James picture theatre. Now I was in two minds as to whether to go into that but I was talked into it. But he took money out of my trust account at Anderson Lloyd to buy those shares.” What Hyslop is talking about is another grand scheme from David Parker – the project to buy and renovate the old St James picture theatre in Dunedin. Parker structured two companies, one called Empire Delux Ltd which was to purchase the building, and the other called St James Ltd which was to run the business inside the revamped cinema. As Hyslop tells it, Parker simply raided some of Hyslop’s funds held in trust at Parker’s Anderson Lloyd lawfirm. 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

“I’ve got documentary evidence that he took $25,000 out of my trust account at Anderson Lloyd, through a fax copy here with his handwriting all over it.” Hyslop has no inherent problem with that, he knew the money was buying him a 20% stake in St James Ltd. What he does have a problem with is finding out a year later that although the future Attorney-General had taken his money, he had never transferred the shares into Hyslop’s name – a fact confirmed in Investigate’s own search of company records. “I never ever got the shares in St James Ltd put into my name. The St James was to work with five shareholders. This was early 1996. There was one guy in there by the name of Rex Simpson who’d been dealing with a solicitor named Mark Kirkland. I went to see Kirkland in February 1997 and it was through those visits that I got the guts of what was going on with companies and what was happening. Kirkland discovered that Rex Simpson and myself were not shareholders in the St James Ltd, Parker had never given us the shares. Now that really annoyed me because I’d paid for something I hadn’t got. “Now as it turned out it probably didn’t matter because the thing went sour but that’s not the point: if it had gone well, what were his intentions? I’d paid him $25,000!” As Parker tells it, however, he was doing Hyslop a favour: “Within a few weeks of getting our liquor licence and opening it was already apparent that the writing was on the wall for the St James and so as to save embarrassment for Rex Simpson and Russell and Sue and Jude I never perfected the appointment of them as directors and shareholders of St James Ltd.”

ndeed, the St James was another tragic chapter in the story of lawyer turned businessman turned AttorneyGeneral David Parker. Business deals sometimes do go wrong, and business is a risk. The point of this magazine article is not to criticize the Attorney-General just because a business deal went sour in his past. But Russell Hyslop does believe Parker was slap-happy, bordering on dishonest, in the way he ran his business dealings. Some three years before the St James project, Parker had set up a café as his first business venture. “He’d started off a coffee bar in Dunedin called The Percolator with his wife and his sister-in-law. That was quite a successful business, and he’d been involved in one or two other little things.” Parker had been restricted by a three year non-competition clause when he sold The Percolator, and according to Hyslop saw his chance to open another café in the St. James. “There were two companies, the Empire Delux Ltd which owned the building, and St James Ltd which owned the business that was in the building. Because Parker had had a success with The Percolator and his three year non-competition clause when he sold it was up, he decided he was going to develop the old St James picture theatre. “Once again, I did all the work in there as a sole trader to redevelop it for Empire Delux. I found an account today that said he owed me $25,000 but he owed me a lot more than that. So that again, never got paid. “Now there were five shareholders in that: there was David, his wife Sue Wootton, his sister-in-law Judith Wootton, Rex Simpson and myself. Now at the time in early 96 I had a health

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 33

From left: David Parker, Sue Wootton, Oliver Lequeux, Jude Wootton, Chris Gourley, Russell Hyslop and Rex Simpson. Photography: OTAGO DAILY TIMES

problem, I lost a hip and had to get it replaced. I was off work for about two months and that didn’t sit well with this whole blinking episode. But he then took over the management of the St James and he started running my staff in there telling them what to do and when to do it. “There was a full page spread on the thing in the Otago Daily Times when it opened and he’s quoted in there saying that if it hadn’t been for him the project would never have happened. But when he was before the Official Assignee he said ‘no, no, no, I had nothing to do with the management of this project’, so essentially he was saying it was my fault. “That’s in the Official Assignee’s report, Parker wanting to deny responsibility.” It is less blunt in the OA’s interview with Parker, where the question was put: “During the time of his absence did you supervise his employed staff?” “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way. During the time he was away I spent more time on site than I otherwise would have but I would have said that the person directing the workforce was his foreman,” said Parker. Hyslop told the OA it wasn’t that simple: “A manager had been hired and was drawing a $42,000PA salary. I made my views known but was overridden. The next day David and the new manager had 52 people working on that site at God only knows what cost. “The night before opening four other staff and I worked until 2am in the morning to finish a hand rail around the mezzanine floor. I was phoned at 6.45 on opening morning by the manager to enquire why I wasn’t at work. I don’t need to elaborate on my reply. “There were eighteen handrail brackets that had been misman34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

“

There was a full page spread on

the thing in the Otago Daily Times

when it opened and he’s quoted in there saying that if it hadn’t been for him the project would never have happened. But when he was before the Official Assignee he said ‘no, no, no, I had nothing to do with the management of this project’, so essentially he was

”

saying it was my fault

ufactured by one of the subcontractors. The manager paid four times the cost of these brackets to have them replaced on time.” Hyslop told the OA that Parker’s role was much more hands-on. “David Parker supervised the running of my on site staff. The job became known as the double job on one site as everything was done twice. One ceiling was erected and pulled down four times because David Parker didn’t like the finished article…the waste of money was everywhere.”

The St James redevelopment was officially a disaster. Although the company had paid up capital of $150,000, with five shareholders each kicking in $25,000, plus a bank facility, there were cost overruns. “What he did, was he got up at the opening, and I was on crutches at the opening, and said ‘The company has come in on budget’, in other words we had $150,000 to complete stage one of the redevelopment of the building, and he said it had ‘come in on budget’ at the opening in front of 300 invited guests. It was six weeks later that we found out the thing was 100% over budget – there was $140,000 still owing of which part of that was mine. We didn’t know that because everything had been left to him.” David Parker denies saying the project came in on budget. Admittedly, says Hyslop, some of the overruns were outside of their control: “When we were developing the St James the council made us put a paraplegic access ramp and it cost us about $30,000 to do it. Parker stood outside the St James and said ‘F**k them, if I had my way this wouldn’t happen’. That was the thinking of the guy!,” exclaims Hyslop. But Hyslop, again, was in the financial gun. Despite Parker’s tardiness at paying what he owed on the Queens Park Mews development, Hyslop had, perhaps unwisely, agreed to act as head contractor on the St James, only to discover a few weeks after it opened that the company was in trouble and couldn’t pay its bills to him. On 29 January 1997 Hyslop wrote a letter to Parker: “Dear David “I hereby resign as director of the Empire Delux. As a director I expected to be kept fully informed and have input into ALL decisions, negotiations and transactions, copies of Annual Returns and correspondence regarding the investment of the Empire Delux. “With information received within the last two weeks I appear to be a director in title only as financial transactions have been negotiated and implemented without my knowledge. “I have not received a copy of the Annual Return filed with the Companies Office 31/10/96 nor copies of any correspondence or minutes.” On 5 February 1997, David Parker replied, setting out that only routine business had been conducted as part of keeping the company afloat and expressing sadness at Hyslop’s resignation as a director, although with the added barb: “It appears to me that you are trying to abandon taking responsibility for the difficult situation the company now faces, leaving the remaining directors to shoulder that burden.” Significantly, however, given what Investigate has now discovered about false statements filed with the Companies Office in relation to Queens Park Mews, the future Attorney-General admits not sending his fellow director and shareholder a copy of the Annual Return before it was filed with the Companies Office: “As to your complaint about the filing of the Annual Return, I don’t know what you think was wrong with that. The document is not contentious and is a procedural step required to keep registration of the company current.” Speaking to Investigate, Hyslop remains annoyed. “He filed an Annual Return in October 1996 on Empire Delux that stated shareholders had passed a ‘unanimous resolution’ not to appoint an auditor. I was a director and a share-

holder and I never had input into that resolution. And if we had appointed auditors we might have discovered the true position of the company a lot sooner.” Hyslop believes Parker’s signed letter shows a cavalier attitude to the legal requirements of running a company, especially as the company’s accounts did indeed turn out to be “contentious”. “[Fellow shareholder] Rex Simpson owned a company called KTV, Kids TV, but he and I were extremely busy and we left everything to Parker because it was his show, and then things started going sour. Now I know that’s no excuse and I don’t want any recompense for that, but the fact of the matter is that he lies about it all the way through, and that’s the bit that annoys me. “It only stayed open for six months, and Rex Simpson moved in and took it over saying it needed management but it was too late because the debt was just too high for them to pull it out, so it folded and they sold it. It became a multiplex.”

or Hyslop, however, it was one of the straws that broke the camel’s back. On top of not being fully paid for the construction and renovation work he’d organized on the St James, Queens Park Mews Ltd – the company still majority controlled by the Attorney-General and his father – had defaulted on what Hyslop alleges was $512,000 it owed to him so he could pay subcontractors on the Invercargill housing development. Remember, even though Queens Park Mews was a limited liability company, all expenses were incurred in minority shareholder Russell Hyslop’s personal name, where he would then seek reimbursement from the company. But because David Parker and his father had taken out debentures over QPM’s assets, and Russell Hyslop had not been given a debenture, he was an unsecured creditor of the company. “Because of all the debt that was owed to me through these entities, I couldn’t afford to pay my bills. One of my creditors, Fulton Hogan, part of the Invercargill development, put a petition out for my bankruptcy. David Parker owed me $512,000 but there was another half a million dollars worth of consequential losses – what I mean by that is I owned a quarter of a million dollar home in those days that was sold for only $180,000, Parkside was sold way, way under value, there was a lot of property like that all over the place, so they’re losses that you can’t get away from. “If I’d have got that half a million dollars he owed me I’d have been sweet. “We tried to do a deal and split things off, we’d done a deal in Invercargill where we sold a house for $150,000 and the guy down there owned a timber company so he gave us $50,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of timber. Now that timber technically belonged to Queens Park Mews, it was in Invercargill and it was going to be used to finish the development off – there was enough timber there to finish the whole development off, and Parker at the end of all this deemed that that timber was mine as part payment of the account to me. He just said ‘It’s yours’ and took it off my bill, no discussion no nothing. “The whole thing turned to custard because Parker hadn’t put the money in, and in the end I could not pay my bills because of the fact that I wasn’t paid by them. And the Official Assignee INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 35

says in his report that I took the brunt for what went wrong.” Parker was playing a high stakes game. By the beginning of May 1997, two of the companies he ran, Empire Delux and St James Ltd, were placed in liquidation. Under Companies Office rules, if you’re involved in three company collapses you can be placed on the banned director or manager list and prohibited from controlling another company. David Parker, the future Labour Government AttorneyGeneral, was facing a corporate “three strikes” policy which crystallized when Russell Hyslop opted to sue Queens Park Mews Ltd for the half million dollars he says it owed him. The real question was, however, whether Hyslop could stave off bankruptcy long enough to get his lawsuit underway. “I did go after Queens Park Mews, but when you go bankrupt the Assignee takes control of that action and he in the end, three years after, disclaimed it because Parker had no money. Why spend $10 to get $5 back? I couldn’t do anything about it because I had no teeth. I know that his father got all his money back, the full $80,000.” Parker told the OA he didn’t owe anywhere near half a million dollars to Hyslop, and that the figures were ridiculous because they exceeded the value of the finished property development. Hyslop told the Official Assignee that Parker at one point offered to bribe him to go bankrupt: “During a meeting with myself, Lindsay Clark and David Parker at my home in October 1996 whilst trying to finalise a sale of QPM assets to Lindsay Clark, David Parker made the following offer: that if I declared myself bankrupt then he would use his and his father’s debenture to ensure that I received $50,000 through the back door. “What he was going to do was have me declared bankrupt and wipe QPM debt to me, as he said because I was only giving him cost analysis each month instead of an account it did not appear on a debtor’s ledger anywhere and would go away. “He would then agree to sell the assets of QPM and repay the bank, any money left over would be used to buy me an asset that he would hold until I was released from bankruptcy and then place that asset in my name. “I remember telling him that it would be a cold day in hell before I received charity from him. Later that month I started taking action against QPM and David Parker through the courts.” Hyslop alleges Parker wanted him bankrupt because he knew the Official Assignee would never pursue the legal action against QPM any further.

he irony is that Russell Hyslop may get the last laugh. He was discharged from bankruptcy in 2000, and as we stated at the start of this article he remains a 33% shareholder in Queens Park Mews Ltd which is still operating and still controlled by Attorney-General David Parker and his father. Hyslop hasn’t seen a financial statement from that company since 1997, but the company has clearly completed property development projects and sold houses, so presumably official accounts exist somewhere. As a shareholder, Hyslop is entitled to see those accounts and see if he’s owed any money after nine years. While the dispute over the missing half million dollars may or may not be resolved, and may at the end of the day not be 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

David Parker’s problem at all, the Devil in some business dealings is in the detail. And it is in the technical detail that the Attorney-General may be about to come a cropper. Investigate has obtained documents from the Companies Office confirming that for at least five years, and quite possibly nine years, he has filed official declarations with the Companies Office waiving the need for an audit of his company’s accounts on the basis of a “unanimous” resolution of shareholders. Clearly, with Hyslop saying he has never been contacted for either an AGM or a shareholder’s resolution, the documents filed with the Companies Office appear false, on the face of it: either Parker filed the statements knowing he hadn’t sought the approval of a hostile major shareholder, or alternatively Hyslop is no longer a shareholder (and so didn’t need to be consulted) but Parker has continued to file documents saying he is…so the documents still contain false statements. It appears Labour’s new Attorney-General is in trouble unless he can turn up proof that he contacted Hyslop each year and gained his assent to waive an audit. Given what we now know, it seems highly unlikely that such a contact was made, let alone agreed to by Hyslop in the circumstances. And the documents held by Investigate on Empire Delux show Parker filed the 1996 Annual Return of that company with a declaration of a “unanimous resolution” despite later admitting he hadn’t even shown the Annual Return to one of the shareholders, dismissing the problem as merely “a procedural step” that was not “contentious”. Section 377 of the Companies Act states: “Every person who, with respect to a document required by or for the purposes of this Act – (a) Makes, or authorizes the making of, a statement in it that is false or misleading in a material particular knowing it to be false or misleading…commits an offence, and is liable on conviction to the penalties set out in section 373(4) of this Act.” Section 373(4) of the Act says: “A person convicted of an offence against [s377] of this Act is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to a fine not exceeding $200,000.” If it was five offences, that’s potentially a million dollar fine or prison. If it is nine offences you can add another $800,000, taking the potential fine facing Attorney-General David Parker to $1.8 million for breaches of the Companies Act David Parker allegedly told Hyslop “I did what I did to protect me and my father”. Ironically, however, if authorities decide the declarations to the Companies Office are false, Parker’s father may also be liable as a party to the offence, because s377(3) states “For the purposes of this section, a person who voted in favour of the making of a statement at a meeting is deemed to have authorized the making of the statement.” Hyslop, meanwhile has been back in business for years now, but he says the sting of the bankruptcy he was forced into still hurts. “I had something like 52 creditors in and around Dunedin, and Dunedin’s not that bloody big, and they’ve got a big memory. So every day, you’re still feeling the effects of it.” He did, he says, catch up with David Parker in an airport lounge just before Christmas, and he laughs grimly when he recalls what Parker said to him: “Don’t worry Russell, I don’t hold any of what happened against you.” “I just bit my tongue,” says Hyslop. “The cheek of it.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 37

ANY STORM IN A PORT China’s Trojan horse in NZ

The Hong Kong business conglomerate trying to purchase a stake in some of New Zealand’s biggest port companies has been named as a front for the People’s Liberation Army of China, and some of its associates have been caught shipping weapons and alleged WMD technology. IAN WISHART has more 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

is name is Li Ka-shing, and if his name sounds like a cash register there’s a very good reason: this 77 year old Chinese businessman has just been ranked by Forbes magazine as the tenth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at nearly US$20 billion. His companies, including Hutchison Whampoa, account for 10% of the value of the Hong Kong stock exchange and have tentacles that reach across the globe – more than forty countries according to one estimate – and in industries as varied as mobile telephone networks, electricity grids, retailing, shipping and real estate. Many New Zealanders may have become familiar with Li’s work in the sixties and seventies, when his main business was making plastic toys with the infamous “Made in Hong Kong” imprimatur. But there are two sides to the Li Ka-shing story. One is the traditional fodder of business magazines, lauding the rags to riches story of a billionaire whose father died after the Japanese invasion of China before World War 2, leaving a 12 year old boy with the task of earning enough money to feed his mother and siblings. It’s a story of a man making wily business decisions, building an empire and showing aspiring MBA graduates how it’s done. And here’s how one of those gushing business stories reads: “The move by the richest man in Asia and one of the richest in the world to take a stake in the operation of the Port of Lyttelton is one that has potentially great benefits for Christchurch and Canterbury and ultimately the rest of the country,” said the Christchurch Press in an editorial mid February. “There is no need to be starry-eyed about the proposed venture. Li Ka-shing has risen from complete destitution as a refugee who fled the raping and pillaging of China by the Japanese in the 1930s to become a multi-billionaire. “He did it by being an astute and hard-nosed businessman. He also did it, according to one account in a business journal, by ‘remaining true to his internal moral compass’ and operating with integrity.” Like we said, that’s one side of the Li Ka-shing story. The other side of Li Ka-shing is much darker, and less likely to be taught in graduate classes. It’s the story of a man whose companies are regarded by Western intelligence agencies as nothing more than a money-making front for Chinese military intelligence as China prepares for what it sees as an “inevitable” conflict with the US. As this 1996 diplomatic cable release by the US Government under a Freedom of Information request shows, Li Ka-shing’s businesses didn’t make money the hard way. ““Embassy Panama has received information to the effect that HIT (Hutchison International Terminals) is controlled by mainland Chinese, perhaps through a Macao front which allegedly recently invested $400 million in HIT,” states the cable. “Such control would have security implications and

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might affect the Panamanian government’s views on awarding the port concessions.” The “mainland Chinese” referred to in 1996 have turned out to be the Chinese Government itself, and more specifically its People’s Liberation Army – more of which in a moment, but first some background. Intelligence agencies have used what they call “arms length” front companies – genuine commercial operations whose owners are sympathetic to a particular cause. Back in the 1970s and 80s, for example, America’s CIA set up a global freight airline, Air America, and a merchant banking operation, Nugan Hand Bank of Australia, to help launder money and assist with so-called “black operations” that the US government could

not directly be involved in. Discretion, and plausible deniability, required “cut-outs” who could take the heat if discovered. One CIA front company, US accounting firm Bishop Baldwin Rewald Dillingham & Wong, even went so far as to open an office in Auckland in 1983. But there’s one difference between CIA front companies and Chinese ones. Ultimately, the US government takes a major PR-hit when dirty covert operations are uncovered. The Chinese government suffers no embarrassment when caught spying, because of its tight control of Chinese citizens and the lack of democratic accountability. Investigate enjoyed a world exclusive in March 2000 when it reported that Chinese businessman James Riady, wanted INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 39

Li Ka-shing admires a portrait of the late Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping.

for spying and illegal payments to the US president, Bill Clinton, had been in New Zealand as a guest of the National Government and introduced to Clinton at APEC.

