Investigate, August 2005

INVESTIGATE

August 2005:

Don Brash

Pacific Terror

Tammy Bruce

Education

Issue 55

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New Zealand’s best cur rent affairs magazine

INVESTIGATE BREAKING NEWS

AUGUST 2005

BRASH PROMISES On current polling, New Zealand could be heading for a change of Government in a matter of weeks. But has National learnt from its past, is it ready to govern? And what of Labour, what agenda would be unveiled if Labour manages to win a third term? IAN WISHART analyses the election and talks to Don Brash and Murray McCully

TERROR’S PACIFIC BASE CAMP If you think New Zealand is not a potential target, think again. Our SAS troops have been locked in combat with al-Qa’ida trained terror groups in the Philippines. MATT THOMPSON has just hitched a helicopter gunship ride right to terror’s front line - a place where the Bali bombers learned their trade, and where the next terror attack against Australia or New Zealand will ultimately be launched from

THE TAMMY TOUR She’s a New York Times bestselling author and political commentator, but NZ’s National Radio didn’t want to talk to her. NEILL HUNTER follows July’s national tour by Tammy Bruce, and its fallout in the media

THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW An in depth discussion of the ideas left-wing media found offensive. TAMMY BRUCE talks to NEILL HUNTER on the death of right and wrong

GOING PRIVATE Figures just released suggest children attending private schools are better-educated than state school children.

With NCEA in crisis, and parents looking for alternatives, one group of independent schools say there is an exam option that’s being overlooked. IAN WISHART with the story

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EDITORIAL AND OPINION

INVESTIGATE vol

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Focal Point Vox-Populi Simply Devine Laura’s World Eyes Right Break Point Doublespeak Line 1 Tough Questions Political Heat Diary of a Cabby

Editorial Condoms got you going, huh?

The backlash against Douglas Wood To immunise or not?

The people’s voice Banning the 10 Commandments Attacks on mosques Chris Carter Does Truth exist?

Greens: bring us your oppressed A Sydney Samaritan

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FOCAL POINT

EDITORIAL London terror

S

o this is the best they could do. Nearly four years after September 11, 2001, alQa’ida-linked terrorists have managed – finally – to pull off another terrorist attack in one of the major English-speaking countries that led the war on Iraq. As of this writing, the death toll of the 7/07 attacks in the U.K. has topped fifty as a result of the peak-hour terrorist strikes that turned a workaday London morning into a bloodbath, and a quiet night at home for thousands of New Zealanders into a frantic evening of calling and e-mailing friends and relatives abroad to make sure eveOur enemy’s capability has, ryone was alright.

Looking at the attacks in less than four years, shrunk in the cold light of day, from being able to kill thousands one says that this was “the best” al-Qa’ida could do in one well-planned stroke to because London has bejust a few dozen come one of the centres of Islamic radicalism in Europe (more on that later), yet fewer Britons were killed on 7/07 than when the World Trade Center was brought down. Hardly a week goes by without news that the police have busted up a terror cell somewhere in Britain, or that an imam has gotten into hot water for preaching that Jews are the enemy, that the West must be destroyed, and so on (a sermon that is, incidentally, regular fare at mosques in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East on any given Friday). Rather than bringing down a landmark building, releasing some terrible nuclear or biological agent, or otherwise killing thousands, al-Qa’ida – or its preposterously-named boy’s clubhouse-sounding Secret al-Qa’ida Jihad Organisation in Europe (“No Girls Allowed”, indeed) – could only manage a few home-built bombs. The deaths and carnage are tragic, but in a time of war, we in the West should count ourselves blessed that our enemy’s capability has, in less than four years, shrunk from being 6, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

able to kill thousands in one well-planned stroke to just a few dozen.

Not that everyone looks at it that way, of course. The Left wasted no time in proving that the long and dishonourable tradition of appeasement embodied by Neville Chamberlain is still alive and well, not just in Britain (where adherents are, now as in the 1930s, in a small but vocal minority) but around the world. Their predictable chorus was quick to arise from those who have been so blinded by post-modernism, relativism, or a simple self-hatred and loathing of Western culture: It’s all our fault!, their chant goes. If only Tony Blair hadn’t tied himself to Chimpy McHitlerburton, Britain would be safe!

In this reductionist logic, a simple Newtonian geopolitics maintains that Britain (and Spain, in the case of the Madrid bombings, before her) supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, therefore those nations and their innocent civilians on the way to work had it coming.

Forgetting the extreme offensiveness of such logic – members of the caring classes now suddenly sound like sleazy defence attorneys telling a rape victim she shouldn’t have been wearing that skimpy outfit – it is also an argument that leaks like an incontinent puppy. For one thing, it is internally inconsistent for those on the left who claimed in the run-up to the Iraq War that Osama bin Laden’s hard-core Islamofascists had no dealings with the secular Saddam Hussein to suddenly suggest that the toppling of a dictator whose favourite tipple was Johnny Walker Black would become a great cause for jihad.

For another, it ignores the giant historical elephant in the room – 9/11, and the decades of Islamic terrorist attacks against American and European targets before that black date – which represents game, set, and match proof that radical Muslims have always held a twisted and violent hatred, for a variety of reasons, of the West. Indeed, more Britons died when the World Trade Center was brought down in 2001 than in this most recent attack.

If the 7/07 attacks on London prove anything, it is that the ‘flypaper strategy’ of the Pentagon is working. This doctrine suggests that if there are going to be jihadists ready to fight against infidel Westerners, then it’s better to have them go to Iraq and do battle with U.S. Marines rather than risk them wreaking their havoc in Western capitals. And given the number of foreign passport-holders killed or captured by Coalition forces in Iraq, one can see that this is working: who knows how many more lives terrorists, left to their own devices at home, might have claimed in cities like London, New York, and Sydney over the past three years?

But a close reading of the attacks suggests that the London attacks represent something deeper, potentially more terrifying, and historically far more significant than the mere toppling of Saddam Hussein or even the democratization of the Middle East – namely, that a longbrewing civil war in the Islamic world has spilled over into the capitals of the West.

Over the past decade or so, London has become a centre of gravity for Islamic radicalism (the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque, for example, has been linked to a veritable who’s-who of terror suspects); at the same time, the U.K. has also, thanks to inflowing migrants from the Commonwealth, developed a huge Muslim population. Several of the tube stops targeted on 7/07 were near heavily-Islamic neighbourhoods, suggesting that not just Britons, but also Muslims who have chosen to live in the West (known as the dar el-Harb, or ‘House of War’, in Islamic jurisprudence) were targets. In the past few years, from Saudi Arabia to Morocco to Indonesia, there have been attacks aimed not just at Westerners, but at Muslims who choose the ‘corrupting’ path of integrating or having relations with or simply living somewhat like Westerners – for, as the Koran tells true believers, “Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors” (Sura 5:58).

There are signs that this civil war is being recognized within the Islamic communities of the West, which have up until this latest attack shown reluctance to speak out in condemnation after terrorist attacks: but within hours of the 7/07 blasts, Muslim lobby groups were faxing and e-mailing statements to the media condemning the perpetrators and offering sympathy for the victims. This is a big shift, and a welcome one – though those who are fond of trumpeting what usually seems like a largely silent majority of ‘moderate Muslims’ will have to do a lot better to convince many that there is not something inherent in Islam that prevents it from living peaceably with the Judeo-Christian West with its secular regimes. (Look at the recent statements of

Labour MP Ashraf Choudhary, who suggested on TV3 that it was perfectly acceptable, Koranically-speaking, to stone adulterers and homosexuals to death, for further illustration of the problem).

Indeed, it was only a month or so ago that a well-publicized “Muslims Against Terrorism” rally in Boston was attended by a scant few dozen individuals, most of them members of the media, when groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations refused to endorse the event. It would be nice to see their counterparts in this part of the world stop acting as outraged as the Islamic Council of Victoria did when the homes of several terror suspects in Melbourne and Sydney were raided by ASIO recently, the next time the cops come knocking on another Muslim’s door.

(One of the suspects fingered in the raids the Islamic Council was so quick to condemn told the Melbourne Age that he wanted to bring Shari’a law to Australia, adding, “We don’t want to melt here, in this country.” Yet as one Internet commentator put it soon after the London attacks, “If there isn’t a Million Muslim March this weekend, if there aren’t crowds of Muslims chanting and holding signs, ‘not in our name’, then doubt as to the existence of moderate Muslims will grow, and grow quickly.”)

Finally, the 7/07 attacks represent what has become par for the course for al-Qa’ida: a massively strategic, if bloody, miscalculation. To think that the British population would take a look at the events of the day and say, “Well, best get out of Iraq, then”, represents an incredible misreading of English history – a history which demonstrates conclusively that trying to bomb Londoners into submission is a fool’s errand. This is a city whose population endured the truly organised terror of Hitler’s Luftwaffe more than sixty years ago and went on unbowed (taking shelter, ironically, in the same Underground system al-Qa’ida hit the other day), and then in more modern times years of carnage at the hands of the IRA. After al-Qa’ida hit, Britons showed their typical stiff upper lip resolve by heading down the pub after the bombing, laughing at Australia’s defeat in a Twenty20 match, and showing up to work the next day.

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair said soon after the bombings, “I think we all know what they are trying to do. They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do and they should not and they must not succeed. When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.”

James Morrow August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 7

VOX POPULI

COMMUNIQUES BLOWING HOLES IN CONDOMS Like the ongoing crusade against condom use carried out in the US since the 1990s, Investigate’s article on “safe sex” selectively cites findings to support its case while ignoring other findings that clearly support condom use and effectiveness. The WHO Public Health Review, used

by Investigate to support its discussion, does highlight complexities and concerns in relation to condom use, but its conclusion is clear: Condom use “can substantially reduce the spread of STIs” including “reduced acquisition” of syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhoea, trichomoniasis, urethral infections and of HIV. The Review states that: “Even partially effective interventions can have a major impact on controlling STIs”.

The US National Institutes of Health report findings, also cited by Investigate, clearly state that “beyond mutual lifelong monogamy among uninfected couples, condom use is the only method for reducing the risk of HIV infections and STDs available to sexually active individuals”. It also states that condoms are “essentially impermeable” and “a highly effective barrier”.

We do know that condoms do successfully reduce the transmission of most STIs, and the Family Planning Association (FPA) also agrees that their effectiveness depends largely on how correctly and consistently they are used and the type of STI. Rather than undermine confidence in the efficacy of condoms for diseases transmitted by semen or vaginal fluids, we need to assist sexually active people wishing to reduce the risk of infection, or unplanned pregnancy, to use condoms effectively.

There are many reasons for increased extra marital sexual activity around the world. In New Zealand these include a far later age for marriage than in the 1970s. To blame this increase in sexual activity on the successful promotion of condoms, when a range of research indicates well over 50% of sexually active New Zealanders do not use them, seems both simplistic and illogical.

FPA always speaks of ‘safer sex’ and places great emphasis on comprehensive sexuality education that includes the 8, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

options of abstaining from sexual activity and delaying sex until it can be managed responsibly. Comprehensive sexuality education involves age appropriate programmes which contribute to building positive and healthy relationships, learning negotiation, communication and sex avoidance skills, while contributing to an understanding of the positive nature of sexuality, providing information on contraceptive options and information on how to access sexual and reproductive health services. Correct and consistent condom use is part of this.

“Just say no” abstinence-only messages in the US, and increasingly elsewhere, frequently ignore the complexity and diversity of young people’s lives, rely on negative messages about condoms, encourage fear and guilt, and provide little information and understanding of the complexity of human sexuality. A body of research indicates that young people who have pledged abstinence develop STIs at rates at least equal to their non-pledged counterparts, and are more likely to have sex secretly and unsafely.

Regrettable though it may be for some, many New Zealanders will not choose to abstain from sex outside, or until, marriage. One report indicated that only 3% intended to wait until their wedding night. Research indicates that internationally up to 30% of those who have HIV are unaware of this, while up to 70% of women and 50% of men are likely to be unaware that they have contracted chlamydia, the so-called ‘hidden’ disease.

Surely we must recognise such realities and give people the means, and motivation, to make positive, healthy decisions in order to avoid the transmission of STIs, and of unplanned pregnancies. This will require comprehensive strategies of which, in the words of the WHO, “condom promotion represents an important component”.

Gill Greer, Executive Director NZ Family Planning Association WISHART RESPONDS

Allow me to demolish this appalling piece of inaccurate spin, bit by bit. Your letter is peppered with rhetoric (‘ongoing crusade’)

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and hyperbole (‘selectively cites’), but you don’t actually deal with the dishonesty of your own Family Planning ‘crusade’.

For example, you accuse us of ‘ignoring’ findings that ‘clearly support condom use and effectiveness’. Go ahead, name one relevant study. The Ministry of Health couldn’t and I very much doubt that you can.

You approvingly quote the WHO as saying condoms can ‘substantially reduce’ the spread of STIs, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that the WHO sees a mere 29% reduction in risk as ‘substantial’. I, on the other hand, and I’m sure most sexually active people, would regard an infection rate of 71% among condom-users (compared to non-users) as still a majority risk. Perhaps Family Planning NZ wrote the WHO’s conclusory paragraphs.

I note too that you conveniently don’t mention herpes or genital warts, which condoms are useless against. Do you tell teenagers that when educating them about condoms?

You continue to quote empty rhetoric when you repeat the assertion that condoms are ‘essentially impermeable’ and ‘a highly effective barrier’. Against what? Fruit flies? If condoms are what they say you are, why do a number of respected American medical journal studies show almost no reduction in STD rates between people who use condoms properly and those who don’t?

That’s what I mean Gill – between yourselves and the Ministry of Health the shallow rubbish you spout out to a gullible media is like The Emperor Has No Clothes meets Groundhog Day. It doesn’t matter how many scientific holes get shot in the condom myth, both of your organisations pretend the scientific studies don’t exist. You’re like a healthcare Flat Earth Society.

You glibly state that condoms ‘do successfully reduce’ the transmission of most STDs. Name one relevant medical study that shows a condom used ‘effectively’ protects against STDs. Oh, that’s right, there isn’t one. Once again, when the science blows holes in your family planning campaigns, you take the option of repeating the myths over and over again in the hope that you’ll brainwash people into believing you.

You state: ‘FPA always speaks of safer sex…’ Yeah right. On FPA’s own website are your own documents that use the phrase ‘safe sex pamphlets’ or ‘Summer Safe Sex Campaign’. Nowhere in your ‘comprehensive sexuality education’ programmes are you disclosing that condoms are scientifically proven to be useless against herpes and warts, and near useless against chlamydia, syphilis, trichomoniasis and other nasties. Quite the contrary: Family Planning and the Ministry of Health lie like flatfish to teenagers, glossing over or avoiding the hard facts.

We are not saying don’t use condoms. What we are saying is that young people have a right, under the principle of informed consent, to be told the real risks, as we now know them to exist, of condoms failing to offer significant protection against any STDs except HIV. You bleat about the ‘just say no’ campaign effectiveness in the States, and yet the medical journal studies are saying condoms are equally useless. Family Planning is in a glasshouse on this one.

Here’s a novel idea for Family Planning: be honest. Stop teaching social engineering propaganda and start giving young people real facts.

MAJORING IN FICTION? Today I purchased a copy of your magazine and was agreeably surprised to find your articles highlighting the fallacies surrounding safe sex. After the Christchurch Press did its front-page piece on that subject two weeks ago I phoned them the next day and asked if they would accept an Opinion piece on the subject from me. They said they would consider it but would make no promises and it would have to be fewer than 700 words. Well I quickly put one together and got it into them the same day. Surprise surprise they didn’t publish it but they did do their own sort of in-house investigation on the subject and published it five days later. I don’t have a problem with that after all it’s their paper.

What I was a little peeved over was that they questioned my credentials when I phoned up (mine are zip apart from being a parent of five adult children – youngest 22) and yet in their own follow up page they 10, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

extensively quote Dr Gillian Greer from Family Planning and I happen to know Dr Greer’s doctorate is in English Lit – hardly any more creditworthy for the subject than my own life experience – never mind that. Anyway, I congratulate you at Investigate for attacking the lame brained attitudes of various so called health professionals who are co-operating in (no, facilitating) what could easily turn into the worst long term health issue NZ has ever faced. Keep it going: the battle has only just started and can only be won when the politicians who ‘serve’ this nation use their spines – something I’m not overly hopeful about in the short term.

Steve Sparrow, Christchurch

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED...

Congratulations on the safe sex media release. I complained to the ASA (decision 05/27) about the “safe” aspect of the rubber and complained that they were promoting a false statement – and they declined my complaint! Well done.

Derek Broerse, via email

EXPERT OPINION I am a research scientist. My area of expertise is in cardiology and the hormonal control of bloodpressure.

Due to the latter specialty, I also have expertise in endocrinology and the massive effect that these agents have upon our bodies.

Your recent article on the safe sex industry here in New Zealand is excellent and I congratulate you on being the ONLY magazine to have the sense and courage to publish the facts.

Name and address supplied

TURNING THE TITANTIC AROUND The Ministry of Health will probably have serious issues over withdrawing or altering the condom message. It has taken money, time and ‘education’ to get not only teenagers to use them, but all the health ‘professionals’ to back them. That is a huge investment. To undo the damage will not happen overnight, even if the Ministry told the news media tomorrow that they were withdrawing the ad and changing their minds about condoms, the public will take at least five years to catch up on the idea. The public will be incredulous that such a significant organization could get their facts so wrong and they will lose trust for other campaigns as well, some of which are quite good.

Keep up the good work.

Lyn Dear, via email

SCHOOLS TAKING NOTICE Congratulations on your excellent follow-up article to your earlier Safe Sex column, although I am amazed there has been so little publicity in the media about it. Other than the short TV3 item, I have not seen any other publicity on what is a very important issue.

However, I must tell you that the message appears to have got through at the grass roots level. At the school my neighbour’s daughter goes to, the health curriculum teachers had a meeting to discuss the implications of your article for the school, and they will now be clearly teaching that condoms will not protect against STIs. Name and address supplied

FURIOUS AND OUTRAGED Found your article on “Safe Sex” both timely and fascinating as it confirmed a concern that recently came to my attention.

My 17 year old daughter had asked, while reading an historical novel, what the “French Pox” was. The description of the symptoms was mildly graphic, but graphic enough for her to look horrified when I replied the characters were discussing syphilis!

During the discussion which followed, I was equally horrified when I discovered that the so called “Sex Education” our children are given at school does not include the vital information of what the symptoms of various STIs are. She promptly put down her book and checked out for herself the symptoms of every STI she could think of, on the net. She was quite rightly furious and outraged. In her words, “They are showing teenagers how to use a loaded gun, without telling them the consequences.”

She and her boyfriend read your article on “Safe Sex” – they are both pretty annoyed that the gun they were handed at school, has an apparently faulty “safety catch”. It is also a safe bet that this lack of information is the reason behind the increasing rate of infection in our young people.

Thank you for publishing this article – you have not only given me the opportunity to discuss this important subject with my daughter – you have given two teenagers the information they should have been given at school.

Pamela Travis, via email

LIES, DAMNED LIES...

The definition of common sense is any opinion that agrees with mine.

Your magazine is full of common sense. However, your use of statistics in your article on the “Hubba” campaign is utterly appalling, if not deceptive. I would expect blind, left-wing idealogues to abuse statistics to “prove” their point, but it is very disappointing to read the same tactics being used by those whose opinions are generally more credible.

Statistical values, like the ones cited in your article, must be carefully analysed and usually can’t be reversed by simple subtration. For example, you quote research that says that the risk of catching herpes virus is reduced by 40% when using a condom. To say that there is therefore a 60% chance of catching it is blatantly erroneous. You would first need to establish what the (absolute) risk of infection is without using a condom. Naturally this will vary significantly depending on the physiology of the individuals involved and the severity (and possible stage) of the infection in the carrier. If, for example, there is only a 50% chance of infection without “protection” then the research suggests that the chances are reduced to 30% – that’s assuming infection in the first place. That indicates a 70% chance of “getting away with it” – a very different statistic to the one your article suggests.

To reverse the statistic that a 40% reduction in risk is the same as a 60% chance of infection is either ignorant or deceptive. Unfortunately, this misinterpretation of data was common throughout the article.

While I agree with the basic point of your article, I believe that an apology and correction is due for your misuse of statistics.

Peter van den Brink, Southland WISHART RESPONDS

I think you’re overstressing the point. Statistics was my best mathematical subject, and I am well aware of the point you make, but perhaps my writing needed to be a little tighter.

Nonetheless, it is implicit in the body of the article that we are talking about risk/reduction-of-risk measured against a common denominator. Of course one doesn’t miraculously have a 50% risk of catching chlamydia merely through the act of putting on a condom, it requires the other person to be infected before any risk at all exists. Perhaps I wrongly assumed that Investigate readers would realize that the risk of infection is measured against condom use, rather than the absolute infection rate in the community.

What the studies illustrate, and which we pointed out in quoting them, is that there is a very good risk over time (as little as three months of normal teenage sexual activity) for such a disease to show up despite the use of a condom. And again, we are measuring relative risk rather than absolute risk.

The point of the article is to say that relative to those people who didn’t use condoms, the ones who did still had an infection rate either equal to or reduced to half those of the other group, over a given time period.

Faced with the promotion of condoms as “the only protection” (Hubba ads) against STIs, clearly the existence of an infection rate still 50% that of nonusers is still significant and a material issue of informed consent.

WE NEED TO BE LOVED You are to be congratulated on bringing the debate about safe sex into the public arena. As we know the only really safe sex is with oneself.

But of course self pleasuring is not yet a socially acceptable topic to teach our young although it could teach them all to be better lovers of others as well as themselves. I suspect too many of my generation of ‘baby boomers’ still have very narrow definitions of sex and sexuality.

As a professional couples counsellor and sex therapist, I would suggest that most people have a desire to love and be loved. Most people also want a satisfying sex life with another (or others), whether they are currently in a committed monogamous relationship or not. The issues around ‘safe sex’ therefore affect all age groups and social groupings, not just the young. Many of the couples we see in counselling have reached a crisis in their relationship because a third party has become sexually involved with one of the partners, or they have come to acknowledge they are not happy continuing in a relationship where sexual passion is absent.

Safe sex between two individuals can only occur when both partners are truly honest with one another. And trust is required for long term relationships to remain sexually adventurous and fun. Why, then, is it so hard for so many to incorporate their sexual fantasies into their committed relationship? And why is our sex industry thriving – particularly close to the city at lunch times and after work? Our young people, quite rightly, don’t respect hypocrisy and will be wary of any ‘dire warnings’ about sexually transmitted diseases that appear to be directed at them as an age group. This is a societal problem and we have a responsibility to provide our young with both accurate information and appropriate relational skills to help them navigate the emotional waters of love and sexuality.

Averill Richardson, Auckland

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX, BABY I read your online article and agree with the disclosure of information you promote but – a new health promotion plan has to be seriously debated and agreed upon by schools, parents, Family Planning and other agencies, to prevent teenagers from ceasing to use condoms altogether. Such a plan will take time but the message must be consistent across the country.

The message is that the biggest sex risk to NZ teenagers is pregnancy! Whether or not STD’s are their reason for usage may not be so relevant as the fact that they need to be used anyway with our high rate of teenage pregnancy.

Of course the research you speak of should have been available sooner so that health promotion that is accurate and useful could have started by now. Health promotion is so much more than dishing out the facts (that is the easy part). Programmes need to be carefully designed to change individual attitudes and behaviour, and this does not happen in one brief lesson. Sex programmes also need to integrate the notion of caring relationships and responsibilities. We separate these issues at our peril.

It’s high time the government employed sufficient numbers of paid Family Planning (F.P.) staff to educate in all secondary schools. This means running proper courses, not being invited to “impart” information to strangers in a 50 min session. F.P. staff are the best equipped for this role, yet often the secondary school science or PE teacher is landed with the job! Teachers are not necessarily the best people to deliver programmes. They may be embarrassed or unfamiliar with the subject, perceived as too young or to have little experience of relationships, to be at ease with their students.

In the meantime, organisations, the education ministry, the health August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 11

ministry and others, need to work together to design and implement the curriculum and action the plans. If your article promotes on going debate that is excellent! It is 30 years since the Johnson report was rejected and we have been on the back foot ever since.

Moira Johnson, (retired health promoter)

LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT SEX, BABY Congratulations to Investigate for its excellent and timely expose of the failed and discredited “safe sex” programme. This is a programme that is deceiving and seducing the youth of this nation. The programme follows the agenda of the Government, supported by the ubiquitous Family Planning Association to restructure the family and society.

It is the God-given responsibility of parents to raise their children and to impart values and morals to their children. Who then has given the Government permission to use our taxes to seduce our children? Our youth deserve the truth, they need to know that condoms do not prevent all STDs. They need to know that fornication and immorality has a price.

Condoms also do not always prevent pregnancy. In the latest figures available, the Abortion Supervisory Committee in its report to Parliament in 2004 reported that in 2003 there were 18511 abortions reported in New Zealand. Of these women who had an abortion, 5464 women reported that they were using condoms at the time of the conception of their child. What a tragic loss of innocent unborn life for so called “safe sex”.

The Government has spent $1.6 million on the controversial “No Rubber, No Hubba Hubba” TV programme. If the Government was really concerned about reducing STDs why have they not produced a TV programme promoting abstinence. There is an increasing international awareness that the “safe sex” programme is a cruel hoax.

A recent study by the United States Health Department confirms that

12, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

abstinence education is effective in reducing unplanned pregnancies, abortions, ex-nuptial births and STDs. The United States Congress recently increased abstinence programme funding by 11% to $115 million. Russian officials are warning that the so called “safe sex” message is having the reverse effect - it is the cause of an epidemic of STDs. Russian legislators are calling the “safe sex” message “propaganda”. Moscow now plans to introduce the new abstinence campaign with stickers and posters stating “safe sex does not exist”.

When will the New Zealand Government follow suit? The Government should scrap its discredited “safe sex” message, cease funding the socially destructive, anti-life and anti-family Family Planning Association and promote abstinence education in our schools.

Ken Orr, Right to Life New Zealand Inc.

MORE TAXIS THAN POLICE CARS In regards to your article in the July issue about the number of Police units (non-traffic), I will tell you now that simply listening to Auckland Central channel on any radio scanner can quickly tell you just how many Police numbers there are.

Each unit is assigned to a specific “patch”, according to which station they are from. For example, a unit from Avondale can only be used for jobs in Ponsonby, Avondale, Balmoral, and other such suburbs. And if Comms wanted to use this unit anywhere else, they have to get permission from the Inspector on duty.

Just the other day I heard the following on my scanner (note, NMI2 is a Newmarket unit, whose patch includes Newmarket, Remuera, Parnell, Onehunga, Etc) NORTHCOMMS: 10-1 10-1 any units around Woolworths Richmond road, we have a report of 10 Maoris or Pacific Islanders fighting, described as late 20’s. *silence*

NMI2: Comms, we’re just on the corner of K and Ponsonby, we can head to that if you want.

NORTHCOMMS: Negative I think we have another I-Car, I’ll get you to head to this 1K job at 277 Broadway…

NORTHCOMMS: Got a report of a male who is extremely 1K (drunk) shouting at people passing by, getting quite abusive.

NMI2: Uhh.. Roger…10-2….

And for the next 10 minutes, until BLI (Balmoral unit) became available to attend to the job on Richmond Road, no one was even en-route to the incident, in which 3 of them were taken to hospital with head injuries.

At any one time, there is only about 3 or 4 units per patch, who are actively patrolling. That means in central Auckland and surrounding suburbs, there is only about, 20 or 30 cars in total, if that. Not to mention, these cars are the ones you hear doing 3T’s the most often (traffic stops).

There are only ‘3’ call-signs for CIB cars at any one time: Day shift: 1A, 1C, 1X. Late shift: 3A, 3C, 3X. As I type this email, 1X just pulled over a car. What a wonderful job of protecting our people and property they are doing. Not. Will Steele, Auckland WISHART RESPONDS

It is significant that just after we published the story, an elderly woman waited 45 minutes for a police car to arrive in the Helensville area after making a 111 call about a man trying to break into her house. It subsequently emerged that for an area covering 200 square kilometres, containing 80,000 people, only one patrol car was on duty dedicated to fighting crime. There were probably at least a dozen dedicated to traffic. But let’s not forget the billboards: “You’re better off with Labour”. Yeah, if you’re a crim.

GETTING IT RIGHT Yesterday, for the first time, I picked up your magazine (May 05) and read a number of your articles. As interesting (and provocative) as your articles are, I found it difficult to assess their veracity since all your claims are not supported with references.

Examples include: Pg 6 – Reference to floodgates opening after Roe vs Wade, Pg 6 – Reference to increased likelihood of getting cancer for women who haven’t had children, Pg 17 – Statistics relating to parenting, Pg 24, 25 – Several statistics re AIDS, Pg 28 – Reference to St Malachi’s visions, Pg 40 – References to Kay Goodger are incorrect (see http:// www.nzherald.co.nz/print.cfm?objectid=10125395).

By the way, in an earlier article, Chris Carter pointed out that very few articles are researched. It is obvious that some of your article about Kay Goodger was lifted straight from the Weekend Herald without reading their retraction. Ooops, didn’t research that one, did you? ...and I’m only half way through the magazine.

How many of your articles are unsupported? This leads to a credibility issue for me. If you don’t or won’t reference your sources, how can we be certain that you are not cherry-picking the data to support your own view?

Brian Hight, Auckland WISHART RESPONDS

All of our articles are supported, and the only reasons references don’t appear as a rule is because we’re not a scientific journal and therefore it isn’t our style (nor is it North & South’s), and also because many of the issues you query are now well established in the public domain or have been previously covered and referenced in detail by us - such as the studies on abortion, which we covered in 2003.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 13

As for the Goodger article, the Herald followed us, not the other way around.

And as we explained in last month’s issue, the Herald’s retraction was unwarranted in our view. We certainly stand by our story.

GODS, GOBLINS & INTELLIGENT DESIGN You misrepresent my position on the subject of apparent design in nature.

I do not “look at nature and come away with a deeply nagging suspicion that life has been designed” because, as I pointed out in my letter, science has revealed that organisms and their parts are really products of purely natural processes. Therefore, it is not a case of conceding that nature looks designed and assuming that “the design must only be apparent because gods, goblins and intelligent designers don’t really exist”.

And, of course, the existence or otherwise of such entities is beyond the ken of science – they simply don’t figure in scientists’ thinking, as scientists. You refer to “things [presumably organisms] that nature in a billion universes could not accidentally throw together”. However, evolutionary scientists do not view organisms as resulting from an accidental throwing together of separate components, a scenario creationists love to promote with their ridiculous ‘hurricane-assisted assembly of a jetliner in a junk yard’ analogy. Rather, they see them as products of cumulative change from generation to generation. And natural selection itself, the chief driving force of organic evolution, is the very opposite of chance. I cannot agree with you that the organisms involved in organic decay are “nasties”. After all, as you point out, they do carry out a beneficial role in ecosystems by filling an ecological niche available to them. On the other hand, although I have no difficulty in accepting the existence of true nasties (those parasitic forms I specifically drew to your attention) as products of a natural, amoral process, I’m simply unable to reconcile their existence within the concept of a benevolent, omnipotent creator. Your outline of a particular religious persuasion has done nothing to change my position on this matter.

Warwick Don, Dunedin WISHART RESPONDS

I think it is a novel idea that organisms - at a molecular non-breeding level - are mysteriously able to know that they should ‘keep’ good molecular changes and ‘lose’ bad ones. This is the evolutionary argument against the complex structures found inside the cell, that somehow these complex structures were built up over thousands or millions of years, and that the organism could afford to wait that long for its cells to become fully functional. This isn’t a new argument, but it is a flawed one.

A variation of it is that a team of monkeys with a typewriter could eventually write A Midsummer Night’s Dream, given enough time to tap on the keys - that eventually, chance would throw up the right combination of letters. The evolutionists claim that the organism or its molecules would know at a chemical level that certain “letter combinations” worked, and others should be jettisoned.

Of course, this is just an appeal to Nature of the Gaps. How would a cell know that the letters ‘TH’ were worth keeping for another million years because eventually an ‘E’ would come along?

