Investigate, April 2005

INVESTIGATE

April 2005:

Tamihere

Horse crimes

Fathers

Income tax

Issue 52

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New Zealand’s best cur rent affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

APRIL 2005

TAMIHERE COMES CLEAN When we invited high-profile Labour MP John Tamihere to lunch at Soljan’s Vineyard, we expected a routine interview. It was anything but. In a wide-ranging, soulbaring conversation, Tamihere hints at a possible leadership challenge, rejects the moral climate Labour has created, and reveals the Clark administration may not be as unified as it seems. In this exclusive interview, Tamihere talks with IAN WISHART

BLUE MAGIC Two men in the racing industry are already dead as a result of investigations into the Blue Magic doping scandal.

Now a terror campaign in the Waikato against a farming couple and their bloodstock is prompting speculation that Blue Magic may be involved there, as well.

NEILL HUNTER investigates

THE FERTILITY CRISIS Where have all the good men gone? DANIEL DONAHOO asks the question as he tries to find out why today’s males appear frightened of fatherhood, and the impact that’s having on society. Then, in Part Two, JAMES MORROW examines alternatives amid New Zealand and Australia’s 120,000 lives a year abortion rate, yet skyrocketing demand for IVF and fertility drugs

OUTGOING TAX Four years ago we reported President Bush was considering abolishing income tax in the US if he won a second term. Now Investigate’s prediction has proven correct.

IAN WISHART updates the story

SUICIDE SEEDS NZ’s committment to a world moratorium on introducing terminator-gene crops appears to be wavering.

CLARE SWINNEY explains the potential hazards

FRONTLINE George Bush’s democracy virus continues to infect the Middle East, as citizens of Lebanon and Syria demonstrate

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

5 issue 52 ISSN 1175-1290

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft NZ Edition Advertising Grant Haworth, Jacques Windell Contributing Writers: Neill Hunter, Peter Hensley, Clare Swinney, Chris Carter, Laura Wilson, Ann Coulter, Tim Kerr, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, and the worldwide resources of Knight Ridder Tribune, UPI and Newscom Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Tel: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine PO Box 302-188 North Harbour Auckland 1310 NEW ZEALAND

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Focal Point Vox-Populi Simply Devine Laura’s World Eyes Right Break Point Doublespeak Line 1 Tough Questions Short Circuit

Editorial Can you hear the people sing?

I am woman, hear me roar Goat-herders who take bribes The gun-control debate My curling wand is a lethal weapon Nationalism vs Globalism Campbell, Wood & Holmes The Resurrection - why is it important?

Murphy’s Law, in technicolor

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ORIAL AND OPINION Editorial Can you hear the people sing?

I am woman, hear me roar Goat-herders who take bribes The gun-control debate My curling wand is a lethal weapon Nationalism vs Globalism Campbell, Wood & Holmes The Resurrection - why is it important?

Murphy’s Law, in technicolor

TYLE Peter Hensley on investment Bright, shiny things Claire Morrow on stress James Morrow on the latest green myth In the footsteps of Darwin Michael Morrissey’s autumn harvest Shelly Horton & Tim Kerr’s reviews

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL

Is Labour using 1984 as a how-to handbook?

T

here are times when I seriously think the only thing missing in this wonderland of ours is the Mad Hatter.

For anyone who bothered to peruse the daily news during March, you couldn’t miss the coverage of La bour’s Orwellian “Hate Speech” hearings. Even the Herald gave them front page coverage, although the Herald sub-editors couldn’t resist describing opponents as “conservatives” (when did you last see the Herald describe the promoters of the Hate Speech policy as left-wing liberals?).

The really worrying thing is that Orwell’s dark depiction of society was overt; Helen Clark’s agenda is sufficiently covert that the drooling chimps who vote Labour every election without fail have pretty much no clue what they’re dragging the rest of Freedom of thought, freedom of us into. That, of course, is the result of dumbing speech, freedom of religion and down the education sysfreedom to impart and receive tem from grammar and three R’s to its current ideas – these things are the the role as a haven for Labour’s lifeblood of freedom itself Thought Police to instruct the young in “rightthink”, reinforced by constant repetition of guttural, words-of-one-syllable slogans that rhyme with the numbers two, four, six and eight. And so, courtesy of the State education system, a new generation of bright young minds become drooling, Clark-supporting chimps as well.

And so the rest of us sit here, raging against the Machine as it continues its relentless march towards the new totalitarianism, the new fascism. Except the new fascists won’t be wearing brown shirts or black shirts, they’ll be dressed in rainbow hues, singing “peace” songs and building a society that reflects their own perverse worldview. “Tolerance” will exist only inasmuch as the proletariat (that’s us) is required by law to tolerate the extremes of the minority. It will be a one-way street.

6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Any attitude held by the proletariat and deemed inimical to the Rainbow Shirts will either be “corrected” by re-education or legislated against.

Why Labour must be stopped dead, with an electoral bullet between the eyes, is best illustrated by the Hate Speech proposals. The brainchild of Rainbow Labour, these proposed new laws would make it a criminal offence to hurt the feelings of certain special groups of people. Just like Hitler Youth back in the thirties, these special groups of people would then – immune from criticism of any kind – rise to become the shock troops of New Fascism. They would have tremendous power and influence – as they’ve already shown by ramming prostitution and civil unions through the House – but newspapers, magazines or members of the public who criticise them or accuse them of having an agenda could be prosecuted and jailed by Labour-appointed judges.

Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom to impart and receive ideas – these things are the lifeblood of freedom itself. They also raise a bigger question that nearly all of us overlook: are we born free, or does the State determine our level of freedom?

Clearly, Investigate is a magazine espousing the concept that we’re all born free, but that freedom must be fought for. No government, no wider group of people, has an inherent right to claim ownership over an individual. For a State to claim that it, alone, is the arbiter of freedom is not only abhorrent to thinking people, it is in reality nothing more than schoolyard bullying on a national scale.

Helen: do your worst, but you can no more stamp out criticism of Rainbow Labour than you can shut down the internet. Huff and puff all you like. It ain’t gonna happen.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 7

CONTRIBUTORS

CANNON FODDER Mentioned in dispatches

Known to friends as “Shelly on the Telly”, Investigate movie critic Shelly Horton knows a good story when she sees one. Although she started her career as a crime reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Melbourne, her big break came when she was sent to England to host her own entertainment program, “What’s on in London”, before returning home to work first as a correspondent on Australia’s “Entertainment Tonight”, then as South Pacific Correspondent for the flagship American version.

When not attending movie premieres, she can be found appearing on Australia’s Today Show every Tuesday (screening in New Zealand on Prime, 9.40am), and also making regular appearances on the weekly comedy-chat roundtable, “The Glass House”.

8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Coals aren’t the only thing the English city of Newcastle exported. Feature writer Clare Swinney emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 11 in 1975, ending up in Whangarei.

A five year stint at Auckland University followed later, studying psychology, zoology, biology, and chemistry.

Graduating with a M.Sc. (Hons) in neuropsychology and zoology in 1988, it wasn’t until 2000 that Swinney made the transition to writing for the mainstream media when she joined Investigate’s editorial team.

Since then, her work has earned her a Qantas Media Awards nomination and the opportunity to mix business with pleasure.

“I live in Whangarei and work in a room overlooking native bush, which is perhaps the perfect habitat for those tired of city life.”

When faced with his girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy in his early twenties, Dan Donahoo did what many would consider unusual in this day and age: he stuck by her, married her, and continued to grow their family. As he puts it in his article examining the role of dads in Australian familes today, “stumbling upon fatherhood has made life more fulfilling and shattered all pre-conceptions that having responsibility for a child is something to fear.”

Currently Donahoo is a fellow at OzProspect, a non-partisan, public policy think tank, and regularly commentates on early childhood and family policy – in between changing nappies, making cars and trains out of Lego blocks and building a family home out of stone and bush poles on their property in rural Victoria.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 9

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES ZULU KILO DOWN Well done on the detailed story in last month’s issue by Neill Hunter who wrote “Zulu Kilo Down – the mystery of Joe Lourie’s last flight” relating to the fatal crash of Fletcher topdresser ZK-LTF in 2003.

No one witnessed the crash – so a good investigation was needed to piece together all relevant factors and come up with likely causes – causal factors – of the accident.

This is very much in line with the thrust of Neill Hunter’s article but what is not mentioned, however, is a more sinister underlying factor. It is that the regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, currently “investigates its own accidents.” To put it bluntly, the CAA has – and always has had – a strong vested interest in the outcome of each accident report. The CAA is thus extremely unlikely to ever criticise itself. Each report is concocted so as to bring about an outcome beneficial to the CAA and inevitably to the detriment of the other “stake holders” in the crash, including the pilot.

Hence it continuously appears that the CAA is never at fault, even in cases where it plainly is.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry – having got a reported message from a bullying bureaucracy that many pilots are larrikins and really should “lift their game” and “manage their risks” better, are left floundering around and on the back foot.

Until this is changed – until the CAA is stopped from investigating its own accidents – the charade will continue. The aviation community will continue to get distorted, negative, inaccurate, biased, incomplete information and be presented with highly irregular and obviously fundamentally flawed reports along with very questionable comparative safety data.

The fact is that no one knows how good or bad New Zealand pilots are because the CAA keeps fudging the true situation, trying desperately to portray itself in a good light.

There is a problem of fatigue in the topdressing industry and the CAA is aware of it but refuses to do 10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

anything about it. The reasons for this are best known to itself and possibly to several of its cronies in the industry who, in return for such favours of laxity, insist on portraying the CAA as a “world leading” and credible organisation in areas where it clearly is not.

Ross Ewing, Christchurch

MOBILE PHONES KILL I wonder if Ian Wishart’s views on the use of mobile phones whilst driving would be changed if a member of his family was run down by a driver busy sending a text message? Yes, I agree that the banning of handsfree kits may be excessive, but the continued allowance of drivers using hand-held devices is idiocy to the extreme. Most accidents of this nature are caused by the inability to react quickly when at least one hand is otherwise employed, although research has also continually shown that phone conversations also slow down reactions significantly. Only 17 deaths you may say, based on your logic I assume you support the use of nuclear weapons because they kill only 180,000 people, while mass-genocide kills 6 million? Luckily a large number of mobile phone drivers have just enough sense to slow down a little, a danger in itself, but which also means there are large numbers of non-fatal accidents occurring. Unfortunately the views in this story too much reflect the self-focused attitude of too many drivers in New Zealand, it is time they thought more about those others who may be using the roads and those they are killing.

Aaron McAleese, Mount Maunganui

SHOCK DISCOVERY: FRESH T-REX I have read with interest the ongoing ping-pong match over evolution, intelligent design and creation within your letters pages. So it was with some surprise that I discovered this past week that the journal Science is breaking a story about the discovery of non-fossilised Tyrannosaurus Rex bones in Montana’s Hell Creek formation.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

As one of the traditional comments about dinosaurs has been that the fossilisation proves their great age when compared to humans, I found it even more fascinating that not only are the T-Rex bones fresh, they are so fresh that they still contain flesh and blood, capable of being “squeezed out” according to the Reuters report on the story.

I’m sure the whole world will wait with bated breath for the full story on the planet’s first non-fossilised dinosaur bone and its DNA, but I’m also sure it spells the end of using fossilisation as proof in itself of great age.

It must surely, now, be even more arguable that perhaps fossilisation and mineralisation were indeed a result of a worldwide flood rather than age.

I found this quote from the article intriguing: “The finding certainly shows fossilisation does not proceed as science had assumed, Ms Schweitzer said. Since the discovery she has found similar samples of soft tissue in two other Tyrannosaur fossils and a hadrosaur.”

Sounds to me like a hundred and fifty years of school lessons about fossil dinosaurs is about to go out the window - not just one fresh dinosaur but four of them!

Schweitzer then goes on to urge other museums around the world to break open their “fossilised” dinosaur bones and see if they actually still contain fresh bone marrow.

Now, maybe these dinosaurs really are 70 million years old as science had assumed. Or maybe it actually is more rational to believe they were killed in a flood only a few thousand years ago.

Darwin must be spinning in his grave.

J Wright, Auckland

MORE EVOLUTION DEBATE Unlike Hans Weichselbaum (Reasons to Doubt, Vox Populi, March 2005) I was very impressed with your answer to his letter of February.

When are you going to enter politics? Your reply took up nearly a column in your magazine and yet you managed to avoid answering a single point that he raised! You took just one paragraph of his letter and played with the words. I haven’t seen such skill since Keith Holyoake was our Prime Minister.

Your even longer reply to his letter of March was marginally more to the point but it raises other problems.

You say that Noah’s flood was not worldwide. Could you please tell your readers and me approximately what parts of the earth were cov-

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ered, and how long ago it occurred. Another aspect of the flood that puzzles me is how is it possible to account for all the regional varieties of human beings in the world if we all descend from Noah’s immediate family? Surely at least some evolution is the only possible explanation. I realise that you are unlikely to publish this letter but I am sure that if you do many other readers would also be interested in your answers.

Yours in evolution, Terry Toohill, Whangarei WISHART RESPONDS

Actually Terry, I never said the Flood was not universal. The point I was stressing to Hans is this strawman argument about when the Flood happened. I can assure you there is no reference in the Bible to a date 4,000 or even 6,000 years ago. Those dates have been guessed at by humans based on incomplete chronologies in the Bible, but the Bible certainly doesn’t use them. So my point was highly relevant.

If critics want to attack the Bible, first they should get their own facts straight.

From the Biblical accounts, we have no idea how long ago in human history the Flood took place. What we do know is that virtually every race on Earth has a legend about the whole world being flooded. And as I’ve said before, we’ve all seen floods. We see them every year. Legends don’t arise from the ordinary but the extraordinary. Our modern languages, curiously, all track back to an area of Turkey near Ararat, according to linguistic scholars, and archaeologists have found submerged cities, miles off the coast of India, more than a hundred metres below the surface of the sea.

Here’s something else for free to chew over: Look at all the “lost civilisation” legends like Atlantis or Lemuria or others. You could ask the question why, if such high-tech societies existed previously on Earth, are we not digging up evidence of them? Good question, unless their cities and their technology lie buried under hundreds of metres of sand and silt on the ocean floor and out of our reach.

We humans appear to know a lot less about the history of our planet than we think we do. I wouldn’t be anywhere near as cocky as you when it comes to ruling out the possibility of a worldwide Flood.

THE DNA PROBLEM Two letters in your March issue raised the possibility of macro-evolution [change from one species to another] occurring. How realistic is it to hold this view? Neo-Darwinists (realising that Darwin’s “black box”,

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the cell, could no longer be the simple organism that Darwin thought it was) now state that macro-evolution came about by mutation and natural selection. However, this is scientifically impossible.

First the copying process for the replication of DNA is extremely accurate. It is estimated that a cell’s DNA is copied with less than one mistake in a billion nucleotides. Secondly the cell is self-repairing with 50 enzymes designed to locate mutations, cut them out, and replace them with the correct nucleotides.

Thirdly virtually all creatures have an immune system which eliminates mutations in DNA and problem cells. Fourthly although mutations can occur in any cells, only those within sex cells (gametes) will affect future generations and hence macro-evolution is limited to these.

There is a biogenetic law that states that life always arises from life of the same kind. So there will be no danger that we humans will eventually change into another creature.

Another problem is that mutation does not add new organised information, such as the information needed for a reptile to abandon its reptilian features and acquire feathers, beak, warm-bloodedness, etc in order to change into a bird. And what decides on a good useful design, produces a set of instructions to follow, and drives the changes to their “completion�? Otherwise mutations would be random and we would have grotesque and useless, inefficient creatures, not the beautiful complex ones that we now have.

Evolutionists say that the process of change is by natural selection.

But as mutations are either neutral or harmful (any benefit resulting only from the alteration of its genetic traits), this process only eliminates mutated organisms as being unfit and not advantageous to the organism.

And where is the past and present evidence of macro-evolution?

At present do we see any creature in the process of changing into another creature?

John Fong, Hamilton

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

IT’S JUST NOT SCIENCE

WISHART REPONDS

With reference to your latest foray (January 2005) into the evolution/ intelligent design (ID) “debate”, it is clear that you have not altered in any way your stance on evolution since the lengthy discussion on this subject in 2002/2003. To reiterate, organic evolution itself is not in crisis – research and discussion occur in other areas, such as the mechanism of the process, about which, incidentally, much is already known.

Your programme of denial cannot influence the reality of the evolutionary process, and Antony Flew’s reappraisal of intelligent design, though of interest, is also irrelevant in this context.

Two features in particular of ID continue to preclude any legitimate claim for science classroom inclusion. First, the fact that it is, in essence, both religiously and philosophically motivated, as confirmed by Phillip Johnson, one of its leading proponents, who has stated that the intelligent design movement “…isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science…it’s about religion and philosophy”. And secondly, that it fails to pass muster as an alternative source of scientific understanding (see Investigate Magazine, November 2002, pp 54-59; 64-65). As Robert T. Pennock, a philosopher and historian of science at Michigan State University, has recently observed: “If ID is to have even a shot at being a real scientific alternative, one should expect to see some precise, testable (and eventually tested) hypotheses that answer the obvious questions: what was designed and what wasn’t; and when, how, and by whom was design information supposedly inserted?”

Your contention that more than 300 of our high schools have acquired “scientific literature and teaching resources on Intelligent Design theory” indicates to me that misconceptions about the exact status of organic evolution and the true nature of the intelligent design movement abound in the education system. Hence, it continues to be most disappointing to find what purports to be a hardhitting investigative journal once again contributing to the gross misinformation in this area, rather than helping to counteract non-scientific inroads into the science classroom.

Warwick Don, Dunedin

Ah Warwick. Haven’t we already shown Pennock’s logic is flawed in a previous round of our debate? To re-cap, you essentially argue that ID theory is unscientific because it does not yet have all the answers to the what, when, how, who and why questions? Need I remind you that Evolutionary Theory has no final answers to those, either?

There are very few fields of science where we have all the answers, as the earlier letter on Tyrannosaurus Rex illustrates. Just because neither Pennock nor yourself can conceive of the answers that ID theory might arrive at does not mean it is not worthy of further investigation. After all, those first explorers to knowingly sail around the world - despite everyone else’s belief that they would simply fall off the edge - opened up fields of scientific endeavour undreamt of by the “locked to the current dogma” approach of their more mundane colleagues.

Intelligent Design Theory is to our world what Columbus was in his - unleashing the spirit of discovery once more, being prepared to break open that dinosaur bone instead of just sticking it on a shelf and looking at it.

Maybe, just maybe, current evolutionary thinking is dead wrong.

And finally, you asked for a testable hypothesis regarding design. Design, by definition, is a product of intelligence and falls partly into an engineering/ science category and partly into an art category. The only proven design that we currently have evidence of in the universe is either human or animal. Either way, we instinctively recognise intelligent design in our everyday lives (cars, computers) and in nature (beavers’ dams, termite hills etc).

Seeing as design is, of necessity, a subjective appraisal that must be measured against human standards, then you test for it by looking in nature for things that cannot just be written off as random occurrences, like a rock in a field.

An ordinary rock might, or might not, have been placed there by an intelligent person. But if the rock we find has also been carved, then we are right to assume intelligence is definitely involved.

The degree of “design” thus detected will depend on the complexity of the design in an objective sense (does it do a particular job and does it work well?) and/or in the subjective sense (is the design sophisticated art?).

A lump of raw New Zealand greenstone sitting in the middle of an English paddock would imply intelligent placement, because such rock is not from there.

14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

But it still looks just like a normal rock so who’s to really know? But a carved and polished greenstone tiki in that same paddock would prove intelligent involvement.

Intelligent Design could be inferred from both, but clearly there is more evidence from the latter example. The testable hypothesis for Intelligent Design is simple: if a structure or circumstance appears to have arisen in a way that requires intelligent intervention, AND there is no convincing evidence to the contrary, then it can be assumed to be a valid inference up until such time, if ever, a better theory explaining it comes along.

That doesn’t rule out further scientific inquiry, it simply states the obvious: a molecular rotary engine that is as sophisticated as a Mazda RX-7 engine appears, on the face of it, to be designed.

Yes, there is still debate about who or what caused the design, but to argue that there is no evidence of “design” in a molecular rotary engine that looks similar and works like a human-designed engine, is simply being obtuse. By definition, it reeks of design to human eyes. You argue that the design is caused by the god of random genetic mutation working through the spirit of natural selection and survival of the fittest. I argue that it is the God of the Bible, the creator of the Universe. Both of us invoke speculative causes of the apparent design, but given the mountain of mathematical and scientific evidence against random mutation/natural selection, I find it much easier to believe the molecular rotary engine was designed by God who, after all, is said to have created human rotary engine designers in his image (ask any RX-7 enthusiast).

It is no more “unscientific” to follow the fingerprints of Intelligent Design where they lead, than it is “unscientific” to prosecute murderers on the basis of the fingerprints they intelligently (or unintelligently) left behind. Our entire justice system is founded on recognising design in crime and allowing forensic scientists to investigate. Why is design in nature suddenly off-limits?

Unless, of course, secular evolutionary thinkers are scared of where the evidence may lead.

TAX LAW CLEAR AS MUD Section CD1 of the Income Tax Act 1994 deals with profits or gains from land transactions. Its most general provision states that taxable income is “derived from the sale or other disposition of any land if the land was acquired for the purpose or intention, or for purposes or intentions including the purpose or intention, of selling or otherwise disposing of it”.

Now, tell me which taxpayers when purchasing property didn’t have a possible intention of selling it again at some later date?

Why, therefore, aren’t all property sales (apart from those covered by the various exemptions such as for owner occupiedproperties) taxable?

If this tax law is too harsh, too difficult to apply or too difficult to understand then the Government should change it. If not, then IRD should enforce it.

Anthony Morris, Wellington

RESOURCE CONSENT ISSUES? It is alleged that the project to extend the motorway through Mount Albert has been deferred because Helen Clark has said “It would be built over my dead body.”

Surely then, as an exercise in “killing two birds with one stone”, this roading project would have to be highly rated in terms of cost benefit per kilometre.

Hugh Webb, Hamilton Letters to the editor can be posted to PO Box 302-188, North Harbour, Auckland, or emailed to editorial@investigatemagazine.com

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE The problem with radical feminists

W

e have come a long way since the days when Freda Beryl Moore, nee Wilson, was being considered as Australia’s first female trade commissioner. The 43-year-old Sydneysider, who had run the San Francisco trade commission office singlehandedly on and off for years and had established the Los Angeles office, was recommended for the top job in 1963 after her competence impressed Sir Alan Westerman, the head of the Department of Trade.

In fact, she reminisced recently, aged 85 and sounding as sharp as ever in her Wahroonga home, that Sir John Crawford, then secretary of the Department of Trade, had sent her a telegram during one of the extended periods between trade A spinster at work, can, and commissioners when she ran everything, convery often does, turn into gratulating her on her something of a battleaxe excellent work and askher to “continue to with the passing years. ing hold the fort”.

A man usually mellows But when Westerman wanted to formalise the arrangement by appointing Moore as commissioner, there was great opposition from within the department, as depicted in documents released last month by the National Archives of Australia.

A Department of Trade minute from March 13, 1963, begins: “It is difficult to find reasons to support the appointment of women Trade Commissioners” and goes on to list reasons against it.

“A spinster at work, can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows,” wrote A.R. Taysom to K.L. Le Rossignol, director of Trade Commissioner Services.

He did concede that in some cases: “A relatively young 16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

attractive woman could operate with some effectiveness, in a subordinate capacity.” But “such an appointee would not stay young and attractive for ever and later on could well become a problem”.

Moore got the job but not before being put through the wringer. She doesn’t want to hurt any of the families of those involved by recounting details, but she did say: “It was beastly.”

Dubbed “Kangaroo” by her fellow trade commissioners from around the world, she went on to have a happy and successful career, even if the all-male trade delegations from Australia did try to go off to the pub without her. She said she didn’t feel she was a “pioneer for women at the time” but after she retired, a decade later, she did note that more women were appointed trade commissioners.

Moore’s experience 40 years ago is a good reminder of why feminism was so important to break down entrenched sexism and set a level playing field.

We’ve come a long way, baby, since then but feminism now seems to have hit its own glass ceiling. Perhaps like any movement which has achieved most of its aims, in its mature years it is prone to being hijacked by people who want to use it to further their personal ambitions or to pursue grievances.

Take Susan Estrich, the fiftysomething American feminist law professor and commentator, and her battle with Michael Kinsley, opinion page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

In a hilariously bitchy email exchange last month, which was leaked to a Washington newspaper and sent all over the internet, Estrich accused the newspaper of “blatant sex discrimination” because it didn’t run enough women columnists and oh, “by the way”, she writes a first-rate column twice a week. (She writes the column for a syndication site from which newspapers can buy articles.)