ver since Clinton was elected to the Whitehouse in 1992, China has bought influence in American politics by using businessmen like Riady and Li to donate to Presidential campaign funds, or the election campaigns of key senators and congress representatives. As a result, when America’s lease fell due on the Panama canal in 1999, the Clinton administration let it slide, and Li Ka-shing’s Hutchison Whampoa picked up control of the crucial ports at either end of the Panama canal. According to US reports, Hutchison also paid substantial bribes to Panamanian officials to secure the deal. Amazingly, the deal also allows Hutchison to transfer its control of the Panama facilities to any other organization or country of its choosing, meaning it could – in the lead up to a conflict – effectively place the canal directly and officially in the control of China, allowing Chinese military and naval forces to legally occupy and defend their beachhead in the Americas. Because of the immense strategic importance of the Panama canal, any military attack on it could cause damage making the canal impassable regardless of who controls it, thus limiting US options. Newssite WorldNetDaily reported a 1995 diplomatic cable 40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

from the US Embassy in the Bahamas revealing Hutchison had just been given the go ahead to build a US$88 million container port there. The embassy copied its cable to the Drug Enforcement Agency and US Customs, noting the possibility of a major increase in smuggling through the Hutchison facility. They were right to be concerned. There are growing reports of a strong Chinese organized crime presence in Panama. Some analysts fear the US is becoming more vulnerable to “Trojan horses”, in the form of cargo or container ships that dock containing weapons of mass destruction and/or short to medium range ballistic missiles, leaving America vulnerable to a surprise attack with no possibility of missile intercept because of the short ranges involved. Indeed, this has been one of the security fears over the past month because of a bid by a Dubaibased company to take control of major US ports – the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be smuggled in through civilian ports controlled by foreign interests. Al Qa’ida has already been implicated in smuggling Islamic extremists into the US across the Mexican border, but China is equally active in shipping the ingredients of terror through commercial operators. Li Ka-shing, for example, sits on the board of CITIC, the China International Trust Investment Company, which has also been active in New Zealand business circles and still has a presence here. But US investigations have determined CITIC is also a People’s Liberation Army front company, and during the Operation Sidewinder investigations

in Canada recently authorities discovered quantities of weapons had been supplied by a CITIC company and stored on Mohawk Indian reservations. CITIC was also in the news at Christmas after signing a US$900 million contract to build an aluminium smelter in Iran. Aluminium tubing is used in the production of missile technology and nuclear weapons. China’s state owned national shipping company COSCO, again a 50% joint venture partner in some of Li Ka-shing’s operations, has been implicated in the sort of activities that would make the CIA blush. “Both U.S. Senate and Canadian intelligence sources have described COSCO as “the merchant marine for China’s military”,” reported Canada Free Press last year. “According to U.S. intelligence reports, COSCO vessels do not just transport Oriental bric-a-brac. COSCO vessels have been caught carrying [two thousand AK-47] assault rifles into California and biological-chemical weapons components into North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. Add to these disturbing events that Canadian law enforcement agencies have kicked in with hard-line information that Chinese Triad criminal elements are active in and around Canadian ports.”

ut it isn’t just smuggling items in, there is also the question of Chinese spies operating through front companies to smuggle information and technology out of countries like Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand – all of which have been named internationally as prime targets for Chinese intelligence. According to the Canada Free Press report: “Conspiracy theories were tossed out the window when U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher revealed that the U.S. Bureau of Export Affairs, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the Rand Corporation had identified Li Ka-Shing and Hutchison Whampoa (Li’s primary business) as financing or serving as a conduit for Communist China’s military in order for them to acquire sensitive technologies and other equipment.” But again, Chinese intelligence is one step ahead of the West. Just as Bill Clinton had been paid off in the US in order for China to gain access at the highest levels, so too was the-then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien: “Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s connections to the burgeoning CITIC conglomerate served as his entrée into the private sector,” says Canada Free Press. “While John Turner was leader of the federal Liberals, Chretien was working for Gordon Securities, one of the many Li-controlled companies on Canadian soil.” According to Canada Free Press, Operation Sidewinder was “sideswiped” after political pressure from Chretien. With the Chinese military currently embarking on the most rapid rearmament in world history, the involvement of Chinese commercial entities should come as no surprise. An American Defense Council report published two years ago paints an extremely disturbing picture for the West. “Li Ka-Shing, the leader of Hutchison Port Holdings (China’s primary shipping line), has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and to the CITIC. The CITIC is believed to serve as a funding umbrella for the Chinese military, supporting the acquisition of military-related technologies. Hutchison Port Holdings

manages, operates and is in possession of significant portions of three of the world’s top five ports as measured by both the number of containers shipped and total tonnage shipped. “China’s other two huge shipping lines are directly controlled by the Communist Party. One, the China Ocean Shipping Co (COSCO) was described in the Cox Report issued by the US Congress as follows: ‘Although presented as a commercial entity, COSCO is actually an arm of the Chinese military establishment’.” According to the Defense Council report, there are 10 strategic global shipping “choke points” that are crucial to US oil and trade lifelines. “In the last decade, China has succeeded in building, managing or operating strategic ports adjacent to, or, as in the case of the Panama canal, at the entrance and exit of seven of these 10 global shipping choke points.” What has not been widely reported is another paragraph in the Congressional investigation into Chinese spying: “The Clinton administration has determined that additional information concerning COSCO that appears in the Select Committee’s classified final report cannot be made public,” concluded the watered down version released by the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. COSCO already has a strong presence in New Zealand, with offices in Auckland and Christchurch and a container line service that runs into Auckland, Tauranga, Napier, Wellington, Nelson, Lyttelton and Port Chalmers. Four of its vessels here, including the Aotea, are Panamanian registered. While there is no doubt that COSCO routinely ships ordinary freight, every day, as any other commercial business does, there are also days when it ships the extraordinary, as this American news report notes. “At least three arms shipments were traced from China to the Cuban port of Mariel during the past several months, according to an article Tuesday in the Washington Times. All the arms were aboard vessels belonging to the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Co., or Cosco, U.S. intelligence officials told the newspaper. The explosives were said to be “military-grade” material, the newspaper said. “U.S. officials said Tuesday that the subject of arms trafficking between China and Cuba is a worrisome one, though they stopped short of confirming the Washington Times account. “We are very much concerned with this PLA [People’s Liberation Army] cooperation and movement of military equipment in Cuba,” said James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, when questioned during a hearing of the House International Relations subcommittee.” Questioning of Li Ka-shing is something Canadian government security advisor Scott Newark would like to do. He told the respected online journal NewsMax.com that a request by Li’s Hutchison group to purchase ports in the US be given full congressional scrutiny. “I’d like to suggest that the appropriate congressional committee hold hearings and that they call Li Ka-shing as the first witness. I volunteer to be second, but frankly there are people far more knowledgeable than me in this regard, including for example the International Association of Airport and Seaport Police, which just held their conference in NYC. As a speaker at that conference I urged ridding ports of such crime and rogue government-con-

nected companies, not making them the local constabulary.” According to NewsMax, Newark identified five critical port security issues: “preventing smuggling of drugs, guns and people; preventing export of stolen products; providing site security as a result of 9/11; preventing terrorism related smuggling; and preventing attacks on ships leaving ports.” To that end, Newark sounds a warning that is relevant for New Zealand authorities as they consider whether to approve a buy-in by Hutchison into Lyttelton and possibly the Auckland or Tauranga ports. “We need full scrutiny of the principals of Hutchison Whampoa and all of their business or government-related associations, and any history of any activity of them or their associates – including links to organized crime and terrorist groups, activities or states supporting the same – that would raise concerns to any of the above. “We should give full scrutiny to any relationship of Hutchison Whampoa, its partners, directors or officers with any foreign government that would raise concerns to any or all of the above issues.” If that isn’t ringing warning bells at the Christchurch City Council and in the Beehive, it should be, especially as the Li’s business partner – the Chinese military’s “merchant marine arm” COSCO - is already a big player in New Zealand ports. Both COSCO and Hutchison have faced this negative publicity overseas. In COSCO’s case, it hired one of America’s leading public relations companies to spin the strong business and economic benefits of trade with China to the news media and key politicians, while playing down the “unfounded and negative” stories we’ve just highlighted. According to commentators the PR ploy has worked, with coverage of the company in the US largely restricted to positive business and trade stories in the media. Nor is Li Ka-shing a stranger to New Zealand business. In Australia, he’s the majority owner of Hutchison 3G Mobile, but you might be surprised to learn Theresa Gattung’s Telecom New Zealand holds the remaining 19.9% in a joint venture.

ronically, it was only a decision by US telecommunications regulators to threaten a veto that stopped Li Ka-shing’s Hutchison from buying the giant international phone network Global Crossing three years ago. The purchase would have given Hutchison the possible option of eavesdropping on phone and data calls being made on Global Crossing’s planetwide network of undersea phone cables linking all the continents. Global was also bidding for US Defence contracts at the time. Li’s business ventures with the Chinese military include the Guangzhou Aircraft Maintenance Engineering Company, a Chinese air force company 25% owned by Li; and a one-third stake in AsiaSat, also part owned by the People’s Liberation Army. The move by Hutchison Port Holdings Ltd (HPHL) to purchase the Lyttelton Port Company in Christchurch raises some more questions for Helen Clark’s Labour Government to answer. HPHL is registered in the British Virgin Islands, the same Caribbean tax haven at the centre of our February story about the New Zealand Labour Party’s biggest campaign donor, Owen Glenn. Coincidentally, Glenn is also a shipping handler who’s managed to get a rare Class A business licence in China and is said to have influence in Beijing, but whose operations don’t appear to stack up based on what Investigate was 42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

able to discover. Glenn funneled $500,000 into Labour’s election coffers last year. Is the New Zealand Labour Party receiving money from the Chinese Government through a complex web of shady business figures and front companies? At this point Investigate doesn’t have enough information to answer one way or the other, but the magazine’s investigations are continuing. In the meantime, we have discovered Li Ka-shing has reserved the name Hutchison Ports New Zealand Ltd with the Companies Office. The deal relies at this stage on Christchurch City Holdings Ltd acquiring the 31% of Lyttelton port shares that it doesn’t already own, and that purchase offer closes on April 8. If CCHL gets the shares it needs, it plans to sell down 49.9% of the port to Hutchison. But Hutchison would get majority control of the company actually running the port on a daily basis, effectively putting the Chinese Government in command of imports and exports out of Christchurch. The Christchurch Press reports the deal was driven initially by Lyttelton Port Company management, but picked up by Hutchison Port Holdings executive directors Mark Jack and Richard Pearson – both apparently ex-pat kiwis. A search of Companies Office records lists a Mark David Jack, resident in Hong Kong, as sole director of Ardmore Hangars Ltd – set up last year – and Ardmore Aviation Services Ltd, set up in 2003. We have been unable to confirm any New Zealand directorships for Richard Pearson. Christchurch mayor Gary Moore has dismissed reported links between Hutchison and the Chinese military as the work of “conspiracy theorists” who’d been listening to a sole US congressman, and Mark Jack has told critics to ignore the bad media and concentrate on the company’s economic performance – a carbon copy of the PR stance Hutchison has taken in the US. But Gary Moore – as provincial local body mayors often are – suffers from not being privy to intelligence. If it was only “conspiracy theory”, why was Hutchison forced to back away from Global Crossing? And if Moore is correct about only one congressman raising concerns about Hutchison, why did the South China Morning Post report that Hutchison’s paid lobbyists in the US were targeting three, including the then Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and former US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger who testified Hutchison’s takeover of the Panama canal would pose a security threat to the US? And if Gary Moore is correct, how does he explain the nowreleased 1999 intelligence briefing from the US military Southern Command which states: ““Hutchison’s containerized shipping facilities in the Panama Canal, as well as the Bahamas, could provide a conduit for illegal shipments of technology or prohibited items from the west to the PRC, or facilitate the movement of arms and other prohibited items into the Americas.”? We put similar questions to a spokesman for Christchurch City Holdings Ltd, the current majority owner of Lyttelton Port Company, and ended up in a slanging match where the response to the allegations was “so what if he is?”. The spokesman pointed out that national security issues were something for the Prime Minister to sort out, and Christchurch was only interested in the commercial deal. The spokesman referred to a statement by a US Clinton administration official in 1999 to the senate hearing that Hutchison Whampoa’s operation of the Panama ports would

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 43

EYE

have no impact on shipping movements, and that the company had no known ties to the Chinese government. However, those claims have already been tackled by the Washington Times’ Insight magazine: “Western policymakers and business leaders have little or no idea of China’s grand strategy and how Beijing’s leaders want to situate their country for the next century. When, in 1999, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) sent Insight’s report, “China’s Beachhead at Panama Canal,” to then defense secretary William Cohen, he called for a full national-security appraisal of the problem. Lott told Cohen, “U.S. naval ships will be at the mercy of Chinesecontrolled pilots and could even be denied passage. It appears we have given away the farm.” “At Lott’s request, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing in which four Clinton-administration witnesses testified that Hutchison Whampoa posed no security challenges to the United States [see “PC Answers on Panama Canal,” Nov. 22, 1999]. But not one of the witnesses could answer the fundamental question, posed by Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.): “Do you believe the People’s Republic of China uses commercial enterprises to advance their military interests?” “Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense, Brian E. Sheridan, who had issued a defense of Hutchison Whampoa, confessed, “I don’t know.” Alberto Aleman Zubieta, whom Clinton had appointed to run the Panama Canal until 2005, didn’t answer either. Neither did Joseph W. Cornelison, the deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Commission, nor Lino Gutierrez [the official referred to by Christchurch City Holdings Ltd’s PR man], then principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. All had contradicted their testimony. Only Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, then chief of the U.S. Southern Command, answered affirma44, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

tively to whether Beijing uses commercial enterprises to advance its military interests, saying only: “I think so.” “That was it. And apparently the government has learned little since. “Many of those who are engaged in China policy or who invest there remain blithely ignorant of Chinese goals to replace the United States as the reigning world power,” says Thomas Woodrow, a former senior China analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.” Lino Gutierrez is the Clinton official whose testimony was used to rubbish suggestions of Chinese government investment. He told the senate hearing: “Through publicly available information, we have been able to ascertain that neither Hutchison-Whampoa, nor its subsidiaries Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH) and the Panama Ports Company (PPC), have any significant investment from mainland China.” What isn’t clear is how Gutierrez determined that, when many key companies in the group including Hutchison Port Holdings are registered in tax havens so their true ownership cannot be searched. Investigate did finally get to put a series of questions to CCHL Chief Executive Bob Lineham. The questions, and his answers, are as follows: Q: How is CCHL satisfied that, even if Hutchison is a front company for the People’s Liberation Army of China, that its majority stake in the operating company for the Port of Lyttelton remains a good idea? A: “In the event that Christchurch City Holdings Limited’s (CCHL) Takeover Offer for Lyttelton Port Company Ltd (LPC) succeeded, and Hutchison Port Holdings Ltd was introduced into the Port of Lyttelton, the Christchurch City Council would retain control of the Lyttelton Port Company with a 50.1% vot-

ing majority (through CCHL) of the shares in LPC. “The purpose of the new port operating company in which HPH would have a 50.1% share is to operate the Port of Lyttelton. It does not and cannot control the Lyttelton Port Company. With HPH as a port partner, the Port of Lyttelton would be controlled, as it is today, by the people of Christchurch through CCHL and the Christchurch City Council. Q: How is CCHL satisfied that Li Ka-shing is a legitimate businessman, in the face not only of his vast personal fortune in a socialist country, but also his well-documented ties to communist China and its ruling politburo long before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong? A: No answer received. Q: Why is it not strange that a communist state can be home to the world’s tenth richest man, without corruption being a factor? A: No answer received. Q: In what way has CCHL consulted with the New Zealand government or its officials over the proposed buy in? A: “The introduction of Hutchison Port Holdings to the Port of Lyttelton would be subject to the usual regulatory consents that are required when an overseas company is involved.” Q: Li Ka Shing or companies and individuals associated with him have been implicated in smuggling 2,000 AK 47 fully automatic military rifles into California, and shipping componentry for nuclear weapons to Iran. CITIC, a Chinese Government company that Li helped found and sits on the board of directors of, is building an aluminium smelter in Iran the product of which can be used in missile technology and the production of nuclear weapons. Why are the reputational issues surrounding Li Ka Shing not a concern to CCHL? No answer received. Q: Why is CCHL not concerned about the fact that Hutchison was prevented from purchasing telecommunications provider Global Crossing in 2003 because of concerns that he was a security threat to the US? A: No answer received.

nd if the Christchurch port administrators are relying on assurances by Clinton administration officials that Li Ka-shing is not a security threat, they could be backing the wrong horse. Sadly, Investigate has reported before on how badly briefed New Zealand officials are on international intrigue. Former National Government Prime Minister Jenny Shipley was given a briefing by Foreign Affairs and Trade on visiting businessman James Riady in 1999 that read like this: “The Lippo Group is one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates in terms of market capitalisation with estimates of value putting it at having US$11 billion in assets. “The vision of its founder Mochtar Riady is to transcend the institutional limitations placed upon organisations run in the traditional overseas Chinese pattern and adopt a modern publicly owned and professionally managed pattern of business. “Mochtar has formed alliances and joint venture partnerships with world class multinational corporations and has high calibre professional management staff working for him. “The Lippo empire rose out of the success of the Lippo Bank. Unlike just about all other banks in Indonesia its founder Mochtar Riady tended to shun the Suharto connections that for other conglomerates in Indonesia were the keys to success.

“He avoided lending to politically connected groups or to state enterprises and instead built his business on legitimate retail and trade finance.” Yes, well. That’s the New Zealand intelligence briefing, but while our diplomats were talking about how politically-neutral and non-crony like the Riadys were, the businessmen themselves were on the run from US justice for illegally laundering $4 million of illegal Chinese government donations to President Clinton’s re-election fund. The saddest part of that story was the information about the Riadys was in the public domain, just as the information on Li Ka-shing is, but New Zealand trade officials chose to ignore it or write it off as “conspiracy theory”. Interestingly, one report from a US Congressional team that visited Panama says “Li Ka-Shing is an investor in the Riady family’s Hong Kong China Bank.” It is this international game of join the dots that seems too hard for New Zealand officials to understand. The Riadys were heavily involved with a company called China Resources Ltd, which is also a joint venture partner with Hutchison in the Panama canal. China Resources has long been known as a front for Chinese intelligence, but this too was completely missing from the intelligence briefing given to Shipley. Indeed, judging from their innocuous contents one would have to suspect the briefing was in fact prepared by Chinese intelligence! “The Lippo Group has a strategic position in China and Hong Kong with substantial investments and relationships with powerful business and government people and organisations. “It owns 49% of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank with the remaining 51% held by China Resources (Holdings) which is a wholly-owned enterprise of China’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.” So despite Christchurch’s insistence that New Zealand authorities have it all in hand and that citizens can rest easy in their beds, Investigate is reminded of this news release about the previous Asian-investor golden boy James Riady, issued by the US Department of Justice in 2001:

JAMES RIADY PLEADS GUILTY WILL PAY LARGEST FINE IN CAMPAIGN FINANCE HISTORY FOR VIOLATING FEDERAL ELECTION LAW

WASHINGTON, D.C. - James Tjahaja Riady will pay a record $8.6 million in criminal fines and plead guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the United States by unlawfully reimbursing campaign donors with foreign corporate funds in violation of federal election law, the Justice Department’s Campaign Financing Task Force and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles announced today. In addition, LippoBank California, a California state-chartered bank affiliated with Lippo Group, will plead guilty to 86 misdemeanor counts charging its agents, Riady and John Huang, with making illegal foreign campaign contributions from 1988 through 1994. As the world’s largest port operator, there are sound economic reasons for Hutchison to operate New Zealand ports. But there appear to be equally sound political and strategic reasons as to why they should not. If the deals proceed, it could turn into yet another political bombshell for the Labour Government to work through, a government that is, itself, close to China. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 45

Bounty’s

LEGACY

Appeal court quashes second Pitcairn mutiny When Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers landed on Pitcairn Island 226 years ago with a bevy of teenage Tahitian girls, they were fleeing British imperial justice. This month, as R ACHEL ROBINSON reports, the Empire struck back by confirming convictions against six Bounty descendants for sex crimes

n a small courtroom in South Auckland the fate of an entire island community hangs in the balance. Gathered in the court are the three judges, the defence and prosecution teams, and assorted diplomats and Pitcairners in the public gallery. All those involved in the Pitcairn case wait with bated breath. After years of anguish for the complainants, the accused, their families and the entire Island community, it comes down to this: Thursday the 2nd of March. At 9.15 the Judge begins to read the judgement of the Pitcairn Court of Appeal. At 9.16am it is finished. A one-minute verdict throws out the entire defence case, bar one count against one of the convicted men. For the complainants and the Crown it is another victory, a quiet acceptance of the complicated legal investigation that has strangled Pitcairn Island since 1999. For the convicted men and their families, all of whom still proclaim innocence of their crimes, it is another nail in the coffin. The verdict, when it comes, is not a surprise to various Island supporters. To them it is just another example of an English justice system that they say has no regard for the welfare of all Islanders, including the complainants. “They have never listened to us. Pitcairners have no rights anymore,” says Julie Christian. Her brother, Dennis Christian, is convicted of 10 indecent assaults and sentenced to 300 hours community work and two years supervision. After the judgement is read out several islanders make their way to Kari Boye Young’s home, where they cry with each other and watch video footage of times past on Pitcairn. The solidarity between the Islanders laughing, dancing and singing across the television screen is palpable. “It is just so sad,” says Christian. “The Island is completely split now. We will never see that INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 47