Intelligent Design scientists argue that a species lugging a heavy ‘TH’ around is likely to be eaten by leaner and meaner organisms during the long wait. Hence, on the balance of probabilities it is much more likely that incredibly complex cellular structures like the blood-clotting mechanism (essential to an organism or it bleeds to death before it can even breed), the bacterial flagellum and so on emerged ready to use from day one, and are therefore strong evidence that a designer was involved in creating life - particularly when we now know that each cell contains more information than 1,000 encyclopedias.

And just for the record, I understand the ‘Tornado in a Junkyard’ analogy was proposed by atheist Dr Fred Hoyle, not ‘creationists’. Hoyle acknowledged that Darwinian evolutionary theory could not possibly account for the origins of life on earth, and instead proposed the now-popular idea that aliens perhaps seeded life here: Panspermia. Warwick, if many scientists now believe it is impossible for life to have arisen on Earth naturally, hence theories like Panspermia, why is it so hard to look at Intelligent 14, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

Design? On the one hand science is prepared to accept life was put here by goblins (unseen aliens) whose existence we have no proof of, and this is found in school textbooks, yet if you name the goblin ‘God’ suddenly the theory is unscientific?

Nor is it scientific to coyly sidestep the origins debate, as you yourself have done in the past: if science must demur to at least a remote possibility of divine fiat in regard to the origin of life, it is no less scientific to postulate that the Creator may have guided the development of life subsequently.

THE BREATH OF LIFE I have been enjoying the “to and fro” between you and Warwick Don over the last few months. The latest one from Mr. Don though, has me itching to butt in – so please may I? There is a true principle, which he alludes to, that a perfectly performing mechanism will cease performing if one part is taken away, albeit he applies this in reverse. I am not a biologist, merely a pragmatic maintenance engineer, so let me see if I have his hypothesis correct.

As I understand it, we have a friendly but lonely little atom or molecule, swimming around in some primordial soup somewhere, until he finds a similarly lonely but friendly atom whereon the two link up. Finding other atoms in the same plight, and linking up piecemeal, we eventually come to a place where one final atom joins the clan and Bingo! We have a perfectly functioning organism – a TTSS whatever that might be – with LIFE – capable of existing on its own. But this does not happen in isolation, for several zillion similar liaisons are happening in exactly the same way all over the planet. Eventually, of course, we get these suborganisms all holding hands together to produce a T-Rex. Leaving aside, for a moment anyway, the question of where all these friendly little atoms and molecules originated anyway, let’s look at this thing called Life. This is a very tenuous but very real attribute. If you have ever seen anyone actually die, as I have, you would realise that one moment we have a living, breathing being, the next we have a mass of cells. Likewise, a tree is a living thing by any definition, chop a branch off and that branch is dead with no prospect of ever living again. So what IS this ‘Life’? What is the power which gives this quality and then removes it at death? No evolutionist has ever, to my satisfaction anyway, explained that one most important detail. However, it is comforting to assume that Mr. Don was around to see the final link-up mentioned above and can tell us all about it – from personal observation by any chance?

Keith Gregory, Taupiri

WAS EVOLUTION GUIDED? There has been some discussion of evolution and Intelligent Design in your magazine. It is often taken for granted that evidence for evolution is evidence against intelligent design. But intelligent designers can use evolution as a design technique. We do! There is a subdiscipline of computing concerned with such methods.

See http://www.genetic-programming.org/, which offers a list where computers using evolution-based techniques have rediscovered patented inventions. This means that “imperfections” or “vestiges” can no longer be relied on as evidence against intelligent design.

As for me, I don’t know what really happened, but I’m sure it’s a lot more surprising and a lot more interesting than we yet understand.

Richard A. O’Keefe, Computer Science, The University of Otago

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

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 15

SIMPLY DEVINE

MIRANDA DEVINE

Douglas Wood has been pilloried simply for speaking his mind

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ouglas Wood survived his murderous terrorist kidnappers in Iraq so no doubt he will survive the sharks of public opinion in the Australian and NZ media. But the unrelenting nastiness to which he has been subjected reflects poorly on his country of birth. Ever since Wood opened his mouth and said he was in favour of George Bush and John Howard’s policies in Iraq, praised the Iraqi Army, called his captors “arseholes” and said “God bless America”, the knives have been out from all those who disagree with an opinion he is probably more entitled to hold than most.

“I’m proof positive that the current policies of the American and Australian governments is the right one,” Wood, 63, told reporters His captors often held a gun at Melbourne Airport.

Referring to the stateto his head, pulling it away just ment his kidnappers before pulling the trigger. Under forced him to make on at gunpoint, pleadthe circumstances, “arsehole” is video, ing for the withdrawal of an understatement troops from Iraq, he said: “Frankly, I’d like to apologise to both President Bush and Prime Minister Howard for the things I said under duress. … I’m very committed to the policies of the two governments today.”

Those words unleashed the full fury of enlightened folk, in newspapers, on radio and in the blogosphere.

The engineer was likened to a “blustering buffoon” without “grace or dignity”. He was not a real Aussie because he lives in the US. He was a “mercenary” and “spiv” for going to Iraq for “business opportunities”.

Wood was “the new pin-up boy of the US-Australian alliance”, sneered Richard Ackland in the Sydney Morning Herald. “What were the civil engineering works that engaged him and to whom was he contracted?” Meaning what, exactly? That he deserved to be kidnapped?

16, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

The Reverend Dr Vincent Zankin of Canberra, a prolific writer of baffling letters to newspapers, claimed in The Australian that Wood called his captors “arseholes” “because they are Muslims, whose dignity, religion and culture have been subjugated by Western civilisations for centuries”.

No. Wood described his captors thus not because they were Muslim, but because they kidnapped him and kept him shackled and blindfolded for 47 days, kicked him in the head, and forced him at gunpoint to beg for his life on video.

Oh, and they also tortured and murdered two hostages, Iraqi men who had worked with Wood, Faris Shakir and Adel Farhaway Najm, before dumping their bodies at a rubbish tip last month. They also forced another hostage, Swedish oil broker Ulf Hjertstrom, 63, to watch “eight or nine” executions.

Hjertstrom, who told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet he spent a month locked up with Wood, said his captors often held a gun to his head, pulling it away just before pulling the trigger. Under the circumstances, “arsehole” is an understatement.

Nonetheless, J.S. Waddell from Horsham, Victoria, felt moved enough to write a letter to The Australian declaring: “Douglas Wood presently disgusts me. He goes from a pathetic whinger advocating a change in the course of Australian politics to save his own life to an extrovert full of bravado singing Waltzing Matilda once he has reached safer shores.”

But the Greens took the cake, using the kidnapping to stage a protest outside the Prime Minister’s office in April, demanding Australia cave in to the captors’ demands and withdraw troops from Iraq.

Now Wood is home, they are lecturing him about money, saying he should reimburse the Australian taxpayers for the cost of his rescue from the filthy lucre he gets from selling his story, or give the money to Iraqi charities.

Then Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, claimed Wood’s statement in favour of Australian and

“As for the $10 million “reportedly” spent on Wood’s rescue, no one in the Government has a clue where the figure came from. “We’ve never made an attempt to estimate the cost and never will,” a spokesman for the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, said. But the cost of flying personnel to Iraq and maintaining the emergency response team was nowhere near the amount quoted”

US policy was “understandably emotionally driven” with the implication it was somehow not to be trusted – as opposed to the statement he made with guns pointed at his bruised head.

Wood has also been pilloried for saying, when he got off the plane, he might go back to Iraq because he has a business there. He sensibly retracted the statement within 24 hours, yet public condemnation continued for days.

He was derided as a greedy mercenary, a “privateer profiteering from war” as one letter to the editor put it, because he was using his expertise to rebuild Iraq and getting paid for it. Since when has making money for honest toil been a crime?

In any case, the term “mercenary” would more accurately apply to David Hicks, the Australian soldier-for-hire who happened to be discovered fighting for the wrong side in the war on terrorism. Hicks is being drawn into the Wood story in an attempt at moral equivalence by the Green Left Weekly and others demanding “the forgotten hostage” be similarly “rescued” from Guantanamo Bay where he is being held

captive of the real terrorists, the US Government and its craven ally, Australia.

Barry Reece, of Valla Beach, summed up the situation in a letter to the Herald: “As it has proved possible to rescue an Australian, Douglas Wood, from Iraqi terrorists … why is it proving so difficult … to rescue David Hicks, another imprisoned Australian, from our American so-called non-terrorist, democratic, fair-playing and freedom-loving allies?”

As for the $10 million “reportedly” spent on Wood’s rescue, no one in the Government has a clue where the figure came from. “We’ve never made an attempt to estimate the cost and never will,” a spokesman for the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, said. But the cost of flying personnel to Iraq and maintaining the emergency response team was nowhere near the amount quoted.

The $10 million is just another manufactured fact designed to elicit venom against Wood, a proud and courageous man whose crime was to speak his mind.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 17

LAURA’S WORLD

LAURA WILSON A question of priorities

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ighty to ninety percent of New Zealand mothers vaccinate their children, and twenty-three percent breastfeed them.

My son is six weeks old and due for his first series of vaccines, seven in one go.

So I took my beautiful, cherubic boy down to see my G.P. and have an in depth discussion about the pro’s and con’s of injecting him with seven deadly toxins at 42 days of age. I was out the door in nineteen minutes, seven of those spent in ‘conference’ with the doctor.

Me: “Doctor B, I would like to hear a detailed summary of international information on the efficacy and the side-effects of childhood immunisation programmes, being that they have been in existence for some fifty-plus years.”

Doctor: “What side-efSome people would like to see fects? There are no proven immunisation made law, as it is in links. Immunisation several American states. In spite eliminates infectious disof these pressures I persisted and eases at nearly no risk”.

Me: “Nearly no risk?” rang CARM to get the gist of Doctor: “One in onehundred-thousand at adverse reactions worst, to one in one-million can experience anaphylaxis for which there is an antidote”. End of discussion.

To add to this detailed summary of the world’s single largest medical experiment I was given three brochures and a phone number for CARM (Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring). Apparently these brochures were produced by totally impartial bodies to disseminate immunisation facts and statistics. Just what I was looking for.

But on closer inspection the one missing ingredient seemed to be impartiality. The Immunisation Advisory Centre’s mission statement is to maintain high standards of immunisation delivery, a theme consistent with the other groups; NIR (National Immunisation Register), Medsafe and the Meningococcal B website.

18, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

Like all parents, my intuition urges me to protect my child with everything I’ve got, yet this protective instinct is seen as misplaced when used to question the wisdom of mass immunisation schemes. Instead my protective attitude puts me not only in the category of negligent parent, but of risk to society through my child being a potential future carrier of infectious disease. Some people would like to see immunisation made law, as it is in several American states. In spite of these pressures I persisted and rang CARM to get the gist of adverse reactions.

CARM had nothing to say to me about immunisation reactions although they take the calls from concerned parents, they merely record the information and pass it on to Medsafe. I asked what Medsafe then does to inform New Zealanders and was told it all goes onto their website.

I spent a couple of hours navigating Medsafe’s extremely un-user-friendly website which has no direct links to immunisation queries, instead leaving you to type in searches for individual vaccines if you happen to remember how to spell their names. Up pops a lengthy treatise written in obscure medical jargon about trials that were carried out to prove or disprove a link between vaccine and a specific reaction. Often, no clear conclusion is reached as some researchers found links and others didn’t. In these cases Medsafe always recommends continuing with vaccinations.

As far as disseminating consumer information and helping parents make an informed choice goes, it is absurd. The same “facts and figures” are used by all the other immunisation advisory groups, so no wonder they quote a near-zero rate of adverse reactions, as nowhere could I find them recorded!

The burden of proof lies with the individual complainant as the safety of vaccines is considered a given.

Reports are followed by stern warnings that media coverage of negative health claims seriously damage vaccination programmes and should be curtailed.

Here, the spectre of vested interests raises its ugly head, as it must be wondered whether clinicians who replicated tests that showed vaccine links to disease, only to disprove the results, were connected in any way to vaccine producers. This clinical oneupmanship made Medsafe recommendations wholly unconvincing and I decided to go after some of the raw material; the parents’ testimonials.

These can be found on a website belonging to the Immunisation Awareness Society, which collates raw data in the form of emails, letters and phone calls from distressed parents the world over. I mentioned this website to the above ‘neutral’ immunisation agencies to have them all warn me that IAS was anti-immunisation. They said this as though it should put a wise observer off, but I asked them why their own pro-immunisation stance shouldn’t put me off them? Silence.

It is silly to claim IAS is anti-immunisation, because every article I read was from parents who supported their country’s immunisation scheme and duly vaccinated their children! The articles comprise a list of detailed reactions including autism, Crohn’s disease, asthma and forms of brain and neurological damage.

Parents write to the IAS after exhaustively seeking help and explanations through those who delivered the vaccines. In all cases their various health providers told them it was not possible for the vaccine to have caused their child’s problems. It follows that these complications were not then recorded with bodies like CARM as they are not believed to be reactions to a medication. Unconvinced, many parents turned to the internet to connect with others worldwide who remained adamant that their child’s life changed directly after, and because of, vaccination.

Still the current wisdom is that these parents are either wrong, or in such a minute minority that the overall effectiveness of immunisation is not dented. Why take the risk of not immunising because of such a small, unproven minority group?

Firstly, it is clear to me that we have no idea at all how big or small this group of adversely-affected is. The data is not collated as links are not recognised until they are clinically proven, and so far they seem clinically unproveable. Many of the reactions began in a minor way and progressed into a variety of thoroughly modern diseases such as ME, MS and allergies. Unproveable.

So parents must decide whether to go along with immunisation in an act of faith until positive links to harmful effects are made, or they can take note of the vast body of private (and some professional) experiences that raise a red flag. I am exercising this right to choose for my child and it irks me that this has “irresponsible” connotations. It is as if entire populations have developed wilful amnesia regarding the history of modern medicine which is littered with errors. Making mistakes is part of progress, but denying that mistakes still occur is part of brainwashing. It is typically onesided that so much emphasis is placed on ensuring our kids are healthy through injecting them, and so little through breastfeeding them.

No connotations of responsible/irresponsible parenting are made in connection with the massive lifestyle inconvenience of breastfeeding a child. I would have six more hours in my day and far more freedom of movement were it not for my ‘choice’ to breastfeed, but doctors concur that a child’s best chance at a strong immune system comes from breast milk.

23% is a very low percentage of breastfeeding internationally (Herald, June 17) and I can’t help but wish that the massive media juggernaut used to promote immunisation would raise the profile of breastfeeding. But I guess there’s no money in that.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 19

EYES RIGHT

RICHARD PROSSER Voice of the People

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emocracy was founded in ancient Greece. It bore, as its central tenet, the promotion, in concept and practice, of the Governance of the People, by the People, for the People. It is a fine ideal; perhaps the best possible system for the Governance of humankind which has been tried and tested so far.

Here in New Zealand, in only a few short months, we will have the opportunity to test this system again. Yes, folks, it’s election year, and We The People get to decide, for the next three years, who will govern us, what guiding philosophy will rule A Government which is sup- our nation, which mindset will determine the direcported by only a minority, cannot, tion our country takes.

Or will we? by any stretch of logic, be deemed Is our system of electto be democratically elected, nor ing Governments the best can it claim any popular mandate we could have, does it deliver true democracy, and can we even trust it to provide us with a workable representation of the views, opinions, and feelings, of our increasingly large and disparate populace?

One of the better aspects of the democratic process in New Zealand is its egalitarian inclusiveness. Anyone can put themselves up for election in this country, join whichever party they prefer, or form their own if they so choose.

I am standing for Parliament myself this year. I’m not saying for whom, other than that it is under the banner of an established and nationally recognised party.

I made an undertaking to our esteemed editor that I would not use his magazine for electioneering, and I will be true to that. Suffice to say, there are issues about which I feel passionate, and over which I am prepared to put my name on the line.

This year, for the fourth time, we will vote in an MMP election. MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional), which 20, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

replaced First-Past-The-Post or FPP, is the first proportional representation voting system to be employed in New Zealand at a national level, and it has been an important step along the road to true democracy in this country. Where MMP falters, in this writer’s opinion, is that to date, it has failed to deliver anything other than an FPP Government.

And FPP, as has been said before, may be called many things, but it may not be accurately described as democracy.

Indeed, New Zealand has not had a Government which could be called genuinely democratic since the 1951 administration of Sidney Holland, which won 54% of the popular vote. That National victory of over half a century ago remains the last Government in New Zealand to have been formed from a majority vote by the People.

Every other Government this country has had since, as well as a good few before it, under FPP or MMP, has been a minority Government; and a Government which is supported by only a minority, cannot, by any stretch of logic, be deemed to be democratically elected, nor can it claim any popular mandate. Neither faulty electoral systems, nor emotive partisan bias, are any match for blunt mathematical fact, which is that less than 50% equals a minority. And when more than half the People want someone other than those who form the Government, to form the Government, there must, by definition, be something wrong with the system.

So what can we do about it? When MMP was adopted as the voting system for the first PR election in 1996, it was up against some fairly stiff competition from the Supplementary Member, Preferential Voting, and Single Transferable Vote mechanisms used elsewhere in the world.

MMP may not be the best of the proportional methodologies on offer, but as a mixed-member system, it retains the concept of locally elected, and presumably locally-accountable, Members of Parliament. That these are still elected under the illogical, unfair, unrepresenta-

tive, and undemocratic FPP counting system, is a fault which needs to be addressed; but in my opinion, having them at all, is better than being saddled with a Parliament comprised – solely – of possibly unaccountable, and possibly faceless, list MPs. STV is claimed by its proponents as being the most technically perfect voting model of all those on offer. They are probably right; but I for one remain unconvinced that technical perfection is a more desirable end than simple, transparent, fair play. True, under STV, candidates may be ranked in order of preference as they may be under Preferential Voting or PV; but neither of these systems allows for the possibility of local or independent representatives being elected, unless the model adopted provides for a mixed-member composition within itself.

Perhaps it will fall to New Zealand to design and implement a new or modified electoral system, which incorporates the best advantages of transferable preferences, whilst retaining both local members, and allowing for the possibility of independents; maybe we could call it Mixed Member Preferential Voting, or MMPV. When voters are allowed to rank candidates in order of preference, it is possible that we may achieve a Government made up of everybody’s second choice, which must be better than the first choice of a few, to whom a clear majority are opposed.

MMP has delivered FPP Governments because New Zealanders haven’t learned how to use it properly. We are not hard enough on our Parliamentarians, and we afford far too great a degree of misplaced importance on the idea of stability within Government. Small parties within coalitions are supposed to toe the line; we are told that the concept of the tail wagging the dog is Bad. I say rubbish. Tails should wag dogs. If the dog is not big enough to govern alone, it needs to realise that it will be wagged by its tail occasionally. Anything else is simply FPP by another name, and as we know, FPP is not democracy. It is minority dictatorship.

Stability of Governance is not necessarily the same thing as stability of Governments. Governments who know they have stability of support, become complacent, arrogant, and self-serving. Governments who know they do not have guaranteed tenure, conversely, are kept on their toes.

Italy is a classic example. Since the end of World War Two, Italy has had in excess of fifty Governments, which, to our conservative New Zealand way of thinking, may seem appalling; but Italy also has the highest standard of living in Western Europe, testament to the fact that her successive Governments know full well that they are on constant notice to provide satisfaction to the People, on pain of being booted out.

The ability to throw out the Government of the Day, or any of its members, or any other elected representative for that matter, at any time during a parliamentary term, should be an essential weapon in the armoury of a well-equipped electorate.

This process is known as recall, and it is not without precedent.

Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California by just such a procedure. Under Recall, any would-be politician’s campaign promises, or election manifesto, become his or her contract with the People.

Should they gain office, they are required to keep those promises. If they fail to do so, at any time during their tenure, they may be removed from office without further delay, subject to the success of any appropriately sanctioned petition, initiated by either the voting public, or by the State authorities.

When proportional representation comes of age in New Zealand, as I am certain it will, we will probably see a system of governance develop which has parallels with some of the mature democracies of Europe. In the North and West of that old continent, through Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, and Germany, coalition Governments have been the norm for many decades. Under such arrangements, it is

commonplace for the Leader of the smaller coalition party to be given the Prime Minister’s job, and for the Leader of the larger party to take the Deputy’s role.

This keeps everybody honest, and rather than preserving minority rule, or provoking silly and pointless arguments about tails wagging dogs, it tends to lead to genuine Government by consensus. This result, surely, must count as one of the greater goals of a true democracy.

In pursuit of that goal, there is one further plank to the platform of representative Government, which I for one regard as essential to the continuance of genuine inclusive democracy in this country, and that is the use of referenda.

Binding, citizen’s initiated, referenda should constitute the single most powerful tool available to the People, in their pursuit of good government, and a fair and equitable nation. Indeed, what is an election itself, if not the greatest referendum of them all?

A referendum is the Voice of the People; a Government must, by design and by intention, and in the interests of justice, be compelled to listen to it, and to obey it. Governments are, after all, our servants, not our masters, however much so many of them appear to have forgotten that essential fact, and however much they would like us to forget it also.

A Written Constitution to ensure that all politicians – of all hues – play by the rules, and an Upper House to prevent marginalization of the regions, I believe are good ideas whose time will come.

Coupled with a preference-based voting system and a regime under which Governments are obligated to abide by the expressed collective will of the People through referenda, such measures will ensure that the Voice of the People may not be silenced by those who seek absolute dominion by a small minority.

The Government of the People, by the People, for the People, through a consensus of the People, is an attainable goal for New Zealand. Perhaps we can begin to achieve it this year.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 21

BREAK POINT

ANN COULTER Thou shalt not commit religion

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o put the Supreme Court’s recent ban on the Ten Commandments display in perspective, here is a small sampling of other speech that has been funded in whole or in part by tax payers:

Graphic videos demonstrating how to put a condom on and pep talks by “Planned Parenthood educators.” – sex education classes at public schools across the nation Korans distributed to aspiring terrorists at Guantanamo. – U.S. military “If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Now the Supreme Court is itch- Eichmanns inhabiting the ing to ban the Pledge of Allegiance sterile sanctuary of the twin towers (than the atbecause of its offensive reference tack of 9/11), I’d really be to one nation “under God” interested in hearing about it.” – Ward Churchill, professor, University of Colorado We need “a million more Mogadishus” (referring to the slaughter of 18 American soldiers during a peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1993). – Nicholas De Genova, assistant professor, Columbia University “The entire federal government – the Congress, the executive, the courts – is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate. That agenda includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives. ... If you like the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture ...” – Bill Moyers’ commentary on PBS’ “Now” “Kiss it.” – governor of Arkansas to state employee “For most Americans ... (war with Japan) was a 22, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism. ... Some have argued that the United States would never have dropped the bomb on the Germans, because Americans were more reluctant to bomb ‘white people’ than Asians.” – Smithsonian exhibit to commemorate the 50th anniversary of VJ Day, later modified due to protests “Anglos consolidated their control of New Mexico, acquiring huge holdings from the original owners through fraud and manipulation.” – Smithsonian exhibit “Ignored were the less honorable aspects of California history – the profiteering, revolts against Mexican authority and Indian massacres.” – Smithsonian exhibit, comment on the painting “The Promised Land – The Grayson Family” “This predominance of negative and violent views was a manifestation of Indian hating, a largely manufactured, calculated reversal of the basic facts of white encroachment and deceit.” – Smithsonian exhibit “In the Americas, sugar meant slavery.” – Smithsonian exhibit Close-up photos of women’s vaginas plastered all over a portrait of the Virgin Mary (which The New York Times will still not mention when it describes the “art”).

– Brooklyn Museum of Art A photo of a woman breastfeeding an infant, titled “Jesus Sucks.” – NEA-funded performance A photo of a newborn infant with its mouth open titled to suggest the infant was available for oral sex. – NEA-funded performance “F – a Fetus” poster showing an unborn baby with the caption: “For all you folks who consider a fetus more valuable than a woman, have a fetus cook for you, have a fetus affair, go to a fetus’ house to ease your sexual frustration.” – NEA-funded performance Performance of giant bloody tampons, satanic bunnies, three-foot feces and vibrators. – NEA-funded performance

A novel depicting the sexual molestation of a group of 10 children in a pedophile’s garage, including acts of bestiality, with the children commenting on how much they enjoyed the pedophilia. – NEAfunded publisher Christ submerged in a jar of urine. – NEA-funded exhibit A female performer inserting a speculum into her vagina and inviting audience members on stage to view her cervix with a flashlight. – NEA-funded performance A performance of large, sexually explicit props covered with Bibles performing a wide variety of sex acts and concluding with a mass Bible-burning. – NEA-funded performance (canceled by the venue in response to citizen protests) A show titled “DEGENERATE WITH A CAPITAL D” featuring a display of the remains of the artist’s own aborted baby. – NEAfunded exhibit A play titled “Sincerity Forever,” depicting Christ using obscenities and endorsing any and all types of sexual activities as consistent with Biblical teaching. – NEA-funded exhibit Essay describing then-New York Cardinal John O’Connor as a “fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth

Avenue.” Also photographs of men performing oral sex, anal sex, oral-anal sex and masturbation. – NEA-funded exhibit That’s the America you live in! A country founded on a compact with God, forged from the idea that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights is now a country where taxpayers can be forced to subsidize “artistic” exhibits of aborted fetuses. But don’t start thinking about putting up a Ten Commandments display. That’s offensive!

I don’t want to hear any jabberwocky from the Court TV amateurs about “the establishment of religion.” (1) A Ten Commandments monument does not establish a religion. (2) The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting” an establishment of religion — meaning Congress cannot make a law establishing a religion, nor can it make a law prohibiting the states from establishing a religion. We’ve been through this a million times.

Now the Supreme Court is itching to ban the Pledge of Allegiance because of its offensive reference to one nation “under God.” (Perhaps that “God” stuff could be replaced with a vulgar sexual reference.) But with the court looking like a geriatric ward these days, they don’t want to alarm Americans right before a battle over the next Supreme Court nominee. Be alarmed. This is what it’s about.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 23

DOUBLE SPEAK

IAN WISHART Are Muslims really in fear of a backlash?

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he London terror attacks, and subsequent vandalism of mosques in New Zealand, have once again thrown the explosive issues of religion and immigration into the mix.

On a national security level, it again shows the dilemma posed by an immigration policy that treats all cultures and belief systems as equally valid.

When a government, backed by United Nations directives, no longer regards its base culture as special then it will make no effort to defend that culture from being gradually overrun by new immigrants. In Europe, this is already Distinguishing between happening. In countries France and Holland, ‘good’ Muslims and ‘bad’ like up to half the children Muslims is difficult, especially now being born are when the Qu’ran authorises Muslim. Within 20 years, these new Europeans Muslims to lie to infidels will be voting for the first where necessary time.

A British intelligence briefing leaked in the wake of 7/07 reveals that 99% of British Muslims are ordinary people going about their business, taking care of their families and generally trying to live life like the rest of us. However, the briefing also reveals that around one percent of Muslim immigrants pose a high risk to national security. In Britain’s case, that’s an estimated 16,000 people willing and able to carry out terrorist attacks inside Britain; assuming a similar cultural make-up of the Muslim community in New Zealand there would still be several hundred fanatics.

The problem, as a correspondent on Danny Watson’s Newstalk ZB show pointed out, is that distinguishing between ‘good’ Muslims and ‘bad’ Muslims is difficult, especially when the Qu’ran authorises Muslims to lie to infidels where necessary.

24, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

The solution, as other commentators have noted, requires Islam in the West to face up to the termites in the woodpile and to alert security agencies whenever they find them. Because the many ‘good’ Muslims who’ve spoken on talk radio in recent weeks, disassociating themselves from terrorism, need to realise that if Wahabbi fundamentalists get a toehold here they will come to dominate local Islam and drive a wedge between New Zealand’s multicultural society that will be extremely hard to dislodge.

In my opinion, having listed to the talkback, I’m firmly convinced that genuinely ‘good’ Muslims are simply Christians-in-waiting who have not yet heard the Gospel preached properly. The ‘good’ Muslims who I’ve heard, and those I know personally, to a large extent share many Christian values. However, they’re still lost people in a spiritual sense.

In a democracy where free speech is cherished, we should be able to engage in debate at this level. Muslims should not find offense when we claim they need to become Christians; likewise New Zealanders should not feel threatened when Muslims preach their beliefs peacefully.

People who resort to bombing innocent commuters, on the other hand, deserve to be put up against a wall and shot, and their corpses draped in pig skins and bacon rashers (in Muslim tradition, a corpse wrapped in pig skin will not pass Go, and will not collect 72 virgins nor will it enter Paradise).

And while I don’t advocate the death penalty for people who vandalise mosques, churches or synagogues, nonetheless being wrapped in a freshly-obtained pig skin for a week might indeed give them something to think about.

Nonetheless, ‘good’ Muslims also need to realise that endless handwringing about fears of a ‘backlash’, while there are people elsewhere in the world who are real victims, who have lost loved ones, is a trifle insensitive and childish. The world is full of idiots, let’s not overreact to them.

LINE ONE

CHRIS CARTER Taxing times indeed!

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eems to me, that generally speaking, there are two major areas of opinion when it comes to the extraordinary amounts of tax which we ever-diminishing number of Kiwi workers have beaten out of us each year. The opinion that, quite naturally, is most popular comes invariably from amongst those, who under various social guises, are in effect direct feeders from the Government’s swollen udder, and being that the more taxes that are applied the merrier, i.e., the more for us!

There are hundreds of thousands of people whose entire income and daily bread is financed from the vote catching benevolence provided by politicians who have long since realised that the best way to build a rock-solid political support base is to make the larger part Do you seriously for a moment of the voting populathink that in a land already awash tion essentially state beneficiaries. People, whose with civil servants and petty adminpolitical allegiance has istrators we could possibly need been bought and paid any more? for directly with the money gouged from the workers’ pay packets have grown in number to the point where it really should be of no surprise to anyone that rabid socialism currently holds such sway in this country, a place that previously held such promise for those prepared to save and to work hard.

Speaking of whom, the aforementioned under-paid and over-taxed workers, who recently had the pleasure of hearing an ex history teacher, now minister of finance, having spent the better part of a several kilometre high pile of $100 dollar bills on a myriad of lunatic schemes and of course political support base bribery, this ingrate with all the displayed compassion of a hungry vulture, blandly announced to those who produce the actual shells and rocks that he currently is responsible for divvying up, that in several years time tax relief 26, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

would indeed be forthcoming. The approximate amount being that necessary to buy a single pack of gum! I think that it was Marie Antoinette who suggested to the hard-pressed French workers some years back that they should “Eat Cake.” Well, our number one chief extortionist apparently believes that his modern taxed-to-death workers should “Chew Gum.” Perhaps we should be reminding our Michael that Marie Antoinette, if nothing else, provided a very interesting historical precedent in the gentle art of head-removal for such heartless arrogance!

It was Forrest Gump who maintained that life is like a box of chocolates, but in New Zealand, certainly in a social sense I feel life is more like we’re all living atop a giant see-saw. When social and economic balance is maintained all is indeed well within our world. Too many wealth-producing workers having a large proportion of that wealth simply transferred to the non workers and Civil Servants currently breeding like rabbits and snoozing gently on the other end of the see-saw, and very quickly things go to pieces. The State beneficiaries in whatever guise they may currently assume, head for ground zero with a rush, with the workers and wealth producers being tossed up in the air, where via Air New Zealand, Qantas whatever, end up in Australia, incidentally at a rate at the moment of around 600 a week!

George Orwell some years back wrote of a time in the future where all citizens of his mythical land would fall under the malevolent control of “Big Brother.” George was considered to be a novelist when in fact I am quite sure he was much more of a prophet. Like simply replace “Big Brother” with “Big Sister” and combined with advanced control freak-ism, whereby simple public mind-control induced “Right Think” you can quickly create socially engineered and now very docile workers no longer being fully aware as to the amount of money that Big Sister is now taking from them to finance her Government’s injudicious spending frenzy.

“Tax, Tax, then Tax them again”, and if we still don’t

“The State beneficiaries in whatever guise they may currently assume, head for ground zero with a rush, with the workers and wealth producers being tossed up in the air, where via Air New Zealand, Qantas whatever, end up in Australia, incidentally at a rate at the moment of around 600 a week”

have enough to pay our supporters and to bribe new members into our political fold, then introduce all manner of levies, tolls, government charges, huge numbers of traffic fines, other assessments and – here comes the really Machiavellian bit – when the workers can no longer feed, clothe and house their families then we generously offer them Family Support. We give them just a small amount of their own money back but dress it up as a gift from Big Sister which should in short order have enough of the mugs voting for us as well. Easy isn’t it!