Estrich told Kinsley, 50, her former Harvard law school classmate, that she and her students had been

counting the number of women whose opinion pieces appeared in the Los Angeles Times for the past three years and “the record is worse than dismal”.

She threatened to enlist the support of her feminist network to campaign against the paper and demanded Kinsley publish a letter signed by 50 women.

Kinsley responded: “We don’t run letters from 50 people, and we don’t succumb to blackmail.”

Estrich exploded: “People are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgement and your ability to do this job.”

Kinsley has Parkinson’s disease.

When the Los Angeles Times editor, John Carroll, complained to Estrich about the “extravagant malice” of her attacks on Kinsley, she threatened to sue for libel.

Entertaining as it is, the now-famous email exchange (at http:// www.dcexaminer.com) exposes two things: that Estrich doesn’t deserve a column in the Los Angeles Times because she can’t write coherently; and that what “popped her cork”, to use Kinsley’s phrase, was actually a Los Angeles Times opinion piece ... written by a woman. Only it was the wrong sort of woman, a conservative.

The catalyst for Estrich’s rage was an article, headlined, “Feminist Fatale: Where are the great women thinkers?”, which claimed that ideological feminism had “ghettoised and trivialised the subject matter of women’s writing” and “tried to systematically shut out - and shout out - dissent”.

The article was by Charlotte Allen, an elegant writer who edits the inkWell weblog for the Independent Women’s Forum, an American pro-woman organisation run by women, established “to combat the

women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism”.

Estrich described the author as a “feminist-hater I have never heard of, nor probably have you, by the name of Charlotte Allen. Her only book was about Jesus and religion, written eight years ago, and as far as I can tell what she does is to edit a blog for the Independent Women’s Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV and get in newspapers attacking the likes of us.”

Allen responded: “I think that translates into: Charlotte Allen is a nobody, whereas I am the great Susan Estrich”.

Estrich wanted a column in the Los Angeles Times and thought she could bully her way into one. Her brand of feminism is reserved only for women like her, which is probably why it has lost its appeal.

But her meltdown set off an interesting debate in the US about why newspapers have so few female opinion columnists. The same question could be asked in Australia, where I’m based.

The Sydney Morning Herald lists 15 opinion columnists on its website, five of whom are women. The Australian lists nine, of whom two, Emma Tom and Janet Albrechtsen, are women.

Being a female columnist is no picnic. Along with the usual criticism directed at anyone who expresses an opinion publicly, which is fair enough, women columnists also cop a certain patronising and insolent male criticism. And some of the most intemperate criticism, splattered with malice and envy, comes from women, directed exclusively at women.

There are plenty of smart women with interesting things to say who could enhance the opinion pages of our newspapers. But perhaps the feral attacks on Albrechtsen when she was appointed to the ABC board offer one clue to why established female columnists are thin on the ground.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON When good goat-herders go bad…

W

h a t is the world’s greatest threat to prosperity, health and happiness? Is it famine, environmental conditions, or lifestyle habits steeped in dark traditions? What single thing most prevents humans from forging ahead and improving living conditions?

According to extensive global surveys undertaken by the U.N. and suffering-alleviation focus groups like the Africa Commission, PERC (Political and Economic Risk Consultancy) and TI (Transparency International) it is none of the above. Their lengthy experience in gloGenerations of corrupt leaders bal problem-solving do not arise out of a zero-corruphighlights a basic human quality as the key pivot tion background. The ingredients between quality of life, that cumulatively form the mindset and a lack of.

This ‘quality’ goes by of the people are the same ‘soil’ the name corruption, betout of which grows the attitude ter defined as the overof leaders whelming desire to put one’s own needs before those of one’s wider group to the extent of disadvantaging the group in favour of self-betterment. This act usually involves some amount of deceit, be it the goatherder siphoning off a larger portion of the communal milk for himself, or the politician elected on the promise that he will undermine the mafia, when in fact he is their kingpin.

So which nations are burdened by the most pervasive corruption, and which the least? TI employs an exhaustive formula for ascertaining degrees of corruption, according each nation an index placing it somewhere between 10 (nil corruption) and 0 (total corruption).

While it is relatively easy to guess at which countries are 18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

likely low-scorers, it is more of a challenge to imagine which nations among the milieu of the ‘developed’ have a squeaky clean record.

Of the seven cleanest-scoring countries, five are Scandinavian. The other two are New Zealand and Singapore coming in at second and fifth places, respectively.

Out of the 133 countries indexed, here are a few interesting placements; COUNTRY POSITION Australia 8 th Canada and UK 11 th Hong Kong 14 th Germany 16 th USA 18 th Chile 19 th Italy 35 th Brazil 54 th China 66 th India 83rd Russia 86 th Indonesia 122 nd Nigeria 132 nd Bangladesh 133rd

INDEX 8.8 8.7 8.0 7.7 7.5 7.4 5.3 3.9 3.4 2.8 2.7 1.9 1.4 1.3

Only one-third of the countries surveyed had an index of greater than 5.0, putting the vast majority of the world’s countries in the seriously-corrupt to absolutelycorrupt category of 5.0 to 1.3 (lowest score). TI’s official definition of corruption is ‘misuse of public power for private benefit’. All countries indexed were additionally surveyed to find out which groups, in the public perception, are the most corrupt. To TI’s alarm, political parties came out on top, scoring double the votes of the next most corrupt bodies; the courts and police.

I sought parallels between the seven least-corrupt societies: Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, and the Netherlands. I looked for connections on the following bases: population density;

social welfare programmes; government spending on healthcare, education and military; history (how long independent, occupied etc), political leanings, religion; gender equality and multi-culturalism. I did not look for connections based on GDP or socio-economics, as healthy economics seem more likely to result from low corruption, rather than cause it.

Singapore proved to be the exception to every parallel. Its form of societal honesty seems to have been achieved through government control of the population, rather than an ingrained evolution of public morality. Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore for its first 30 years of independence from Britain and he hit upon a winning formula of high economic growth and powerful control of public order and security. Freedom of the individual was sacrificed to economic advantage, seemingly willingly by the largely immigrant population.

Searching for similarities amongst the six remaining truly democratic ‘clean’ nations showed that, in all categories save one, there was nothing to distinguish them from the next thirty. For example Denmark and Holland are extremely multi-cultural whereas Iceland is essentially a mono-culture, America spends 15% of its GDP on health, as opposed to Singapore’s 3%, and only 55% of Dutch are tertiary-educated, compared to 70% of Russians.

The single criterion that fitted all six nations was their extent of gender equality. Interestingly, the dominant religion of low-corruption societies is Protestant Christian, with Scandinavian countries rating over 90% evangelical Lutheran. As the percentage of Catholicism increases, so does the level of gender imbalance, as the following table infers; (2003 figures, TI)

Statistics make it too easy to draw parallels that may not be there, but suffice to say that, in this case, TI proffered only one conclusion to their corruption survey: as the level of gender inequality reduces, so does the level of corruption.

Other parallels exist. Both Finland and New Zealand claim to be the first country to have offered women the right to vote, as well as the first to give them comprehensive equal rights. Finland also came out top in a survey naming the world’s most technologically-advanced society.

New Zealand also is known for its high level of adaptability in adopting new technology, coupled with an inventive mentality. Since TI global surveys began in 1996, Finland and New Zealand have held the top

spots, followed closely by a changing order of Iceland, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Whilst Singapore is the only high-scoring Asian country, Italy is the only OECD country to be languishing in the mid-regions, alongside the Balkan states, Cuba and South Africa. Clearly, mafia entrenchment is no simple matter to resolve. Russia ranks even lower, alongside the Philippines, Tanzania and Pakistan, which makes Finland’s cleanness all the more stark considering her similarity to, and history with, Russia, which goes way beyond a shared border.

In the 12th century Finland was divided into Swedish and Russian territory. The rise of Lutheranism in the 16th century persuaded Sweden to get rid of Russian Orthodoxy, but Russia won Finnish territory back in an 1809 war with Sweden. Russian rule lasted until Finland’s 1917 Declaration of Independence, and subsequent war after which Finland became a Constitutional Republic.

Finland and Russia have long overlapped, culturally, genetically and territorially and yet occupy opposite ends of the corruption spectrum.

Finns say this difference dates back to feudal times when, throughout Russia, peasants were serfs to landed gentry, but not so in Finland where peasants maintained their independence and freedom.

This independence paved the way for the overthrow of the highly authoritative Catholic church in favour of Protestant Christianity, which made religion the property of the individual, rather than the church elite. This theme of a self-empowered, self-motivated population is consistent with the low occurrence of corruption in democratic nations (relative disempowerment as in the case of Singapore obviously can also work). One could infer that populations who have long been used to external authority and control, be it by religion, state or nobility, are fertile ground for the instinct of self-preservation via corruption.

Aminatta Forna, daughter of a disgraced former African politician and now a commentator on African development, complains that “the ordinary African is as outraged by corruption as we are in the West.

Corruption is not, as is often hinted, some sort of cultural weakness, even if it has sadly become the norm.”

She goes on to blame the rampant rise of African corruption on an alliance between Western moneylenders and corrupt African ministers. I disagree with her and so, it seems, does she by concluding her report with the comment that the solution to corruption lies within civil society becoming intolerant of their lying, thieving leaders and holding them to account.

If civil society is where the solution lies, then I suggest it is also where the problem originates, for civil society is the birthplace of the attitudes that describe a nation. Generations of corrupt leaders do not arise out of a zero-corruption background. The ingredients that cumulatively form the mindset of the people are the same ‘soil’ out of which grows the attitude of leaders.

The political configuration of all low-corruption countries scoring over 9.5 is democratic proportional representation of social-democratic leanings, with a Green party inclusion. Essentially capitalist societies tempered strongly by state welfare institutions. Singapore again is the exception with an essential one-party, benevolent dictatorship. As Singapore’s order and morality have been imposed upon, rather than issued from, the population, it is foreseeable that they could similarly be deposed with a change in leadership and a rising desire for greater freedoms and personal rights.

New Zealand should take great heart from the results of such surveys.

It is no small feat to have risen above what is obviously a pervasive human trait, so common that one could call corruption a natural quality of the human being. We are doing significantly better on this front than our near neighbours, and interesting indeed that in this arena we share commonality with a few far-flung nations on the other side of the globe, more closely than with our historical and cultural compatriots.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Weapons of choice

D

riving home from work one afternoon last week, I spied a bumper sticker which gave me cause to reminisce. It read “Take My Gun, Lose My Vote.” Time was, that such stickers, and others with similar slogans, adorned many a vehicle on New Zealand’s roads. There are not so many now, and those still on display are largely fading; their demise a testament to the successful campaign waged by legitimate, law-abiding gun owners, the last time the control-freaks of the self-important academic left tried to convince New Zealanders that we were all rabid criminals hell-bent on mass murder.

We won on that occasion and, for a few years, But just as being required to the gun-control Nazis register my guns individually have been relatively quiet.

But there have been won’t affect my behaviour with stirrings in the jungle of regard to the law, neither will late, signs and sounds that they are on the move it affect the behaviour of my again. Compulsory firehypothetical criminal neigharms registration lurks bour up the road just beneath the surface of the parties of the Left and, in this election year, it is a fairly safe bet that this pointless and discredited theory will rear its ugly head yet again.

Whatever the colour of their politics, the proponents of firearms registration appear to suffer from some form of collective learning disability. They can’t seem to get it through their heads that gun registration doesn’t work.

The reason behind this is quite simple; for compulsory registration to be effective, gun owners have to register their guns. Law-abiding citizens will of course do this, because by definition, they abide by the law.

But criminals will not – that’s what makes them criminals, y’know?

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New Zealand knows this better than most nations.

Up until 1983, all firearms owned by New Zealanders were required to be registered. But in that sensible year the firearms register was finally axed, to the great relief of the Police Force, who had long since given up pretending that it was accurate enough to be of any use.

The registration of individual guns was replaced by the licensing of individual users, and that far more practical system has worked well to this day.

1983 was also the year that this writer, then aged 16, purchased his first firearm. I was one of the last people to be issued with the old “Permit to Procure” a firearm, and one of the first to receive the new “lifetime” firearms license.

That same .22 rifle, lovingly maintained, is still in my collection, and still has regular workouts against bunnies on the vineyard. And in the twenty-two years that I have owned it, and many other firearms, I’ve never used any of them to commit a crime. This is not because I haven’t had means or opportunity; it’s because I haven’t had the inclination. Guns do not commit crimes. People commit crimes. And I am not a criminal.

But just as being required to register my guns individually won’t affect my behaviour with regard to the law, neither will it affect the behaviour of my hypothetical criminal neighbour up the road. He’ll carry on being a criminal, he won’t be applying for a license, and he most certainly won’t be registering his sawn-off shotgun with the Police. Why the control-freaks have difficulty understanding this, is quite beyond me.

But fail to understand it they do, and they still clamour for registration. Some firearms in this country do still have to be registered, of course, and so they should; pistols and military-style semi-automatics, and a few other categories of restricted weapons, accounting in total for around three or four percent of the estimated 1.2 million guns owned legally by New Zealand citizens. The anti-gun nuts, however, would like to see registration for all weapons, and it is this desire which

“Sweden and Switzerland, where citizens are required by law to keep and maintain their national service-issue rifles at home, have lower rates of murder, rape, and armed robbery, than do Britain or Germany, where firearms ownership laws are most restrictive”

gives cause to question their motivation. Registration is an essential precursor to confiscation, and there are many amongst those who hold power in this country – and those who would like to – who would very much prefer ordinary New Zealanders to be unarmed, and thereby weak and vulnerable.

Their stock standard argument is that fewer guns in the hands of citizens equates to fewer gun-related crimes, and a safer and more caring society, and blah blah blah. The reality, borne out by statistics from all over the world, is quite the opposite. Those nations whose people are denied the right to own firearms, have rates of violent crime far higher than those who permit their citizens to possess The Great Equaliser.

Luxembourg, for example, where private firearms ownership is banned outright, has twice the murder rate of Israel, where it is virtually compulsory. Sweden and Switzerland, where citizens are required by law to keep and maintain their national service-issue rifles at home, have lower rates of murder, rape, and armed robbery, than do Britain or Germany, where firearms ownership laws are most restrictive.

The story from Australia is even more telling. Following the Port Arthur shootings in Tasmania in 1996, Australia’s knee-jerk reaction was to drastically re-write its firearms laws, placing draconian restrictions on who could own guns, and on what type of firearms they could own. During the amnesty period which followed, the Australian Government bought back, and destroyed, at a cost of around A$500 million, some 600,000 of Australia’s estimated four million rifles and shotguns.

Predictably, it was only law-abiding gun owners who made use of the voluntary disarmament scheme. In the twelve months from the end of the amnesty, across Australia, homicides increased by 3.2%, assaults by 8.6%, and armed robberies by a staggering and tragic 44%.

In the State of Victoria, homicides by firearm rose by a sickening 300%.

Criminals, it would appear, much like control-freaks, prefer their victims to be unarmed.

The similarity between the mentality of armed criminals, and that of anti-gun politicians, is unsettlingly obvious.

Why is there, I cannot help but wonder, such a fervour amongst so many who would seek to govern, to ensure that the citizenry is denied the most fundamental tool enabling resistance against the worst excesses of the usurpers of authority? What do these wannabe-rulers have to fear from a population which is able to resist the illegitimate and unconstitutional misuse of power?

Perhaps the answer lies in some stark and telling statistics from the turbid history of the twentieth century. Many regimes from our recent past have succeeded in taking the right and the ability of self-defence away from their populace, and the results have followed a grim and disturbing pattern.

In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Germany established gun control in 1938. From 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews and others, who were unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million “educated” people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

What’s the total number of defenceless people rounded up and exterminated during the 20th Century because of gun control? 56 million. Is it intended, somehow, that Australians and New Zealanders should be amongst the next to suffer?

I enjoy hunting and shooting. I always have. As a teenager, my mates and myself shot possums, rabbits, and goats, as much for fun, as for the skins and the bounties. We were taught gun safety by responsible parents who had experienced military service, and who regarded a rifle as being as much of a natural and wholesome accessory for a young man, as a bicycle or a dog.

Today, I still shoot as much for recreation, as to fill the freezer. Like a third of a million other New Zealand farmers, hunters, and good ol’ boys and girls, I don’t subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine, or stalk the hills in camouflage pants and face paint. I don’t regard myself as being a criminal, a radical, a red-necked vigilante, or a subversivein-waiting.

But at the same time, in this day and age where a home invasion 111 call in the middle of the night, from a small South Island town named Alexandra, is quite likely to result in a Wellington-based Police operator dispatching a car – and probably a taxi, at that – to an Auckland trotting park, it’s reassuring to know that the means of protecting my home and family is only as far away as the gun safe in the wardrobe, and that I know where the key is and the intruder doesn’t.

And I regard with great suspicion the motives of any self-professed do-gooder who wants to take that protection away from me. Lawabiding folk like me giving up our guns, or providing the Government with a list of them, won’t make a shred of positive difference to the crime statistics; and in all honesty, I have to say that I simply don’t trust the self-appointed gun control-freaks, or their plans for the future of my democracy.

So to those who claim that the innocent have nothing to fear from the law, I can only say that I agree wholeheartedly. After all, innocent Governments have nothing to fear from people like me owning firearms.

Perhaps that bumper sticker of a decade ago needs to be revised and updated for a changing world. Maybe nowadays, it should say “I’ll Keep My Gun, So That You Can’t Take Away My Vote.”

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

BREAK POINT

ANN COULTER

Freeze, sucker! My curling wand is a lethal weapon!

H

ow many people have to die before the country stops humouring feminists? Last month, a defendant in a rape case, Brian Nichols, wrested a gun from a female deputy in an Atlanta courthouse and went on a murderous rampage. Liberals have proffered every possible explanation for this breakdown in security except the giant elephant in the room – who undoubtedly has an eating disorder and would appreciate a little support vis-a-vis her negative body image.

The New York Times said the problem was not enough government spending on courthouse security (“Budgets Can Affect Safety Inside Many Courthouses”). Yes, it was tax-cuts-forWhile a sane world would not the-rich that somehow a 200-pound employ 5-foot-tall grandmothers enabled former linebacker to take as law enforcement officers, a sane a gun from a 5-footworld would also not give full tall grandmother.

Atlanta court officials body-cavity searches to 5-foot-tall dispensed with any grandmothers at airports spending issues the next time Nichols entered the courtroom when he was escorted by 17 guards and two police helicopters. He looked like P. Diddy showing up for a casual dinner party.

I think I have an idea that would save money and lives: Have large men escort violent criminals. Admittedly, this approach would risk another wave of nausea and vomiting by female professors at Harvard. But there are also advantages to not pretending women are as strong as men, such as fewer dead people. Even a female math professor at Harvard should be able to run the numbers on this one. Of course, it’s suspiciously difficult to find any hard data about the performance of female cops. Not as hard as finding the study showing New Jersey state troopers aren’t racist, but still pretty hard to find.

22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Mostly what you find on Lexis-Nexis are news stories quoting police chiefs who have been browbeaten into submission, all uttering the identical mantra after every public safety disaster involving a girl cop. It seems that female officers compensate for a lack of strength with “other” abilities, such as cooperation, empathy and intuition.

There are lots of passing references to “studies” of uncertain provenance, but which always sound uncannily like a press release from the Feminist Majority Foundation. (Or maybe it was The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which recently released a study claiming that despite Memogate, Fahrenheit 911, the Richard Clarke show and the jihad against the Swiftboat veterans, the press is being soft on Bush.)

The anonymous “studies” about female officers invariably demonstrate that women make excellent cops – even better cops than men! One such study cited an episode of She’s the Sheriff, starring Suzanne Somers.

A 1993 news article in the Los Angeles Times, for example, referred to a “study” – cited by an ACLU attorney – allegedly proving that “female officers are more effective at making arrests without employing force because they are better at de-escalating confrontations with suspects.”

No, you can’t see the study or have the name of the organization that performed it, and why would you ask?

There are roughly 118 million men in this country who would take exception to that notion. I wonder if women officers “de-escalate” by mentioning how much more money their last suspect made.

These aren’t unascertainable facts, like Pinch Sulzberger’s SAT scores. The U.S. Department of Justice regularly performs comprehensive surveys of state and local law enforcement agencies, collected in volumes called “Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics.”

The inestimable economist John Lott Jr. has looked at the actual data. (And I’ll give you the citation! John R. Lott Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?

“Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police.

Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings” Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)

It turns out that, far from “de-escalating force” through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won’t reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)

Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott’s analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent.

Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings. (And for my Handgun Control Inc. readers: Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to approach the suspect and make an arrest.)

In addition to accidentally shooting people, female law enforcement officers are also more likely to be assaulted than male officers – as the whole country saw in Atlanta last month. Lott says: “Increasing the number of female officers by 1 percentage point appears to increase the number of assaults on police by 15 percent to 19 percent.”

In addition to the obvious explanations for why female cops are more likely to be assaulted and to accidentally shoot people – such as

that our society encourages girls to play with dolls – there is also the fact that women are smaller and weaker than men.

In a study of public safety officers – not even the general population – female officers were found to have 32 percent to 56 percent less upper body strength and 18 percent to 45 percent less lower body strength than male officers – although their outfits were 43 percent more coordinated. (Here’s the cite! Frank J. Landy, “Alternatives to Chronological Age in Determining Standards of Suitability for Public Safety Jobs,” Technical Report, Vol. 1, Jan. 31, 1992).

Another study I’ve devised involves asking a woman to open a jar of pickles. There is also the telling fact that feminists demand that strength tests be watered down so that women can pass them. Feminists simultaneously demand that no one suggest women are not as strong as men and then turn around and demand that all the strength tests be changed. It’s one thing to waste everyone’s time by allowing women to try out for police and fire departments under the same tests given to men. It’s quite another to demand that the tests be brawneddown so no one ever has to tell female Harvard professors that women aren’t as strong as men.

Acknowledging reality wouldn’t be all bad for women. For one thing, they won’t have to confront violent felons on methamphetamine.

So that’s good. Also, while a sane world would not employ 5-foot-tall grandmothers as law enforcement officers, a sane world would also not give full body-cavity searches to 5-foot-tall grandmothers at airports.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART

Divided loyalties: the liberal push for a new world order

I

The as

t is a debate that rears its head with increasing frequency in Helen Clark’s New Zealand. You know the one: we’ve all got to be “tolerant” of the flamboyant demands of the simpering lobby groups who make up Labour’s core support. We have to “celebrate” the “diversity” of minority interests to the point where they are given special protection by Executive Order. And we all have to stand back scratching our heads wondering why a series of swastika graffiti attacks always seem to pop up just as Labour’s minions are trying to ramp up publicity supporting legislation to ban “hate speech”.

Is it possible that Rainbow Labour supporters are donning fancy dress (that’s camouflage gear, soldier!) and scampering around Mongol Empire wasn’t known Jewish graveyards in the of the night with the MongoloSinoRuskyKrauto middle pots of paint, helping to Empire, in recognition of its whip up public hysteria?

Who can tell? All I multicultural configuration. know is that in a journalHeck no! To the istic career spanning quarvictor, the spoils ter of a century I can count on around one finger the number of previous such highly-publicised incidents (as opposed to the ones perpetrated during a full moon by a bunch of boozed-up bald boofheads who, frankly, looked better when they used to wear white sheets over their noggins). On the other hand, or make that two, I’m running out of fingers as I try to count the sudden upsurge in “hate speech” attacks.

Anyway, one of Labour’s philosophical disciples, Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres, is the latest to spin the tolerance and diversity speech, particularly in regard to giving immigrant groups equal standing in the official language stakes. Nothing inherently wrong with his right to say that - after all that’s what he’s paid for - but listening to Newstalk ZB’s Leighton Smith

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(does anyone in intelligent society still admit to listening to arch-liberal Michael Laws?) analyse the issue the other day drove home some points that I’ve probably overlooked in the past.

Essentially it is the clash of worldviews that has given rise to the debate in the first place. You see, once upon a time a country was defined by the dominant culture within its borders. England is called England because the Angles ultimately dominated the Celts, not because some politically-correct committee held a meeting in one of London’s left-wing town halls somewhere and England is the best name they could come up with.

Although admittedly, it’s the kind of name they probably could have. Given half a chance.

Likewise, the Mongol Empire wasn’t known as the MongoloSinoRuskyKrauto Empire, in recognition of its multicultural configuration. Heck no! To the victor, the spoils. And that is the way our planet has worked since time immemorial: nations and empires defined by their dominant cultures, not their dissonant parts. At least, it has worked that way until the rise of the New Zealand Labour Party and their halfwit globalisation, one world government fantasies.

You see, the globalists in the United Nations have convinced people like Red Helen that true world peace will only emerge through UN hegemony and, contingent to this, the citizens of Western democracies have to be brainwashed into thinking that national borders no longer apply, that their own cultures are nothing special, and that anyone in the world should have the right to live in New Zealand, the US, Australia or the aforementioned England.