“Families of the accused, themselves having done no wrong, have spent years in their own private hell. They are br anded as “child r apists” and other terms of abuse that are unable to be printed”

kind of camaraderie again. Our home has been destroyed – completely destroyed.” So what really happened on Pitcairn Island? With such a complicated, historical case it was never going to be easy to pin down the facts. Add to that the brutal nature of the rapes and assaults complainants testified to and emotions run high on all sides. What has appeared through the murky waters surrounding Pitcairn Island are two completely different stories fired from each side of this increasingly bitter divide. The stories of the women who claim to have been raped are horrendous, and anyone reading the Supreme Court judgement that established the recognised facts of the case would howl for convictions and jail terms. From this side justice has indeed been served. However, from the Pitcairn side come allegations of a corrupted police investigation and the deliberate crucifying of an entire community. When it comes to cases involving rape it is often forgotten that there are victims other than those making the complaints. Families of the accused, themselves having done no wrong, have spent years in their own private hell. They are branded as “child rapists” and other terms of abuse that are unable to be 48, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

printed. It is acceptable, in the eyes of the media and the public, to treat these families and the Pitcairn community as being somehow less than human. “If we try to approach someone to tell our story we are automatically labelled as supporting child abuse,” explains Kari Boye Young. “It’s hopeless. We have never been given a fair go, we have never been given the opportunity to defend ourselves properly.” Scare tactics like this and the mire of differing accounts surrounding Pitcairn make it unlikely that the whole story will ever be told. The legal facts may be judged upon in court, but what really happened on Pitcairn will in all probability remain known only to the accused and the complainants themselves. The tiny island is home to a controversy that has badly wounded, if not ultimately destroyed, the small community. The courts dole out legal justice according to what it rules to be the facts, but the moral justice must come through an airing of both sides. Walking the middle line is not easy, but it is required. At the Pitcairn Court of Appeal it was the defence that took centre stage. Arguments spearheaded by defence aid lawyer Charles Cato and QC Grant Illingworth attempted to have the 1956 Sexual Offences Act, under which the men were convicted, ruled to be inapplicable to Pitcairn Island. The lack of published law on the island, difficulty of access

to the law, inconsistent policing and procedural abuses during the investigation were argued to have created a miscarriage of justice in the trials of the accused men.

owever the ruling of the Appeal Court in early March rejected these as grounds for a mistrial. “Even viewed cumulatively, the alleged grounds for abuse of process do not militate against a fair hearing”, concluded the judgement in regards to abuse of process arguments. According to this judgement, and the previous judgement in the Supreme Court, the six convicted men are guilty as charged. The offences read like a parent’s worst nightmare; sexual abuse and rape of young girls on such a widespread scale that it has virtually left no one untouched on Pitcairn Island. One case involved an 11 year old being pinned down in the bushes, gagged and raped by two men. Another case: the complainant alleges that rape happened so often that she just stopped fighting: “there was no point.” By any person’s standard these crimes are horrendous, and if proved to have happened, should be punished to the full extent of the law. Even the family members of the convicted men say as much. “Do you think for one second that all of us would have stuck by our men if we thought these charges were true?” asks Christian. However, while the majority of Pitcairners still dispute that the rapes and indecent assaults ever happened, public prosecutor Simon Moore and Pitcairn deputy Governor Matthew Forbes say there is no question of the men’s guilt. “Not one of the cases of rape do we rely on statutory definitions,” says Moore. “Every one of those women said no, they did not want this.” The five counts where statutory age of consent was relied upon instead of professed consent were all charges of indecent assaults. Forbes says that the entire issue is one of the rape and abuse of little girls by adult men. Both reject the idea that the complainants are not telling the whole truth, an allegation put forward by Pitcairn supporters. “Not one of those people sat in the trials and watched the tears roll down these women’s faces as they gave evidence. It’s such an easy thing to say that they’re making it all up, and it’s just wrong,” says Moore. He describes the process of the trials, in which complainants gave evidence before a judge and were then cross examined by defence lawyers, as lengthy and emotional. Court had to take numerous breaks as “decades of pent up emotion came out.” The crimes were so widespread and so serious as to outweigh any of the alleged abuses of process. However, the defence and island supporters tell a completely different story, something that is not, perhaps, altogether surprising. Emotion is evident on both sides, and if the Crown passionately believes in the men’s guilt, many Pitcairners believe just as passionately in their innocence. It is difficult to tell who is more ardent. Boye Young and Christian, both of whom have family members charged with sexual offences, maintain their position that the real issue on Pitcairn is an all-prevailing underage sex culture. “You can’t get away with much on Pitcairn. It’s a small com-

munity and it’s a gossip hill. If these abuses were so widespread why did no one know about it?” Christian asks. Christian left Pitcairn at the age of 13 to pursue secondary education at a boarding college. She left a virgin. “These trials have been on a ‘she says he says’ basis. But I grew up with these girls and I didn’t hear anything about any rapes or abuse. Maybe I was an innocent. But I never knew of any rape.” Christian says there was an incident where she was approached when she was younger, but she said no and that was it. Up until a few years ago all she knew of Pitcairn was an untouched paradise, a safe place. She says that some of the complainants had been in touch with her up until 2003, saying how much they missed Pitcairn and that it was a wonderful place. “That’s a very different picture to the hell hole they described in court.” Boye Young talks along similar lines. A Norwegian by birth, Boye Young married a Pitcairn man and settled with him on the Island for more than 20 years before moving to New Zealand. She says at first she was shocked by the very open sexual culture, in which young girls willingly became sexually active at the tender ages of 12 and 13. “And I know this sounds terrible, but it was a part of the culture and gradually I got used to it. I educated my own girls to my own standard to keep them from the sex until they were older, but Pitcairn is a very sex-oriented culture and that was normal. No one told us otherwise.” When asked about rapes and assault on the island, Boye Young is emphatic. “I’m sure that people did not know there was any rape. They would have reacted – we knew what it was.” She says there were times when women and girls said no, and that was where it stopped. According to a large group of Islanders there is no doubt about the presence of underage sex on Pitcairn. The question mark remains over the rape and assault allegations, as well as the many issues that surround the entire investigation and history of Pitcairn. In the seven years since police investigations first started thousands of documents have been produced. Correspondence between Pitcairners living both on the island and abroad became more frequent as locals tried to deal with the allegations that shattered the easy pace of their world. Added to the mounds of legal documents and media reports, the Pitcairn issue is a complex one with no easy resolution. However a large group of islanders raise serious questions over Britain’s handling of the case. Both Boye Young and Christian speak of seriously questionable police behaviour during the investigation. This includes a police officer deliberately getting one of the accused drunk in order to obtain information from him. The incident was admitted in the Supreme Court, but although unethical in the extreme, it was considered to have been a justifiable measure. Boye Young’s daughter originally agreed to testify as a witness, but later pulled out when she realised what the charges actually involved. “It was never her intention to be part of the court case and the destruction of the island she loves,” says Boye Young. The INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 49

PRESSPIX

“Not one of those people sat in the trials and watched the tears roll down these women’s faces as they gave evidence. It’s such an easy thing to say that they’re making it all up, and it’s just wrong,” says Moore”

police then harassed her so much that she felt it necessary to appeal to the Norwegian consul in New Zealand. “The authorities kept telling her that she didn’t have a happy childhood, and that she didn’t need to have any loyalty to Pitcairn at all because they were all terrible people.” The consul sent a complaint to the Norwegian embassy in Canberra. Only then did the police back off. Several more women who pulled out of testifying have similar stories. They say the police told them to make up stories, and offered compensation to the tune of thousands of pounds. This last point is strongly denied by the police investigators, Moore, Forbes and Governor Richard Fell. The evidence given in the Supreme Court established that compensation was not raised with complainants until well after the statements were taken, and the offer found to be invalid before the trials on Pitcairn started. “Every single one of the complainants were cross-examined regarding this. The subject of compensation was raised well after they had nailed their colours to the mast,” says Moore. However Boye Young and Christian are adamant that compensation was talked about with women during the police investigation by Karen Vaughan. They describe Vaughan, in charge of the police investigation, as being over zealous and 50, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

enthusiastic in regards to questioning women on the island. “I was offered 10,000 pounds per successful conviction,” alleges Christian. “Vaughan was obsessed – she said she needed to fix Pitcairn.” Boye Young tells a similar story, saying her daughter was offered compensation to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds. These claims are dismissed by Forbes as being lies from a group of women determined to “trivialise the nature of the offences and to make it appear that the charges are part of some elaborate conspiracy to allow the UK to shut the island down. This is, of course, absurd.” Another peculiarity arises in that these claims were never heard in court as a defence. Whether that was down to stories made up to protect family members or obeying legal advice given against raising the matter in court is unclear. However questions over the conduct of police involved in the investigation remain. Police went from house to house, interviewing every woman on the island and demanding lists of names. “I believe it is wrong for people to come and interview every girl, looking for rape and offering compensation to those who talked,” Christian says. The fallout following the allegations, charges and convictions has taken its toll on everyone involved. Christian is fight-

ing for the Pitcairn cause because of the way she has seen her family members and community treated by the world in the wake of the allegations. “It has been hell. The papers crucified my mum. She went through absolute hell on earth. The media were calling her a rapist-raiser because her child was facing charges. I will fight because of what they have done to my family.” Christian says she has had someone walk up to her and say “Raped anyone lately?” Although as an adult she can stand up for herself, the backlash has devastated younger members of her family. It seems that the whole community has been vilified for the actions of a few. “We have both been on the brink of suicide,” Boye Young says of herself and her husband, who will be tried for sexual offences later this year. “According to the press every Pitcairner is a child-rapist.” Along with intense media attention, the legal sledgehammer employed by the Crown to deal with the allegations has all but destroyed the tiny community. Moore makes the point that restorative justice was offered to the accused men time and again and turned down. “No one would have been happier than I if we could have resolved this out of court.”

he Pitcairn Sentencing Ordinance specifically made room for this provision, becoming the first criminal law in the world to offer restorative justice. It gives both parties the chance to opt out of a trial in favour of getting together to resolve the issue. However it involves the accused admitting guilt and apologising, something that Moore says the Pitcairn men were unwilling to do. “The law is a blunt instrument and it certainly is not the best way to deal with situations like this. I had hoped that we could deal with this case without going to a contested court hearing, but this was the position we were forced into.” Early on in the investigation it looked like restorative justice would win out over heavier legal action, with both the complainants and the island community making it clear it was what they wanted. “A lot of the complainants did not want these men to go to jail,” says Moore. However, even though he appealed to the accused on the first day of the trials, restorative justice was turned down. Boye Young is astounded at this, saying she knew of no such offer being made. “We all wanted restorative justice. We wrote letters, we petitioned for it, but it was denied to us.” Again the two sides of the Pitcairn case tell two completely different stories. It is clear that the community, the prosecution and the complainants all wanted restorative justice. It remains unclear as to why something that was so passionately called for on both sides did not happen. Moore rests the answer squarely on the shoulders of the now convicted sexual offenders. Boye Young and Christian raise questions over the role of Pitcairn Governor Richard Fell and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and whether legal advice told the men not to accept the offer. With public defender Paul Dacre unavailable to comment it

remains a mystery. But somewhere in the mountainous pile of documents relating to Pitcairn lies the reason as to why restorative justice was not entered into. Unfortunately many of these documents, including letters from the Pitcairn community, have either been destroyed, barred or had injunctions placed on them. Again, it is unlikely that the whole story will ever be known to the wider public. Knowledge of the Pitcairn debacle remains the private, tortured domain of those who are directly involved. And so the legal machine marches on. The Court of Appeal judgement threw out claims of abuse of process. Judges Barker, Salmon and Henry conclude that even the cumulative nature of deficiencies such as lack of publication of the law, lack of policing, and the creation of a legal system to try all men at once are not sufficient grounds for a miscarriage of justice. In court Crown lawyer Christine Gordon maintained that trying all the men together created a fair trial for them all. This suggestion is met with anger when mentioned to Julie Christian. “These were individual men accused of individual acts. Why couldn’t they have been investigated and tried individually like with any other criminal case? Instead they were tried as one, in a class action, before the world. The whole community has been on trial.” It is a long, drawn-out process with things getting worse as the years pass. With the last opportunity of appeal due to be heard by the Privy Council in July the legal end of the case is in sight. However it will take years, if not decades, for Pitcairn to recover. At the heart of the Pitcairn issue is the credibility of those involved. The courts so far have judged on the side of the complainants. The accused exercised their right to abstain from giving evidence in the trials, although in doing so forfeited being able to explain themselves to the judges and the onlooking media. Dacre was unavailable to comment on whether this choice ultimately crippled their defence. The evidence given by complainants was found to be credible by the judge, if not by supporters of the accused men. “The defence didn’t dispute the acts, they disputed the laws used to try the men,” says Moore. The legal minds that have found the men to be guilty are some of the best in the country, with decades of experience shared between them. Moore and Forbes both reject the idea that compensation affected the evidence given by complainants. “It was made clear to the complainants prior to the trials that no compensation would be paid,” says Forbes. Moore makes the point that offering of compensation after statements had been made and withdrawing it before the trials is a bizarre way of enticing complainants to make up stories. And to the outside hearts and minds watching the case unfold it is difficult to understand how money, even a lot of it, could persuade women to wilfully create lies that would destroy the lives of those they grew up with. However Christian, Boye Young and others remain unconvinced. They say some of the complainants originally condemned the investigation and allegations until compensation was mentioned. Growing up among the women at the centre of the allegaINVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 51

tions, Christian says there are various aspects to the allegations that don’t make sense. “This is why we are up in arms. It’s not because we support the men. We know these girls and the stories just do not gel.” Christian and Boye Young also note that the complainants continued to visit Pitcairn long after they had left for other shores. They never saw any evidence of bad blood between the complainants and the accused during these visits. Christian becomes feisty when people dismiss supporters claims as having come from subservient women scared of being beaten up by their husbands. “My mum is the strongest person I know. All Pitcairn women are strong – there is no way we are bowing and scraping to our men.” Britain’s role in Pitcairn’s tragedy is also one that needs to be examined. So far the colonial power has escaped almost unscathed in the wake of the devastating allegations and convictions.

nsurprisingly the way Britain is coloured with regards to Pitcairn again relies on who is telling the story. According to the defence lawyers and Pitcairn supporters Britain has long neglected the Island community, leaving it to develop abnormal practices in ignorance of the English laws that applied. Independent QC Grant Illingworth says he has always been most concerned about the lack of local publication of the statutes the Crown rests their case on. “The reality is that Pitcairners did not have any reasonable access to the law. It appears to me that Pitcairn was pretty badly neglected for a very long time.” However the courts have found that lack of publication did not significantly affect the Islanders understanding of rape as a criminal offence. “It is so fundamentally and so morally wrong, so obviously wrong, that everyone would know,” says Moore. “As for having access to the law, all they had to do was ask.” As for the suggestion of neglect, deputy governor Forbes vehemently rejects this. He points to the numerous documents supplied in the trials that have shown Britain’s involvement with and assistance of Pitcairn, including legal advice. “It is not the case that Britain has neglected Pitcairn.” However a wealth of correspondence from the Island shows that time and again concerns over the sexual culture were made known to the FCO. Time and again the response came back that there was nothing Britain could do. It was either too expensive, too hard or too inconvenient to send someone to Pitcairn to help. “They did not guide and educate us, but now they think they have the right to come back and crucify the whole community later on,” Christian says. Again Forbes rejects these claims, saying Britain carries no responsibility for the offences committed on Pitcairn. This is in stark contrast to his predecessor Karen Wolstenholme, who wrote in a letter to the FCO that the situation on the island was “partly of our own making”. Wolstenholme was the first diplomat to admit that the UK carries some moral responsibility. It is an admission that has not been picked up by Fell or Forbes. As it is Britain has taken full financial responsibility for the investigations and trials, including both the defence and prosecu52, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

tion costs. This has now run into well over the six-figure mark. However it would seem Britain is also trying to dodge questions of partial responsibility for the culture that evolved on Pitcairn. While Forbes is right in saying that an over-arching underage sex culture is no excuse for the brutal rape and sexual abuse of young girls, it is hard to see how such widespread crimes in a community as small as Pitcairn were not noticed by the islanders or the governing authorities. Unsurprisingly the other side of the debate paints Britain’s actions in a far more flattering light. Moore says it took considerable courage on the part of the British to investigate and prosecute the widespread sexual abuse eventually found on Pitcairn. “The easiest thing in the world for Britain would have been to sweep this under the carpet.” As with so much of the Pitcairn case it comes down to who you believe is telling the truth. It is a task that is much more murkier and difficult than anyone involved would like it to be. So what next for Pitcairn? Two men are yet to be tried for sexual offences. Their cases are expected to begin within the next few months. The six convicted men will take their appeal to the Privy Council later this year, with a possibility of appeal to the European Courts if necessary. The Privy Council will also review Britain’s territorial claim over Pitcairn in July. Life for the complainants will continue on in their adopted countries. If indeed they have been victims of rape and assault as found in court, their pain is great and should not be taken lightly. If the convictions are upheld and all appeal options are exhausted the men will begin their sentences on the island. The families of the convicted men will in all likelihood continue to be treated by the outside world as subhuman monsters rather than as victims themselves, to be left locked in their private torment. And while the international spotlight will inevitably move on to the next scandal, the Pitcairn community faces a schism that may never be healed. While Moore hopes for the rift to be able to be left in the past, Christian says this will take years, possibly decades. The accusations were so wide-ranging that, although only six were eventually convicted, virtually no Pitcairn man was left untouched. “Not everyone comes to the community Christmas now. The men can’t afford to be around children anymore. This is not just a big fight – it’s not something you take lightly.” Britain has big plans for Pitcairn, including improving access to the island and helping it to become attractive to tourists and potential settlers. Although Pitcairn has been self-sufficient in the past, financial reserves ran out in 2004. “The current investment is to provide Pitcairn with a sustainable economy in the modern world,” says Forbes. But for an island community that has been ripped apart at the seams it is difficult to see how the future will pan out. “It’s so sad that it has come to this,” says Boye Young. While the group of Pitcairners will continue to fight against the convictions under a law they say has no jurisdiction and the allegations they claim are not true, the Crown is confident that justice has been served. “The question is was this a fair go? And looking at all the factors, putting it all together, yes they did get a fair trial,” says Moore. Whether this is true, although judged to be the case so far, remains to be seen.