And who was it who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time? Well certainly someone who lived before the advantages of having a blatantly partisan, Government-owned and operated Television Corporation to sell the Brave New World that Helen and friends are currently ring-fencing us with. I take it that you have seen the enormously expensive Television and press ad campaigns all the go at the moment re “Family Support”? At the risk of upsetting a number of you, has it never occurred to you that the only reason an increasing number of working families actually need support is because the very same politicians who daily pick your pockets are with malice and aforethought creating, as it were, the disease, so that they may then ride up on their white horses to cure it!

It’s classic political manipulation, although, thank heavens, I see from some of the latest polls that a number of our brighter citizens are all of a sudden starting to realise what these reprehensible layabouts have been doing to us, which in my opinion at least goes way beyond acceptable politicking to the point of being damn near an offense bordering on High Treason! Going back to the enormous expansion of the bureaucracy, to the tune of no less than 39,000 extra bodies no less in just the last six years. Do you seriously for a moment think that in a land already awash with civil servants and petty administrators we could possibly need any more? Then again can you fancy the chances of any opposition party that states as an election promise that it intends to reduce the size of this enormous bureaucratic mill-stone from around the tax payer’s neck? Quickest way to not gaining their vote known to man!

Even worse of course, is that the vast majority of these legions of bureaucrats are highly talented people that outside of their politically captive environment could flower and prosper as normal wealth producing New Zealanders, but can they now be prised from the Dark Side to which they have been drawn by those who many now think would sell their mother’s soul for a single vote and invariably using, in effect, stolen tax monies to promote the sale.

Just departing for a moment from the criminal avarice of those who currently are bleeding the workers and their families economically dry at the moment, and pausing to take a quick look at the politicians themselves who actually get to spend it. Now I think that most people would agree that it takes a very special talent to handle vast sums of money. Conversely any fool at all can spend it, and indeed it would appear that at the moment that is exactly what is happening. May I

recommend that the next time you Internet users have a spare moment or so that you go to our Government Parliamentary site and then look up Cabinet Minster’s statement of assets file. You will find this not only most revealing but very likely will cause you near heart failure.

Far from apparently enjoying any talents at all with regards to wealth creation personally, as individual cabinet ministers they appear in the main to have all of the monetary handling ability of a bus driver or ex talk back host. In other words, although having no more talent in handling huge amounts of money than say I would, they never the less have the absolute cheek to enter Parliament whereupon they immediately set about spending vast amounts of our money like a bunch of drunken sailors. That they never ever have anything left over to give back to the workers in the way of tax relief should I suppose come as little surprise, or for that matter that long term and current cabinet ministers after years of earning a fortune have little else listed in the way of personal assets than a joint family home.

Certainly to end up with your own home these days where ill thought out and indeed rampant and virtually uncontrolled immigration has pushed house prices up to the point where young couples can no longer buy them should not be sneezed at. But I have mates who have never in their lives earned more than 40% of an MP’s salary, let alone a Cabinet Minister’s, whose financial acumen has them with personal assets that could buy and sell most of Labour’s front bench. Perhaps it is some of them who would be a sight more careful with public money, because I have come to the unshakable belief that the only reason we are at the moment paying the enormous amount in total taxation that we are, is because we have a bunch of incompetent tossers in charge, who enjoy no other financial talents, other than to fritter our money away as fast as they can gouge it out of us.

Get some competent people in control of Government spending, employ some people who actually have the talent to know what a budget and indeed budgeting actually is, and I think that there is a very good chance that we could slash taxes in this country by probably a third. As a friend of mine said to me a couple of days back on the subject, “If Nana had turned into a raging pokey machine addict, then who at home would be silly enough to leave their wallet lying around?

The more she spent the more she would feed into the machine, now tell me the essential difference between this Government and poor old Nana.” Got to be true enough eh? With politicians of all different parties we’ve come to expect and even forgive a bit of double talk and stuff like that, but total incompetence in the handling of our money combined with, at the moment, the legal ability to steal any amount of our wages each week that they might decide they need, is another matter altogether. Chew gum indeed Michael Cullen, the next photo-op you attend at a machine shop, if I was you I would stay well away from the guillotine!

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 27

TOUGH QUESTIONS

IAN WISHART How do I know what is true?

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n a world like ours, rapidly becoming a global village, does ultimate truth still exist? In a world of diversity, should we not act to preserve and protect different religious beliefs as valid for the cultures they represent? Isn’t it incredibly arrogant of Christianity to claim that it, alone, is the home of all truth in the entire universe?

There are many people in the world who have been conditioned to think that truth now only exists in scientific terms: if something cannot be measured or proven scientifically, then it cannot be true or at the very least cannot be proven to be true and therefore should be ignored. It is this mindset that dominates current western thinking, but it is flawed and I’ll show you why.

Premise: It cannot be measured or proven scientifically, therefore it is only an unproven belief and is Galileo offended many not important. people by speaking the truth, Solution: Just because something cannot be but the world is better for it, proven, does that make it regardless of how many necessarily untrue or irrelpeople were offended evant? Suppose a massive asteroid is hurtling on a collision course with earth, and for some reason (perhaps it is comprised of a kind of substance that makes it transparent and therefore invisible to our current technology) it remains undetected by the best scientific instruments. It is due to collide with Earth in a year’s time. Does the fact that we cannot measure it, or prove its existence, make the problem go away? Clearly it doesn’t. The objective truth is that the invisible asteroid continues to speed through space towards us, regardless of whether we choose to believe it or not.

And obviously such a circumstance is very important to the future of humanity, rather than “unimportant”.

It took only one example to show the weakness of pure science in answering truth questions. Science is good, as far as it goes, but it can never go to the furthest limits 28, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

of human reason and experience because such things go beyond the reach of scientific endeavour. It is where science stops that some of the toughest questions facing humanity begin. Questions dealing with Origin – where did we come from? Identity – who are we? Meaning – why are we here? Morality – how should we live? Destiny – where are we going? These questions have been posed by philosophers throughout human history, and they are much more fundamental to our lives than the invention of the CD or the discovery of Planet X. Religious Truth is a bit like our asteroid. Regardless of whether science can see it or not, if the world was indeed created by the Christian God then this has massive implications for the entire planet, regardless of whether they choose to believe it or not.

In university philosophy or “religious studies” departments around the world, they like to tell the story of the six blind men and the elephant. The elephant is said to represent the concept of Truth, while the blind men represent major religions. One man grasps the elephant’s leg, convinced it is a tree; another the trunk, convinced it is a snake. Each man has a different piece of the elephant and a different idea of what he’s touching. This, say the university professors, shows that world religions are all equal – each is touching the truth but describing it differently relative to their own experiences and cultures.

What is overlooked in the parable, however, is that the narrator is holding the ultimate Truth: he alone can see the entire animal and he knows it is an elephant. So, ironically, the parable fails in its own logic – it relies on at least one person knowing the whole Truth.

Is Truth something that is true for all time, or merely something that is true here and now, but not necessarily true there and later? Again, many lecturers argue from the latter perspective. Truth changes, they say. We used to believe the world was flat, now we know it is round.

But did the truth of the roundness of the planet really change? Was the world flat, and then it changed into a sphere? Or was it merely our own understanding of the

truth that changed? Clearly it was the latter. Objective truth exists – the world is a sphere, regardless of whether we believe it or not.

We used to believe the Sun orbited the Earth, say the lecturers, now we know the Earth orbits the Sun, and Earth is not the centre of the Universe. It’s a good example, they say, of another failed truth claim.

How dare we challenge others’ views of the truth when ours might be wrong, they say?

Well, they picked a good example. Galileo was persecuted for daring to speak the truth. Galileo offended many people by speaking the truth, but the world is better for it, regardless of how many people were offended. So why is it that we demand truth in the world of science, yet so many of us are prepared to shut down religious debate for fear of offending someone? We’ve already shown that science does not have all the answers, yet in the debate about the biggest and most important questions of all, we demand pluralism – the belief that all religions are equal and deserve equal merit.

How can that be?

Christianity and Islam both claim to be the one true religion of God, yet Christianity says Jesus died on the cross and rose again while Islam says Jesus never died on the cross. Obviously, only a village idiot could suggest that both religions have equal merit. They cannot both be telling the truth. Surely the issue of equal time would depend on assessing the factual claims of each, in just the same way that Galileo’s claims about Earth’s orbit were put to the test scientifically. We may not be able to put God in a test tube, but we can certainly put claims about God in a test tube. Step one towards finding religious truth might be to stack up the factual, testable claims that each major religion makes, listing them on a sheet of paper, and then looking at the hard evidence available to support each claim. Buddhism and Eastern religions, for example, claim the universe is eternal, but science has now pretty much established that it is not – so there’s a truth claim capable of being tested against the evidence.

Once we’ve worked out which religion has the best factual evidence in support of its claims, you can begin testing its philosophical claims – are they logical? Are they contradictory?

The search for ultimate Truth should not hit the wall at the dead-end road we call tolerance. Tolerance does not mean that we have to accept everything is equal. Tolerance only means that we should respect someone’s right to hold a belief, even if it is a dodgy one. But tolerance does not mean that we should be afraid to debate the truth claims of differ-

ent belief systems. The future of humanity may well rest on discovering ultimate truth, but we spend a lifetime hiding from it.

And what is truth? How do we measure it? Even in our normal lives, we accept less than 100 per cent evidence as sufficient proof for most decisions we make – we marry without knowing everything it is possible to know about our partners; we vote without knowing everything it is possible to know about a candidate or their party’s policies or agenda; we put people in jail for life only on the basis of beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond total doubt.

As philosopher Paul Copan writes, many Westerners make a serious error in confusing the difficulty of discovering Truth with the possibility of finding the Truth. “The elusiveness of truth in some areas of life is a major reason people believe something can be ‘true for you, but not for me’. Looking around the world, the relativist comes to one conclusion: too many people genuinely disagree about too many things for truth to be absolute! If people have significant, almost irreconcilable differences in vital things such as religion, morality, politics and philosophy, doesn’t it seem rash or even arrogant to say one perspective is true and all others are partly or wholly wrong?”

Yet, says Copan, what is really happening is that people have become incapable of resolving conflicting ideas through debate and reason, preferring instead to shy away at the first sign of disagreement, retreating into relativism.

“Disagreement may simply indicate that some or all concerned do not have full knowledge, a clear grasp of the issue at hand.” Imagine, says Copan, a murder trial where the jurors are having real difficulty discerning the truth in the face of a weak prosecution case. There are strident arguments in the jury room that the accused must be innocent – ‘who are we to say he is guilty?’. Then imagine what happens when a key eyewitness is discovered and subpoenaed to testify. Suddenly the truth that seemed so hard to find is crystal clear to all the jurors. It is not that the evidence did not exist, it was simply that the truth had not yet been found and digested.

Although it is far easier in religious affairs to retreat on the path of least resistance – ‘all religions are essentially equal’ – it doesn’t solve the ultimate question: does one of those religions actually have ultimate Truth crucial for human survival?

Hiding from it just to avoid conflict, or to avoid having your own preconceptions challenged, is nothing more than putting your head in the sand so as not to see that incoming asteroid.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 29

POLITICAL HEAT

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS A Green vote means you want more refugees here

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’d like to welcome all of you, whether you are new migrants or your ancestors have been here for generations. It’s great to see New Zealanders of so many ethnic origins – Pacific Islands, Sri Lanka, Middle East, Palestine, Philippines and China to name just a few. All of us in New Zealand are here because we or our ancestors came here in search of a better life. All of us come from people who have had to learn to live in this land with its unique climate, plants and animals, culture and political processes. All of us are still learning – and as we do so, contributing to the richness and diversity that is Aotearoa.

My best friend when I was ten-years-old was a Chinese girl. She was a third-generation New Zealander but I learned from her that We all understand much not all families have the cultural traditions or better who we are if we know same the same expectations of about other cultures, just as their children, and that the we never fully understand differences between people are interesting and enhow our own language works rich us all. We all underuntil we learn another stand much better who we are if we know about other cultures, just as we never fully understand how our own language works until we learn another. I really valued the opportunity to learn that at a young age.

The Greens want to see a society here in New Zealand that welcomes diversity in the knowledge that it adds richness to all our lives. We want to increase the quota of refugees we accept, knowing that as a small country we cannot do much to reduce the international crisis of suffering, but that we will do what we can.

We want to see a society that doesn’t think the job is over when people cross our borders, but that offers practical help to learn language, find homes and jobs and schooling, and build understanding of what is unique in New Zealand. That is particularly our Treaty relationship, which we expect all new migrants to honour, and our 30, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

unusual biodiversity of unique plants and animals, which we hope new citizens will grow to love and care for.

We recognize that people will never be truly at home if their families are not able to join them, particularly if those families are in danger. So we emphasise family reunification in accepting new migrants. We want a country where people feel secure that they have equal rights, regardless of their ethnic origin, religion, gender or political beliefs.

Imagine a world where Winston Peters was Minister of Immigration – migrants and refugees already in New Zealand could find themselves herded like cattle by “flying squads” in the middle of the night and loaded onto planes. And those wanting to come here may be met by an iron curtain for which only the white middle class from Britain and other European countries have a key. It has not passed me by that while Winston is out there ranting about migrants, he has had little to say about his deputy leader, who himself immigrated here from Britain.

And we should note that a vote for either National or Labour could lead to Winston being able to implement his policies of discrimination. Neither of them has ruled out a coalition with NZ First and Winston has not said who he would work with in a new government. A party vote for the Greens at this election, therefore, is a vote for inclusiveness and a vote against bigotry.

Winston and I seem to look at the same reality but see quite different things. When Winston Peters walks down Queen Street and sees Asian faces, he wonders whether he is still in New Zealand. When I walk down Queen Street and see Asian faces, I see the essence of New Zealand: the coming together of many peoples, under a shared vision of a fair, compassionate, sustainable society.

When Winston Peters realises that we are taking in refugees from the world’s wartorn places, he cries blue murder, and shouts ‘bludger!’

By voting for the Green Party you are voting for a Government that will reject the fear-mongering and the hate, and will work to build an inclusive society that values all its people.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 31

DIARY OF A CABBIE

ADRIAN NEYLAN Walking wounded

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round 9pm two young blokes in shorts, singlets and barefeet flagged me down on a residential street in Coogee. One had an old fella propped up against a fence.

The other opened the cab door and said, ‘Mate, this gentleman has fallen over and hit his head - would you mind taking him home?’ ‘Yeah, righto’, I replied, thinking he was drunk.

In fact he could barely move due to a deformed leg.

He also carried a shortened left arm tucked tightly into the body, with a contorted claw fist. The young fellas helped him to the cab, carefully lifting each foot.

‘He’s got money in his wallet’, the Samaritans said, ‘and his address is __ _____ Street. You got that?’.

‘Yeah’, I told them, ‘I’ll I grabbed him under his good get him home’. From arm and we made our way up the then on it felt like a mercy trip. The man was well dozen steps of his boarding house, over 70 years old, in shock gingerly dragging his gammy leg and disorientated.

Slowly he came around, checking his pockets and patting the back of his head.

‘You sure you don’t want to go for a check-up at Saint Vincent’s?’, I asked. ‘I’ll be alright’, he said. ‘Just take me home’.

Within fifteen minutes, he freshened up enough to demand we pull over. ‘But you don’t live here’, I said, but he insisted. What could I do? As he was conscious enough to pay the fare, I hopped out and went around to help him. ‘Mate, this ain’t home! What are you getting out here for?’

Eventually he agreed he was in the wrong street.

Climbing back in the cab I drove to his address a few blocks away. We stopped outside a shabby unlit boarding house opposite the Hard Rock Café. As I helped him out onto his feet, my spotlight bathed the back of his head. It was covered in wispy strands of snowy hair, 32, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

half covered in dried blood. ‘Jeez, mate’, I said, ‘you’ve given your noggin a real crack. There’s a cut and some blood there’.

Despite his proud assurances, I grabbed him under his good arm and we made our way up the dozen steps of his boarding house, gingerly dragging his gammy leg.

After fishing around for his key, he opened the door to a gritty darkened corridor. There was no one there for him.

But he point-blank refused any further help beyond the door, and thanked me in a strong dignified voice. Five minutes later I returned and drove past to see a light on in the unit directly opposite the front door. A good result, I thought, and with luck a community nurse will come around and clean up the wound.

Speaking of wounds, in an amazing coincidence a few hours later, I was hailed in the very same block by a tall, barrel-chested bloke, around 30, wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt. I pinned him for a gym jockey. His left arm was heavily wrapped in bandages from the hand to above the elbow. Climbing in he said, ‘It’s just a short trip up to Oxford Street. My arm’s throbbing too much to walk’.

‘What happened to you?’, I asked. ‘Mate’, he replied, ‘did you read about an attack early last Saturday morning?

Back there on William and Bourke Street?’ This was the Ferrari dealer corner, a notorious night-time haunt of hookers and pimps.

According to my passenger, he and his girlfriend were approached by two Persian males and asked for a cigarette.

The request was declined, unambiguously. One of the males then allegedly produced a machete and proceeded to attack my passenger about the head. In defending himself my passenger raised his left forearm and sustained numerous gashes from contact with the blade. These required some 150 stitches to close. Plus he lost 1½ litres of blood.

After resisting the initial attack, he was able to disarm and ‘subdue’ the assailant, whose mate ran off. Five days later, the assailant remains in hospital, facing a possible 20-year jail term. And he didn’t even get the cigarette. Dope.

Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au

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YES, PRIME MINISTER? Has National got the nous to govern

It is shaping up as one of the closest election battles in two decades – an election that Labour thought it had in the bag. IAN WISHART analyses whether National has what it takes to resume command, and what Labour might do if given another term in office

M

urray McCully draws in his breath, glancing out the Koru lounge window at the jet screaming down the runway, and waits for the boarding call announcement to finish reverberating before venturing an answer: “If Labour get a third term, they’re going to see that as their swansong and there’ll be no holding back whatsoever.”

At 52, and an MP since 1987, the former corporate PR strategist is now one of National’s most seasoned operators, and a close advisor to party leader Don Brash. For McCully, this election is a big deal, and not just because McCully can sniff a Cabinet Minister’s salary again for the first time in six years. No, this time National’s will to win is about more than merely returning to power: to listen to McCully and Brash, it’s now about righting some wrongs, about acknowledging the mistakes of the past and treating the public with a new respect. For a long time in politics, there’s been a kind of gentlemen’s agreement about how far radical agendas can be pushed, how far constitutional conventions can be stretched. The reason for this gentlemen’s agreement was simple: without a written constitution, New Zealand relied on the integrity and goodwill of successive administrations to acknowledge that although they had absolute power on paper, they should not exercise absolute power in principle except in the case of a national emergency.

David Lange’s 1984 Labour government changed all that. Having campaigned largely on the anti-nuclear issue and an end to Muldoonism, Lange and Roger Douglas extended their mandate far beyond what the electorate had anticipated. The reforms of the 1980s were breathtaking in their vision and scope and, because of that, they captured the hearts and minds of the media.

For Labour, this was crucial. Without favourable media coverage, the government knew it could not achieve its far-reaching reform goals.

By the 1987 election, when McCully finally entered parliament as part of the public backlash against Labour, the Government was embarking on phase two of its major reforms – restructuring the state sector. By 1990, with Lange gone, Labour had chewed through two more Prime Ministers, Palmer and Moore, worn out several finance ministers, mismanaged the BNZ and the Cook Islands tax haven scandals, and outflanked the National Party on the economic right.

Although voters in the 1990 election resoundingly threw out a tired Labour Government, with Helen Clark as Deputy Prime Minister, the election was National’s to win only because it was the 34, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005 August05_NZ_sec2_Pilippines.p65

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FOTOPRESS: Ross Setford only other showboat in port, not because people were enamoured of National itself.

July 2005, fifteen years after the election that brought the last National Government to power, the electoral pre-conditions now are eerily similar to those at the end of the eighties: Labour’s once-formidable front bench are looking tired and scandal-plagued, there are strong rumours that Helen Clark’s once impregnable media team have been on the verge of quitting, caucus black sheep John Tamihere has given an insider’s view of the ‘lesbian sisterhood’ agenda dominating the Clark Beehive, and Finance Minister Michael Cullen has delivered a black budget to rival Nordmeyer’s election-killer in the late fifties.

Sitting on a multibillion dollar surplus, Labour offered voters a tax cut equivalent to just $0.67 cents a week - less than the value of a packet of chewing gum - with the added proviso that Labour’s generous offer would not kick in for another three years.

It was, offers McCully, the Mother of all Budget insults, but not the only reason for Labour’s final deflation in the polls: “There’s no one incident or issue. You tend to see an accumulation of issues and then finally there’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Earlier this year we had the 111 saga, the NCEA and so on, Don Brash was saying to some of us ‘Good God, it’s not making any difference in the polls!’. Some of us who’d seen this process before were very confident that if the trend continued that sooner or later there’d be a point where things collapsed.

“I think the Budget was probably the thing that signaled to the public in a profound sort of way that these guys are utterly disdainful of the people they’re supposed to serve. At a time when they’re running $7.5 billion surpluses and when they can allow an expectation of tax cuts to be created, they can then turn around and say ‘well, this is what you’ll get in three years’ time’ – I think to a lot of people that just

summed up the whole culture. If you’re looking for a tipping point, that was it, but simply because it sat at the end of a long list of other things that have done considerable damage.”

The beginning of the end for Labour arrived on the morning of Monday April 4, 2005, when Prime Minister Helen Clark hissed to Tamihere in a 6am phone call: “I’m going to be interviewed by Paul Holmes in a few minutes (the PM’s Monday slot on Newstalk ZB is often pre-recorded), what exactly am I supposed to tell him?”

F

or Clark, the timing could not have been worse. The previous day she’d wrapped up Labour’s pre-election conference in Wellington to adulation and praise from hundreds of party members on the floor, convinced that her lead in the polls was unassailable and that Labour would indeed become ‘the natural party of government’, as president Mike Williams was suggesting.

Yet here, on Monday morning, the headlines did not reflect the success of the party conference and the presidential aura of the Prime Minister, but instead that Tamihere had spilled the beans on serious factional splits within the outwardly unified Labour, and a plot by “frontbums…tossers…and queers” to socially engineer New Zealand.

Labour’s list had just been announced, and Tamihere highlighted the elevation of lesbian and former Labour president Maryan Street to a guaranteed seat in parliament via the list. The left wing, he warned, was gearing up to seriously control Labour after the election.

National leader Don Brash couldn’t believe his good fortune as the Tamihere saga played out, night after night.

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a sudden someone from deep inside Labour says that basically everything the public had suspected about Labour was in fact true.”

Even so, like McCully, Brash recognises that Tamihere was only an entrée, and that Labour’s fall coincides with the public finally beginning to discern a difference between the main parties.

“I think it’s a combination of positives and negatives. Positives about our programme: we’re outlining a policy on the Treaty of Waitangi, on welfare reform, on roading, on education, law and order and so on, which is appealing to the electorate. We’ve also announced policy on racing, agriculture, biosecurity – all of which are appealing to parts of the electorate.

“Tax is still to come, but we’ve made it clear that there is scope for beginning a process of tax reduction on the first of April next year. Clearly that won’t be a massive tax reduction, it can’t be until we get government spending under control, but as we do that we think we can gradually ease the tax burden which hardworking New Zealanders are carrying.

O

n the negative side, I think people are getting increasingly angry about the government, and that’s partly about a perception that they’re hellbent on a politically-correct social engineering agenda, but it’s partly also a whole series of individual disasters – the 111 emergency call system report, the NCEA scholarship exams, the Immigration Service problems, the Peter Doone affair, the Budget itself disappointed people in a very substantial way, the total muck-up about the Kyoto Protocol which was supposed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to NZ and it’s now clear that it’s going to cost us very substantial amounts of money – potentially more than a billion dollars.

“And then of course we’ve seen the government quite desperately trying to change direction. Michael Cullen suddenly finding half a billion dollars to spend on roads when only six weeks back he was saying he could only provide a further one hundred million and there’s no scope for more and no scope for tax relief – but out of thin air he finds another $500 million.

“Then we saw of course the land access thing. The Government’s been hellbent on giving the public access across private farmland, then all of a sudden they say no, they’re going to defer that for further consultation after the election. We saw it again with the pylons through the Waikato. That decision was supposed to be made pre-election, and all of a sudden they’re saying it won’t be made until after the election.

So I think the public is getting cynical about Labour at the same time as they’re finding National’s policies more attractive.

“There are also a whole lot of individually small things which are irritating people, and I heard a journalist the other day saying that for him the tipping point had been Jonathan Hunt sitting in his High Commissioner’s car on Anzac Day during a shower of rain when the rest of the ceremony was going on in the rain. He said that for him, that was the last straw. So I think it’s a combination of positive things about National and negative things about Labour.”

Commentators watching the new political landscape unfolding

around them can’t help but be fascinated by the vision of the oncepowerful Clark administration as impending road-kill in the headlights of an oncoming centre-right resurgence.

“Clark has also been trying to corner the ‘family’ market,” wrote Colin James in the Herald, “witness the bus shelter posters you paid for as taxpayers telling you your family has never had it so good. Now there are billboards of a flying baby.

“The flying baby is a puzzling ploy, given Clark’s babylessness. Since the ‘mainstream’ has babies, that seems to be singing to multiplebabied Brash’s tune.”

Indeed, if you were looking for evidence that Labour’s strategy team had lost the plot, you wouldn’t have to go far past one of their billboards. Internet bloggers moved rapidly to parody the image of a baby caught up in red tape.

“Labour are SO going to regret that ad campaign,” posted one blogger in early July. “I reckon ‘Red Tape from Cradle to Grave’ would be a little more succinct,” wrote another.

National’s Murray McCully, likewise, is bemused.

“They’re running a slogan, ‘You’re better off with Labour’, but they’re doing that with public money, a taxpayer-funded programme on one hand and then piggy-backing off that with private Labour party advertising on the other, which is a highly questionable activity.

“I think if they get a third term you’re going to get firstly a consolidation of the trend of the last six years which is higher and higher taxes. As an article of faith, they simply believe that the cash they collect in revenues belongs to them, and they feel no sense of embarrassment that this is the fruits of the toil and risk-taking of private individuals and those individuals are being denied the opportunity to invest in growth and greater employment opportunities.

“So you’re going to see a continuation of the current trend – the indexation proposal that Cullen brought down in the Budget, three years before it comes in, small bracket creep for everybody before we get there.

“I think on the treaty stuff you’re going to see a whole lot of settlements completed miraculously just after the election. Under the Seabed Foreshore legislation there are a number of negotiations that are going on directly, Ngati Porou, Tainui and things like that, and I don’t think it’s too much to suggest you’ll see very substantial customary rights acknowledged in agreements that will be pretty much signaled to those groups to maintain their political support before the election but which will only manifest themselves in some kind of public agreement afterwards, and you will see a further trend towards separatism.

“Consolidation of the role of the unions. We’re already seeing differential pay rates in the state sector depending on whether you’re a union member or not, large sums of money are being given directly from the Department of Labour to the trade unions for all sorts of spurious ‘development’ purposes, and some of it of course indirectly finds its way back into the coffers of the Labour Party. You can expect to see a consolidation of that union influence, particularly in the education sector where Mallard runs the portfolio pretty much in conjunction with the two education unions and follows policies pretty much their own.”

And although National can easily be accused of scaremongering with its predictions, they’re not without independent corroboration. John Tamihere, before he was muzzled by the Ninth Floor, told Investigate that Labour’s list would bring a new wave of left wing trade unionists into Parliament.

“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… Just because they controlled yesterday doesn’t mean they should control tomorrow.”

Asked what the unions’ three year plan was, Tamihere was blunt:

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FOTOPRESS “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 greater union membership, but having said that it’s another impost and imposition on business… It’s really ugly.”

The Herald’s Colin James senses electoral blood in the air, and the possibility that Helen Clark may be turning into a liability for Labour, if National’s campaign reinforces to the public that Clark is not a mainstream “Us”, but a social-engineering “Them”.

“Labour’s PC second term has given Brash scope to do that. How might Clark retrieve the initiative? By rebuilding her image of downto-earth competence and acquiring the one-of-us-ness prime ministers have to have.

“That’s now a tall order. Brash, with tax and populism, has got the ‘mainstream’ jump on her.”

Has Labour’s politically-correct second term taken the party, Icaruslike, too close to the fire? Murray McCully thinks so, but warns that a third term Labour government would take PC legislation to a radical new level, knowing it would be the party’s final chance.

“In terms of what you might call the political correctness, I think you’ll just see a continuation of the trend we’ve seen in the last six years where the fringe groups that drive the government’s agenda in this area are going to push through Georgina Beyer’s transgender bill to be passed, and various other pieces of legislation of that sort. They’re just going to get on with doing the things that their constituencies demand

because they’ll see a third term as an unexpected bonus and you’ll see what they really think!”

McCully also fears that Labour is preparing to gerrymander massive constitutional changes to New Zealand.

Y

eah, that’s on the list, and the manner in which they dealt with the Supreme Court issue gives you a rough indication of how much regard they’ll have for alternative points of view on the way through. So they’ll get through the election and decide that this is their final opportunity to make some fundamental changes without necessarily troubling too much about whether there’s a genuine consensus for it.”

So far, National has been good at articulating what Labour might do, given half a chance. The question on the lips of many voters, conversely, is whether electing the centre right back into power will be a return to the eighties and nineties.

Has National learnt from its mistakes? McCully believes so.

“My own observation, having been around during most of the nineties, is that there are some pretty harsh lessons that the National Government of the nineties should have learnt. As one who was there for most of that period as a Minister, I’d like to think we’d taken those messages on board, particularly from the early part of the 90s.

“The primary one is that in politics, what you can’t sell you can’t have. We saw, both in the late 80s and early 90s, governments trying to do things they thought would be good for people, without turning their minds as to whether they could secure acceptance from the public

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for some of those policies. I think that did a huge amount of damage to the National party’s standing in 91, when I first came into the ministry – we’d sunk below 20% in the polls.

“I was around at the time of the Mother of all Budgets, and you couldn’t go through that process as a relatively new politician without learning that lesson. I’d like to think that others who were with me at the same time will, if we have the opportunity to form a government, have that lesson sitting very firmly at the top of their minds.

“I think the big lesson is that you’ve got to have a programme that focuses on the things that are really important, and use your political capital really well to achieve those things, and don’t get distracted with things that may not carry too much in the way of payback, particularly if they’re going to absorb a whole lot of energy in the marketing.

“You may have seen Don Brash saying that he’s going to be focused on the priorities that ‘make the boat go faster’ to borrow Sir Peter Blake’s expression. I think the big lesson that we’ve learnt from the early 90s is that we should focus on those things that are going to really matter, and do them well.”

For his part, Don Brash agrees, telling Investigate: “I’m certainly different. I’m not beholden to any lobby group. I was brought up on the political left, in a Presbyterian manse, with a very strong commitment to concern for the disadvantaged and when I was brought up what I was explicitly taught was that to be concerned for the disadvantaged was to be a Fabian socialist – that was my background and tradition. I’m no less concerned about the disadvantaged now than when I was a Fabian socialist, but I’ve reached the very firm conclusion that socialism does not deliver in the way its supporters believe it does.

“But my concern about education, welfare reform and so on, is primarily about concern for the people who are crushed by the failings in the education system and the current welfare system. Welfare costs the average worker $50 a week to fund, about $14 million a day, and that doesn’t include NZ super, just the major benefits. But in a sense that’s the smaller of the two costs. The other is the human cost of having 300,000 working age adults and their quarter million children dependent on a handout from the taxpayer. Now of course there’ll be some people who will be and should be supported by the taxpayer indefinitely – people who are seriously ill or invalided in some way – but for most of those 300,000 people we should be working to get them off dependence on a state handout as soon as we can, because that saves not only financial costs but also a very large human cost.”

But if a National/NZ First coalition is elected in September, it’ll face an economy left behind by Labour where the tide’s going out. Can the former Reserve Bank Governor steer us towards the good times again, and “make the boat go faster”?

“I think you’re absolutely correct,” says Brash, “the economy has already slowed down quite markedly. If you take GDP growth over the six months to March, we had a 0.3 quarter in December and a 0.6 quarter in March, which is 0.9 for the six months to March and an annualized rate of growth of 1.8, so it’s come off to a very substantial extent from the 4% we’ve had for the last year or two.