Don’t get me wrong. I have consistently argued since the 1980s that New Zealand’s future lies with immigration and population growth. However, I’m also firmly of the belief that when one leaves the country of one’s birth for the bright lights and fresh shores of a foreign clime, let’s say Rome, you give up your previous nationality and take on the nationality of Rome. You swear

New Zealand’s new world message does the business at an education expo in Beijing in February your earthly allegiance to Rome, renouncing all others. This doesn’t mean you have to forget the country of your birth or your culture, but it does mean that the culture of your birth is secondary to the new culture you have chosen to live within.

This isn’t rocket science. If you love the nation of your birth more, then why did you leave it?

What the globalists want, however, and have successfully prettymuch indoctrinated Gen-X to believe, is that other cultures should not “assimilate” but should effectively ghetto-ise, so that New Zealand no longer has a dominant culture influenced by its sub-cultures, but instead becomes a kind of federation where the dominant culture is no longer recognised as special.

So I come back again to the point I made above: if the dominant culture is not special and enticing, then what is the real reason behind the new wave of immigration? As I’m sure many have guessed, the primary motivating factors behind immigration these days are lifestyle and economic, not nationalistic. The people beating a path to the doors of the West are no longer doing so because they fervently love Western culture and ideals. They do so because they can earn more money driving taxis for a week in New York, Sydney or Auckland than they can in one year in the markets of our less-developed neighbours.

Indeed, for some of these immigrants, not only is love of new country not a motivating factor, hatred for it and a desire to transplant the dominant culture may actually be one. In Europe, immigrant communities are growing so fast that within 15 to 20 years the actual demographic balance of power will have shifted, from the cultures who built those nations over thousands of years, to the cultures who claim it now by virtue of an air ticket, United Nations directives and the acquiescence of globalist parliamentarians within those nations.

It is entirely feasible that within my lifetime I will witness the re-branding of Europe as an Islamic fundamentalist empire – a goal dreamt of by Caliphs and Sultans virtually since the time of Muhammad but never achieved by military means. Today, the great great-great-greatgreat-grandchildren of the generations to last fight the Ottoman Turks in Europe have sold out the heritage their forefathers died to protect.

Which, I guess, is what happens when a population is stupid enough to give left-wing globalist governments the reins of power. Socialist

KYODO governments, like the NZ Labour administration, are primarily about “social” agendas. That’s why they’re called “socialist”. And the socialist agenda has always, always, been a world domination one; but only a government comprised of mental midgets can fail to see that the socialist immigration model they pursue will ultimately be the sword at their own executions, as the governments in Europe are now discovering.

I guess there is a grim irony in this: the godless atheists and secular humanists who embody the ideals of socialism’s great manifestos will be first up against the wall when the beast they unleashed ultimately bites the hand that fed it. Islam, after all, loathes one thing even more than Christians and Jews: it hates secular humanists and “pagans”.

And so we come full circle: the liberal agenda is to create a new world order where sovereign states give way to federation states in a world government where all cultures are equal and all people have the right to live anywhere they choose. On the basis that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, the liberals encourage the rise of minorities hostile to the Christianised-West, all the while preaching tolerance and diversity to our children so that they won’t realise what’s hit them until it is too late. But the liberals don’t realise that the other cultures don’t share liberal ideals.

Modern civilisation is at a crossroads. If we follow the path set by Helen Clark or Joris de Bres, ultimately the sun will set on the West and rise in the East.

Don’t get me wrong. Many immigrants do indeed come here to forge new lives in the New Zealand culture. But when we institutionalize and force cultural change under the guise of globalism and world citizenship, we bring many other balls into play. Should New Zealanders become subject to Sha’ria Law simply because an Islamic party holds the balance of power here at some future point? Is everything we stand for ultimately for sale to anyone who can afford an air ticket?

Is a nation defined by lines on a map, or the map of the heart? I like to think it is the latter. When a people lose their heart they lose their nation, that is the lesson from history. Under Labour, will New Zealand even exist fifty years from now?

That is the question posed by, and potential legacy of, this year’s election. Vote wisely.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 25

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER A plague on all their houses…

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trangely, if we were silly enough to believe all of our friends and acquaintances, then it appears that hardly anyone at all watches television. Which makes it all the harder to understand, why it is at the moment, the nation’s daily newspapers are bothering to print, let alone appearing to take so much undisguised pleasure in the reporting of the various hissy fits currently taking place between TV One, Three and Prime, where it appears that those channel executives wishing to promote their respective 7pm magazine shows have come directly from primary school to do so.

What an unseemly series of verbal brawls have been taking place between these worthies and all because of the supposed viewer Keep this sort of stuff up John delights that could be should any of us and next thing you’ll know the ours sample their particular ceGovernment’s bought up all of lebrities’ offerings, as they TV3’s shares so that they can with varying degrees of skill, render a particular effect a bit of “influence” in day’s “News” or “Current your direction as well Events” via the ubiquitous autocue machine.

Nevertheless, let us not indulge ourselves with too much of a cynical appraisal of the abject nonsense that we have been reading and hearing from those who count the beans or draw very impressive salaries by allegedly controlling the content of what it is that they all fervently pray we will end up actually watching. Instead, rather, comment on the shows themselves, which to be fair, one is forced to allow, are about as different from one another as to suggest that both in format and content they have emanated from entirely different planets.

Television One, government-owned and increasingly suspected as being more a part of the propaganda arm of government than a serious transmitter of anything much more than the thoughts of Chairperson Helen & 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Co, combines its news with supportive programming that scarily mirrors the latest government departmental social-engineering type advertising.

Can anyone of you ever remember a time when so many little “messages” quite clearly bought and paid for by the government have graced our screens via the good offices of Television One? However, to the matter at hand...The ever-delightful Susan Wood, whose animated visage has long appeared on One, with the departure of Paul Holmes was an absolute given to fill the Great Man’s shoes, if for no other reason than it is more than probable that both of these fine presenters share the same shoe size, together, with both having, by reason of over all similarity in actual bodily dimensions, the wonderful ability to make any set look a whole lot larger than it in fact actually is.

TV One has, in Susan Wood, the required Corporation Blonde. Indeed were Susan not a blonde, regardless of her being quite plainly an intelligent and winsome wench in any company, her chances of an on-camera position would appear to have been somewhat limited. However, there she is, nightly presenting, I would think in a pretty commendable fashion, some of the worst crap it has ever been the misfortune for a person of her undoubted talent to have to deal with.

For starters, a continual studio infestation by the hordes of parliamentary weasels that TVNZ’s charter quite obviously dictates should be her nightly penance, that no human being should ever be called upon to face or have to publicly deal with. Imagine the poor woman’s dilemma. Several times a week her producers trundle in yet another wretch from parliament who,

by Susan’s on-air body language, she is about as glad to be seeing as the first clear signs of a particularly nasty tropical disease.

The same old dissemblers of the truth, week in, week out clutter up her show, with it being quite obvious to all but the truly stupid that should Susan ever be unwise enough to even infer, let alone actually say that

her ministerial guest is little other than a lying bastard, she would find herself very quickly another victim of TVNZ’s somewhat Orwellian employment policy.

“Question, by all means the endless parade of political prostitutes we nightly put before you, indeed we expect you to do so, but embarrass not these oily oafs nor call into serious question the utter bilge that they are wont to disseminate, for verily these same degenerates, to all intents and purposes are our very employers.”

Which brings me I guess to a final observation re Close Up and in particular its presenter Susan Wood...The show is absolute rubbish, the lady presenting it is nevertheless an absolute stand-out, being possessed of that very rare ability of being able, night after night, to sublimate I am sure, her well crafted journalistic talent, to conduct instead a sort of politically correct variety show where none are to be offended nor, of course, as a consequence are we, the viewers to be in any real sense enlightened or informed.

Which brings us to the curious tale as to the current exploits of arguably the most talented radio and television broadcaster that this country has yet seen: Paul Holmes, recently headhunted from TV One by the Aussies who currently are spending squillions on the establishment of their Prime channel, and who most certainly could never be described as being mean when it comes to the amount of baksheesh they were prepared to shovel in our Paul’s direction to present their version of a 7pm show to compete with the current time slot leaders TV One and TV3.

OK let’s come right on out and say it. At the moment, Holmes on Prime simply is not working and I believe that there are two or three clear reasons as to why this should be. First up, anyone at all in television knows full well that you don’t ever employ a world class chef to prepare a fine meal and then have him serve it up on a tin plate at a converted hash foundry. Having decided to partake of the delights afforded by Chef Paul, what indeed is the experience that we can look forward to? Well, where to begin...

The studio? It’s apparently a recycled set from Tales from the Crypt that I am sure should anyone inclined towards claustrophobia enter therein, combined with its somewhat dark and sombre décor and overall lack of ambience would reduce such a person to heart palpitations and bouts of uncontrollable screaming. And that before Paul has even had a chance to open his mouth! What on earth were these people thinking about – to provide such a small, dark and satanic on-air home for the pixie-like Mr Holmes? For the Member for Mt Albert perhaps, but then of course some people can scare the hell out of most of us where ever they happen to be.

But even before this cramped and under-lit little studio frames the unmistakable mush of Mr Holmes esquire, consider what the poor man’s show is condemned to follow. Ever watched an Aussie game show called The Price is Right? You haven’t? Well my guess is that neither has the chief programmer at Prime either, because unless he is completely out of his mind (or hers), this program placement is absolutely guaranteed to deliver to the otherwise redoubtable Mr Holmes a total audience no larger than the home team’s recent scores at Eden Park! To all of which we can only then muse on the inadvisability of a highly-talented television performer to busy himself in the role of being the co-producer of his own show. It’s like Sir Lawrence Olivier forgetting he was the premier Shakespearian actor, then trying to outBard the Bard and writing some stuff of his own. No need, stick to your knitting, and apart from anything else if things turn to custard on a given night you can kick someone else’s backside instead of your own.

Aside from all of which, if Holmes’ show continues to wither on the vine, more fool Prime TV...like they may be paying Paul Holmes,

by NZ standards at least, a minor fortune, but once again anyone who

employs a top chef to produce a top meal and then gives him a rusty and cold tin plate to serve it up on is just plain stupid.

Which brings us to TV3 and the freshly-coiffed and exquisitely dressed Mr John Campbell, or “that little creep” as her Ladyship is given to describe this man, who alone in the whole television industry, once had the temerity to do exactly what any good current affairs broadcast journalist is bound to do and gravely upset the PM, in this case by laying a trap for her, which she fell right into trousers over cardy.

It took a lot of courage for TV3 to break up their highly successful 6pm news presenting team and to take a punt to have John Campbell get amongst the 7pm current affairs stuff. My pick, for what it’s worth?

Having seen just the first few shows to be sure, so far, Campbell, along with his old compadre Carol Hirschfeld as chief producer appears to be getting everything just about right...Like stories not only of wide and general interest, but gutsy, need-to-know stuff that the public just haven’t previously been seeing.

Keep this sort of stuff up John and next thing you’ll know the government’s bought up all of TV3’s shares so that they can effect a bit of “influence” in your direction as well.

Isn’t competition just great? Especially when it is now starting to produce a likely end to the bland nonsensical “news, just fit it between the ads” type rubbish we viewers have had inflicted upon us for years. Certainly the ratings fight is by no means over, as you can be sure that the huge amounts of money the various channels have invested in their respective seven o’clock shows will undoubtedly lead to all sorts of changes and fresh ideas. We are in fact extraordinarily fortunate here in New Zealand, to by and large enjoy some of the best produced and presented news shows in the world. It’s just that two of the channels appear to have had a new hall mark set...by TV3, which from my point of view is just great...Wonder who will be out there in front this time next year, not so much in a ratings sense, but in quality news reporting and content.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART

Debating the Resurrection – is it important?

S

o that was Easter. You know, the time of year when we all jump in cars for a long weekend away, enjoying the rain and high winds, before coming back to a week of sunshine. You know, the time of year when the Good Friday movie on television is invariably something like Deep Throat or – as it was this year – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

In the midst of the stormy weather and the Bacchanalian dancing on the cross of Christ by hostile TV programming mavens, hundreds of thousands of people nevertheless turned out to Easter services nationwide where they would Buddha, Muhammed, Confucius? have also heard a wide of opinions on the They’re all still dead and buried. Of range Resurrection of Christ. all the great religious leaders, only If you’d gone to the liberal New Age BudJesus Christ actually claimed to be dhist hang-out centre God the Creator and performed formerly known as St miracles to prove it Matthew-in-the-City Anglican “church” in Auckland, you’d have heard a sermon telling you Easter has nothing to do with whether Jesus Christ was resurrected – because he probably wasn’t – it was all about the circle of life, and rebirth and other symbolic New Age concepts.

In other words, a sermon based entirely around the Easter Egg. Across town, at a genuine Christian church, you’d be more likely to hear a sermon on the real significance of the crucifixion and resurrection. In other words, a sermon based on hot cross buns.

Out of all that, the ordinary punter is expected – once a year, anyway – to try and make some sense out of Christian doctrine when it seems even the churches don’t know what they stand for or what they believe.

Is the actual resurrection important? Yes it is, and here’s why.

28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Without the real death of Christ on the cross, and a real, bodily resurrection out of the tomb, there is no Christianity. Sure, Jesus was a wise man and a great teacher, but if he’s ultimately still in the grave then he cannot have been God and cannot have been telling the truth in that regard. He’s just another wild-eyed wannabe and whether you follow his principles of living or not is entirely up to how you feel.

But, if Christ was indeed resurrected such a feat would prove his claim to be God, to be someone far more powerful than mere mortal humans. In short, if Jesus really was resurrected then everything else he said must be true, because he is the only person in all human history to have not only claimed to be God, but given evidence to prove his claim and done so in front of witnesses.

Buddha, Muhammed, Confucius? They’re all still dead and buried. Of all the great religious leaders, only Jesus Christ actually claimed to be God the Creator and performed miracles to prove it.

Buddha said there were many paths to Nirvana, but offered no evidence of his authority to make the statement. Hinduism bases its religion on ancient legends, not demonstrable historical figures whose existence we can prove. Moreover, Hinduism is like a throwback to the ancient Greek and Roman gods. Hinduism believes in different classes of humans, that some people are scum just because of the social class they’re born into.

Does that sound like a religion founded by the Creator of the Universe?

Muhammed claims God can only be attained through his teachings, but he never performed the miracles that Christ did to show his divine authority.

So we’re left with a resurrected Jesus Christ saying “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me”.

So it all hinges on the resurrection. If it happened, then his comment immediately above affects every living human on this planet, regardless of what religion

they think they follow. If the resursidelines as the Romans taunted rection really happened, then Jesus’ Jesus on the cross before he drifted call to the disciples to preach that away suddenly crying out that even fact to all nations is not just ChristiGod had forsaken him. Maybe, anity seeking “equal time” alongside thought the disciples, he really was other religious beliefs; it is Christionly a man after all. So their own anity saying every other belief sysvisions and dreams of the Messiah tem out there is wrong, and if you died on the cross with Christ, and choose to follow them you’ll be when the women first talked about committing spiritual suicide. a risen Jesus they thought the Did the resurrection happen? women were insane. It just wasn’t The evidence clearly suggests it did. computing in their heads.

Firstly, we are struck with the fact of Let’s assume, for the sake of this, an empty tomb. It is abundantly clear that Jesus only fainted on the cross both from the Gospel accounts and and woke up in the tomb, still alive. from Jewish writings that Jesus’ body A Roman crucifixion was not a was missing. The Jews accused the smack on the hand with a wooden Christians of stealing it. So fact one: spoon. It was a bloody and brutal the tomb was empty. affair where death was guaranteed.

Then there’s the role of women.

On the remote offchance that Jesus In the Gospel accounts, women was only a human who survived the were the first to witness the empty cross, are we to believe that – after MODERN DISCIPLES: tomb, and witness the risen, resurrolling away the two-tonne boulder Easter pilgrims in Jerusalem ZUMA rected Jesus. So what? Well it may – a half-dead Jesus, bloodnot seem a big deal in our modern encrusted, gaping nail wounds in world where men and women both get to vote, but in Middle Eastern hands and feet and a spear gash in his heart, crawled into the disciples’ countries of the time, as today, women were second-class citizens whose meeting room triumphantly muttering, “see, I’ve beaten death, I’m testimony was so worthless they couldn’t even be witnesses in court. Lord and master of the Universe”? Would such a spectacle have If the Gospel accounts were fiction, the authors would definitely have inspired the disciples, or would they assume, like you and I, that he must made men the first witnesses, to lend credibility to the accounts. They simply have survived and not died at all? Hardly a triumph over death. would not in a million years have dreamed of making women the first But the Gospel accounts speak of a radiant resurrected Jesus. An witnesses unless, of course, that’s what really happened and they inspiring figure. Could the disciples have invented the resurrection regarded the facts as more important than the spin. accounts? Obviously they could have, but it is extremely unlikely. First Fact two: with women being first to witness the risen Christ, this and foremost, virtually all the disciples were later executed by Rome for indicates the story is more likely to be factual because it is counter-cultural continuing to claim that Christ really was God and really had been – it runs against what people of the day would have expected, yet tells the resurrected. Roman documents in British and European museums story straight despite the risk of alienating potential converts. show the Roman emperors gave instructions that Christians were to Which then brings us to the other witnesses. A resurrected Jesus be shown mercy if they publicly renounced their faith, and executed if Christ appeared to the women and the 11 surviving disciples and around they did not.

500 others during the six weeks after his death on the cross. Search the It is highly significant that the disciples were fed to lions; dipped in annals of Sigmund Freud’s cases, or search every library of every psychol- tar and set alight as garden lanterns; and put to death by crucifixion ogy department at every university in the world, and you will never find because they refused to renounce their claims. It is one thing to die for one case of a hallucination appearing to hundreds of people at different something you believe to be true, but we’re not arguing here over whether times, or 11 people in a room all reporting that a hallucination sat down the disciples “believed” it – critics say the disciples knowingly made the and ate fish with them, or that they could touch the hallucination. So the story up. only other possible option here is that all the witnesses were simply liars Question. Would you volunteer to be torn apart by starving lions to who constructed a fictional story to help sell their message. defend a story you’d made up, when you could go free just by admitFact three, then: the resurrection appearances to hundreds of people ting to the con? Why would the disciples die such horrible deaths for were not hallucinations, and must either be true or the deliberate false something they knew was fake? It doesn’t make sense. The only racreation of the early Christians. tional explanation for it is that the disciples genuinely believed they’d So could the resurrection appearances have been deliberate lies to sell seen the resurrected Christ (which, for reasons covered above, must the Christian message? Let’s examine that for a moment. Such deceit have been the genuine Jesus), and that fact gave them enough faith to stands in direct opposition to everything Jesus Christ stood for, and endure a few moments of pain from lions, rather than give up an everything preached in the Gospels. In other words, if you truly be- eternity in heaven. lieved Jesus was the way and the truth, how was inventing the mother And that, folks, is the ultimate power of the resurrection. It is Chrisof all fairy stories going to reflect that “truth”? tianity saying to the world, in the words of a recent song: No matter Secondly, after the crucifixion, the record shows the disciples were what they tell you / No matter what they do / No matter what they teach you crushed men. They’d been expecting to see the man they followed as / What you believe is true.

God be triumphant at the cross, perhaps smiting all the Roman solA liberal, symbolic, Easter Egg, counterfeit construction of the resdiers and proving to all that he was God come to deliver justice and urrection may be non-threatening to followers of other religions, but vengeance against those who had dared to harm him. Instead, whipped it will never set them free like the Truth. If I was on a road to Hell, I’d and scourged to within an inch of his life, they’d watched from the want to be told. Wouldn’t you?

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

SHORT CIRCUITS

MURPHY’S LAW And, ironically, shot on location in Ireland

30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

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THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

The GHOST in the MACHINE

Former Cabinet Minister John Tamihere’s most candid interview, ever

John Tamihere is fighting for his political survival, both in and outside Parliament.

Now, in a make or break interview with IAN WISHART, Tamihere spills the beans on what he really thinks of the Labour Government, the power struggles inside it, and where it is taking New Zealand INVESTIGATE: John Tamihere, you’ve been cleared by the SFO of any wrongdoing, you’ve got a fight on your hands for your electorate seat this year, and I see Labour Party President Mike Williams suggesting a mid-to-late September election…

TAMIHERE: I reckon it is going to be earlier. Just in case a number of economic issues start to deteriorate, with the hedge contracts coming off and the dollar holding, and commodity prices having an adverse impact as a number of other producers start to get over either drought and/or Mad Cow disease and so on and so forth, and start to access markets where we’re there in a vacuum, as opposed to competition.

Also, we’ll set the agenda from May 19th because of the budget. This is what I’d do if I was up on the ninth floor. I’d wait until May the 19th, set the agenda, get everyone talking about the budget and then we go - we go straight after that. Use the budget as the discussion document for an election in early July. The budget is going to be business friendly, or it was when I was working on it. It has to be.

32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

INVESTIGATE: Labour has managed, in the past 20-odd years, to capture Liberal economic theory while retaining a socially liberal outlook. How did they do it?

TAMIHERE: We’re lucky in a number of regards. One is that there’s no huge economic debate anymore over socialism, or communism versus capitalism. That’s gone. Capitalism has won, and the argument now is about best practice, best structure, best systems, and it’s nowhere near as exciting for the masses.

There are two other things that must follow. Labour is now business-savvy. We never had that before because you had unionists who begat our party who believed all bosses were bad bosses. That chasm has now gone, because SME’s [small-to-medium enterprises] produced 86% of all new jobs in the past five years, nearly a quarter of a million, and that will increase. Because more people are becoming business-savvy. Not all businessmen are bad. The biggest sweatshops we’ve got are hospitals, run by the government and funded by the govern-

LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE? “Out of 51 in the caucus, 10 would back me to the hilt, another 15 say they would, but who knows? But that’s a solid block in any caucus. What I’d do is promote Maharey immediately, make him wear all the bulls..t that’ll come out. He deserves it, him and his mob”

FOTOPRESS April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 33

ment. And so the caterers and the cleaners are actually government funded, and they’re jumping up and down at their own government.

Award rates are a joke because they bear no resemblance to the capacity of the business sector to achieve it, and that’s why those general wage rounds are anathema to reasonable economics. I mean, you get a number of people jumping up and down seeking a five percent general wage order – get a life!

INVESTIGATE: What sort of power do the unions still have with the Labour party?

TAMIHERE: Well they just increased it after the List! (laughs).

Having said that, you know, they come in all ‘ra ra ra’, and the next minute, you know, it’s welcome to the real world, when they’re exposed to a whole bunch of competing advice and information that they’ve never had before because it’s always been the union line before.

Unions. I can’t stand them.

I had a big pow-wow with some of them. You go into town, have a meeting with them. Won’t name any names but they were all sitting there, and I said to them, ‘All of you sitting over there were all on good jobs, and you all sold us out under Rogernomics in the eighties’. Now I actually think a lot of things happened under Rogernomics in retrospect which were extraordinarily good, but when you’re suffering you take a more vested interest. These guys were all running around in their bloody Falcons and they were on $55,000 those years, which was bloody good money. And what did they do? Nothing! Now some of them are politicians.

One dude says to me, ‘Look, I’ve got fifty paid organizers in our union, in this region, that can lock up against you, if I wanted them to’.

I said, ‘Oh, right, where are you from?’

He says, ‘You know where I’m from, I live in Panmure’.

I said, ‘No, where were you from before you got to Panmure?’

He says, ‘Oh, I come from England’ ‘Is that right,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in the union movement?’

‘Since the day I arrived here, 22 years ago’.

‘How long have you had a job in the union movement, how long has it been since you’ve been out amongst the real workers?’

‘I’ve been a paid union representative for 19 years.’

‘Well you wouldn’t know a f...ing thing about a proper job, mate, so stick your f...ing organizers up your date, I don’t need them.’

It’s always about threats and intimidation, and ‘we’ve got big balls, what have you got?’

INVESTIGATE: What do you take out of the Labour’s new List?

TAMIHERE: Two things. One, there was a precedent forming that the parliamentary wing would number off first, and that precedent was busted. Secondly, when you look at the List, the union movement have got four new members coming in, end of story. And so they’ve done extraordinarily well at reasserting themselves. They don’t deserve to have that level of influence. I’m going to lead a charge against that, very shortly, because the party has to be updated to reflect where our society and communities are, as opposed to where they were.

If we continue to be driven by historical liabilities and ideological overhangs, that’s an anchor and a weight that pulls you right down. If you really think about innovation and initiative, you can’t be bound by a range of standards and rules that are only applicable because certain people have dragged their way to the top of it. Just because they controlled yesterday doesn’t mean they should control tomorrow.

INVESTIGATE: Looking ahead three to six years, what do you think the unions are aiming for in the Labour Party.