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WORLDBRIEF

Is Europe the new Soviet Union? One of last century’s leading Russian dissidents is warning old socialists don’t change their spots, and they’re preparing to turn the European Union into a dictatorship. PAUL BELIEN caught up with Vladimir Bukovsky at a speech in Brussels

ladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech just delivered in Brussels Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state. Bukovsky paid a visit to the European Parliament at the invitation of Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Forum. Fidesz, a member of the European Christian Democrat group, had invited the former Soviet dissident over from England, where he lives, on the occasion of this year’s 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. After his morning meeting with the Hungarians, Bukovsky gave an afternoon speech in a Polish restaurant in the Trier straat, opposite the European Parliament, where he spoke at the invitation of the United Kingdom Independence Party, of which he is a patron. In his speech Bukovsky referred to confidential documents from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992. These documents confirm the existence of a “conspiracy” to turn the European Union into a socialist organization. Bukovsky was one of the heroes of the 20th century. As a young man he exposed the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 19171991) and spent a total of twelve years (1964-1976), from his 22nd to his 34th year, in Soviet jails, labour camps and psychiatric institutions. In 1976 the Soviets expelled him to the West. In 1992 he was invited by the Russian government to serve as an expert testifying at the trial conducted to determine whether the Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. To prepare for his testimony Bukovsky was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet secret archives. He is one of the few people ever to have seen these documents because they 54, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

are still classified. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, however, he managed to copy many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Soviet government. Now he’s drawing strong parallels between the European Union and the old Soviet Union, and he makes no apologies: “I am referrring to structures, to certain ideologies being instilled, to the plans, the direction, the inevitable expansion, the obliteration of nations, which was the purpose of the Soviet Union. Most people do not understand this. They do not know it, but we do because we were raised in the Soviet Union where we had to study the Soviet ideology in school and at university. “The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new historic entity, the Soviet people, all around the globe. The same is true in the EU today. They are trying to create a new people. They call this people “Europeans”, whatever that means. “According to Communist doctrine as well as to many forms of Socialist thinking, the state, the national state, is supposed to wither away. In Russia, however, the opposite happened. Instead of withering away the Soviet state became a very powerful state, but the nationalities were obliterated. But when the time of the Soviet collapse came these suppressed feelings of national identity came bouncing back and they nearly destroyed the country. It was so frightening.” Bukovsky believes the same thing will happen to the European Union. “Absolutely, you can press a spring only that much, and the human psyche is very resilient you know. You can press it, you can press it, but don’t forget it is still accumulating a power to rebound. It is like a spring and it always goes to overshoot.” One of the reasons, he says – and this may be familiar to New Zealand readers – is that the bureaucrats behind the EU project refused to take a democratic ‘no’ for an answer, and

4th January 1976: The Russian dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky arriving at London Airport on his way to stay with actor David Markham, one of the principal campaigners for his release. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

kept pushing referendums that wore various countries down. “Look at Denmark which voted against the Maastricht treaty twice. Look at Ireland [which voted against the Nice treaty]. Look at many other countries, they are under enormous pressure. It is almost blackmail. Switzerland was forced to vote five times in a referendum. All five times they have rejected it, but who knows what will happen the sixth time, the seventh time. It is always the same thing. It is a trick for idiots. The people have to vote in referendums until the people vote the way that is wanted. Then they have to stop voting. Why stop? Let us continue voting. The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage.” One of the questions emerging from this is whether it is too late to make the European Union structure more accountable to the citizens of Europe. Bukovsky doesn’t hold much hope.

“I think that the European Union, like the Soviet Union, cannot be democratized. Gorbachev tried to democratize it and it blew up. This kind of structures cannot be democratized. “The European Parliament is elected on the basis of proportional representation, which is not true representation. And what does it vote on? The percentage of fat in yoghurt, that kind of thing. It is ridiculous. It is given the task of the Supreme Soviet. The average MP can speak for six minutes per year in the Chamber. That is not a real parliament.” But it is in Bukovsky’s Brussels speech that he delivers his major warning: that the rise of a united Europe was no political accident. “In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo Central Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are even now, for 30 years. These documents show very INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 55

“I have no doubt about it. There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover”

clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our “common European home.” “The idea was very simple. It first came up in 1985-86, when the Italian Communists visited Gorbachev, followed by the German Social-Democrats. They all complained that the changes in the world, particularly after [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher introduced privatisation and economic liberalisation, were threatening to wipe out the achievement (as they called it) of generations of Socialists and Social-Democrats – threatening to reverse it completely. Therefore the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once. Prior to that, the left-wing parties and the Soviet Union had opposed European integration very much because they perceived it as a means to block their socialist goals. From 1985 onwards they completely changed their view. The Soviets came to a conclusion and to an agreement with the left-wing parties that if they worked together they could hijack the whole European project and turn it upside down. Instead of an open market they would turn it into a federal state. “According to the [secret Soviet] documents, 1985-86 is the turning point. I have published most of these documents. You might even find some of them on the internet (http://psi.ece. jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html). But the 56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

conversations they had are really eye opening. For the first time you understand that there is a conspiracy – quite understandable for them, as they were trying to save their political hides. In the East the Soviets needed a change of relations with Europe because they were entering a protracted and very deep structural crisis; in the West the left-wing parties were afraid of being wiped out and losing their influence and prestige. So it was a conspiracy, quite openly made by them, agreed upon, and worked out. “In January of 1989, for example, a delegation of the Trilateral Commission came to see Gorbachev. It included [former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro] Nakasone, [former French President Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing, [American banker David] Rockefeller and [former US Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger. They had a very nice conversation where they tried to explain to Gorbachev that Soviet Russia had to integrate into the financial institutions of the world, such as Gatt, the IMF and the World Bank. “In the middle of it Giscard d’Estaing suddenly takes the floor and says: “Mr President, I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen – probably within 15 years – but Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that, how would you allow the other East European countries to interact with it or how to become a part of it, you have to be prepared.” “This was January 1989, at a time when the [1992] Maastricht treaty had not even been drafted. How the hell did Giscard d’Estaing know what was going to happen in 15 years time? And surprise, surprise, how did he become the author of the European constitution [in 2002-03]? A very good question. It does smell of conspiracy, doesn’t it? “Luckily for us the Soviet part of this conspiracy collapsed earlier and it did not reach the point where Moscow could influence the course of events. But the original idea was to have what they called a convergency, whereby the Soviet Union would mellow somewhat and become more social-democratic, while Western Europe would become social-democratic and socialist. Then there will be convergency. The structures have to fit each other. This is why the structures of the European Union were initially built with the purpose of fitting into the

Soviet structure. This is why they are so similar in functioning and in structure. “It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similarly, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo. I mean it does so exactly, except for the fact that the Commission now has 25 members and the Politburo usually had 13 or 15 members. Apart from that they are exactly the same, unaccountable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all. When you look into all this bizarre activity of the European Union with its 80,000 pages of regulations it looks like Gosplan. We used to have an organisation which was planning everything in the economy, to the last nut and bolt, five years in advance. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU. When you look at the type of EU corruption, it is exactly the Soviet type of corruption, going from top to bottom rather than going from bottom to top.

“I

f you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union. Of course, it is a milder version of the Soviet Union. Please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that it has a Gulag. It has no KGB – not yet – but I am very carefully watching such structures as Europol for example. That really worries me a lot because this organisation will probably have powers bigger than those of the KGB. They will have diplomatic immunity. Can you imagine a KGB with diplomatic immunity? They will have to police us on 32 kinds of crimes – two of which are particularly worrying, one is called racism, another is called xenophobia. No criminal court on earth defines anything like this as a crime [this is not entirely true, as Belgium already does so – PB]. So it is a new crime, and we have already been warned. Someone from the British government told us that those who object to uncontrolled immigration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes. I think Patricia Hewitt said this publicly. “Hence, we have now been warned. Meanwhile they are introducing more and more ideology. The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I watch very carefully how political correctness spreads and becomes an oppressive ideology, not to mention the fact that they forbid smoking almost everywhere now. Look at this persecution of people like the Swedish pastor who was persecuted for several months because he said that the Bible does not approve homosexuality. France passed the same law of hate speech concerning gays. Britain is passing hate speech laws concerning race relations and now religious speech, and so on and so forth. “What you observe, taken into perspective, is a systematic introduction of ideology which could later be enforced with oppressive measures. Apparently that is the whole purpose of Europol. Otherwise why do we need it? To me Europol looks very suspicious. I watch very carefully who is persecuted for what and what is happening, because that is one field in which I am an expert. I know how Gulags spring up.

“It looks like we are living in a period of rapid, systematic and very consistent dismantlement of democracy. Look at Britain’s Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. It makes ministers into legislators who can introduce new laws without bothering to tell Parliament or anyone. My immediate reaction is why do we need it? Britain survived two world wars, the war with Napoleon, the Spanish Armada, not to mention the Cold War, when we were told at any moment we might have a nuclear world war, without any need for introducing this kind legislation, without the need for suspending our civil liberaties and introducing emergency powers. Why do we need it right now? This can make a dictatorship out of your country in no time. “Today’s situation is really grim. Major political parties have been completely taken in by the new EU project. None of them really opposes it. They have become very corrupt. Who is going to defend our freedoms? It looks like we are heading towards some kind of collapse, some kind of crisis. The most likely outcome is that there will be an economic collapse in Europe, which in due time is bound to happen with this growth of expenses and taxes. The inability to create a competitive environment, the overregulation of the economy, the bureaucratisation, it is going to lead to economic collapse. Particularly the introduction of the euro was a crazy idea. Currency is not supposed to be political. “I have no doubt about it. There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover. Just think what will happen if it comes to an economic crisis. The recrimination between nations will be huge. It might come to blows. Look to the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries now living in Europe. This was promoted by the European Union. What will happen with them if there is an economic collapse? We will probably have, like in the Soviet Union at the end, so much ethnic strife that the mind boggles. In no other country were there such ethnic tensions as in the Soviet Union, except probably in Yugoslavia. So that is exactly what will happen here, too. We have to be prepared for that. This huge edifice of bureaucracy is going to collapse on our heads. “This is why, and I am very frank about it, the sooner we finish with the EU the better. The sooner it collapses the less damage it will have done to us and to other countries. But we have to be quick because the Eurocrats are moving very fast. It will be difficult to defeat them. Today it is still simple. If one million people march on Brussels today these guys will run away to the Bahamas. If tomorrow half of the British population refuses to pay its taxes, nothing will happen and no-one will go to jail. Today you can still do that. But I do not know what the situation will be tomorrow with a fully fledged Europol staffed by former Securitate officers. Anything may happen. “We are losing time. We have to defeat them. We have to sit and think, work out a strategy in the shortest possible way to achieve maximum effect. Otherwise it will be too late. So what should I say? My conclusion is not optimistic. So far, despite the fact that we do have some anti-EU forces in almost every country, it is not enough. We are losing and we are wasting time.” Paul Belien’s article first appeared in the Brussels Journal at http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865 where it can be read with hyperlinks to relevant documents.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 57

thinkLIFE money

Musical wheelchairs

As old age looms for baby boomers, Peter Hensley says some will miss out on money because of their debt burden

ebt is a four letter word yet punters are queuing up to take on more. As a country New Zealand is approaching a debt to income ratio of 140%. This is almost a threefold increase from around 50% in 1990. Amongst all the OECD nations we are winning the race when it comes to household indebtedness. America is lagging with a ratio of 106% (as @ October 2005), however they are on target to reach 150% in just over three years time. (Source NZ Reserve Bank). Late blooming baby boomers are trying to play catch up for their retirement. They see leveraging into property as a sure fire way of achieving what they have put off for so long. We regularly have clients coming in to seek reassurance that a 100% mortgage on a rental property will be their key to riches. A simple cash flow analysis suggests that they could be playing Russian Roulette with their financial future. A simple cash flow analysis is where a prospective investor lists the total amount of income they could expect to receive

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from the investment property. They then deduct all the known costs, such as mortgage repayments, council rates, maintenance, management fees. With 100% financing on a residential rental the end figure is almost guaranteed to be negative. This is where the term negative gearing was coined. Gearing is another word for debt and negative gearing is where the investor borrows money knowing in advance that they are going to lose on the deal. The potential investor is then encouraged to take the simple cash flow analysis and extend it into the future to produce a projected cash flow analysis. A projected cash flow allows them to consider what might happen in the future. The most important variable in this exercise is the expected increased in value of the property over time. Over the very long term property prices tend to track inflation. The recent spurt in property prices over the past five years, whilst unexpected, is not unusual. There are a lot of reasons why it happened with immigration being

a major factor. It should not be extrapolated into the future. History shows that over time property prices track inflation plus a couple of points. Since 1989 inflation has been the sole focus of the Governor of the New Zealand Reserve Bank. That position has a contract with the Minister of Finance to contain inflation within a set band with the upper limit being around 3%. If over time property increases in value at 3% (thereabouts) and mortgage interest rates are currently running at 8% pa (thereabouts), it means that the investor will be losing at a rate of 3 - 5% pa. What makes property investment worthwhile is that from to time, prices outstrip inflation by a large margin (as has happened recently). Well located property tends to benefit more from this phenomenon than others. Well managed and maintained properties become more attractive, and because of circumstances some properties will be mispriced to the market. This is known in the trade as the

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Our practice understands that the average New Zealand couple tends to enter retirement with a debt free home and around $100,000 in total savings. They rely heavily on their entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation to finance their lifestyle once they finish paid employment

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three D’s – death, divorce and departure. The property price cycle operates like any other business cycle. Values move from being attractive (cheap) to unattractive (expensive) and back again. The mean (average) being the rate of inflation. This cycle is where the premise comes that if you stick it out long enough you can’t lose on property. For some investors the cycle will always be too long. Skilled property investors have patience and deep pockets, good novices will learn those skills, however most are doomed to failure. Novice investors tend to enter the cycle at the wrong time and they simple do not have the resources (ready cash and or time) to last out the cycle. Some novices are just plain lucky and enter the cycle just as it bounces off the bottom. They chance their luck again and if the market is still moving up they strike the jackpot. This is the danger period for their unfortunate friends and relatives. They see their friends make what seems to be very fast money and sometimes out of envy and

greed they jump into the market at exactly the worst time. Debt to income servicing ratio is often confused with debt to income ratio. The debt to income ratio of 140% is an investor’s total debt compared to their income. The younger a person is, the higher the figure will be. As they age their debt is expected to reduce over time. Debt to income servicing ratio is generally recommended not to exceed 35%. The servicing ratio is the amount of annual income that will be utilised to service (repay) the debt. This figure tends to limit the amount an individual can borrow from a lending institution. Taking into account lifestyle, utility costs, insurance and various taxes such as rates etc it is generally accepted that the average investor on an average wage will be able to afford about a third of their income to repay debt. A higher income earner will obviously be able to exceed this percentage. Our practice understands that the average New Zealand couple tends to enter retire-

ment with a debt free home and around $100,000 in total savings. They rely heavily on their entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation to finance their lifestyle once they finish paid employment. The relentless march of the Baby Boom generation through the decades is one army that politicians have generally elected to ignore. Individuals have raised the issues and recognise the enormous issues that the county will need to address. The first wave hits in just over three years. Initially the drain will just be on the nation’s purse strings via the universal nature of NZ Super. The second more demanding wave will be the cost of medical care for this ever increasing population bulge. The waves will continue to come for the next forty years until 2050. Some writers suggest that the recent rise in debt levels indicate that as wealth has traditionally been transferred between generations, debt will also become intergenerational. Other writers suggest that the huge amount of wealth built up by baby boomers will not be allowed to be transferred to the next generation without the Government attempting to facilitate the transfer for a fee. Experience suggests that late blooming baby boomers should focus on eliminating their debt rather than increasing it. The property cycle appears to be entering one of its shake out periods. This is where investors’ patience and wallet are tested with static/slipping prices. The rising cost of money (via increasing mortgage rates) will have investors revisit their cash flow forecast. Any financial pain could cause some novice investors to sell at a loss. This act of desperation (another D to add to three outlined above) could provide an experienced investor an opportunity to obtain a property which is now mispriced to the market. Potential retirees are encouraged to focus on increased income opportunities such as taking in boarders (not taxed under current rules), or perhaps selling their property down and moving to a smaller realistic residence before they are forced to. For many others, a reverse mortgage may be a viable option. Many retirees don’t care about the issue of death duties because they are intent on spending the kids inheritance and then reverse mortgaging the home so that they get to spend and enjoy what they spent a lifetime building.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 59

thinkLIFE education

The modern dunce cap Sorting out teenagers can be hard, but Rochelle Riley argues it is necessary

asha Henderson made her 14 year old daughter Coretha stand on an Oklahoma City street corner wearing a sign that said: “I don’t do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food.’’ That was just before Christmas, and

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since then Henderson has been praised and vilified. Some saw her action as bold; others saw it as cruel and unusual punishment, as abuse. But abuse is forcing your child to sell drugs to the pay the rent so you can sit on your butt and watch The Young and the Restless. Abuse is not making your child

understand that they will be responsible for their lives. I saw Henderson’s actions as the unusual result of a mother’s love. Sometimes it takes unusual to get a teen’s attention – because some of our teens don’t get it. Some recent studies have found that many college-age youth may be maturing too slowly because their parents planned their time, their schedules and their lives. An Annie E. Casey Foundation study last year also found that millions of today’s young people 18-24 are “disconnected’’ – neither working nor in school – who have neither “the skills, supports, experience, education, nor confidence to successfully transition to adulthood,’’ Douglas W. Nelson, president of the foundation, wrote. A friend mentioned a divorce case where a mom told the judge her ex-husband needed to increase child support so her daughter could have a car like all her friends. The judge agreed! I had a chat with my daughter about some of her peers who want to be Paris Hilton without the cash or Beyonce Knowles without the pipes. They are living unrealistic lives with unrealistic dreams. Some are not focused on school and class and college and potential careers because they, particularly the girls, want to depend on other things to carry them. I had a message for them: Depending on looks, luck and men could get them a job on that street corner we were just passing by. Tasha Henderson, 34 and a mother of three, knows her own child. Her actions reportedly led her daughter to improve her behavior. But she has paid the price, becoming a topic for talk radio and having the police send a report to the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, whose officials declined to confirm even the existence of an investigation. I hope the department issues a report, the Henderson Report, which says if more parents cared about their children as much as Tasha Henderson did, that department would have fewer cases. Parents must wake their children up, show them the world being made for them, complete with bills they will have to pay for the increasing costs of Social Welfare, Health and the like. Our kids will be paying these bills in the next 1020 years, so they must learn to stand on their own. And working for food won’t pay those bills.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 61

thinkLIFE science

Turning history on its head

What was a white European doing in America 9,000 years ago, before the Indians arrived? Susanne Rust has the latest on Kennewick Man

round to the bone, the teeth of the famous fossil skeleton, Kennewick Man, look as if they’ve spent a lifetime gnashing rocks. But it’s from these worn choppers that Thomas Stafford Jr., a research fellow in the department of geology at the University of WisconsinMadison and president of Stafford Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., plans to learn about the origins, movement and lifestyle of this highly controversial, 9,000-year-old North American. In 1996, Kennewick Man was discovered on the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash. Found by a couple of college students who were hydroplaning along the river, KMan – as he is fondly called by Stafford – became one of the most notorious and controversial skeletons ever discovered. With a narrow face and nose and a high forehead, he more closely resembles a European fur-trader of the 19th century than a Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce or Colville – the American Indian tribes known to have inhabited the area for the past 5,000 years. Kennewick Man’s discovery and description excited and rattled not only scientists but also American Indians and government officials. And for the past nine years, his bones have been locked away as court battles have ensued over his future. In February 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the scientists. And last summer, for the first time, archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists and chemists began investigating this enigmatic American, attempting to answer questions that have been nagging them for nearly a decade: Was Kennewick Man an aberration? A loner who wandered into the New World

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on his own? Or does he represent an early migration of people who subsequently died out or were killed? Or is Kennewick Man an ancestor of the native tribes we recognize today? To help answer some of these questions, Stafford has begun examining Kennewick Man’s teeth. He’s working with John Valley, a University of Wisconsin geologist, to decipher the secrets hidden in the worn enamel of this enigmatic fossil. From the fossil’s tooth enamel, they’ll learn where Kennewick Man lived as a child, the kinds of food he ate, from where and whence he traveled, and when he died. Although enamel is an extremely hard substance, it’s actually more like a sponge in terms of its record-keeping - soaking up and recording the events of an individual’s early life. For example, on a lark, Valley decided to geochemically demonstrate the birthplaces of his children by examining the oxygen isotope ratios in their baby teeth: One was born in Texas, the other in Wisconsin. “There was a significant difference” in the ratios of the two isotopes of oxygen in their teeth, he says. It’s analyses like these that Stafford and Valley will use to determine several aspects – geography, migration and diet of Kennewick Man’s life. For starters, Stafford is going to try and figure out when Kennewick Man died. While most experts agree his death was likely 8,000 or 9,000 years ago, the five different dates collected so far have varied by as much as 3,000 years. “That’s unacceptable variation,” explains Stafford. To settle the issue, Stafford will use radiocarbon gleaned from Kennewick