“In a sense I am less concerned about a short turn slowdown driven by high exchange rates and various other things, than I am about the longer term trend outlook. And the treasury’s own projections which were included in the budget suggest that they think growth in the next ten years will be markedly slower than growth in the last ten years. Now there are a variety of reasons for that, but if true then the gap in living standards between NZ and Australia will get wider not narrower, and that’s my real worry, not the short term cyclical slowdown that’s already well underway.”

So what’s National’s vision for managing this new economy?

“We have to take steps to increase our growth in income per capita,

and that is about having a tax structure which encourages investment, encourages people to get skilled, encourages people to take responsibility, and doesn’t discourage those things. I think it’s about getting infrastructure fixed up, particularly roading and electricity, it means fixing the Resource Management Act, and we’re committed to getting a major amendment of that into the House within three months of becoming government and getting it passed within nine months. It means reducing the compliance costs facing the business sector, particularly small businesses beset with red tape. I have to say that the red tape compliance cost issue is not just a problem in the business sector, it’s a problem in the education sector and the health sector. I talk to people in those sectors all the time who say we’re absolutely burdened down having to do more reports and more reports for Wellington.”

A National administration would surgically remove surplus bureaucracy from the health and education sectors, says Brash, saving taxpayers huge amounts by getting rid of paper-shuffling middle-managers and consultants and leaving more money to be spent on frontline services for the public.

W

e’ve got 120,000 people waiting for first specialist assessment currently, and some 60,000 on the waiting list for surgery, so the public is angry about that, they’re angry about the fact that they’ve got quite restricted choice for subsidized drugs from Pharmac, but they’re also making it pretty clear they don’t want a big restructuring. They feel that Health’s been restructured so many times they’re fed up with it. So we don’t plan to embark upon a major restructuring but we do think there’s too much bureaucracy in the sector and we do think there’s scope for improving productivity and particularly we think there’s more scope to use private hospitals in parallel with public ones.”

With just weeks until the election and the polls ruling out Act as dead and buried bar a Lazarus miracle, Brash is acutely aware that his coalition options are limited. New Zealand First is an obvious potential partner, although Winston may prefer to avoid a formal coalition in favour of keeping any new government honest on an issue by issue basis, and the Maori Party is a potential, although unlikely ally for National.

“I respect Tariana Turia,” admits Brash. “She’s a person who is sincere in what she says, I’ve no doubt at all. But I have to say the differences in policy are pretty substantial. We’re committed to removing references to the principles of the Treaty from legislation because we don’t think they’ll have any meaning. We’re committed to funding on the basis of need, not on the basis of race. We want to remove from the RMA and the Local Government Act special obligations to consult iwi – in other words we want to treat all New Zealanders as equal under the law. And that seems quite a long way from where the Maori Party are.”

And as for Act, Brash says National would actively try to bring some of Act’s best performers under its wing if the minor party fails to cross the five percent threshold and forfeits its seats in Parliament.

“We certainly would want to because some of them have real ability.

Without picking out particular individuals there are some very competent members of that party and they’ve made a considerable contribution in Parliament…It would be a pity to lose them from public life.”

If a week in politics is a long time, eight weeks is forever.

“We’re clearly in the race now with a lot of hard work ahead,” says Brash. “Nobody’s getting complacent, nobody’s counting chickens, but it’s certainly possible to contemplate a National Party victory.”

i

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LABOUR’S 3rd TERM AGENDA PUBLIC ACCESS TO PRIVATELY-OWNED LAND Issues: The Labour Party wants to introduce legislation giving anyone the right to enter private property for the ostensible purpose of gaining access to waterways. While in theory this looks to be nothing more than formalizing existing informal arrangements between farmers and the community, in practice any move to compel it by law becomes a major encroachment by the State on the rights of any New Zealander to control access to their own property. A person’s home remains their castle only up until the moment that Labour designates it a public thoroughfare. If passed by Labour, such a law could see private land owners liable under OSH rules if a member of the public comes to any harm while traversing their land. It would also make it almost impossible for farmers to prevent people casing their properties for potential home invasion, burglary or stock theft, because the underlying defence available to all members of the public would be a presumption that they were simply en route to the waterway.

Current Status: The Labour Government is kicking for touch, and intends to shelve its proposal until after it has won the election when it will then have power to force it through the House.

THE FART TAX Issues: Labour wants to be seen as pro-active on the Kyoto Protocol, having committed New Zealand by way of international treaty to a document that contains highly questionable science. While few would disagree that a process of climate change is underway, there is growing evidence it is caused by an increase in the temperature of the sun and natural planetary cycles, rather than human affairs. Nonetheless, having committed NZ to Kyoto Labour has recently been forced to admit it made a billion dollar miscalculation. That means it will have to find hundreds of millions of dollars more to meet our international obligations under the Protocol.

It is highly likely that Labour, if re-elected to a final term in office, will force through a raft of new environmental taxes regardless of public opposition, in order to raise money to pay for Kyoto.

Current Status: The Labour Government called off the fart tax in favour of further consultation in the wake of massive protests by farmers that threatened its poll ratings. A re-elected Labour administration with nothing left to lose is unlikely to be so reticent.

PETROL TAX Issues and current status: As above.

HATE SPEECH LEGISLATION Issues: Ever since a court ruling that a Christian video about AIDS had been wrongly banned by the film censor, a core group of Labour MPs have been trying to

draft laws making it a criminal offense to criticize the beliefs or values of certain groups in the community. A Select Committee hearing recently found submissions overwhelmingly opposed to introducing Hate Speech laws, but nonetheless the idea is gaining political momentum within Labour. The danger of hate speech law is that it restricts the ability of the community to genuinely debate certain issues. The situation is even more serious when protected minority groups then politicize their beliefs, and it then becomes unlawful to criticize their political statements.

Current Status: On the backburner until after the election. No legislation has yet been brought to Parliament.

GEORGINA BEYER’S TRANSGENDER IDENTITY BILL Issues: Beyer ostensibly wants to end discrimination on the basis of transsexuality, thereby normalizing the practice. Despite the appeal to the sympathy vote, however, the scientific jury is well and truly out on the merits of transsexual surgery. There is good evidence that people seeking to change genders often have much deeper psychological problems of which gender identity confusion is just one manifestation. In the same way that employers cannot be forced to hire people with serious medical or psychiatric problems, should the same employers be forced to hire people in a state of denial about their own sexual identity? Should the Scouting or Guide movements be compelled to hire transsexual applicants to work with youth?

Current Status: The Labour Government is kicking for touch, and intends to shelve the Bill until after it has won the election when it will then have power to force it through the House.

GAY ADOPTION Issues: Should a transgender person be permitted to adopt children, for example? Under Beyer’s Bill, once it becomes unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of transsexuality, the Gay Lesbian Bi Transgender (GLBT) community moves one step closer to effectively purchasing children ‘off the shelf ’ by way of adoption with Government approval. It is one thing for gay couples to privately conceive children themselves – the child will be living with at least one of its biological parents – but it is an entirely more dangerous ethical issue to approve of GLBT child adoption where none of the parties is the biological parent, and where the child is not given a say as to what kind of ‘family’ the State will choose for it. While GLBT activists claim the “right” to adopt, they do not acknowledge the right of children to be brought up in natural families – i.e., mother and father.

Current Status: The groundwork for gay adoption has already been laid with the Care of Children Bill. It would only require an amendment to that Act once Labour has returned to power for a third term.

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ON TERROR’s FRONTLINE You’ve seen the carnage in London.You may not realise that al-Qa’ida has a training camp in the Pacific. And it may come as a bigger shock to learn that NZ SAS troops have been in fierce battles with al-Qa’ida affiliates there.The Pacific branch of Osama bin Laden’s terror network knows where Auckland and Sydney are, and when a terror strike comes, it will probably trace its origins to this camp.

Back in March, Investigate sent its Australian correspondent deep into the jungles of the Philippines on special assignment. Last month, we sent MATTHEW THOMPSON and photographer RENAE CARLSON back there after receiving fresh intelligence about al-Qa’ida activity. This is what we found…

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T

he War on Terror is a circle of wars. It has hot zones like the Philippines, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, all sharing the experience of war, but each with its own logic, reason, and radius of impact.

The war also has cooler areas, cities across the world where sleeper cells wait for contact from their superiors in the mechanics of terror – master bomb-makers and logistics experts.

These areas are battlegrounds of intelligence rather than arms. If the intelligence fails, jetliners ram city buildings, shrapnel sprays through shopping centres and churches, and the logistics men retreat to their sanctuaries.

The jihadist’s great crimes of the past year include scattering train carriages in London and Madrid; transforming a Russian school into an abattoir; demolishing a Hilton hotel in Egypt; and sinking a Philippine passenger ship as it sailed from Manila. Several hundred civilians were deliberately targeted and killed in these attacks alone, and more than one thousand injured.

Today nearly three years have passed since the night Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) breathed fire across Bali’s nightlife, burning and blasting more than 200 to death, including 88 Australians and three Kiwis, and wounding many times that number. Yet there has still been no atrocity on Australian soil, even if one of JI’s bombing crew at Bali, Ali Gufron (a.k.a. Mukhlis), told interviewers the attack was ‘a curse from God that [Australians] be afraid of their own shadow’.

These curses have been strongly encouraged by JI’s allies, al-Qa’ida. A month after the Bali atrocities, bin Laden said ‘we warned Australia before not to join in in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali.’ New Zealand, of course, was also involved in both Afghanistan and Timor. The latter campaign at the express instigation of New Zealand’s Green party.

The pain and loss from Bali was overwhelming, but consider the trauma if al-Qa’ida or its regional allies carry out the threat to send ‘cars of death’ into Australia, perhaps to Melbourne’s Lygon Street, Campbell Parade at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, or into the heart of Fremantle.

Gone would be the sanctuary, the division between Australia’s relative orderliness and the turmoil of her neighbours. Whether or not the Spirit of Tasmania gets sunk en route to Hobart, a P&O cruise is bombed at sea, or a pair of vans explode at opposite ends of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, depends to a considerable degree on how tough the Philippine military is on the Australia-hating terrorists who infest their south. Is it safe for the likes of the Bali-bombers to come and go, and to hold courses in bomb-making, or are these people being relentlessly and ruthlessly hunted?

If people want to know who to support in the War on Terror, they should look north to a bunch of ill-equipped, underpaid, malaria-wracked young men in uniform, who cope with violent death, corruption, and political incompetence in a struggle to shut down terror camps and hold their nation together. While Australasian troops are serving a world away in the deserts and alleyways of Iraq, just

a few hours flying time from here, Filipino grunts are locked in a hot war with our enemies. ❖❖❖ Australia’s sworn enemy in the region, JI, is one of the most aggressive and entrenched terrorist organisations in the world, with the U.S. State Department estimating that its membership numbers in the thousands. Like all paramilitary groups, JI depends on experienced cadres to discipline and train recruits. Many of JI’s veterans cut their teeth in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and later joined armed conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1990s. These cadres have much to teach potential terrorists about how to protect themselves against intelligence and military operations, and offer expertise in the delicate arts of bomb manufacturing and detonation.

JI is like an Islamic Ku Klux Klan on speed. They are violent bigots who hate race-mixing and multiculturalism, even if they will exploit the West’s pluralism to further their aims, and who are fighting to bring large portions of South-East Asia under the sway of their own intolerant brand of Islam – a brand similar to that of their former benefactors, the Taliban.

And while much is made of poverty and lack of educational opportunities as ‘root causes’ of terrorism, many of JI’s luminaries lack these excuses. One of the senior Bali-bombers, Dr Azahari Husin, is a scientific author who studied engineering in the UK and lectured at university in Malaysia, yet still managed to fit in explosives training in Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Experts like Dr Azahari and his accomplice, Dul Matin – believed to have built the larger of Bali’s two bombs – have a habit of becoming known, so to avoid arrest they spend much of their time beyond the reach of the law. Since the mid-1990s, JI’s best and brightest have chosen to kick back in the picturesque mountains, swamps and jungles of the southern Philippines, within large regions controlled by Muslim rebels. There, JI has joined forces with elements of South-East Asia’s toughest guerrilla army, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (or MILF), and its most extreme, the head-lopping, bomb-planting, anti-Christian marauders of the Abu Sayyaf Group.

As Investigate revealed last March, members of the Australian Federal Police are in the Philippines, helping local authorities with counter-terrorism measures. Prior to their heavy involvement in Afghanistan, New Zealand SAS troops have been actively engaged in firefights with Abu Sayyaf – New Zealand's own covert war in the Pacific during the 90's. Make no mistake, these al-Qa'ida affiliate groups know where Auckland is. The United States is more heavily involved, running the controversial ‘intelfusion’ program which sees American military operatives stationed in terrorist hot zones to provide local armed forces with target information gathered via high-tech means such as state-of-the-art communication intercepts.

This has caused a backlash from the shrill anti-American lobby in the Philippines, who paint the U.S. as greedy puppet- masters every chance they get. However, there are also concerns within the military about the intelligence’s accuracy. A general spearheading the war in central Mindanao’s terrorist heartland told me that the information is better for ‘storytelling’ than for war, because it is

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JEMMAH ISLAMIYAH IS LIKE AN ISLAMIC KU KLUX KLAN ON SPEED. THEY ARE VIOLENT BIGOTS WHO HATE RACEMIXING AND MULTICULTURALISM, EVEN IF THEY WILL EXPLOIT THE WEST’S PLURALISM TO FURTHER THEIR AIMS, AND WHO ARE FIGHTING TO BRING LARGE PORTIONS OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA UNDER THE SWAY OF THEIR OWN INTOLERANT BRAND OF ISLAM often out of date. He said that relying on the U.S. advice has led to botched raids, needless deaths, and could undermine the chances for peace in Mindanao.

But, in the ever-shifting alliances and deals in the war on terrorism, it turns out that the military is also getting help from the dominant faction of JI’s Philippine patrons, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The MILF is increasingly split between those who are open to a peace deal that will deliver land rights for their tribes, and the extremist commanders who will not abandon what they see as a religious war, and who embrace JI, the Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qa’ida.

This means that in some areas the military is getting tip-offs from the MILF which enable them to launch strikes on terrorist suspects inside rebel-held areas. A pro-peace MILF spokesman even told me that his

organisation gave the police the information they needed in 2003 to trap and kill one of JI’s most formidable bombers, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi. This is a remarkable betrayal, given that al-Ghozi, an esteemed Afghan veteran, had been very close to the MILF, establishing the JI training camp within their territory in the mountains of Mindanao and conducting joint JI-MILF terrorist attacks.

Yet in other areas the military seems to get nothing from the MILF and sits in idle observance of the current ceasefire, even with strong suspicions about terrorist recruitment and training taking place a stone’s throw from the frontline troops.

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mountains, the world divides between the known and the unknown.

Behind lies a beautiful and fertile valley, its lowlands lined by forested peaks as it widens toward the warm waters of the Moro Gulf. Ruins from the valley’s previous inhabitants dot the climb to this outpost. Back down to the left I can see the bombed-out remains of a large reinforced concrete building we hiked through. My hiking companions pointed out the proliferation of doors – most rooms had multiple entries and exits – and as fighting men, they saw meaning in this. The soldiers also showed me tunnels leading back into the mountain. They showed me cramped chambers with barred ventilation holes high on the walls and hooks hanging from the ceiling. Torture, they said. This is what they do to their own. This side of the ridge hosted the

Bali bombers of JI when they practised the art of terrorist bombings, and it has since been picked over by the government forces that captured it four years ago.

Now all attention is directed north of the ridge into lands still controlled by thousands of Islamic rebels.

We crouch behind sandbags and gaze ahead into the vast volcanic wilderness of the Mount Kararao region, watching mists and low cloud drift across the jungle.

The reconnaissance company’s young commander, Lieutenant Jeriko Roman P. Sasing, tells me that worrying sounds often echo from the mountains. ‘We hear them playing with their bombs; their terror explosions’, says Sasing, whose few dozen men are charged with guarding this rugged frontier.

Sasing’s men are perched on the border of lands under the control of the MILF.

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The Government has been unable to defeat the MILF despite three decades of fighting, so it has offered the rebels a ceasefire while the two sides discuss how much sovereignty the Republic of the Philippines is willing to cede.

The MILF fields about 12,000 full-time, uniformed fighters armed with automatic rifles, heavy machineguns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and intimate knowledge of Mindanao’s rugged terrain. It can also call on tens of thousands of irregulars from the region’s farming men. More than a halfmillion people turned up to a MILF forum in May. Full-scale fighting with the military breaks out every couple of years, but more often than not the ceasefire (signed in 1997) maintains the conflict as an armed standoff punctuated by skirmishes which kill a mere dozen

or so. About 120,000 people have been killed since the modern Muslim rebellions kicked off in the early 1970s.

Having the ceasefire-protected time and space to be ‘playing with their bombs’ has been terrific for the MILF’s civilian-targeting units and their Indonesian friends from JI, who moved their training from Afghanistan to rebel territory in Mindanao in the mid-1990s.

The leaders of another al-Qa’ida affiliate, the Abu Sayyaf Group, hide in MILF areas and have merged their terror operations with JI. Together, Mindanao’s bomb crews have killed hundreds and wounded thousands in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past few years. Including, of course, the 88 Australians and thee New Zealanders at Bali three Octobers ago.

Disturbingly, reports have lately emerged from captured terrorists that the jihadist groups have been training together to strike shipping in the Asia-Pacific region, a threat that should be taken seriously after the Abu Sayyaf ’s sinking last year of a passenger ship leaving Manila Bay. The bombing of the Superferry 14 killed an estimated 130 people and stands as the deadliestever maritime terrorist attack.

Yet as accomplished as they are, Sasing, who walks everywhere with an M16 slung over his back and whose eyes never stop moving, doesn’t much care for his neighbours. Not only are they noisy, they’re also pushy.

‘We had to withdraw from there’, he says, pointing about 100 metres up the ridge to a thickly-forested summit sporting an abandoned system of trenches and lookouts. ‘It was too dangerous. The enemy was harassing us’, says Sasing, using the military euphemism for being shot at. The MILF know these outposts well; they built them – the trenches, the sleeping huts.

‘Could they be sitting there watching us?’ I ask.

‘Yes, possibly.’

‘Do you patrol forward of here to see what they’re doing?’

‘No, that would be a breach of the ceasefire. Also, they have laid landmines and it is too dangerous’, Sasing says.

Ropes run along the perimeter of the outpost, and at likely jump-in points the soldiers have strung bottles of rum, each empty except for a bullet suspended inside to rattle if the ropes are bumped.

‘Sometimes deer sound them. The men up here hunt deer when they can, because all food and water has to be carried in and it can be very basic. But the enemy know this, and once when a soldier heard a deer call and went forward to hunt it, it was the enemy making the call’, says Sasing, cupping his hand over his mouth and simulating the animal sound. ‘They captured the soldier and cut off both his heads, above and below, then put them together and dumped him in a sack. No one here wants to be taken alive’, he says.

Sasing’s enlisted men receive about NZ$9 per day for their work. If the situation erupts, such as it might if they weren’t ordered to withdraw when harassed, then their combat bonus would be another 20 cents per day.

Their equipment is antiquated – this outpost’s main weapon is a World War II machinegun – and many soldiers are sick.

‘I have about 12 men in hospital with malaria’,

ONE SENIOR ARMY OFFICER TELLS ME THAT THE CEASEFIRE EVEN PREVENTS THE MILITARY FROM BUILDING FENCES AROUND MILF AREAS IN THE HOPE OF HINDERING THE GUERRILLA’S TROOP MOVEMENTS AND ARMS SHIPMENTS

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laments Sasing, as the rains come in. They used to receive anti-malarial pills, but ‘now there are shortages, so we rely on mosquito repellent’, he says.

I ask how frustrating it is for he and his men, all aged in their twenties, to camp for months and months on the edge of enemy territory, within which terrorists freely practise their trade, watching each other succumb to malaria.

‘We can only do what we are ordered to. The military is just a tool of politics. You know, on clear nights we see spotlights from [the MILF’s] Camp Sultan’, says Sasing, pointing across the jungle to a mountain obscured by clouds.

The enemy are close. The first contingent of guerrillas is one kilometre away – ‘just there’, says Sasing, jabbing a finger down the hill - and another six bases have been identified in the region. The most notorious of their bases is Jabal Quba, where JI moved much of its training after the valley behind us, formerly known as Camp Abu Bakar, fell to the Government in 2001.

About 100 soldiers died on the road into Abu Bakar, yet now Government troops are restrained by the ceasefire, reduced to watching as fresh MILF forces move into the area each month and others leave in a rebel troop rotation.

Sasing leads me back down the ridge, slipping

and sliding on trails now turned to mud. ‘It rains every day,’ he says, picking up his thongs and walking barefoot.

Once again we pass the ruined complex of the late founder of the MILF, Salamat Hashim, where an Islamic crescent moon rises from the broken roof. Soldiers have graffitoed the building with lists of battles and military campaigns; one artist’s work depicts a particularly acrobatic sexual feat.

Sasing is careful about what he says, but other senior military sources report their bitter frustration with the peace process. One senior army officer tells me that the ceasefire even prevents the military from building fences around MILF areas in the hope of hindering guerrilla troop movements and arms shipments, and that they likewise cannot conduct reconnaissance flights over the Mount Kararao region to see what JI, the Abu Sayyaf and their MILF hosts are up to.

These restraints remain despite a backdrop of continuing terrorist attacks. Bombers have hit the CBD of Manila and locations in two other major cities, Davao and General Santos City, as recently as Valentine’s Day, killing about a dozen and injuring almost 150.

The triple bombing followed the military’s airstrike on suspected JI and ASG leaders in Mindanao’s vast marshlands.

Romero is intimately familiar with Abu Bakar, and he

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tells me over fried fish and fruits that the threat grows worse the longer the ceasefire continues. The MILF is recruiting and rearming under cover of the peace talks, and weapons shipments have been reported landing on the coast, most likely from Malaysia.

He tells me that there may well be a peace deal struck sometime in the next year, but it will let the MILF keep its weapons and leave large areas under its de facto control, just like the 1996 agreement signed with another Muslim guerrilla army – the Moro National Liberation Front – elements of which continue to attack Government forces.

All of which is ideal for the terrorists and kidnappers working out of MILF areas, he says.

‘There are JI about four or five kilometres from [Government occupied] Abu Bakar. The boundaries are imaginary, but if we cross, we will be charged with violating the ceasefire … and we will be fired at’, Romero says.

The guerrillas and the terrorists learn much from each other, with JI agents absorbing the skills of insurgency on Mindanao’s frontlines. In turn, members of the MILF’s special operations group ‘are taught by JIs to make IEDs [improvised explosive devices]’, he says.

W

hile the troops sweat it out with malaria, World War II-era guns and 20 cent-per-day combat bonuses, the enemy is cashed up.

Romero says that the MILF pocket percentages of ransoms from Mindanao’s thriving kidnapping trade; that they and their terrorist allies receive money from international Islamic charities; that they seize ‘revolutionary taxes’ from farming communities; that they have their fingers in the zakat, or Islamic donations given at mosques; that they run illegal logging operations.

The overtly terrorist groups, the Indonesian JI and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, also receive large payments from foreign backers, all of which makes it easy for the jihadists to pay locals to shut up when the military comes around asking questions.

And without local sources of intelligence, the military has very little to go on indeed. ‘We are facing a face- less JI – they look the same [as Filipinos]; they have learned our dialects – so unless someone tells us, we don’t know what they are doing,’ Romero says. The Government has more than 50,000 troops in Mindanao, yet even so, ‘we have sacrificed some areas’, says Romero, telling me a story later corroborated by Australian and US sources.

He takes my map and points out substantial stretches of the Mindanao coast and hinterland where the military has only a token presence. ‘It’s practically a freezone for them [JI and the Abu Sayyaf], but if we move troops from Abu Bakar, then they will take it over again’, Romero says.

The US is providing satellite imagery, communication intercepts and other ‘technical intelligence’, but as long as local civilians who could potentially supply up to date ‘human intelligence’ are more likely to encounter terrorists and rebels than Government forces, the free-zones will remain, Romero says.

‘They are getting stronger.’

THE SWAMPS ‘If the rain continues water will cover all of this,’ says Lieutenant Rhoel C. Tremedal of the Philippine light infantry, gesturing across the lush fields we glimpse between fruit trees. The scattering of homes our patrol passes are built on stilts, and their occupants watch blankly as we walk along the riverbank.

Tremedal and his men are stationed on the edge of Mindanao’s vast marshlands, their base a checkpoint on one of the tributaries of the Rio Grande. They have a sandbagged machinegun nest from which to order passing boats to pull in for inspection, but no one is stationed on the other side of the river, nor do any soldiers take to the water for river patrols.

‘We would be too vulnerable to ambush’, says Tremedal, one of the Philippines’ many bright young men who is spending his twenties clutching a gun, sleeping rough, and surrounded by farmers who commonly stash automatic rifles wrapped in greased-rags near their houses and whose sympathies often lie with the Islamic rebellion.

The rains make everything more dangerous in the marshlands, Tremedal says. When the water level rises from rain either in the marshes or in the surrounding mountains, boats can move swiftly in almost any direction, giving the enemy extraordinary mobility. By contrast, Tremedal’s troops will be struggling to secure what they can while their bunkers fill with water.

‘We will make necessary precautions – we will protect any Government facilities in the area’, he says. With roads becoming impassable and the waterways too dangerous because of the known presence in the marshlands of the MILF, JI, the Abu Sayyaf and bandits, ‘we will just move by foot’, says Tremedal, whose handful of men operate in a municipality with a population of about 80,000.

The entire marshlands cover about 500,000 square kilometres and contain about 500,000 people, almost all of them Muslims, who have never been conquered – not during more than 300 years of Spanish colonisation, not in the half-century of U.S. rule, not during the days of the Japanese invasion, and not by their own Government in the post-WWII years of Philippine independence.

Tremedal calls the patrol to a halt when the banana and palm trees thin out and we find ourselves entering a large open plain bordered a few kilo-metres away by thick forest and steep hills. The infantrymen fan out and study the horizon. ‘We should not go any further’, Tremedal says.

While small-group terrorist training and operations continue in the mountains and elsewhere, central Mindanao’s huge swamp is known as the main hideout for JI and the Abu Sayyaf ’s top commanders. The coastal ‘free-zone’ on its western flank allows for easy entry and exit; the terrain is excellent for hiding in and is an attacker’s nightmare.

Back in the 6th Infantry Division’s operational base for the region, outside Cotabato City, the general who plans raids and airstrikes on marshland stilt houses suspected to be occupied by terrorists, Brigadier General Horacio T. Lactao, talks me through his difficulties.

‘The ground appears from the air as if it’s a hard

THE ABU SAYYAF HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO KIDNAP DOCTORS TO TREAT THEIR WOUNDED, AND IN ONE INFAMOUS INCIDENT STORMED A HOSPITAL IN A CHRISTIAN TOWN OF BASILAN, TAKING AWAY MEDICAL STAFF, SOME OF WHOM WERE RAPED, MUTILATED AND MURDERED

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surface, but it’s just water lilies. If you step on it, you go under. Even the bombs are not so good – the bombs sink because it’s this high with liquid mud’, says Lactao, holding his hand at his waist. ‘And the water is above a person’s head, so even if a bomb hits 10 metres away it will not damage the structure. The rivers are their mode of movement, and a lot of routes are unknown to us.’

Lactao is one of the Philippine military’s hardened journeymen – one of those officers who have not gone bureaucratic despite decades of active service; who are instead still sweating it out in the shacks and trucks of the hot zone. Lactao asks if I mind if he has a cigarette, then leans in with smoke curling from his mouth while an enlisted man paints small pieces of wood to add to a three-dimensional map of the marshlands. The general ashes, drifts his hand across the diorama, and tells me, ‘this area has been in constant armed conflict since early times. This part of the [Philippine] islands has never been subjugated because of its social structure. It was governed by Muslim warrior kings [called] Datus.’

‘The Spanish, when they conquered one Datu king-

dom, they would be surprised that another would rise up. Each of these had their own domain. There’s a natural defence system here. Now that Datuism’s not being practised anymore, there emerged another group – the MNLF, and then the MILF. Then the Abu Sayyaf. Whoever has provided the guns is the one who commands’, Lactao says.

The Government will always be at a disadvantage to militant Islamic groups in central Mindanao, an intensely religious region, Lactao says.

‘Our laws are not consistent with the Koran – which one will they follow? Not ours. The Koran provides them with their standard. When you interview the Abu Sayyaf, they say the Constitution is just provided by man’, he says.

Terrorists such as those who blew the Australians to hell at Bali fit straight into this system, using their explosives expertise, money and reverence for Allah to win over the large number of Islamic clerics commanding MILF units in the marshlands. Jemmah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have fused operations in the marshlands and move together, Lactao says.

‘The terrorists contact the MILF’s Ustadz [military commanders who are also clerics], then move to them for protection. The MILF units of the fundamentalist leaders then form the outer ring of security around the terrorists, and because of the ceasefire we must avoid [military] contact with the MILF.’ The military has been cultivating informants in the marshlands, and Lactao says that a picture has emerged of how some of the most wanted men in the world move around. There is a group of about 37 JI explosives and logistics experts who have attached themselves to Khaddafy Janjalani, the Abu Sayyaf leader who has earned the blessing of al-Qa’ida through his ruthlessness, and enjoys a cult of personality throughout the world of jihad. Janjalani and his JI team, sometimes including Bali bomber Dul Matin, are surrounded by an inner security team of up to one hundred Abu Sayyaf fighters from the southwestern islands of Basilan and Sulu. Then that group will be surrounded by another ring of gunmen supplied by MILF commanders religiously disposed towards international jihad.

Janjalani, who has a US$5 million bounty on his head for his multitudinous outrages, always keeps his face covered, sometimes dresses as a fully-covered Muslim woman, and wears a bomb vest so that he can blow himself to atoms if cornered, Lactao tells me. ‘Then we will not have his body and someone else can become Janjalani, because that is the name that brings in large finances from foreign sources. For every bombing that [the Abu Sayyaf] conduct, they will receive US$200,000.

In this way they made large amounts of money from the Superferry bombing and the Valentine’s Day bombings.’

Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf have targeted U.S. citizens and interests, and in an attempt to eradicate these groups, the U.S. has stationed military intelligence personnel throughout Mindanao in what is known as ‘intelfusion’. The Americans are not universally welcome, especially with the mayor of Cotabato City, a former MNLF guerrilla named Muslimin Sema. Sema refuses to acknowledge his region has a terrorism problem,

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despite multiple arrests, exposed JI safe houses, testimonies from detained militants in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the still-unsolved 2003 car-bombing of the airport.

The U.S. has plans to fund highway construction near Cotabato City, but the project is suspended due to a perceived lack of action on terrorism. Sema is pissed off about this and has plastered the city with signs and banners calling American diplomats ‘agents of Satan’, proclaiming that ‘Arabs are charitable’, and denouncing the U.S. as ‘the world’s number one terrorist’. Sema knows that the US is providing counter-terrorism intelligence assistance, so signs around town also read: ‘Reject the terroristic policies of the U.S. in Mindanao’, and ‘U.S. presence here in Cotabato get out’.

All of which make working in and around this gunned-up frontier town an uneasy experience for a Western journalist. The first assumption of everyone I speak to is that I am American military, and it is hard not to be a little edgy when walking the streets or driving through the city outskirts, the roads hazy from countless barrels of burning coconut husks. Paranoia comes easily when I am told by one of the least drama-prone, most understated intelligence sources I know to ‘stay in your room at night’, and ‘do not overdo your luck.’

Pour another San Miguel and pass the ammunition.

Lactao smiles when I ask about the value of the hightech intelligence he receives on terrorist positions and movements from the Americans based in central Mindanao. ‘It is only good if it comes in time. If it comes late, it is just good for storytelling. Sometimes they will be sending it way after the people have left. The Americans are learning much from us – some of them don’t have any experience’, he says, tapping out another cigarette to smoke.

The general stares at me. ‘Let me tell you about some recent operations targeting Janjalani and JI, who we know are in constant contact. On January 27 we conducted airstrikes against seven targets [houses] stretching over a kilometre along the river. We believe some were wounded, but not the main personalities. Now they learn their lessons, and the leaders will be sleeping outside in a hammock or sleeping bag or a banca [small boat] 50 to 100 metres away from the structure. They let their men sleep in the house.’