TAMIHERE: Well, obviously greater influence. I think we f...ed up with our 2004 amendments to the Employment Relations Act. I think it’s very silly, a number of things that we did then, merely to give unions greater organizational capabilities. I don’t think it’ll translate to 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

greater union membership, but having said that it’s another impost and imposition on business. It’s really ugly. Because as business downsizes and subcontracts, if it was me I wouldn’t have anyone in the union. The ‘union’ was our company, our whanau. Guys that actually make small businesses work, as you’ve correctly indicated, they’re not bad employers otherwise they screw their own business. The other thing is a lot of small businesses in NZ are familial, either direct family or references from mates.

INVESTIGATE: The union movement is angling for more of its old heyday, but in your opinion that’ll backfire if the activists achieve that?

TAMIHERE: Yes. Mark Gosche never delivered for them, so they’re bringing in Maryann Street, and she’s a very capable person. I’ll tell you this: Burton was actually meant to be the Speaker but as soon as Street came in and got a high place on the northern regional list, that was it.

You see, these people think in timeframes of ten to 15 years, it’s only bastards like me that struggle through the current term. So when you’re positioning for high places, they’re thinking that far ahead.

The Labour hierarchy purposely lost the election in 1993. They could have won in 1993. Mike Moore came within one seat. But the party pulled all their energy out of Auckland. He was up here at two o’clock in the morning, the leader of a major party, nailing in hoardings in Greenlane.

Him and Clayton Cosgrove, hammering away, because no one else would help them.

But yeah, they purposely planned to lose. ‘That era’s gone, we’re new, and we’re coming. He’s gone, Helen’s it’.

INVESTIGATE: This goes back to the great conspiracy theory. Most people like you and I can’t get our heads around the idea that someone can sit in a darkened room and figure out where they want to be in fifteen years.

Where do they get the time to do that?

TAMIHERE: They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet. They don’t even think about that.

I’ve got a fifteen year old whose testosterone’s jumping and he’s scrapping around at school. Now they don’t have that, and because they don’t have that they’re just totally focused. You’ve also got a fully paid organization called the union movement, who can co-opt fully paid coordinators.

These people just never sleep.

INVESTIGATE: How dangerous is it to be in the Labour Party?

TAMIHERE: If you’re a free and independent spirit, very dangerous.

Like, if there was a popularity poll for me, I can assure you that there’s more ministerial klingons voting on the old PC against you, and yet I’m on the same team! They sit there, typing away, muttering, ‘come on SFO, let’s nail this bastard!’

In this outfit it’s all ‘rosy’ on the outside, not the inside. When I used to make a contribution in cabinet, on the cabinet papers, I’d go, ‘Hang on’, and she’d go, ‘you want to be difficult again, do you?’

I’d say ‘it’s not about being difficult, it’s just that a number of these amendments are pointless. You’re just scoring brownie points off the other side when you’ve already beaten them. I don’t think you need to do that. I think you can lighten up on some of these points and still achieve what this mob over here want, the Blues Brothers over here, Maharey and his mates.’ Thankfully, my advice was accepted on a number of occasions.

There’s independent thinkers in there. Clayton Cosgrove’s a good thinker, but very angry at the moment because he’s frustrated. Damien O’Connor’s a good thinker. Maharey, you can spend two hours with Maharey and walk away none the wiser but you’ve got three screeds of paper full of notes. So there’s operators like him who are very smarmy, very clever, but no substance. It’s all about status.

INVESTIGATE: What do you make of the ‘machine’ that exists on the ninth floor at the moment?

NATIONAL’S MISSED CHANCE “I tell you what, if I was on the other side mate I’d have cut the bloody Labour Party to pieces over moral issues. There’s a huge pendulum swing against what my leadership stands for” TAMIHERE: Oh yeah, there’s definitely a ‘machine’ all right. It’s formidable. It’s got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA all the way through. It’s actually even built a counterweight to the Roundtable – Businesses for Social Responsibility.

Its intelligence-gathering capabilities are second to none.

INVESTIGATE: How good is the media, or are they totally useless and sycophantic?

TAMIHERE: They’re utterly and totally useless. And sycophantic.

You know and I know there’s no investigative journalism done in that bloody gallery. In an information age, we’ve got more ignorant people out there than there’s ever been.

INVESTIGATE: Labour’s enjoying the benefit of that, but surely there’s got to be a day of reckoning..

TAMIHERE: Not when the journalists know they’ve got to deal with this government for another three years, and the same goes for business. Right now there are people writing cheques out in the corporate sector who wouldn’t bloody cross the road to pee on us if we were on fire, for the same reason: at the end of the day it’s business. They’ve got to deal with this party.

And the other mob aren’t helping themselves much. Even if they wanted to, they’ve got no one who can articulate it.

INVESTIGATE: What about John Key? TAMIHERE: Oh no, he’s going to be very good. I’ve got the greatest regard for John. One more term, he’s a formidable character. He’s the one who scares the s..t out of me the most out of the whole bunch. He’s talented, affable, good sense of humour. Bastard came from a state house! I could go to bed comfortable at night, knowing that he was in charge – fair dinkum, not a problem. Couple of the others over there, forget it.

FOTOPRESS I think Bill English will make a comeback after the election, but give John Key one more term to get blooded in the House. He’s an extraordinary talent but I think he needs one more term. If I was to pick National’s dream team it would be Key and Rich – Rich for the South.

INVESTIGATE: So would it be fair to say you’re in Labour because there was no credible opposition place to be?

TAMIHERE: I’m in Labour because Tau Henare and ‘moderate’ NZ First abused the Maori vote. And the only way to get it into mainstream was to do this. It was like the Prodigal Son, you know, you’ve had some fun and debauchery over there, look what happened, now come home. I’d be a very wealthy man by now if I’d stayed down the road at the Waipareira Trust, but for all the wrong reasons.

INVESTIGATE: The media got stuck into you and ignored some obvious facts, such as the Trust’s liability to pay the tax…

TAMIHERE: Well, they wanted me. The ninth floor wanted me.

Heather Simpson – Helen’s assistant – wanted me in the tent as damaged goods. Too tough to lose completely. She’s dangerous, a very dangerous woman.

INVESTIGATE: How much longer can the current machine dominate?

TAMIHERE: The current machine wants to become, in all ways, the natural party of government, and just have us vote different coalition partners on the fringes. Has kiwi culture changed that much?

I don’t know.

INVESTIGATE: So if Labour becomes the natural party of government, and the opposition remains weak, presumably that opens up the possibility of factionalisation within Labour as an alternative way of keeping things in check?

TAMIHERE: Not a problem. I tried to set one up, we called it the April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 35

‘Mods’, for moderates, from the class of 99. I’ll tell you who screwed it up, through his naked ambition: Cunliffe.

The boss sent emissaries out, let it be known it would be detrimental to the party and detrimental to our career prospects.

The problem the Tories have is there are no great litmus issues left, because the economic debate’s won, so that leaves social policy, education, housing. There’s no big circuit breaker.

INVESTIGATE: Even on moral issues?

TAMIHERE: I tell you what, if I was on the other side mate I’d have cut the bloody Labour party to pieces over moral issues! There’s a huge pendulum swing against what my leadership stands for.

INVESTIGATE: What is the most powerful network in the Labour executive?

TAMIHERE: The Labour Party Wimmins Division. Whether it’s bagging cops that strangle protestors they should be beating the proverbial out of, or – it’s about an anti-men agenda, that’s what I reckon. It’s about men’s values, men’s communication standards, men’s conduct.

I spoke to the boards and principals association in Wellington, and I showed them a picture of two girls with their fists clenched, standing on top of two young male students. The object of the exercise was to prove that once again the female students had romped home academically against all the boys. If the positions in the photo were reversed, all hell would break loose.

Where else in the world do Amazons rule?

In our constitutional base you could kill the Prime Minister – sure, there’s a deputy prime minister – but in the interregnum the second in charge is the Speaker. The Governor-General. If those three die you go to the Chief Justice, another woman.

I don’t mind women being promoted, but just because they are women shouldn’t be the issue. They’ve won that war. It’s just like the Maori – the Maori have won, why don’t they just get on with the bloody job. I think it becomes more grasping.

INVESTIGATE: Speaking of constitutions, looking back instead of looking forward, is there room for a new written constitution, ideally not penned by the ninth floor, to set the country on a new track?

TAMIHERE: I think you’ve just hit the nail on the circuit-breaker of the next decade: that’s going to be the defining moment in politics this decade. This is who we are, this is what we are, this is what we stand for. We’ve arrived. Somebody just now needs to put that in a manifesto, put it on the public agenda. Whoever does that will ride that wave.

INVESTIGATE: It’ll take a while to bring the public up to speed on the issue first.

TAMIHERE: That’s the problem with the press. There’s this bulls**t that there’s such a thing as the Crown that exists in the NZ constitution. It does not. It’s a myth. It’s run by prime ministerial dictate, fullstop.

INVESTIGATE: Will Labour win this election?

TAMIHERE: It’ll win it. Who it does business with to maintain it…she’s too savvy, mate. It’s too clever. You’ve got Cullen – we wouldn’t survive without Cullen – he can cut a deal on a piece of legislation, he can change a single word in a piece of legislation without those other bastards [coalition partners] knowing about it, and it melts down everything they wanted but they still think they got their clause in. The pressure, they bring pressure to bear on individuals.

INVESTIGATE: How intense does the pressure get?

TAMIHERE: Close to fisticuffs!

INVESTIGATE: Very un-PC! TAMIHERE: I always kick the officials out when I know it’s going to get a bit tetchy, because you know they’ll blab all over the place. So I say ‘hang on mate, I want to talk political now, get them out’. And 36, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Cullen goes, ‘oh no, no, he’s ok’ or ‘she’s ok’. And I say ‘It might be for you, but not for me. I’m uncomfortable’.

What you do is you always use the wimmins’ language: ‘I’m feeling unsafe!’ And the women, as soon as they hear that, they’re instantly with me. ‘I’m feeling unsafe in here’. [chuckles] INVESTIGATE: Where do you see yourself being, three years from now?

TAMIHERE: Well, as long as I’m doing the business and championing the right debate. The issue you’ve raised about where we’ve arrived, and whoever identifies that and encapsulates that, but more importantly is able to bring the masses with them, will set a new benchmark for New Zealand nationhood.

Because it is there. The sense of belonging is for everyone and the Maori don’t have a mortgage on that.

INVESTIGATE: You can get trapped, as you’ve made the point, looking back instead of forward, and letting bitterness over the past poison your future. They don’t grow as people or move on.

TAMIHERE: I hear Maori talking about how they were burnt out of the Orakei marae in 1951 and so on. Big deal. What are we doing about it? Well, we’ve fixed it, actually. So what are you going to tell your children? It’s part of their history. It’s not baggage and it’s not an anchor. It’s part of their folklore.

INVESTIGATE: What’s Helen like?

TAMIHERE: A very complex person, a very, very complex person.

And she’s been made complex by the range of sector groups she’s been made to engage with and occasionally confront. But she’s no good with emotions. She goes to pieces. She’ll fold on the emotional side and walk away or not turn up. She knows it’s going to get emotional and it upsets her.

We’ve never had a great relationship. I said to her, ‘look, I don’t give a f..k about the unions. You’ve got enough of those. My job is to bloody talk to kiwi males who are feeling out in the cold over the whole thing and also to stand up against some of the PC bulls..t.

And that’s why I said to Chris Carter, ‘I’m standing against that bloody civil union bill mate, because you’ve already had enough! I voted for one piece of social engineering and now you’re f..king coming back for another! Those two queers never got it right. I said you can have one, Civil Unions or Prostitution, make up your mind. And so I gave in on Prostitution. And then he comes up to me and harangues me, because he wants to be the first get married on April 1, the tosser, and he says to me ‘but you’re a minority John, you understand’, and I was thinking about it over the morning tea after cabinet, and I went up to him after and said ‘look, if you threaten me again - you’re looking at the face that’ll run hard against you on civil unions.’

I’ve got a right to think that sex with another male is unhealthy and violating. I’ve got a right to think that.

INVESTIGATE: Why are these policies so popular on the ninth floor?

TAMIHERE: Because Helen has been brutalized by people who have called her lesbian, no children and all the rest of it. Her key advisor Heather Simpson is a butch, and a lot of her support systems are, Maryann Street and so on, and she’s very comfortable in that world and comfortable with it. I’m not.

And so that’s why it’s got strong legs. And when you go down through that building [the Beehive] it is infiltrated with it, in key policy and decision making processes and the upper echelons of the ministries, and it skews things, it is an unhealthy weighting, because even if you give a policy directive they’ll skew the policy underneath you.

You wake up and think, ‘am I wrong thinking this way?’

But that’s when they’ve got you. They’re trying to make men think and act like them, but I’m not one of them. In my view this is a circuit breaker because you can actually rally numbers. That group of women

GENDER EQUITY “Men’s problems are traditionally dealt with by the criminal justice system.

Women, on the other hand, get a bloody Cartwright Inquiry” has only one worldview, and men have to organize themselves to deal with that, and start winning the debates. Men can actually reassert a position. It’s about social conduct and performance. It’s about good father role models. It is about societal mores that will achieve that, not the police.

INVESTIGATE: You’ve often been tipped as potential leadership material for the party, but is there a Labour Party you could be leader of?

TAMIHERE: That’s a difficult question to answer in light of a number of internal environmental issues in the way. I could be a real pain in the ass to them on this one. Is that enough leverage to say ‘yes’?

I don’t know.

Out of 51 in the caucus, 10 would back me to the hilt, another 15 say they would, but who knows? But that’s a solid block in any caucus.

What I’d do is promote Maharey immediately, make him wear all the bulls..t that’ll come out. He deserves it, him and his mob. Because we’ll be in power ten to fifteen years. I couldn’t possibly sit there and defend a number of things they’ve done, and we’re yet to see the full fruits of that.

INVESTIGATE: And some of the chickens coming home to roost would be?

TAMIHERE: The number of do-gooders who are paid extremely well in government. We’ve got 180,000 fewer unemployed, but a bigger bureaucracy than when we did! What the hell is going on here?

We’ve got a range of poor incentives. We say to people ‘you stay in a state house at 25% gross’, and we’re teaching them to be crooks. There might be four income earners in there – we’ll never know it.

And instead of trading up and moving on, we’re encouraging them to stay in there. One third of kiwi families don’t have a male in them.

That’s not good. But we got a document printed – cost me $50,000 to get a document telling me what you and I already know – that tells us all the young males need and are desperately craving for is a male role model who’ll acknowledge them, acknowledge where they’re at and be supportive of them, which is what a normal father does. And if the father’s not there we’ve got to find a male role model somewhere else.

And we can’t get them in primary schools, because we’re all ‘molestors’, all ‘rapists’, or ‘potentially’ we’re going to do it. So we’ve got to shift that attitude and provide scholarships to encourage men back into the education system.

Men’s problems are traditionally dealt with by the criminal justice system. Women, on the other hand, get a bloody Cartwright Inquiry and get millions of dollars thrown at their breasts and cervixes. Men get nothing. You need a debate that we can tackle unfair and stupid policy with.

i April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 37

Photography: COREY BLACKBURN 38, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

THEY

SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY? The mafia comes to Morrinsville They are thoroughbreds. Racehorses at their prime. Beaten to death with fenceposts. Then there’s the half-breed Doberman guard-dog, so savagely attacked that it’s lost its edge. And don’t overlook the Blue Magic. NEILL HUNTER breaks open a story of John Grisham proportions April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 39

B

efore their world became hell, Jonathan McRae and Dayle Pike were going places. They ran a small successful thoroughbred horse-training farmlet and McRae, the licensed public trainer, had a reputation as a good operator. Some one who knew his horses.

Horses. It’s all McRae has been doing for most of his 33-year working life. Tenacious, hospitable, tough, gracious, quick to laugh – just like his woman-of-many-contrasts partner Dayle – they both exude complete adoration for their charges, the bloodstock horses.

But now their dream stands hobbled. Somebody has been trying to shut down the couple and their business. Mystery tormentors torturing their animals. Prized thoroughbreds assailed by attackers so heartless that they maim one horse to the point of death and another is put down due to “ailments from suspicious cause”. The toll since then: a further 18 animals tortured. The allegations fly thick and fast: Horse traps, druggings, poisons, home invasions, telephone-tapping, computer-hacking, strange visits, strange vehicles, horses let out of paddocks by day and by night, gates tipped upside down, horses painted, shaved, cut. It’s a story that goes on and on like the never-ending roads on the plains east of Morrinsville; all precisely documented, photographed from 2003 to 2005.

With such a cloud of darkness hanging over them, even McRae’s reputation as a skilled trainer was not enough to stop loyal clients leaving and taking their livestock with them.

By last winter, the attacks had reached such frenetic levels that Jonathan McRae spent most nights in an old Lazyboy armchair at the main stable in chill temperatures of four degrees or lower, trying to repel invaders. Now, he and Pike are down to just one loyal client. Scrounging for any work he can get, McRae does occasional shoeing jobs and, in the quiet moments, wonders why he has become a victim of the most calculated raids and brutality to animals – a crime story as bizarre as any seen by this journalist – comparable perhaps to vendettas in the Northland drug scene of the eighties.

Not far from the tiny farm they now share is the scene of what was once New Zealand’s worst air crash. An NAC airliner, an old DC3, lumbered out of the clouds and straight into the Kaimai ranges. It was decades ago but, just up the lonely rural lane leading to McRae and Pike’s home, two propeller blades from the ill-fated passenger aircraft still stand in silent vigil – a reminder to anyone who bothers to stop of the tragedy that occurred there. Search and rescue volunteers took an age to find the remains of that National Airways Corporation airliner, scouring deep valleys and impregnable misty and rain-soaked bush before discovering the broken Dakota wedged in a dense bushy ravine.

McRae and Pike liken themselves to those searchers long ago: they, too, will never give up, never stop searching until they find those responsible for wrecking everything they cherish.

Motives? We don’t know…yet. There are theories: for example, while working for a large ‘corporate’ horse trainer in 2003 before she met McRae, Dayle Pike finds that her own horse stabled on her employer’s Waikato property has been internally examined and – she believes – given the drug Blue Magic, the doping agent that’s been the subject of a criminal investigation and caused the suicide of two prominent horse industry members in 2004. Pike’s big issue here?: she never sanctioned the veterinary-administered work and her horse was not part of the bloodstock operation at that stud farm. In short, it appears her own steed had been accidentally caught up in something much bigger. Not realising how big, Pike’s first reaction when she mistakenly receives the vet’s bill for the “work” is to go looking for answers. She loses her dream job. That’s one possible motive for everything that’s happened since, perhaps small in the chain of circumstantial evidence in this weird case under investigation by police, but abandoned by others.

Enter Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF). They don’t want

40, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

to know, after McRae turns to them for help. MAF staff interviewed (two) say they will not rule out poisoning of the animals, are certain it’s not disease(s) and believe it’s not an owner-related animal welfare matter.

So we dig a little deeper with them. Isn’t it true, we ask, that when you tried to investigate, a prominent racing industry executive warned you off with the words “it’s paranoia, nothing to it”?

“I won’t confirm or deny that that happened,” one of the men from MAF responds after a moment.

So why hasn’t anything been done? Why haven’t the police and SPCA and MAF, or even the racing industry itself, been all over this like a plague, looking for the culprits? McRae suspects it’s because the can of worms would make the current Blue Magic investigation look tame by comparison. Everybody is running scared.

“I had a vet come and see one of my horses last year after an attack with a length of wood,” mutters McRae. “He told me, ‘it is multiple haematoma upon haematoma from repetitive beatings’, and then obviously realised what he’d said and started backing away saying, ‘I don’t want to know…I don’t want to know’.”

McRae and Pike say vets they went to gradually closed ranks and virtually none will now respond to call-outs despite financial assurances and the fact that bills have always been paid.

And so we return to the winter of 2004 and a cold, dark farm building near cross-roads on the plains south of Hauraki. Forty-four year old McRae, typical of the man passionate about his craft and the survival of his business, is spending every night (for four months) in his main stable shivering in the icy temperatures, trying to guard clients’ horses, the yearlings and the weanlings – those no longer relying on their mothers.

Slumped drowsily in an old armchair positioned well inside the stable door, his head mostly covered by a black balaclava, McRae barely registers the time pip on his watch as it clicks over to 1am on this particular June night. Nearby, in the lounge of their farmhouse, 47-year-old Pike has drifted off in the lounge.

“I was too scared to sleep in the bedroom so I slept in the lounge with another baseball bat, high powered slug-gun and a cellphone…and a packet of slugs but I knew I’d never get to use them anyway because I knew I was only going to get one shot,” she laughs nervously.

On the dusty, dry concrete floor of the stable, close to McRae’s feet, lies a steel baseball bat; black, menacing, the tool of thugs not of horsemen. An expensive hand-held night vision and audio scope with long-range listening device graces the table beside him, its earphone wires draping from his head like a technician in a warship command centre, rather than a stable, as he dozes, head wobbling in that twilight zone between dozing and genuine sleep.

Suddenly, McRae’s entire body jerks, and he’s bolt upright, listening.

Sometimes, he recounts to Investigate later, he would hear sounds but decide they were only his imagination: “I’d hear voices and I’d move then I wouldn’t hear them again.” But on this night there is an unmistakable and distinctive metallic rasping sound of old hasp and staple bolts squeaking against steel from across the open ground between McRae’s resting place and another stable.

“There are two stable boxes,” he explains to Investigate, reliving it. “I was in the main stable box with my Lazyboy armchair, and Nelson (his dog – half-Doberman, quarter-German Shepherd, quarter-lab) was asleep in a little bed covered in blankets.”

The sound blows away the sleepiness and bone-numbing cold as he carefully puts aside his electronic helper and wraps gloved hands around black steel. The veteran horseman slips silently into the darkness, Nelson alongside as they creep beyond the walls of the stable towards the other old wooden “box,” negotiating farm obstacles, wooden yards and an old overhanging tree effortlessly, like a blind man embracing blackness.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 41

Then, he hesitates. On other occasions, before taking up his barnyard vigils, he’s seen torch beams in the dead of night, seeking out the electronic camera monitors installed by a friend. Tonight, McRae contemplates calling that friend, Peter Doughty. It feels like Doughty is the only loyal client remaining and he knows the tough, clean-cut solid dairy farmer just up the road will come instantly, “any time of night he told us to ring him,” but McRae decides there’s no time and, besides, desperation overrules.

Whether it’s the cold muddling his mind or the craving to blindly smash out and engage battle with a faceless enemy, he doesn’t know; but he’s had enough of chasing fleeting glimpses of movement, torch beams and sounds in the night. Putting it bluntly, McRae by this stage desperately wants the tonic of physical confrontation, even at risk of life and limb.

“I wanted it alright (physical fight), I still do,” he says, hiding his rage behind an endearing smile.

On this particular night, it is not to be. Where there was sound a moment ago, now there is just bitter silence. Where there was movement, there’s now only an eerie stillness, another fruitless night beneath the dark ranges barely silhouetted against a starry sky. Another unrewarding search.

Nelson returns and stands watching his master examine old halfdrawn door bolts. Big and black, with a Doberman’s head, the mongrel has borne the brunt of many an attack himself.

“He’ll be right with me then he’s off, he doesn’t bark when he’s with me, he’ll stick with me, he’s shy by himself because of the beatings,” says McRae. The victim of countless beatings, Nelson has failed to stop the intruders who as recently as this issue was going to press continued their invasions of the little farmlet 45 minutes from Hamilton, 10 from Te Aroha. That latest event - the sudden distinct rattling of a door latch at 9.30pm at the modest, white Stucco-clad, immaculately house-kept home where McRae and Pike doze with lights out, in front of their lounge TV. The Doberman, almost recovered from the attacks, bolts for an opening - a missing glass pane in floor-to-ceiling windows next to the locked back door, then disappears. McRae follows, dashing through the lounge across the dining room along the back entrance-way and – without bothering to unlock the door – almost mimicking his dog, dives headlong across the floor, skidding on his belly through the same opening and out into the warm late-summer night.

“The dog shot off one way and I raced across to the road, but we found nothin’.”

Retreating along seemingly well-rehearsed escape routes, the phantom prowler leaves no sign this time, but in the past there have been exhibits now held by police.

“Bizarre” is the common word used to describe these events when Investigate begins some door-knocking and head-crunching it its own.

Another favourite word is “omnipresent”, almost as if it’s a haunting - that from a general duties constable in Te Aroha. The stocky policeman says that so much has taken place, over so long, and without any sighting of an intruder, that it defies belief. But he has no reason to disbelieve, and neither has a detective at another station.

“So’ve you written it off?” Journalistic question in cop jargon learned long ago, to the young fresh-faced detective sitting across the brand new desk in a brand new police station.

“No. There’s too much evidence. We are treating it seriously,” he replies, but points out he has to give priorities to broken skulls, drug raids and a murder. Then, during a long, relaxed conversation, the Waikato cop sits back and shares things in confidence, not in breach of privacy or law, but privy to an investigation.