Man’s teeth to give a definitive answer. Indeed, Stafford is considered a pioneer – and expert – at using carbon to date teeth and bones, said Margaret Schoeninger, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego. Therefore, his dates are pretty much considered gold. But Stafford’s hoping that Kennewick Man’s teeth can tell him more than when he died. He’s working with Valley try to figure out what kind of climate Kennewick Man was born in. They will analyze the ratio of a heavy form of oxygen (Oxygen 18) to a lighter form (Oxygen 16) stored within them. Normal elemental oxygen is made up of eight protons and eight neutrons, hence, oxygen 16. But every once in awhile, an oxygen atom will appear with nine or 10 neutrons along with its suite of eight protons, making oxygen isotopes 17 and 18. These different isotopes are found in predictable ratios - reflecting the source from which they were extracted, or in the case of carbon, from the period of time they were deposited. Stafford and Valley are interested in oxygen because water - local springs, lakes and rivers – contains isotope signatures that are particular to geographic regions. These signatures become embedded in the enamel of a person’s teeth. And because enamel is laid down early in life - depending on the tooth, it can accumulate anywhere between birth and adolescence – researchers can gain information about the birthplace of an individual, and possibly whether he or she migrated or moved as a child. Therefore, Kennewick Man’s teeth “should tell us about the temperature,” of his environment “and the source of water this individual was ingesting,” says

Is actor Patrick Stewart the closest living relative of Kennewick Man? Valley, as well as whether he grew up in a lower or higher latitude, close to the sea or far inland, high on a mountain or deep in a valley. In other words, they should be able to say whether Kennewick Man was a Kennewick native, or not. That’s a key question. Was Kennewick Man an anomaly in this region? Did he grow up elsewhere and trek across the Bering Land Bridge to present-day Washington state? Or was he born there – representing an, until now, unrecognized population? Stafford is expecting answers. “We don’t really know what happened. It’s possible there were several waves of migrants moving into the continent.” Some, like those in Kennewick Man’s population, may have died out. They may have been killed. Or they may have interbred with other groups who were already here or yet to come. In their research, Valley and Stafford will be using an 11-tonne machine called an ion microprobe to separate the oxygen isotopes. James Burton, an archaeo-chemist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study, laughs when asked if this is an appropriate tool for such an analysis. “Yes,” he says, though it’s so powerful, it’s “like using dynamite to crack open walnuts.” In general, performing isotopic analyses requires a substantial amount of material. But the CAMECA 1280, as the ion microprobe is called, reduces the sample size by a factor of a million. “You’re talking about a sample smaller

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From the fossil's tooth enamel, they'll learn where Kennewick Man lived as a child, the kinds of food he ate, from where and whence he traveled, and when he died than the unaided eye can see,” says Valley, which means little, if any damage will be inflicted on the skeleton’s worn teeth. The researchers embed the flake into a mold of gold – a coin-sized chip they place inside the microprobe – which they place inside the probe. The machine fires a narrow beam of ions – 10,000 volts of cesium – onto the sample, essentially blasting a small number of atoms off its surface. A double-focusing mass-spectrometer and secondary ion mass spectrometer then measure the charge and mass of the atomic masses, revealing the isotopic ratio in question. Burton says researchers will need to make sure they are comparing Kennewick Man’s oxygen ratios with the ratios of the Columbia River region of 8,000 years ago, not today, because the climate has likely changed. Valley said they will compare Kennewick Man’s ratios to those of mammals from that time and place. Stafford also will be looking at other isotopes, including nitrogen and carbon (Carbon 12 and Carbon 13) to see what kinds of foods Kennewick Man ate. These isotopes, which are also stored in the teeth, can tell Stafford whether Kennewick Man was a fish-eater, big-game hunter or a man

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with broader tastes. They’ll also provide Stafford with a glimpse of the man’s produce preferences: legumes, grasses, seeds or leaves. The tricky part, at least for the nitrogen analyses, is that Stafford will need enough collagen – a protein found in bone and teeth – to run them. As bones fossilize and mineralize, the collagen often disappears. But if he can find enough, he can run those informative tests, as well as others that may tell him and his colleagues even more about Kennewick Man. If there is collagen, then there’s DNA, opening the door to genetic analyses and information. Stafford, who was not part of the original team of scientists who fought to study Kennewick Man, says all of his work has been done in conjunction with the core group of researchers, including Doug Owsley at the Smithsonian Institute; James Chatters, the archaeologist who first excavated Kennewick Man; Vance Holliday, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona; and others. The team has presented some of its preliminary discoveries at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists in Seattle. INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 63

thinkLIFE technology

Photography: PETER ZELEI

Chip-speed hits a wall

Have you noticed the pace of computer chip development is slowing? Victor Godinez says there’s a good reason

oore’s Law marches on. But it’s clearly headed in a different direction. Named after Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law is a simple observation that the industry is generally able to double the number of transistors on a single computer chip every two years or so. Over time, though, Moore’s Law became synonymous with equally dramatic increases in the speeds of the top computer chips. As companies packed more transistors on a processor, they used that extra technology to increase the speed of the chip, like adding more horsepower to a car engine. But physical barriers are starting to

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make those raw horsepower gains harder and more expensive to achieve, and even when they can make those gains, the chips are starting to run at fantastically high temperatures. As a result, the major chipmakers – everyone from Intel to AMD to IBM to Texas Instruments – are rethinking how they design their products so that overall computer performance continues to increase. Whether it’s designing chips that consume less power, or putting several processors on a single piece of silicon or building chips that can process much larger chunks of data at a time, it’s clear the megahertz mantra is over.

“We’re transitioning to a new mechanism,” says Bernie Meyerson, who oversees the chip division at International Business Machines Corp. “That’s the good news. You’re going to see a shift basically in the mechanisms by which you achieve those gains. But those gains will continue.” Meyerson and others say the most popular way to ramp up processor performance now is by putting multiple processors on a single chip, creating what’s known as a multicore system. “It is vastly more efficient to use much slower processors, in terms of the power per computation, and combine those, as opposed to trying to make one go like a bat out of hell,” Meyerson says. For consumers, that means the end of being able to use chip speed to rank processors against each other. But it also means that the pace of technological progress isn’t going to slow down any time soon. The new approach to boosting performance can be seen in range of products. Microsoft Corp.’s new Xbox 360 video game console, for example, sports a triple core chip from IBM, with each core running at 3.2 gigahertz. Sony Corp.’s upcoming PlayStation 3 game machine will sport an IBM-designed multicore processor of its own. And dual-core processors from Intel power the new machines unveiled by Apple Computer Inc. in San Francisco in January. Another major design change has been the move towards 64-bit chips, which can process more data at a time than their 32bit predecessors. Brian Wing, a shop assistant at one computer retailer, says the move towards multicore systems and 64-bit chips has changed the way he sells computers. “We’re doing a lot more educating about what the chips will do. It has presented a change, because we’re having to redo what everyone’s been taught.” But consumers seem to be adapting, he says. He notes that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), whose chips generally run at slower speeds than competing chips from Intel, has established a reputation as the maker of the most powerful processors for multimedia applications like gaming. The processor speeds in the new Apple iMacs top out at 2 gigahertz, for example, well behind the 3-gigahertz speed barrier that Intel crossed more than three years ago. The performance increases users have

seen in their PCs the last few years and are seeing in the new Apple machines didn’t come from faster processor speeds, says Intel’s Chuck Malloy. “You could probably keep going on the speed, but the wall you hit is heat and power consumption.” Even if heat weren’t a problem, the cost of making faster chips is also escalating, with new manufacturing plants easily costing several billion dollars. Exploring other routes is less expensive, Malloy says. “The overall rate of performance gains will not slow down, but performance will come to users in a different fashion. It will come in the form of multiprocessing, better designs, more efficient designs.” A multicore processor essentially lets you do multiple tasks at once without having your machine struggle to keep up. For example, a multicore PC would let you copy music or movies to a DVD in the background while you play a computer game or stream a video off the Internet, with all the tasks running at top speed.

“The industry has been heading this direction for quite some time,” Malloy said. In August 2001, Intel launched its 2gigahertz Pentium chip. A little over a year later, in November 2002, Intel boasted that it had produced the world’s first 3-gigahertz commercial microprocessor. Since then, Intel has released plenty of chips with better overall performance. But the push for a faster processor has screeched nearly to a halt. While the slowdown is most apparent for Intel, which regularly touted processor speeds as the best way to measure chip performance, most semiconductor makers are grappling with the fact that they can no longer just dump a faster engine under the hood and hit the gas pedal. Bob Doering, a senior fellow and technology strategy manager at Texas Instruments Inc., notes that the basic premise of Moore’s Law is still true. “In the traditional terms of Moore’s Law, where you’re just talking about transistors per chip, we’re moving along really

about as fast as we ever have.” But those transistors are being put to new uses. “Intel got us in the habit for many years – it played into their market strategy – to talk about megahertz,” Doering says. “They talked about megahertz and that was it.” TI is perhaps best known for its digital signal processors, which power cell phones and other devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers. But those processors are subject to the same physical laws as Intel’s Pentium chips, and TI has adopted many of the new design elements that other chipmakers have. For example, the company makes multicore digital signal processors, and is developing energy-saving features for its chips. Craig Sander, corporate vice president of technology development at AMD, says innovations like 64-bit and multicore processors will continue to proliferate thanks to Moore’s Law. “We’re still on track with Moore’s Law,” he says. “It can’t go on forever, but it can probably go on longer than some people think.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 65

feelLIFE

sport

presspix

League of extraordinary gentlemen

Chris Forster argues the Warriors’ salary cap scandal is a turkey coming home to roost

ardcore Warriors fans must be tearing their hair out. The Aucklandbased franchise has again exhibited an uncanny ability to shoot itself in the foot. They’ve been caught out flouting of the National Rugby League’s ultra-strict salary cap, to the merry tune of more than $1 million. As a result multi-millionaire owner Eric Watson’s footing a bill for half a million dollars. But, far more damagingly, the players have been lumbered with a four point

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deficit before the season even kicked off. They’re sitting ducks for the NRL’s wooden spoon. Former CEO Mick Watson is getting all the blame, and is defying all media requests for interviews. He’s the Sydney corporate guy who took over the running of the club in 2000 and two years later was part of the Warriors incredible journey to the Grand Final. The working class game of rugby league was riding high in those days, they were

bigger than the All Blacks. Watson had a dangerous glint in his eye, with the full backing of his philanthropist boss. But the wheels fell off the Warriors machine and Watson CEO eventually quit the club last year. Five years in the Auckland fast lane was enough for the father of four. He may also have had an inkling the club was about to be caught out for his spending excesses. Half a world away a former Warriors

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Eric Watson the entrepreneur has proved to be a generous man. Remember he gave away 10 thousand tickets for Warriors fans for their successive semi-final appearances in Sydney, in 2002 and 2003. But his henchman clearly got above his station

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icon is settling into a dramatically different sort of rugby league life in the south of France. Stacey Jones is seeing out his career at the Catalans club in Perpignan on the swanky Mediterranean coast, after 10 years of undying service for the beleague-red club back in Auckland. Jones is nursing a broken arm suffered early in his tenure as the Catalans’ Little General, but in almost Napoleonic fashion he’s not carrying a broken heart about what’s going on back home. “I haven’t really been keeping up but the Mad Butcher (Peter Leitch) has kept me up to date, and it’s a real shame”. Jones seems relieved he’s away from the drama, and not stung with the responsibility of defying the odds of a four point negative and somehow guiding the Warriors to a successful season. Success means the playoffs, and it’s been three years since they last achieved that. “I’m glad I’m on this side of the world, but I guess they can’t let it get to them”. Jones remains loyal to his team-mates, many who were part of the team sports story of last year – the Kiwis’ march to the Tri Nations title in England and that magnificent “blackout” of the cocky Kangaroos in the final “I was at the Warriors for a long time, I know it won’t faze most of the guys at all”. The ultimate team man is also sticking up for captain Steve Price and Kiwis veteran Ruben Wiki – the two big name signings from Australian clubs perceived by many critics to be the ones responsible for blowing the lid off the salary cap. “It’s probably a bit unfair to point the finger at two guys, just because they were new to the club, it’s just one of those things”. The NRL laid down the law against the Warriors late on Monday night, February the 27th, just under two weeks before the new season got underway. Chairman Maurice Kidd and board

member John Hart had spent all day telling the NRL they were sorry, had mended their ways and pleading for a straight fine. The blame was all to do with the previous administration, they implored and there’re guarantees of a clean slate and legitimate salary structure. The NRL board reacted by stripping points for the first time in the competition’s history. The hefty bill the Warriors could live with; the pre-season loss of points could be fatal. The reaction was swift from commentators on both sides of the Tasman. Legendary Ray Warren wasn’t sitting on the fence. “What kind of boofhead does something like this, sheer stupidity”, he told Radio Live sport. Owner Eric Watson wasn’t shirking the hefty fine. “We’re big boys now – we can handle it”. But he was livid about the points deduction, implying the NRL was reneging on the fairness of trans-Tasman rivalry. Chairman Kidd was shell-shocked and upset by the swift penalty before he’d had a chance to pass on the bad news to players, fans and sponsors. Outspoken former coach Graeme Lowe fired a shot at ex-CEO Eric Watson. “The guy has a reputation for being a bully, and the NRL’s shown if you try to bully them you get your tail kicked”. Ownership and leadership wobbles have always dogged the Warriors. Since their explosive debut in 1995, which promised so much – there’s been a catalogue of disasters, controversies and casualties. Watson’s secret squirrel deal with the IRB to launch a Polynesian Super 12 rugby team in 2004 could have been the spark for the Warriors rapid decline since the high of making the 2002 Grand Final. The all-powerful New Zealand Rugby Union was livid at being usurped, and the International Rugby Board soon backed away. But the damage was done.

Brilliant ball-playing forward Ali Laui’ti’iti was sacked and headed for a better paying job in England. It.set the trend for the next 18 months. The club’s Australian coach Daniel Anderson ended a 4 year reign with his own golden handshake, rumoured to be worth $650, 000. Another loyal club man Vinnie Anderson also headed to the U.K, and Stacey Jones signalled his French intentions early in the 2005 season. There was also the significant “dropped pass” of deciding to let go hardened Australian professionals Ivan Cleary (who’s returned to become head coach of the club) and Kevin Campion at the end of their best ever season. Mick Watson will eventually have to front with his side of the Salary Cap scandal. Here’s the wise guy who was happy to court the media when they made the playoffs for three years running. It was and still is an outstanding achievement for a franchise which was teetering close to extinction after the Tainui ownership debacle in 1999. Eric Watson the entrepreneur has proved to be a generous man. Remember he gave away 10 thousand tickets for Warriors fans for their successive semi-final appearances in Sydney, in 2002 and 2003. But his henchman clearly got above his station. Midway through their disastrous 2004 season, a desperate Watson courted league journalists from radio, newspapers and TV to explain his mistakes and how he planned to fix them. He fed them and watered them at a private dining room above a swanky restaurant on Ponsonby Road. Eric Watson was clearly obsessed with the bad publicity and sports personalities who’d been lampooning him. He vowed to get back to the core business of Rugby League and stop his dabbles into Pacific Island rugby and other codes linked with parent company, Cullen Sport. But we left the meeting with more doubts than convictions. The Warriors will need all their fighting qualities to dig themselves out of this one. There’s already talk outstanding fullback Brent Webb and long-serving centre Clinton Toopi could be forced to leave at the end of the year to keep the spiralling wage bill under control. The one time saviour could have sparked the biggest crisis of a tumultuous eleven year existence.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 67

feelLIFE

health

Shaky theory

‘Detox’ diets are more about hype than health, reports Claire Morrow Photography: Mateusz Zdanko

t’s a bit late for a New Year’s resolution, right? Well, if (like 64% of people) you’ve kept yours for more than a month, congratulations. A majority of new years resolutions are health related; more exercise, weight loss and smoking cessation are all common resolutions. The next problem is diminishing returns – quitting smoking and getting more exercise make a huge difference to your health, arguably you don’t need to do anything more. Ever. Or you could detox. Detoxing is a fairly broad term that varies according to the person using it. In the context of drug addicts, it refers to the hideous days of physical withdrawl from the dreaded poisin, during which the addictive substance(s) is banished from the poor fool’s system and the chemical balance of the body is temporarily disturbed resulting in pain and suffering. Most people (in my

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social circle anyway) who refer to detoxing mean something different. The mean that they will eat whatever strange things the “detox diet” they are on dictates. The general idea refers to the idea that you are (now! as you read this!) ingesting harmful toxins and chemicals in the course of your day to day life. Now, this shouldn’t come as a shock: all food is made up of chemicals, as are the carbonbased life forms who consume them. And in the process a certain amount of junk goes into the system. The idea behind “detoxing” is that by following a few strict guidelines you can cleanse your body of “accumulated toxins”. There is often some degree of fasting involved in detox diets, although a detox that lasts for six weeks may allow, say, unlimited raw fruit and vegetables, but exclude other food groups. Red meat, dairy, wheat and sugar are

commonly excluded. Needless to say, caffeine and alcohol are out. Before the liver cleansing diet was a hit in 199seven, there was the “whole foods” fad. I cannot pass judgment on the “whole foods” movement except to say that it made a brief appearance in my household as a child. Of course, all the food from my childhood except dessert was bad: traditional Australian boiled meat-and-threeveg, and so the lentils were somewhat of an improvement. I can, however, pass judgment on Sandra Cabot’s liver cleansing diet, though not without running afoul of libel laws. And long before that, for the indulged and indulgent classes, way back in 1866 there was the Seventh day Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium. There, the Kellogg brothers (of cereal fame) ordered chewing 32 times before swallowing, exercise, enemas – and of

course, lots of corn flakes. The brothers had a horror of “auto-intoxification” – the process whereby constipation causes the evil in poo to stay in the body and poisin it. Oddly, they didn’t have a horror of regularly filling their guts with water and…well, you get the idea. Strangely, their ideas about avoiding sex have not really survived to the modern age. It’s a basic law of systems that what goes in will inevitably come out. There are a range of medical conditions that cause, or whose treatments cause, constipation. Constipation is when you can’t go for longer than you normally would, and usually results in hard uncomfortable stool. This would be nice to avoid, but you don’t need to go “like clockwork” or else risk terrible sickness. People who believe in colonic irrigation really believe that there is toxic poo stuck to the inside of your bowel and they must blast it off with a garden hose to make you better. There are medical reasons to require an enema. (Really, there are.) But general health and wellbeing are not among them. Techniques vary, but we are talking about putting a hose into your bowel and filling it with fluid. There is a risk that you will perforate the bowel (rare), alter the body’s electrolyte balance (likely) and flush out all the good bacteria with the bad, leaving behind a strange environment (pretty likely). There is a risk that the genius doing this to you has no idea what they’re doing, is using filthy equipment and will give you hepatitis. It’s happened. If you were constipated, you should get extra fluid, extra fibre, or try some “dried plums” – what the marketing department is now calling prunes. And if all else fails, you can see a pharmacist. Unfortunately taking laxatives (or frequent enemas) decreases the bowels ability to function independently. Not good, and as I’ve said before, there is no reason to go messing with the body’s own systems if you can avoid it. The body does a great job of getting rid of the junk you put in it. The liver, kidney, and bowel get rid of bad stuff. That’s what they do. The filters don’t get “clogged” and need a wash. You can damage your liver through drinking, but eating fruit isn’t going to solve that. You’ll need to not drink to excess. So the detox theory starts out from a logical premise, but then it all goes a bit silly. A few weeks of healthy living is a great idea. If you get hungry or dizzy, you’re overdoing it. Vegans can be extremely healthy (they usually live pretty healthy lives aside from their diet alone) but they are adapted to their diet, and usually go to some trouble to balance it. You can’t just cut out whole food groups overnight; it’s not good for you. And your body doesn’t “heal itself” because you eat raw vegetables. It just goes on doing what it always does. There is the psychological benefit of feeling healthy and virtuous and the philosophical interest in observing how the mind changes when it’s deprived of food, and the psychological risk of treating your body worse than ever when you come off the wagon. Sorry, but with detox as just about everything else, moderation is the key.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 69

feelLIFE

alt.health

Eight simple rules

Sometimes good health involves lateral thinking, writes Julie Deardorff

ood health is not a singular event. It’s a lifestyle. But most people don’t know how to begin taking care of themselves. Here, in no order of importance, are our favorite ways to live a healthier life.