The terrorists struck back a fortnight later with the Valentine’s Day bombings – blasts in Manila and two of Mindanao’s cities, Davao and General Santos City. Twelve dead and almost 150 wounded. Several other devices were discovered before they could be detonated.

Lactao then tells me that as Janjalani and the JIs kept moving through the marsh in April, the military correctly anticipated that the MILF commander who had been protecting the terrorists would sign them over to another guerrilla commander well known as a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. The vow of protection is binding, and ‘if anything happens there will be an investigation within the MILF and within the al-Qa’ida organisation’, Lactao says.

Yet the military also faces heavy politi-cal fallout when it launches a strike or raid and hits the MILF instead of JI or the Abu Sayyaf. ‘It could dis-turb the peace process. We

have to be dead sure that we are striking the right place at the right time. If they are in this house, we can only hit this house. The people in the marsh area are very religious; they look at the ASG [Abu Sayyaf Group] as international mujahadeen. If we hit the wrong house and kill innocent civilians, then it helps the enemy’, Lactao says.

The MILF is comprised of semi-autonomous units, with each commander operating like the Datu warlords that gave the Spanish such grief centuries ago. More secular elements currently have the most sway politically, and are using all their power to convince the organisation’s independent-minded commanders to stick to the peace negotiations with the Government. Getting into shootouts with the mainstream of the MILF could set off full-scale war again, of the sort last seen in 2003. ‘We must be 100 per cent sure of our information. It should be very precise because we are constrained by the peace agreements’, Lactao says.

I

t was in this climate that word came in April that the terrorists were staying on a particular hill inside the marshlands. About 120 special forces in plain clothes were dispatched from Davao in nondescript vehicles to a small town on the edge of the marsh area where they assembled for the assault. There the surprise was lost, however, after a civilian spotter text-messaged the enemy with a warning about Government troops massing. ‘Filipinos are fond of texting’, Lactao says.

Yet, Lactao says that the attack may still have succeeded, but for ‘some errors in the system’. The intelligence provided by the U.S. was out of date, and caused the Philippine airborne and land units to attack one kilometre to the side of the terrorists, starting a firefight with the MILF in violation of the ceasefire.

‘Intelligence must be real-time’, Lactao says.

Three soldiers were hit before they pulled out, including one man shot in the face, and on the other side, several MILF guerrillas were killed and a dozen or so wounded. To calm the situation, the Government flew the dead and wounded rebels to hospital.

The April incident was a lost opportunity to kill or capture scores of South East Asia’s most skilled and ruthless terrorists; men in close contact with al-Qa’ida.

Nevertheless, Lactao says that the combination of informers selling out the jihadists and the sudden violence their information brings is having an effect on his prey: ‘They are getting paranoid and that’s why they are asking for shabu [methamphetamine].’

Yet the US can quite reasonably argue that without the millions of dollars worth of training and equipment it gives the Philippines each year, the country would be taking even more of a hammering from the terrorists.

Until the US ran the Balikatan (‘shoul-der-to-shoulder’) joint military and development exercise across Janjalani’s home island of Basilan in 2002, the Abu Sayyaf were running rings around the armed forces, sacking Christian towns and conducting mass-hostage takings at schools, hospitals and even Malaysian resorts. (When French and Germans were taken, the European response was worse than useless – funneling a US$25 million ransom through Libya with which the Abu Sayyaf

OUR LAWS ARE NOT CONSISTENT WITH THE KORAN – WHICH ONE WILL THEY FOLLOW? NOT OURS. THE KORAN PROVIDES THEM WITH THEIR STANDARD. WHEN YOU INTERVIEW THE ABU SAYYAF, THEY SAY THE CONSTITUTION IS JUST PROVIDED BY MAN’, THE GENERAL SAYS

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bought more weapons, faster speedboats, and launched a new wave of violence.)

A private security consultant based in Manila told me that the US and Philippines need each other. The Philippines needs the US to keep badgering it about JI, the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qa’ida. The US needs the Philippines to learn how messy life is. One matter the U.S. State Department will not stop pushing is the need for the Philippines to enact counter-terrorism legislation, which would enable security forces to detain suspected foreign terrorists. Lactao says that without that power, the military can only watch as suspected al-Qa’ida operatives roam Mindanao.

‘We monitored a meeting where one of these Middle Eastern men was trying to convince everyone to sign on with the cause. He said that the Muslim community is the next superpower, and he praised the head of al-Qa’ida.’

Yet most suspects can only be detained for six hours, or 72 if the offence is grave, and there are strict limitations on intelligence gathering.

‘We are not allowed to tap anyone’s phones, and we couldn’t detain anyone for interrogation purposes’, he says.

With Mindanao hotly contested ground in the war on terror, the island has more than its fair share of international undesirables, but when suspects have discovered they are under surveillance, they have complained to their embassies, with the military personnel involved castigated, Lactao says.

‘According to our reports, some of these Middle Eastern men are recruiting children as young as twelve to use later’, says Lactao, stubbing out his cigarette and smiling.

Still, a few undesirables are moved on or arrested.

Two Middle Eastern men suspected of involvement with al-Qa’ida arrived in the Philippines in March this year – around the time when police seized hundreds of kilograms of explosives at a Manila house, apparently ready for use in the bombing of Easter celebrations.

Philippine security officials speculated that al-Qa’ida was sending in specialists to coordinate the terror campaign.

A Saudi Arabian national, Abdullah Nassar al-Arifi, was deported soon after arriving at Manila’s airport due to his listing on terrorism databases, while a Palestinian, Fawas Ajjur, was arrested in Mindanao. Ajjur was allegedly identified by Abu Sayyaf prisoners as their former explosives instructor on the blood-soakedisland of Jolo (pronounced HO-lo), in the Sulu archipelago.

THE JUNGLE ‘Don’t misinterpret this as flippant. We are sad because today we have killed people’, says Colonel Orlando E. De Leon of the Philippine Marines.

I am in a Philippines Marine base on the island of Jolo, eating raw goat and drinking ice-cold San Miguel beer as an officer croons another karaoke epic of lost love.

‘This is our way of coping with what we do,’ De Leon says.

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Today the Marines shot and killed about ten Abu Sayyaf fighters in an attack on a terrorist camp just four kilometres from my military lodgings. The operation began at around 10 o’clock last night when a local informant slipped the Marines a tip about the jungle camp and said that the 30 or so ‘Abus’, as the troops call their enemy, were holding a kidnap victim.

By midnight a group of sixty Marines began to creep into positions around the camp, with everyone in place by dawn, and a ring of reinforcements waited back should the Abu Sayyaf launch a successful counterattack.

The commanding officer, Colonel Juancho Sabban, tells me that they let the terrorists relax. ‘Dawn came, so they thought they were OK. They were boiling water for coffee, which gave them away – smoke. Then we attack’, he says, declining an offer of the microphone: ‘No, my men sing for me.’

The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas returned fire, taking about 45 minutes to shoot themselves out of the trap, dragging the kidnap victim with them but leaving behind several dead, including two commanders apparently involved in the raid on Malaysia.

Relatives of the slain took some of the bodies away to prepare and bury before sunset, in accordance with Muslim custom, which causes some confusion about the number of dead. The unclaimed corpses ranged in age from teenagers to the near-elderly, and the Marines truss them on poles to carry out of the jungle.

‘Their relatives are probably afraid,’ Sabban says.

‘There were blood trails, so we know they suffered wounded’, he adds, signalling one of his privates to replenish the beer. One the Government side, only two men were hit, suffering minor gunshot wounds to the hand and foot.

The Abu Sayyaf have been known to kidnap doctors to treat their wounded, and in one infamous incident stormed a hospital in the Christian town of Basilan, taking away medical staff, some of whom were raped, mutilated and murdered.

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abban says that they will keep an eye on doctors after this encounter, but it is more likely that the Abu Sayyaf will pack their wounds with herbs according to traditions followed for centuries by the Sulu island people, known as Tausugs. Other military and intelligence sources tell me that the Abu Sayyaf take their wounded to nearby parts of Malaysia, where they share more kinship ties than they do with the bulk of the Philippines.

Jolo is a strange place. Its volcanic peaks, freshwater crater lakes and unspoilt beaches are overwhelmingly beautiful – a traveller’s dream. Even from that icon of war in the tropics, the Huey helicopter with a gunner at each door, the island looks too exquisite and too small to be a battleground.

However, Jolo’s jungles and coconut palm forests are thick with killers and outlaws. An estimated 500 heavily armed Abu Sayyaf fighters roam the island in teams, hiding in camouflaged bunkers or visiting their families after conducting terrorist attacks elsewhere in the archipelago; stowing hostages while waiting for ransoms,

and hitting the military with improvised explosive devices and snipings.

Parked near the karaoke hut is a shot-up battered truck, the legacy of a nearby ambush a few days ago which killed three Marines.

Yet the Abu Sayyaf are not the only game in town. There are also about 1200 wayward guerrillas of the Moro National Lib-eration Front who have resumed their rebellion in violation of the MNLF’s 1996 peace treaty with the Government. Then there are the plentiful but less-organised kidnap-for-ransom-groups (KFRGs), and any number of heavily-armed criminals of opportunity. Oh, and then there’s the reported intrusion of al-Qa’ida. All on an island with a population of about 500,000, about one-eighth that of Sydney.

Jolo has been divided into two sectors for security purposes, with the Marines working one half and the army the other. When enemy forces launch large-scale attacks, as happens often enough, these two branches of the armed forces fight together.

The day after the raw goat, I board a Huey helicopter which flies me to Hill 300, which the army is occupying after recent fighting with both the Abu Sayyaf and renegade elements of the MNLF. Chinese tombs of travellers who died here a thousand years ago sit atop the hill.

The graves have become a Muslim holy site, and the trees here are covered with fluttering plastic rubbish bags which have been tied to the branches as a nod of religious respect from the locals, who would otherwise just throw their trash on the ground. One of the Abu Sayyaf commanders, an Islamic mystic known as Dr Abu Pula, conducted rituals here before the army captured the hill.

His men would also hang about asking pilgrims to pay a fee before they could bring their children close for a blessing.

The officer who assumed command of the offensive after two of his superiors were cut down, Major Feliciano Tabanao, tells me locals are happy to have free entry to the site even if Hill 300 is occupied by Government troops, many of whom are Catholic.

Yet as we listen to the pinging of insects and take in the view down to the stilt houses on the shores and out to the smaller islands of the Sulu Sea, Tabanao tells me that in the last couple of weeks soldiers have been killed and wounded from ambushes and improvised explosive devices.

‘This area is a known lair of the ASG. There are about sixty or seventy of them around here – highly mobile – and we have reports that they are laying landmines. Right now I cannot guarantee your safety’, says Tabanao, who seems very tired. He talks about the dead of this mission – his colleagues and an 11-year-old child caught in the crossfire.

I join a patrol down the inland side of Hill 300. The red dirt sticks in large clumps to my boots, weighing them down. Tabanao tells me that the ever-resourceful Abu Sayyaf ride horses through these areas, moving their supplies much faster than the troops can in many parts.

‘We don’t have horses’, he says.

Eventually we come to an empty village of battered houses built over formi-dable bunkers – large excavated areas covered by a double layer of coconut palm logs.

I JOIN A PATROL DOWN THE INLAND SIDE OF HILL 300. THE RED DIRT STICKS IN LARGE CLUMPS TO MY BOOTS, WEIGHING THEM DOWN. TABANAO TELLS ME THAT THE EVER-RESOURCEFUL ABU SAYYAF RIDE HORSES THROUGH THESE AREAS, MOVING THEIR SUPPLIES MUCH FASTER THAN THE TROOPS CAN IN MANY PARTS. ‘WE DON’T HAVE HORSES’, HE SAYS

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An abandoned schoolhouse still has Arabic lessons chalked on its blackboards, and Tabanao points out a large kite leaning against a wall. ‘They use the kites as signals to warn of our movements,’ he says.

One of the pilots with us says that the kites are also used as a defence against helicopters. During Government attacks, guerrillas send up kites on heavy nylon strings which get tangled in the rotors.

The soldiers are careful to contain any sign of the religious tension many of them must feel serving somewhere like Jolo, but I spot a local word for ‘pig’ written on the schoolhouse door, an obvious slight to Muslim sensibilities.

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s we wait back on Hill 300 for the Hueys to return, Tabanao tells me that although the military is making life hard for the Abu Sayyaf on Jolo, the enemy is very skilled and getting more so. The improvised explosive devices that are claiming troops are growing more sophisticated. ‘We have reports of foreigners training locals in IEDs, and reports that a handful [of locals] went to Cotabato for explosives training’, Tabanao says.

Also, while the military does not have control over the seaways, ‘the leaders of ASG can get in and out easily – they come by boat’, he says.

Concern is growing about seaborne attacks by JI and Abu Sayyaf, particularly since a man arrested for allegedly planting Manila’s Valentine’s Day bomb said that the terror groups had earlier sent him to scuba training in preparation for strikes.

The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas of Jolo and Basilan know the water better than most; many of them grew up in the offshore stilt houses where small boats are the only way to get around. The sea is their highway, one general tells me, and with their famous quadruple-outboard motor 1,000 horsepower speedboats, the terrorists can easily travel at about 40 knots.

De Leon of the Marines looks pained when I ask him about this one afternoon at a base of the Marine Battalion landing Team on Jolo’s Quezon Beach, a glorious strip of sand and crystal clear water.

‘They are faster than us. How can we compete? We can only do 15 knots,’ says De Leon, walking us over to a row of very modest little outboards with 60 horsepower engines. ‘The ASG can outrun us on water. They can get away and hide their boats in the mangroves, with leaves on top so we cannot see them. They can cross the ocean at high speed, as they did in their attack on Dos Palmos [a resort on a distant island]. We need good, fast boats for amphibious assaults. It is what we are trained to do’, he says.

DEBRIEF The Philippines lost about a million people in the World War II. Manila was destroyed. Since then the Filipinos have endured multiple civil wars, natural disasters, dictatorship, massive corruption, widespread violent crime, and a democracy that has failed in the eyes of a growing proportion of the population.

Against that sort of backdrop, Filipinos could be forgiven for being slow to take counter-terrorism as seri-

ously as do many Western countries. Yet slowly the authorities have realised that their calamitous financial state is unlikely to pick up should potential investors feel they run a serious risk of face bombings, sabotage, and kidnapping if they set up shop.

Even substantial portions of the MILF seem to have realised that without peace and security, the people they claim to represent will stay poor and impoverished. Part of the MILF’s realisation is waking up to what bad friends they’ve been keeping.

The rebel’s spokesman, Eid Kabalu, admits that JI has ties to some parts of the MILF, coming clean after years of issuing blunt denials and far-fetched assertions that the Indonesians just hung around the training camps without anybody noticing.

‘Honest-to-goodness, yes, there are some elements within the MILF who were able to establish a link with this group, but now we are trying to address this issue’, says Kabalu, from his home in Cotabato City.

The new consciousness in the MILF’s progressive faction, led by Chairman Al Haj Murad, even extends to wanting in on the anti-JI attacks. The military couldn’t do it properly on their own, Kabalu says. ‘You will notice that [in Lactao’s April assault] instead of hitting their target they hit us, our men on the ground.’

Despite April’s stuff-up, the MILF has since validated the Government’s hit list and is helping work out a battle plan, Kabalu says. What’s more, Kabalu talks openly of his organisation’s hand in betraying one of the world’s most accomplished and well-connected terrorists, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, who helped establish JI’s training at Camp Abu Bakar after the shift from Afghanistan.

‘There are some MILF elements who co-ordinated with the authorities [and] that is why he was effectively pinned down’, says Kabalu about al-Ghozi’s shooting death a few months after the bomber made fools of the Government by escaping from jail the day of Prime Minister John Howard’s visit to Manila for the signing of a joint memorandum of understanding on terrorism.

The MILF’s assistance is acknowledged by the commander of the armed forces in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, General Alberto Fernando Braganza. ‘There has been information provided by them that [has] triggered our operational activities’, says General Braganza, who is approaching retirement in September and seems a little less fired up than after his instalment last year.

Perhaps frustration is taking its toll. Last November Braganza proudly told me there had been no major terrorist inci-dents for two years (which was true if you squint hard and overlook the 170 combined dead from blasts at Davao and the Super- ferry sinking). Mindanao is a very peaceful place, he told me then. Yet several bombs have struck since November, and now Braganza admits that although the military has neutralised some terrorists, including 10 to 15 JI members, ‘there have been persistent reports of training activities in the central Mindanao area … [and] it’s expected that they also have their bases in the urban centres as part of their support system.’

Furthermore, the interception of the Palestinian in Mindanao ‘is a clear indication of the involvement of al-Qa’ida here,’ says Braganza, whose recognition of the

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Photography: KATE GAREGHTY

problem seems to have won respect from U.S. officials more used to a culture of denial.

‘Braganza’s kicking some serious ass’, says a U.S. official who pulled his hair out last year over the Government taking months (during which a national election came and went) to admit that the Superferry 14 was bombed, just as the Abu Sayyaf had detailed in public statements.

Politicians have raised hell over U.S. claims that the Philippine borders are wide open to terrorists, but Braganza says frankly, they don’t have enough boats to secure Mindanao’s borders – which an Australian official described to me as ‘non-existent’. Nor is Braganza pretending that a peace deal with the MILF will solve everything. Some terrorist groups will dissolve, but ‘we expect that there will still be some that will remain, like the Abu Sayyaf Group and the JI network,’ he says.

Braganza advocates a combination of military action with a drive to bring law, development and education to regions where generations have grown up inside a guerrilla war. US and Australian aid projects are greatly appreciated, he says.

However, the military is just a tool of politics, as the reconnaissance lieutenant said on the mountains above Abu Bakar, and Mindanao’s politics is hard core. Plans for a joint U.S.-Filipino military and development sweep across Jolo, like that which cleaned up Basilan three years ago, were shelved after fierce opposition from local politicians.

Yet, as Braganza says, almost all of Jolo’s mayors live across the Basilan Strait in Zamboanga City, which has a large military presence as the armed forces headquarters for Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.

‘They have their residences here; their children go to school here; they have properties here’, Braganza says.

As many observers see it, plenty of the region’s politicians are doing well out of the situation, so why would they want to change it?

Braganza will be gone in a few months, and his replace-

ment will face all the difficulties of fighting cashed-up and determined enemies while the Philippine economy continues to deteriorate. Local politicians, on the other hand, often stay in power for a decade or more in the Philippines, and are often succeeded by close relatives.

So to get the views of someone who will still be making decisions when Braganza packs up, I visit a mayor – and a mayor who does live in his seat of power. Soud B. Tan is the mayor of the notorious Jolo City, where Philippine security analysts say I am almost certain to be snatched if I don’t move with substantial firepower.

‘You won’t make it three blocks’, one tells me. ‘Men will produce guns and force you into a jeepney, a car, anything. No one will interfere.’ Duly protected, I drop by Tan’s mayoral compound to hear his take on matters.

Of all the many guns I’ve seen in the Philippines, Tan’s bodyguards are packing some of the snazziest – gleaming little room sprayers in tip-top condition. With his guards stationed out the front, in the hallway, and in the office where we talk, Tan sets me straight on the negative impressions people have of his town.

‘I can tell you that Jolo is a peaceful place to live … it’s a very peaceful place. Jolo’s only a little bit congested with people coming in’, says Tan. Yes, they are coming in, so if anyone feels like helping stop them – for all our sakes – and has a little-used fast boat or two, I know some guys who could really do with them. Anyone?

An imperfect but proactive approach is surely better than doing too little, for the jihadists will exploit any lull in the counter-terrorism campaign. If they are using all their wits and resources just to stay alive, then their potential targets – including us – are safer. If they have the time and space to recruit, train and plan, then disaster is on its way.

EVEN SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS OF THE MILF SEEM TO HAVE REALISED THAT WITHOUT PEACE AND SECURITY, THE PEOPLE THEY CLAIM TO REPRESENT WILL STAY POOR AND IMPOVERISHED. PART OF THE MILF’S REALISATION IS WAKING UP TO WHAT BAD FRIENDS THEY’VE BEEN KEEPING

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WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE A visiting US author gives the sisterhood a slap

T

he poster in a Hamilton State broadcaster National Radio PM’s response. She sought first to book store asks: “Who is blame “a minor magazine”, then shifted refused to interview her. TVNZ’s to the “stress” defence before profferTammy Bruce? Previously Close Up was hostile. Her book ing “it wasn’t a real interview”. By the high up in the US feminist movement Tammy – hertime Tamihere had been relegated to The Death of Right and Wrong self gay – has now changed sides and the back benches – because New Zeawas a New York Times bestseller. land has no Siberia – many were still exposes the damage to our culture and values caused by radical groups, politiconfused about why he spoke, and So what is it about the ideas cal correctness and the prevailing social about his feelings. Tamihere later Tammy Bruce is putting forward explained that, amongst other things, agenda. She also offers a powerful that so annoys what she calls the as a heterosexual, married father he was solution to restore society. ‘She says what most NZ’ers think but are afraid to say’!” allowed to own his feelings on such ‘liberal elite’? NEILL HUNTER lauds the promo. Then there’s the issues as men having sex with men, or finds out book trailer in The Death of Right and the disparity between women’s and Wrong describing her as: “America’s men’s issues funding. But it all finally favorite openly gay, pro choice, pro turned pear-shape when J.T. used that death penalty, gun-owning, voted-for-Reagan feminist”. Such a busy “h” word, holocaust, because there are some other victims who own life description; “it’s exhausting,” she mutters to broadcaster Bob that word. Tammy Bruce calls it victimhood but says it’s part of a McCoskrie in an interview. She’s also a Democrat who enjoys the free- much bigger picture, one controlled by the left, and that is what this dom to vote for the opposite party. It’s called being an individualist. story, and her visit, is about.

Do we have those in New Zealand? In the NZ Herald last month a Feelings and thoughts. There is a piece of legislation being dusted small story appeared about a National Party rising star, and for the off for an already allergic voting public, called “hate speech”. It will take uninitiated it read like yet another piece of election year politicking. New Zealanders where they have not gone before, with a new criminal Chris Finlayson, barrister, talked about the “flawed legislation” – of law that will punish us for the way we feel, think and speak – effectively the Civil Unions Act, but, being National, you could immediately dis- free speech, minus freedom. Verbal attacks, bigotry or speech against miss him as just another right wing political redneck. Probably one of any segments of society, whether sexual, cultural or religious, may be those interfering Christians… That is, until the end paragraph of the seen as inciteful, possibly even as hideous as bullying, maybe more story where the journo writes that Finlayson is gay. At the opposite destructive. Apparently our thoughts and speaking about them are end of the political spectrum, another politician vented his feelings reaching such a level of nastiness as to warrant prioritising by parliaabout social engineering and Labour’s sisterhood, which became huge ment. Radio talk-back host, columnist, feminist and Fox News politinews as the nation’s media exploded over “that” interview with cal analyst Tammy Bruce says there’s a bigger picture. And she’s seen it Labour’s John Tamihere. He bared his soul, and a university professor all before, in America.

– a political psychologist no less – joined the legions of commentators “I’ve seen when it comes to the bills that are passed, existing laws, trying to help NZ’ers understand why he did it. The shrink told us it the discussion of hate crime legislation and now of course in America was Tamihere being egotistical, but what was more interesting was the it’s not enough to publicly humiliate someone who thinks inco56, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005 August05_NZ_sec2_Pilippines.p65

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rrectly…let’s criminalise it,” says the attractive long auburn-haired woman who romanticises her unknown father but denies victimhood – that’s also a left agenda, which we will return to.

And so with that, the 42 year old from California rolled into NZ, a few copies of her books, The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong tucked under her arm, so sought after that not even this journalist could score copies which was probably good because it compelled searching for information elsewhere.

If you thought Tuesday night was for Lions-battling-Aucks at Eden Park, 1,000 others would say you were wrong because the audience in Hamilton three quarters filled the city’s Founders Theatre when teenagers, the retired, marketing managers, shopkeepers, politicians, Baptists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Anglicans, lawyers, social workers, in never-ending diversity, came to hear the Amercian work the crowd.

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hich raises another question. Which group or political organisation really was behind this Californian who has a cat, a dog, a wild raccoon and .38 caliber handgun she’s nicknamed ‘Snuffy’? After all, it’s election year. Some left wing spin doctors would have us believe it was none other than Satan himself as they went frantically into overdrive searching for the messenger’s puppeteers. There were none. Even Leighton Smith, radio’s Mr Talk-Back, acknowledged this was a personal thing. Well partly true. Enter diminutive Hamiltonian Joanne Reeder. Dressed casually in jeans the slim, youthful looking blonde grandmother, mother and wife was coming down with a cold when Investigate found her. She thought it was probably from the stress of going it mostly alone, bringing the American here.

Joanne Reeder lives by a river and directions to their home include how to find the front door. “Go around the left side of the garage” she says, but forgets to mention it’s part of the cedar wood wall, literally, and at first glance there is no distinguishing wall from door.

Some might say there’s no distinguishing Joanne Reeder the New Zealander’s position on social engineering from Tammy Bruce the

American’s. After all both are women, both fierce upholders of the need to differentiate right from wrong, and neither will settle for less.

They exude much more common ground but, like the river below the Reeder front lawn dividing Hamilton’s rural-suburban mix from pure rural, philosophically these two are not exactly joined at the hip. The biggest chasm? One is Christian…the other a lesbian feminist, once militant and so fierce in her own crusade that she lambasted one of America’s darlings, Bill Cosby, not long after his son was murdered.

That got her the sack from her radio show after the Irish American confronted the Cosbys’ assertion that their son was the victim of racism. Her position-shift from the left gained momentum but there was no Damascus road experience. Bruce attributes her journey to another racism attack from within her own organization, the powerful National Organization for Women (NOW), over her alleged violenceagainst-women stand after the OJ Simpson debacle. “Racist” was again hurled her way when she portrayed the case as a male violence issue, instead of buying into the white oppression of blacks angle that Simpson’s defence team were running. Reliable sources tell Investigate there’s more, that Tammy Bruce the pro-abortion lobbyist, was also attacked for going after an abortion specialist doctor whose patients had a nasty habit of dying…on his operating table. NOW told her to lay off the doctor because the bigger picture was abortion rights and the dead mothers were worthy sacrifices, not the doctor. The hypocrisy of the left started to make Bruce question her views on a variety of issues.

“Hijacked” appears a lot when researching Tammy Bruce because amongst her luggage are phrases new to NZ, like: the “gay elite”, which she says has hijacked homosexuality by introducing civil union and hate speech legislation. Bruce suggests it is responsible for moving liberal politics so far to the left that it has reinvented socialism. Take gay marriage for example: Non-Christian Bruce says that there are gay elite fundelmentalists with agendas to neutralise the Church and thereby ultimately redfine society down to their own level. “Churches would then fall into anti-discrimination laws and not be able to turn away the blessing of homosexual union. If that were to occur it would strike at August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 57

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the core of stability”. She contends that because homosexuals can’t blend in with society, they want society to blend in with them.

Bruce casts daylight on a much darker picture when it comes to agendas. “When you have a government that says it is liberal and progressive and perhaps feministic, legalising prostitution which of course brings in licensing fees that are then paid to the government because it is now legal and then there are taxes involved, you essentially become a de-facto pimp.”

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hat are Bruce and Reeder’s own agendas: one wants to expose left wing governments and the truth behind the type of legislation they have become known for; the other wants to educate. Reeder is passionate on education, not in the class room but in a wider sense, of being fully informed. “You can’t make change from the top down, it’s got to come from the people, if we want our politicians to lift their standards which I personally do, as a nation we’ve got to demand that but we can’t demand it if we don’t know what we want.” So she formed Liberty Trust, a forum for educating the wider community through public speakers, instead of government spin. “One of the things I struggle with as a New Zealander is that we turn to the government to solve all our problems, whatever is being discussed we’re looking to government to solve it, I’m not comfortable with that.” Initially the woman who became a parent early in life instead of seeking a profession turned to books, and that set her course towards the American. “Over the last few years I’ve put my hands on everything I could read, and two of those books happened to be Tammy’s. Quite literally, what I did was I read her book and I emailed her. I don’t know why I did it, it was just something driving me,” as she recalls receiving a “long but positive” email from Bruce in about June 2004. Neither knew if it would work, but Reeder was surprised at Bruce’s attitude, “if she could come she said she would love to visit New Zealand.”

Then the planning began, albeit unwillingly at first. “I thought if I talked to people then it would make me do something about this” and was surprised by the “average Joe Bloggs” who came to help, a broad spectrum of supporters, some Labour, some Act, those with religious positions, those not – “even an atheist” she adds. For a while however her efforts were solo. “I’ve never done so much cold calling in all my life” then when all seemed plain sailing, disaster struck. Suddenly Bruce announced her withdrawal when her advisers, realising that the driving force behind the trip down under was only one woman, made her stop.

“She actually panicked and backed out at a crucial planning stage” Reeder says laughing as she recalls their logic: “I was one woman at the other end of an email – she didn’t know what she was coming to.”

One News, not “one” woman, perhaps may have been something to worry about had Bruce known of the reception about to be meted out to her by state media. Little did TV One realise that, like a Venus flytrap, they were being drawn into Bruce’s ever-expanding anecdotal repertoire of antics by “the leftist media.” Referring to her TV One Close Up interview with Ian Sinclair she recalls the state broadcaster’s welcome which was replayed as a question further into the pre-recorded interview: “who are you to tell us how to vote?”.

It was, says Bruce, an inane question typical of the cultural left trying to protect its monopoly on ideas and public debate.

“People are the same everywhere. I deal in ideas that have no national boundaries, these are universal.”

According to Bruce, to suggest that there can be no bipartisan approach is to say “Christians can’t sit in a room with atheists, that homosexuals have nothing to say to heterosexual Christians, or that Americans would have nothing of value for New Zealanders, New Zealanders have nothing of value for Australians – all of that’s bunk.”

Despite the aforementioned Lions-Blues game at Eden Park, on

this Tuesday July night in Hamilton the giant Founders Theatre is almost packed out. “I’d say it was about three quarters full” says Tammy Bruce who should know, she faced the 1,000, including three gay people who put their hands up when asked by Bruce as she worked the crowd during opening moments of her first of two public addresses in New Zealand. Then a smattering of atheists put up their hands, so too one parent with a child, then a politician sitting dead centre front row…and a heckler – but he didn’t last – not due to good security but two women’s voices: Bruce’s – who offered to debate him afterwards – fool that anyone should try; and a lone woman who shouted down the lone heckler with “I’m here to listen to her not you!” Heckler problem solved.

The lights go down and Bruce marches confidently onto centre stage and begins her address joking about things All Black like her and Leighton’s suits. She calls for more light then begins striding continuously backwards and forwards across the wide stage, ignoring the podium, apologizing if her marching irritates.

Much later, oration almost over, she exhorts, stamping her foot for emphasis and for the first time receiving loud vocal audience response, that everyone support their community, especially the local church and to “trust yourself and that even if you’re called a bigot know that you’re not one…ask of every politician that you know what’s best for your children…you will not have them tell you that they know better than you do”.

The brave heckler shouts from the back “who’s paying you to say this?!”

She wants to engage him, “stay here and I’ll talk to you guys, I’m talking about the power of the individual and less government. If you’re afraid of that, think about it and come talk to me, I don’t care about who you vote for…don’t be afraid to change…you’ll find allies with homosexuals, authentic feminists and it will be a revelation to you,” ending to thunderous applause.

Leighton returns informing her that he’s been counting and it’s 73.4 kms that she’s walked backwards and forwards across the stage, tells the audience to watch Bruce on TV, listen to her on …then mumbles into his hand “John Banks on radio…,” to loud laughter, then: “look out for Investigate Magazine” as a lone scribe halts mid-scribble, “with a Tamihere-type interview where the tape recorder will be on the table”.

More laughter.

Afterwards a woman comments: “I should totally trust in my own instinct, I’m just going to trust them and have confidence in them.”

Aaron, 16, of Huntly, a student who heard about Bruce from a friend, thinks long before replying: “I was very impressed that from all different walks of life we can come together and agree on one point, that we deserve personal freedom and that government shouldn’t have the right to say what is right and wrong over what we believe.”

In Christchurch, two nights later, the performance will be repeated, again to a packed house of hundreds, proof perhaps that the battle of fresh ideas will be fought not in the fusty newsrooms of governmentcontrolled media outlets, but on talk radio and in public halls and meetings. As one commentator has already noted elsewhere, New Zealand’s feminist elite could only muster 500 delegates to its 30th anniversary Womens’ Convention in Wellington last month, despite sponsorship from five government departments, massive media coverage, money from Telecom and an outfit calling itself ‘Lesbian Nation’. Yet triple that number of people turned up to hear Tammy Bruce’s take on the need to return to family values.