Technically, it is a police investigation into offences under the Animal 42, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

Welfare Act for which the police are warranted to carry out arrests, as well as offences relating to unlawful entry and breaches of anything else that may be applicable. The evidence? Enquiries, interviews, forensics, photographs, vets’ examinations – some of the evidence is still under evaluation. Some evidence is strong, other strands – not so strong.

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either police nor Investigate have any reason to disbelieve, especially considering the strange encounter at our first interview of McRae and Pike. Arriving at their home in late February we were surprised. Neither Pike nor McRae seem eccentric or irrational – despite the first impressions conveyed by the material sent to Investigate and in our first telephone discussion. The interview takes all day and by the end of it we are left under no illusion that something sinister is happening at the place where chooks roam free, bristly green hedges separate paddocks and ducks swim peacefully in a nearby crystal stream until disturbed during reconnoitre. But the interview is exhausting.

“I need a break,” sighs the scribe, “let’s take a walk,” and as we wander along a garden path leading to the first horse paddock Dayle Pike shouts an alarm “where’s Monaco?!” Monaco is a jointly-owned five-year-old thoroughbred gelding belonging to Pike, McRae and a client. Confusion reigns, running, frantic body language, shouting, gestures, reactions too animated, too spontaneous for contrivance as shock sets in that their thoroughbred horse – previously secure in a small paddock with a gate latched by two new leather straps – has escaped. Or has it been let out by audacious daylight intruders?

McRae examines the gate collar closely: “it’s been undone,” while Pike runs then walks, desperately searching, and a journalist unhelpfully runs for a camera. Minutes later McRae shouts from beyond a hedge at the end of a race, “he’s over here!” In another paddock behind a closed gate is the missing horse. Is this imagination running rampant; stress; post-traumatised farmers losing track of themselves?

“I put him in the paddock, when you arrived, that’s what I was doing when you were waiting at the gate,” says Pike. Following scene reconstruction of events, the horse experts and journalist conclude there is no way a horse could push open a belted gate which snags and buries itself into dirt unless lifted heavily, wander off along a meandering race, open another gate into another paddock, close gates behind it then stand aimlessly alone in the middle of that paddock. If it could escape the first paddock it would simply have wandered over to its nearby mates.

“He would’ve met up with his friends, not in another paddock somewhere else. They’re herd animals,” Pike explains later. She says of similar incidents: “We were making sure the horses couldn’t escape because on several occasions Tudor Court got out of her paddock and greeted us at the road gate. She’s been let out because the catches are spring loaded. It was quite scary. It’s happened countless times during the day. We found wires cut, horses let out and gates off hinges – one we found at 10 o’clock in the morning.” Pike, now like a horse with its nose in front, charges, animated, “once we found Judy, a two-year-old filly locked in Pine Tree Palace (a paddock named after its lone tree).

She was looking bewildered, like what am I doing here. She’d been in another paddock with another horse the night before. No gates were open.”

Was all this a set-up for journalistic impression? Or is it evidence? It seems every time we contact them there’s something new, like the black paint mysteriously sprayed on horses’ hooves, the spray can neatly returned to its exact position inside their laundry; but some might say it all drifts away like smoke from a paddock rubbish fire.

Then again, there’s the electronic bugging and telecommunication surveillance. That seems too much. So the next interview becomes interrogative and planned. The objective? Solicit confession of fraud –

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 43

tax or insurance – an ulterior motive, human error, imagination.

Although the magazine employs a raft of techniques learned long ago, both McRae and Pike survive, emerging unmoved, plausible and credible. Then they add that they want to continue, they don’t care what it takes to get those responsible.

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hese are not people sophisticated in the skills of investigation or interview and some offer opinion that they are perhaps naive when it comes to security and selfpreservation. But what they do not lack is transparency.

They have signed comprehensive privacy act authorisations and court forms allowing Investigate to check everything, from credit-worthiness to criminal history – and engage expert consultants of the lineage who do not come cheap. “Do it,” says Pike after long discussion. She is prepared to use her savings to try turning this investigation from the inactive to proactive and they don’t care what others may think of their claims that they, too, have been spooked.

Hard on the heals of watching the latest New Zealand movie Spooked, it seems ironic to then embark on investigating and writing about … spooks. So when one of this country’s leading forensic experts explains example after example, scenario after scenario illustrating commercial

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espionage and dirty tricks are still alive and very well in New Zealand, it all seems too much. After all, the consultant may be the very spook we’re looking for, or perhaps implicated because that’s the irrational mindset of mistrust that tosses this story around like a rider on an untrained horse.

In 2005 when McRae and Pike discovered their scanner and printer malfunctioning, experts confirmed the probability of bugging. McRae called a friend, who we’ll name Jim, owner of a small computer solutions business, to remedy a seemingly innocent problem. Eventually Jim found a spy bug had penetrated one of the best firewalls available, and was transmitting information from McRae’s computer back to an unidentified source. It was also monitoring everything printed and emailed. Jim delved deeper, and when interviewed at his quiet home amongst immaculate gardens and manicured lawns, he calmly recounts his journey through a matrix of cyberspace voids so unique he sought help from another friend, once a professional hacker with a big reputation. Now reformed, married with children and gainfully employed by a large reputable computer software company, the friend agreed to use past ill-gotten skills to plunge deeper and seek out those hiding behind the electronic masks; visible but so far unidentifiable. Then the friend panicked.

Jim says he received an edgy and skittish call a few nights later from his now-clean-hacker chum saying he was pulling out, he’d found things scary beyond the curtain which frightened even his cavalier-beat-the-challenge mentality; he had too much to lose, family to consider and his job.

“He declined to elaborate,” says Jim, who would not allow us to speak confidentially to his friend.

S

o Jim repaired, ‘cleaned’ and boosted the cyber-defences of McRae’s com puter. But then to his astonishment the spy bug returned with an encore that left them both dumbfounded.

Before McRae’s very eyes the bug began systematically deleting every trace of every intrusion registered on his antivirus/firewall programme. That, after a naive call to McRae about evidence on the computer. He manages to take a blurry, illegible photograph of the screen before all trace is lost.

“That’s not unheard of,” says our expert consultant later, “after insertion it scrubs up behind itself,” he explains mimicking someone scrubbing their back, leaving no trace of what has been done.

Is there a link between computer phantoms vanishing like a black dog racing into the night after fading intruders, and animal torturers?

We shall see, but in the meantime we close this chapter of an ongoing investigation with one more twist. Returning to their home on a day in March 2005, McRae and Pike found Nelson limping heavily from yet another attack. At the time of compiling this report they are searching for the tell-tale hallmarks – spooked horses, horses with syringe marks, dead chooks, to name a few, of yet another invasion but this time things have changed.

Investigate spent part of the previous week and several evenings visiting around a dozen nearby houses. Now, for the first time that locals can remember, a farm neighbourhoodwatch plan is in place with offers of night patrols. A milk tanker driver will shine his spot light over the property during his watch. Registration checks are in progress as we write and a band of angry farmers on the plains are alert.

A police direct cell phone line has been re-activated and McRae is hoping that the next thing to go bump in the night will connect with the end of a black, steel baseball bat.

The bigger mystery – whether these events are indeed connected to criminal activities in the racing industry in the Waikato like Blue Magic – remains like a giant elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. Yet.

i April 2005, 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 45 45 April

WHERE HAVE the

ALL

good men

GONE? It’s a Catch-22 situation. Women are delaying pregnancy until they’ve established careers, and then finding fertility is a big problem for thirty-somethings. And men are running scared of committment, still living at home in their 20s or even 30s.

DANIEL DONAHOO reports on why men are increasingly shying away from parenthood, and women are increasingly holding out for a hero who’s harder to find...

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y colleague shook his head when he heard the news.

“Bloody good decision,” he said. “I should have had kids younger.” At 47, he was the father of a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, and was feeling the strain. He told me on more than one occasion that he’d be 63 when his youngest child turned 21. It wasn’t a prospect he was embracing.

I was 23, full of energy and ready to tackle fatherhood head-on.

For both men and women, there are many benefits in having children at a young age. Women are healthy and more fertile. The likelihood of complications in pregnant women over 35 increases dramatically. Men have more strength and energy, and are not yet set in their

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childless ways. And both genders carry less of the cynicism that the years seem to pile on.

Despite all this, men are helping stall the baby-making process. The average age for first-time dads across the Tasman is 32.5 years: an alltime high. These days, if you are dad in your early 20s, you are on the fringe.

Recent projections suggest we will continue to put off having children. Consequently, fewer couples will end up with kids. The Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates that in 2016, more couples will be without children than with. A similar trend has emerged in New Zealand as well. The birth rate has definitely boarded the down escalator, and the implications could be pronounced.

While the statistics strike out, men of all ages are discovering that becoming a dad is an ambition that is never too early, or late, to pursue. Young dads might be an endangered species, but they would do well to hear the messages from older men who are finding more in fatherhood than they thought was there.

A friend of mine who became a dad at 42 is disappointed he left his run so late. He and his partner won’t be having another child. He now works part-time and shares the care of his daughter, which he says is “the bloody toughest and most rewarding gig” he has ever had. He can understand now why he grew up around so many large Catholic families. “Creating your own family is a feat greater than anything,” he says.

Men these days are often busy establishing careers and embracing singledom. But, for some, stumbling upon fatherhood has made life more fulfilling and shatt-ered all pre-conceptions that having responsibility for a child is something to fear.

I committed to a relationship and having a baby after only knowing my wife for five months. In a society where many men turn and run I decided to stand my ground. By not shirking the responsibility my libido had thrust upon me I suddenly found myself more employable, more capable and tackling responsibilities that the constant delay of singledom had denied me.

Consequently, my life took on new meaning and much greater emotional and financial responsibility. My partner and I turned our $10,000 combined debt, amassed before children, into an eight-acre asset by the time my first son was six months.

Some regard the popularity of delaying fatherhood as a major factor in the decrease of couples with kids. It is an issue documented by Leslie Cannold in her new book, What, No Baby?, which points the finger at men and asks them to consider whether their lack of commitment to equal relationships and shared responsibility is fair on our society.

Cannold wrote recently, “In particular, my research makes clear that while the vast majority of women want to become mothers, their freedom to choose to have children at any particular point is limited by a range of social circumstances and attitudes.”

One of those circumstances appears to be all those things young men believe they ‘should’ do before having kids.

“I want my son to get an education, travel and enjoy himself before he gets married,” one mother told me.

Here, the implication appears to be that marriage and having a family is not an

enjoyable experience. Or at least, not as enjoyable as travelling the world.

The fact is that an increasing number of young men are putting off fatherhood. It isn’t surprising when you measure the images of parenting against pop-culture images of the party-hard, single life. The women who adorn Ralph and FHM don’t ask men to settle down.

But some young men are proving that having children young is not the burden it is made out to be. They are choosing responsibility over partying.

A

s part of my recent research for a forthcoming book, I have been interviewing young dads about their experience of fatherhood. They unanimously agree that it is hard work. But they are living the cliché that the more work you put in, the more rewards follow. They are building upon their own childhood experiences and finding new ways to make family relationships work in the 21st century.

One of those men, Lifon Henderson, has spent his working life as an entertainer, but as a 26-year-old father of two boys he has returned to study to pursue a new career. His wife Barbara Sparks is also studying part-time.

They both balance study, work and raising their children in a juggling act that beats anything Lifon does in his clown shows.

They told me they are looking to be qualified and established in new careers by the time their boys go to school. Having children for them was a grounding experience that brought direction into their lives.

Our society assumes study is something we should do before children. But many stayat-home mums and dads are making the most of new developments in distanceeducation, thanks to the Internet and off-campus learning.

Julian and Anna Hetyey are a young professional couple in their mid-20s who are looking forward to the birth of their first child in just a couple of months. They see this as the first step in a move to reject the hectic work culture that currently dominates their lives.

Julian is adjusting his working arrangements as a lawyer to have a better work-life balance, while Anna will stop practicing podiatry and stay at home for the first few years of their child’s life.

Instead of cementing careers and paying off much of their mortgage before they have children, Julian and Anna have decided that having children will bring their lives a perspective it is currently lacking. They are interested in being part of a community first and foremost, instead of a workplace.

As for me, at 27, a big night out is usually a April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 47

visit to my mum and dad’s. They take care of the kids and my wife and I can kick back and relax. Having children young has meant that my parents are considered young grandparents. Very few of their friends are grandparents.

I

t is a joy to watch my sons roll around on the floor with my dad, or play in the park with mum when they take the dog for a walk.

Yet men who are delaying fatherhood are also delaying their par ents’ grandparenthood. The longer it is delayed, the greater the risk to developing those inter-generational relationships.

Interestingly, the delay of parenthood isn’t for the lack of wanting children. A recent study of over 3,000 fertile Australians is proving that more people want children than we assume, and they want more than one child. According to a recent Australian Institute of Family Studies report, “It’s Not For Lack of Wanting Kids”, a large majority of us aged 20-39 want two or three children.

In the survey men come out looking like they have great family intentions. Those who we would expect to be holding tightly onto their freedom are interested in parenthood. Over 60 percent of single men aged 20-29 ‘definitely want children’, while only 20 percent rule out ever having children. Almost 90 percent of married-but-childless men between 20-39 years indicate they definitely want kids.

So if we want kids, what’s the hold-up?

Men appear to have so many pre-set goals and objectives. There is little imagination or flexibility about the many ways a life can be lived.

Many of us are stuck on a set of mantras promoted by marketers and the

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media: “I want to be secure in my career”; “I want to provide my children with economic security”; “I want to have at least half of my mortgage paid off ”.

I never had a five-year plan. But my younger brother does, and so do many of his drinking buddies. And, despite wanting to have children one day, kids never seem to be factored into these five-year plans. If children are not in the plan, what does happen if one comes along?

Many young men may be denying themselves a happiness they haven’t considered by boxing themselves into a life that is a series of dot points where family and kids don’t figure.

There is a modern-world life-checklist young men complete before they move on to the next goal: finish school, check. Go to uni, check. Experiment with drugs, check. Travel overseas, check. Establish a career, check. Find a partner, check. Buy a house, check. Achieve financial security, check...Have children?

But what if one of those items doesn’t materialise? What if you get stalled for a while in finding the right career, or the right person to love?

The statistics suggest this is what is happening. The result is that while men may aspire to have children, they are less likely to. And if they do, they are unlikely to have as many children as they want.

Still, many men are out there challenging the checklist, taking the less-travelled path and becoming dads. These fathers may not stop the birth-rate decline, but they are demonstrating that there are options out there. And that having kids isn’t the end of the world.

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April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 49

FA M I L Y

SECRET

Nearly 120,000 women terminate their pregnancies every year in New Zealand and Australia. Thousands of others, desperate for a child of their own, undergo IVF and other painful and expensive fertility treatments. And, just to make things more interesting, somewhere around 20,000 kids are sitting in foster homes right this moment, many of them craving a permanent, loving family to truly call their own. In between these stark realities stands adoption: an issue that, despite recent publicity surrounding it, most people leave in the “too hard” basket. JAMES MORROW sorts out the myths from realities and looks at why the adoption option deserves a second look

T

h e first thing many strangers say when they meet Christine* and her five-year-old daughter is, “she looks just like you”. Indeed, mother and daughter do share the same skin tone and chiseled European features. The only thing they don’t share is DNA: Christine had ovarian cancer when she was 19, had both ovaries removed, and although grateful to be alive was left unable to have children of her own. And so, like a small number of couples, Christine and her husband went down the long, sometimes expensive, and often frustrating path of adopting a baby.

As highlighted by the surprise reunion earlier this year between Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott and the son his girlfriend gave up for adoption when he was 19 – albeit later found not to be his – adoption was once a routine practice. But for a variety of reasons – increased access to abortion, more government assistance for single mothers, political concerns, and a loss of stigma around single motherhood among them – adoption has slowly but surely gone out of favour.

In fact, there are now more babies adopted from overseas in New Zealand than actual NZ-born children placed as adoptive children in local homes. In 2002-03, the latest years for which figures are available, just 83 NZ-born children were adopted to non-relatives, down from around 3,500 thirty years ago. * Not her real name; due to privacy concerns and the open adoption regime which keeps birth parents involved in their children’s lives, all the adoptive parents contacted by Investigate and named in this article have asked to remain anonymous.

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By way of comparison, in 2002-03, nearly 600 foreign-born children were adopted by New Zealanders.

Keith Griffith, author of two books on adoption in New Zealand, believes changing social factors including the introductionof the DPB and a massive increase in abortions, are among some of the causes of the huge drop in adoptions.

Yet despite the much-discussed fertility crisis – our 1.75 child-perwoman rate is hardly enough to keep the population steady – on the one hand and the vast number of children living in foster or “out-ofhome” care on the other, adoption continues to remain on the sidelines of the family planning agenda.

Part of the reason for this is the time, effort and money involved in adopting a child – though, to be sure, many fertility treatments can also take years and run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Rules, procedures and costs vary from case to case depending on complexity and arrangements, but legal fees running to the thousands can be involved, while the cost of overseas adoptions is likely to run to $20,000 to $40,000 or more, especially once plane tickets, accommodation, and other travel-related expenses are factored in. And money is no guarantee of getting a child, either: even qualified parents have been known to wait five, six, seven years or more before being allowed to take home a new member of their family, though two to three years seems the norm. “Adoptions are made so very carefully,” says Jane West, a spokesperson for Anglicare Adoption Services in Sydney.

Beyond being able to afford the cost (fees are waived for special-

needs adoptions, says West), typically couples need to be between the ages of 21 and 45, have been married for three years (though some agencies accept de facto partners and singles) and be citizens. Much of the expense comes from the training, background and reference checks and medical screens which are all performed. Once these steps are completed, the lucky couple is then put in a pool of applicants with no guarantee that they will ever be chosen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, West points out that when a child is placed for adoption, his or her birth mother is given extensive counseling (as is the father, if he can be located) – a far cry from the bad old days when young mothers had to give up their children literally without so much as a second look. Birth mothers are given a selection of profiles of potential adoptive families to choose from, and have final say over with whom their child is placed.

“We had never really had any plans to adopt when we got married,” says Christine, who says that she had been thinking about the idea for a while when, one night, she turned to her husband in bed and said, “what do you think about adopting a child?” To her surprise, he thought that was a great idea, and before they knew it they were taking the first steps into the maze of adoption.

When they started the process in 1998, they had planned to go to Romania to find a child because they were under the belief, subtly encouraged by social workers, that there were simply no children available to adopt locally.

And Christine and her husband were fine with that idea; as she says, “we figured that we’d be doing the right thing by giving a baby who needed one a home, the baby would be happy, we’d be happy and, well, everyone would be happy!”

But the more they researched it and found out that it was actually possible, the more they became convinced that they wanted to adopt a child born in this country – though Christine admits that initially she was scared off by the whole process of “open adoption”, which allows for contact between the birth mother and her offspring. (Indeed, the ongoing rights and feelings of the birth mother are one reason why Christine’s family has asked for anonymity).

“At first, I have to admit, it was really difficult from my perspective. It was like the changing of the guard: one family is accept-

ing this new responsibility, and seeing the woman who gave birth to your child is probably the most difficult part of the whole adoption process,” she says.

In fact, when Christine and her husband initially filed their applications, they said that they were not keen on having contact with the birth family, though they were encouraged when a social worker told them that, paradoxically, “the families who say they want the least contact often turn out to be the best candidates for open adoption”.

E

ven though it was initially difficult (her daughter sees her birth mother twice a year: once around her birthday, and once around Christmastime), Christine says it has actually been a blessing in disguise. “For my daughter, I think she’ll benefit from the contact,” she says. “And I know from my circle of friends who adopted from overseas that we are lucky to have this contact. In the beginning, yeah, it was extra stress, but now five years down the track I think it’s fantastic.” One feature Christine is especially keen on is the fact that her daughter has a real sense of where she comes from: “She knows her story, she knows everything, but it doesn’t really come up much. It’s just how it is. For the most part it’s been really positive.”

While Christine’s story has had a happy ending, she and others who have been intimately involved with adoption are concerned that, with so many children in need, far too many are being shuttled back and forth from foster homes to unsuitable and abusive family situations and back again – hurting their abilities to form trusting bonds with anyone, and creating thousands upon thousands of adults who will, in all likelihood, have repeated runins with the law or simply become wards of the state. A recent study by Australia’s CREATE Foundation, an advocacy group for children in state care, confirms that that is just what is happening, with those in foster care reporting that they are missing school, are victims of bullying, have trouble making and keeping friends, and are subject to everything from decreased educational aspirations to emotional instability and violence.

The head of the NSW Adoptive Parents Association, who, like Christine, has concerns for her privacy and that of her adoptive child’s birth mother and thus asks that her last name not be used, is a woman called Sonia. She recalls going to an Adelaide conference on adoption in 2004. Sitting in the audience amongst a thousand other delegates, she heard that there were many children in various state foster care systems who had gone through eleven or more placements in the space of just April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 51

ABOUT FACE: New Zealand’s fertility crisis has some rethinking adoption

a few years – numbers confirmed by CREATE. According to Sonia, there is a golden opportunity here to connect at least some of these children up with parents wishing to adopt, and she believes the government ought to set some sort of time limit – even just a loose one – stating that after a certain amount of time in foster care, a child should be eligible to go into the adoption pool.

“Surely adopting would be more appropriate than long-term fostering,” she says. “We have learned from the stolen generation, and we’ve learned from the days when we forced adoption on girls when there wasn’t any other option, but since we don’t have that social structure anymore where women are forced into doing something they don’t want to do, why can’t we do something about it?,” she asks. “If a child has to spend, say, a year in foster care while some issues are sorted out, that’s one thing. But if we see that a child is going back and forth from foster home to birth parent and then back out again to some other foster home, there has to be a point at which we say, enough is enough?”

H

aving children is one of the most emotional and important issues to face New Zealanders, both as individuals and as a nation. Without enough young people who have been raised up to be solid, productive citizens, fifty years from now the country will find itself in the same position as contemporary Western Europe.

There, an aging population which is incapable of replacing itself has been forced to make what now looks like a devil’s bargain with various increasingly hostile immigrant groups in order to keep their leaky welfare state economies afloat. While this sort of situation is unlikely to occur here – for one thing, New Zealand is generally a lot better at assimilating new migrants – the fact remains, we’re not raising enough kids to keep our economy growing at the sort of clip that has, until recently, been standard operating procedure.

So where does adoption fit in? Certainly, it takes a very special sort of person to decide to go through filling out the forms, sitting

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through the interviews, and writing the cheques that go along with becoming an adoptive parent. And, on the other hand, it also takes a very special kind of person to recognize that, under their particular circumstances, their child might be better off being placed with another family. All anecdotal indicators suggest that there are large numbers of parents who would consider adopting children if they thought that the process was easier and that there were more NZborn kids who not only needed permanent homes, but were eligible for them as well. (Christine recalls that in a moment of candour, a social worker – who was later happily proved wrong – told her “there are no healthy babies out there for adoption”, an attitude which surely causes plenty of prospective parents to chuck in the towel before they even begin).

It’s a comment echoed by author Keith Griffith, who says prospective parents now think there’s no point going on a waiting list because their chances are so slim.

There are many things that need to happen before adoption is thought of as more than just a pricey and rare special offering on the menu of reproductive choices. Part of this could include a look at allowing private adoptions, a process that has worked successfully for years in the United States to put couples in touch with women who want to adopt out a child.

Furthermore, too, cultural attitudes must shift, and concerns about repeating the mistakes of the past must eventually subside if they get in the way of doing good in the future. The number of terminations and children in foster care on the one hand and, on the other, the number of couples going through difficult infertility treatments shows that there are lots of parents who want children but can’t have them – and vice versa – in New Zealand.

For the record, of the thousands of kiwi kids in foster care during 2003, only two were adopted by their foster families.

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THE DEATH OF TAXES As pressure builds on the Clark Government to cut taxes, IAN WISHART reports on moves in the United States that go one giant leap further, and which may yet impact on New Zealanders: the possible abolition of income tax

T

here is nothing as certain, so the old joke goes, as death and taxes. But by the end of this decade, it could be income tax itself lying dead and buried in the graveyard of bright ideas that outlived their use-by dates. If it seems like a bold, even ludicrous, idea, that may be more reflective of the way we’ve been conditioned to think about income tax than the merits of the prediction.

At the heart of it all lies a “rolling thunder”-style tax revolt that’s been quietly sweeping across America since the 1990s. In places as diverse as local community halls, Washington, D.C. thinktanks, and plush resort hotels in offshore tropical tax havens, people have been quietly gathering to discuss ways of removing America’s cumbersome Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from their lives. Many of those meetings were instigated by so-called tax rebels who argued that the US Tax Code was invalid, and that people had a constitutional right, backed up by old Supreme Court judgments, not to pay the federal income tax.