Go fishing

Oily fish are one of the best sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which the body desperately needs to fight disease but can’t produce on its own. Omega-3s work together with omega-6 fatty acids (found in seeds, nuts and vegetable oils) to promote health. But most Americans have an imbalance – too much omega-6 and too little omega-3 – that leads to disease. Scientists know omega-3s reduce inflammation, decrease the risk of heart disease, lower triglycerides, inhibit the development of plaque and blood clots, and reduce cardiac arrhythmia. But newer research has shown omega-3s can help with diabetes, arthritis, depression, attention-deficit disorder and breast cancer. To avoid eating fish contaminated with mercury (pregnant women should be especially vigilant), look for wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, which is still relatively pure. The white fish tilapia also is extremely low in mercury, according to neurologist David Perlmutter, author of “The Better Brain Book”. Avoid farm-raised fish because they typically are fed hormones, antibiotics and other substances your body doesn’t need, Perlmutter says. If you can’t get your omega-3s through salmon, sardines, herring, tuna or mackerel, try ground flaxseed and walnuts.

Eat your medicine

Modern medicine likes to promote pharmaceutical drugs as the answer to everything, but we like Hippocrates’ belief that food is medicine. In particular, we’re fans of the polymeal, a feast of fish, fruits and vegetables, garlic, almonds, dark chocolate and wine. This nutritious food combination was devised partially as a tongue-in-cheek

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response to the “polypill,” a cocktail of aspirin, folic acid and cholesterol-lowering and blood-pressure drugs. The polypill, created in 2003, was to be a preventive wonder drug and was touted as a way to cut the risk of heart attack or stroke in people over 55 by as much as 80 percent. But Dutch researchers found that eating a polymeal would achieve roughly the same effect. The scientists discovered that heart disease could be cut by 76 percent and men could expect to live more than six years longer (and women 4.8 years longer) simply by eating a polymeal a day. Two handfuls of almonds alone can reduce low-density lipoproteins (LDL), the notorious “bad” cholesterol, by nearly 5 percent, according to a University of Toronto study. A daily dose of garlic can reduce total cholesterol levels by 17 points, for a 25 percent decrease in heart-disease risk.

Get in bed

The dalai lama was right on when he said, “Sleep is the best meditation ... not for Nirvana but for survival.” Sleep heals both the mind and the body, but at least three of every four people have trouble getting enough z’s a few nights a week. Recent studies show more people are sleeping less than six hours a night. Occasional insomnia is nothing to worry about, but chronic sleep loss can result in weight gain, increased risk of hypertension, increased stress-hormone levels, irregular heartbeat and problems with learning, memory and the immune system. Your sleep deprivation also can affect others; it contributes to medical errors and road accidents. The use of sleep medication is on the rise, but drugs can be physically or mentally addictive. Instead, lay the foundation for a good night’s sleep during the day; don’t caffeinate, exercise or stimulate the brain by watching television or reading a thriller too close to bedtime. Create a before-bed ritual as you would for a newborn. To soothe the senses, Ann Dyer recommends “taking a hot, fragrant

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The average smoker spends $46 a week and $2,394 annually, a tidy sum that Northwestern University graduates Jeff Schell and Ethan Lipkind felt shouldn’t be burned away

bath, giving yourself a foot massage with scented oil, turning down the lights and lighting a candle, changing into soft sleepwear, having a cup of herbal tea or hot milk, turning off the TV and turning on some quiet music or just enjoying silence.” If all else fails, Dyer says, “have confidence in the power of rest.” If you let go of the goal to sleep, you’ll very likely drift off.

Chill out

The telltale signs of stress – stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, memory loss, exhaustion and eating too much or not enough – are hazardous to your health. Virtually every major disease, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, obesity and even cancer, has been linked to stress through mainstream medical research, says Dr. Vern Cherewatenko, author of “The Stress Cure”. Cherewatenko offers seven steps to de-stress, including eating right, exercising, getting enough sleep, building strong relationships and practicing mindful living.

Do the write thing

One doctor I know calls journaling “one of the most powerful tools we have to transform our lives,” but don’t just take his word for it. Start one. Journaling helps release and process emotions, it provides clarity and can help you find your inner voice. “Your writings, musings and doodles are a way to talk to your soul,” writes Sandy Grason in “Journalution”. There is no best or right way to journal. Pick a medium – a spiral notebook, a blank book labeled “diary,” drawing paper, a computer – then write whatever you want whenever the mood hits. An obsessive journaler since the age of nine (I have more than 70 notebooks), I favour a portable, lined desk journal that is small enough to carry at all times. Don’t know where to start? Write what you eat every day. (It could help you lose weight.) Write what you do. Write what you feel. Eventually, journaling will become a natural habit, a conversation

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with yourself. And although you might not want to go back and re-read some of the darker moments you’ve chronicled (feel free to rip these pages up), your journal inevitably will preserve precious snapshots of your life.

Stop smoking

If the threat of lung and throat cancer isn’t terrifying enough, consider the health of your bank account. The average smoker spends $46 a week and $2,394 annually, a tidy sum that Northwestern University graduates Jeff Schell and Ethan Lipkind felt shouldn’t be burned away. So after a miserable road trip to New Orleans with several nicotine-addicted friends, the two non-smokers founded Smokers’ Brokers (www.smokersbrokers.com), an online savings plan that allows smokers to invest the money that they would have spent on cigarettes into an interest-bearing mutual fund. Members are encouraged to make deposits with the same frequency as in buying cigarettes. They can make any size deposit at any time using PayPal payments. The only condition is that funds are not withdrawn for a year in order to benefit from a potentially higher-payout mutual fund. Since the two launched the site in October, more than 100 members have signed up, including Courtney Montgomery of Arkansas, whose non-smoking boyfriend sent her a link to the program. “So far, so good,” said Montgomery, who likes that she can contribute one pack at a time. “It’s better than trying to do it on my own, where I would feel the need to save and make one larger deposit.”

Stop blushing

If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t smear it on your body, which absorbs chemicals like a sponge. Most people don’t realize the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t evaluate cosmetic products for safety before they’re sold. Yet many nail polishes, perfumes and moisturizers contain phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates),

which can increase circulating levels of estrogen and testosterone in humans, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In June, a study linked phthalate exposure in pregnant women to abnormal genital development in boys, and the research is mounting. The European Union recently banned more than 1,200 chemicals from personal-care products, but most still are used in the US. (Though L’Oreal, Revlon and Estee Lauder have promised to reformulate their products using the European standards for the U.S. market.) A single exposure might not be cause for alarm, but the average woman uses 12 personal-care products each day, exposing herself to a total of 168 chemicals, according to a report called “Skin Deep” by the Environmental Working Group. You can look up your favorite products on the Skin Deep database at www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep/ by the Environmental Working Group (www. ewg.org). For more information, check out The Breast Cancer Fund (breastcancerfund.org),which researches environmental links to the disease, and The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (www.safecosmetics.com).

Exercise

Don’t go down this path alone. While men join pickup basketball games or assemble a foursome for a round of golf, women tend to have more trouble finding a partner on their fitness journey. This prompted Kim Murphy and Kris Carpenter, two formerly out-of-shape women, to write the “The Best Friends Guide to Getting Fit”, a guide to using friendships as the foundation for establishing a consistent exercise routine. But really, it’s not that complicated. If you’re a swimmer, join a master’s group. These take swimmers of all levels, help break up the monotony of lap swimming and provide camaraderie. Runners can join group workouts and cyclists can check with local bike shops to find group rides. Or find some company at the gym.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 71

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

India's southern secrets

Think India is all beggars and Delhi-belly? Kristin Eddy discovers the jewels in India’s tourist crown

OCHI, India – Most of the people who visit India for the first time aren’t coming for the peace and quiet. Exotic contrasts between East and West, perhaps; the ferocious mountains of the North; or the regal features of manmade attractions such as the Taj Mahal. Maybe even the chance to creep near the stolid frame of a richly head-dressed elephant. What newcomers such as I don’t expect to find is the calm of a houseboat ride along inland waterways in the back country, the peace of hill towns ringed round with spice farms, and the dreamy luxury of an Ayurvedic massage, all encountered in a tropical haven far from the crush of the big cities. Even in this port town with a population of about 600,000, the jittery traffic patterns seem as orderly as a funeral procession compared with Mumbai (Bombay). This is the beautiful strip of southwest India called Kerala, a state with the highest level of literacy in India – close to 100 percent – and the fragrant center of much of the country’s spice production. I came here for work, to see this industry for myself, and returned home as relaxed and soothed as if I’d been on a two-week beach vacation. The contrast between what I expected and what I found was brought home at every stage of the trip, as different people asked me what impressions I held of India. “We rarely get American tourists here, just Europeans,” the manager of one hotel said wistfully. “They go up north instead to see the Taj Mahal.” It is true that the charms of this part of the country have been relatively untapped by visitors until only recently. Yet I would

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go back to Kerala in a heartbeat. And not a pounding one. In fact, I can still feel relaxed just at the thought of walking near the beach in Kochi, on the way to the 16th Century St. Francis church, painted a faint mustard yellow and cooled by big shade trees and branches of frangipani. Vasco da Gama was buried in this church after the Portuguese navigator died in 1524 in Cochin, which Kochi was known as until recently. A brass plaque marks the spot, although the body was returned to Lisbon 14 years later. He was just one of many foreigners who paused here for a rest, including traders who built a 16th century synagogue and others who were the first of generations of Kerala’s Muslim citizens. The men doing business from the court of Kublai Khan left behind a system of Chinese fishing nets, giant beach-based webs still raised and lowered for a day’s catch by huge levers. The multi-cultural and multi-ethnic flavor of the city is as pleasantly energizing as the homes and storefronts painted in a Key West-style riot of teal, yellow, red and green. The Key West comparison isn’t too far off, seeing as how the sun felt so warm and close, the air breezier and the flowering trees and shrubs thick and moist with petals and humming insect life. I spent an afternoon walking around the old part of town, Ft. Cochin, looking for bargains in cashmere and instead, with the word “Sap” stamped firmly on my forehead, was handily led into paying full price for everything. I also found plenty of fast food; at the tip of a peninsula bordered by the Lakshadweep Sea and Vembanad Lake, Kochi’s beachfront is studded with bat-

tered shacks selling fried fish and grilled prawns, and street stands touting okra fritters and ice cream. The temperature and humidity can be ferocious, and at the time only fresh coconut water, drawn from the freshly hacked top of a coconut shell, seemed refreshing enough. While I waited for the vendor to chop the top with a machete and pop in a straw, a few teenage entrepreneurs vigorously offered to sell me postcards and cotton shawls. But even this city seemed too cosmopolitan, too Western, for my taste. Much better was the tour through the countryside, begun the next day as the hired driver, Amar, began our journey into the Cardamom Hills to the east. All seemed peaceful for a while, on twolane roads, twisty enough that Dramamine might be in order, yet empty of traffic for long stretches. Then suddenly a psychedelically painted public bus would come shuddering around the corner, packed with people cooling their faces at the open windows. Just like that: quiet country road, then a noisy metal frame painted pink, purple, yellow, blue and gold passing inches from your own window. It was like a regular pinch in the arm as if to say, “Pay attention; you’re in India.” We stopped at a village along the way to pick up lunch – cartons of curried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, crisp pancakes and whole mangoes, a fine picnic that we spread out on the hood of the Jeep and ate sitting under trees at the side of the road. The rich vegetation in this area is clustered on every hillside, from terraces of tea bushes to stalks of cardamom to thick jackfruit and coconut trees. There were occasional stops in little

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This is the beautiful strip of southwest India called Kerala, a state with the highest level of literacy in India – close to 100 percent – and the fragrant center of much of the country’s spice production towns along the way, and I attracted some curiosity; nothing unfriendly, just clusters of people who would gather across the street to stare. At one point we saw an elephant being led across the main street and followed it to a small courtyard. What do you know? He was getting decorated, with a jeweled and sequined head dress, for a festival at the temple. I had my pachyderm fix. It was a good five hours before we finally reached the hotel, the Spice Village, in Thekkadi. Dark as it was, I could see on the path to my little bungalow the spice trees and plants growing all over the grounds.

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The resort is part of the Casino Hotel group, run by an ecologically minded group of brothers who incorporate environmentally friendly business practices into their hospitality. Guests are encouraged to conserve water, for instance, and to appreciate the flora of the region by understanding more about spices. The resort also has an Ayurvedic spa, one of several that can be found throughout Kerala. Everything about Ayurveda but the name was new to me, but as it has become better known outside of India, such spas are increasingly a tourist magnet. As with

Chinese traditional medicine, Ayurvedic medicine involves balancing all the elements of the body to achieve health, with an evaluation of the skin, hair, and the functioning and frequency of every bodily function. I don’t think I’ve ever gone into such detail with my own doctor. Fully dressed, I felt thoroughly exposed. Turns out, my fair coloring and flushed cheeks, fine hair, round figure and damp, warm skin after even a minute in the sun branded me a dual combination of Pitta and Kapha, two of the three doshas, or life forces, I need to balance for health and harmony.

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Doses of herbs and a regulated diet of specific foods are some of the ways to bring all three doshas into balance. So are steam baths and massage. And so, apparently, are medicated oil dripped into the nose, enemas and blood letting. My dual life forces united to say “No” and “Way” to the latter. An Ayurvedic massage would be just fine. Sarah Stegner, the executive chef at the Ritz Carlton Chicago, had been to Kerala just before my trip and tried to give me a heads up about the massage. “You’ll be oiled all over like a pork roast,” she teased. I didn’t understand at the time, especially as the first part of the treatment was a standard shoulder and back rub performed by my masseuse, Smita, while I sat on a stool. But then Smita led me over to a long teak table, slightly tilted at the head, bare of any cushion or toweling, and unremarkable except for deep grooves that ran along the edges of the wood. She placed cotton in my ears and a cloth over my eyes. Then came the oil, gently heated in a copper bowl, spiced with cardamom, and poured from a ladle so liberally that I could have been deep-fried as well. Oil

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ran in rivers over every limb, over my hair, down the back of my neck and along those grooves in the teak where it pooled at the end – an hour-long massage of kneading and a monsoon of oil, to the point where I began to slide down the incline of the table and turning over had to be done with her help. A pork roast, indeed. I felt like a fish, and eventually was floating, happy, just like one. When it was time to get up, with much help, Smita took me to a shower and scrubbed my skin with a gritty clay to remove all but the lightest sheen of the oil. She washed my hair and poured bowls of warm water over my head. When I was clean and dressed, I remembered that feeling of being a little kid, warm from the evening bath, snuggly in my pajamas and ready for a hug from my mom. Oh, baby. That pampered feeling lasted even into the next day, when it was time to try one of the houseboats for which Kerala is famous. The inland waterways of the back country are home to families and small farms, all lining the canals that pour into Vembanad Lake. The kettuvallam, as the boats are known, are the motorized boats, covered with a canopy of woven coir, making them look sort of rough and rustic on the outside. The interior leans more to House Beautiful, with comfortable, padded chairs on deck, fresh flowers on the table and one or two rooms, outfitted with queensized beds, bathrooms and showers. And me. And a staff of three. We took off, me still somewhat bewildered at the thought of having this grand setting all to myself, while the cook, Kishore, brought me a glass of fresh watermelon juice and freshly fried banana chips made in the boat’s tiny galley. We passed water buffalo grazing among coconut trees, people washing clothes and dishes in the water,

“

Believe it or not, it took a while to realize that it was OK to just slow down, to read and write and take pictures. No phone or radio was on board

”

and men in canoes laden with bags of harvested rice and grasses. Little kids, hearing the motor, ran along the banks, waving. Believe it or not, it took a while to realize that it was OK to just slow down, to read and write and take pictures. No phone or radio was on board. The crew had very limited English. And the sun was setting so redly that it was obvious the thing to do was just sit and dream. Dinner arrived, so many courses out of that little kitchen. I looked; barely enough room to chop an onion, but out came fried fish steaks and prawns, and stew of okra and onions, rice and tomatoes in coconut milk, and sliced pineapple and watermelon and on and on. We had dropped anchor in the lake at that point and I could just barely make out lights from a town in the distance, while our electric lanterns rocked a little overhead along with the boat. The crew slept on a mattress on deck and I pulled the mosquito netting around my comfy bed in the cabin and dropped off like that anchor. I wouldn’t have bothered to see the morning except for the wakeup call of music from a temple, broadcast in full stereo across the water. By the time breakfast was served – another lovely meal of eggs and bananas with coconut flakes and fresh orange juice – I could have mutinied and forced the boat to keep going for a week. But there was a train ready to take me north again, on the way to Mumbai, on the way back home. I had to let everyone know how beautiful this country was, how interesting and fun and calm. I wanted to make plans with friends and family to come back. This was India? This was work? Don’t tell my editor.

tasteLIFE

TRAVEL

Domestic bliss

Ian Wishart discovers Whakatane is a tourism playground

“M

ichael Laws hates the place,” she grinned at me over a flounder, delicately pan-fried and served with lashings of fries and salad with a glass of the house wine. Three metres away, the incoming tide lapped at the wharf piles, and as the late summer sun beat down I could think of no better place to be than somewhere that the mayor of New Jack City – Wanganui – loathed. Sure, Whakatane is a little off the beaten track, if your beaten track is Auckland, Rotorua, Queenstown, Australia, but nonetheless the town offers some real benefits to visitors. “The trip to White Island is terrific,” says Whakatane Visitor Centre’s Mary Hermanson after a moment, and our eyes all drift to the distant rock across the bay with the plume hanging ominously above it. It is, but heavily pregnant as we are, the boat ride across is not one we’ll be making. Instead, for us, Whakatane is a place to chill out, tune out, ignore the world for a few days. It’s great for that. Ohope Beach over the hill stretches for miles, and once you’ve driven far enough it’s just sun, surf and sand. This, however, is not what the international jetset are coming to Whakatane for. “We don’t get many buses through here, so we’re getting adventure travelers, backpackers, self-drive, not many Asians, mostly Germans, Australians and people from the UK,” says Hermanson. “White Island is the big attraction, our point of difference.” If you’re into adventure, not only is the volcano a must, but also swimming with the dolphins. Or perhaps a beautiful kayak trip down the Waioeka River. Not to mention the deep sea fishing. American writer Zane Grey put the Bay of

Plenty on the map as a big game destination back in the 1920s, and that reputation is still attracting anglers from around the world. While we were there Whakatane was hosting hundreds of boaties for its big summer fishing contest, and the town was buzzing. The local cuisine was fantastic, and discovered on the first night. Lacking a major hotel, the town’s motor inns have stepped up to the plate, and centrally-located

Tuscany Villas has an arrangement with some of the best restaurants and cafes to deliver meals to your motel door, charged back to the room. Suddenly, instead of taking your chances on one kitchen, you have a selection of 12, ranging from Mexican to Seafood to International cuisine; spoilt for choice in fact. But don’t let the incredible dine-in expe-

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American writer Zane Grey put the Bay of Plenty on the map as a big game destination back in the 1920s, and that reputation is still attracting anglers from around the world

rience deter you from trying the region’s best eateries. Global, again centrally located, offers nice views of the downtown area from its second story locale, and the food was excellent. Whether it was because they have heartier appetites down-country, I don’t know, but the meals were generally much larger than those offered in Auckland restaurants. Cooked to the same exacting standards, just bigger. The Wharf Shed Restaurant, scene of the aforementioned flounder, is another not to be missed. As its name suggests it sits happily on the town’s small fishing wharf to offer genuine harbourside dining both inside and out, weather or mood permitting, with views out to the dunes across the narrow harbour entrance, the shallows full of wading birds and the serenity of an ancient Maori urupa at the heads. Over the hill in Ohope, those who haven’t been there for a decade or two wouldn’t recognize the place; rundown old baches replaced by glittering architectural beach homes, some in the million dollar range. And, as one would expect, a

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string of fine cafes and restaurants to relax in over a drink and a good meal. Pier 5 at the Ohope wharf is another must on the gourmet trail, perched on piles it juts out into the sea, which laps happily underneath the deck. It’s the inner lagoon, and as tranquil a restaurant location as you’re ever likely to see. Although the Whakatane region has 960 visitor beds, it’s not enough. “They had to turn away a major midweek conference from here this month,” says Kathleen Law out at the Leaburn farmstay on the main road into town. “We get so many commercial travelers here on working days that the motels and homestays couldn’t cope with a conference as well. For many it would have meant turning away a regular customer just to make way for extra business.” Mary Hermanson agrees. “I think a small boutique hotel, up to 70 rooms, would be really good. Tuscany Villas is the newest motel and they have 20-odd rooms, and they’re always full. White Island Rendezvous, they’re plan-

ning to put another block of 20 which would give them 40 rooms, and all the motels coming into town seem to be doing pretty well. But we need a big conference venue as well.” Farmstays and homestays are a major growth area for the region’s tourism portfolio, with rates anywhere from $80 a night to several hundred, depending on the facilities. “A lot of people find it nice to know that when they arrive there’s a homecooked meal waiting for them, and good company. We offer something different from motels or hotels, the personal touch, and we’re generally pretty well booked,” explains Kathleen Law. Although the majority of the region’s tourists remain domestic, there’s a growing international contingent, and the voices on the street underscore that: Americans, Swedes, Australians. “And Aucklanders,” exclaims a shop assistant. “There’s a lot of Aucklanders in town at the moment.” Then after a pause, “Where are you guys from then?”