Which raises the question: at the end of her tour, who was more in touch with the values of ordinary New Zealanders – Tammy Bruce or TVNZ’s Close Up? Kiwis can probably figure than one out for themselves.

i

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THE INVESTIGATE INTERVIEW

THE DEATH OF RIGHT AND WRONG Not everyone agrees with everything TAMMY BRUCE says, but as NEILL HUNTER discovered in this interview, the bestselling author is a provocative merchant of ideas in a land of normally muted ideological debate

INVESTIGATE: Where do you get your energy from?

BRUCE: I believe that with the control that the Left has in the western world culturally – not politically but culturally certainly – that my generation is going to decide what the next 200 years is going to be like. I think our generation is responsible like no generation before.

So at 42 I’m very passionate about it.

INVESTIGATE: So that’s what drives you?

BRUCE: Yes. When I went into activism, injustice has always infuriated me. Of course in America why certain people are attracted to the Left, instead of Christianity or the Right, and that kind of social activism, is I was the perfect combination of infuriated by injustice, damaged in my childhood, narcissistic and had been victimised in one shape or another. So I became the perfect foot soldier, but injustice – even within the left infuriated me. I have to be very careful in my own willingness to compromise and to conform in order to belong and please people. I have to personally make a serious effort as I continue on my own personal journey. Because I’m very attracted to Christianity. And because I am, it concerns me. I want to be able to respect it.

I have to be very careful about why I’m attracted to things so I’ve made a point of making all the work I do

independent, I’m answerable to no one, the decisions I make are my own and I completely own what I’m saying.

INVESTIGATE: You’ve said that there is a God, or that you believe in God, but you don’t count yourself as a Christian. Who is the god that you believe in?

BRUCE: Well I believe that Jesus Christ is the man.

I think that the structure, ideas of Christianity within the structure, I feel that is right, I trust in that but in the organised religion aspect of man, clearly I represent things and hold beliefs contrary to what the church advocates to being a homosexual. And so I want it both ways. I want my cake and eat it to. I want to be able to believe in God and yet I am made too nervous by the idea of needing to conform or accept things on which I have too many questions. Can’t do it.

INVESTIGATE: Care to make a prediction about Iraq.

BRUCE: It’s what I was saying last night and to some young Christians afterwards. There’s an argument that – and this is round-about but it’ll answer your question, my point is that government isn’t a solution for anybody, for the Christians who are made nervous about moral relativism and the decline of society, these young people were saying that we need a Christian party and what they’ve grown up with is that government has

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all the power. My point is that if you have little government, human beings naturally will be attracted to the good and the decent. Now in the western world it’s Christianity which belongs – you don’t even need to identify as a Christian, it makes everyone’s lives good, but when it’s done within a natural choice framework where people like how I choose to believe in God and be benefited by Christianity etcetera and be influenced by it.

What I believe is going to happen in Iraq: all human beings are the same. The human condition is the same everywhere. You will not find one father on this planet whether he is in a tent in Yemen who has children, or a man in Russia, or a Frenchman and his family or here in New Zealand, that they all work exclusively to make that child’s life good. It is the same everywhere and what I predict and what the Iraqis clearly responded to early this year, was the idea of controlling their own future. Whether Muslim, Christian or atheist but the desire to be free to be able to trust yourself is the natural and instinctive place for humanity. It is so instinctual, to suppress it requires insane despots.

The only thing that can keep it down is genocide and fear and murder.

That’s why you see either free countries or you see terrorised ones.

Now I believe that the Left, even though it uses a different tactic, with issues of criminalising what people think and say, speech codes and general intimidation is also a way of terrorising people, by keeping them down. But Iraqis, because of the human condition, if protected from the very few who want to terrorise and murder them into submission, if people can be protected from that they will emerge as

human beings, desiring faith and a government that does not oppress them and an ability to control and run their own lives – and that also means capitalism, money, freedom that money gives people, freedom that allows them to decide what they want for their children – money is the thing world wide that lifts people out of slavery, emotional slavery, physical slavery and political slavery. I think that the Iraqis – clearly the seat of civilisation, a complex rich people, culturally rich people, are going to be a beacon and already are a beacon for change in the Middle East. You have a woman finally in parliament in Kuwait, you have [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak saying he’ll have free elections – we’ll see, you have the Lebanese throwing the Syrians out after 30 years, my God! You have the Iranian people but you don’t hear about, during their election, tens of thousands of people protesting against the government, no one in Tehran voted, the mad Mullah shipped people up from the boondocks to vote, ballot stuffing – it was a farce. That election was as legitimate as Saddam Hussein’s election. When people would go to vote in Baghdad the ballots were held out to them, it was handed to them, they put it in the box. With the exception of Saudi Arabia – they need to move as well, the entire Middle East has changed and that is not a fluke.

America is not pro-war, and the result has been the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. We waited for World War One, we entered in the last year, in World War Two we waited for London to be bombed for years and did nothing. Can you imagine us doing that now? Let’s say the Chinese went “screw you New Zealand” and started bombing Auckland, do you think America would think “well too bad for them, too bad they won’t let our nuclear ships in”? Of course they wouldn’t. We would be here in one half of a second because we’ve learned that being pacifist means tyrants will prevail, millions of people will die.

I don’t know if we can ever say sorry enough to Europe for sitting back and doing nothing when World War Two started. Americans learned that lesson, 53 million people died. In this age 50 million people have been liberated. It’s like cancer: it only exists if I look, so I look away, the next thing you know you’re flat on your back. You can aggressively treat it or wait until you’re almost dead.

INVESTIGATE: Have you got enough international experience to talk to New Zealanders about their situation?

BRUCE: Sure. The first thing that the leftist media (referring to TV One’s Close Up interview) said was “who are you to tell us how to vote?” Here is what we just talked about in the Middle East and what I firmly believe in. That people are the same everywhere. That I deal in ideas that have no national boundaries, these are universal. Now I’m not here to talk about the nuances between the parties, there may be some but then again politicians are also all the same. If it’s suggested that Christians can’t sit in a room with atheists, that homosexuals have nothing to say to heterosexual Christians, or that Americans would have nothing of value for New Zealanders, New Zealanders have nothing of value for Australians – all of that’s bunk. It’s necessary to divide and conquer within one’s own nation to control the population and it’s also of course the very basic tactic to suggest that one group of people in one nation could never understand another group of people in another nation. I believe the opposite: that while clearly New Zealanders know best for their country, there are some things I have to say which will immediately resonate.

INVESTIGATE: I saw in research “this is why we need Minutemen” and a picture of an alien shooting a ray gun. Please explain.

BRUCE: Well this is why I decided to come here – when I heard that regular people had had enough of the Establishment and decided to do something. There is a project in America called The Minutemen and it’s regular Americans; grandmothers, men, women. Illegal immigration is overwhelming and up to April on the Arizona border there August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 61

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BRUCE ON GEORGINA BEYER’S TRANSGENDER LEGISLATION: “A transgendered man who has become a woman. My question is what in God’s name is your benchmark for knowing what it is to feel like a woman?”

FOTOPRESS

were about half a million people who’d crossed over despite the fact that we have a Border Patrol. We also realised that al Qa’ida is organising in Honduras and that Mexico has acknowledged that there is al Qa’ida and extremist Muslims organising in Mexico. So if you can’t get into America through visas you simply walk in through Arizona. We’re finding Muslim prayer rugs and Korans in the desert of Arizona, and we’re also arresting OTM’s – other-than-Mexicans. Those are Yemenis, Saudis, Iraqis and Afghans. A guy found OTM’s on his property that began shooting at him. There was no support from the border patrol which drives along, patrols then goes away. So the Minutemen set up an internet site saying they were going to set up outposts along the border and sit there, unarmed, not arrest people, hang out and if we see illegals coming over we’re going to call the border patrol. They did it and there was virtually no crossing in April. The Mexican government finally employed their army along the border as well. So the Minutemen is what I love, grassroots activism. President Fox of Mexico called on President Bush to arrest them, that it was illegal. President Bush has a special relationship with Fox and said ‘we don’t put up with vigilantism’ and Americans got very mad with George W Bush, Fox made proclamations about suing the US. I use the absurd to point out the absurd.

INVESTIGATE: There are commentators here saying there is a sisterhood element ruling New Zealand at government level. Those commentators will listen to what you’ve said and brought here and say that your views on narcissism, damaged goods, gay elite, are applicable to New Zealand’s political situation. Have you heard enough about New Zealand to make a comment about that?

BRUCE: I would be more comfortable commenting if – this is one of the problems with the Left is that

I would have liked to have seen more representatives from that side of the aisle engage me. What the Left tends to do is retreat and ignore. Part of what I say frightens them because they know I know the questions and answers. They know the usual name calling and manipulations don’t work with me. My credentials speak for themselves. I think that anyone who believes themselves to be on the Left or believes themselves to be a feminist or lives a homosexual life openly or in the closet looks at my background and knows that I know who they are. It changes the background of the discussion. The same with the transgender issue which I hear is a bit of an issue here with some legislation. That for me is a misogynistic framework and I know why I think that and I ask questions that other people don’t and can’t ask, because I am a lesbian. As an example: a transgendered man who has become a woman. My question is what in God’s name is your benchmark for knowing what it is to feel like a woman? And only the most misogynistic man would think that “he just knows”, that’s the irony of that situation. There are many people who, because of political correctness, would be uncomfortable and would never suggest that, because they feel that that person might have the moral high ground. Or even in the homosexual community you can be shunned if you challenge someone who is sexually different. I don’t have those burdens. I know on issues where I stand and I’ve seen what the Left has done and I’ve worked with the Left in America and I’ve met international leftists and I know what their agenda is.

But when it comes to New Zealand and what the other side, if there is another side – it seems like it’s Labour when it comes to what’s happened to this country – and when it comes to issues such as legalising prostitution – tells me volumes about the nature of what’s in control of this country and it’s not feminist,

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it’s not liberal, it’s misogynistic. When you have a government that says it is liberal and progressive – and perhaps feministic – legalising prostitution, which of course brings in licensing fees that are then paid to the government because it is now legal and then there are taxes involved, you essentially become a de-facto pimp. So if you’re going to have a government – and this is the obscenity I reject as a feminist, I don’t want de-facto pimps representing themselves as feminists. It smears feminism, it is misogynistic. With a government that is so burdensome it must have more and more and more money that “gosh of course there’s so much money in pornography and prostitution, gosh if we can legalise prostitution we can get taxes, we can get fees, we can get licence fees, we can get some of that money”.

INVESTIGATE: Proponents of prostitution law are going to say “we did it to protect the safety and the health of those dragged into prostitution.”

BRUCE: What do you think pimps say? That’s the pimp’s role. The pimp says, “I’m going to protect you honey. No one’s going to come and take your territory or beat you up, I’m here to protect you, I’m your god, you’re doing this because that’s fine because that’s your choice and I’m going to make your life better because this is what you need to do.”

The other misogyny of course is the idea that the solution is to facilitate that instead of getting them out. The equivalent would be to say to a battered woman “well you did marry him, you say you don’t want to prosecute, you stay in that marriage so clearly it is your choice, we’ll just try to make it more comfortable for you so that maybe he can beat you up while you’re on vacation. We’ll send you on vacation then we’ll get you a nice house so that when he’s dragged you across the floor you’ll have nice plush carpet.” We don’t do that. We don’t try to make the hell more comfortable, we say we’re going to stop it, we’re going to recognise battered woman syndrome and we’re going to recognise that no woman in her right mind wants to be beaten up; we’re going to make that judgement. We’re going to make that judgement and we’re going to prosecute even if you as a victim don’t want to press charges, we’re going to say that we in this particular instance recognise that you need more help than you say you do, because of commonsense and decency.

How is it that it doesn’t apply to a woman who is on the street selling herself like a piece of meat? We’re going to facilitate it instead of saying our role is that we’re going to be involved in this to get her out of that instead of legitimising it. It’s obscene!

INVESTIGATE: I know of a case here of an intellectually handicapped woman who has been taken into prostitution since the Prostitution Law Reform act came into being, which is another sign of the failure of that law.

BRUCE: It is not just a failure. It is a complete abandonment of decency. Frankly prostitution isn’t a choice. You can tell me prostitution’s a choice when you have a 10 year old looking up at you and saying “Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a whore”. Or if a woman said, “I really have choice, should I be a dental assistant, or a lawyer or an architect or a prostitute? Hmm, which should I be? I’ll choose prostitute.” There is no choice and it is about individuals who are either drug addicted, psychologically hopeless, pulled into it against their will. Those women who are also into pornography, they are the face of the use of, the need for, pornography. They are kept drug addicted because how do you make enough money to maintain that drug addiction, because there is money to be made if you like this. Every now and then you get the light, that’s the exposure that you’re not dealing with liberal progressiveness for feminist, you’re dealing with the anarchic Left who condemn peoples’ lives.

INVESTIGATE: So the type of legislation that you’ve seen here signals the same common denominators that form your views on narcissism, gay elite and left wing control?

BRUCE: Absolutely and what the Left also relies on are groups of individuals in society – again the only way they can keep control of a country is to keep the people down because the natural response of humanity is to reject that kind of destruction of individual humanity.

By keeping and legitimising drug addiction, prostitution, things that keep society in some level of chaos, they maintain control as well. It reinforces also the idea that there is no right or wrong in their sense of, “well, I don’t have the moral high ground, maybe they really do.”

Things are so contradictory to what people think is normal it reinforces the idea that you don’t know what’s best. It immediately destroys people’s lives but it is part of a general dynamic. This is not feminist theory. It’s leftist theory of dividing and conquering, maintaining some level of cultural anarchy while keeping people unstable enough morally to not know what to do because there are so many mixed messages.

INVESTIGATE: So what’s wrong with civil union?

BRUCE: Your civil union – because it seems here that the church has already been wiped away when it comes to influence. In America it hasn’t happened yet. So when I talk about the American civil union concept it’s different than the civil union concept here. What I support in the American structure is that you can respect marriage and equal rights, but when the goal is not really that, just like any leftist government that says it’s one thing but it’s really another, the goal for the radical gay elite in America is having all the rights – which I want, I want all the rights other Americans have – I do! But I also know I can get that without having to smear other groups in my country. For the gay elite the discussion isn’t just about wanting the same rights, the goal and the core of it really is to have it on exactly the same position because if recognised at the state or federal level the churches would then fall into anti-discrimination laws and would not be able to turn away the blessing of homosexual unions. If that were to occur it would strike at the core of stability especially in the Catholic Church. If government from the Left found a wedge of controlling even what the Catholic Church’s actions are and what they can implement, it is the ultimate destruction of the Church and its autonomy.

INVESTIGATE: So they’ve succeeded in Spain?

BRUCE: Yes exactly. This is where their social experiment is going and New Zealand is one of the experiments. California was one as well. How far can we push people? They saw how far they could move it with the Soviet Union and it collapsed. There have been nuances about how we can change it. The Chinese are implementing those nuances as well. How can we maintain economic control and stability while oppressing a people to such a degree that the individual becomes irrelevant? Can we have it both ways? That’s what the elite want to know and that’s what they’re experimenting with right now.

INVESTIGATE: These agendas that you talk about are they decentralised internationally or are they centralised in any form, government level, or pseudo government or at political level?

BRUCE: One of the centralising factors is the United Nations – absolutely. You have a centralised frame work through Non Government Organisations that are under the banner of UN such as population, birth control conferences sponsored by the UN. Also, of course, the new international gathering of feminists. Women who get together to talk about how much money needs to be given to each country, of throwing money at countries to facilitate issues of birth control and abortion. Those are important issues especially for poor women, feminists recognise. Those conferences are used as internationally funded gatherings of leftists to strategise and co-opt women’s issues, control nations and to get more money to facilitate larger agendas.

INVESTIGATE: Can you give me anecdotal evidence that there’s an international link in what you’re talking about?

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BRUCE ON LABOUR’S PROSTITUTION ACT: “If you’re going to have a Government – and this is the obscenity I reject as a feminist – I don’t want de-facto pimps representing themselves as feminists”

NZ HERALD

cially with the internet, while there are not phone calls in the middle of the night, when I was in leadership we had a global feminist conference – we brought in feminists from around the world so we could sit down around the table and talk. It was all kinds of people from all over the world where it was “yes we are a unit”.

INVESTIGATE: How long ago?

BRUCE: Early nineties. So the strategy then was to reinforce leftist policy and theory with feminists. So there of course has been a public effort to unite and gather and to strategise collectively. Those relationships haven’t stopped. And the recognition of the need to activate collectively of course is standard leftist framework through Marx, through today’s international socialist organisation [which Prime Minister Helen Clark remains affiliated to].

It’s recognising the use of existing international bodies which are all leftist. The UN is just a gathering of leftists which is why it’s such a disaster and so corrupt because there’re no ideas there. And use of that to organise extremist groups and to force those agendas on, particularly, poor nations so it’s about watching it happen and listening to the development of that strategy, international feminist conferences the use of the UN and those conferences but also something much more informal which is information that is passed around internet groups, feminist discussion forums, and things are then looked at through a kind of tacit approval: “Oh, this is what we’re doing”, and it doesn’t require that you go into a meeting about Stalin as you smoke your cigars and think about how can I get my latest makeover. You see a consistency, throughout the world of legislation, of attitude in declarations about what needs to happen and what societies need to do.

You’ll see a consistency in that.

INVESTIGATE: In New Zealand we have been

considering legislation over smacking to take away the defence of parental discipline in cases of assault on children. In defence of the legislation, in part it stems from a case where a child was brutally assaulted, witnessed, yet no prosecution due to parental defence.

BRUCE: Decent people know the difference, know when a child has been beaten, at the same time there can be some social pressures, where it’s decided if a child should be spanked, that belongs in the social sphere.

Civilised society knows when it’s a criminal act – when somebody beats somebody up. That already exists presumably in New Zealand, it’s assault, the same as protection for a woman when a man beats his wife up. We move into a civilised frame work when it’s a family matter. But again every piece of legislation that controls what one can do especially involving their children simply continues the behaviour modification and the brainwashing, “you can’t be trusted” that’s the message over and over and over.

INVESTIGATE: That’s the bigger picture?

BRUCE: That’s the bigger picture. It will involve always the same thing in these restrictive laws, an underlying message, “we know better than you” and if you hear it long enough as a generation you’ll begin to believe it. That’s why these kinds of discussions we’re having now are so damaging to the Establishment, which is why a major NZ newspaper would say I support torture, why I was called an extremist by your stateowned TV – that in itself should speak volumes about their agenda.

INVESTIGATE: On guns. You’ve said in the past that if Chinese student protesters for example had been armed in Tiananmen Square it wouldn’t have happened.

I put to you there’d have been an even bigger massacre.

BRUCE: My point is, China has gun control, and if those students had been armed you would not have

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had that massacre. What would have happened is you’d have a democracy in China right now. You wouldn’t have, instead, a bullying military regime in China murdering its own people. You had protesters saying enough is enough. As the Berlin wall fell the world began to change saying we want freedom too. The only way Tiananmen was put down was because the military was able to massacre those people. That’s what those regimes rely on. You can’t have them armed because those people will shoot back at you! That is why there is gun control. When you outlaw guns, only the law-abiding respect that. [Editor’s note, as this issue was going to press, Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe ordered citizens to surrender all their guns to police] INVESTIGATE: But communist east Europe fell without guns?

BRUCE: Part of the reason why, which is also the reason why Pope John Paul made some of his comments about Iraq, is there have been experiences in Eastern Europe where the influences of Christianity have managed to overpower a despotic government because Christianity is still powerful and the message of the Vatican and of Christians could galvanise an entire population. In a nation where Christianity is not important like Iraq and China, you do not have that same universal galvanising power. I was struck by the Pope being against the Iraq War because of his experience in Poland. You could have peaceful people rise up. There is a difference when you’re talking about a nonChristian nation. Eastern Europe had a rich Christian heritage, that’s not the case in China or the Middle East, they don’t think what the Pope thinks, and they’re not moved by a Christian message. The Pope didn’t get that message. Take Romania, Ceaucescu – a horrific, genocidal maniac and the Romanian people with their history of Christianity did the same thing, the military was with them but their common thread was Christianity.

Washington DC is a gun-free zone, you’re not allowed to own a gun there, they’re banned, and it is the murder capital of the United States.

What that tells the criminal element is “wow, sitting ducks”.

England confiscated firearms and their crime rate eclipsed New York City. When Castro threw his criminals out of Cuba to Florida crime went up there exponentially. Florida then allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons and crime went down hundreds of percentage points.

INVESTIGATE: How does that fit in with school massacres?

BRUCE: The problem is not based upon owning firearms. There have also been killings by someone driving a truck onto a school yard.

If someone means to kill someone they’ll use aeroplanes flying into buildings killing three thousand people. What are we going to do – ban planes?

INVESTIGATE: You served on Arnie’s transition team. Does that mean you’re a fan?

BRUCE: He has become what politicians become. I was a very big fan. He represented an outsider but who was inside enough to get things done. He embodied that. He can’t be bought, he doesn’t care, and he already has a great life. He’s suddenly become a politician because he wants something more, and that’s the presidency. He’s begun to mitigate his comments, he’s begun to compromise, his approval ratings have plunged. Americans wanted an outsider, grassroots person not affected by the system but now he’s decided he wants to be part of the system. Those are a dime a dozen. Californians are not happy about that.

INVESTIGATE: Victimhood. Black civil rights vs. Maori rights.

You’ve heard quite a bit about our situation. I’ve heard you say that we’re not entitled to victimhood if the stuff happened before our generation.

BRUCE: It’s not about being entitled to victimhood but in the sense of being paid and receiving compensation, there’s a concept that paying someone today is somehow going to make up for what happened to somebody in several generations already gone. It’s absurd.

“If you can’t get into America through visas you simply walk in through Arizona.

We’re finding Muslim prayer rugs and Korans in the desert of Arizona, and we’re also arresting OTM’s – other-thanMexicans.Those are Yemenis, Saudis, Iraqis and Afghans” INVESTIGATE: Surely you’ve got to do something because where you’ve got a current culture, taking Maori as an example, and I know Allan Duff says “we don’t’ need help” but where you’ve got a generation affected by injustices to a previous generation surely in the interest of fairness you’ve got to do something?

BRUCE: Let me put this to you. I grew up in a lower middle class household with no parental guidance, emotionally abusive, not a lot of opportunities, no real form of education. There’s choice where you say ‘that’s somebody else’s fault and I want you to pay me because I’ve had a bad life because of circumstances, that single woman didn’t have enough money to give me the life I deserve’, or I can say ‘I now have opportunities to make my life better than what my mother’s was, and I’m going to work hard and make the difference’.

All of us have suffered some kind of indignity in our ancestral history. As part Irish, I can point to what the English did to the Irish, genocide and enforced famine, I’ve got family who have passed down the stories, and I can say that genetically that’s made me a victim; or you move on. Am I going to drown in what happened 200 years ago? I could find some linkages but for me that would be a waste of time.

Government once again is saying yes it is our fault so we’re going to make it so that I am so helpless, so unable to make a difference that without Daddy or the great white master… what you would do? We did this with the American Indian, at the time not 200 years later: we gave them sovereignty and as a result they’ve stayed isolated, suicide is the highest in America, alcoholism is overwhelming in epidemic proportions. A very few people are getting fabulously rich in casinos, everyone else is in despair and hopelessness.

INVESTIGATE: So it’s not them being a victim of white man’s economics?

BRUCE: I think it’s a combination of things. I think there’s an investment in minorities that is keeping their constituencies down because without their constituencies there would not be leaders; it’s a choice of whether or not you’re going to take advantage of economic opportunities that exist, work within a competitive framework, or move back to the plantation and wait for Daddy to give you more money. People say “well you deserve it, you’ve been harmed so you’re owed that money.”

INVESTIGATE: You’re not denying that people trapped in poverty don’t need help.

BRUCE: I’m a big advocate for people who’ve fallen through the cracks or in trouble just any family deserve in getting up and out. But it’s about giving them way to be able to compete. Not simply giving them an allowance, getting them off the plantation and having the means to live an independent life. If you can only make ends meet by getting that government cheque every week then you’re a slave. If you want to be a slave then just admit it. Quite frankly it’s racist. Just like it’s helping the prostitute by facilitating it. How do you empower people by enslaving them?

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THE THIRD WAY

A new kid on the education block

For the past 12 months, all many of us have heard is how the NCEA exam system is failing our kids. Now a small group of independent schools are trying to stamp their own mark with a different way of doing things, as IAN WISHART discovered

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xactly fifty years ago, the movie The Blackboard Jungle gave the US cause to gasp and take breath, with its portrayal of juvenile delinquent thugs terrorizing a high school with switchblade knives and attitude. Back then, education was only nominally compulsory in many outlying areas of the US, where children were expected to learn just enough to read and write before leaving school to help their families earn an income.

High schools, especially in run down inner-city areas, were de-facto prisons for the bored and disenchanted, the kids whose parents were either just poor or criminal to boot. That’s if they even had all their parents still in their lives. For girls, particularly, education was merely a precursor to life in the ‘burbs, married with kids and a white picket fence – if she was lucky.

Even into the seventies and early 80s in New Zealand, many girls chose home economics and sewing classes over science or history, such was their faith that Mr Right was just around the corner.

Walking into the Auckland International College (AIC) in 2005, one can’t help but be struck at how much the education system has changed in the past couple of decades.

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The science classes are full of girls, and there are no playing fields at AIC, not even a netball court. The corridors are not full of discarded banana skins – partly because (as anyone who’s watched Jamie’s School Dinners knows) kids wouldn’t been seen dead eating fruit in these modern times unless it came in a pack with a logo and 19 teaspoons of sugar per serve – but mainly at AIC because the corridors are so clean you could eat your dinner off them.

“We have a school policy that the kids are responsible for their own work environments,” explains executive principal Carolyn Solomon, “which means they pretty quickly get in the habit of keeping the school clean without further prompting.”

Eat that, Blackboard Jungle.

Nor is AIC like a regular high school, spread out over an acreage. This school is a converted Auckland city office block, capable of taking hundreds of students although – as a relatively new institution, it has not yet reached those numbers.

But what’s really different about AIC is its curriculum. The college offers the International Baccalaureate programme instead of NCEA. Rather than take instructions from government education Wallahs in Wellington, AIC has chosen to break the education mould and offer students something very different from the average Kiwi high school.

Haven’t heard of the International Baccalaureate (IB)?

Sounds like one of those courses you take, like Wellington Maths, when you haven’t learned to count and you’re just biding your time until you’re old enough to leave school? Think again.

Five of New Zealand’s leading independent schools are now offering the IB, either exclusively like AIC, or as an alternative to the NCEA. Solomon, a former principal of Tauranga Girls College and deputy principal at a prestigious international college in Singapore, is passionate about the IB course – a two year Diploma that covers Years 12 and 13.

“Not many people have heard of it, but it really is internationally recognised by institutions like Harvard University. It has been used a lot overseas in what are called ‘international’ schools, and these are colleges and schools that service the children of expatriate communities, or parents who want their local children to get an internationally recognised qualification.”

For the record, AIC is an international school – around three quarters of its students come from offshore, and Solomon says this adds not just to the flavour of the college but also the learning experiences of all involved.

“Parochialism is the antithesis of global enlightenment. The IB Diploma is very relevant to New Zealand students because the curriculum is taught from a global perspective where possible. IB students graduate learns August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 69

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at least two languages which is an advantage in today’s world. The IB is academically rigorous and therefore challenges and extends students intellectually. It develops critical thinking skills and a spirit of inquiry. But it is more than that. In the Creativity, Action and Service programme students engage in a minimum of 150 hours of creative activity which benefits others. An IB Diploma student therefore is equipped with a smart mind, a world perspective and a good heart. This is highly relevant for a New Zealand student.

A

s for the local market, New Zealand universities recognise the IB Diploma for university entry and there are many NZ graduates from NZ universities working successfully in the local market who were once IB Diploma students at IB schools in New Zealand or overseas. The IB Diploma graduate is well positioned to succeed not only in the local market but also in the global market.”

Across town on the 20 hectare estate that contains the rolling fields, parkland and classrooms at Auckland’s Kristin school, they know this well. Last year one of Kristin’s female students scored top in the world in the International Baccalaureate exams, with a perfect mark, no errors.

With a roll of 1600, from Kindergarten through Year 13, Kristin has been offering the IB since the 1980s, when Claudia Wysocki was still the principal.

“I was the head at Kristin from 1978, and in 1986 my board gave me a sabbatical leave, and their mandate to me was ‘we want you to find something which will be challenging for our academically able students’. So I took off overseas and found as I went through Canada that there were a lot of national schools undertaking the IB diploma, which I had always understood was a qualification that was used by international schools for kids studying abroad. And I was a little bit amazed to find that increasingly, especially in countries where there had been a change in the national qualification system, a number of schools were looking to find an alternative and IB was the one. Then I went to Britain and found a few – not that many – but some of the national schools doing it, and in Scandinavia it became very evident that the top schools were looking at this programme and many were teaching it.

“The thing about IB is that it is actually a philosophy of senior education. We have schools in NZ doing Cambridge, we have our own NCEA Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 – they are qualifications. They do not really in my opinion have a strong pedagogy that underlies them.

Whereas the IB, in fact, was developed as a result of looking at the qualifications systems of the US, Great Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. The people who put IB together in the sixties looked at all of those systems and said ‘let’s take the best out of them, but let’s also ensure that the programme that we have teaches

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young people to be lifelong learners. So it’s very much based on developing those thinking and critical questioning skills, and that’s what I think separates it from anything else I’ve ever looked at.

“With the IB programme you have the six subjects that the students must study. Now that’s like any qualification. The thing that makes it different is the core which is the Extended Essay, the Theory of Knowledge and the Creativity, Action and Service (CAS).

So with the extended essay every student must undertake what I would call a mini-thesis. They must decide on some topic of research, and it has to be something – they can’t just pick up someone else’s research they have to have their topic approved, they must work with a supervisor, and present a 4,000 word thesis on that particular topic. In doing that they are learning sound research, they are learning to question and evaluate resource material, they are learning to analyse and to present and to argue a particular point of view.

“It’s teaching them how to evaluate and know how to use that material appropriately. And so it is the best training for tertiary studies. I’ve had kids go off from Kristin to university and be asked ‘where on earth did you learn such sophisticated research skills?’.”

Wysocki is speaking today from the leafy St Margaret’s, an Anglican college for girls in Christchurch that traces its own origins back to 1910. Four years ago, she brought the Baccalaureate there, and the uptake by students has been high.

“It’s not a programme for everybody, but it is a programme which an increasing number of our girls are taking on. We’re up to about 30% of our year 12 girls taking IB and I expect we’ll be up to 50% very shortly and that would be my goal – to have half the girls doing NCEA and half doing IB. “NZ universities are becoming more familiar with it, and certainly 72, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005 August05_NZ_sec2_Pilippines.p65

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are accepting it. Canterbury have been extremely supportive. However, NZ universities are not as familiar with it as overseas universities, and when three students applied to Melbourne University last year they were told very clearly what grade they needed to get in their IB, they all got that grade and they all walked straight into Melbourne University.

“There’s still more education in NZ to do at tertiary level. As far as employers are concerned it’s not relevant because all these kids go out and get some kind of degree.”

Even so, the IB is a qualification in and of itself. Students must tackle six subjects, from Literature (English, in the case of most New Zealand students), through learning a foreign language, to business and management, information technology, classical Greek or Roman studies if they choose, geography, history and even psychology, as well as the sciences, mathematics and arts.

At the heart of IB is a global perspective. Developed as an internationally standard course, the curriculum is set by head office in Switzerland, and students worldwide are tested against the international achievement standards set by the Baccalaureate. In theory, it creates outward-looking students who retain that sense of global citizenship throughout their lives.

And theory plays a big part in the IB itself. AIC’s Carolyn Solomon: “In a world of mixed messages the truth is elusive. Knowing how to think critically about what we hear, see or read is an important life skill. Students reflect on how they know what they know and on the nature of knowledge. By learning how they learn, they learn how to learn. Learning how to learn effectively enables an IB Diploma graduate to continue learning throughout life.”