Significantly, these tax rebels also took their arguments to Australians and New Zealanders in the late 1990s with a series of offshore “tax seminars” held in exotic locations like Vanuatu and Fiji. While the legal niceties of the Australasian tax codes were different to those in the US, the principles were the same and a tax revolt briefly flowered here in New Zealand as a result. But in America it actually took root.

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Whether the arguments were right or wrong turns out to be immaterial, because as of 2005 the tax revolt has placed so much pressure on the US tax system that it’s cracking at the seams.

Just a few short weeks ago, President George W. Bush put the abolition of income tax firmly on his domestic agenda this term, with a special advisory panel due to report its recommendations by July 31st.

And, later in March, US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan added his voice to what is now a cacophony of calls for income tax to go, saying that individuals should be taxed on what they consume rather than what they earn.

You heard it right.

It is an issue that has barely touched the radar of most media in Australia or New Zealand, but the implications for our region if the United States abolishes income tax are huge. And both the NZ and Australian governments know it.

Investigate understands Australian Treasurer Peter Costello and his officials are keeping a close eye on developments in the US because – just like the old Vietnam War red peril theory – if one domino falls then other Western democracies may have no choice but to follow suit.

Here in New Zealand, Opposition Leader Don Brash, a former central banker, is also “watching with considerable interest”.

“Although we have a much more rational and clean tax system than

the US does, the Labour government has been complicating our system over the past few years by adding higher marginal rates.

“If the United States were to abolish income tax in favour of some kind of direct expenditure tax, then I would think that is certainly something that countries like New Zealand and Australia would have to take a serious look at.”

Most people probably cannot remember a time when income tax was not part of their lives, yet income tax is actually a very modern invention. While kings had the power to levy special taxes on ordinary citizens to pay the bills during times of war, income taxes were not permitted – and in fact had been expressly outlawed from the time of the Magna Carta.

Contrary to popular belief, taxes on commoners were extremely uncommon throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Britain was the first major nation to impose an income tax, between 1799 and 1816, to fund the Napoleonic Wars with France. The US Government imposed a special income tax in 1864 to fund the Civil War effort, but under the US Constitution the tax had to be repealed in 1872.

Having seen the benefits of a national tax on citizens, however, the governments of both Britain and America realised they could do so much more if they could find a way to permanently collect income taxes. In 1874, just two years after the US tax was repealed after the Civil War, Britain introduced sweeping legislation, including a partial repeal of aspects of the Magna Carta, and gave itself the power to impose a permanent income tax.

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ew Zealand and Australia followed soon after. News headlines from the time disclose considerable public disquiet about the idea, and warnings it would be “the thin end of the wedge”. But in pioneer lands like Australia and New Zealand where roads and infrastructure needed building, the income tax pill was largely swallowed whole by the public. Still, there were many who felt the tax burden, at one and a half pennies in the pound (a tax rate of about 0.75% in today’s terms), was onerous. Just what those first Australians would make of today’s 48 per cent tax rates is unclear (New Zealand’s top rate hit as

much as 66% in the 1980s), but history appears to have borne out the warnings that giving a government the power to levy income taxes – even at 0.75% – was indeed the thin end of the wedge.

Not to be outdone by the Mother Country and the Antipodes, US officials reintroduced a federal income tax in 1894, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. So in 1913, amid much lobbying from merchant bankers who saw the chance to make lots of money, the US reintroduced income tax by way of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It is this document that lies at the heart of the US tax revolt after revelations in the past ten years that the Sixteenth appears never to have been properly ratified by the required number of state governments.

Therefore, argue the protestors, income tax remains illegal under the US Constitution.

Either way, the protests over the past five years have seen hundreds of thousands – some commentators say it is into the millions – of American individuals and small businesses refusing to file their tax returns, and tying the NEWSCOM IRS up in red tape and court challenges every step of the way. Adding insult to injury for April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 55

the IRS, it has lost some cases in front of unsympathetic juries – spend most if not all of their income on the necessities of life and fueling the perception that income tax might indeed be “voluntary” in have no way of avoiding a sales tax, while the wealthy can save their the US. money or invest it and not be taxed. It’s a simplistic argument at the In August 2001, Investigate was the first media organization in the best of times – the low paid haven’t generally been able to avoid southern hemisphere to report that the recently-elected President Bush income tax either – but in the case of the FairTax the argument fails at was taking on board the protests and considering abolishing the fed- an even more basic level. eral income tax: Recognising the need to ease the burden on the poor, the FairTax “The growing rebellion against income tax that’s sweeping New Zealand, provides for regular tax rebates to every single household in America, Australia, the United States and Canada has just taken a major step towards so that a family of four on the poverty line, with a household income achieving its goal: US President George Bush has confirmed he is considering the of just US$23,000 a year, will effectively pay zero tax. Under that $23,000 complete abolition of income tax in the United States. threshold, the tax system actually works in reverse, so that families “In a front page story in The New York Times on July 16, Bush’s chief under the poverty line will not only get all their tax back, they’ll get as economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey confirmed that the White House has adopted much as 23% more of their income back on top of that. In real terms, a Ground Zero approach to tax reform, and that all issues, including the scrap- say the FairTax proponents, for a family of four on a household inping of income and company tax altogether, are “in the discussion stage.” come of US$45,000, the effective tax rate will be only 11.5%, and at “ ‘The facts are that one needs a broad consensus before moving on fundamen- $90,000 it is still only 17.2%, rising to 20% by the time you’re earning tal tax reform,’ Lindsey said. ‘The process of building that consensus takes $180,000. time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start the process’.

President Bush has instructed a nine-member panel of “If the White House does push ahead with ditching the century-old income experts to conduct a series of public hearings on the idea of abolishing tax, the newspaper reports a likely replacement is either a flat sales tax of income tax, and they’re due to report back to the White House this between 20 and 30 percent, or an Australasian-style GST. “Pressure’s been coming July. building in the United States At one of the hearings for nearly a decade for the US in March, US Federal Simply punch your gross annual salary into a Government to come clean on Reserve chairman Alan the constitutional status of Greenspan threw his calculator, divide it by 52, and that’s how much the income tax. Lawyers, connot-inconsiderable influtake home cash you’d get every week gress researchers and even ence behind the idea of former Internal Revenue Servscrapping income tax ice agents are now saying the income tax is illegal - that its introduction in 1913 and replacing it with a consumption tax. “As you know, many econowas not properly ratified by the states of the Union, and that ordinary Ameri- mists believe that a consumption tax would be best from the perspeccans cannot be forced to pay it. tive of promoting economic growth – particularly if one were design“The White House has also been sandwiched in a pincer movement between ing a tax system from scratch,” argues Greenspan, “because a concompeting groups of tax rebels. One of them, the FairTax organisation, sumption tax is likely to encourage saving and capital formation.” has congressional, bipartisan support and its cause is being championed by A recent OECD report noted Australasian marginal income tax rates Congressman John Linder (R-Georgia) and Congressman Collin Peterson, are among the highest in the world. If America does indeed get rid of (D-Minnesota). income tax less than a hundred years after it was introduced, it will “The two men, with a number of other politicians behind them, have intro- undermine the philosophical foundations of income tax in other westduced legislation to Congress clearing the way for the abolition of income tax in ern democracies like Australia and New Zealand, where it has crept favour of the so-called FairTax.” from 0.75 cents in the dollar when it was introduced to 39 cents in the That was August 2001. A month later, the attacks on the World dollar today. Not only are the US, Australian and New Zealand tax Trade Center took Bush’s attention away from domestic issues codes huge and unwieldy – running to thousands of pages and requirand agendas like the FairTax. But the Linder/Peterson proposal ing teams of Queens Counsel to interpret – the wastage in the collecto totally reform America’s, and possibly the West’s, taxation system tion system is also massive. didn’t disappear.

Most tax money taken from private citizens gets eaten by the large government bureaucracies set up to administer the system. In the US, ver the past four years, largely through an email blitz the people behind the FairTax are quietly confident their proposal will fired out from their website fairtax.org, the Con- get the green light from the White House, though it will still have to gressmen have marshaled the support of more than get through a string of congressional and senate committees and pubhalf a million Americans and a large number of lic hearings.

“Can you imagine,” writes one advocate, “what Joe Public will think current and former politicians and business leaders.

And, fresh from introducing democracy to the Middle East, George W. when he wakes up one morning, five years from now, opens his Bush now has the chance for a domestic legacy as well: becoming known paycheck and finds the government has taken nothing in tax? Suddenly, Joe is in charge of his own financial destiny.” to future historians as the President who killed income tax.

For people who, like National’s Don Brash, will be watching how Bush can’t stand for re-election in 2008, so this term he’s largely unfettered by political considerations. And Bush has shown he’s a this plays out in the next few months, it won’t be too hard to do the math: simply punch your gross annual salary into a calculator, divide it man who likes to pursue big visions. by 52, and that’s how much take home cash you’d get every week. How Which is why the FairTax may return to centrestage this year.

In the form now being proposed in the US Congress, the FairTax much tax you’d pay would be determined entirely by how much you would see the federal income tax abolished, the IRS disestablished, bought that week.

Is this kind of tax reform possible in New Zealand? Maybe. Just ask and the introduction of a 23% flat-rate sales tax imposed at the final point of sale to end users. Nothing particularly new in the idea of a the people who questioned the possibility of democracy in the sales tax, you might say. And critics of sales taxes are usually quick to Middle East. suggest they are unfair to the low paid, because people on low incomes

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Is there a biotech industry plan to control world food supply?

So you thought the GM food battle had been fought and sorted? Think again.

CLARE SWINNEY reports on so-called Terminator-genes that make crops sterile, and could leave the biotech industry in full control of the world’s food supplies icture yourself in sub-Saharan Africa, a hot dry breeze whipping up eddies of dust from the infertile ground. Around you, your children and family; starving and thirsty, because this year you couldn’t afford to buy the corn seed you needed from Monsanto or Syngenta. Where once you’d have saved the seeds of your own corn or wheat crop to re-sow next year, now the natural lines have been contaminated by the sterile GM varieties and your own crops have become sterile too.

Now imagine, on a world scale, what happens if Terminator technology spreads and becomes dominant? There are a lot of ifs, such as whether human-engineered biotech varieties would be stronger or weaker than the natural ones, but is it a risk the world really wants to take?

Only a few years ago, Genetic Engineering (GE) was part of the media’s main oxygen supply. The Royal Commission’s report on GE, the attack on GE-potato crops at a Crop & Food Research facility at Lincoln, the Prime Minister calling TV3s John Campbell a “little creep” when he confronted her without warning with details from Nicky Hagar’s book – Seeds of Distrust, the throngs on GE-free marches, the lifting of the moratorium on the commercial release of GE in October 2003 - all these stories were treated as momentous.

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Today GE issues no longer ride the crest of the media wave, but are submerged, out of public sight and mind, with even significant stories being ignored as if GE is old news. So much so that you probably didn’t even know that a Private Members Bill to reinstate the moratorium on the commercial release of GE in New Zealand, was voted down in Parliament on March the 16th, 2005. Despite support from New Zealand First, The Maori Party, The Green Party and the government’s own coalition partner - The Progressives, the vote was met with complete silence by the media at the time, ensuring that the public was none the wiser.

And there are other stories you’ve not been told about. Worldwide there has been an informal moratorium, (not an outright ban), on the use of seed-sterilisation techniques, which are officially referred to as Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTS). One of the most contentious aspects of this is referred to as Terminator technology or “suicide seeds,” designed specifically to become barren after the first generation. The intention of this informal moratorium was to give the global community time to come to terms with the scientific and ethical issues associated with GURTS, before further work was pursued. It was instigated in 1998 following international outrage after

the public learnt about a patent for “suicide seeds”.

The public condemnation prompted the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to impose an informal moratorium on GURTS’ further development. o what is Terminator? “Suicide seeds” are a type of GURTS that are technically very difficult to produce and their commercial use is likely to be a number of years away.

But Terminator-seed technology, while still experimental, has not been regarded well by the international community for scientific, commercial, ethical and moral reasons. Some regard it as the outcome of a long process of companies seizing control over living things, which began when biological heredity started to become a commodity.

If allowed to be released commercially, many people believe the cost of the technology will impact heavily on farmers, as Terminator uses genetic engineering techniques to program a plant’s DNA to kill its own embryos, thus forming sterile seed. The plant-to-seed-toplant-to-seed cycle of life is broken, preventing a farmer from saving the harvested seed to grow next season. This will force the farmer to return to the seed companies each year to purchase new seed, that could be encumbered with heavy GE-seed technology-licensing fees.

This is of particular concern for struggling Third World farmers, who traditionally save seeds to plant the following season, but who are viewed as prime targets for the Terminator concept by GE-seed companies.

One of the foremost authorities in the field of seed sterilisation technology is retired Professor of Biology at Indiana University in the

US, Dr Martha Crouch. A former genetic engineer, she helped develop Terminator sterile seed technology, but became so appalled with the ethical implications of her work, that she shut her lab door on it.

‘How the Terminator terminates: An explanation for the non-scientist of a remarkable patent for killing second generation seeds of crop plants, was written in 1998 by Dr Crouch about the first patent granted for a Terminator, and although somewhat dated, is still regarded as an excellent reference and available on the Internet.

In the document, Dr Crouch details her concerns about Terminator seeds. She believed they may be unsafe to eat by humans and other species, and suggested they may be allergenic because of the toxic component used to kill the embryo. She also questions whether their nutritional value would be equivalent to that of non-GE seeds, an issue raised about other April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 59

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Photography: COREY BLACKBURN GE crops also. Furthermore she states that although the patent application was proposed as a method to prevent contamination from Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), the technique was not likely to function well for such a purpose and would probably be hazardous to the environment.

This first Terminator patent application, titled ‘Control of Plant Gene Expression,’ was filed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in partnership with a U.S.-based cotton seed company, Delta & Pine Land Company in 1995, and the patent granted in 1998. Since then, Terminator patents have been granted to Syngenta, BASF, DuPont, Monsanto and the research foundations of Cornell and Purdue amongst others.

In regard to the viability of these patents, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Studies at Auckland University, Dr Robert Mann points out that the existence of these doesn’t mean that any one of the inventions will function as proposed.

“The Terminator patent does not entail any evidence that such a seed exists or could exist. Patents are granted without regard to whether the invention would work. Unless the application describes a blatant violation of scientific law, such as a perpetual motion machine, a patent may be issued for what the examiner is convinced will not work,” he asserts. While this may be so, it has not stopped corporations from pouring millions and millions of dollars into trying to achieve a commercially viable product.

So what does this business about seed sterilisation technology have to do with New Zealand? This year, at a United Nations CBD meeting held in Bangkok from February the 7th to the 11th, the Canadian government was found to be making a bid to overturn the informal moratorium on GURTS and observers at the conference reported that the 62, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

attempt had been backed by the New Zealand and Australian governments. In stark contrast, many African and Asian governments called for Terminator to be banned and the European Union has been supportive of the existing moratorium. As a result of last-minute negotiations the informal moratorium on this technology is set to continue, at least until the issue is revisited by another CBD advisory body in March 2006. e questioned the Minister for the Environment, Marian Hobbs, on New Zealand’s position on this technology, a position which is regarded by many as an attack on farmers in the developing world, who traditionally save seed, and as an attack on the integrity of the food supply, and on the natural cycle of life and the environment. We put it to her that the majority of countries clearly back an informal moratorium while the complex social and ethical issues are discussed, before proceeding with the terminator-style projects and asked her if whether New Zealand accepted there was an informal moratorium at all? In her reply the Minister side-stepped the question: “The decision reached in 2000 by the fifth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, recommended that, until there was enough scientific data, countries should be encouraged not to approve GURTS. This constitutes a recommendation to Parties, and not a formal moratorium.”

However, the Minister showed her standpoint more clearly in a press release dated 10th February 2005. She states: “New Zealand has no firm view on the merits of new organisms involving seed sterilisation technology, but supports their case-by-case assessment rather than a blanket ban.”

Consumer rights advocate and spokesperson for GE Free NZ in food and the environment, Jon Carapiet says that in opting for this “case-by-case” stance, the Minister is breaking ranks with the international community.

“She’s refusing to state a clear stand on this most contentious issue - patented Terminator seed technology. This was not designed to offer environmental benefits of restricting spread of GMOs, which some argue other GURTS may bring. Terminator is to control the patent on the seeds and prevent farmers from saving seed. It’s an ethical, human rights, food security, social justice and sustainability issue, not just a scientific one, which Marian Hobbs is pretending it to be,” he says.

Carapiet believes that instead of taking the case-by-case approach, the Minister should be choosing “voluntarily” to put a hold on GURTS while the discussions continue internationally on the pros and cons of Terminator technology.

According to a member of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Genetics (PSRG), 63-year old Dr Robert Anderson, who holds a combined honours degree in physics and chemistry, and a PhD in science education, GURTS technology is still very experimental and the mantra that government ministers echo worldwide, that we use a “case-by-case” approach, is disingenuous.

“As I mention in my book, The Final Pollution, the “case-by-case” claim is misleading.

Geneticist Dr Mae-Wan Ho said in her review of the British GE Science Review, that it is deeply flawed. It “side-steps fundamental criticisms of GE technology and fails to take the full range of scientific evidence into account.

It is riddled with misrepresentations, halftruths and worse.”

Dr Anderson, who wrote Exploding the Myth of Genetic Engineering, and is in the process of obtaining a publisher for The Final Pollution, deems these comments made by The Institute of Science in Society to summarise the situation employed by the New Zealand regulatory system perfectly: “The ‘case by case’ approach advocated is based on the unsupported assumption that there is nothing wrong with GE technology in general. The most that is being investigated is whether any particular crop presents specific hazards. At no point are the important and fundamental issues addressed, thus the public assume all is well, no thanks to the complicit corporate press. Worse, each application that is approved serves as a precedent for approving later ones and, in the end, it will be claimed that the entire technology has been properly investigated and approved, when in fact it has never been investigated at all.”

“To be pushing something that almost the

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whole world agrees is wrong to proceed with under current scientific knowledge and circumstances is shocking in my opinion,” grumbles Carapiet. “The case of Percy Schmeiser alone is a good reason to make a stand against it. It is a wake-up call to civil society,” he says. (see: www.percyschmeiser.com).

Although the case of farmer Percy Schmeiser versus Monsanto is not concerned with Terminator technology per se, it does offer a chilling insight into what happens when a company patents seeds and what could happen if Terminator seeds became commercially available. It was billed as a classic David-and-Goliath confrontation between an aged Canadian farmer and a corporate giant. Schmeiser had proudly grown his own strains of canola for over forty years using traditional farming techniques, but was accused by Monsanto of using their patented genetically-modified canola, Roundup Ready (RR) canola, on his 1,400 acre farm, without paying a fee for it.

Schmeiser says in the late-1990’s he found canola in a ditch by one of his fields and sprayed it with herbicide but, to his surprise, it failed to die. He realised his farm was contaminated with Monsanto’s RR canola and did a field test on three acres of his canola crop, discovering 60% of the canola plants sprayed with Roundup survived in clumps. It’s estimated that 40% of the canola grown in Canada is Monsanto’s RR canola. It was already being used by five of his neighbours, who were paying a licensing fee of US$15 an acre for it and they, like others using it, had entered into an agreement with the seed sellers to buy it yearafter-year and to only use the proprietary chemicals sold by Monsanto.

Monsanto, which had investigators doing field tests in the area, accused Schmeiser of stealing its seeds. Schmeiser said he hadn’t - that the seeds arrived somehow without his knowledge - yet Monsanto sued him for illegally using its patented GE canola.

For seven years now and at great personal expense in court costs and stress, Schmeiser, who says he’s been fighting for the fundamental right of the farmer to save seed and use it year-after-year, has maintained that the RR canola pollen must have blown onto his field, or seed fallen from passing trucks.

In a decision that shocked farmers, Judge MacKay made it clear that it didn’t matter how the seed got on his land - Schmeiser was guilty. He stated: “Yet the source of the Roundup resistant canola...is really not significant for the resolution of the issue of infringement…” utrageous as it was, it also didn’t matter that Schmeiser didn’t benefit whatsoever from the RR seed. In order to derive any economic benefit from growing it, he’d have to sell it as seed, or spray Roundup, and he’d done neither.

None of these points are disputed. No one, including Monsanto argued that Schmeiser actually benefited or even intended to benefit from growing a crop contaminated with GE plants, but these details were of no consequence. He was found guilty, and fined US$15/acre x 1030 acres, plus the value of his crop US$105,000, plus US$25,000 for punitive and exemplary damages. And to add insult to injury, he lost the improved genetics resulting from his lifelong practice of saving his own seed to produce his own tailor-made variety of canola, as his own crop was confiscated.

Offers Dr Anderson: “We’ve a full-length documentary of Percy, together with all the other poor devils that Monsanto has screwed to the wall. As the US president of the Corn Growers so aptly put it when he came over to see us: ‘We’ve been screwed.’ They certainly have!”

According to the editor of The GE Sellout, Jonathon Eisen, who is due to launch a magazine titled Uncensored, the reach of the multinationals such as Monsanto, has become so pervasive that they would have little trouble corrupting individual politicians, cultures, international agencies, NGOs and traditionally independent judicial systems in their quest for greater and greater power. The state does their bid64, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

ding and their enforcing, through its politicians, and thus via its laws, police and court systems.

“There is now virtually nothing left of a system that at least once made a token effort to separate corporate influence from how and what we think,” warns Eisen.

While it’s transparently clear Schmeiser is a victim, the Royal Commission report had no sympathy for him, nor concern about the destructive effect Monsanto’s [and other GE-seed companies] policies have on traditional farming. It states: “Anti-genetic modification campaigners mentioned his case as exemplifying the perceived evils of GM crops. In the event the Canadian court held that Mr Schmeiser had knowingly used genetically modified seeds without authority, thus infringing Monsanto’s patent,” (p.147). Such economy with the facts, in a document used by our government for formulating decisions, will by its very nature have an insidious influence.

A case in point: in discussion with the New Zealand First spokesperson for Agriculture, Brian Donnelly, Investigate used the Schmeiser saga as a reason not to pursue Terminator technology. His rebuttal was that the Royal Commission report had found that Schmeiser was guilty.

Hon Marian Hobbs says she too has been reliant on the Royal Commission to formulate her understanding of the issues. She admits: “The Royal Commission has been the major effect on my thinking of how a government manages any risks,” but then dodged answering a question on whether she would support a ban on GURTS like Terminator seeds, which are designed solely to stop farmers saving seeds and protect patents. “I am unwilling to offer a position on such a hypothetical and speculative scenario. This technology is new,” she offers.

She was also asked to comment on Terminator techniques from a humanitarian perspective, but remained silent on this critical issue.

Says Carapiet: “Terminator technology and the ethical issues are not new as Marian says - they’ve been around for at least 6 years and Marian’s refusal to be drawn on the ethical issues betrays the government’s strategy of separating scientific debate from ethical issues. They lack a moral or ethical foundation for their decision-making, which is the nub of the problem!”

Investigate asked the Minister to address the ethical and moral issues related to Terminator, but she avoided doing so repeatedly, electing instead to echo corporation spin on “What the farmers can do with even more GE.” For instance, she believes it should be remembered that there is potential for seed sterilisation to offer benefits for agriculture, including small farmer holders, and management of indigenous plant communities. She says: “Controlled use of some forms of GURTS technology could reduce unwanted breeding between GM commercial crop varieties and closely-related indigenous or wild relatives as the hybrids formed through cross-pollination would be sterile. Other forms of GURTS could provide the ability for plants to express certain agricultural characteristics in particular ways, or at particular times that best suit the environment or the farmer’s needs.”

In light of the prevailing domination of our culture by the corporation, and the fact that New Zealand is investing hugely in biotechnology, it is not surprising that the Minister repeatedly avoids the ethical implications of the Terminator technology says Dr Anderson. “It’s diabolically unethical and reflects, to a large degree, the corporate mind-set: to control the world’s food supply and the world’s farmers,” he remarks.

Investigate persisted with the Minister using a scenario that is quite feasible on the basis of a report in Nature, (22 March 2005) - Swiss company Syngenta distributed GE corn that didn’t have regulatory approval for more than four years ‘by mistake.’ We asked Hobbs: “What would happen if a Third World farmer buys seeds, not knowing the seeds are Terminator, saves them for the next year and plants his crops – and nothing grows?” And she began her reply: “Again you have presented a hypothetical and speculative scenario.”

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As Carapiet points out - all GE research is “speculative,” but that doesn’t mean that the Minister can ignore the implications of it from an ethical perspective. erhaps to reassure the public, the Minister asserted that Terminator technology is years away from commercial application and the issue will be discussed at future international meetings. “At this point, it can be anticipated that sound commercial controls such as appropriate provision of consumer information will apply to such goods,” she says. Her arguments infuriate Carapiet, who is on the verge of a meltdown, over what he sees as sidestepping and misleading comments. “This makes my blood boil. It’s such nonsense, as we already have a system where over 20 GE foods can be imported and sold - and don’t have to be labelled in cafes, restaurants, takeaways etcetera and are inadequately labelled on shelves in supermarkets. She has zero credibility on this and why on earth should the public have confidence she will do any better in future?”