GETAWAY GET YOUR BUSINESS SEEN! This space could be yours! From $110 a month (12 mth booking) or $150 a month (3 mth booking) Email sales@investigatemagazine.com for details

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tasteLIFE

FOOD

Guru in aisle 8

Organic food is an expensive scam, writes Eli Jameson. But biodynamic food? Well, that’s an expensive and tasty scam!

here’s an organic food supermarket on the corner of my street. I almost never go there, but every now and then I’ll be short an ingredient and given that they are open until eight and just a few metres up the road, well, I get sucked in. And every time I go, the same thing happens: I wind up being wildly overcharged for a product that is often inferior, quality-wise. The last time I went, they wanted to charge me two bucks for a lousy head of garlic; I left it on the counter and walked out that much richer, while shaking my head in wonder at the customers paying three-figure sums for anemic baskets of food. Shopping at the organic market feels like going back in time to Germany between the wars, except those wheelbarrows full of coins the citizens of Berlin used to cart to the shops have been replaced by gold cards. (Looking at the humourless visages of many of the staff and customers, and the exhortative moralistic posters designed to make everyone involved feel virtuous, well, one can’t help recalling that Hitler was a tee-totalling vegetarian who abhorred smoking). And I’m not the only one who questions the value of organic food: writing last January in the Glasgow Herald, columnist Joe Fattorini explained his New Year’s resolution to only buy processed supermarket fare – the more genetically-modified, the better. Calling organic food “self-indulgent, wasteful, and frankly immoral”, Fattorini went on to describe how if organic methods were used around the world, the world population would have to shrink by a few billion souls, and why all the worry about chemicals in “artificially”-fertilised food is woefully misplaced. Ironically, all the nattering on about “sustainability” by organic food-lovers betrays the fact that they support some of the most unsustainable practices around. Distressingly, he noted, organic food is being marketed to

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people lower and lower down the socioeconomic ladder, meaning that the poor are being asked to give up even more of their hard-earned for another middleclass indulgence – when the money could be spent on other more useful things for the family. But this is not to say that good food and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo are mutually incompatible. Sure, I long ago bought my last $5 organically-grown avocado, and gave up organic meat after spending the better part of a $50-note on a few ribeyes for a barbeque that were tougher than even the steaks from the supermarket’s bargain-basement clearance fridge. But there is another farming method out there that not only makes organic food look like it was grown downwind of a Chinese nuclear test site and fertilised with enough steroids to win ten Tour de France’s, but produces some damn fine food as well. It’s called biodynamic farming. And before we go any further, yes, its adherents all sound like they are insane. Biodynamic farming methods were invented by Rudolph Steiner, who also lends his name to a method of education. Steiner, who believed in a spiritual world underlying the material one, rejected the Newtonian physics of his time and was a pioneer of “holistic” thought – and was also an adherent to or inventor of various movements such as Theosophy and Anthroposophy which enjoyed popularity among intellectuals in the US and Europe in the late 1800s. In short, Steiner was old-school New Age; in his brilliant study of gurus throughout history, Feet of Clay, British psychiatrist Anthony Storr describes Steiner’s belief in Astral bodies (that leave us during sleep) and the seven stages of Earth evolution – all of which he managed, somehow, to graft onto a belief in the centrality of Christ to the human condition. But enough mysticism: what did Steiner

say about farming, and how does it work? I first encountered biodynamism at the same place I encounter so many other interesting concepts: at a bar. Well, not really a bar so much as a wine shop, but one where they were hosting a tasting of a relativelynearby winery called Krinklewood, in the Hunter Valley outside Sydney. The wines were fantastic, especially the rosé, which was clean, crisp, tight and biting – in only the best ways. I asked the fellow doing the pouring about it, and he told me all about how the wines were grown, and as I sipped away I realized that this otherwise normallooking vigneron was banging on about burying cow’s horns in the fields at pre-

scribed times in the lunar cycle and keeping track of the alignment of the planets. Dismissing the grower as harmlessly nuts, I bought a bottle. Serendipitously, I next encountered biodynamic farming at my local farmer’s market, where a woman was selling olives grown using Steiner’s methods and which were fine enough to drown in the Pope’s martinis. Biodynamic farming has a heavy touch of mysticism – which may be why the Nazis subsidised it until 1941 – and it relies on a lot of homeopathic and other preparations and methods that skeptics might dismiss as wacky. And I think that while the skeptics are right (and Fattorini

would be horrified if he found out about this as well), and that this sort of farming is unsustainable for anything more than artisinal products, I imagine that it works so well simply because it forces the farmer to be utterly in tune with what’s going on in his fields. One biodynamic website touts “the relationship between earth and the cosmos, between humans and angels. Science is not science unless knowledge of how the angels create life is relearned. All earthly life is but a manifestation of these spiritual creatures.” Which is, I think, a nice way of telling farmers to keep an eye on the fields. Me, I’ll have another glass of that rosé, thanks.

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Biodynamic farming has a heavy touch of mysticism, and it relies on a lot of homeopathic and other preparations and methods that skeptics might dismiss as wacky

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seeLIFE PAGES

Of mountains and men

Michael Morrissey conquers an Everest biography, and re-discovers post 9/11 New York SIR EDMUND HILLARY: An Extraordinary Life By Alexa Johnston, Penguin, $59.95

hen I was travelling from Amsterdam to Venice by train, an Italian gentleman, on learning I was from New Zealand, immediately formed his fingers into a pyramid shape. “Hillary ... he climb the mountain,” he said in broken English. It struck me then quite forcefully if strange men on trains from a non-English speaking country have heard of Hillary probably he is our most famous son. He was the sole New Zealander mentioned in Clive James’ selection of the 250 most famous people of the century for his not unfamous programme Fame in the Twentieth Century. Somehow, ballooning around the world nonstop just doesn’t cut the mustard beside reaching the highest point on earth on foot. There’s something special about mountains. They have a permanent place in the world’s spirituality – Jesus went up onto a mountain to pray and ever since monks, whether Christian or Buddhist, have done likewise. Doesn’t it seem appropriate that Moses obtained his commandments atop

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a mountain than from (say) a cave? For conservationists and for many of us normal mortals, regardless of our religious beliefs, mountains have a kind of secular spirituality. If heaven is above and beyond the earth, then mountains, by towering skywards, form the nearest point to that divine location. Hillary’s famous (or indeed, infamous) first spontaneous reaction on coming down from Everest, was to say, “We knocked the bastard off.” But truly, don’t we also like him for being such an ordinary New Zealander for thus giving vent to his feelings in such a manifestly unscripted way? Only sixteen years later, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon had to be scripted thus: “That’s one giant step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” Hillary later softened the bluntness of his early comment by saying that Everest had not been conquered but had relented. Even if – unimaginable as it now would seem – Hillary had performed that one feat and thereafter faded into obscurity, his name would remain etched into our minds and hearts. As it is, Hillary’s life in all its variegated, continuing and outstanding array of achievements has become the embodiment of that alas somewhat worn

phrase “living legend”– but how aptly it fits Ed! Indeed, he has something of the status of a mythical hero, a lantern-jawed Hercules, who seemingly has lived many lives within one life, and left a series of completed labours for us to gape and wonder at. As Hillary’s friend, curator and official biographer, Johnstone has had access to many personal scrapbooks and documents that might possibly have not been so readily available. It is curious how historic-looking telegrams now appear – almost from another era. The combination of numerous family photos, personal letters, telegrams, and diary extracts give this otherwise coffee table-style biography, a gritty down-to-earth documentary feel that is in pleasant contrast to the almost celestial dizziness experienced when contemplating high altitude photography – the picture of Peter Hillary on the summit ridge of Akash Parbat, or the hauntingly beautiful shot of Jim Wilson’s boot on Thamserku. In several photos, Hillary’s features suggest that if he had no icepick, he could have chipped out steps with his jaw. Just as Hillary is well-known for his fair-mindedness, so too is this biography

even-handed in its encyclopaedic inclusion of every member of the Everest team plus cameo portraits of many of Hillary’s mountaineering contemporaries – Harry Ayres, Eric Shipton, George Lowe, Mike Gill. The book is also generous in its treatment of the sherpas without which the expeditions could not have moved, let alone succeeded. And lastly, it also includes all the Hillarys. In short, this is a biography in the spirit of Ed himself – generous, fair, even-handed and meticulous in detail.

Everything You Need to Know About BIRD FLU & What You Can Do To Prepare For It By Jo Revill, Rodale International, $27.95

he next pending “biologically inevitable” flu pandemic must be the most anticipated and pre-documented in history. The great plague epidemics of the sixth and fourteenth centuries probably will still surpass the almost certain-to-come flu epidemic in proportionate mortality – though no one can be sure. However, the causes of these prior calamities were not understood hence mitigatory or preventative strategies were not an option. Like the nuclear war, which did not and hopefully will not occur, the documentation of this decimating event is in danger of becoming a minor industry. However, if the next great flu epidemic arrives and we all remember – as this compact book repeatedly warns us – to wash our hands, deaths may be less than envisioned. Looking back to that huge 1918–19 flu pandemic which killed (say) 40 million – though the true total could have been as high as 80 million – Revill calculates a proportionate killing of our current population would leave 150 million dead. While other subsequent flu epidemics like that of the Asian Flu epidemic (1957–58) killed a modest two million and the more recent Hong Kong epidemic of 1968– 69 snuffed out less than a million, there are no guarantees that the pending epidemic may not be worse than the 150 million equivalent of the 1918–19 epidemic (which, significantly, started with chickens kept in British army camps along the Western front). Apart from frequent hand-washing which Revill warns is the single most

important precaution, she tells us the bleak facts about sneezing – 100,000 viral particles propelled at speed up to 128 kph. Like tuberculosis, flu is carried on the air. In such a scenario, turn your head away and close your eyes. Possibly, we should all wear goggles from here on? Revill vigorously rebuts some mistaken beliefs. For instance, though it was true that recent epidemics killed mainly old people, the great flu epidemics of 1918– 19 was particularly lethal among healthy young adults aged 20–40 – why? Because their immune systems were so robust they mounted an overly strong defence which means their lung tissue broke down more quickly. Here’s the detail: cytokyine proteins activate lymphocytes in white blood cells to repel the virus. The reaction doesn’t kill the virus but produces a strong inflammatory response known as a cytokine storm. The tissue breaks down and fluid leaks into the lungs which quickly fill up. The infected person rapidly drowns. Despite this dark scenario, a person in good health still stands a better chance than someone malnourished or in bad health. Revill also quotes Dr Adam Carey to the effect that while good nutrition may help fight off the flu, multivitamins won’t – though Omega-3 (which I take daily) may be beneficial. Other preventative measures include flu shots which earlier generations did not have available, flu masks and the compulsory slaughter of innumerable chickens, geese, pigeons, and ducks – a task (if you’ll pardon the bad taste pun) now in full swing. The mask option sounds highly sensible – if highly inconvenient – but there are drawbacks. The most effective can only be worn for short periods and may well carry the germs around with them. Nonetheless, France has a stockpile of 200 million. Prior to September 2005, it was thought that the bird flu virus could not jump the species barrier but the virus had other ideas. Since 2003, some 130 cases have been reported and 67 deaths – a frightening 50 per cent lethal rate. By now, we should all be on bird flu red alert. This compact, lucidly written book with its exhaustive Q and A section, glossary and websites, should be a necessary part of our anti-flu kitset. And don’t forget to clean that computer keyboard plus phones, doorknobs, toilet seats and kitchen surfaces.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING By Joan Didion, Fourth Estate, $34

he lives of the rich and the beautiful can be visited by dark gods ... Joan Didion, writer of some renown (A Book Common Prayer, Slouching Towards Bethlehem) had been happily married to John Gregory Dunne, also a writer of some renown (True Confessions, The Panic in Needle Park) for nearly 40 years when Dunne, who was asking her if she used single-malt Scotch for his second drink, suddenly stopped talking. Alternatively, Didion’s memory recalls her husband was talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed ... when he stopped talking. Didion is no longer sure which topic her husband was discussing when he slumped over the table, then onto the floor. A massive heart attack took his life in a matter of minutes. Only a few days earlier, Quintana, her daughter, had fallen seriously ill (pneumonia then septic shock) and placed on life support. Thus, in a phrase, which Didion is to repeat more than once in shock, Life changes in the ordinary instant. Literary marriages – marriage between two writers – are as often as not, made in hell rather than in heaven but in Didion and Dunne’s case their union was deep, constant and heartfelt. It was an unusually intimate relationship by virtue of their shared occupation – they were always at home together writing. In fact, Didion touchingly records that she did not have a single letter from her husband because on the few occasions they were apart they spoke on the telephone several times a day. Some would call such unrelenting closeness unhealthy or at least a compelling scenario for prompting the overwhelming loss that Didion so poignantly describes in this book. The narrative has its own emotional logic. At times, Didion finds in literature apt analyses of her grief – which in one passage is described as a temporary mental illness ie manic depression which the subject then overcomes. At other times, she gives extended medical detail about her husband’s death – and the reader understands this is all the swings of a mind and heart trying to grapple with overpowering loss. Much the same shifts occur with her daughter, who eventually pulls through though, heart-

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breakingly, she has recently died. Didion is no gusher either in style or, I would guess, in person. She keeps a tight grip on herself, though this apparent control is itself a symptom of shock, numbness and emotional shifts that, in the final analysis, remain beyond control. Moving in a composed way though this account is, I felt myself longing for just a small touch of lightness, even of humour. Didion gives us no letup but then for her, I have no doubt, this is a chronicle of unrelenting honesty. And we can all gain courage from that.

WHO THE HELL’S IN IT? By Peter Bogdanovich, Faber and Faber, $35

ver tire of reading how (say) Hugh Grant was caught in flagrante delicto on a busy LA street? For many of us, I suspect the honest answer is no. The guy’s got it – all fame, fortune, beautiful women, good looks, a fabulous home, presumably an expensive car, clothes and watch – so why shouldn’t he cop a bit of flak for being caught doing something sordid? It kind of evens the score. And we can all (except Hugh Grant) feel gloriously self righteous. Well, if that’s what you’re expecting from a book that gives cameo portraits of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe plus many others, you will be disappointed. The closest Bogdanovich comes to scandal is a teensy mention of the fact that Dean Martin used to drink ... a bit. He quotes Martin as saying yes, he drinks but doesn’t get drunk and the stories were good for his image. And the Duke (John Wayne) used to swear. Frank Sinatra? – no Mob connections here, though he does send a nasty telegram. The majority of the actors celebrated here were friends or colleagues of Bogdanovich – actors that he blatantly admires for their acting and star quality. Of Henry Fonda, Bogdanovich asks, Was there ever a more reassuring president than Fonda in Fail-Safe? And categorically declares, “If Fonda had run for president or governor you could have been sure he would have won, and no one would have been unhappy about it, either.” Yup, it’s true Fonda would have been more convincing than Reagan, (though Reagan, one could

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say, helped end the Cold War by forcing the Russians into an arms race they couldn’t afford). There are some surprises here – the apparently intelligent method actor Montgomery Clift gives the impression of being inarticulate (or is he acting?) whereas the never one to be fancy with words John Wayne is revealed as surprisingly articulate and intelligent about the director’s craft. Indeed, having read the chapter on John Wayne, I went to the wonderful Videon store in Balmoral, took out some classic John Wayne films like Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and formed the impression that everyone else seems to be acting (make that over acting) while John Wayne seems to be being just himself – large, solid, reliable, dependable, righteous – the old-fashioned hero personified. One can’t help wondering whether Bogdanovich’s admiring views of these great Hollywood stars are the result of (a) loyal friendship, (b) fan-like naivete, (c) fatigue with scandal, (d) the wish to reaffirm the old reason why we like actors (because they’re heroes we’d love to emulate) or (e) genuine admiration of their craft and screen presence? Or indeed, an admixture of all of the above? Whatever, if you’re tired of reading scandal about Hollywood’s finest, this is a refreshingly old-fashioned revisitation of the times when actors didn’t just act but embodied qualities of character that we could all admire.

THE GOOD LIFE By Jay McInerney, Bloomsbury, $35

ack in the early 80s when newly arrived author McInerney published Bright Lights, Big City, he himself seemed to be living the good life. He was seen as being at the forefront of a new wave of urban and urbane fiction writers which showed the high lives of New Yorkers, high meaning coked out rather than merely monied – though that was also part of the equation. Like many, I read it as one would also read Tom Wolfe to get the current flavour of the Big Apple – crisp, tart and juicy, one might presume. I was not overly impressed and gave his later novels a miss. With this his eighth novel, I am somewhat more persuaded that McInerney is a writer of considerable talent. In The Good Life, McInerney seems at

times to rise to Fitzgeraldian heights in his elegant and psychologically acute style. Like Anna Karenina, the novel presents two sets of characters – sinfully rich but now taking it easy Luke McGavock with his trophy wife Sasha, and the Galloways, Russell and Corrine. As with its great nineteenth century predecessor, we long for the main characters to meet, as indeed they do, under morally attractive circumstances. Luke and Corrine both begin to voluntarily help survivors after the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers. The decadence we have come to expect of New Yorkers is unsurprisingly part of the bill of fare – teenagers take drugs and have affairs with older men; couples initiate their illicit liaisons all too blatantly, and good looks, whether manufactured or professionally maintained, plus not being perceived as professionally idle, are just as important as in Hollywood. All the characters dance to the tune of McInerney’s supple and expert prose. Like any craftsman, McInerney knows not to rush the pace of development, so the couple’s slow meeting, and delayed involvement means that is not until page 163 before they share their first kiss. Their relationship with its passion and tenderness is the gem at the heart of the book and the other more satirically toned social analysis a la Tom Wolfe passages are less heartfelt. When I read contemporary New York novels with their dazzling array of business and cultural glitterati (The Good Life includes guest appearances by real life celebrities O.J Simpson and Salman Rushdie), I can’t help wondering isn’t there a great novel waiting to be written about a garbage collector or a short order cook? How silly of me – everyone knows such low life untouchables don’t even exist in New York – they are socially and novelistically invisible. However, in The Good Life’s favour, is the use of the 9/11 disaster in fiction. The unthinkable has artfully become the highly readable.