What she’s talking about is the Theory of Knowledge – a universitystyle approach to education that forces kids to challenge assumptions, test evidence, learn how to argue rationally and debate, learn how to research effectively.

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Wysocki again: “This is really a superb programme in teaching them philosophy, in teaching them to think and to look below the surface of the subjects that they’re studying.

“It’s just a really superb programme in developing those critical thinking skills. In fact, we’re probably going to use the Theory of Knowledge with more girls than just our IB girls next year, because we think it has so much going for it in terms of really training their minds to be analytical.”

M

arry the Theory of Knowledge to applied life-skills, or “Creativity, Action and Service” as the IB calls it, and you have the programme in a nutshell. With our state education system still reeling from the NCEA debacle, and other schools adopting the Cambridge A-levels, the IB schools are making a concerted push to highlight their “third way”.

“I’m worried,” admits Wysocki. “I’m not a knocker of NCEA, I have a lot of staff in this school really involved in not only promoting it but working at ministry level for this programme. But what I’m really worried about is that we pay lip service in the education sector to training young minds to be independent learners. Our primary schools emphasise thinking skills, De Bono’s ‘six hats’; NZ primary schools are doing extremely well. In this whole middle school move that’s hitting the country now, that’s a continuation of wanting to be able to give our junior secondary school kids the ability to think analyse research and present. And so we have these great big meetings saying we must educate young people to be thinkers of the future, and then we introduce a senior examination system which in my opinion does not encourage them to be independent learners and thinkers. It is based on an assessment process which I think is flawed.

“In fairness, NZQA are addressing that, but I’m wor-

ried about the underlying philosophy. Education is not about assessment. Assessment is a part of it but assessment should not be what underlies a qualification.”

So is IB a viable replacement for NCEA in toto?

“It’s not for everybody, no way. We’re still teaching NCEA because I wouldn’t expect everybody to be doing IB. It’s a qualification that kids have to be of average or above average ability, but they must also have a very sound work ethic. I don’t think that IB is for the whole of NZ at all.

“One of the things that’s always worried me about education in this country is the philosophy that one size fits all, and it doesn’t. Why do we have to have one system that’s meant to fit everybody? If we could recognise that different kids have different needs and that we have a system where there are alternatives that people could choose what was most suited for them, we would have far more kids going on at school, we would have our academically able kids really challenged, and we would have a much better and more successful education system. Within that framework you could certainly fund the IB, or you could look at the NZ qualifications system and take some of the IB philosophies and put them into that, or you could use something like NCEA in those subjects where it’s appropriate.”

More than 50 skills offer IB across the Tasman, and the number in other countries is growing rapidly as well, despite a subscription fee of $11,500 that each school must pay each year to be part of the programme.

“It’s gone from 400 to 600 schools in America in the last 18 months. There’s an increasing number of schools in Britain moving to IB instead of A-levels, which are found to be old fashioned and outdated, and in Scandinavia there’re huge numbers of schools.

“The problem in NZ is that unless a school can fund it independently they cannot teach it. There’ve been attempts at state schools, for example Waitaki Girls taught it for a few years, but no state school in NZ is

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allowed to use state money on a non-NZ qualification.

Therefore if a state school wishes to teach this programme they have got to find a way of funding it, and IB is expensive. Therefore only those schools, either because they’re independent like Kristin, [AIC] or St Margaret’s, or because they have more ability to find alternative funding – like the integrated schools, John McGlashan, Nga Tawa, only those schools are able to do it.

“State schools, their hands are tied because it is government policy that you can only be funded by the state for NZ state programmes.”

But surely monster schools like Auckland’s Rangitoto College can afford to introduce it? Well, yes and no.

Schools that offer multiple exam programmes effectively carry extra overheads: different curricula require different teachers and resources and deadlines.

“Auckland Grammar has looked at it very closely but again chose the Cambridge A-levels because at the end of the day it was a financial issue,” Wysocki confirms.

Is there any reason why an incoming National government couldn’t offer some kind of funding?

“None at all, it is certainly within the government’s domain to do that and if they wanted to they certainly could. This current Labour government won’t, but if a National government came in and said ‘we would fund an international programme’ I think loads of schools would do it.”

Back in the study rooms at AIC full of the latest desk and laptop computers, there are conversations taking place in Mandarin, Spanish and English, not just because there are students from all these backgrounds but also because it is compulsory for students to learn a new language as part of their course.

“Building bridges,” is what Solomon likens it to. “As we are explicitly an international school, the New Zealand students who come here get the chance to make friends who will be high achievers around the world.

The networks and friendships I’ve seen built through international schools are incredible, and I understand that some international disputes have been settled because a delegate on each side had gone to the same school, and had a common linkage to draw on.”

Interestingly, just as we were going to press the Ministry of Education released the latest figures on public vs private, and independent schools have been quick to trumpet the news.

“Private schools are continuing to perform to a higher standard than state and state-integrated students,” said Joy Quigley, of the Independent Schools of NZ in a prepared statement to the media.

“Maori and Pacific Island students leaving with NCEA Level 3 or equivalent did particularly well in private schools. Maori students were 5.1 times more successful and Pacific Island students were 4.8 times more successful than their counterparts in state schools.

“European/Pakeha students were 2.5 times more successful, and Asian students were 1.2 times more successful in private schools than in state schools,” Quigley noted from the Ministry’s data.

The debate about public vs private schools rages perennially, and now that IB schools are making themselves heard it’s sure to rage even louder.

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LIFESTYLE

MONEY

MONEY WORRIES How to make yourself miserable with a million in the bank, writes Peter Hensley

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lare & Grant sat huddled in the rented house figure and Clare soon realised that their outgoings were wondering what to do. It seemed that life was larger than their income. against them. It was blowing a gale outside Initially they went interest only on the mortgage, but and at times it looked like the rain was sweeping hori- it soon became apparent that they could not keep up zontal against the glass sliding door like tiny silver bul- and when the bank started adding interest on the interlets threatening to pierce the toughened glass and make est, the added stress became apparent. They agreed to their lives worse still. finish out the season and put the extended farm up for Here they were, living in a rented house, neither of sale. They were so caught up in trying to see their way them with a job and a queue of people hassling them. out of their current problem, they never spent any time They had thought that their problems would be sorted thinking about their next step. The next step for them after they repaid a million dollar mortgage back to the was only to step free and clear of the financial mess they bank. The dairy farm, shares, associated stock and mis- had created for themselves. cellaneous plant had fetched close on $2.4m. They had They were now free and clear. A month had passed walked away from a lifetime on the land with the pro- since the sale. They were still lost in the wilderness. Their verbial million dollars in the bank and were totally flum- friends did not and could not understand their dilemma. moxed. They had no idea How could anybody what to do. with more than a million They saw the writing dollars in the bank have Their friends did not and could on the wall three years a problem? not understand their dilemma. ago. They held onto a Some times the reslim hope that the next sponsibility of having How could anybody with more dairy cheque would help money is greater than than a million dollars in the bank erase the message. They not having it. Clare have a problem? battled against the eleand Grant, like many, ments for two years and thought that their probwith the assistance of lems would be solved by their accountant came to realise that unless they could having more money. In reality they just swapped their reduce their expenses to below their income, then the problems for a different set. only way out was an asset realisation sale. They were in During the past month Clare and Grant had been to over their heads and the mortgage was slowly increasing the field days in Hamilton and investigated a new style instead of decreasing. Clare understood the power of farming venture which was based upon raising purecompound interest, except in their circumstances it was bred beef cattle for slaughter. The promoters appeared working against them and not for them. more interested in guaranteeing the premium sale of The extra production and increase milk fat compo- the stock to the farmer then they were in identifying the nent which they had based their figures on never mate- supposedly premium kill price at the works. rialised. The bank had advanced them the money to buy They had investigated raising chickens for a living. This the land next to their existing farm, however the previ- involved buying into a contract with one of the two ous owners had extracted a high price. Grant had under- major suppliers to the NZ market, either Tegel or estimated the pasture management skills of the previ- Inghams. Clare with her good head for figures soon ous share milker and the fencing was barely adequate. worked out that even with their million dollar deposit The dairy payout had dropped below their budgeted they did not have enough capital to make it viable. Also

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there was little room for growth in their turnover, however new innovations and maintenance costs would only add to their expenses which would soon see them repeating similar mistakes they had worked through with their dairy farm venture.

They had been approached by people at their local church who suggested that they had the inside running for inside information which had something to do with the share market. They had been told to keep the details to themselves and not ask around as the information was very confidential and it might get some people in trouble if the word got out. The rate of return on their money was exceptional and they were told that they would be invested in prime bank bills which sounded safe.

They had not proceeded with that as they were waiting for their funds to mature from the 60 day bank deposit. They had another month to investigate their other options. But it certainly sounded attractive and they felt sure that they could trust their fellow church goer.

They went to an after hours presentation from two individuals who had extensive experience in the livestock industry. The presentation was in a computer which was hooked up to a flash projector which shone up onto the blank wall of their rented living room. It was colourful and very professional. Jim and John were offering them a chance to buy into a new company venture which would take advantage of some patented ideas Jim had already registered. Clare asked about financial projections and if any of the patents were in production. Jim’s response was along the lines of “don’t you trust us? And it wasn’t as if they were asking for all their money for the project, just half of it”.

Clare and Grant were at their wits end. They were afraid to answer the phone and let all calls go through to either the answer machine or cell phone secretary. They recalled that their eldest daughter had been through high school with another lass whose father was an investment adviser. They were a bit hesitant to approach him as he did not charge for appointments and were unsure of what he might say. They had nothing to lose and made an appointment.

The interview took about an hour and when Clare and Grant left his office they felt like a weight had been lifted from their shoulders. On reflection Grant realised that he didn’t have much to say at all. The adviser had provided the most value to them by listening. He asked them what they wanted to do. He took them back to the time before they bought the extra land and extended their farm. It turned out that this appeared to be one small error of judgement in a lifetime of sound decisions. He let them verbalise their dreams which they had forgotten. They recalled how the land had been good to them and that their future probably remained with the land. He pointed out that the offer from their well meaning church buddies had all the hall marks and alarm bells of a huge scam and they would best to stay clear.

He advised them to leave their money in the bank and worked out that if they took a two month holiday to Europe that the interest their cash would earn whilst they were away would pay both the rent on the house and the holiday. He didn’t try to fix their problems, he just put them into perspective.

It took a week to arrange the holiday and they leave on Monday.

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LIFESTYLE

TOYBOX

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LIFESTYLE

FOOD & DRINK

FIT TO BE FRIED Eli Jameson writes that cooking is just like defending a besieged castle: sometimes, it’s done best with boiling oil

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ity the carnivore in love with the vegetarian. quality of ingredients, and have learned that vegetables All of a sudden one of his most cherished have more of a role than as a creative garnish to a really loves – all things meaty and on a plate – is called good piece of meat. No longer do I believe a meal is into question by the new love in his (or occasionally her) balanced if it has been sprinkled with parsley. life. Can a relationship last when two parties disagree on In terms of technique, this newfound emphasis on something as fundamental as whether or not the chil- cooking with things that grow on the ground rather dren’s song ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is cause for hunger than run around on it has taught me a renewed love for pangs? Or if tempeh is actually yummy, or something deep-frying. sent up to torture us from the depths of hell?

Perhaps it’s an atavistic masculine thing buried someSamuel Jackson’s hit man in Pulp Fiction summed up where deep in the cerebral cortex: If I can’t cook manly the dilemma perfectly when he chowed down on one of things like ribeye steaks, at least I can cook in a manly his more hapless victims’ fast food order: ‘That is a tasty (i.e., dangerous) way that involves high temperatures burger! Me, I can’t usually eat ‘em ‘cause my girlfriend’s a and the potential for serious injury and a trip to the vegetarian. Which pretty much makes me a vegetarian.’ hospital. Sort of like the way some guys cloak their creaNow my wife is a vegetarian, but nowhere near as tivity by expressing it through the medium of power doctrinaire as Jackson’s movie girlfriend – the most flack tools. And unlike those wimps on the home improveI ever cop for frying up a load of bacon and slapping it ment shows, I don’t even wear safety goggles. on some toasted bread with good mayonnaise is caused Back in the days before I left my butcher for my wife, by health concerns, rather than I still enjoyed the whole frymoral ones (‘are you sure one ing process – but never to the With a vegetarian to keep packet is meant to be eaten by point where I would put a happy, deep frying preserves just one person?’). Hey, it’s bench-top Fry-o-lator at the not like I actually toast the domestic harmony while also top of my Christmas list. But bread in the bacon fat, Elvis with a vegetarian to keep horrifying the health police Presley-style, right? happy, deep frying preserves Still, though, I know men domestic harmony while also whose vegetarian partners would leave them if they horrifying the health police. found out they regularly went to steakhouses for lunch.

Frying is also a great way to handle leftovers: golf One friend’s vegetarian girlfriend even uses meat as a balls of the previous night’s mushroom risotto can be weapon: if things are going well, and she’s happy with coated in an egg and parmasean mix and fried in olive the way she’s being treated, beef is on the menu. If not, oil for a particularly decadent, if loose, re-interpretation the poor man is sent packing to the salad bar while she of the Sicilian classic arancini. announces to the table, ‘Alex doesn’t eat meat’. Ouch.

But two of my favourite deep-fried treats these days Since we set up housekeeping together a few years involve that late-summer treat, the zucchini flower, and ago, I’ve had to figure out ways to cook dishes that that winter delight, the artichoke heart. The former is my satisfy both my wife’s moral code (apparently pancetta is go-to, make-ahead starter course whenever the things come not allowed, even if it’s pretty much dissolved in the up in the local farmers market (good food retailers also final product; the sam goes for anchovies) and my love stock them – keep an eye out when the time is right); the of rich food. latter, a fun way to bang and clatter around the kitchen and And in truth, cutting out meat has made me a better wind up with something that is, almost literally, heartcook in a lot of ways: I’m much more conscious of the stoppingly good.

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STUFFED, BEER-BATTERED, DEEP-FRIED ZUCCHINI FLOWERS Three flowers makes for a good first-course serving; my supplier sells in packets of ten, so we generally tend to have five per person at my house. Waste not, want not, right? The goal here is to make the lightly-battered, delicate zucchini flower the perfect vehicle for an incredibly rich packet of warm, melted cheese and herbs.

You’ll need: • 12 zucchini flowers, preferably with zucchini stems attached • 150 grams mozzarella cheese • 150 grams fresh parmagiano reggiano or grana padano • 1 bunch chives, finely chopped • 150 grams flour • 200 ml beer • Cayenne pepper • Good sea salt • Black pepper • Olive oil • Butter • Lemon (optional) 1. First, make the batter: a good flour-based batter needs at least half an hour to rest and come together. In a wide bowl (you’ll be dipping in here later) mix the beer and the flour together, adding a dash of cayenne pepper, salt, and fresh-ground black pepper. What you’re looking for is a lightish consistency, not a heavy, gloppy batter.

2. Then, make the stuffing. Mix up the two cheeses, most of the chives, and some salt and pepper in a bowl (taste to make sure the balance is to your liking). Take the zucchini flowers and, being careful not to tear the leaves, open from the top and with your little finger or a small spoon pop out the stamen from inside the flower. Fill with

stuffing, and twist shut, laying aside on a plate. These can sit in the fridge until you are ready to cook.

3. Get a good, heavy-bottomed pan out and fill with a centimetre’s worth of olive oil, and a good whack of butter to boot. Allow this to get quite hot – test it by dripping some batter into it; if it doesn’t immediately set to sizzling, the oil is too cold. Working in batches, dip the flowers into the batter using a turning motion that works with the direction in which you closed them, to help keep them sealed during frying. Place in the oil, and, turning occasionally, fry until golden brown.

Set aside on paper towel, sprinkling with salt, until all the flowers are cooked. Place three on each plate, sprinkle with some of the leftover chives, and a squeeze of lemon juice (optional). Serve immediately.

Serves four.

ARTICHOKE HEART FRITTERS Adapted from Julie Rosso and Sheila Lukins’ New Basics Cookbook, this recipe hails from Chicago’s celebrated Gordon Restaurant. Apparently this was a classic from the day the eatery opened in 1976, and the whole thing does have a bit of a wonderfully haut-1970s feel to it.

You’ll need: For the béarnaise sauce: • 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar • 2 tablespoons dry white wine • 1 tablespoon chopped eschallots • 1 teaspoon dried tarragon leaves • 125g room-temperature unsalted butter (for this sort of sauce, it pays to buy some good-quality butter, like Lurpak) • 3 egg yolks • Salt and pepper For the fritters: • 1 cup flour • 1 teaspoon baking powder • 1 cup milk • 1 egg • 1 teaspoon olive oil • 3 cups corn or peanut oil • 10 artichoke hearts, halved, rinsed, and dried

1. Make a batter by mixing the flour, baking powder, salt and pepper together in a bowl, and then combining with the milk, egg, and olive oil. Let this rest for at least a half-hour.

2. Knock up a quick béarnaise by boiling down the vinegar, wine, eschallots, and tarragon until reduced by half, and then allow to cool.

Then, get some water to near-boiling in a double-boiler (or just use a steel bowl over a pot like I do), and in the top part, combine the vinegar mixture with the egg yolks, giving it a good whisk. Bit by bit, add the butter until the sauce thickens, season with salt and pepper, and set aside.

3. Working in batches, dip the artichokes in the batter and then fry in hot oil. Drain on paper towels, and serve on plates with a daub of béarnaise on each fritter.

Serves four.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 81

LIFESTYLE

HEALTH

MILKING IT Is A2 milk a lifesaver, or just a genetically-altered quack in cow's clothing?

T Claire Morrow

he ad on television doesn’t tell me what the prod- instead of saying, ‘oooh, seafood’, or ‘well, that bee uct does, only that I should inform myself and sting was unpleasant’, it considers the protein to be a make up my own mind. Tricky. The website full bore terrorist attack and launches a full-bore retaliaactually doesn’t tell me what it does, either – although it tion. This is a problem because the immune system is does tell me about ‘unsolicited feedback’ they have not aware that if it swells up all the body’s tissue to fight received. Bridgett [not her real name] is apparently ‘very the perceived attack, it might also stop you from breathexcited about the product’. The company makes no claim ing. It is a very short-sighted tactic, as the system is willthat her claims are correct. Again, tricky. Links are pro- ing to kill you to take down the offending protein. vided to abstracts of relevant studies; full texts are not But allergies are not the same as food intolerance, available on the site. A ‘respected reporter’ is quoted as which comes from difficulty breaking down foods. The believing the product is ‘exciting’. The company is being b-casein protein is a suspect in triggering milk allergy, very, very careful not to cross the line and get in trouble but so are at least six others. The small study that perwith the Fair Trade Commission. formed a prick test on children truly allergic to regular The product in question is milk. As in the nutritious milk (A1 or A1 and A2-combined milk) confirmed that fluid produced by fethe children were in fact male mammals to feed allergic to milk, and that In the studies that have been their young. But not they were decidedly aljust any milk: this is ‘A2’ lergic to A2 milk as well. carried out, first-world countries milk, and the A2 CorChildren generally outwho consume a lot of A1 milk and poration is pretty spegrow milk allergies, so cific about their product. next year or in five years, cream have a lot more heart disIt doesn’t come from most of the children ease and diabetes than first world just any old cows, it will be able to drink any comes from cows who milk they like. Maybe countries who consume less are ‘homozygous for the miracle milk, in this the A2 polymorphic case, is just picking up variant at amino acid 67 of the beta-casein gene’. the children who were never truly allergic to milk, or In English: milk is made up of good stuff like sugars have outgrown their milk allergy. and proteins. There are many different little proteins – Another problem occurs with the endless exploitawhich are chains of amino acids – in cows’ milk. On one tion and manipulation of families with children who of those proteins, one of the amino acids is either an ‘A1’ suffer from autism spectrum disorder or schizophrenia or an ‘A2’. Now they don’t do anything to the cows, it’s a or other rare conditions. Some people think that A2 simple genetic variant like eye colour. They just test to see milk causes a decrease in autistic behaviors, or that A1 which cows have the A2 variant, and milk them. Voila, milk worsens the behavior. And I will admit to switchA2 milk. For your information, goats, sheep, soy, rice and ing my toddler to soy milk and lactose-free milk for a many other more unpleasant milk substitutes are also A1 month to try and get rid of his recurrent ear infections. free. You might wonder why it matters.

I didn’t think it would work. There was no plausible Somehow the claim has got out there that A2 milk is hypothesis (that is, theory to tell me how it would work). suitable for people who are allergic to cows’ milk. An And, of course, it didn’t work. Of course, children outallergy occurs when your immune system comes across grow the horrid ear infection stage. Autism is forever. a nice normal protein in food or the environment and There is no good evidence that special diets help

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MILK BUILDS STRONG HEALTHY BONES. SO, UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, YOU SHOULD GO RIGHT AHEAD AND DRINK ANY KIND OF MILK YOU LIKE autistic children or their families. I’m sorry, but there isn’t. There is no good evidence that vitamins, chelation ‘therapy’, or half of the available ‘therapies’ do any good. Boy, the parent who doesn’t try everything must get a guilt trip. As if in the handbook of parenting special needs children it says that you can never give up, therefore you should try everything. Always. Even if it doesn’t make much sense.

There are some small, poorly controlled studies that demonstrate some improvement in autistic behavior when a dairy and gluten free diet is introduced. The studies are seriously flawed though, and essentially prove nothing. There are strategies that can help a lot for autism, but A2 milk isn’t one of them. My concern would be that chasing after every new fad in the autism ‘therapy’ collection tires out tired parents, and can leave them with less money, hope, and time to pursue strategies that show realistic promise.

But that’s not to say the news is all bad on A2. There is some kind of link between diabetes, heart disease, and the beta-casein gene (A2 v A1). In the studies that have been carried out, first-world countries who consume a lot of A1 milk and cream have a lot more heart disease and diabetes than first world countries who consume less. In an ecological study which just looked at the numbers population-wide there was a strong link: Drink lots of regular milk, get heart disease and diabetes. In another study some rats also got more heart disease if they drank A1 milk compared to A2 milk. The funding for the study was

not released, causing some to speculate that it was funded by the A2 Corporation. Personally, I have nothing against that, I just think they should say so.

The study I described gives us no information on whether drinking A2 milk for life gives protection from heart disease you would have otherwise had or if A1 milk causes diabetes you mightn’t have otherwise gotten. We don’t know. Probably doesn’t hurt to spend the extra money for the magic milk, but again, we just don’t know. Unfortunately there is no way to untangle the details of what, if anything, is going on, without further study.

The logical fallacy involved here is called post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is a fancy way of saying that correlation isn’t causation. This means that just because events occur one after the other, doesn’t mean the first caused the second. It could be coincidence, a third factor could have caused both incidents, or it could be far more complex than that. The main risk factors for heart disease and diabetes haven’t changed. Eat well, exercise more, don’t smoke, live well – yes, I am aware that I sound like a broken record. If only you knew me, you could accuse me of hypocrisy too.

So to sum up: A2 milk tastes good. Just like regular milk it is full of healthy calcium and so forth. Milk builds strong healthy bones. So, until further notice, you should go right ahead and drink any kind of milk you like.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 83

LIFESTYLE

SCIENCE

BEAM ME UP, BONES The controversial Kennewick Man is finally getting a chance to let his bones do the talking, reports Sandi Doughton

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ine years after university students stumbled designed to stop the desecration of Native American across a human skull on the banks of the graves requires that human remains be turned over to Columbia River in the northwestern United indigenous people who can show an ancestral connecStates, Kennewick Man’s secrets are about to be unearthed. tion. A group of five regional tribes stepped forward to A team of 11 top anthropologists are in Seattle to claim what they called the Ancient One. But eight scientists sued for the right to study the begin the first comprehensive studies of the skeleton that touched off a bitter struggle between scientists’ bones, arguing they could offer invaluable insights into quest for knowledge and Native Americans’ reverence early man. A pagan group from California even joined the legal fray to protect what they said might be an for their ancestors.

The researchers have already conducted high-resolu- ancient Norse forebear.

An attorney for the scientists estimates the federal tion CT scans of the skull and pelvis that will help them learn about the ancient man’s origins and the government spent $6 million on the court battle. That healed-over spear point embedded in his right hip. Next, includes $2.6 million in attorney fees awarded to the they will try to figure out whether he was buried, or scientists when the federal court ruled in their favor. The judge concluded there simply swallowed up by was no clear link bethe mud.

Eight scientists sued for the right tween Kennewick Man The long-term goal is and modern-day Native to glean every detail the to study the bones, arguing they Americans. bones can yield about could offer invaluable insights into “When you start gethow Kennewick Man ting back 1,000 or 5,000 lived and died, and what early man. A pagan group from years or more, you’re his relationship might California even joined the legal fray getting to a period of have been to the contito protect what they said might be time where those linknent’s earliest inhabitants. ages are really not possi“This is something an ancient Norse forebear ble to make”, says Doug that should have been Owsley, a forensic andone years ago”, says Seattle archaeologist Jim Chatters, who was the first thropologist from the Smithsonian who participated in researcher to inspect the bones after they were discov- the lawsuit and is leading the science team.

“It’s important to be able to study discoveries like ered in July 1996.

When carbon dating showed the skeleton was this, because it’s part of American prehistory.”

While the case crawled through the courts, the bones between 9,200 and 9,500 years old, Chatters knew he was dealing with one of the oldest, best-preserved sets remained locked in a basement room at the University of human remains in North America. Eager for the of Washington’s Burke Museum. The door to the vault nation’s leading experts to examine the find, he was requires two keys to unlock, one held by the Corps of preparing to ship the bones to the Smithsonian Insti- Engineers, which retains ownership of the remains.

A Corps curator hand-carried the skull and pelvis to tution for 20 days of intensive study when the U.S. Chicago in early June for the CT scan. The bones, in a Army Corps of Engineers seized them.

As owners of the Kennewick river bank where the protective carrying case, got their own seat on the airplane, bones were unearthed, the Corps planned to hand them says Corps spokeswoman Nola Leyde.

The industrial scanner used to create three-dimensional over to local Indian tribes for burial. A federal law

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pictures of the bones is three times more powerful than machines used in medicine. Clear plastic models are being generated from the images, Owsley explains.

Because the Corps of Engineers has forbidden the researchers to glue the bones back together, they will rely on the models to see how broken sections interlock. Scientists will also take a series of detailed measurements to compare with skeletons from different groups of people around the world and through time.

Earlier studies concluded Kennewick Man’s facial features don’t match those of Native American populations – or many other population groups.

The most famous image of his face may not be altogether accurate, either. An early reconstruction depicts him as hawk-nosed and thinlipped – a dead-ringer, some say, for Patrick Stewart, the actor who played Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. A later computer reconstruction by Owsley suggests slightly different features, with a wider nose, fuller lips and deep-set eyes.

Based on previous skull measurements, scientists say Kennewick Man most closely resembles the Ainu, an aboriginal group that still lives in northern Japan but doesn’t resemble the nation’s modern inhabitants.

The new studies will help fine-tune those comparisons, Owsley says.

Scientists used to believe the first New World inhabitants arrived in a wave about 11,500 years ago, walking across an ice-age land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. But a handful of anomalous skeletons like Kennewick Man and scattered evidence of earlier settlements may indicate several waves of migration from different parts of Asia and the Pacific, said David Carlson, head of the anthropology department at Texas A&M University.

“It’s possible Kennewick Man represents one of those migrations that hasn’t left very many – or even any – descendants.”

The best evidence of lineage would come from DNA analysis, Carlson said. Government scientists tested small leg-bone fragments several years ago, with no success. The new study team may try again with the same fragments. So far, the Corps has refused permission to take any more samples from the skeleton.

To even handle the remains, the scientists had to agree to elaborate precautions, including use of an elevated sandbox covered with cloth where the bones can be arranged without contacting a hard surface.

Much of this week’s work will focus on figuring out what happened

THE TWINPACK SYSTEM is designed to ensure you don’t run out of gas. When one cylinder empties, it automatically changes across to the reserve cylinder. An easily readable indicator on the regulator changes colour from green to red indicat-

to the bones between Kennewick Man’s death and discovery: How they weathered out of the bank; how they were oriented in the sediment; whether they were exposed to sun or the gnawing of animals.

That will help determine whether he was laid to rest by his people, or left where he fell. It will also provide a baseline for sorting out the dings and breaks that reflect injuries suffered during his lifetime.

The pattern of bone healing shows he recovered from the spear in his hip, and lived several more years – perhaps to the age of 40 or more.

His left arm appears withered, while the rest of his body was wellmuscled. In the next phase of study, scientists will delve into these features in more detail.

“He’s going to get the Cadillac treatment in terms of very careful, comprehensive analysis to try to figure out as much as possible about him and where he came from”, says Owsley.

“There’s nothing in the anthropological record that can tell you more about past peoples than the bones themselves.”

ing that you now have one empty cylinder.

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livered to you on your designated day.

So if you’re thinking gas, the BOC gas experts will take the hassle out of getting you connected to TWINPACK. Simply call on 0800 800 753, or email customer_services@boc.com

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 85

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

FIRE & ICE Travel writer Anne Chalfant has a hot time in a cold Canadian ski resort

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HISTLER, British Columbia – It’s bitterly My class put me in the company of other solo skiers cold, and the early morning is wintry gray. from Newfoundland, Chicago, Great Britain, Atlanta, No, correction on the gray. Ski parkas in California. All of us were advanced beginners, nervous eye-popping colors - lightning bolt yellow and tutu pink Nellies amid the bluster of athletic hyperconfidence sur– rush past, making the morning look like an explosion rounding us. at a Goretex factory.

But in short order, we learned that Whistler Blackcomb This is the daily storming of the gondolas at Whistler is for everyone, even shy schussers like us. By afternoon, Blackcomb. The scene tells the story: this ski resort is the we were kings of the mountain, so to speak. We were place to be. Whistler Blackcomb is the North American skiing long runs from the high reaches of Whistler’s ski resort most frequently rated No. 1 by ski and 6,069-foot gondola. The secret of these slopes is that snowboard magazines. they feature “green” or beginner runs up top as well as The mountains Whistler and Blackcomb nestle side- at the base, some trails labeled “slow zones” with big by-side, two wide snowcones of trails boasting 7,000 yellow signs that say “slow.” skiable acres.

This means even the greenest skiers can return home The 8 a.m. rush of rainbow puffy people is not just raving about the very thing the expert skiers love about about excitement. Dusk comes early in the Canadian these mountains - long vertical drops. That translates to winter, and the chair lifts charging downhill on shut down at 3:30 p.m. chattering skis as long In fact, the town and mountain are To the skier new to as a mile, if you wish.

Whistler, the scene can named after the western hoary mar- Most ski resorts start be intimidating. their base partway up mot, which makes a shrill whistle.

Which mountain? the mountain.

Which gondola? Which Whistler also has These little fellers, of course, have chairlift? Even the trail Green Acres Family tucked off to bed for the winter map, titled “Mountain Zone, where parents Atlas,” intimidates. On can ski with kids withthis map, trail lines stream down like dreadlocks. out threat of out-of-control hot-doggers knocking them My arrival in Whistler had been at midnight the night on their little noggins. before, so I felt a little overwhelmed looking up at the Our small group of ski schoolers followed instructor mountain at 8 a.m. and watching the gondola climb – Dave Tait of Edinburgh, Scotland, up the gondola to to where? Somewhere in the Himalayas, I thought. the Upper Olympic trail (don’t tell me that name isn’t I had come to these slopes as a solo wobbly skier who good psychology). had not hit the alpine slopes in 20 years.

We trailed downhill behind Tait like ducklings, matchMy friend Susan had traveled to the village with me, ing his sweeping S-curves with ours. Then we did rabbut she’s a nonskier and made a beeline to the warm, bit hops across the slopes to center our balance on our nurturing spa at Fairmont Chateau Whistler. skis. Next: skiing across the slope balanced on one ski So it was just me against the mountain. while squashing imaginary tomatoes with the other.

Thank heavens for ski school. I had signed up for an allYou can bet the other skiers on the mountain day class, and before serious jitters got the better of me, I admired our flair and style. was greeted by several yellow-and-blue jacketed Whistler But truth be told, by morning’s end we had all found Blackcomb Ski and Snowboard School instructors. our center of balance, and we were looking good.

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To the top! said instructor Dave, and up we went on Whistler Village Gondola. At 6,069 feet the mountain was blustery with wind, but the sweeping view of mountains was worth the red nose.

We headed down some great trails for green skiers – Whiskey Jack, Pig’s Alley and Ego Bowl.