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It has been suggested that Marian Hobbs’ refusal to support the informal global moratorium is driven by the knowledge that related work is already under way here. New Zealand currently has experiments on at least one form of GURTS, which is of a different type to those aimed at protecting GE-crop patents. In a field trial in Rotorua, the so-called “Barnase system,” is being tested in GE pine trees to establish how it might kill reproductive cells. While the Minister said she doesn’t believe this breaches the informal moratorium on GURTS, she intimated otherwise in this statement: “I would stress again that decisions on whether to allow controlled research into genetic restriction technologies to be carried out are currently up to individual countries and their domestic legislation. In New Zealand, ERMA controls the use of GMOs under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996.”

Responds Carapiet: “New Zealand has allowed at least one trial in the form of the GE trees – which shows that our system does not stop potentially unethical experiments going on. It’s been left up to ERMA at the local level and they appear to care not a jot for the international de facto

moratorium, which the Minister seems to recognise as being in place.” ccording to Dr Mann, the Minister should be told to condemn the concept of the Terminator, “New Zealand showed the world a good example in excluding nuclear reactors; let us not only ban GMOs except in strict containment, but also show the world again some moral leadership. The pollen from a ‘Terminator’ tree could well be harmful in a variety of ways including actively crossing with wild or cultivated relatives to produce fertile progeny of unknown harmfulness, or novel pathogens.

The prospects for damage are so many, varied, and dismaying that no Minister for the

Environment should condone the notion of field-testing such a rotten idea.”

A study into the effect of GE crops on the environment, the largest in the world thus far, will undoubtedly make it harder for the Minister to justify their use. Recently published in Nature (22 March 2005), the UK investigation showed that GE crops would seriously exacerbate the decline of farmland wildlife, especially plants and birds, as there were fewer seeds, bees and butterflies found in the GE fields owing to the chemicals used.

So far, New Zealand has been free of GE catastrophes such as those that have occurred elsewhere. Even so, we have experienced the GE salmon and Communication Trumps debacle, Corngate, and the mess caused by the Tamarillo aka the ‘Tam Scam’ trials, which has

not been cleared up. Virtually all GE crops have problems that clearly demonstrate the truth, which scientists worldwide have claimed from the beginning, that GE is a seriously flawed technology. Carapiet, and others, argue that the unfortunate outcome of the mainstream media not covering incredibly important GE issues such as the New Zealand government’s support for Terminator technology, is that the government is not being held to account. GE, they say, is dangerous and untested technology, which is being implemented virtually instantaneously worldwide. Genetic engineering biotechnology is beginning to affect every aspect of our lives - and it has vast scope for doing so, if our government allows it to.

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FRONTLINE

THE DREAM OF DEMOCRACY TAKES WING IN LEBANON

Photography: STEWART INNES / ZUMA

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LIFESTYLE

MONEY

MYTHICAL BEAR-FAIRIES Financial analyst Peter Hensley spells out why he has a bearish outlook, and why he’s swimming against the popular mood

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t has been three years since I shocked my colleagues to prove that they followed a system supported by and surprised my clients by radically restructuring their research and textbooks as to why they did what they did investment portfolios. Now, whenever I get together because the textbook said they should. In addition to with industry colleagues, there appears to be an air of this defendable approach they will quote that many of concern and a willingness by them to provide some their industry colleagues follow the same approach, and collective collegiate support. They inquire after my health because they have followed this approach faithfully, they and well-being, suspecting that I have been kidnapped have done no wrong. This may get them off the hook and brainwashed by mythical bear-fairies. technically, but it does not assist their aggrieved clients.

They fear that these fairies have convinced me into Client needs should always come first and foremost. believing that the textbook “buy and hold” theories If a client requires income from their investments, then (which they steadfastly promote) may no longer apply. the investment strategy identified for them by their They are concerned that if I continue to advise clients adviser should allow for it. Income clients should not that share markets could be overvalued and may not be be encouraged to adopt a growth portfolio (which gena wise investment choice, then investors might listen to erally contains inherently higher risk investments) with my story and take appropriate action. a suggestion that some of the assets can be cashed along They are genuinely concerned for my financial welfare the way to provide income. and struggle to Advisers also comprehend that I have a responsibilOne of the side effects to corporate am able to operate a ity to comprehend business that does and understand the globalisation is that countries such as not charge establishinvestment enviUSA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand ment or entry fees. ronment in which now have trade deficits at levels that have They are unable to they are operating. grasp that I do not They should look broken all records. They rely on the kindcharge consultation with their own eyes ness of strangers to fund their excesses or plan-writing fees. and read the signs They look on with that have been knowing and sympathetic nods when they hear that my apparent in the market place for several years. administration and portfolio reporting fees are one quarHistory shows that investment markets go through ter or a third of what they are charging their clients. cycles. The last bull (upward-trending) market in the US They struggle to appreciate the asset allocation and started in 1982 and ended in 2000. Eighteen years of investment selection model that I use to build client unparalleled growth and prosperity fuelled by technoportfolios. They are unable to understand that portfo- logical advancements which were inconceivable to the lios built with a clear preference over weight to income- war ravaged parents of the baby boom generation. The styled investment products provide investors with US authorities, ever aware that as sure as night follows spendable income, which can either be transferred out day, that bust would follow the boom did everything in of the portfolio or compounded back and added to their power to avert the inevitable. They rapidly decreased the principal. the overnight interest rate to below that of inflation They often refer to the defendable approach which and virtually gave money away (free) to financial instituthey have adopted and use for their client funds. Should tions. The carry trade allowed banks to borrow short (at they ever be sued by a disgruntled client they will be able 1%) and lend long at 5%.

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This created an ocean of liquidity which stopped the share market from falling out of the sky, but opened flood gates of money that could not be controlled. It spilled over to other asset sectors and real estate was the next flood casualty. Baby boomers, stymied by the lack of growth potential in the stock market quickly sought another avenue for an effortless return on their money. Because valuations of individual shares had already been pushed to eye-watering levels they chased property prices to obscene levels. Still eager for effortless investment returns they borrowed more (because increased property values allowed them) and invested into hedge funds with high risk and high return strategies.

Now the USA does not have sole rights to high debt levels, skyrocketing share values and overpriced houses. Every country with a baby boom population bulge is suffering similarly. A vast number of the affected are unaware of the fate that awaits them. Maturing baby boomers are collectively spending more than they earn. One of the side effects to corporate globalisation is that countries such as USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand now have trade deficits at levels that have broken all records. They rely on the kindness of strangers to fund their excesses.

I have been told that the very first thing that young doctors are taught at medical school is that they should do no harm. I believe that this ideal should be adopted by investment advisers. They should not harm people’s money nor place it at risk.

My rules are simple. Clients should own their own home, free and clear, with no mortgage. They should eliminate all other debt prior to adopting an investment strategy. In the current environment they should concentrate on investments that produce income. Depending on age and requirements some investors should have a small exposure to growth assets. Depending upon the quality of the underlying asset (or issuer) no investment should be greater than 5 or 10% of the total.

This is my current strategy which is styled to current economic conditions. It will change and be revised when market conditions change.

No one (including me) can predict the economic future of the world.

All I have done is to construct an asset allocation model that recognises some of the perils that could affect world markets adversely.

The flood of liquidity created by the issuing of oceans of new money into financial markets around the world could give birth to two sinister scenarios. We could get a recession or hyperinflation. The antidote to hyperinflation is higher interest rates which in turn is likely to hasten the globe into a worldwide recession and possible depression. People remember the depression when debt was a four letter word and unemployment rose to 30%. People who are debt-free, with savings or a steady job, have little to fear from a depression.

Call me old-fashioned, but being debt-free with a low risk investment portfolio does have its advantages.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 79

LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

SEE, HEAR, DO Hi-tech toys for all your communicating and computing needs

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magine having a home theatre - or for that matter corporate presentation - projection system that didn’t require you to initiate war-time blackout conditions just so you could see the screen. ICE AV Technology Ltd. has just developed a revolutionary new projection screen that will make a bog-standard el-cheapo projector look so good that your mates who spent $6,000 on a state-of-the-art projector will be envious. ICE AV’s “DayLight Digital” incorporates the latest in light refraction research and technology into a screen surface that is 20 times brighter than any other screen on the market. End result is a screen (up to 8 metres wide) you can watch in the office or at home with the curtains wide open and the sun shining. Although we’ve had to superimpose a picture on the screen above to give you an idea because the image we were given had the screen turned off, we’ve seen the system in action and for less than $2,000 it is absolutely phenomenal!

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B

eoCom 2’s cordless telephone is crafted from a single piece of aluminum. The graceful curve of the unique handset fits naturally to your face and hand adding extra ease and comfort. Along with Caller ID and Redial functions, BeoCom 2 also has an electronic Phonebook with space for up to 200 name and number storage. The volume control on the phone can adjust the sound of Bang & Olufsen televisions and music systems directly from the control pad. Weight of handset 220g.

RRP $1570

F

ive hundred dollars for a Mac? You’re kidding, right? Wrong.

Apple’s new Mac mini comes in at A$499, and includes all the bells and whistles, from a DVD-ROM drive to 80GB of hard drive space. Just one thing: BYOKDM (Bring Your Own Keyboard, Display and Monitor).

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alk about your life-like viewing experience: Pioneer’s PDP-505HD Plasma Display flawlessly reproduces High-Definition broadcasts, DVD’s, games, computer graphics, and just about anything else you’d care to watch on a 50" screen that’s less than 4" thick and can be hung on the wall. The 505HD up-converts all sources to a 768 progressive display, resulting in stunning clarity and definition.

Watching movies will never be the same. RRP $7999 – 10,999.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

TYPE-A FOR EFFORT A little hard work never killed anyone, but coping poorly with it can do some real damage

K Claire Morrow

eep working like this and you’ll give yourself an someone who described themselves as calm and worry ulcer!” The year is 1982, and all they do is work, free? I just took an online stress test, and apparently my work, work. Late into the night and early into low score indicated that I am in severe denial about my the morning on this damn fool scheme of theirs. These stress. I think they were trying to sell me something.) are driven men, mavericks, pursuing their research until But if this hard-charging type-A isn’t destined for a finally one of them gets an ulcer. stomach ulcer, then what kind of problems does he or And what was the grail these blokes were chasing? she face? Although it runs contrary to conventional wisProof that stress and personality are not the major fac- dom, having a “Type-A” personality in itself has also tor in the development of peptic ulcers. The men were repeatedly been shown not to cause heart disease. (In Australian doctors J. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, hospitals the joke is that this must be true, because and they intentionally gave Marshall an ulcer to prove cardiologists do not, as a rule, have particularly sanguine their hypothesis, namely, that the bacterium Helicobacter personalities). More often than not, it is how people Pylori (and not worry or stress) is what causes ulcers. It choose to cope with the stress that brings them to grief. took a long while to persuade the medical world of this, Aggressive and high-energy workaholics do many of so it is little wonder that many amongst us still believe things to deal with their stress, and smoking and drinkstress causes ulcers, amongst other things. ing (often a lot) is at the top of many a type-A’s list of Science has been hard at work on the stress-and-health hobbies. Thus high stress often appears to cause illness, connection for some time now, and it’s now very clear when in fact it doesn’t. The stress causes bad behavthat – for rats – iours, and the bad being confined in a behaviours cause High stress often appears to cause illness, health problems. small cage with lots of other rats, an Did I mention when in fact it doesn’t. The stress causes unpredictable food that there would be bad behaviours, and the bad behaviours supply, and the odd hair-splitting? cause health problems electric shock is defiBut this is a nitely not a healthy useful distinction, way to live. Human studies are not nearly so conclusive. because behaviours like smoking can be changed. Of For every study that sees a link, another one doesn’t. course, if society stopped rewarding angry men who work Time for some hair-splitting. hard with nice jobs and lots of money that kind of So-called “type-A” personalities are hostile, impatient behaviour might also diminish, but that’s another story. and competitive. Picture a red-faced fellow running The counter-argument that turns this on its head is across the road (can’t wait for the traffic lights), yakking one I hear a lot, and basically goes like this: “If I don’t into the cell phone that is wedged between his shoulder deal with my aggressive feelings by yelling at people and and ear while at the same time shoveling a burger and slamming my phone down, all those repressed feelings coffee into his mouth. This type of individual is often will make me even more sick, even give me cancer”. Nice described as a workaholic. He (or she) is also probably try, but no. Instead, it’s the same old story: genetics, very good at his or her job, very likely feared and reviled diet, environment, smoking, booze, plus some other by employees and underlings and, in all probability, factors for some specific types, all cause cancer. Personalproudly describes himself (or herself) as a “Type-A per- ity doesn’t. sonality”. Everyone he or she knows warns them of But, despite the lack of a connection to heart and their health risk. (Then again, when did you last meet stomach problems, too much stress is definitely not

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healthy. Remember learning about the body’s fight or flight response in high school biology? Sense danger; flood body with stress hormones like adrenaline; increase heart rate; make breathing rapid and shallow; constrict arteries near the skin (to curtail blood loss); increase blood pressure; release energy stores. All very, very good things to do if you happen to be cornered in a dark alley or need to flee a lion on the African veldt. But these physical responses to stress are of very little help in most offices, unless it is a particularly bad day.

“And don’t even bother with “I don’t have time to…” speech. If you’re a busy person, you don’t have time to be sick either, so take the time to look after yourself now. Here’s the deal: Stress isn’t good or bad. But lots and lots of stress is bad” One stress hormone that does have an impact on health is cortisol. This stuff raises blood pressure, increasing the work the heart has to do (fine in the short term, bad in the long) and suppresses the immune system, which means that it can lead to more infections and the like. Lots of cortisol, lots of the time, leads to lots of irritating colds and flu’s. So chill out. Take a deep breath and breathe out slowly. Now try to keep your blood pressure low and brace yourself for one last little nag.

And don’t even bother with “I don’t have time to…” speech. If you’re a busy person, you don’t have time to be sick either, so take the time to look after yourself now. Here’s the deal: Stress isn’t good or bad. But lots and lots of stress is bad. Go fix it so that disasters don’t happen constantly in your life, or failing that, teach yourself to cope better when they do. Practice saying the words, “thank you for telling me,” instead of “what!!!!! How the !@#$...” This works equally well for “Mummy, the dog did a poo on the sofa” as, “Sweetheart, I love you, but I’m moving to Rio with the tennis pro”.

Also, stop doing all the things that really will shorten your life, and maybe even make it unpleasant while it lasts. Sorry.

Let’s do that again. The cardiologist is going to say that. I’m going to say this: do one thing to be healthier. Maybe it’ll be enough. Maybe it will lead to other lifestyle changes. If you know you eat terribly, and you don’t want to change, at least take the odd vitamin. Run to the shops for your smokes, instead of driving. Drink with dinner, instead of for breakfast, that kind of thing. For my money, I’d start with exercise.

Even if it feels terrible the first twenty times, it will actually start to make you feel good. You will enjoy it, your mood will brighten, and you’ll sleep better. Maybe you’ll smoke less and eat healthier as well. It’s also easier to start doing something and make a new habit than it is to break an old one. If you think you might be getting a bit overwhelmed with stress or have some niggling physical problem, see the doctor. She’ll probably say what I said, only in a bossier tone, but better safe than sorry.

Look, you know what you’ve gotta do, so do I. I’m just going out for a run. To the shops…

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April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

SMART OF DARKNESS One would have to be pretty dim to buy the latest environmental scare story, explains James Morrow

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obody knew it at the time, but thirty years ago similar to that of Malthus (“an angry Gaia will smite us the environmental movement suffered the for not having the moral restraint to resist buying greatest blow to its credibility since a grumpy 4WDs”). And in a day and age when the Bureau of 19th Century Scottish churchman named Malthus made Meteorology can’t reliably predict on Thursday whether his now-infamous prediction that, due to a lack of Saturday’s barbeque will be a washout, the Kyoto treaty “moral restraint”, the world’s population would soon holds a gun to the heads of Western economies – all outstrip food supplies. For it was on 28 April 1975 that based on what are essentially some very long-range the American magazine Newsweek ran a story on the new weather forecasts. ecological scare that was sure to doom the human race: Which is why the latest nightmare scenario to make not overpopulation, but global cooling. headlines around the world is particularly – one might That’s right, cooling. even say darkly – amusing. According to a handful of Here’s how their package, “The Cooling World”, scientists, life on Earth is actually getting dimmer. Here’s began: There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather how a BBC report recently aired in Australia put it: “Nopatterns have begun to change dramatically and that these ticed less sunshine lately? Scientists have discovered that changes may portend a drastic decline in food produc- the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface has tion–with serious political implications for just about been falling over recent decades. every nation on Earth.

“If the climatoloThe drop in food outgists are right, their Which is why the latest nightmare put could begin quite discovery holds the soon, perhaps only 10 scenario to make headlines around the potential for powerful years from now. The disruption to life on world is particularly – one might even regions destined to our planet. Already it say darkly – amusing. According to a feel its impact are the may have contributed great wheat-producing to many thousands handful of scientists, life on Earth is lands of Canada and of deaths through actually getting dimmer the U.S.S.R. in the drought and famine, North, along with a and that even the dirnumber of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts est predictions about the rate of global warming have of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indone- been seriously underestimated.” sia – where the growing season is dependent upon the It gets better. According to this handful of experts rains brought by the monsoon. (cut from the same cloth as the boffins who, thirty years What a difference a few decades make. Not only is the ago, predicted we would all be taking ski holidays in Fiji U.S.S.R. a thing of the past, but global cooling is an all- when not clouting each other over the head for the last but-forgotten article of the greenie faith, consigned to handful of maize), global dimming is a double-edged the dustbin of embarrassing eco-history – along with sword. This sudden bout of planetary mood lighting is predictions that the world would run out of fossil fuels bad, they say, but without it things would be a whole by the year 2000 and that mass famines would trigger lot worse: “By allowing less sunlight to reach the Earth, global conflagrations and economic catastrophe through- global dimming is cushioning us from the full impact out the ‘80s and ‘90s. of global warming, climatologists say. They fear that as Instead, doom-mongers have spent the last decade we burn coal and oil more cleanly, and dimming is focused on global warming, using language surprisingly reduced, the full effects of global warming will be

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unleashed.” In other words, when we’re not making the world hotter, we’re making the world … cooler. We’re damned in both the doing and the don’t-ing, but either way, as the narrator of the BBC’s program on dimming put it in the conclusion, “we have to take urgent action to tackle the root cause of both global warming and global dimming - the burning of coal, oil and gas.

We may have to make very difficult choices about how we live and how we generate our electricity. We have been talking about such things for 20 years. But so far very little has been done in practical terms. The discovery of global dimming makes it clear that we are rapidly running out of time.”

This is the same sort of end-is-nigh apocalyptic language that environmentalists (and their philosophical ancestors) have been preaching for centuries. Malthus told us all to practice some “moral restraint” and stop procreating, lest we all die from mass starvation. Today’s greenies frame the debate in the same moral terms even as journalists and scientists vying for headlines and grant monies out-do each other in trying to freak the public out.

Global dimming is the latest attempt to give some scientific ballast to global warming, which has never borne a lot of close scrutiny.

Indeed, many environmentalists now like to call it “climate change” instead – a deft semantic shift that means just about any freak storm can now be blamed on John Howard and George W. Bush. And it is pretty clear that the science behind dimming is overhyped bunk as well; as Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies put it recently after seeing the BBC documentary, “The suggested ‘doubling’ of the rate of warming in the future compared to even the most extreme scenario [is] highly exaggerated. Supposed consequences such as the drying up of the Amazon Basin,

melting of Greenland, and a North African climate regime coming to the UK, are simply extrapolations built upon these exaggerations … while these extreme notions might make good television, they do a disservice to the science.”

So what is it that is so attractive about global dimming to its supporters? As with Malthus, the answer is not so much scientific as moral, and an underlying discomfort with modern life and all its trappings. Just look at some of the other rhetoric of radical greens these days: people consume too much, waste too much, products come in too much packaging, our food comes from too far away and all this divorces us from one another and the Earth. But this ignores the fact that all this economic activity is actually good for people and, ultimately, the environment: when I got married four years ago in New York City, for example, New Zealand lamb was the main course. This may horrify some as wasteful, but their outrage ignores the fact that those few dozen plates of lamb, multiplied countless times every day, help pay the wages of hundreds of farmers, abbatoir workers, drivers, pilots, fuelers, mechanics, loading dock workers, chefs, and so on – in other words, the sort of ordinary people whom we are supposed to be more in touch with.

The problem with environmentalists is that, after thirty-plus years, it gets awfully hard to take anything they say seriously. Yes, the outdoors is lovely and nature spectacular, and no one wants their kids to grow up breathing thick and smoggy air – which is why economic development is the key to cleaning up pollution, not relying on a bunch of spurious climate models and a distrust of capitalism. When people are allowed to get rich, they can not only desire a cleaner environment, but do something about it as well. In the meantime, the environment is too important to be left to environmentalists.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 85

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

FORGOTEN ISLANDS Jane Wooldridge explores the wildlife on the remote Galapagos Islands, and follows in the footsteps of a man named Darwin

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alapagos Islands, Ecuador: A tawny sea lion that flew into an unprotected booby nest, cracked the sprawls in the middle of the path leading from eggs and gobbled them up.

Each year, 80,000 tourists visit this chain of sea-flooded our Zodiac to the crest of this arid isle. To get to the nesting grounds above, we’ll have to go around volcanoes for what is billed as one of the greatest travel him. A few steps into the skeletal incense trees, we spot adventures. On this day, it beat its reputation.

“This afternoon was worth the whole trip,” says a blue-footed booby. On our first day in the Galapagos, the bird’s adolescent-embarrassing name still draws a Katharine Kevill, a paediatrician from Connecticut.

For the next seven days, we’ll dodge nesting boobies, few giggles.

From a distance of a few metres, we see the baby-blue playful sea lions, dragonlike iguanas and albatrosses webs - not some watery pastel, but a Day-Glo hue right engaged in bill-tapping courting routines as we wander off the fashion runway. The bill, too, is bluish, hunched the Galapagos Islands on the maiden voyage of our over fluffy white chicks that must be protected from particular cruise vessel.

It was here, 1,000 kilometres west of the Ecuadorean wind and sun and marauders. For six months, we learn, mainland, that the young Charles Darwin spent five parents will take turns tending the young.

A blue-footed booby, on our first day! And then we seminal weeks in 1835 during his five-year voyage aboard see another, and another, and another - so many we’re the HMS Beagle. The experience led him to his theory of evolution. playing hopscotch. A The isolated location virtual booby trap, and a rare convergence someone remarks.

I had no idea we could get so close of currents creates a In Hour One of our to the animals and they wouldn’t unique meeting place week-long cruise tour, of species – some we’ve snapped hunmove,” says one tourist beside me, unique in themselves. dreds of digital images dodging another blue booby. “We Coldwater creatures – and stood nearly nosealmost stepped on that sea lion penguins, fur seals, sarto-nose with bluedines and anchovies – footed boobies sitting join migrating whale on nests, boobies feeding their babies, honking and lifting their oversized sharks and humpback whales, albatrosses and boobies (blue-footed, red-footed and masked), flightless cerulean feet in a mating ritual disguised as a can-can.

We’ve stared down tough, spiky headed land iguanas cormorants and sea lions and bright red Sally Lightthe size of schnauzers - the paunchy hunchback punkers foot crabs.

Darwin’s theories and the place that inspired it have of the lounging lizard clan. Male frigate birds hoping to snag a date for the mating season have puffed out the drawn the tourist market.

“The people on board this ship are travelers” huge female-attracting red pouches beneath their chins, as mindless of ogling tourists as the snoozing sea lion not vacationers, says veteran cruiser Joan Vasata.

“The primary purpose is to experience other cultures along the entry path.

“I had no idea we could get so close to the animals and environments.”

Twice each day, we’d head out on Zodiacs for exploraand they wouldn’t move,” says one tourist beside me, dodging another blue booby. “We almost stepped on tions set at three levels. High-intensity activities included a four kilometre walk over stones; the lowest involved a that sea lion.”

We’ve even witnessed nature in its gory: a lava gull boat ride. Galapagos National Park regulations require

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that a naturalist accompany guests - a max of one naturalist for every 16 travelers – on excursions.

On Espanola, a two kilometre walk led to nesting areas of the ungainly albatrosses, which literally flung themselves off a cliff to catch updrafts strong enough to support their weight. Like the blue-footed boobies, the albatrosses have a geek-dance mating ritual complete with bowing, swaying and a clickety-clack crossing of beaks that looks like a fencing match subject to elaborate rules of engagement.

(Albatross couples mate for life, we’re told - but they aren’t necessarily monogamous. A recent study indicates that 70 percent of offspring are not fathered by the mate, our naturalist tells us.)