THE TRUTH ABOUT LIES By Andy Shea & Steven Van Aperen, ABC books, $35

f there is a field of human endeavour that has progressed, it is lie detection. Early tests were heavily loaded against the innocent, particularly the float or sink test for witches which required the accused to die by drowning to prove they had had

naught to do with spells or black cats. Scarcely better was having to walk barefoot over nine red-hot ploughshares without burning your tootsies (“the ordeal of the burning irons”) – a difficult feat, though in legend, at least, a pious woman called Lady Emma, widow of King Canute, managed it back in 1050. Readers and my occasional fibbing self will be relieved to note that trial by jury came into the British system as far back as 1220. It has been somewhat more tardy in entering other “legal” systems – deposed Saddam Hussein’s regime, for instance, where no matter how often you’re burnt you stay guilty. What this book makes crystal-clear is that if you’re asked a straightforward question like, “Did you kill your wife?” the appropriate answer is “NO!” not something like – “I don’t know how you could ever accuse me of such a thing. I am just not that kind of person. This question is completely inappropriate. I’ve never been cruel to animals, never even pulled the wings off flies so how you could imagine I would ever harm anyone is ridiculous ...” etc etc. In other words talking around the topic looks, and is, evasion which may well indicate guilt. Using this model as a “lie detector ”, some may be surprised to read that the straightforward denials of Michael Jackson, Linda Chamberlain and Schapelle Corby imply innocence while Vicepresident Gore, Sean Penn and O. J Simpson’s evasive answers suggest the opposite. Most of us have heard of the polygraph or lie detector but it is surprising to read that it is used in 50 countries and not just the USA – as numerous films might indicate. The authors keep insisting that the machine is never at fault only human operators and their interpretations. Even so, they claim accuracy in the 97–98 per cent range – though is that good enough when you compare it with the much more refined accuracy of DNA tests? An early form of the polygraph was invented by criminology pioneer Lombroso’s as long ago as 1895. However, there are now more scientific ways to ascertain if someone is telling the truth or not. There is magnetic resonance imaging or MRI and its update method functional resonance imaging (fMRI), brain fingerprinting and the controversial neuro-linguistic programme which I personally believe to be a load of cods. The former is at the moment impractical for everyday use because of size and cost but it is claimed to be even more reliable than the most skilled lie detector graph. Apparently females are better able to lie than males who give the game away by pauses and hesitations. So if you’re going to lie – deny flatly, don’t evade or prevaricate, don’t swivel eyeballs, (or swivel them the right way), don’t change tenses, don’t be abstract. It also helps not to breathe and not have your heart beating. It might be easier to tell the truth. I thoroughly recommend this book – and if you think I’m lying, fingerprint my brain.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 83

seeLIFE MUSIC

Urban legends

A Kiwi film soundtrack and a Scottish songstress tell local stories, says Chris Philpott

VARIOUS ARTISTS No. 2 (Original motion picture soundtrack)

f the soundtrack for No. 2 is anything to go by then the movies’ success internationally should be no surprise, with this collection of Kiwi tracks providing the ideal backdrop to a uniquely Kiwi movie. I won’t say too much about the film, but one of the best decisions director Toa Fraser made was hiring local music legend Don McGlashan to serve as soundtrack producer. The result is a fantastic score, reflecting the culture of the film to great effect and reproduced here with additional hip-hop/dub tracks from NZ artists Che Fu, Tha Feelstyle and TrinityRoots. I believe music is key to showing the culture of any film and McGlashan has captured the NZ/Polynesian feel of No. 2 perfectly. The individual tracks and score are great, however – as with any soundtrack album – No. 2 tends to lack coherence or direction when it doesn’t at least bring memories of the corresponding parts of the film, kind of like having a car with no engine or steering. Besides, the music just sounds better when accompanied by the movie itself so I would definitely recommend catching No. 2 at a movie theatre before grabbing a copy of this CD.

84, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

ARCTIC MONKEYS Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I’m Not

KT TUNSTALL Eye to the Telescope

cottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall’s rise to stardom in the UK has gone largely unnoticed here in New Zealand, but since the quiet release of her debut album her star has been steadily rising here too – and for good reason. Eye to the Telescope sounds like it was designed rather than written, with each track constructed almost to perfection, every piece falling into place as an integral part of the whole. It’s hardly surprising since Tunstall draws from such a wide variety of sources and influences, and when you listen to tracks like “Suddenly I See” or “Other Side of the World” you hear how delicately they’ve been placed together. Another great thing about Eye to the Telescope is that the songs don’t get weaker as the album goes on, even shifting into another gear on some of the later tracks. Tunstall’s voice is an asset on every track, silky smooth on slower ballads like “Silent Sea” and “Heal Over” but equally powerful when required on more intense songs like “Another Place to Fall”. Eye to the Telescope is the perfect album for any fan of great songwriting or writers like Beth Orton, Brooke Fraser and Norah Jones. Highly recommended.

nter the Arctic Monkeys, holder of the British record for fastest selling debut album of all time – no small feat for a band whose only real promotion came via internet downloads and word of mouth. As you might have guessed, I was surprised to hear that such a little-known rock band could achieve that kind of success, but fortunately from the opening track of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not any questions I had were very quickly answered as the Monkeys’ infectious dance-rock sound oozed from within my stereo. The Arctic Monkeys make their living by creating catchy tracks and hooks that appeal to listeners and this album features some of the most entertaining I’ve ever heard. But this band is far from a one trick pony. Yes, this album will have you tapping your feet, but it is also chockfull of great lyrics and some of the most dynamic arrangements around. In an album of highlights it’s always hard to pick a single great track, but first single “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” definitely stands out. Overall, this album is one of the highlights of the year to date. Highly recommended.

seeLIFE MOVIES

The Weather Man

Out of his cage

Nicolas Cage is the man of the month in the latest movie releases THE WEATHER MAN Released: March 16 Rated: R16 Starring: Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis 98 Minutes

he definition of “mid-life crisis” must be the day that it all stops making sense. The rules you were playing by feel wrong. The goals you set seem out of whack. Especially if you’ve reached them. The life you might have led becomes the life you’re leading, and no matter how many yardsticks tell you it’s all good you’re a success – you know what you do has no consequence. The Weather Man is an engaging meditation on a man cursed with that midlife self-awareness. Dave Spritz (Nicolas Cage) has the cute TV weather-guy name, which he changed. He’s a maestro of the blue screen, utterly at home standing front of a blank wall, pointing into space, and communicating whether or not we need an umbrella in the morning. Not that he knows. “It’s all just ... wind.” Heck, he’s not even a licensed meteorologist. But he’s a major-market weather

86, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

guy, in Chicago. He’s making $240,000 a year, and earning interest from Bryant Gumbel’s national morning show. Why isn’t he happy? Well, he’s the son of a famous writer (Michael Caine), so whatever he does is always going to be judged as beneath him. He’s divorced and can’t get along with his ex-wife (Hope Davis) despite his fondest hopes for a reconciliation. And he’s very slow to see how his chubby daughter and rebellious son (Gemmenne de la Pena, Nicholas Hoult) are making poor choices and headed for disaster. This is Sideways with none of the wine and all of the whine. Dave’s unfocused futility comes from the juggling act that is modern life. We’re all so overscheduled that details are missed. We’ve acted on childish impulse, taken the easy way out too many times. “Easy doesn’t enter into grown-up life,” Dave’s dad tells him. Dave is just starting to understand. Cage is the best in the business at playing this particular brand of put-upon frustration. He doesn’t even need to do his classic slow-burn or melt-down any more. We’ve seen it so often that when Dave’s little indignities – “fans” are forever pelting him with fast food – and life mistakes

pile up, we know what’s to come and we can enjoy imagining what color red his face will be. There’s real wit and pathos here, and no easy laughs. Dave wants to know more, to “knuckle down” and make this or that aspect of his world work. Director Gore Verbinksi (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring) puzzles over Dave’s problems along with us. The movie’s suggested solution to midlife ennui is really no different from the one in City Slickers. Remember Jack Palance holding up a finger and saying life was just “one thing,” figuring out what matters and letting the rest slide? Michael Caine has that moment here. There are nice little epiphanies on an archery range, at the food court. But Steve Conrad, who scripted Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, built a serious handicap into his movie. Dave’s omnipresent voice-over narration, a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, ranges from cute to cloying to downright maddening. The Weather Man isn’t quite the new face of quiet desperation. But if the “angry white male” has devolved into the whiney one, Cage is the perfect guy to tell us which way the wind blows. Reviewed by Roger Moore

Lord of War

LORD OF WAR Released: March 23 Rated:R16 Starring: Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Bridget Moynahan 117 Minutes

he riveting Lord of War takes a tragicomic, sometimes even satirical look at the bloody arena of arms dealership. Inevitable targets also include moral irresponsibility and the ruthless pursuit of the American Dream. Kiwi director and screenwriter Andrew Niccol does not hesitate to point fingers, and his chutzpah is noteworthy in an era of play-it-safe filmmaking. Lord of War is an undeniably compelling movie but also a somewhat distant one. Directed with energy and style, it nonetheless suffers from an intriguing yet ultimately hollow lead character. Nicolas Cage, in his best work since Adaptation, makes his amoral con artist so cunning that viewers initially have a dual reaction. The moralist inside you will hope that he gets the fate he deserves. The moviegoer inside you will hope that somehow he escapes too harsh a punishment.

Cage’s character of Yuri is a loathsome charmer, and his amoral loathsomeness overrides his charisma. To Cage’s and Niccol’s credit, they beg for your understanding but never your sympathy. Growing up in Little Odessa, the son of immigrant Ukrainian parents, the youthful Yuri realizes the lucrative nature of weapons dealership when he witnesses a mob killing. He justifies his chosen trade by thinking of himself as a businessman supplying necessary hardware to his customers. Soon he’s a millionaire, with a trophy wife in the form of a supermodel he’s coveted for years. He also keeps his sweet, somewhat simple younger brother gainfully employed. That’s a rather cornball touch, but apparently, arms dealers do have family values. Niccol’s visual flair is apparent in the opening credits, which follow the manufacturing of a bullet and conclude with its heading straight for the face of an African child. Other moments are more whimsical, including an air battle composed almost entirely for comic effect and a gun fair that turns into the kind of soiree that Hugh Hefner might host. Through it all, Niccol manages to keep the mood swings almost seamless.

“

Nicolas Cage, in his best work since Adaptation, makes his amoral con artist so cunning that viewers initially have a dual reaction

”

The performances are largely on target, with Jared Leto overcoming his cliched role as Yuri’s too-trusting brother and Ethan Hawke effectively taut as a special agent doggedly on Yuri’s trail. Bridget Moynahan’s trophy wife is the screenplay’s foggiest character, but Moynahan at least tries for something more profound than eye candy. Lord of War definitely aims to be something more profound than brain candy. It gives moviegoers something to think about. If that recommendation sounds too dutiful, let it be known that it’s exciting as well as thought-provoking. Reviewed by Philip Wuntch

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 87

seeLIFE DVDs

Crash & burn

Ian Wishart looks at how Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash at the Oscars

CRASH R16, 113 minutes

t is little wonder that Crash won best picture at the Oscars this year. While the rest of the media were salivating over the tepid Brokeback Mountain, Crash was a movie that touched real lives and real issues for a far greater number of people. Which is probably why the Academy backed it. Crash director Paul Haggis, who incidentally was behind last year’s Best Picture, Million Dollar Baby, shot an edgy, compelling take on life in LA and the interconnectedness of a group of people over 36 hours. Having walked LA’s streets at 5am in the morning, and been pinged by a crim wanting a free ride back to NZ, the movie spoke to me in a way the gay cowboy flick was never going to. As an indie shot on a US$6.5 million budget, Crash garnered $55 million at the US box office and sold a further four million DVD copies over there. Here in New Zealand it is being temporarily re-released at the movies by Hoyts in the wake of its Academy Award success. It isn’t all down to Haggis. His movie’s chances were aided and abetted by a bunch of Hollywood A-listers: Sandra Bullock, Terence Howard, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe to name a few, who gave the film some strong outof-the-comfort-zone performances. I liked it. Thousands of my fellow media pundits who’d all been picking Brokeback have spent the past few weeks pouring vitriol into their columns about how the Academy got it terribly wrong. They didn’t. They got it spot on. And the almost 44,000 people who cast a vote on the IMDB movie website agree, giving the film an 8 out of 10 rating. Ignore the sulking critics. See Crash.

88, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

“

While the rest of the media were salivating over the tepid Brokeback Mountain, Crash was a movie that touched real lives and real issues for a far greater number of people

”

THE ISLAND M, 136 minutes

rmageddon director Michael Bay turns his attention to what appears at first to be a post-apocalyptic Earth where humans survive only in an underground facility with the promise of freedom on an uncontaminated offshore island. But then Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) finds a moth, and the facility begins to unravel. To divulge too much more would be a plot spoiler, but Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson turn in convincing performances in this fastpaced thriller-with-a-message.

WALLACE & GROMIT The Curse of the Were-Rabbit PG, 85 minutes

nother Oscar winner, this time in the animation category. Wallace and his trusty dog Gromit set up a pest control business to capture rabbits, but when Wallace decides to conduct a brainwashing experiment on one of his bunnies the plan backfires hilariously, and soon the town is being tormented by a mystery creature that gobbles up vegetable gardens every night. Like most kids movies these days, this one’s aimed at grown-ups as well.

Let us entertain you

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 89 Danish Sound Design

touchLIFE

TOYBOX

MDS-60 Music Desk Stand

The ultimate bar trolley And other must have items

STUNNING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY FROM NEC WITH NEW HD LCD TV LINE-UP

As one of the world’s leading suppliers of visual display technology, NEC announces the company’s High Definition LCD TV Aura line-up, with screen sizes covering 32 to 42 inches. Boasting the latest widescreen technology, the new models come with in-built High-Definition tuners for the latest in high-resolution digital reception. With the announcement of the 42-inch model, NEC is one of only a few companies to offer large widescreen LCD TVs to the market. The new Aura line-up comprises of the NLT-32HD1 (32inch), NLT-37HD1 (37inch) and NLT-42HD1 (42inch). All models offer widescreen 1366 x 768 resolution with a contrast ratio of 1200:1 for brilliant, clear images making them ideal for today’s digital broadcasts. In addition, all models offer a fast response time of only 8 milliseconds, ideal for watching sporting events without trailing or blurring. RRP A$3499 – $5499. Visit www.nec.com.au

90, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

When you're serious about sound quality, the Walkman™ – branded Music Desk Stand MDS-60 is a powerful music desk stand that lets you share your favourite phone-based music with a whole group of people. Just put your music mobile phone in the cradle and pump up the volume. Compact and slim, yet with a very rich sound, the MDS-60 has an exclusive sleek design that makes it the perfect centrepiece for your desk or at home. Drawing its power from either battery or wall socket, the MDS-60 can be folded to fit in your bag, making it a truly portable music accessory. With speaker covers available in orange and white, the MDS-60 can be dressed to match your mood. The exclusive yet discreet design makes it an attractive addition to your selection of music accessories. Visit http://www.sonyericsson.com

DRINKS TO GO

It’s a good time to buy outdoor furniture, and Dedon have some great pieces in stock if you’re looking for something different, something premium, and something you won’t find anywhere else. This Bar Trolley is from Dedon’s Bonneville Collection, and includes a glass top as standard. RRP $3999. Dedon® – premium outdoor furniture made from Hularo® synthetic fibre. Weatherproof in all conditions. Call 0800 587 895 for nearest stockist

WIRELESS FABRIC KEYBOARD

On the road, on the move the ElekTex Smart Fabric wireless keyboard designed for Smartphones, PDAs and handheld computers redefines mobile business. Designed for business people on the go the keyboard supports easy access to email, document editing, texting and mobile web browsing. A generous full laptop keyboard design creates an alternative to the small, embedded keypads on many of today’s mobile devices. Its Bluetooth connectivity enables easy connection with many of the most popular mobile platforms used by business people. The standard design features a charcoal grey fabric keyboard and the electronics housing has an embedded LED to show status and Bluetooth connectivity status. Visit www.eleksen.com

Epson Stylus Photo RX650

The Epson Stylus Photo RX650 advanced all-in-one photo centre has increased photo print speed and a 2.5 inch colour LCD viewing screen using Epson Photo Fine (TM) technology for high resolution viewing and editing of images before printing. The Epson Stylus RX650 uses six individual colour dye ink cartridges for high quality photographs printing at a resolution of up to 5760dpi (dots per inch) and a minimum droplet size of 1.5pl (picolitres) using Epson's VSDT (Variable Sized Droplet Technology). BorderFree(TM) photos can be printed directly without the need for a PC from compatible memory cards#, PictBridge or USBDirect enabled digital cameras, scans of negative or positive film, selected USB Flash memory devices and compatible BlueTooth devices [with the optional BlueTooth module]. With the highest resolution MatrixCCD(TM) scanner in its class, the Stylus Photo RX650 scans at up to 3200x6400 dpi, and the built-in TPU (Transparency Unit) also allows users to scan both positive and negative film. Visit www.epson.co.nz

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006, 91

touchLIFE

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92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

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realLIFE

15 MINUTES

The look of love

The shot a poison arrow through the heart of pop – Ian Wishart looks back at ABC

“I

wanted a name that would put us first in the phone directory, or second if you count ABBA.” So said ABC frontman Martin Fry to an interviewer’s question back in the eighties. Although he took a risk placing his band in the phone book alongside ABC Pest Control, as marketing moves go it turned out to be a smart one. Hailing from the English industrial town of Sheffield, Fry and his team set out in their musical careers in the late 1970s with one goal: “to destroy rock music”. Their weapon of choice was pop. Effervescent, funky, synthesized and ultimately all about the decadence of the 80s, instead of the anthems and struggles of the sixties and seventies. While they may have been legends in their own lunchtime in Sheffield, ABC didn’t hit the big time until 1982 when their debut album The Lexicon of Love thumped into the pop charts worldwide. One of the first bands to really make use of the MTV phenomenon, ABC’s catchy “Look of Love” was a worldwide pop hit and moved some critics to declare that Martin Fry had penned “the ultimate pop song”. Fry brought to music what analysts brought to that other growth industry of the eighties, investment banking. “It seems that the initial idea had been to make music like a factory would build a car, with a designer’s attention to detail scanning from bumper to fin, upholstered and customised to personal specifications,” notes one review reprinted on the band’s website, putting a ring around the professional approach to creating a sound, tailoring it and marketing it. “Fry’s own obsessions with Pop had taken him out of his bedsit but nowhere important. With ambitions to carve out a very considerable niche in the International pop world, a portfolio of arrangements and an attache case full of surprises, he had a world view and a name ABC… What he

94, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

1982

“

Hailing from the English industrial town of Sheffield, Fry and his team set out in their musical careers in the late 1970s with one goal: “to destroy rock music”. Their weapon of choice was pop needed more than anything else, was a group to back it up. “Recruitment would not be easy, but with a certain amount of detective work and a wide scope dragnet in operation, members were found. Musicians, who

”

knew the meaning of a clean shirt and even cleaner syncopation, with promises of a road that leads from your living room to Las Vegas, Fry was armed.” For a few brief years, Fry and his band made a mint from songs like “Poison

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Arrow”, “All of My Heart”, or their biggest US hit, “When Smokey Sings”, but by the late eighties the wheels were falling off the ABC phenomenon. The icon of the 80s, the sharemarket, took its biggest pasting since the 1929 collapse, and suddenly the business-suited ambassadors of Brit-pop who’d delivered albums like How To Be A Zillionaire didn’t seem quite so relevant in a financially post-apocalyptic world. Martin Fry has nonetheless kept his hand in, with a series of 80s tribute concerts and gigs keeping him busy since 2000, and a new ABC album due out later this year. He and co-founder David Palmer – now living in Los Angeles and working as a music producer – are working on it together. Stephen Singleton, one of the other originals, left the band way back in 1984 and still lives in Sheffield, working as a nightclub DJ, while Mark White quit in 1992 and left the music biz altogether, choosing instead a life as a Reiki master. Neither Singleton nor White were willing to reunite for a VH-1 special on ABC, preferring to concentrate on their existing commitments. Asked by RememberTheEighties.com about the album that launched it all – Lexicon – Fry was circumspect. “I listened to it recently for the first time in years. It sounded pretty current in a funny kind of way. For many years it was a source of frustration. I’d be standing there holding Zillionaire or Alphabet City and critics would say good but not as good as The Lexicon of Love. I don't feel like that these days. It was great assisting Daryl Easlea on the recent Universal reissue The Deluxicon. It felt great performing 'The Look of Love' along side Trevor Horn at the Princes Trust show at Wembley Arena. It would be nice to turn The Lexicon of Love into a stage show some day. It has a life of its own. I'm honoured that people hold those songs in high regard all these years on. I never ever take that for granted.” And the song he’s proudest of? “'All Of My Heart' is a joy to perform. It's a real tear jerker. In any show it always provokes an emotional response, there’s always someone wiping away a tear.” Fry’s hectic schedule on the retro circuit prevented an interview in time for Investigate’s deadline for this issue, but we have now confirmed a date and we’ll post that interview online in due course.

96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2006

2005

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