Then we rode the Emerald Express chairlift back to the top. Down again, up again, down again, up again until we were exultant with our progress and exclaiming like the veterans over six fluffy inches of new powder, smiled on by blue skies and sunshine.

And midafternoon we whined like all the other skiers – why do the lifts have to close at 3:30 p.m.? (Because everyone has to have time to get down off the big mountain, leaving the ski patrol time to sweep the trails, which means look for lost skiers, before dusk.)

I credit the day’s success to the mountain’s accommodating atmosphere for all levels of skiers, and to instructor Tait. An investment banker for years in his former life, Tait applied that skill set to his determined yet wobbly class of skiers. He had patience that things would change, and we did. And he had a desire to win, and he did. The ducklings made it to the mountaintop.

The ski instructors at Whistler Blackcomb are said to be among the best in the world. Whistler Blackcomb employs a total of 1,400 instructors in both the adult school and the Whistler Kids program, an indicator of the premium this resort places on getting people skiing safely and well. Nor are the classes expensive.

A word on the weather and ski conditions: These, too, are among the best in the world, since Vancouver’s nearby marine climate generally brings big dumps of snow and milder temperatures than what other parts of Canada experience. Our ski day in January hovered at 8 degrees Farenheit, and colder at the top of the mountain. However, some snowboarders I know who went to Whistler early in January said they found the snow conditions disappointing.

Even being No. 1 doesn’t guarantee a daily dusting of the beloved white stuff.

Skiers from warmer areas also need to get comfy with the concept of “cold.” People here are not all dolled up in colorful ski garb just to make a fashion statement. Ski clothing geared for sub-zero is expensive, but much appreciated when you are dangling from a chairlift with wind whistling through its metal bars.

One might think that’s how Whistler got its name.

In fact, the town and mountain are named after the western hoary marmot, which makes a shrill whistle. These little fellers, of course, have tucked off to bed for the winter.

Not so we skiers.

After a hard day on the slopes, it was time for Whistler’s apres-ski scene, which carries a reputation equal to the ski scene.

Energetic and pink-cheeked, I returned to Chateau Whistler to find my friend Susan, post herbal wrap in her white terry robe, drifting down the hall like a melted Gumby.

“Pull it together, girl,” I urged, grabbing an arm and propelling her to the room. This was just the beginning of her launch into full-out spa mode; she needed food.

Our best find in Whistler was Bearfoot Bistro, where the waiters are tuxedoed and classically French trained, the atmosphere tres sophisticated.

But then there’s the menu - filet of dry-aged Alberta buffalo wrapped in wild boar bacon with foie gras emulsion? Loin of wild arctic caribou with morels?

It took a while for it to make sense. Then I got it: French-Canadian cowboy fusion food!

Then it became whatever it was when the wine steward said the wine had a surprising finish - like kayak slipping over a waterfall, or perhaps the slap of baby dragontail on wet slate.

In spite of myself, I was persuaded to eat caribou, Susan had Que-

bec Mullard Duck “cannette.” Good fun, and fortification for another day in the snow and in the spa.

Although I longed for a second day on the alpine slopes, I also couldn’t wait to try out cross-country skiing at Lost Lake Trails, a short walk from my hotel. I’m a good cross-country skier, so I took off on beautiful groomed trails up among the pines. Plenty of up-and-down climbing and fun downhill runs. At dusk, I returned to the loop around Lost Lake, which is lit in the evening, an enchanting place to glide along in the silent woods in moonlight.

Skiers sailing around the lake add to the Currier and Ives snow scene appeal of this town. Then there’s a trail to the village for a nice winter walk through a covered bridge over a sparkling stream.

Whistler is the most walkable of ski towns, with slopes and town nestled together.

Had I been skiing Blackcomb, I could have climbed onto one of its gondolas right outside Chateau Whistler. Several hotels in the village feature tumble-out-of-bed-and-onto-the-slopes convenience. Similarly, some village bars feature a tumble-down-the slopes-and-intothe-door convenience.

I wished I’d had time to throw my wallet at some of the charming shops in the village. Shopping the Canadian dollar right now is downright gleeful, with the exchange rate hovering of late around 62 American cents equaling the Canadian dollar.

The only souvenir I took home was chapped cheeks.

Susan took home the better souvenir.

“Feel my skin,” she said following her third spa treatment.

I did. Amazing – soft as a baby’s.

“Hmm,” I said, touching my own reptilian top layer.

I realized I should have planned more than a weekend in this resort town.

Next time, I’m going to adjust my sweeping turns to take in some spa treatments and a spin of the Canadian dollar.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 87

LIFESTYLE

TRAVEL

THE GOLD COAST

Forget the beaches, Jacques Windell decides Dream World is the place to be

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hen one utters the words ‘Gold Coast’ or spins you around until you experience zero gravity. Safe ‘Surfer’s Paradise’ in conversation it nearly to say I felt quite ill after having had my insides rocked always conjures up images of sun, surf from side to side, until I couldn’t breathe and then and sexy meter-maids. But, as I discovered on a recent spun around until I could no longer think. trip, theme parks, thongs and theatres aren’t the only The management of this theme park knows what memories discerning travellers should settle for, if they you’re about to experience and are nice enough to leave are willing to spend a bit more time in this part of couches outside these rides for you to recover on. Thanks the world. guys! I got some ‘excellent value’ for money recovering I must say, I’m kind of past the stage of the ‘thrilling’ on those. I just felt too uncomfortable and no soft sensation of my inner body having an out-of-body ex- couch was going to make me feel any better. So, if you’re perience. When we visited Dream World, we made the not sure about how your stomach will handle the mistake of taking the first ride we saw. It’s called “The Harlem shuffle when you visit “Scream World”, STAY Claw”, but it could just as well be re-named “McCaw”, AWAY FROM THE CLAW! because as any Lions loosy would tell you, it’s about just In the end, it must have taken my stomach an hour or as scary as having ‘Claw McCaw’ grip the ball. In fact, I so, (off the couch) to fully recover. But, for about a month can’t remember when now, I’ve kept my last I was that petrified! shrink’s couch real The management of this theme park warm. I break out in It starts off really gently, like a pleasant bouts of cold sweat just knows what you’re about to experimemory from those thinking about it… ence and are nice enough to leave sunny, carefree schoolHaving said that, the days when one got lost couches outside these rides for you to rest of the rides we went in one’s own thoughts on were heaps of fun. recover on. on a school swing. But, No really and they rate it rapidly turns into a the rides for you, so scene from “Nightmare on Elm Street”. Initially, I felt you know what’s extreme and what’s not. Having said my body giggle, but I couldn’t actually vocalize it, that, I still wasn’t quite prepared for the Tower of Terbecause the air in my lungs was being pressed into the ror. No biggie. You just get propelled forward at dragopposite direction. When we got to the end of the pen- ster speed (literally) and end up with your head pointing dulum, I literally exploded into a fit of laughter, just to to the sky about 10 flights in the air. When you stop, be followed by the feeling of my stomach literally being you actually feel gravity pulling you out of your seat. It’s left behind. scary, but it ain’t “The Claw”.

And unfortunately “The Claw” seems to believe in But, enough of ‘things that make you go mmmh’. value for money, because it just won’t stop! All up it One of the highlights of my trip was the Carrara Marprobably only lasts a minute, but it’s a very long 60 kets in Carrara, on the Nerang-Broadbeach road, which seconds. Seriously, 10 seconds into this ride, every fibre have become a virtual institution on the Gold Coast, of my body was yelling: “Get me off this thing!” My drawing weekend crowds of more than 25,000. It has body really felt very out of sorts. become a bargain hunter’s paradise providing an almost But, as with most things in life, we never seem to unlimited variety of products from 500 stalls. But, it’s learn our lesson the first, second or 100th time and after the large variety of unique and innovative goods, all at this ride, it was time to try “The Vortex”. Well this one bargain prices that really made an impression on me.

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These markets are said to be the largest permanent markets in Queensland and is open every Saturday & Sunday from 7am to 4pm with ample free parking and better yet, free entry. I’d really urge you to pop along, as it’s a lot of fun and an easy way to make good quality purchases and not break the bank. And for the traveller that’s staying in self catering accommodation, they can get their foodstuffs fresh from the markets and do their holiday shopping in one easy and convenient place, because believe me, parking is an issue especially in Surfers.

Then there’s quaint little Cedar Creek Estate, set close to Mt. Tamborine’s boutique boulevard in Eagle Heights. They have a great selection of wine, for those discerning nose-to-palate people, but don’t have issues educating lay-men either. Their staff members are friendly and fun and can be trusted to get you in the right frame of mind to find the perfect drop. I was quite impressed with the Verdelho, which has a wonderful nose of tropical fruit, mandarin and citrus, with a palate that shows citrus characters and a clean, lingering finish. It is apparently the new buzzword in the wine fraternity over there and is becoming increasingly popular.

It’s advisable to make this your last stop, after the boutique shops, if you don’t want to max out the credit card, before your trip has even begun.

I must say the shops are very impressive too, but as I don’t have the space to go into all that, I’ll leave that leisure, for your pleasure. The cuckoo clocks, however are a must see.

The good news is that you can win a trip to Surfer’s Paradise with Nature Bee and boost your immune system at the same time. With those nasty little bugs flying around, it’s the prudent thing to do.

Although the Gold Coast is never going to be as beautiful as the South Island, it’s a worthwhile place to visit this time of year. As you might have seen on some of the Sports channels recently frostbite down South can cause shoulders to dislocate.

Before I become too politically incorrect, here are some travel tips to keep you out of harm’s way: ✗ Make sure you stay no where near a supermarket. Huge, very noisy trucks deliver foodstuffs from about 5h30 – 7h00. We were quite high up and I got woken up nearly every morning with that piercing, little, beeping noise trucks make when they’re backing up. Ugh! It seems to get amplified in between all those skyscrapers.

✗ Stay away from skimpy clad women calling themselves meter maids.

They make blood rush and can cause discolouration in the face. ✗ Look after the old immune system. Going to and from warm and cold climates tend to make one more susceptible to colds and flu’s, as I proved yet again. ✗ Whatever you do, stay away from ‘The Claw’. ✗ Make a point to go to Mt. Tamborine. It has heaps of lovely walks, waterfalls and breathtaking scenery, including panoramic views of the Gold Coast. ✗ It’s pretty easy to get carried away, as nice things are pretty cheap over there. Too many trinkets and treasures could mean additional charges from your airline for being over the limit, even if the plane is half full. At Freedom Air for example, we were told the limit is 23kg per person. We were 4kg over in total and had to pay an additional $50.

Suddenly our great bargains, weren’t that great after all. ✗ Do sip the Verdelho very slowly wherever you can lay your lips on it. ✗ Tigers can be viewed for $2 per person at Jupiter’s Casino. It’s cool.

We even saw a full-on fight – bad kitty! ✗ The show “Midnight Magic” is pretty good, if there’s nothing on telly. There is a scene where guys on motorbikes race each other in a very small cage, which was the highlight for me. I thought the main singer was a bit average, though. ✗ Take your time when looking for that special gift. Chances are you’ll find the same thing for considerably less around the corner. This also applies to fuel prices. The service stations are extremely competitive over there. It seems that their prices also get adjusted immediately when the oil price drops, creating the impression that they’re not trying to rip their customers off. Maybe it’s something the powers that be on our side of the ditch could also aspire to.

For more information on the Gold Coast, visit http:// www.hellogoldcoast.com.au

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 89

LIFESTYLE

BOOKCASE

AN ECLECTIC MIX Michael Morrissey finds Hannibal Lecter meets Jack the Ripper, and retraces the life of a Kiwi author

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

By Lionel Shriver, Serpent’s Tail, $29.95

Michael Morrisssey

This novel won the latest Orange Prize – but is it a Lemon? (The Orange Prize by the way is a chick-lit only award and so far as I know there are no bloke-lit awards.

In my view we should all be allowed to sip Orangeade.)

We Need to Talk About Kevin comes endorsed by numerous rave reviews. My reaction is heavily mixed – some positive, much negative. It has a slow overly domestic “woman’s book” feel at the start so much so that had I not been pre-armed with the knowledge that murder and mayhem were to eventually follow, I might have quit before page 30. On page 41, we thankfully (well almost) get a hint of the thoroughly nasty psychopath who is to dominate this book. Perhaps a little hatred of a villain via art has therapeutic value. Certainly, well before the end I was hoping that a pained and psychologically crucified mother – or indeed anyone – would give Kevin his just desserts.

However, the book has some surprises. If you wanted to genre-categorise this book you’d have to call it an example of horror as bad or worse than any of the B-grade trash Stephen King serves up – except it is more disturbing because instead of ghouls in remote towns we have a chilling work of psychological horror centred in the city. Warning – compared to Kevin, Hannibal Lecter is a New Ager.

That said, We Need to Talk About Kevin exerts a horrible fascination. What are teenage mass killers really like? What is their motivation? Is it their troubled upbringing or bad genes? This book takes a dark tour in these troublesome nether regions. Kevin, an amoral monster that only a mother could love – or endure – is arguably the most malignant spiteful charac-

90, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

ter yet concocted in fiction – though I am sure some other gothic novelist, usually serene-looking, will come up with someone, some ur-human, even nastier.

Psychopath isn’t a term the text applies to Kevin, though clearly if there is any label that would fit someone who ties up their baby sister to feed her petroleum jelly and Thai curry paste, sluices her eyes with drain cleaner and eventually murders her in a bizarre way, this would be it. Kevin’s long-suffering mother who writes “letters” to her husband Franklin makes it convincingly clear that we should not look to either recreational drugs, attention deficit disorder or Prozac to “explain” Kevin’s cruelties. Inasmuch as he competes with other teenage killers and calculatingly makes his serial killer hits just before reaching adult age, he is, simply put, evil. Or to put it another way, if he is not evil, then who the hell is?

The problem I have with Kevin is that the author seems to have one foot in the Stephen KingHannibal Lecter zone, another in the anticipated almost inevitable shock-horror film camp but with just enough psychological realism or Southern Gothic to make a bow toward the unsurpassed inventor of this genre, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Unlike the great Russian novelist, modern would-be equivalents seem to have a lower moral ceiling. It’s as though they’re half in league – or in love – with their nasty creations, nudging us in the dark like a giggling schoolboy (or with a bow to the Orange Award) schoolgirl.

That, in the end, Kevin’s mother, as it were, appears to forgive him is either a demonstration of the inexhaustible depth of a mother’s love or a case of where the novelist had written herself into a corner and took the only way out. Readers must decide.

POSTCARDS FROM ELSEWHERE: Odd Destinations and Unusual Encounters

By Graham Reid, Random house, $29.95

retrieving that dialogue you can’t quite accurately remember. For a scribe who can write, “All babies look like Winston Churchill to me”, all is forgiven.

Graham Reid, a former colleague of mine, is in my view the best current feature writer at the Herald. To my knowledge, this is his first book. Travel books are a major genre today – as always – and the overcrowded field swarms with everything from giant talent to embarrassing mediocrity. At his best, Reid is well along the spectrum of the Giant Talented but his work is uneven and there are some missed opportunities. I was pleased to discover the book was not simply a collection of the genre for which he is well known – pop music critiques or encounters – though that would have been entirely legit.

For my money, the best items are the haunting evocation of Cajun territory in Louisiana; the evocation of Clarksdale, one of Robert Johnson and other blues giants; the description of the erotic museum in Barcelona (which I only associate with Gaudi’s epic cathedral); the chapters on Dali, Cervantes; the explorations of Korea and Samoa and the wonderful essay on the history of the brick (which resolutely doesn’t mention Jethro Tull even once).

The chapter on Ullungdo (feel no shame that you haven’t heard of it) has Reid (and us) wondering why he went here – certainly not for the main attractions of dried squid, dried seaweed or pumpkin candy. Unlike the late Hunter S. Thompson who would take a stiff dose of mind-altering substances to ensure that the least eventful of locales mustered up a glow if not flying bat, or better still trouble, Reid simply tells us that the sometime pirates that attracted him there have gone and all that is left is a vomiting woman. Ah, well.

Less forgivable – really the one thing which disappointed – was his reportage on meeting the premier of Taiwan – briefly summarised in indirect speech. If ever there was one encounter which called for actual dialogue this was it. In general, the better chapters could have been longer (though their brevity is part of their charm) so I would like to suggest to Graham that he extends his range and leave the tape recorder switched on – it’s handy

Q and A

By Vikas Swarup, Doubleday, $34.95 I tend to be suspicious of bestsellers. When I open their pages I am braced for disappointment mingled with traces of envy – why them and not me? I was blown away by Wild Swans but disappointed by The Da Vinci Code and The God of Small Things. OK.... I am a big fan of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” because it gives me a chance to say to my wife, “I’ve just won half a million dollars!” – from the safety of my armchair. In Swarup’s lively highly readable first novel, Ram Mohammed Thomas, a penniless waiter from Mumbai (Bombay) has just won a billion rupees (approx NZ$33 million) and been arrested and soon after is being tortured by rope suspension, chilli-smeared butt plugs, near drowning and electricity in order to get him sign a fake confession that he cheated. Thus the crooked organisers will not have to pay him.

A great start to a novel that could only have been written post-2000 and assuredly will be filmed real soon.

After this gripping beginning, the rest of the novel – composed of ingenious episodes reminiscent of ancient fables that explain why the under-informed Thomas is able to come with the answers to the quiz – has a less firm grip on narrative interest but rewards with its multiple ingenuity: rich slices of Indian culture and history at no extra charge. My favourite was the $200,000 question which involved a gun holdup on a train, an experience that leads to the waiter learning that the inventor of the revolver was Samuel Colt – a fact I shall confess, sans torture, that I picked up from a Buffalo Bill book when I was eight years old.

I have also to own up that I couldn’t resist peeking to see if I could answer the questions.

Indeed, if you’re a quiz show nut like I am, I defy you not to. Naturally, the Indian theme questions had me stumped and I should have known but, alas, did not, in which key Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was written – a billion rupee cinch to any classical music student.

Depending on how you look at it, Swarup is not as clever or impressive a writer as that fearsome quartet of magic realists Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandler, David Davidar and Hari Kunzru, geniuses of the inventive baroque style, or you can regard this new quiz kid on the Indian novelists’ block as simply a captivating, at times, exhilarating read. I’m taking best both ways.

THE PAINTED SAILOR

By Alyson Hunter, Zenith publishing, $22.95 Anyone who was part of the inner bohemian 60s Auckland scene – Hotel Kiwi, Grafton, the Elam school of Arts – would have known the Hunter sisters, artists both. They have both made their careers in London, these last three decades or so.

Like Michelangelo (say), Alyson Hunter is a successful artist turned poet. Her poems span from 1962 to 2004. Thematically, many echo that time-honoured topic of the colonial artist visiting the “home” land then the return to the place of growing up. In either locale, the mind in exile or finding a new home, looks back.

This the feeling of dislocation or relocation runs full circle. Distance looks our way as another New Zealander once put it.

In times of motherhood the nexus is tested out. In “Camden Girl”, Hunter writes: Some primitive need made me come back here to have you born.

In the present the poet thinks of herself and daughter “now we are back as Kiwis” and while driving through the rainforest of Lone Kauri Road meditates: A safe little cocoon of London hurtling around the bends The homeland is even more keenly celebrated in a poem of the same name : So still and black, but soft movement there the phosphorescence of the sea August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 91

licking the black iron-ore sand with lime-green lip Sometimes London is celebrated as “a great furnace in which “a green twig” was “engulfed” and reformed. At other times London is for all of us our safe nowhere land our Erewhon.

And Hunter triumphantly interfuses both layers of feeling at the collections’s end: Soho I live and breathe but for me Made in New Zealand I will always be.

The collection includes numerous black and white photos and photo-etchings from the poet’s life which bring (I have to confess) a sepia tremble of nostalgia.

Zenith Publishing, a leader in the education field, has moved into more general publishing with this first book of poetry. Watch out for others in the coming year.

NO ONE LOVED GORILLAS MORE: Dian Fossey Letters from the Mist

By Camilla De La Bedoyere, photographs by Bob Campbell, Hardie Grant Books, $59.95 Fiction offers Tarzan but, improbably, real life has given us Dian Fossey. A tall woman of fiercely independent character, Fossey became world famous after publication of her book, Gorillas in the Mist, which detailed her life with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. Her courage, fortitude and an ability to empathise with these large and generally gentle creatures, as well as her resolute fight against poaching are all celebrated in this handsome book.

The text is liberally sprinkled with Dian Fossey’s letters. Basically homey missives to Mum and Dad, they are moving in their way but somehow do not convey the full impact of Fossey’s achievement. On occasion, her prose could sing – she once referred to this “fog bound, frenzied, fossilized site” but often they are merely chatty. Campbell’s photographs are, on the whole, more impressive than Bedoyere’s somewhat lack-lustre text. As we stare into those deep-sunk eyes gazing back at us, it’s difficult not to feel there is an almost human compassion, warmth, and thoughtfulness in their gaze.

These huge shaggy fel92, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

lows look kinder and more intelligent than several people I know – some of whom are well known media personalities.

Fossey was not the squeaky clean green new age type that some might have expected. She was a heavy smoker who enjoyed tinned spam, corned beef and hot dogs while the men on her expedition ate sweet potatoes, beans, corn and vegetables. Fossey disliked vegetables and claimed to be allergic to fruit.

Though Fossey became the most famous of those who sought and achieved close contact with gorillas she was not the first. She was preceded by George Schaller who clocked up more than 400 hours of close study with the giant simians. It was Schaller who pioneered the quiet and highly visible and proximate approach to gorillas.

Fossey’s stubborn and unrelenting fight against poachers eventually led to her murder. But the true murderers were never brought to justice. Corruption in high places may well have been the explanation. Fossey’s life and death were not in vain – back in 1969 she feared the 200 remaining mountain gorillas would be extinct in 20 years. Today, there are 385. In later years Fossey suffered panic attacks and other darkly-hinted mental disturbances; these are, however, insufficiently explored. Despite these reservations, the book is a memorable tribute to Fossey’s bravery and foresight while Campbell’s marvellous photographs make it a worthy addition to any library.

BANGKOK TATTOO

By John Burdett, Bantam Press, $36.95 Bangkok 8 was possibly the most colourful, richly backgrounded and well-plotted thriller I have read. Bear in mind this high praise comes from one who does not read a lot of thrillers. I enjoyed its successor Bangkok Tattoo almost as much.

So while I consider this latest rollicking multi-layered tale of the steamy Thai capital a cut above most western city-based thrillers, it suffers a mite from successor syndrome. Thus said, I will still read with eager anticipation any more books with

redoubtable Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep weaving his way through Bangkok’s lurid nightlife.

As portrayed by Burdett, Jitpleecheep is a straight up and down sort of cop who doesn’t take bribes. Reportedly, bribery is rife in Bangkok, police included, and I’m inclined to believe the reports. Interestingly, in a short foreword, Burdett says he has not himself “come across police corruption in Thailand in any form, although the local press media reports malpractice on almost a daily basis”.

Whether he likes it or not, Jitpleecheep has family ties with vice and corruption – his mother and his own oddly likeable boss Police Colonel Vikorn run a brothel called The Old Man’s Club in which – in typical lurid Burdett style – a male corpse is found with member sliced off – a practice, I believe, not unknown in Thailand. A working girl’s instant confession seems too glib to be true. Thus begins our honourable detective’s latest foray.

Part of the exotic Burdett mix is to upend expectations. Hence (as already noted) we have an honourable non-bribe taking Bangkok detective, a colleague who has effeminate tendencies, a moderate Muslim who is trying to protect (!) bumbling CIA agents – these kind of reversals, one could say, are comparable to Shakespeare giving vengeful moneylender Shylock another more human side. The effect is not only to rattle our cliched expectations but to enrich character – hence the justified label “literary” thriller.

The rich mix of characters also includes Ishy, a stuttering Japanese master tattooist in demand by top gangsters; Chanya, an opium smoking working girl; formidable Mitch Turner who winds up minus his large body tattoo and an important part of his manhood plus Elizabeth Hatch, an equally formidable CIA agent, “close to six feet, slim with military bearing, a fit and handsome fortysomething”.

In other words just the sort of people you meet in shopping mall queues everyday. With his wry observations about reincarnation, his asides about the foolish and often wrongly based expectations of the farang (foreigner), Jitpleecheep is arguably the most colourful of all. Like Thai cooking, this book is hot and tasty.

Enjoy.

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August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 93

LIFESTYLE

MOVIES & DVDs

MOB RULES Also: DreamWorks’ latest fails to excite, and don’t expect a rush of copycat oyster farming flicks any time soon

Shelly Horton

Layer Cake

Madagascar

Released: July, 2005 Rated: MA

Released: June, 2005 Rated: PG

✯✯✯✯

✯✯✯

B

henever I hear DreamWorks has a new animated movie, I hope for a Shrek. I always forget that DreamWorks also made the disappointing A Shark’s Tale. Madagascar falls into the second category. It’s not a multi-leveled family film that adults can get a kick out of too. This one is for the kiddies.

The animation is reliably impressive and the story has a lesson, so as a film for ankle-biters it’s fine. It’s the tale of a group of animals from the New York Zoo. Alex the Lion (voiced by Ben Stiller) is living it large on steak and adoration from his fans. His friends include Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) who wants to break free, Melman the hypochondriac Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the streetwise Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith).

Marty leads a break-out of the zoo in search of adventure and they all get caught and sent to Africa. But on the way they get shipwrecked in Madagascar. They have no idea how to act in the wild. It’s like Survivor for accountants. They stumble across a colony of lemurs ruled by the amusing King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his right-paw-man Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer).

Insert musical number here.

Trouble is brewing (or should that be stomachs are grumbling?) because Alex the Lion misses his daily steak fix. He’s a meat-eater. He starts seeing Marty the Zebra as food. Alex even tries to take a bite out of Marty’s butt. I can only assume forcing the kiddies to confront the dynamics of the food chain is the reason for the PG rating. There’s a great running-gag involving a pack of plotting penguins that act like elite special forces soldiers and a funny re-enactment of an American Beauty scene. But that’s it for the grown ups. So if you are a non-breeder who has to take someone else’s bin-lids to the movies, Madagascar is non-offensive and slightly amusing. But that’s it.

They can’t all be Shrek.

oy, is the cast of Layer Cake ugly! But that’s the joy of British gangster films – forget Hollywood glamour, in these flicks the mobsters aren’t pretty or even all that smart. Instead they all have bad teeth and wear horrible parachute-cloth tracksuits.

Layer Cake is a great name for the film because the viewer is taken through several character stories in rapid succession. Don’t go to this movie tired or you’ll never keep up.

Daniel Craig plays the lead role as the most attractive gangster (which is not saying much; he is still horribly pock-marked). He’s so successful as a top-level drug dealer that no-one knows his name – and neither does the audience. He’s planning to pull off one last deal before early retirement. No surprise when it all goes terribly pear-shaped.

To offload a shipment of ecstasy, our main man has to deal with crooks further up the drug food chain than he’s used to. Enter Jimmy Price, played by Kenneth Cranham, an unattractive dealer in every sense of the word. Of course, that leads to dealing with an even more unattractive mobster even further up the food chain, Eddie Temple, played by Michael Gambon (it’s hard to believe he played the loveable Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter). Oddly enough, they don’t want one of their best dealers simply retiring. Go figure.

(There is one notable exception on the ugly front, the gorgeous Sienna Miller – who’s more famous for being engaged to Jude Law than for her acting – has a small part as the hero’s love interest. Her role is tiny but then so is her lingerie. One for the fellas.)

Add to that a drug deal gone wrong in Holland and a pissed-off Slavic hitman and the viewer is left with a lot of action that turns out to be smart, funny and ugly.

Just the way it should be.

94, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

W

DOWN ON THE FARM: ‘Aren’t oysters great, honey?’

‘Forget mollusks, I want Manolos!’

Oyster Farmer Released: June, 2005 Rated: M

✯✯✯

F

rom the very first shot you can tell Oyster Farmer is using the scenery as another character in the film. It shows the Hawkesbury River as a stunning yet isolated place to live. And the people who live and work on her banks have to cope with its ebbs and flows.

Oyster Farmer is a gentle movie about a young guy (played by Alex O’Lachlan) who escapes a pain-filled life by working with an eccentric community of, you guessed it, oyster farmers. His love interest (played

by Diana Glenn) is a local who grew up in the area but longs for the trappings of city life – like fabulous shoes.

Both have secrets. And yet both are drawn together. There’s stealing, lying and jumping to conclusions. O’Lachlan is handsome in a typically

Aussie way and brings the right amount of depth to his character Jack to show just how uncomfortable he is in his own skin. Glenn captures a naivety you’d expect from someone brought up in those conditions.

Both play true Aussies without falling into parody.

The standout role is Brownie (played by David Field). He’s a weatherbeaten farmer battling a temperamental crop of oysters. Field is best known for his performance as Bob Hawke in A Night We Called It A Day, but I think this is some of his finest acting yet. His estranged wife (played

by Kerry Armstrong) is sexy and strong but ultimately under-utilised.

The trouble with the film is that the story line meanders along like the Hawkesbury River. There isn’t enough drama. Too much is left unsaid; each sub-plot needs more guts. Yes, Oyster Farmer feels like a film about real people, but as we all know, real life can be a tad boring.

I wouldn’t recommend rushing to the cinema to see it, but if you’re looking for a rainy night DVD selection it would be a comfortable choice. Perhaps with a half-dozen Sydney Rocks on the side.

August 2005, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, 95

DVDs

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 94 minutes, R-16 Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne lead a strong cast in this action thriller centered on a run down police station out on the edge of town in the hands of only a skeleton staff on News Years Eve, when it’s required to take an unscheduled delivery of dangerous criminals on remand during a snowstorm. Fishburne, a cop-killer, is no sooner behind bars in the station than suddenly the building is under siege. But it’s not an attempt to break the organized crime leader out, it’s an attempt to get in. Burnt-out undercover cop Ethan Hawke finds his new life as a coffee-and-donuts desk sergeant shattered when he’s forced to take sides in this bizarre invasion of his Precinct.

Full of action and some particularly good plot twists.

Reviewed by Ian Wishart

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS 118 minutes, PG When the Academy Award nominations were announced this year, the name most conspicuously absent was Billy Bob Thornton’s, whose portrayal of Gary Gaines – the coach of a high school football team in the factbased drama “Friday Night Lights” – was equal to any of those nominated for Best Actor.

Despite great reviews and a good opening weekend, “Friday Night Lights” was only moderately successful, probably because it was perceived as just another sports movie.

That misconception should be rectified by the release of the DVD (4 stars, Universal), which should convince a new audience that this is one of last year’s best films of any description. It’s a faithful adaptation of former journalist Buzz Bissinger’s best-seller about a year spent in football-obsessed Odessa, Texas, as the coach and players devote themselves to winning a state championship.

Director Peter Berg (who also is Bissinger’s cousin) 96, INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM, August 2005

divides his time between the on-field action, which is filmed with hand-held cameras for bone-crushing realism, and the ongoing drama that takes place away from the gridiron, focusing on Gaines as he tries to balance winning with concern for his players.

That concern is most noticeably directed at star running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), who suffers an injury that threatens to ruin the season; talented but troubled quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) and running back Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), whose inability to hold on to the ball results in physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father, a former team star, played with convincing intensity by country singer Tim McGraw.

“Lights” could still pick up an Oscar nod or two in technical categories and should qualify for editing and sound design, the latter of which can be fully appreciated in the 5.1 Surround mix on the DVD. Extras include a commentary by Bissinger and Berg that covers a lot of the same territory they explored in a Detroit Free Press interview last fall; outtakes that consist primarily of extended scenes; and a 30-minute visit with many of the people portrayed in the film, including the ill-fated Miles.

Reviewed by Terry Lawson

MEET THE FOCKERS 113 minutes, M There’s something about Ben Stiller. That ability to be totally self-deprecating in a hysterical way has given Stiller guaranteed bankability at the box office. Picking up as a sequel to Meet the Parents five years ago, Meet the Fockers suffers none of the usual problems with sequels and the interplay between sensitive male nurse Focker (Stiller) and his hard-bitten ex-CIA father-in-law (Robert de Niro) when the latter demands to meet Focker’s parents, played by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, is hilarious.

Fockers is now Stiller’s most successful movie, and it is also the highest-grossing movie in the careers of De Niro, Hoffman and Streisand. Which is saying something.

Reviewed by Ian Wishart