At the Charles Darwin Center on Santa Cruz, we learned about the famed giant tortoises with their thick, elephantine necks - real-life models for the celluloid “ET”. Conservation programs here have sent 1,200 babies back to the wild. None, alas, are the offspring of Lonesome George, a native of Pinta Island believed to be the last of his race.

When he dies at the ripe old age of 150, George’s kind will be gone unless recent discoveries of scat on Pinta turn out to have come from tortoises.

Later, in Santa Cruz’s jungled interior, we spotted 13 giant tortoises hauling their 500-pound hulks in the wild, then haul our own hulks to the friendly “cevicherias” and bars in the town of Puerto Ayora.

Fernandina Island brought a mob-scene of black marine iguanas – a casting call for the next “Godzilla.” Here, too, nest flightless cormorants, cousins to the Everglades birds but with shriveled wings used now only for swimming - the most extreme example of Darwinian adaptation. Off its coast, we snorkeled with huge sea turtles and human-chasing sea lion pups that dashed in close, then zipped away in a classic fake-out move.

On Bartolome, scene-setter for the movie Master and Commander, we hiked the lava fields, a rugged chocolate canvas of nipples and crags

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that astronaut Buzz Aldrin called the closest thing on earth to going to the moon. From one of its fine, gingery beaches, we watched whitetipped sharks and a hawk that perched only a few metres away.

Snarling fur seals, red-lipped lava lizards, the Galapagos penguins each demanded dozens of photos.

Said honeymooner Jane Williamson of Chicago: “This is the best vacation I’ve ever had. And I’ve had some pretty good ones.”

ABOUT THE GALAPAGOS The Galapagos islands, part of Ecuador, lie 1,000 km west of the mainland. The group is comprised of 13 major islands and 120 smaller ones; 97 percent of the area is protected as Galapagos National Park. It is the world’s second largest marine preserve, after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The group is essentially a flooded volcano range that is still active. Landscapes vary from lush jungle to raw lava flows and arid hills.

The islands span the Equator. But because of a unique convergence of currents, the Galapagos are home to coldwater species such as penguins and whales.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, buccaneers and whalers stopped here to restock supplies, including giant land tortoises, which could live up to a year without food and therefore provide a long-term meat supply for the voyagers as they sailed. The young Charles Darwin came here in 1835; the adaptation of animals in this remote location influenced his theory of evolution, later described in his “Origin of the Species.”

Today, about 20,000 people live in the Galapagos. Two camps dominate: fishermen, who occasionally protest limits on lucrative sea cucumber fishing, and guides, shopkeepers and naturalists who benefit from the 80,000 tourists who visit each year. Most tourists head for friendly Puerto Ayora with its cheery eateries, bars and small hotels.

The National Park is funded through a US$100 entry fee paid by each tourist.

The Charles Darwin Foundation’s research center in Puerto Ayora (darwinfoundation.org) focuses on conservation and education.

To protect the area, visitors to the National Park must be accompanied by a licensed guide. The government also restricts animals, plants and foods that can be brought into the area.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 89

LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

FEEL THE ROTH Michael Morrissey gets stuck into a what-if book about the outcome of World War 2 and comes away unsatisfied

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

By Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, $54.95 A new novel by Philip Roth is always an event worthy of notice – will it win the Pulitzer or the National Book Award? My guess is not this time. While Roth’s latest book has dazzling passages that show the aging virtuoso can still write like an angel, there are dull stretches, making this an uneven work. It lacks the authoritative passion of the recent American Pastoral and The Human Stain.

The Plot Against America is a fictional re-write of American history which has the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh ousting Roosevelt as president in 1940 – a critical time in world history as Hitler’s armies were swarming over Europe. “The Plot” belongs to the growing number of novels that portray a world where Hitler won - books like The Sound of His Horn by Sarban, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Fatherland

by Robert Harris.

Like Hitler, Lindbergh offers political solutions in very simple terms – the election is a choice between Lindbergh and war. Choose Lindbergh and America stays out of war, choose Roosevelt and involvement in world war ensues. To the dismay of the Roth family, Lindbergh is given the mandate and America begins a slow inevitable slide into pro-Nazi anti-Semitic fascism. A lesser writer than Roth might have had it happen at breakneck speed, yet the slowness of its unfolding is its fictional undoing.

The gradual extinction of liberal pro-Roosevelt voices like popular columnist Walter Winchell and the detaining of Roosevelt himself takes too long – and when they do occur they are not all that convincing nor dramatic. Dramatically speaking, the novel has a saggy midriff. The intermingling of large public events, narrated in newsreel style, and the personal lives of the Roths doesn’t quite gel. Alvin’s bothersome, much-highlighted stump, even if symbolic, failed to ignite interest in this reader.

As with most Roth novels, the best parts lie in family divisiveness – the bitter arguments between turncoat son Sandy and his father Herman, the stubborn heroism of cousin Alvin. The frighteningly bland Rabbi Bengelsdorf, connected to the Roth family by marriage, 90, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

who espouses his repugnant views during an uneasy dinner party show Roth’s passion for ideological debate at its most lively. Alvin gets the novel’s finest line when he says that Bengelsdorf is “koshering Lindbergh for the goyim”. Disappointingly, Lindbergh is a remote grey presence never dynamically present and his “kidnapping”

by Nazis is a weird unconvincing echo of the real life kidnapping of his son.

In case any readers might literally believe in the gloomy events outlined in the novel, Roth includes a lengthy postscript giving potted biographies of major historical personages such as Lindbergh, (the meeting with Goering and the swastika-crowned medal all true!)

Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Winchell – and the full text of

Lindbergh’s 1941 speech wherein he claims that Jews have a dangerously-large ownership of motion pictures, press, radio and government and are using that influence to get America involved in the war.

Despite its winning touches and always assured (though suitably doctored) historical and clever social detail, The Plot Against America lacks the grim dramatic darkness of 1984 – which was after all another ‘what if?’ novel – a black view of a world completely run by communist totalitarianism. While 1984 always seemed gloomily possible, The Plot doesn’t quite convince – and the postscript, while a failsafe document for those who have forgotten history (or never knew it), has the ultimate effect of sabotaging the premise on which the novel is based. If, on the other hand, the book is read as an attack on current trends in the Bush government, it becomes more scarily up to date.

SATURDAY

By Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, $59.95 Booker Prize-short listed Atonement was arguably one of the best novels of the last ten years and Saturday, McEwan’s tenth novel, is also a finely written and powerful work – though of a lesser stature. The main character of Saturday is a highly respected neurosurgeon, loyal husband, a man of principle who, when all is said and done, is that rare thing in fiction, a good man (though some may find him stuffy). Being good is not always good enough to deal with life’s bitter twists. And goodness unassailed by wrong, evil or harm would be fictional suicide.

Henry Perowne surveys all human beings through a merciless medical gaze and when he is threatened by a petty psychopath whose car he has pranged, he can’t help noticing that Baxter’s “poor self-control, emotional lability, explosive temper,” is “suggestive of reduced levels of GABA among the appropriate binding sites on stratal neurons. This in turn is bound to imply the diminished presence in the striatum and lateral pallidum – glutamic acid and decaboxylase and choline acetyltranferase”. In short, Baxter has Huntingdon’s chorea.

It’s a swag of medical minutia to flood your brain just before you are about to be thumped, but the exhaustive and meticulous detail that McEwan has lovingly researched – much in the manner we have come to expect from American rather than English novelists – serves McEwan’s dramatic purposes very well.

In the end, we start to see as Henry Perowne sees. However, it’s much more than medical insight, it’s the true stuff of novelist’s irony when Perowne, who has every reason to hate Baxter for his thuggery towards his family, is called upon to operate on the fellow’s brain after he has been, of necessity, nearly de-brained

by his son. The passages of threatening, then escalating violence, are superbly done in thrillerlike mode. These contrast with the – by comparison – almost duller passages of family background in which McEwan can sometimes sound like that other well-known documentmaker of twentieth century life, Iris Murdoch.

Satisfying as Saturday is, it is thinly plotted compared to a Murdoch novel – it sometimes feels like a novella roller-pinned out to a novel.

The attempted political dimension to the novel – numerous encroachments into Perowne’s eyes and ears of contemporary events in Iraq, considerations of Bush – are rather less successful than the expertly detailed medicalcum violence drama that is the book’s inner heart beat. Nevertheless, the argument between son and father brings out a more conservative side than the good surgeon expected - and makes the perceptive psychological point that different people provoke in different ways. This seems but a minor flaw in Perowne’s stable upper middle class moral strengths, which border on the priggish. The trouble with a happy marriage (choke) – and a happy family (gag) - is that it is not the stuff of arresting fiction though McEwan makes a fair fist of it. He even gets away with the happy ending – and I’m not sure if I’m happy about that.

HELL-HOLE OF THE PACIFIC

By Richard Wolfe, Penguin, $35 The prolific Richard Wolfe is becoming one of our leading specialist historians. Originally noted for several books on Kiwiana, his publications now include studies of folk art, clothes, war and the New Zealand holiday; his recent history of the moa was definitive. Now he has turned his attention to Kororareka, (name changed to Russell in 1844).

Kororareka’s early PR was caustic: “a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe”; “Of all the vile holes I ever visited this is certainly the vilest”.

Wolfe sets himself the task of finding out if such descriptions had objective correlatives.

The answer seems to be, as with many such questions, both yes and no – as well as maybe.

Undeniably, drunkenness and prostitution were rife. In 1842, American consul John Brown Williams estimated six out of every eight European houses were nothing more than grog-shops. When D’Urville’s ship anchored, fifteen women visited the ship every day and that was keeping contact to a minimum. As the whale trade peaked in the 1830s, 500 sailors would be in port and would require as many women.

“Hell” was an appellation that came easily to both clerical and secular lips. In Australia, Macquarie Harbour prison was known as Hell’s Gates; Port Arthur convict settlement was dubbed “hell on earth”. In terms of harshness – flogging and brutality – undoubtedly the Australian colonies produced more suffering than Kororarekea. As noted by Wolfe, Hawaii and San Francisco had even more decadence than the southern hell-hole. Still, Kororareka more than held its own when compared to other New Zealand whaling towns such as Cloudy Bay in Marlborough and Waikouaiti in Otago.

Apart from the steamy side, Wolfe expertly chronicles the many eminent personages that passed through the northern capital – property owner Joel Pollack, printer William Colenso, gallant Bishop Pompallier, Governor Hobson, painter Augustus Earle, biologist Charles Darwin (who remained resolutely unimpressed) – as well as the dramatic April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 91

destruction of Kororareka by Hone Heke. This book is a vivid well-documented account that brings to life the brutally glamourous days of New Zealand’s first capital.

FUGITIVE MINDS: On Madness, Sleep and other Twilight Afflictions

By Antonio Melechi, Arrow Books, $27.95 First time author Antonio Melechi makes a stunning debut with this brilliant book. For many, this will be the gateway to a strange, almost alien world – the far reaches of the human mind. Most will have heard of schizophrenia, depression, hypnotism, epilepsy but how many will be familiar with synaesthesia, Capgras’ syndrome, xenoglossia or Le Cerembault’s syndrome?

This wide-reaching overview splices the familiar with the strange in short but compact chapters, dripping with references, both well known and arcane. It is divided into eight sections with such evocative names as Unholy Turmoil, Nerve Storms and De la Trance. Each section contains from three to twelve individual disturbances of the mind – making 52 trips into the twilight zones of human consciousness. Within each chapter, further maladies are listed. Truly, the human mind has its own bizarre ecology. Just as the Ngorongoro crater contains many wild animals, so too, does the human skull house its own lions, zebras, cheetahs and hyaenas.

Every chapter begins in an arresting, pithy or learned way that engages: “It is a sickness.

It is a drug. It is blind.” Of what is Melechi writing? None other than romantic love. The opening sentence of the “Impersonators” chapter alludes to Freud, Capgras, Brothers

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Grimm, Borges and Philip K Dick.. Some almost read like a Borges short story. (Surprisingly, the famous Borges short story “Funes the Memorious” is not mentioned in the wonderful chapter on “Total Recall”.)

Rather than being the expected chronological history, chapters can be composed as a dazzling non-chronological mosaic. Take the chapter “Epilepsy” – it kicks off with an 1844 French novel, backtracks to Hippocrates, rockets forward to Temporal Lobe Seizure, side steps to Dostoyevsky, Charcot and Marie, mixes in neurologist Norman Geschwind, name drops Van Gogh, Poe, Tennyson, Flaubert, and Maupassant, clean bowls with V.S Ramachandran, throws in Wilder Penfield, pulls in Canadian neurologist Persinger, and finishes off with Byzantine historian Theophanes – all in four pages!

The curious thing is, Melechi’s bedazzlements do not seem shallow. The bewildering arrays of references are arranged like jewels in a display case. Science is showcased with the art of the essayist recalling The Periodic Table by Primo Levi or the astonishing footnotes of Oliver Sacks. This book is an awesome display by a virtuoso savant. I look forward eagerly to further coruscations from Master Melechi.

COLLAPSE : How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

By Jared Diamond, Allen Lane, $39.95 This book complements Diamond’s earlier and justly famed book, Guns, Germs & Steel.

While the latter explored why some societies (mainly European) ventured forth across oceans to wreak havoc on other cultures, Collapse examines the converse – why do some societies perish and, more heroically, why do some survive over thousands of years?

Diamond examines a number of small island societies and some larger continental ones and offers in his confident analytic way a shopping list of factors. Unlike some historians, he doesn’t tend to favour large apocalyptic causes like ice ages, floods or giant asteroids (which did in dinosaur society with a bang) but looks to factors like deforestation, salinization, erosion, overfishing, overhunting. Rather than environmental damage as the sole main cause, Diamond says he discovered four other factors were prominent – climate change, hostile neighbours, lack of friendly trade partners and the society’s response to environmental factors. Some societies cope with (say) deforestation, others do not. Easter Island is the clearest and most graphic example of what Diamond calls “unintentional ecological suicide” – every tree felled. Japan, Tikopia and Tonga, on the other hand, developed successful forest management.

Diamond devotes three chapters – his most detailed examination - to the reasons why

Norse Greenland collapsed and Inuit Greenland flourished. In essence, it seems the reason was that the Norse saw Greenland as a “green” land – one that could be farmed. So they took cows and for some mysterious reason – Diamond speculates a taboo was the cause – ignored the plentiful fish. The Inuit, by contrast, richly harvested the fish and mastered whale-hunting in open seas. The Norse built structures out of wood (limited supply), the Inuit constructed igloos out of snow (infinite supply). The Black death hit Norway hard as did the drop off in trade in carved ivory - elephant ivory supplanted walrus ivory.

By contrast with the 100 pages devoted to the Vikings, Diamond gives a scant 22 pages to the Mayan collapse. Call it cultural bias, but I find the Mayan society of greater fascination than the Norse. China, the “Lurching Giant” gets a mere 19 pages, while Diamond’s native Montana (yawn) gets a chunky 60 pages.

Despite what some might perceive as an odd weighting of emphasis, this is a grand overview, narrated in Diamond’s clear sober prose – a must for any student of history, society and environment.

Though we face possible huge privations and possible economic and environmental collapse, Diamond, let it be noted, remains a “cautious optimist”. One of his reasons for being thus is the fact that while the Easter Islanders and the Greenland Norse did not know that their societies were collapsing at the same time, in today’s global inter-connected world, we often do know about such events.

Awareness of disaster is not sufficient in itself, however. There must be the will and the means to change and often that arrives, sadly, too late. Hopefully, Diamond’s book will be part of the catalyst for such a necessary change.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 93

LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

CHILI PALMER’S COOL But two other offerings this month prove that heroin and histrionic overacting aren’t

Be Cool Release: March, 2005 Rated: PG

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Shelly Horton

hate sequels.” That’s John Travolta’s first line in this sequel to Get Shorty. So immediately Be Cool lets audiences know it’s not taking itself too seriously. I felt like I was in on the joke, and the joke is so good the sequel is better than the original.

Ten years ago in Get Shorty, John Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, was a hip gangster trying to make it in the movie industry. Now, in Be Cool, he’s trying to muscle his way into the music business. There’s a young starlet trying to get her big break, nasty music moguls and the Russian mob. You know – the usual. But in Be Cool the plot isn’t as important as the all-star ensemble cast.

Now I need to come clean about something: when I was a younger I wanted to marry John Travolta. He’s just so, well, cool. Granted, I had to forgive him for Michael and Battlefield Earth, but when he was in Grease and Pulp Fiction he made my knees weak. And he’s back to his coolest as Chili Palmer in Be Cool. He’s suave, he’s sexy, and he’s unflappable. Matter of fact, I still want to marry him.

Then there’s Vince Vaughn’s stand-out role as Raji, a white-bread music rep who wants to be a “playa”. It’s hysterical to see such a honky white character like Raji spouting hip-hop lines like, “that sh*t was tight, gangsta!” It’s so wrong it’s right.

Uma Thurman is the weak link in the movie. She plays Edie, the sexy CEO of a failing indie record label and Chili’s love interest. Uma is beautiful but, alas, she can’t act. She really should be used as a supporting actress rather than a lead.

On the other hand, one of the best castings is WWF’s The Rock as Raji’s gay bodyguard. He’s constantly taking the piss out of himself – even slagging off his signature wrestling glower (one raised eyebrow). His comedic timing is spot on and my favourite scene involves him reciting a monologue from teen cheerleading

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movie Bring It On. The Rock rocks. But wait: there’s more. Cedric the Entertainer plays Sin LaSalle, an uppermiddle-class music producer who’s not afraid to use muscle to get his songs played. Andre Benjamin (who most people would know as Andre 3000 of Outkast) makes a fabulous acting debut as Dabu, a dim but trigger-happy gangster. Harvey Keitel is a music company executive with no rhythm. Danny DeVito has a cameo with Anna Nicole Smith that is cringe-worthy but funny.

Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler plays himself and is a natural.

Think Pulp Fiction with less violence, more gags and an equally funky soundtrack. Cool.

Being Julia Released: March, 2005 Rated: M

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n Being Julia, all the world’s a stage and Annette Benning’s over-acting on it. Now don’t get me wrong: I loved Annette in American Beauty and The Grifters. I know she’s won a swag of awards for this film.

But really… she’s trying so hard in Being Julia that she makes Jim Carey look subtle.

The problem is Annette’s character is so damn repellent. Julia Lambert is an ageing diva of the London stage in the 1930s. She’s at the peak of her career yet she’s bored. So she’s prone to histrionics. It’s hard to care for a woman who decides the spark she needs is to have an affair with a younger man but then is devastated when she finds out not only is her husband cheating on her but her lover is too. She’s either melodramatic, egocentric, overbearing or overwrought with nothing in between. Her manic laughter grates even more when hideous wailing follows it as the spotlight travels past her.

The support roles in the film are more refined. Jeremy Irons is restrained as her long-suffering husband and manager Michael Gosselyn. Miriam Margolyes is fabulous and funny as theatre owner Dolly, a frustrated lesbian desperate to bed her lead actress. And I had to side

with Juliet Stevenson who plays Julia’s straight talking yet likeable dresser, Evie.

Basically everyone is more likeable than Julia.

I can understand comparisons between Being Julia and All About Eve. Both lead characters are egotistical actresses who blur their public and private lives. But the comparisons should only remind you why All About Eve is a classic and Being Julia will be a $2 weekly DVD in a flash of an eye.

Maria Full of Grace Released: March, 2005 Rated: M

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aria Full of Grace is a spinach film. That is, you know it’s good for you but you don’t really like it. The story revolves around a seventeen-year-old Colombian girl who thinks the only way to escape her miserable life is to become a drug mule.

The film is a drama that feels more like a documentary. It’s shot with a sometimes-nauseating handheld camera style making the entire film feel grainy, dirty and real.

The lead role is played by astonishing newcomer Catalina Sandino

Moreno and, basically, she is Maria. I believed she’s desperate to escape her demeaning job of de-thorning roses at a flower farm where she earns about $2000 a year. I believed she’s feisty and intelligent.

I believed her downtrodden family and friends stifle her. And I believed she’d swallow heroin for a round trip to New York and an easy five grand.

But it’s not easy. That’s the point. This film does nothing to glamorize drug smuggling. The drug dealers aren’t sexy, powerful ‘bling bling’ characters; they are slack-jawed mouth-breathers who are as bored with their jobs as Maria was with the roses.

The scene where Maria swallows the heroin pellets will test the strongest gag reflex. They are about the size of a thumb, coated in Vaseline and washed down with some clear soup. When Maria got down her first pellet, I gagged. By the time she had swallowed 62, I nearly passed out.

The film is shot in Spanish with English sub-titles but there is so little dialogue you could watch it with the sound down. The emotions and fears that cross Maria’s face speak volumes. It’s a basic story of survival.

First time director and writer Joshua Marston has captured the ugliness of drug smuggling with grace.

You’ll feel uncomfortable watching Maria Full of Heroin.

April 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 95

DVDs

By TIM KERR

IN MY FATHER’S DEN, R16, 122 mins

these two there is an unsettling air especially when we’re seeing them in flashback knowing that Celia has vanished and knowing Paul is not being entirely truthful about the events.

In My Father’s Den will without doubt go down in New Zealand film history; the cinematography is beautiful, the characters rich, the directing outstanding – a superb, rare type of adaptation of an iconic New Zealand novel.

Special Features: Audio Commentary, Behind the Scenes, Featurette (Possum Short Film), Teaser Trailer.

It is fairly reasonable to suggest that 2004 was a very successful year for acclaimed New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee. In My Father’s Den was just one of two films adapted from his novels last year, the other Fracture. Unlike Fracture which uses a different name (based on Maurice Gee’s Crime Story) and remains true to the original plot, In My Father’s Den borrows its name directly from the 1972 novel but takes great liberties in its storytelling; liberties that can be forgiven. In its adaptation it is just as tender, conflicted and captivating.

Not only does it gently update the setting but breathes new life into the story by renewing its themes and by finding fresh ways of approaching its many facets. Perhaps the success of Maurice Gee’s novel and of this film lies in its truth; the desire New Zealanders have to get away, to get out.

Just like the novel, director Brad McGann has constructed a piece of art which deftly switches between viewpoints, the past and the present. In My Father’s Den at first reveals the present situation: a damaged man’s return to his remote New Zealand hometown due to the death of his father. Paul Prior (Matthew MacFadyen), the damaged man, prize-winning war journalist and “lone wolf ” in returning home realises what remains of his family is the same as it ever was – dysfunctional.

He meets up with his teenage girlfriend (Jodie Rimmer) who unlike Paul stayed and became the butcher in the small Otago town that replaces Gee’s West Auckland in the novel. Paul soon strikes an unlikely friendship with her discontented sixteen-year-old Celia (Emily Barclay), who really really wants to leave the small-town existence she knows so well. “I’d rather be a no one somewhere than a someone nowhere,” she says. Her dream destination is Spain, to sit in a café, to enjoy the anonymity; drinking wine while staring at the sea. It is a friendship which forces Paul to come to grips with his past, a friendship that is greatly misunderstood by the township and ripped to shreds when Celia goes missing. The world around Paul and Celia’s hermetic, self-made cocoon is fast closing in; in “the den” there are secrets, secrets that seem to linger in and amongst the books. Paul is the first to be questioned.

British actor Matthew Macfadyen (most familiar for his work in TV series Spooks) plays the role of Paul brilliantly. He has sensitivity yet his cynicism and world experience give him a dark edge; although the viewer is on his side, it’s hard to trust him. Emily Barclay is terrific as the bored but creative teen and in the scenes between 96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, April 2005

PAPARAZZI, M, 81 mins Bo Laramie is a movie star who has finally achieved success. But success comes at a price, in the form of persistent photographers known as the ‘paparazzi’.

Using their dishonest methods of getting the money shot regardless of what it takes, they’ll stop at nothing in exploiting Bo for every last penny. But when one of their ventures nearly costs Bo’s life and that of the family, he’s reached his breaking point. In doing so, he will exact revenge on those who have enjoyed making his life a living hell with a focus on the paparazzi’s ring leader, Rex Harper.

Special Features: Featurette, Trailer.

TOP GUN SE, PG, 105 mins Yep, SE stands for Special Edition, digitally-remastered, best viewed on a thumping great plasma screen or one of the new ICE AV projector screens, with full surround sound.

My teenagers weren’t even born when Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis set the screen alight in the original back in 1986, and the cold-war menace of the Soviet Union (what’s that, Dad?) is a chain firmly anchoring this film in the past, but the screaming F-14 Tomcat jets in dogfights with Soviet MiGs and Skyhawks (remember those?) speak to the adrenalin of most teenagers and adults alike. It is a movie that defined the eighties.

It still has wings today.

Special features: on this two-disc set include the 1986 music video clips from four of the hits on the soundtrack, several director’s commentaries, a 6-part makingof doco and multi-angle storyboards. - IW